by K. J. Coble
Cross-hatched script had been inked with exacting detail across each length of the burial linens. More of them following the golden trim of the robes, sewed in crimson thread. A simple headdress adorned the brow, no skulls, here, just a sun patterned-diadem, the rays splaying upwards into a crown. The outline of a face, high cheekbones, blocky, proud jaw, was obvious behind the tight wrappings.
“That’s him,” Durrak said into the hush.
“Big man, himself,” Aelren added with an edgy snort.
Strayden looked around, then back down at the corpse of Thyss-Mallik. “Strange, isn’t it, though? All the others got the sarcophagi. But not him?”
“This whole place is his sarcophagus,” Durrk replied.
Strayden shivered, realizing the truth of the Nuburran’s words. A rush of sound from outside the room, down the hall, brought another shiver. He cursed. “It’s going to be our sarcophagus, too, if we don’t get that door!”
They rushed to the entryway, which they could probably block with two men. Durrak and Aelren arrayed themselves so, almost instinctively, with shields locked. But Strayden shouldered between them to get a look.
At first, the struggling light of their torches revealed only the dark thickening down the way they’d come. But there was no mistaking the shambling, dragging, scuffling echoes preceding movement out of the shadow. The dark churned. The mummy shapes materialized, their ragged, rotten faces glowering into the yellowy light. Claws raised and gapped-toothed mouths stretched open with silent howls.
“We fight in pairs,” Strayden commanded, trying to keep the despondency from his voice. He shouldered Aelren aside and took his place at Durrak’s shoulder. “It’s a narrow space. We can keep them out.” He hefted his axe to his shoulder, glanced once at Durrak. “Skulls for Gruzh, old friend.”
“Blood for Gruzh,” the Nuburran replied softly.
They came on like a like a slow-motion landslide, the first pressure manageable, but the weight building rapidly behind. Strayden shattered a mummy with a blow of his shield boss to the thing’s face. But another was instantly behind it, scraping at the already-mangled elmwood. He smote this one between the eye-sockets with the heel of his axe handle, watched the face crumple in upon itself and the rest of the body collapse backwards. But a third slid in where it had been, pawing, scrawling.
It went on and on, a desperate drudgery of hammering, hacking, and shoving. Dust and bone powdered by impact thickened the air. Smashed, twitching mummy remnants piled in the corridor, whatever eldritch energies that’d powered them fading with the destruction of their forms. The Vothans wrecked enough that the bony shapes began to make a barricade. But more clambered over.
Exhaustion became a deadlier foe than the mummy tide, muscles already punished going quivering and unresponsive. Joints roared, sinews slivered with the pain of overexertion, and previously-manageable weights became unbearable. Strayden slumped back from the fight and Sigurd stepped in with a half-hearted battle cry. He knew. They all knew.
This would be the place they met their end.
Sigurd met his, a moment later. A cloven half-mummy, still twitching, got a grip on his ankle and he flinched back to boot it in the face. In the same instant, when his shield tilted down, another living corpse got itself up over the rim and dragged it down. Lunging over the top, the abomination sank its teeth into his exposed neck. A squawk of pain and surprise cut out with a gurgle and arterial red foamed and jetted.
Hollering, Aelren launched forward to drag the man free. But Sigurd toppled, eyes rolling up in his head, and the monster tumbled after him, with more undead surging into the gap behind it. In seconds, Aelren had his work cut out for him pounding the breakthrough back and covering Durrak’s momentarily exposed flank.
Strayden staggered to Sigurd’s side and kicked the still-chewing mummy off his chest. The thing shattered before his iron shod boot and blood spouted free as it rolled away in fragments. Strayden got a one-handed grip on the stricken man and dragged him back from the scrum, towards the couch. Slipping on blood, he went down on one knee, send a jolt of pain up to the hip. He was covered in the stuff, could taste it in his mouth, had felt it spraying all over him, the walls, the couch and dead form upon it.
One look at the ruin of Sigurd’s neck and throat told Strayden his efforts had been in vain. Sigurd had gone to Gruzh’s ale hall.
“Captain!”
Strayden dragged himself back to his feet, back to Durrak’s side. A tangle of claws and limbs was enveloping the Nuburran, trying to tear the shield from his arm, the axe from his fist, the skin from his bones. Strayden shouldered into the fight, wielding his shield more than his axe, now, shoving, pummeling, pulverized ancient bones, driving the undead tide back. Crimson limned his vision and a red roar of rage exploded from his lungs. He fought on with the full berserk frenzy of the Vothans of repute.
They’d all dropped their torches in the struggle and these guttered low, left them fighting in deepening dark and writhing shadow. Thrown back by a sudden press, Strayden had a momentary glimpse of the rear of the chamber. It almost looked like the shadow of Thyss-Mallik’s form had risen from its couch and was crouched over Sigurd’s fallen form.
But he couldn’t have seen that!
One of the living corpses had gotten a hand over Aelren’s shield rim, was gripping him by the throat. Strayden booted his own attacker backwards into the mob and pivoted to his right to drive the head of his axe crunching into the thing’s ribs. When it crumpled towards him, releasing Aelren in the process, Strayden hooked the curve of his weapon around the abomination’s bony neck and yanked, sent it tumbling into its undead peers.
None of it mattered. The undead mob was spilling past Durrak as he leaned into it, shoulder against his shield, hobnailed squalling on the flagstones. The monsters were piling at their feet, still-grappling at shins and boots. They were clawing and snagging and biting, and the three Vothans could no longer bar the doorway.
Strayden tripped on something—or had his ankle grabbed—and stumbled onto his back. A mummy crashed down on top of him, pinned him beneath his own shield. He roared, began lifting the decrepit weight off him, but a second shambling body clambering over the first, doubled the weight. And a third joined them, crushing him down, left him sobbing for breath as the thing’s claws extended for his face.
This is it, he thought in shock. He felt relief, at least, to have his weapon in hand, clenched it close. I go to the Table of Gruzh armed, at least. But his thoughts truly went across the sea, back to Scintallard, to Hilde and her sad-eyed boys who, yeah, probably were his. He thought of his comrades at his sides to the last, Durrak and Aelren—who’d deserved better ends and a better leader. And he thought of his friends, haunted Lyssa, cunning Asyra, wished them well, that they got out of this horror.
Because he wasn’t.
The mummy on top of him looked up at something. And began to smoke. Its jaws opened in a mute scream of what could only be a memory of pain and it flinched back, flames sprouting from its burial rags. Others were doing the same, the air filling with their smoke, their fire, their writhing as they gave up their assault and crumpled back.
Strayden flung the burning corpses off him and they didn’t resist, too busy immolating. Sparks and flaming bits stung his flesh and he kicked them back, rolled, and struggled to crawl. He ran into Aelren on the way, retreating from another conflagration. To their left, Durrak was batting out fires on his pant leg and crab-walking in reverse towards them.
Before them, a wall of fire swelled, consuming the terrible mass of the living dead. Squirming, struggling limbs entangled in the blaze, collapsed and fused together as the terrible heat seared through them. And a fresh clamor rose in the hallway behind them, sounded of the ring of metal and the crash of battle. But the eye-stinging fume and flame obscured its source.
Strayden felt Aelren stiffen at his side before he felt the weird chill, himself. He paused in his retreat from the fires as a numbness tickled his fingers
and toes, crawled up his limbs. He recognized it as similar to the sensation of the mummies’ touch, wondered if it wasn’t residual from the fight. But it had a new, terrible character, like the breath of Death, itself.
Aelren was staring at something behind them, mouth hung askew and eyes shimmering. Strayden knew he didn’t really want to look, but knew he had to.
He turned.
Thyss-Mallik, Pharoah of the Nightmare Lands of Xyxia, the Violator, stood in the middle of the chamber, just beyond the flames and the fight. Struggle had caused burial wraps to peel away from his face, left bony jaw bare, and splashed in blood that coated his impossibly complete—and sharp—set of teeth.
Strayden glanced in horror at Sigurd’s visibly shrunken—drained—body and knew whose blood it was.
Thyss-Mallik’s eyes were open, watching. But it was not any natural orbs that occupied those sockets; a pair of smoothly-shaped rubies glinted bloody and cold at their surroundings, flashed as they panned over the fires. The dead monarch stepped forward, time-stiffened joints crackling, with a hand raised. The blaze pushed back from him, gave way, even as everything within them disintegrated into a foul miasma that bunched at the ceiling.
The conflagration parted as he stepped by the battered Vothans to the doorway. Nothing remained before him. With the fumes parted, the struggle beyond, in the corridor, became apparent. The mummy tide was being attacked from either side, was being driven back as the skull-statues lining the way up to Thyss-Mallik’s burial chamber animated and stepped straight into battle—a weird, voiceless, ringing war of dead versus dead.
Thyss-Mallik paused in the midst of dissipating smoke and debris, stood at the entrance, and seemed to watch the fight as it raged down the corridor, like a general surveying the turn of the tide in a campaign. Vaguely, Strayden was aware of Durrak scuttled close, Aelren crowding in from the other side. The three of them huddled there, like children gripping one another close beside a campfire as an elder tells a ghost story.
But they were living this one.
Thyss-Mallik glanced stiffly over his shoulder at them and the ruby-eyes flickered, their hot gaze slicing right through the last of Strayden’s resolve. The jaw moved with words he heard, not through the air, but in his head, a deep, terrifying voice. The words jumbled, had no meaning at first, but coalesced suddenly into fragments he understood. And then sentences.
“I see she has been busy,” the dead Pharoah said.
Shivering, Strayden asked through a desert-dry mouth, “W-who?”
“My queen, my love...that conniving bitch.” The ruby-eyes sparkled. “How did you animals get in here?”
Strayden trembled without shame. He faced not a god, here, but somehow something worse. Thoughts stumbled over one another in his skull. Memory took a moment to jar. “The key...we found a key.”
“And let them in,” Thyss-Mallik said, turning back to the hallway. The sound of the fight receded, the skull-statues apparently having the momentum and driving their undead opponents back. “She finally figured out a way through the wards and traps and guardians.” Strayden though he heard a sigh. “All that, just to fail. Again. The fool.”
“I don’t understand,” Strayden surprised himself by saying.
“Of course, you don’t!” Thyss-Mallik replied with thunderous tones, half-turned back to scorch him again with that ruby glare. “You’re a dog. You’re a pest, a mortal. You do what your betters tell you.”
“No one told us to come here!” Durrak spoke up.
Thyss-Mallik’s glower flicked towards him and the Nuburran visibly quailed. “They did. Your simple minds simply cannot conceive it. You are but pieces on the gameboard, moved by the hands of players. And these players have carried on their duel for over two-and-a-half thousand years.” He turned back to the doorway. “But she has grown truly reckless now. So now I will bring the game to an end.” He took a step for the exit.
“What game?” Strayden croaked at the dead Pharaoh’s back.
Thyss-Mallik paused, half-turned to them once more. The bony ruin of his face almost seemed to crinkle, flesh-like. “The game of undeath,” he replied. “The riddle of everlasting life. The contest against time. I solved it you see. I accepted its truth. But Ulea—ah, beautiful, brilliant, terrible Ulea—she could not.” Mummified shoulders shrugged. “I suppose it’s not surprising, that she would not trust what I have learned. I was wrong once, too. And I led her and the others—ah, so many, many others—astray into this” he hesitated, glanced about the chamber “this madness.” Another shrug. “She has a right to her grudges.”
The eyes flared again. “But she has no right to my soul.”
With that, the dead Pharoah turned and stepped through the doorway. Ages-stiffened joints popped, left him with a shuffle, and a strand of loose wrap trailed behind him. But he had a terrible dignity, even in undeath, and as he moved on his spine almost seemed to straighten, his strides to lengthen.
The Vothans sat, huddled together in the dark, lit only by the guttering remnants of one of their dropped torches, in silence. The shuffle of Thyss-Mallik merged into the clamor of his statue-minions, still battling their way through the mummies. A boom shuddered stone wall and floors, and the red glare of flame swelled up the corridor with a puff a hot air—the Pharoah adding his sorcery to the fight—before fading.
“What now?” Durrak asked hoarsely.
Strayden had never felt so beat down. “I don’t know.”
“How did...” Aelren fumbled for words. “What woke...him up?”
“Blood.” Strayden gestured over his shoulder where—Gruzh help him, he didn’t want to look again—Sigurd sprawled by the burial couch. “At least, that’s what I’m guessing.”
“Guess we know why they called him the Violator,” Durrak rumbled.
“Who’s he going to Violate now?” Aelren asked.
“His queen, I guess.” That brought inadvertent chuckles from the other two, but Strayden wasn’t feeling humorous. “You heard him rambling.”
“I heard him call us dogs,” Durrak growled.
“And maybe we are.” Strayden couldn’t find an ounce of strength, wanted to just sag back and let it all go. “Gods...kings...we’re all just curs to them.”
“I’m not a dog.” Durrak sat up fully, glowered at him in the dark.
“Me neither,” Aelren added with equal fervor. “And I’m kind of tired being treated like one.”
Strayden forced himself to sit up, nodded. “Aye. Me, too. But we’re all that’s left, lads.” He shook his head and was glad for the dark that hid the tears he could feel rushing out to sting his eyes. “The Fifth’s destroyed.”
“Again,” Durrak said with a grim chortle. “It’s always destroyed. And we always put it back together. That’s the Vothan Guard way.”
Strayden started to snarl at the Nuburran—who wasn’t even remotely Vothan. But the rightness of his words struck him like a cascade of mountain spring water, shocking the fog from his mind, cleansing the muck from his soul. He blinked away the tears, wiped grime and blood from his face, and nodded again. “Aye, it is.” He struggled to his feet, suppressed a wince when the knee twinged, when his shoulder throbbed. “It is. And we’ve got at least one more member of our circle to still find.”
“The sorceress,” Aelren said, getting up rather more quickly.
“She’s not part of our Guard, exactly, but she’s one our people,” Strayden declared. “And we don’t leave our people behind.”
“Pretty words,” Durrak replied, rising stiffly to stand. “How do we carry them out?”
Strayden shrugged and pointed down the hall, to the still-glimmering light of Thyss-Mallik’s magic fire. The racket of the fight had moved on, could still be heard echoing faintly. “Lyssa’s always in the middle of the witchery. And it sounds like the witchery is moving that way.” He grinned at the other two. “So, we follow.”
THYSS-ULEA’S HOLD WAS weakening.
Lyssa wasn’t sure how she knew i
t at first, surfacing from the chill, drowning current of the mummies’ clutches. Perhaps it was no more than the realization that their touch froze her no longer, felt only of dry, scratching bone, long-dead flaking flesh, and the tickle of funerary rags dangling loose. But her mind came back to her. And her eyes fluttered open to slits.
Through them, she saw doom.
The lid of Thyss-Ulea’s huge sarcophagus was drawing fully open with a stony grind, propelled by magic, Lyssa presumed. Asyra stood at the undead queen’s side. How had she gotten here? And as Lyssa watched through her carefully-lidded eyes—so as not to alert the mummy-servitors still clenching her—the queen reached out. Asyra slowly, obviously quite-unwillingly took her hand. Together, the pair started towards the casket, obviously waiting to receive them.
Together.
No!
Lyssa flinched reflexively. It was then she felt the icy caress of the blade at her throat, as the mummies tensed around her, dead fingers clenching at arms, shoulders, and back of her neck. She forced herself to sag immediately, feign unconsciousness, make like it had been a convulsion. Eyes pinched shut and she remained as utterly still as possibly in their scraping, rotten grasps. Slowly, their grips eased.
And she let an eye crack open.
But Thyss-Ulea seemed alerted now, had broken contact with Asyra and had turned. Her blazing gaze sought not Lyssa, though. She seemed to search some unseen distance. Her face twisted in fury. And just a bit of fear.
“No...” she rasped.
Lyssa thought she felt a shiver pass through the slab beneath her. Trickles of dust from the vaulted ceiling blurred the air and the twin braziers, which had guttered down without their queen’s attention, flared fully back to purplish life. Thyss-Ulea turned to these, glaring at one and then another. Neither appeared to contain any coherent imagery, like they had before. Within the blaze Lyssa recalled as holding the vision of Strayden, she though she saw flashes of violence between shadowy shapes, a battle. She took it for the fighting that must surely still be raging on the surface above the tomb. But...