Crypt of the Violator

by K. J. Coble

  The dead queen shook her head. “This can’t be. Those fools led them right there...”

  Something boomed and Lyssa definitely felt the chamber shake now. In its shuddering wake rose the racket of what was unmistakable as battle, clamoring closer and closer.

  Thyss-Ulea snapped her fingers and some of the hands clenching Lyssa’s body released. “Seal and hold the southeast doors. More help will be coming from the northeast. Just hold. Quickly, fools!”

  Lyssa sagged backwards as most of the hands propping her up drew away. It felt as only the creature holding the knife at her neck remained. She felt her heartbeat accelerate. There would be a chance, now.

  Asyra was looking about in disorientation. Lyssa could see—could sense, too, practically clouding the air—the layers of sorcery that had dulled her mind beginning to unravel. A flinch of anger crossed her foggy eyes and she began to pull back.

  But Thyss-Ulea’s hand shot out and caught her once more. Asyra visibly sagged at the touch, eyes going lidded and glazed. “No,” the queen said icily. “No, you and I are not done yet. He won’t stop it!” With a yank, she dragged the small woman towards the gaping maw of the sarcophagus. “He wo—”

  A blast ripped into the chamber.

  Lyssa toppled off the slab, out of the arms of the servitor, and onto the floor. Impact struck the breath from her. The hideous roar shocked her ears momentarily into deafness that only cleared after several moments. She lay, stunned, trying to suck air into her jolted lungs and gagging on infernal hell-fumes. In the chaos, though, she dared open her eyes and look about.

  Smoke and tags of fire lingering from the explosion frothed into the burial hall. Debris clattered down around the southeast entrance, which the blast had ripped wide and left a jagged, scorched outline, still-glowing. Empty sarcophagi lay in pieces, smashed, thrown on top of one another. The servitors Thyss-Ulea had sent to bar the way had stood directly in the cone fire, had been thrown back in fiery rags across the lower steps of dais, some still twitching.

  A lone, ragged figure stepped out of the settling cloud and Lyssa felt a new wave of iciness sweep into the chamber with it. It limped over a steaming pile of rubble, side-stepped a quivering pile of mummy, and came to stand below the dais, somehow grand and terrible, despite its appearance, which was not that different from the living dead serving Thyss-Ulea.

  But the smoke began to twin about the figure, and the dust. And the time-ravaged features smoothed and the burial linens vanished as tendrils of living debris wound around the figure, knit into it. Lyssa had seen this, with Thyss-Ulea. The figure materialized into darkly olive, muscular shoulders, wedged torso, chorded arms and legs, and a darkly handsome face framed by a square-cut, black mane. The man that became of the living corpse stiffened his back, stretched casually, and shook himself, as though recovering after long exercise.

  Lips peeled back from perfect, vaguely sharp teeth as Thyss-Mallik smiled.

  “I’m beginning to suspect the marriage is in trouble, my dear.”

  Thyss-Ulea thrust Asyra aside with a shriek, let her fall to the floor, and stepped forward to the edge of the top tier of the dais. “Marriage? You mean slavery!”

  “The bondage could be said to go both ways” Thyss-Malik’s smirk hinted at a very human sense of humor “and with more meanings than one.”

  “Still the jokes!” she snapped back at him. “I hated them in life and have hated them across the ages! You think everything’s a joke!” She gestured at their surroundings. “Even this!”

  The undead Pharoah’s smile fell slightly. “Not anymore.”

  With a screech and crackle of metal on stone, towering figures strode into the burial chamber behind him, spread out at his flanks. They looked like living bronze, save the heads, hideous, glaring skulls that looked too small for the massive shoulders atop which they perched. Some looked blackened by the flames of their apparent master. Others bore scratches in their metallic skins. All carried heavy, broad-bladed spears.

  Thyss-Mallik advanced towards the lower steps of the dais and his statue-servitors followed. His nearly-black gaze shimmered as he looked towards the great sarcophagus of Thyss-Ulea—Asyra struggling to get to her feet beside it—and he frowned. “What foolishness did you intend? You’d planned on retaking mortal form?”

  The dead queen held up a hand that shimmered with purple fire. “Stop where you are.”

  He did, and shook his head pityingly. “Still, you don’t understand. This is existence for us now, and always. Only here will be the Long Sleep. I know you didn’t want to hear this when I told you. But, still, you will not accept.”

  “I will not remain trapped down here!” she shrieked. “You cannot keep me!”

  “You’re right,” he replied. “After all your attempts to destroy me, all your endless schemes and plots, across the ages, through these endless, dark tunnels, and amongst our sad flock, you’ve never gotten so far. You’ve made it clear; if you escape, the first thing you will do is destroy me.”

  “Brilliant, my love,” Thyss-Ulea said with a nervous cackle. “The Great Thyss-Mallik, Violator of Bodies and Souls, can put one and one together!”

  “There’s still time.” Thyss-Mallik planted his foot on the first step of the dais. “You can give this up. Hear me, Ulea! If you leave this place in that sad, little mortal’s form, you will be vulnerable to the Final Death. You will be food for the Gods, at last.” He clenched a fist before him. “Only if you accept the Long Sleep, only if you stop fighting reality, can you hope to live forever.”

  “Live forever?” Thyss-Ulea screamed. “Encased in a rotting carcass, buried under a thousand tons of rock and stone? You call that living?”

  He shrugged. “Existing. After all we did, Ulea, across the centuries of prolonged life, all the pleasures, all the terrible, bloody excesses, it’s the best we can hope for.” He shrugged again. “Otherwise, you get to face the vengeance of Creation.”

  Thyss-Ulea snorted and raised her hand, the eldritch flames about her fingers intensifying. “I’ll take my chances.”

  Rasping and dragging from the northwest side of the chamber foretold the arrival of shuffling shapes, these in the rotten strips of Thyss-Ulea’s mummy legions. Dozens shambled through the entrances there, a great dusty, reeking tide. Some bore corroded weapons of the tomb; others had picked up chunks of rubble. Inexorably, they trudged across the benighted burial hall, edging around the sarcophagi that’d encased them, stepping over wreckage, eyelessly staring at the man that had been their Pharoah. It was hard not to imagine hate blazing from those empty sockets.

  Thyss-Mallik offered them a contemptuous glance before turning his glower back upon his queen. He held up a hand casually and sorcery ignited around it, not purplish like Thyss-Ulea’s, but nearly-pure white.

  “Not for long, you won’t.”

  The white fire leapt from Thyss-Mallik’s hand and arched across the burial hall with a scream like souls in torment.

  A shaft of Thyss-Ulea’s purple flames met it in midair, their sorceries colliding with a thunderclap that shuddered through the flagstones. The roar of fire-against-fire was almost anticlimactic. But the glare of the contest threw hard shadows like direct sunlight and, like that, prickled the skin with its heat.

  Lyssa curled up behind the slab upon which she’d been held, using its mass to shield her from the scathing light. She dared a look around its side, saw Thyss-Ulea in the midst of the brilliance, both hands up, now, feeding more flame into her attack. The illusion of her beauty fluttered away like smoke in spots as the duel quickly absorbed her powers and attention. Dried flesh and crackling bone beneath literally smoked as the fury of the contest took a physical toll.

  Near Lyssa’s feet, the servitor that’d held the knife to her throat lay exposed to the scrawling light. Twitching, it tried to crawl after her. But its legs burst into flames and quickly charred and crumbled away in blackened smear. The thing pawed at her meekly as more fire spread up its back. She kicked it a
way, sent it rolling backwards into the light, and watched with some satisfaction as the conflagration scoured the rest of it away, left sooty marks and part of a skull, still vaguely grinning.

  Blinking through sweat, Lyssa saw another shape writhing in the cone of shadow cast behind Thyss-Ulea. Heart leaping into her throat, she remembered Asyra. The only thing keeping the sorcerous firestorm from consuming her, too, was the protection of Thyss-Ulea’s own defenses.

  Lyssa scooted sideways down to the other end of the slab, dared a look beyond. Punishing, hot winds scoured tears from her eyes and she flinched back almost immediately to save her face and vision. But she’d seen. Thyss-Mallik was advancing up the steps of the dais, hands out before him, forcing his magic and will ahead of him. The fire-plumes of his sorcery were swallowing the more-disciplined shafts of Thyss-Ulea’s power within their frenzy. He was hammering down her defenses, slowly, grindingly.

  When that happened, Thyss-Ulea, and everything—everyone—around her would burn.

  Words and formulae jumbled together in Lyssa’s mind. She didn’t know that she’d have the strength to cast a spell, wasn’t even sure one would function with the conflicting storms of magic already charging the air, but she was going to try. Scuttling back to the edge of the slab nearest Thyss-Ulea and Asyra, Lyssa began to murmur words she couldn’t even hear over the din. But she knew them.

  The rawest Novitiate into the White Guard is first taught the basics of a defensive aura. For the things they will be exposed to, they must have it. The Aura is simple, mental force manifested in the material plane, held there by concentration. It is the shedding of one’s essence as armor. Lyssa had seen the most shrunken, liver-spotted Elders in the Order weave shells of indestructability so dense about them, even a collapsing building could not penetrate.

  To make such happen she’d been taught a simple mantra: harden the mind, harden the soul, harden the heart.

  Harden the heart...

  She knew it was working as the air about her flecked with cyan sparks and her skin tickled with an almost electric current. Truly, she’d woven her own defenses so many times, this should have been second nature. But her ordeal, her utter exhaustion gave doubt to even the simple task of moving her muscles. And the holocaust of the duel between undead monarchs marching steadily up the steps towards her shook her mind.

  The heart had to remain strong.

  She stood, left hand held out to the side, giving the Aura direction. The blowtorch of battling magics struck it like a gale and she stumbled sideways. Flames wheeled around her, spun off in fiery vortices that scorched stone. For a moment, she wobbled towards the edge of the dais, was nearly shoved off.

  Lyssa leaned back into the pressure, put her shoulder into it. Slowly, battling a wind that seared across more than one plan of existence, she started back towards where Asyra sprawled, in the lee of Thyss-Ulea’s shadow. Lyssa dared not look away from her course, angling behind the embattled queen and straight for the downed burglar. She could feel the terrible heat, terrible light of the contest.

  Asyra twitched where she was, stirred, and rolled over. Eyes fluttered once and her face flinched in pain, hands shooting up to shield her eyes from the glare. She rolled the other way, away from the brilliance. The reflexive carried her too far, to the smoking edge of the shadow behind Thyss-Ulea, where the queen’s power did not extend. There, she flinched again, rolled back the other way, leathers aflame from the hellish touch of Thyss-Mallik’s fire.

  Lyssa staggered through the torrent of hell to reach Asyra’s side, left her shivering with the effort of supporting her Aura. She knew she’d reached the protection of Thyss-Ulea’s defenses when the pressure abruptly eased. She nearly stumbled, resistance to motion gone, too, and she able to reach Asyra in a couple, long strides.

  The burglar was batting furiously at her smoking leathers and blinking furiously through tears. Lyssa knelt at her side and put a hand on her chest. Asyra stilled in her struggled and looked at her. Her eyes seemed foggy and unfocused, dazed by looking into the glare of the sorcerous battle.

  Lyssa leaned close to Asyra’s ear be heard over the din. “It’s me. I’ve come for you.”

  “I...was wondering when you’d be done laying around,” she replied.

  Lyssa’s hardened heart could’ve burst.

  A shriek rose above the cacophony of the raging magics. Lyssa felt the buildup of energies in waves of hair standing across her skin. Looking up, she saw Thyss-Ulea half-turn towards them, sheathed in flames, half-woman, half-corpse, fluttering back and forth between them as she glared. The flames that blazed in her eye sockets shrank to nearly-white pinpricks, intensified to stabbing brilliance as her fangs gnashed in fury.

  “You will not have her!”

  The eye lights slashed out from the sockets to slam into Lyssa’s Aura. She grunted at the impact, a smashing blow that shivered the bones of her forearm. But she leaned into it, tears of pain running free across her wrenching face as the hateful light pummeled her to the core. The faint glow of her shield grew to a shimmer of cyan, a visible, trembling shield of light off of which Thyss-Ulea’s hate splintered into a hundred shards of energy, blasting off stone, punching through embattled servitors below them and leaving fiery shreds.

  Thyss-Ulea’s scream trembled and rose to mind-rending heights, passed beyond human senses. Her husband had nearly reached the top steps, capitalizing on her distraction. She whipped back to him, released Lyssa from the hammering of her attack to turn her attentions back to Thyss-Mallik.

  But he was right there, their fires merging into one, swirling around them, blacking the dais beneath them as though their coming together formed an awful, miniature sun. In the midst of that immolation, Thyss-Ulea screamed one more time and lunged at him, claws outstretched for his face, his glowing eyes. He caught her by the wrists and they twisted and writhed together, a flurry of swipes and slaps and blows, he almost seeming to laugh at her—an echo of an older fight, somehow mundane and pathetic, despite the whirl of world-ending powers around them. They were petty and almost childish in their final grapple.

  They deserved each other.

  Their dueling powers shrank in around them, became a single shaft of flame, interspersed whorls of purple struggling against yellow-white. The fire-column rose to the ceiling, scoured it, sent streamers of debris cascading down. The floor beneath them glowed, began to sag, steps running away as slag as the blaze ate through them. Neither combatant was visible now. There was only the inferno.

  And then there was nothing. With a terrible roar, the flames died, left only a great plume of smoke, still winding wildly until the forces driving it tore it into tendrils of dissipating fume. Behind Lyssa, the braziers crackled, puffed, and died out, plunging the chamber into near darkness, save flecks of debris that still glowed with incidental flames.

  Nothing remained of Thyss-Ulea or Thyss-Mallik but a molten dimple in the stone, faintly glowing with a cherry hue.

  A crash from behind them sent a flinch through both and Lyssa turned. The sarcophagus of Thyss-Ulea had fallen face-first from the wall to shatter on the dais. Silence followed the impact, almost painful after the din of the last several minutes. Pops and crackles of dying fire disturbed the fuming dark. Nothing else.

  “Can you walk?” Lyssa whispered.

  “I-I think so.”

  “Good.” Lyssa chortled feebly. “Because I’m not sure I can.”

  Together, holding one another, supporting each other, the pair got up and started for the stairs down from the dais. They gave the spot of Mallik and Ulea’s convergence a wide berth, could feel its heat punishing, nonetheless.

  “So, that’s it?” Asyra asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “They’re just gone, and the whole thing was about their ages-old spat?”

  “They’re gone.” Lyssa didn’t really know that. She’d seen too much of powerful entities to be convinced that their undoing was ever simple. But, at the least, the feuding monar
chs were no longer present in this time and place. “And, yes, it was all about their...failed marriage, I suppose you could say.”

  “Their hate, you mean.”

  “Hate is love’s opposite.”

  “Maybe the world’s better off without it, then,” Asyra murmured.

  Lyssa stiffened a little as they neared the lowest steps of the dais, wasn’t totally sure what the other woman had meant by that. “You came for me,” she said unsteadily, “again.”

  Asyra snorted. “Actually, I got drawn along by the nose. She lured me down here.” Lyssa felt the Ybbassid gulp. “I...didn’t tell you. Should have. She’s been luring me down here.”

  Lyssa nodded. “You mean with visions.”

  “She was in my mind...and more.” Asyra shivered. “She called her husband the Violator. She was the one doing the violating.” She looked up at Lyssa. “I should have told you. It might have changed things.”

  “It’s all right.” Lyssa thought of dead Xass-Kham, suddenly, recognized another of the Violators’ victims. “She had many games pieces moving at once. We all should have realized.”

  “She pulled us apart,” Asyra said.

  Lyssa didn’t immediately respond in the silence that followed, again wasn’t certain what the other woman meant. Finally, “She did. Or, at least, she tried. That’s the great contradiction of the path She followed; the Dark Ways are always walked alone, so of course she understood isolation and division. But she forgot the power of friendship.” Lyssa halted, forced the shorter woman, who was almost comically propping her up, to pause with her and look her in the face. “In her hatefulness, she forgot the power of love.”

  Asyra looked back at her, eyes shimmering through a mask of filth and bruises and exhaustion. For a moment, Lyssa thought she’d drift closer. But a blink of the eyes brought a hardening to them, a vague unease, and she started them moving together again. They limped gingerly between steaming piles of rubble and mummies and warped pieces of Thyss-Mallik’s bronze servitors.

  “You would really have gone into Her casket?” Lyssa asked.