Crypt of the Violator

by K. J. Coble

  But Modyn swayed from the blow, more blood gushing from his nose. Another mummified guard took advantage, grappling over his shield to claw at his face. Modyn slashed from left to right, clumsily in the press, but took the thing’s hand off at the wrist. Shards of bone flashed out from unraveling burial linens and the thing stumbled.

  With speed unexpected from so brittle and decrepit a figure, it lunged back at him. The splinter of a wrist bone skittered over the rim of Modyn’s shield and plunged into his neck, under the chin. For a horrid instant, the Church Militant stood, transfixed, with the bone in his throat, blood-grimed lips mouthing something soundlessly. Then his sagging form was dragged into the tossing press and mummies surged through the gap.

  Strayden backpedaled to block the breakthrough, felt the line bow and reconstitute around him as he did so. An overhand hack of the axe blasted a mummified face in half. The thing kept coming in its mindless, staggering way. But a boot to the chest sent it hurtling back into its unliving comrades.

  To his left, another Vothan went down—Asgrim, a chestnut-bearded womanizer and murderer who, nevertheless, had survived many campaigns. Mummies had piled onto his shield till his knees gave out and he toppled onto his back. Flailing, he smashed them off his shield face, but others had gotten a grip on his heels. With a yank they dragged him from the line into their teeming mass.

  His screams rose to an unspeakably high, gurgling pitch.

  Mummified claws were grabbing at Horsa through the gap left by Asgrim. Strayden lunged that way, hammering them back with shield face and axe. He forced the kid to hold his spot with his own mass, then, and felt the shield wall crumble back, once more, forced into an ever-shrinking curve in front of the still-locked door.

  And the mummy-guards kept coming, more shambling out of the dark beyond every moment they fought here.

  “Get that thing unlocked or find a place in the line!” Strayden snarled at Durrak, who the press had forced him back-to-back with.

  Asgrim’s screaming had fallen to a wet warble through which pleas could be clearly understood. Gruzh’s curse...no way for a man to die. The poor bastard was begging them to come back for him.

  “Durrak...”

  “Got it!”

  With a crack and a clang, the Nuburran and Aelren wrenched their improvisation the opposite direction, got the handle reversed. Another boom went through the floor. Again the blade trap slashed, this time the two comrades hunching low to avoid the inevitable flop of severed rope.

  And the great, golden door clacked and tilted inward, allowing a gust of stale, cool air to kiss the back of Strayden’s neck as he fought.

  “Horsa, go!” Strayden leaned into his shield, forced the unliving tide back with all his strength. “All of you, go-go-go!”

  The shield wall came apart reflexively. For a terrible handful of seconds, man was indiscernible from mummy, a jostling, jabbing scramble to fall back through the door. Strayden knew he was alone, was surrounded, with the claws coming at him from every side and his mouth and nose full of the stale, rot-reek of the undead. With a screech, he backed towards where he thought the exit must be, hacking and pummeling, kicking off hands that gripped his legs, slamming away faces that lunged, open-mouthed for a bite of him.

  A hand gabbed his shoulder—one of warm, living flesh the color of scarred mahogany. Durrak cursed at Strayden’s ear and dragged him past the door, into the dark passage beyond. Torches fluttered. Steel glinted in the tossing struggle. Mummies still clung to Strayden and he turned in their grip, with a final, flailing burst of strength shrugging them off and driving them back. Some of the others were leaning into the great, golden door, trying to force its bulk back across the passage. Strayden turned and put his back into it.

  With a groan, the quarter-foot-thick slab of gold-plated door slid nearly shut. Desiccated claws pawed through the last open crack, futilely. Vothan blades hacked them to bits. Pieces hit the floor and flopped over like stunned spiders seeking a meal. Horsa stomped at them till them crumpled to dust and tags of flesh.

  Boom.

  The door shut. The way was barred. Bloodied, weary Vothans panted in the feeble light of their few remaining torches.

  Strayden sagged against the door, slid down to the floor, and sat there, wheezing for a fresh lung-full of air. Everything still stank of them—the lifelessness of this place. He tried not to think about Asgrim. Or Modyn. He breathed out a prayer to Gruzh to accept their souls at His Table. A glance around at the others showed him a few more gaps in their group, a few more places needed in His Ale Hall.

  “What...” Durrak, leaned against him, swallowed to catch his breath. “What now?”

  Faintly, Strayden could both hear and feel the pummeling of mummy fists on the other side of the door. With a moan, he leaned forward, half-rolled, and staggered back to his feet. Plucking a torch still guttering from a man’s fist, he panned it over the floor. Despite the smudges of the Vothans’ struggle and their exhausted forms sprawled over it, the trail was still obvious, dragging off into the dark.

  “We keep going,” Strayden replied.

  TURNING IN THE SADDLE, Eddar Urius clenched his teeth as pain slivered across his left ribs where a spear thrust had rent but not pierced his lamellar corselet. The destrier’s flanks were slathered in foam and blood and the beast looked ready to collapse. A glance around him showed the rest of his wing of the army was in little better shape.

  They’d re-taken the mouth of the Khayaz Valley, not far from the smoldering wreck of their previous camp. The fumes of that lingering conflagration bit the nostrils and throat, blurred the vision, cast the scene in hellish contrast of smoke-smear and flame red. Masses of men crammed around in a bristling, writhing circle. Shields boomed with impacts. Steel rang. Throats gone raw wailed in fury or anguish.

  They’d won. And gained nothing.

  The Xyxians had collapsed so quickly, Urius should’ve seen the trap coming. His attack had ripped through them, rolling downhill off the escarpment and onto the wastes, scattering poorly-armed and armored conscripts before him, butchering them, trampling them. But the glorious rush had become a slog, and then a grapple. The very weight of the dead and dying and cornered and fleeing had slowed them, allowed other contingents to rush to the breakthrough and encircle the Sctinallans, even as they seemed on the cusp of victory.

  Now, battered and weary troops reformed with the enemy all around, the Xyxians too mangled to take advantage, too numerous to coordinate, too leaderless to get out of the way. Urius’ legions had likely lost another thousand, killed or left for dead on the slopes and crags of the escarpment. Blubbery Kleve had been left among them, knocked from the saddle and likely trampled by his own men.

  Junios had survived and reined in alongside Urius, covered in blood and soot, with a gash across the bridge of his nose. “Cavalry got a look before being driven in! The road east is crawling with horse archers and infantry scattered by our attack.”

  “We need to get this lot sorted and push through them!” Urius snarled at him.

  The professional soldier spat blood and shook his head once. “That’s a hard fight ahead” he looked meaningfully at Urius “especially after we rescue the Emperor’s contingent.”

  Urius ground his teeth. Bazul...yes, damn it. This is the tricky part. Can’t just abandon him—too many witnesses around. This is confusion, but not that much. He turned again in the saddle, hissed as the ribs complained, and tried to see over the purls of smoke and dust.

  Sand stirred by the fighting on the heights under Zadam misted off into a sky yellowing towards dusk. Steel glinted furiously in that haze. That the fight before Bazul’s wing hadn’t shifted further downslope told Urius they hadn’t gotten far past their starting point. The blocks of Immortal infantry still waiting down the hill to go in confirmed it, though units were feeding in slowly, and some were reversing course and peeling off to head down his way.

  There...that’ll be convenient, he thought. That’s what I’ll say; we
couldn’t break through their elite footmen. Let any fool question that!

  “We’re running out of light,” Junios was saying. He flinched as a stray arrow zinged between the pair of them—in the chaos, neither could say if had been hostile or fired by one of their own. “My Duke, if we intend to break through to them, we have to do it soon!”

  “I know that,” Urius snapped at him. He glanced about furiously; so hard to tell what they had left. “Form the cataphracts on me. I will take them up that hill to Bazul. You will secure this space and hold the mouth of the valley. I will bring the Emperor back to you.”

  “And if it’s dark by that time?”

  Urius hid a little smile. It would most assuredly be dark—another factor he could say prevented him from getting through to foolish Bazul. “Then we fight in place till the dawn and break out to the east then.”

  Junios nodded and spat again. His voice fell and Urius could barely hear him over the cacophony. “By Scintallos, my Duke...what a calamity.”

  Again, Urius fought down the little smile. “I will trust you to keep that to yourself,” he replied with mock-sternness. “But, yes. I always feared this crusade was folly.”

  “The Empire is ruined,” Junios said.

  “I remember a saying from the reign of Spectaculare III; ‘there’s a lot of ruin in an empire’.” He reached out a hand to the battered solider, gave him a shake to fortify him, a moment of real emotion. It wasn’t the fool’s fault. He was just another simpleton caught in the web of greater men’s schemes. “The Empire will get through this,” he said.

  “And then what?”

  And then I rule, Urius thought. He glanced again to the fuming escarpment of Zadam, where Bazul might even now be facing his death. Ah, cousin, that famous luck of yours looks to have given out, at last.

  “Then,” he said in reply to Junios, “we will just have to see.” He met the soldier’s gaze. “But for now, we’ve got to live through these next hours. Rally your men, and summon the cataphracts to me! We’ve got work to do!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  AS SHE FIRST CAME TO, Lyssa knew only the chill, cutting through bone to marrow, slowing the very flow of blood. But the pump of her heart defeated it, one beat at a time, and feeling crept back into limbs, joints, and torso. She moaned. Memories began to jumble together, thought coalescing.

  Hands on her body...dead hands, grasping, dragging...

  She started to sit up from the hard stone she could feel under her spine. But the strength fled her and she slumped back. With what seemed a terrible effort, she peeled her eyes open and dared to look around.

  Torches fluttered at uneven intervals from sconces affixed to columns, provided uncertain, shivering illumination throughout what was obviously a large chamber. Brighter light came from a pair of large braziers, burning with a weird, purplish hue that Lyssa knew well enough to guess as magically-imbued. The greater fires flanked what looked like an upright sarcophagus, with its back to a far wall and its feet upon a dais. Carved with great care, the ancient pigments painted onto its surface were still vivid, still portrayed the features of a great, timeless, terrible beauty.

  The lid of the sarcophagus was open. And the casket, itself, was empty.

  Fear cresting, overriding the numbness of her body, Lyssa tried again to sit up. She lurched, half-rolled, got up on one elbow. Hissing with effort, she tried to make her legs move, grunting, thinking furiously at them. Knees bent and she put a hand on her thigh, tried to force a leg over the edge of the slab upon which she’d apparently been left.

  With a crackle of brittle bone and dried sinews, figures stood up around her.

  Lyssa froze. Sprawled upon the high slab, on a lower tier of the dais the sarcophagus occupied, she hadn’t seen the ring of mummified figures crouched around her, knelt as though in prayer. Her movements had stirred them back to unholy motion. Her flesh squirmed, recalling their chill touch. The stink of them winkled her nose. The awfulness of their eyeless, fanged, rotten faces, draped in scraps of burial linens and tags of still-intact flesh, shrank her back onto the slab.

  Movement thumped in the dark beyond the torchlit dais. Rows of columns filed off into the gloom. Between them, arrayed in ranks across the floor, lesser sarcophagi filled the spaces. There was little uniformity to them. Some, closer to the dais, had finery and craft suggesting higher favor in their mute, dead order. Others, further off into the shadows, looked crude in comparison, poorly cut, unadorned, some of them crumbling, some of them already holed and exposed to the elements. One or two even looked pilfered.

  Many looked too small to be for adults.

  Shadows wormed at the shivering edges of the torch light. Small figures in rags and rot labored against the lids of the caskets, cracking them with their combined strength. One at a time, they pried them apart and fresh shadows, shaking off dust and peels of funerary strips, emerged to join their foul kin. Slowly, their party grew.

  Straining hard to see into the dark distance, Lyssa knew that, once freed from their caskets, their numbers would swell to a small army.

  “And there are many more chambers like this one,” said a voice like dust blown across stone from behind her.

  Lyssa squirmed around on the slab. Sand was swirling lazily across the upper dais, absent a breeze or any other force. Its motions sped up, twisting, twining into an inverted vortex that grew as she watched. Quickly the cyclone swelled until it was the height of a man and began to bulge, at about hip-high, at about shoulder-high, curving into an hourglass figure that began to move down the steps towards the slab.

  “The bloodlust of the kingdom filled them,” the voice went on. “First it was defeated enemies, entombed while still alive, ensorcelled and encased and damned to return. Then it was criminals and slaves. Then it was political dissidents. Then it was the poor.”

  The dust-figure took on details, its drift becoming the strides of shapely legs, the swing of arms. For a swirling moment, those details were horror, a vision of rent funerary strips and rot. But the billow of sand filled in empty eye sockets and fleshed over gaunt ribs and grasping claws. Skin glistening with warmth cocooned the death, made it live, a pulsing, sensual form, drifting towards Lyssa.

  “Soon it became an honor,” the beautiful face—which Lyssa recognized from wall paintings around her, but from her readings, too—said with a touch of bitterness. Lovely, almost unnaturally red lips quirked. “People came to believe that being gutted, their organs pulled from them, their still-bleeding bodies wrapped up and dropped for two thousand years into a stone casket was the holiest of services.” She chortled as her body finished materializing around her, clad in the sparsest of royal gowns. “Service to a mad man who’d elevated himself to the level of the gods.”

  “You are...” Lyssa began and found her words choking on the sandiness of her throat, the still-lingering numbness. “Thyss-Ulea,” she finished.

  “You are correct,” the dead queen replied. “And you are a surprise to me. You’re partly one of these grasping Scintallans who foolishly seek to use me in their treasons. And you’re partly something else...closer to one of my blood-line...not Xyxian...”

  “Kurshan,” Lyssa replied, working her hands and toes, trying to force feeling and strength back into her joints.

  “Ah, yes, the Kurshites,” Thyss-Ulea purred with a wistful expression. “It’s good to know some fragments of my time endure into this one. You forebears were a most fierce and persistent foe.”

  “They sack and burned Zadam,” Lyssa replied. “They destroyed your empire.”

  “I would say, rather, we destroyed ourselves.” The dead queen pivoted to take in the activities of their shadowy surroundings. “But we saved some part of ourselves, for the right time.”

  “And the right time is now?”

  “I should think that is obvious.” Thyss-Ulea turned back to her with a smirk. “And aren’t you the clever thing? I can see why she covets you so...”

  Lyssa frowned. “Who?”
/>   “It doesn’t matter, at least not yet.” The dead queen stepped close to the slab and the rotting figures of her minions shrank away. “I can sense the power about you. You have touched the Outer Dark.” She reached out for Lyssa, who cringed to the furthest corner of the slab, then paused. “You know more than most. But it’s not nearly enough.”

  Trying to clear her mind enough for a spell, Lyssa knew she was right—at least not yet. She needed time. She was still so cold. The grip of those dead things had left frost on her very soul. “So, what do you want with me?”

  In the dark chamber beyond the dais, a sarcophagus lid came off with a pop and was dropped to one side with a crash. Thyss-Ulea withdrew from Lyssa and stepped to the top of the stairs to look out across the shadows. Turning awkwardly, Lyssa followed her stare.

  A pair of crooked, brittle shapes was helping a third one as it sat up from its millennia-long repose. Ancient linens crackled as they stretched and split. Dust purled off the figure. Hiking a spindly leg over one side, it rolled and scuttled down from the casket, came to stand with its weird comrades.

  It was perhaps no taller than a living nine-year-old might be.

  Lyssa’s guts writhed and burned with disgust as she watched the trio turn together and shamble to the next casket, like unholy siblings on an errand.

  “Yes,” Thyss-Ulea said, glancing at her. “They are mine...my children...”

  Bile rose from Lyssa’s throat. She scanned the rows of still-unopened caskets. “All of them? They can’t be.”

  “They are,” the dead queen replied, setting a hand to her abdomen. “At least, in this chamber, they are. Born of my flesh. Raised and then taken from this world. Pledged to the next.”