Crypt of the Violator

by K. J. Coble

  And screamed.

  And jerked back, kicking free of the queen’s embrace, flailing her way across the cushions, which seem to catch and scrape as she did. She slammed into something at her back, paused her retreat, sat breathing hoarsely and cupped the hand to her wounded neck. Instinctively, her eyes sought her sword. It’d come free in their tangling, dropped to the floor.

  “Oh!” Thyss-Ulea got up, cackling, from where Asyra’s kick had knocked her. She grinned horrifically through the blood, licking lips and fangs as she brushed herself off and stepped around the curve of the bed, moving in on her. “Oh, my dear. Look at you. So startled! Don’t be. I will explain all.”

  “What are you?” Asyra tried to squirm further away, found her retreat blocked by a wall. She grimaced at the glistening fangs, the lips red as a wound, the rivulets of gore beading off the dead queen’s chin—her gore. She pressed her fingers tighter against the tear in her neck, felt the frantic twitch of her pulse beneath them, fought off a wave of nausea. A fragment of memory came back to her, from her times wandering the Perialus Kinglets—wretched, frigid backwaters, haunted by things that fed on people.

  On blood.

  Asyra shuddered. “Vampyre...?”

  Thyss-Ulea threw back her head in laughter, face crinkling with cruel mirth, the expression more than bestial with smeared crimson and sharpened ivory. “Oh...like a child seeking new words. You don’t understand, my dear! You’re not completely wrong, I’ll give you. But what you describe is a...phase...a transition, if you will, that I left behind so long ago.”

  “Then why...” Asyra sidled away across the cushions as the dead queen stepped to the bed’s edge and reached for her. “Why this? Why the blood?”

  Seeing Asyra’s retreat, a hint of something that might have been doubt fluttered across Thyss-Ulea’s face. In a moment, the fangs receded and she wiped her face, became almost human again. “Habit, I suppose. Passion. Perhaps I forgot myself.” She sat, patted the spot Asyra had occupied. “Don’t. It’s all right. I...I was caught up in things.”

  A little anger flared to life in the cooling embers of Asyra’s resistance. The fog cleared and thoughts began to regain sharpness—and bite. She scowled at the queen, even as she wiggled further from her, and closer to where her sword had dropped. It was desperation. She didn’t even know if it would hurt her. But she wouldn’t be cornered like this.

  “Caught up?” Asyra spat. “You were going to kill me!”

  “No,” the queen replied with a soft chuckle. “No, my dear, if I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead, perhaps impaled on those spikes with that other little spy-bitch.”

  The words pierced like those spikes and sickening fury seethed up in Asyra, stoked the fires of anger and awareness higher. Clover’s dead eyes stared out of her mind, horrified, agonized, and now demanded vengeance. Too, Asyra’s purpose in all this returned, the Emperor’s peril. But, not just him...

  ...Lyssa...

  Asyra’s lips peeled back from her teeth, her own fangs against this horrid thing

  “Why am I still alive, then? What do you want with me?”

  “I want you,” Thyss-Ulea replied.

  “Maybe I’m not for the taking!”

  “And I want you,” the dead queen continued, as though not hearing her, “to come to me, join with me, give to me willingly.”

  Asyra had reached the edge of the cushions. With a lurch, she tumbled from the bed, rolled across the floor, and came up with the sword in her hand. The point shivered as she aimed it at Thyss-Ulea. “That’s it, isn’t it?” She ignored the fresh trickle of blood from her neck, took the weapon in both hands. The point steadied. “Whatever it is you’re doing—more damned sorcery, I’m sure—requires my cooperation. That’s it. Isn’t it?”

  The queen sighed and closed her eyes, oblivious of the steel angled at her chest. “What this is, is love, my dear.”

  “I doubt you even know what that is!”

  Thyss-Ulea’s eyes sprang back open and now glimmered with eldritch fires. “Do you?”

  Asyra’s sword shivered again before steadying. “More than a creature like you does.”

  “No,” the dead queen said in a pitying tone. “You poor, confused thing. You’ve been alone so long, on the run so long you think you know. But you’ve never given yourself to another, never trusted yourself—or them. I have seen it in your memories.” She smiled wickedly. “Not even that sad, silly wizard you flung yourself at.”

  Fury scalded through Asyra—and a tickle of fear. “You know nothing of that.”

  “I know everything you have known,” Thyss-Ulea replied coldly. “From the time a street urchin girl-mother abandoned you to the flesh-peddlers of Akbir, to your escape from the Pasha’s compound, to your help pilfering the Tome of Flesh from its lair in Urrogott, I know you. No one else can say that, Asyra. I have been you. I know you in a way no sad mortal girl or heaving mortal man can.”

  “You don’t.” Asyra struggled to keep the sword up. She could feel the fog spreading through her skull again, knew it as Thyss-Ulea’s presence in her mind, strangling her thoughts, twisting them, violating. She ground her teeth. “And if it’s cooperation you seek from me, you’re not going to get it!”

  “I can promise you unimagined pleasures, girl,” the dead queen said. She took a step closer and Asyra retreated one. Doubt fluttered again across her face. “I can give you power. I can take the sting of mortality away. Vengeance upon those that wronged you? Done. A life of luxury and comfort? Yours. Never having to look over your shoulder again? I can give you that. We can make that together.”

  Thyss-Ulea spread her arms wide, let Asyra look fully upon her beauty.

  “Asyra, I can give you everything, if you give yourself to me.”

  A shaky smile twitched across Asyra’s face, a crazed fragment of defiance. She adjusted the grip on her sword. A fatalistic plan formed, her only way out. But she wouldn’t be a pawn for this thing. And if what Thyss-Ulea required was Asyra’s life—well, she wasn’t going to get that.

  “There’s something you can’t give me,” Asyra said and flipped the sword in her hands, pointed the steel at her own heart. “Freedom.”

  Thyss-Ulea stiffened momentarily, the fires in her eyes flaring nearly white-hot before simmering down. The look of alarm passed, was replaced by impatience. She held out a hand. “Don’t be foolish. In bondage to me, you will go beyond freedom.”

  “Just another cage.” Asyra began backing away from her, towards the passage through which they’d come. “At the very least, I’ll pick my own cage.”

  Thyss-Ulea’s hand clenched into a fist.

  Asyra found herself backing into a wall—no passage, no escape. Around her, the scenery changed. Rays of sunlight withered from the air, replaced by the guttering light of torches in sconces. The columns and curtains and finery unraveled around her, an illusion disintegrating before the dusty, gloomy reality of a tomb chamber—like all the others. The bed shimmered away, was only a slab, streaked with blood from their encounter.

  Thyss-Ulea nearly unraveled for a moment, too, the hot flesh of her smoking partially away from crooks of linen-wrapped bone and time-blackened skin. Half her face spooled into wisps of dust, left a death’s head grin and an empty eye socket glowing with a single hell flame. But her body rose and fell with a breath—what Asyra realized was a memory of breathing, of her mortal form—and the illusion of Thyss-Ulea reformed around the desiccated remains.

  “You’re certain I can’t convince you otherwise.”

  “I’m sorry,” Asyra replied—surprised herself by almost meaning it.

  “You will be.” The dead queen’s voice could have frozen a lake. “You could have made this easy on both of us. Now, we’ll have to work at it.” She turned and strolled to the corner opposite Asyra’s and touched a block in the wall. Something gave a stony crackle. A rumbled followed and a slab of the corner receded to reveal another passage.

  “Come,” Thyss-Ulea said,
turning back to her.

  Asyra remained in place, but reversed the sword, again aimed it towards the dead queen.

  “Come.” Thyss-Ulea gestured to the newly-opened doorway. “There’s really no other way out. You won’t be harmed. And, as you will see, I actually do have something else I can give you.”

  Asyra fingered her weapon. The steel glinted, beckoned. But with the moment of anger and desperation passed, she was no longer sure she could fall upon it. And something in the dead queen’s words birthed a new fear in her chest. It...can’t be. Her heart flopped over once in her ribs as a dread suspicion began to birth within her.

  She had to know.

  Thyss-Ulea stepped through the door. Asyra followed. Their course took them down a short passage, at the end of which danced a weird, purple light. Coming out the other side, Asyra realized it was a fire, blooming in a brazier, one of two, flanking an empty sarcophagus.

  She knew whose it was.

  In the flames she saw a great battle wracking the ruins of Zadam. In the midst of the steel whirlwind, Bazul II’s flag still fluttered, while men locked shields about it and the Emperor, himself, appeared to holler orders or encouragement. All around them, anarchy reigned. Men fought each other and mummified abominations in a three-way orgy of butchery. And more of the undead were coming, boiling up out of passageways hidden until Thyss-Ulea sprung her great trap.

  “They won’t last long,” the dead queen said with a false sigh. She pointed at the second brazier. “Nor will they.”

  In the second blaze, Asyra recognized Strayden and the remnants of his Vothan band. They were creeping up a long, wide hall, lined with fierce-looking statues of bronze, fashioned into the likenesses of guards. All of the party looked hurt. And they were so few.

  “It would’ve been better if more of them had made it,” Thyss-Ulea lamented. “But my husband’s traps and guardians are more effective than I would’ve guessed. Nevertheless, they’ve gotten farther than any before.”

  Asyra looked at her sharply. “This kind of thing has happened before?”

  “Many times.” Thyss-Ulea turned her gaze to her, offered a flash of fangs. “Always the attempts have ended in failure and disaster. And always I’ve had to wait, in silence, across centuries, wait for mortals to forget and for fools to seek the secrets of Zadam again.”

  “That means...” Asyra’s gorge rose and she had to gulp it down. Shaking now, not just with disgust, but rising fury, she held up her sword again. “That means there have been women before me?”

  Thyss-Ulea’s fangs looked impossibly long, impossibly sharp. “Sometimes men.” She cackled. “Oh, look at you! Oh, my sweet, simple child! You thought you were the only one, the special one.”

  Asyra fingered the weapon handle and began to back towards the passage through which they’d come.

  “I suppose you are special,” Thyss-Ulea was going on, apparently unconcerned with Asyra’s retreat. “Like those barbarian dogs, you’ve come further than any.” She regarded her with an almost-pout. “What would’ve made you truly special would’ve been if you’d joined with me willingly.”

  “No chance of that now,” Asyra snapped.

  “No, I suppose not,” Thyss-Ulea said pityingly. Her tone regained its brightness. “But, before you go, I think there’s something you should see, something that might make you a bit more willing.”

  The queen turned and gestured. The braziers and sarcophagus were not alone on the dais they occupied, looking out across what appeared to be a vast, largely empty burial chamber; a circle of Thyss-Ulea’s mummy-servitors stood around a stone tablet, facing inward at something. At some unheard command, they turned as one. Those nearest Asyra, stepped back from the slab, revealed what occupied it.

  Asyra gasped and nearly dropped her sword.

  Gripped in the hands of the mummies, held limply upright in the chill, dead claws, was Lyssa. Normally rich ebony features had gone ashen and she looked sunken in upon herself. For an instant, Asyra feared she looked upon a corpse—like everything else in this hellish place. But a rattling breath lifted Lyssa’s chest and shoulders.

  One of the mummies held a long, bronze knife of especial craft and beauty, pommel and hilt bejeweled, blade shined to a near-mirror brilliance, and the edges sharp enough to cut the chamber’s weird light into purplish scintillas. Stiffly, the abomination touched the weapon to Lyssa’s bared neck.

  Tears burned Asyra’s eyes. A sob began, but caught in her chest, was wrenched apart by a grunt of rage. She whirled to Thyss-Ulea, sword clenched at the ready.

  “It’s your choice,” the dead queen said, unfazed. “I can wait another millennium, if I have to. But neither of you can.”

  Asyra trembled. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the mummy pull Lyssa’s chin back and level the knife against her throat. Releasing a shriek of fury, Asyra flung her weapon to the floor with a clang that seem to echo on forever. She glared through the tears.

  “All right,” she snarled, “what is it you want of me?”

  “We’d already begun,” the queen replied, “but your suspicious nature took over. Regrettable. But perhaps it is better this way.” She gestured towards the open, empty sarcophagus. “I want you to join with me.”

  Asyra looked at the beckoning casket and shivered. “I have to go willingly. That’s the trick, isn’t it?”

  Thyss-Ulea nodded with what almost looked like regret. “I went in willingly, thinking I understood. I’ll spare you that, at least, the lie. We will become one, within. Once we have...consummated our union, I will step free.”

  Asyra’s shivers intensified. Tears ran freely now and she felt her whole form would liquify in fear. But she had to do this. She knew it. They were trapped. There was no other way. She glanced over her shoulder, at Lyssa. “She goes free, first.”

  “You have not the leverage to make demands.”

  “I have me.”

  Thyss-Ulea smirked, but made a motion with one hand. The mummies began to gather up Lyssa from the slab. “They will take her to the surface, though I have no idea what safety she’ll find up there.”

  “And Strayden and his Vothans?”

  “The barbarians?” Thyss-Ulea snorted in disdain. “I’m surprised you worry about them. No, I’m afraid I can’t grant you that. They’re already beyond my influence.” She shrugged. “They might survive what comes next. It’s out of my control.”

  But they might have a chance. Asyra nodded slowly. Her whole life shrank down to these moments. She sniffed once, tried not to think about the sarcophagus before her, shut within it as she must be, with her.

  “All right. What next?”

  THE WIDE HALL NARROWED as the climb grew steeper. Strayden and the others reached a flight of stairs, clambered up those, reached a flat stretch, and proceeded. Another flight of stairs followed at the end of an increasingly narrow corridor. It was hard not to imagine they were reaching the end of some terrible climb.

  “Ugly devils,” Sigurd said, waving his torch over the bronze statues in alcoves at even intervals along the corridor.

  Time had apparently not affected their sheen or details. Each had been fashioned to resemble guardsmen in the full armor of their long-lost era, clenching heavy spears before them, two-handed. Only the ceremonial headdresses they’d all seen on Xyxian art and statuary before were missing. As were the heads. All that remained atop each set of shoulders was a grinning skull and, unlike the rest of the statues, these appeared to be real.

  “Skulls for Gruzh,” Durrak murmured.

  That brought nervous chuckles from the others, but a screech-boom from somewhere behind and below drowned them out.

  “Those things have forced the door,” Strayden growled, picking up his pace. The hiss of shuffling feet on stone and dust spread up the hall at their backs. “Come on, you dogs.”

  “This has got to end somewhere,” Durrak said, panting, as he clambered up the steps after Strayden. “What do we do then?”

  They reached
another flat tier, another, even narrower hall. “We worry about that when we get there,” Strayden replied and strode on.

  The next hall stretched on in a way the others hadn’t, wide enough for four-abreast, and lined with more of the statues. Strayden’s flesh squirmed to have them towering to either side, eyeless stares seeming to follow them as they passed. The darkness felt thicker ahead, torches struggling to pierce it as they delved deeper. Everything took on a claustrophobic atmosphere and the rising clamor of their pursuers only made it worse.

  The hall opened suddenly into a wide, semi-circular chamber. In the struggling light of their torches, Strayden could see details of what looked almost like private quarters. Finery crowded the room, fire light glimmering off gold and silver and platters whose sheen the ages had not dulled. Tapestries not yet faded hung among cobwebs along the walls. Dust lay in a patina over rugs with colors still, nevertheless, bright. It all felt like the echo of long-dead merriment and power.

  Strayden stiffened and, by the sharp breaths of the men around him, knew they beheld the same thing he did.

  On the far, flat side of the chamber, a huge couch spread, partially curtained-off by more cobwebs, but obvious with its red velvet and bronze fittings. Mahogany legs had been worked to look like claws and armrests at either end had been carved into likenesses of leering skulls. Laid upon the couch, enwrapped in the funerary linens the Vothans had seen everywhere, now, but also draped in robes of purple and gold was a body. With hands folded over its chest and head resting upon a monstrous pillow, it looked more still than death.

  “Touch nothing,” Strayden said, starting into the room.

  Shivering torchlight crept with him as he moved gingerly towards the couch, the dark around it almost a physical thing that only retreated when Strayden stepped right through it. His blood ran with currents of ice to look upon the thing on the cushions, but couldn’t escape the utter normalcy of the body. He stopped beside it, stared.