by K. J. Coble
Aelren surged over him, sword thrusting, pummeling. Horsa rushed by, too, followed by others. The sandy, choking gloom of the corridor was briefly filled with the shriek and clang of battle as the Vothans drove the unholy back and battered them to pieces.
Propped against the wall where he’d sagged, Strayden tried to wrap his arms around himself, appalled at the cold in his blood. But feeling had begun to return to fingers. Breathing no longer felt like it frosted in his lungs. He shivered to think of what dozens of those things’ grips would’ve done to him. With a sparkle of insight, he figured that was how they’d overpowered Lyssa.
Lyssa...shit...
“Are you all right?” he called out to Durrak.
The Nuburran nodded wordlessly, but his face was a rigid, clenched mask of pain. The Militant was on his other side, his strength apparently returned and trying to help him to his feet. Strayden joined them to help while others coming down the hole from above hustled by.
Crack!
All three looked up, had felt the break as well as heard it. The flow of sand, which had slowed to a steady pour, suddenly intensified to a flood. Fresh rivulets joined from cracks between stones in the ceiling, became showers. Vothans still coming down the sinkhole stumbled and flopped as they overwhelmed them. Limbs flailed as men were buried. Another crackle rippled through their bodies and stones began to fall.
Strayden met the Militant’s stare through the buckled, bloody remnant of his helm visor. “Go!” He wrenched Durrak fully back to his feet. “We can’t stay here. Go!!!”
A stone crashed down where Durrak had sprawled, a moment before. A section of ceiling peeled inward and collapsed. Sands flooded the corridor, snuffing out the sun, dulling the screams of trapped Vothans.
“Go-go-go!!!”
The three started forward, seemingly in a nightmare, slow-motion stagger, the corridor caving in right at their heels. Roaring sand and splintering rock drowned out a cry for help behind them. Strayden forced himself not to look back, kept going, sobbing for breath, willing power back into his limbs, dragging Durrak with him. Dust puffed after them. The last shards of sunlight from above fluttered, fluttered, and died out.
Strayden collapsed with Durrak half-piled on him, the two breathing in unison. The Militant rasped close by. All was darkness. The shudders and rumble of cave in went on for what seemed a terribly long time. Strayden beseeched Gruzh to hold them at bay, spare them the horrid end he knew good Vothans had just faced, crushed to pulp or left to wheeze out their last minutes in suffocating blackness.
Maybe just like us...
A hand grabbed his arm. Cursing, Strayden shot out an elbow and, flinging Durrak aside, fumbled for his axe.
“Gruzh’s balls!” Aelren’s voice swore from the utter black. “Who the hell...? That was my face!”
“A broken nose would improve that ugly face,” Durrak managed to quip between still-laboring breaths.
Laughter thick with relief sputtered from the dark. Strayden could hear several of the lads. “Who’s there?” He remembered Lyssa again—and their own plight. “Damn, does someone have a light or are we just going to fumble here in the dark, playing grab-ass?”
“I’ve got something,” Horsa’s voice said. A clack-clack of flints prefaced the flutter of sparks. Gloriously, painfully bright flames flared as a torch lit up. It wasn’t exactly a torch the kid had fashioned. He’d picked up what looked like one of the mummy-things’ humerus bones, wrapped the end in half-disintegrated linens, and lit them.
The numbing effect of their touch, apparently, did not last longer than their destruction.
“Good thinking, kid,” Strayden said. He looked around, by the light saw four others. That made nine survivors. He couldn’t think on how many had been crushed in the cave-in, nor worry over how many hadn’t reached the sinkhole before it. “Everyone, make like Horsa did.”
“We need to pursue the Adeptus,” the Militant urged. He’d lifted his mangled visor, but his face was still a mass of blood, his nose likely broken.
“And we didn’t follow you down here for a picnic,” Strayden replied, “but we’re not finding her without light, yeah?”
The man scowled but nodded.
The others quickly got grisly torches made and lit. By their light the corridor into which they’d recklessly plunged became apparent, largely featureless, and stretching on endlessly into the distance and dark.
Durrak was nudging the skull of one of their attackers with a boot. “Not that it needs saying, but these were dead...walking dead.”
Strayden glanced at the filth still greasing the underside of his boots. “Better than more spiders.”
“Aye,” Durrak said with a snort, “that they are. But what I’m saying, Captain, is that something—someone—made these things walk.”
“And sent them to take the Adeptus Lyssa,” the Militant added.
Strayden blew out a long breath and looked down the hall as far as the pitiful light of their makeshift torches would extend. Another underground ruin...another way we don’t know, bumbling around like great, fat idiots. He let himself think about what might be happening above ground, battle and slaughter. Thoughts turned to Lyssa. He couldn’t help a shudder, thinking of those bony, icy fingers on her.
“All right,” he said, at last. “we’re not doing any damned good, standing here. Weapons at the ready, lads!” He shouldered his way past the others, to the head of what became a column behind him. “Let’s see where this goes.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE MOAN OF WIND FADED as Asyra and Clover followed the corridor into the dark. With her glowing ring, Clover had the lead, but Asyra hovered just behind her left, sword clenched, senses straining. Glances left and right showed the walls continuing to be detailed, every step of the way, by more pictograms, hieroglyphics, and—increasingly—hatch-marked script that looked like it had been gouged into the stone, deliberately marring the art.
“Vandalism?” Clover asked, pausing to pan her light over a scene of a tall man, arms crossed, watching columns of laborers—slaves, Asyra somehow knew—haul masonry supplies up the steps of what was obviously the half-finished Great Pyramid.
The man’s face had been chiseled away.
“Looks that way,” Asyra replied. Gingerly, she touched the wall, ran her fingertips in the grooves that formed a word. Grit tickled beneath them. When she pulled them away, some of the ancient paint purled loose with them, looked almost like blood. “Or maybe some kind of warning?”
“Like I needed one.” Clover snorted and didn’t bother to hide a shiver. She extended her arm and let her light play down the hallway. “Looks like things open up ahead.”
Asyra nodded, suddenly couldn’t find words. An inexplicable dread crept into her chest, tendrils of cool filling her heart. The presence she’d felt, not so much as a comfort, but as a companion seemed to retreat—cringe, even—from her mind. She sensed aloneness, even with Clover at her side, as the pair moved down the passage.
The corridor walls angled away until the spies found themselves standing in a long wide hall, more like a vast antechamber. Clover whistled and the sound of it echoed cavernously, betrayed high ceilings, but also suggested a further exit, far ahead and into the dark. The prowl of her light across the walls to the left showed columns and buttresses, between which towered ten-foot statues on lovingly-labeled bases, effigies of stern-faced men with the headdresses of high offices. Time hadn’t faded the details of great finery, nor implements of their various trades; scrolls, scepters, tools, and weaponry.
Asyra had the sense of these men glowering down upon them in disapproval—and then their eyes looking up, expectantly to the opposite side of the corridor.
Clover’s cyan brilliance played to the right, now, illuminated details of more columns, these flanking a series of alcoves, five in all. The nearest, to which the pair stepped first, looked damaged, some past disturbance having half-collapsed one of the columns and a flap of ceiling across part of it. A b
ronze door of unreadable markings, green-black with corrosion could be seen beyond, but half-buckled and very much out of reach.
Clover moved on to the second one, but Asyra felt tugged further, to the middle one. The cold of before intensified, especially as her course carried her increasingly out of the globe of Clover’s light. She realized as she paused before the middle alcove, that it was the door before her, now, and the details fashioned over it, that triggered the chill.
As with the others, a bronze slab comprised what was clearly an entryway. Cyan glinted off metal that hadn’t faded with time, retained its luster and its exact details. And those showed a man standing with hands on hips, muscled, confident, his lips twisted into what the artisan’s efforts had perfectly-represented as arrogance. Armor of a make abandoned millennia ago rested upon his powerful frame, and a headdress peaked almost comically high atop his head—humor lost the instant Asyra realized it was fashioned from the upper half of a skeleton, the ribs splayed to frame the hateful face, a small skull glaring above as his crown.
Asyra drifted back a step, knowing exactly whom she faced.
“Beautiful,” Clover said, almost wistfully, to her right and still standing before the second alcove with her light aimed into it.
Almost in relief, Asyra withdrew from the middle door, came to stand at Clover’s side. But that feeling jolted away when she regarded the second door and the bronzed visions the other spy’s eldritch light revealed.
Slavering horror stared out from the alcove at them. The long-dead artisan’s craft detailed figures of rot and decay, writhing with hideous un-life and seemingly ready to burst through the doorway. Flesh peeled from the bones of faces, splintered teeth gaped wide, and empty eye sockets didn’t need their normal occupants to stare with otherworldly menace, hunger. Asyra had seen enough of the abominations magic could make of the dead to appreciate the realism—and cower back a step with her flesh crawling.
“Do you see them?” Clover asked, her voice still that unnervingly dreamy tone.
“I see them, all right.” Asyra looked at her sharply. “What do you see?”
“They’re beautiful,” the other woman replied. “Like...I don’t know. I never believed but...almost like angels.”
Asyra winced back bile. “What the hells are you talking about?”
Clover sheathed her short sword and took a step towards the door. The hand now free, she reached out. “Oh, to have been here, when such walked the world...”
Asyra grabbed her shoulder. “Wait, Clover. You’re not—”
She spun at the hips so fast, Asyra had no warning. Clover’s backwards-cocked elbow cracked into her cheek, blasted sparks across her vision. Asyra barely felt the blow as her stunned body struck the floor, ass-down, and her breath jarred from her. She heard the clatter of her sword bouncing off the flagstones but could do nothing about it, rolling onto one side involuntarily, wincing with the pain of a bruised tailbone. Through a rush of tears, she saw savage fury wrinkling Clover’s face.
But it faded, features smoothing over into that weird, almost worshipful expression as she turned away from Asyra and drifted back to the second door, hand upraised.
“Clover...”
Grimacing through more pain, Asyra rolled onto her belly and worked her way up onto hands and knees. Slivers of agony continued to flicker up and down her spine and legs, but she was pretty sure the fall hadn’t broken anything. Blinking away the last of the tears, she fumbled for and found her dropped weapon, swept it up as she staggered to her feet.
“Clover, don’t.”
But she had. Stepping fully into the alcove, Clover had placed her free hand upon the bronze-fashioned arm of one of the ghoulish figures. She sighed. Then she stiffened. By the magical light of her ring, the bronze seemed to shift, to squirm.
The arm she’d touched shot out from what had been solid bronze and grabbed her.
Clover screamed.
Finger tips shrunken to claw-points latched in the bandages about her forearm. Pressure dimpled them in, bit through. Crimson spurted, speckled the floor, the walls, the thing emerging from the face of the door. Bandages rent loose. Clover’s screams rose to squeals.
Asyra shot across the floor to the alcove, pain forgotten. The apparition, a wild-haired face of flesh rags and fangs, turned as she neared it, seemed to notice. But it was too late, Asyra gripping her companion with one hand to yank her back, clearing enough space for the other to bring her short sword hacking down. The edge sang through wrist bones and viscera, parted claw from wrist, and broke the tension to let Clover flop back, away from her attacker.
The thing screech and toppled. But a press of like monsters was already washing past and over it, a stampede of putrescent figures. The stink of them threw Asyra back, gagging, even more than the violence of their rush. She had a brief glimpse beyond them, wasn’t certain what she saw. It seemed almost the bronze door was still there, shimmering like cobwebs as the abominations pushed through it.
Beyond its filmy presence, there appeared to be a vast chamber choked with shadows and death and unspeakable foulness, piled to its ceiling. Their attackers boiled up out of this, frenzied with hunger. Asyra needed only a momentarily glance to see that their only sustenance had been each other, feeding, feeding upon each other’s rotting matter for whatever timeless sentence they’d been condemned to serve out.
She had no more time to ponder it, the press of them at her throat.
With a shriek of disgust, she hacked the arm from the next thing to place a claw upon her. The bony appendage spun off at the shoulder, but the rest kept coming, head outstretched with mouth wide for a bite. Asyra’s return stroke sliced the head free, filth-clotted hair splayed out like demons’ wings as it bounced across the floor. That seemed to finish it, the rest collapsing into a putrid heap.
Clover’s scream matched Asyra’s. The reflexes of an Eye of the Emperor had saved her from going under in the first avalanche of ghoulish figures. She’d gotten her blade out, slashing left and right to clear a space around her. The light of her ring sent wild splashes of brilliance every which way.
One apparition went down at a gut-thrust but, still writhing on the floor, got a grip on her calf. Clover ripped her leg free of its claws and brought her heel down with such force the thing’s skull splattered, ichor jetting loose from eye sockets and gaping maw. The move left her flank open for another monster to grab for her sword arm, though. Clover turned into the attack, slashing across its brow. The top flap of its skull leapt off, spuming matter into the air, and the blow sent it flying backwards. But the frenzy of its grip left claw tracks sluicing blood down her arm as it rocked away.
“The far side!” Asyra barked as she cleaved the lower jaw from one attacker and wove left to hack the outstretched arm from another. “Get to the far side of the hall. It keeps going! I saw it!”
Clover retreated, trailing blood across the floor. Asyra followed, backpedaling furiously, pausing to offer flurries of steel any time the ghoulish figures got close. More were pouring from the door—portal—Clover had somehow opened. But the newer arrivals seemed to mill about in confusion, clogging the corridor, wandering into one another.
“Keep going!” Asyra called over her shoulder.
Clover had reached the far side, where the space narrowed into a lesser hallway into the dark. Heaving for breath, the other spy paused there to pan her light into the dark. After a moment, she nodded to Asyra and moved on.
Asyra followed, offering a final, frenzied counterattack to drive the monsters off balance. Then she spun and ran, counting on live muscle and sinew to outdistance the foul, rotting matter of her opponents.
She couldn’t help a backwards glance that showed her the effigy of Thyss-Mallik on the huge, middle bronze door. His eyes seemed to follow her. And his lips were bent into a smirk of satisfaction.
“IT OPENS UP, PAST HERE.”
Aelren had taken the lead as they chased aimlessly into the dark after Lyssa and her capto
rs. He slowed ahead of Strayden at the end of the long hall they’d trod, seemingly forever. They’d found no other sign of Lyssa and her cries had long-since faded. Now they came to a stop, clumping up behind Aelren and waiting as the younger Vothan edged forward, his torch held out before him.
“You hear that?” someone whispered from behind.
“Ssh!” Durrak scowled over his shoulder at the speaker.
Aelren stepped into what his torch light revealed was a vast space. The flutters of his flame hardly carved a globe out of the blackness around him. Beyond its pitiful boundary, just more floor, stretching off into the distance. Vaguely, outlines of great columns materialized, looming high to an unseen ceiling. Distant walls wormed with shadow, crawled with the ancient Xyxian markings all had grown accustomed to.
“What were you babbling about?” Strayden whispered back to the man who’d broken the quiet—Ordin, a pig-eyed brute and recent recruit, better skilled at draining a wine cask than wielding an axe.
“There’s nothing,” Ordin replied. “Y’hear nothing...no sound.”
“Except us, idiot,” Durrak growled back.
But Ordin was right. As Strayden took a step gingerly into the chamber, it seemed even his boot made no noise on the flagstone. The air clenched about them, a cool, unmoving presence on the flesh, smelling faintly of dust and something else—dried out...dead.
Strayden held his makeshift torch high, added its illumination to Aelren’s. Behind him, the others slowly spilled into the chamber. The combined torch light brought out details around them. The room was massive, its far side still unrevealed by their illumination. But closer, shapes appeared from the gloom. In the weird shudder of the torches, figures formed, the flame dance bringing out muscled limbs and fierce faces and rank after rank, clenching archaic weapons and coming on—
“Shit!” Strayden backed into Durrak, raising his axe. “Aelren...everyone back!”