Crypt of the Violator

by K. J. Coble

  “And how do you propose doing that, fool, without burning up like Grunnach?”

  “I’m thinking on it!” Strayden snarled to quiet the pair.

  He glanced at the key again. The concentration of the eye-beams was melting a dimple from the floor. He wondered how long they’d keep it up, if they’d just go on scorching their way deep into the stone. Burning...heat. He blinked with jolt of insight. Like sun bolts...like...that symbol around the lock...the sun. Could it be...?

  “Aelren, do you still have your looking glass?”

  “My looking glass...” The younger Vothan frowned with momentary confusion, but his gaze flicked towards the beams and widened, blinked with the same insight. “I...yeah, right here.” He fumbled to get into his pack.

  “Be careful when you do it,” Strayden said as he produced the mirror.

  “You mean like—”

  Aelren held his little mirror into the path of one of the rays and crimson scintillas ripped the air. Strayden ducked, felt the crumpling heat just above his head, rolled onto his belly. Others were shouting. The wild flutter of redirected energy slashed the room into fiery chaos—then ended abruptly.

  Strayden looked up. The pedestal where he’d leaned smoked where a fresh line had been burned into it. “Careful, I said, dumb ass!”

  “Sorry.” A wisp of smoke drifted from Aerlen’s mirror, but it looked otherwise unharmed. “I...I think I get what to do now.”

  “I should damned-well hope so!” Strayden snapped back, voice shaking from fear. He swallowed once, calmed himself. “You think maybe you could try again?”

  “I’ve got it,” Aelren replied.

  He held out the mirror and touched one of the beams again. It flashed agonizingly bright, but this time the young Vothan kept his arm steady and the beam ricocheted back at the opposite wall. With a hiss, the energy blackened the stone, scrawled a trail up onto the statue as Aelren carefully angled the glass. The hiss became a squeal like boiling water trying to escape a pot as the beam cut across the statue’s face and met the eyes. Rubies went white, bubbled, and ran down the stone face like magma tears.

  And a set of beams died out.

  Aelren hissed and withdrew the mirror, blew on it.

  “You all right?” Strayden asked.

  “Gets hot, is all. I can finish.”

  “Then, do it.”

  He did. With methodical effort, Aelren moved the mirror into the path of one set of beams after another, stepping further and further into the chamber as he did so, ricocheting the energies back upon their sources. The air stank infernally, heated stone and seared meat. The smoldering bits of Grunnach smoked feebly in their corner. Everything felt scorched and horrid.

  With enough of the beams neutralized and space to move, Strayden crawled to Horsa’s side. Durrak joined him and together they worked to carefully roll the kid over.

  It took everything Strayden had within him to hide the grimace of horror as he got a look at the injuries. The left arm peeled off with the motion of lifting him, remained on the floor. Horsa didn’t seem to notice, his eyes foggy with shock. Part of his lower torso had caught the same beam that’d severed the arm, a crescent vaporized from muscle and bone, just blackened matter that stank as Strayden knelt and cradled the poor lad in his arms. Fumes burned in his eyes. They were watering anyway.

  “It’s bad, Captain?” Horsa wheezed.

  “Ssh,” Durrak whispered, patting him on the chest, “he’s just upset that he’ll have to carry you the rest of the way.”

  “Carry me...right...” Horsa twitched and Strayden realized it was a chuckle. The kid smiled groggily. “I can’t feel my arm. My axe?”

  “Right here.” Durrak picked it up off the floor from where it’d fallen. He pressed it into Horsa’s good hand. The fingers didn’t close around it till the Nuburran forced them.

  “Guess I’m...” Horsa convulsed slightly. He swallowed once, fought it back. “Guess I’m going to taste from Gruzh’s Ale Horn first, Captain.”

  Strayden didn’t hide his wince, now. “I suppose so, kid.”

  Horsa blinked and a flick of fire entered his eyes. He worked his mouth, bared his teeth. Tremblingly, “Blood for Gruzh...”

  “Skulls for Gruzh,” Strayden and the rest—who’d gathered round—intoned.

  Horsa twitched once last time, and sagged in Strayden’s arms.

  Utter silence thickened the air of the chamber. Strayden didn’t hear a single motion from the others, didn’t even hear his own pulse. Slowly, he settled Horsa back to the floor and straightened up, stared dumbly at the scorch-marked walls. His body felt like it weighed a ton and he’d never be able to drag it to its feet again.

  Waste, he thought. It’s all a waste. Just pawns in the gods’ games—ours or these devil Xyxians’. He dared to glance about at the others, Durrak, Aelren—and one other. Sigurd, a short, meaty brute who liked to pick fight with bigger men. That was it. Gruzh’s balls! What the hells are four men supposed to accomplish?

  Strayden stood and turned to regard the key, resting at the bottom of the still-cooling dimple in the floor. Well, there’s no stopping now. He stepped over to it and knelt. He felt the shimmer of heat off slag, but something told him to ignore it. Besides, he didn’t give a damn anymore. He reached for the key.

  “Captain...” Durrak began in alarm.

  Strayden touched the metal, smiled as fingertips didn’t encounter agony, and withdrew it quickly as the heat from the scorched floor began to bite. He held it up. “It’s cold. Like nothing happened.” He snorted and balanced it in his palm. “Damn Xyxians...”

  No stopping...

  The key in gripped firmly, now, Strayden strode to the steps, trudged up them and stood before the door at the top. He could hear the others gathering things together, settling their dead, moving up behind him. He waited, and puzzled. The key had two ends, as he’d noticed before. Wary of yet another death trap, he eyed each set of teeth. Asyra might know. But he hadn’t a clue, was left with just gut.

  “Gruzh guide a fool’s hand,” he whispered quietly.

  And inserted an end into the lock. And turned it.

  A resounding clang shook the door and Strayden couldn’t help but flinch, felt the others behind him jolt back down the steps an inch or two. The door was still ringing with the sound when a second clang, and third, and more shook through the stone. But each sounded further off, fading into booms, like a series of mechanisms were releasing throughout the underground complex, triggered by this one lock.

  The surviving Vothans stood frozen in the torchlit gloom, staring at one another as silence settled upon them once again.

  “That didn’t sound good,” Aelren said.

  With a creak, the door drifted a half an inch open, seemed to beckon them through it.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Durrak growled, clenching his axe close.

  Strayden clenched his jaw and unstrapped his shield from his back, situated it on his forearm. With the other, he readied his axe. He glanced over his shoulder at Aelren. “Keep that torch lit and close.”

  He reached out with his weapon, used it to push the door wide enough to enter. Cool, stale air caressed his face. Nothing else greeted him but—

  “More damned darkness,” he said and stepped into it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE CHAMBER OF THYSS-Ulea shuddered with what sounded like a series of blows, like doors slammed—or flung upon. And the dead queen cackled, her rich contralto ringing off columns and walls and sarcophagi as her children pried them open. She raised up her hands, as though to show something off, and looked at Lyssa.

  “You see, don’t you? Three sides of the triangle—pyramid, I suppose. It was always meant to be so.”

  “What I see,” Lyssa said with her chin up, determined to be defiant, “is that the ages spent in your unnatural state have made you mad.”

  Thyss-Ulea cackled again and it had a ragged edge of mania, this time. “Oh, I suppose that’s true. Neverthe
less, plans laid two and a half thousand years ago come to fruition, this eve, all thanks to you fools.” She held out a hand to the brazier to the left, where the weird flames scrawled an image of Strayden’s now badly-diminished party edging through the door they’d just unlocked. “The first side, your drooling barbarian friends, have unlocked the inner gates, that which I and mine could not touch.”

  Lyssa realized now what the sounds had been.

  “Yes,” Thyss-Ulea purred, “the simpletons thought they were pursuing you, still. My priests” she gestured at the mummified figures arrayed around Lyssa’s slab “split up, made it look as though they’d brought you though the Chamber of Preparation and into the Key Room. But none of mine could pass through, as you saw.” The dead queen scratched her chin. “Really, I’m impressed. That such stone-witted dogs could solve that which my husband had set to keep me out.”

  “Keep you out...” Lyssa began wonderingly, and then stopped. “You mean, this isn’t about freeing Thyss-Mallik?”

  Again, she cackled, and her voice punished the ears, a lunatic howl booming off the walls. “Free him?” she shrieked with mirth and a hint of remembered agony. “My tormentor, my abuser, my imprisoner? No, you stupid, stupid bitch, this is not some attempt to resurrect his Nightmare Kingdom, as so many misguided fools have tried.”

  The dead queen raised both hands and the fingers clenched until her index fingers pointed into the distance. Out in the chamber, mobs of the child-mummies had gathered. At her gesture, they split into groups, one crowding to exits at the far side, another, smaller one, to a side passage, a third and final group continued the work of freeing more of their horrid siblings.

  “This,” Thyss-Ulea said, smiling wildly at Lyssa, “is an assassination.”

  Lyssa gawked at the dead queen. “You’re sending them to destroy him?”

  “Three sides of the pyramid!” Thyss-Ulea boomed. “The first side, the first phase was breaking down the barriers that have kept me from the Violator’s crypt. All these millennia I have been baffled by his puzzles and traps. He was so, so clever when he imprisoned us. We thought the plan was to wait out the whims of the mortal world, wait for time to move on past us, and then rise again. But no. His plan was to trap us in this hell with him for eternity, lording over us in undeath as he did in unlife.”

  She clenched her fist and shook it. “I have had to wait for mortals, for outside fools to solve this for me. First that scheming Xyxian prince broke the Wards of Imprisonment for me. Now your barbarian companions have unlocked the crypt complex. My minions are free!”

  “And what follows that?” Lyssa asked incredulously. “A war rages outside this place. And it doesn’t matter who wins; neither side is going to welcome your rotten horrors as allies. They’ll try to control you, or try to destroy you.” She forced herself to snort and shake her head. “You can leave this place—but, really, you can’t.”

  “Yes.” The dead queen nodded, smiling wickedly. “You’re not wrong, my perceptive, young lovely. That was part of my husband’s great treachery. He promised us the magic could be restored. We were fading, you see. We were desperate. We could feel us fading. So, we turned our city into a tomb and buried ourselves un-alive” her face twisted hideously “to wait for an awakening that would never come.”

  “Because if you leave this place, you’re just like them” Lyssa nodded towards the shuffling mummy mobs “a dead thing.”

  “Undead,” she replied. “But, yes, not what I was promised. That brings me to the second side of the pyramid.” She turned and gestured at the second brazier, at fiery image of Asyra, now prowling down a cramped passage with the dead spy’s magic ring playing its light before her. Cyan brilliance glimmered in tear tracks across her cheeks. “She is fine, is she not?”

  Lyssa swallowed once and could not help but whisper, “She is.”

  “And so very wounded,” Thyss-Ulea said. “By her childhood, by the world...by you.”

  Lyssa bit her lip and glared at the thing that had been a woman—though she wondered if even that was true. “You know nothing.”

  “I know that she is alone. And I know that she wishes that wasn’t the case. She seeks that which has never had, a home, a family, always. She thought she had it. Now, she’s not so sure.”

  “How do you know any of this?”

  “She told me, of course. And her pain, her loneliness is practically louder than her voice, so it wasn’t exactly hard to understand.”

  Lyssa winced, knowing the truth of the words. “Why her?”

  Thyss-Ulea smirked and shrugged. “I wish I could tell you she was special, that it was destiny—and it is, after a fashion. There was always going to be One who would serve my purpose. But, if I’m being honest, which I might as well be, since we have the time, there have been any number of fools I’ve lured down here in the hopes they’d serve my purpose. But I could only ever complete one side of the pyramid, only one part of the plan. I could never escape this prison. And I was always left with a perfect subject, and no way to use them.”

  “What happened to them?” Lyssa asked without really wanting to know the answer.

  Thyss-Ulea gestured absently to the foot of the great dais. There, her horrific children were prying open the innermost ranks of caskets, those with greater finery and construction. From these emerged figures surprisingly less-degraded than the others, some remarkable composed, almost fresh in their graves. Lyssa realized with a gulp of disgust that they were; bodies interred perhaps only in the last century or two—maybe even only decades. She noted that all of them appeared to have been female.

  “Perfect subject...” Lyssa turned her gaze back to the dead queen. “Perfect for what?”

  Thyss-Ulea smiled brilliantly, horribly at her. “Oh, I think you’ve already figured that out. I can’t go far from this place in this...body. It’d simple crumble to dust and be blown back here.” She pivoted to regard the image of Asyra in the flames. “But with the Wards broken and my Imprisoner slain, she can give me new flesh, new blood.”

  Lyssa grimaced. “You’d steal her body?”

  “Theft is such a crude way of putting it. She’d still be in there, in some sense. But she would no longer have control. She would become me.”

  “You’d make her a prisoner in her own flesh.”

  Thyss-Ulea shrugged again. “I’ve been a prisoner for two-and-a-half thousand years. Anything can be endured. Perhaps she’d find new purpose, as a fragment of my whole.”

  “You’re...” Lyssa choked on the horror, and on her own helplessness. She started for the edge of the slab, but the mummy guardians stiffened, arms outstretched, ready to seize her. She paused and glowered past them at their unholy queen. “You’re a monster.”

  “I am—was—a woman to whom monstrous things have been done,” she replied coldly. “Were you to tread the dark, haunted paths I have, you’d be little better.”

  A desperate plan formed suddenly in Lyssa’s mind. “Take me,” she said.

  Thyss-Ulea chuckled softly.

  “I’m serious,” Lyssa said. “Take me. You said it, yourself; there is much you could teach me. Well, you could be me, with all my potential!”

  The dead queen’s chuckle rose to a cackle. “Ah, you simple, simple fool! It is exactly because of that potential I can’t use you! Your soul is too conditioned, your mind already too prepared. You are hardened against me, even if unconsciously.” She shook her head. “And it’s really too bad, because you are delicious. So fierce, so young in your power. You remind me of myself, so many ages ago.”

  Despairing as the plan collapsed in her mind, Lyssa spat. “I am nothing like you.”

  “You’d be surprised. I was an idealist of sort, like you are now, until I learned that ideals are merely lies we tell ourselves in order to tolerate reality. My reality then, like yours now, was a brutal, incompetent regime, drifting on a river of blood.”

  Lyssa pinched her lips into a tight line, refusing to acknowledge the truth of what
Thyss-Ulea said.

  “She” the dead queen pointed at the illusion of Asyra “seeks a home” she pointed now at Lyssa “you are beginning to realize it’s time to flee yours.”

  With grinding teeth and a flare of rage, Lyssa lurched forward again. This time the mummies did grab her, the chill of their touched biting her flesh. She flinched back as dead claws gripped her wrists, found enough strength to tear loose. She kicked and flailed, heard the crackle of breaking things. But the ring of fleshless things didn’t break. She dropped, wheezing onto her back again, on the stone. With her cringing at the center of the slab, the mummies relented, resumed their mute, motionless stances.

  “Such fire!” Thyss-Ulea cackled.

  “Take me, instead,” Lyssa plead between sobbing breaths. “I beg you.”

  “Such pointless nobility.” The dead queen stepped past her servitors to again caress Lyssa’s cheek. Her touch was wormy warmth on her skin, unnatural still, but a weird relief with the iciness of the grave still rippling under her flesh. “Really, it is pointless. The course is set. The way is clear. You are the third side of the pyramid.”

  “Bait...” Lyssa sobbed.

  “Enticement,” Thyss-Ulea replied. “You see, she must give herself to me willingly, as you’re attempting to do now. A delightful irony, that. But such is the nature of the Powers from the Outer Dark. I cannot force the Gift upon her. She must accept it—in your crude sun-god’s parlance, she must Sin and Be Damned. And I fear that spunk of hers, but also a lifetime of suspicion, will keep her from doing that which she inevitably must do. So” she smirked down upon her “I have my leverage, if need be.”

  “Monster...”

  The dead queen sighed. “Again, you bore and disappoint me. And since I can’t have that fire of yours burning this whole plan down...” She gestured at the mummies around them.

  Hands gripped from all sides. Lyssa flinched, froze, didn’t even have time for the scream she could hear in her mind. All was cold. All was the prison of their touch. She sagged to the stone, some of the claws even helping lower her in a mockery of care. She wanted to shiver. But there was no spark in her nerves to propel it.