by James Derry
“I would ask you the same question. This place is far too dangerous for a science teacher.”
“At least I’m not here out of mere curiosity,” Sygne said. “Or are you here because you’re bored? Is life on the throne proving to be less exciting than you thought?”
“Oh no,” Pawn said. “I’m surprised you’ve forgotten. You know better than most… I’m the Demigod King, and my life is never boring.” Pawn gave her a rakish grin. “I know for sure that you were never bored around me.”
“Please,” Sygne said. “Don’t mention anything to Jamal about who you are. About… us. He’s already on-edge. I don’t want to stack another worry onto him.”
“Don’t worry. You know I like to work surreptitiously. It helps to add to my mystique. I won’t tell him a thing.” Pawn put a finger to his lips. Sygne noticed that his nail was black with grime; she suspected that the venerable sovereign of Albatherra had been sleeping outside—without bathing—for several days.
Jamal had opened the tower’s back portal and stepped inside. A second later, his arm emerged from the door and beckoned them forward.
Sygne and Pawn hurried across the back lawn and inside the tower. Torches lit the conical interior. The curving walls climbed high above them, circular rows of loam brick stacked one on top of the other. A series of ladders and rickety wood platforms scaled the walls, leading to an observation deck at the top of the tower. But Sygne didn’t spend much time looking at that; her eyes were quickly drawn downward.
The floor extended in front of them for a few paces; then it dropped to form the lip of a circular pit. It was clear that the pit was some sort of hub of activity. A heavy wooden scaffolding straddled the pit, with several ropes twined around its central beam and extending into the depths of the shaft.
The torchlight was much more intense coming from the deeper reaches of the pit, so that as Pawn stepped close to it, the infernal light illuminated the underside of his unshaven jaw and threw sharp shadows across his face.
“Will you look at that?” he said. Sygne and Jamal stepped closer. Pawn’s neck craned upward, then down again. He said, “I believe this tower is nearly as deep as it is tall.”
A swirl of vertigo passed through Sygne as her eyes followed the descending line of the illuminated shaft. On and on it went, to a flat floor of orange clay, possibly fifty feet below them. The walls of the shaft ended before they reached the floor. “It looks like it opens into a wider space at the bottom,” she whispered. “Is this some sort of excavation?”
Buckets hung at the end of each rope. One pail dangled just ten feet below them; a dried crust of clay was smeared on its insides. She could see other pails settled among coils of excess rope on the distant floor of the pit.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
Pawn said, “If your damsel is anywhere, she’s down there.”
Sygne glanced to Jamal for his opinion. He shrugged. Sisprii hadn’t been on the lawn, so there was nowhere left to check. A ladder descended one arcing wall of the shaft; Sygne took a step toward it. A sound at the tower’s front portal stopped her in her tracks. Voices rose from the other side of that closed door.
“The cultists are coming.” Jamal drew his sword.
“We don’t fight,” Pawn declared in a low voice. He studied the sturdiness of the scaffolding and the ropes extending from it. He lunged out and grabbed one of the ropes. “We stay stealthy. It’s the only way to ensure that the cultists don’t kill your damsel before we reach her.”
With that, Pawn swung out into the precipitous space and slid down the rope with an easy grace that seemed immune to trivialities like rope burn.
“Wait—” Sygne started. But Pawn had descended beyond the range of her whispers.
Jamal sheathed his sword. Feet were tromping up the stoop to the front portal. The cultists’ movements didn’t seem nearly as placid as they had a few minutes ago.
“What do we do?” Sygne’s eyes darted to the open back portal. They could retreat…
“We have to follow him,” Jamal said. “But do we take the ladder or the rope?”
Sygne could see that Pawn had made it safely to the bottom of the pit. But the idea of attempting such a death-defying feat herself made her feel queasy.
“Prudence or speed,” she weighed the options. “I choose the ladder.”
“Wow. That’s unexpected.” Jamal scooped her into his arms and leaped toward the same rope that Pawn had used. Sygne struggled for a second, then she clung tight, trying to make herself as unobtrusive and irremovable as possible. Jamal caught the rope as they fell, and the weight of both their bodies swung ponderously, until they nearly touched the far side of the shaft. Sygne squeezed her eyes closed, and her stomach lurched to her throat as they slid down into the pit.
She couldn’t hear the sounds of cultists in the tower. Had they seen them? All she heard was the extended groan of Jamal as he struggled to maintain a secure pace down the rope—and the sound of her own muffled scream, escaping from her clenched teeth like steam from a poorly sealed beaker.
Then Sygne’s feet touched the ground with a cessation of motion that was surprisingly gentle.
“I haven’t slid a rigging like that,” Jamal puffed, “since my pirating days.” Sygne was infuriated to see a smile dawning on his face. Before she could say anything. Pawn tugged her sleeve and pulled both of them into the shadows behind a crate of mining gear.
Pawn and Jamal shared macho smiles and a brief clapping of shoulders. Pawn said, “That was impressive.”
Sygne glared daggers at both of them. “I said I wanted the ladder.”
Jamal blinked at her. “Do you mean ‘latter’ as in ‘the second of two options’ or ‘ladder’ as in ‘an apparatus for climbing?’”
Sygne replied through gritted teeth, “The second one.”
“Wait. I’m still confused. You said, ‘Prudence or speed. I choose the latter.’ You know, as in ‘the former’ and ‘the latter’…”
“Former and latter?” Sygne asked. “Who actually uses those words in conversation?”
Jamal held up his hands to Sygne. “Okay. Okay.”
Pawn asked, “Can you two be quiet?”
Sygne held her breath and listened. She could hear a low murmur. Soft, but full, as if a crowd of people were whispering intensely. She took in their current environs. They were in another circular space. The walls were raw clay, gouged by shovels into curves forming a nearly perfect circle. The gouge marks in the walls seemed fairly recent, so it was the cultists who had created this chamber. Sygne assumed that the Urrists must have gone to great effort to make the space perfectly circular. The ceiling was low. If she had been standing instead of crouching, then she could have reached up and touched the top of the room with her hand. The shelf of clay above her was supported by stout wooden props, but Sygne couldn’t help feeling a tremor of claustrophobia as she looked up at that heavy plane of malleable earth. She thought she saw its center drooping downward.
Digging tools were lined up neatly along the walls, but Sygne also noticed votive candles arranged lovingly on delicate, small tables. Tapestries had been tacked into the wooden support beams, and mats made of interwoven reeds had been set out in a pattern of concentric circles. In the center of the space stood a thick stump of gnarled wood that was sanded flat and smooth across its top. That might have been a pedestal for a speaker—or a priest.
“I think this is a place of worship,” Sygne said.
“It’s empty,” Pawn said flatly, as if that was the only quality of the room that mattered. He pointed to the lone passageway leading out of the chamber. “Maybe we’ll find your damsel in there.”
A large cart, loaded with buckets of dirt, squatted in front of the passageway. It provided a convenient hiding place as they scurried forward and examine the tunnel. The passage descended on a shallow incline into an impenetrable fog of shadow.
“It’s far wider than it needs
to be,” Jamal said. He was right. The tunnel was nearly wide enough to allow two carts to pass.
A sly grin spread across Pawn’s face. “They must be hiding something big down there.”
4 – This Immortal Coil
Jamal took a moment to study Pawn’s face. This might not have been the best time to do so, but then again, Jamal didn’t know the Albatherran at all—which made him just as much of a potential dangerous variable as any of the mystery cultists they might bump into. A moment of inspection couldn’t hurt. Despite the cultists’ creepiness, they knew how to fill a space with a flattering light. The soft glow of the votive candles made Sygne’s face look positively luminous. She looked prettier than Jamal had ever seen her—and she had been looking prettier and prettier to him lately. The incandescence also seemed to suit Pawn’s swarthy complexion. The outrider had a heavy, protruding brow; it hung like a precipice over his deep-set eyes so that now he looked less wolfish and more like a caveman. Albeit a strangely handsome caveman. There was something about the assemblage of the features on his face that was almost dashing—in a rough-spun, dirty sort of way. The way he stared at Sygne… And the way she talked to Pawn… Jamal wondered if there was something between them.
“Well, let’s go,” Pawn said. “This tunnel isn’t going to delve itself.”
As the outrider creeped ahead, Jamal took note of the gilded hilt of his sword. It seemed far too grand in comparison to Pawn’s shabby cloak and his dusty, nicked boots. The sword’s pommel was bejeweled with an opalescent blue stone. Jamal had never seen a gem of that size, or of that particular hue. He wanted to ask the outrider whom he had stolen the weapon from, but he decided that would be poor manners, considering that Pawn was taking point in such a treacherous situation.
Then they were slinking into the thick shadows of the passage, and Jamal couldn’t see the sword’s gleaming hilt—Jamal couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face. The tunnel had a strange smell to it, different than just the wet, earthy smell of a recent excavation. The air was thick with organic smells—musk, matted hair, and excretions.
Was this some sort of animal’s lair? What had Pawn said? ‘They must be hiding something big down there.’
Jamal had taken up the rear of the company. In front of him he heard Pawn and Sygne’s footsteps suddenly stop. Pawn lowered himself into a crouch, and now that his broad back was out of the way, Jamal could see that they were approaching a dim light at the end of the tunnel. No. They had stopped, and yet the light was getting bigger and brighter. The light was approaching them.
Pawn reached for Jamal in the dark. “May I have your grappling hook again?”
The light divided into three lobes of orange fire. At least three people carrying torches. The tunnel was very long, and the outer edge of the torches’ glow had not yet reached them.
Sygne pressed herself against the convex wall of the passage, and Jamal handed over the cable with the heavy claw of metal at its end. He could see the vague outline of the torchbearers’ robes. They were Urrists. Perhaps they had seen a vague impression of Pawn as well. One of the cultists said, “Sisprii, get behind me, I think—”
Pawn didn’t bother to swing his grappling hook; instead he threw the hook overhand. It struck the closest torchbearer square in the face. Pawn yanked the line, and the projectile snapped back to his outstretched hand. He caught the hook and charged forward.
Jamal was frozen in place, awed. He had to admit: even he couldn’t move that fast, that flawlessly. Pawn’s first target had collapsed to the ground, dropping his torch. That change in light made the scene easier to discern. Jamal saw two other cultists who had no time to do anything but begin to cower as the outrider bounded forward. Pawn’s next closest victim was a woman; the outrider clocked her across the jaw. Without even stopping, he enveloped the third cultist in a sleeper hold.
“Wait!” Sygne called. But she was a half second too late. Jamal wondered if she had been shocked into silence, as he had been, or if Pawn had been fast enough to fell his three targets in the time that it had taken Sygne to draw in and exhale a breath.
They moved in a stumbling trot toward the Albatherran and his pile of bodies. Pawn still had his arms wrapped tightly around the third cultist’s neck. Jamal felt fairly confident that it was Sisprii. She seemed to share a resemblance with Mdobaa; although it was hard to tell with her face scrunched up and her eyes bulging from lack of oxygen.
“Let her go, Pawn,” Sygne cried. “Don’t—”
Sisprii went limp. Pawn let her fall to the dirt floor as he stood. “Don’t worry. She’s just unconscious.” He swept his hand over all three Urrists. “They’ll all be fine… Oh.”
A dropped torch had caught on the hem of the first man’s robe. Pawn stamped out the burning garment with his sandal. Then he picked up the torch.
Sygne checked Sisprii’s pulse. She huffed to Pawn. “I wish you had been gentler.”
“Trust me,” Pawn said. “This is for the best. Damsels are easier to transport when they’re unconscious.”
Jamal bent to examine Sisprii. She was pretty, with dark mocha skin, and grown-out hair like her mother’s. Her hands weren’t bound in chains. She had considered these other cultists to be her friends, not her captors. “Pawn has a point,” he told Sygne. “In my days as a mercenary and an adventurer I’ve learned that usually there’s a thin line between a rescue and a kidnapping.”
Pawn chuckled. “I agree with that.”
Sygne gave both of them a pinched look. Jamal shrugged. “Remember Princess Ilona?”
“Besides,” Pawn said. “Now that she’s immobilized, we can move onto the next part of my mission. “I want to learn more about the mystery of this mystery cult.”
“Wait,” Sygne said. “We can’t just leave her here.”
Pawn pointed to a glowing spot where the tunnel seemed to open out.
Jamal cleared his throat, “We’ve gone this far. We might as well…”
Sygne shrugged. “Just for two minutes. Then we’re heading back.”
Pawn grinned victoriously at Jamal. They left Sisprii and her friends on the dirt floor and proceeded through the gloom with torches in their hands.
The outrider whispered, “I don’t know if we’ll find the Un-God here, but it certainly smells ungodly.”
The odor had become progressively worse. It seemed to thicken in the air, until it seemed to gather like humidity on Jamal’s face. It was as if he was walking through a pungent, airborne broth. Certain sections of the wall were coated in a viscous fluid, like drool or the slime of a slug.
And so, it was with a mood of predisposed disgust that the three adventurers stepped into the soft glow at the end of the tunnel. Again, they found themselves on the edge of a circular pit.
Pawn was first to step close to the ledge and stare down into the shaft. When he glanced back at them, he had an expression of giddy horror plastered on his face.
“What did you see?”
“I… I have no idea. You better take a look for yourself.”
Jamal half expected to find that the entire pit was the yawning throat of an abysmal monster. But no, it was just another shaft of excavated dirt. How had the Urrists managed to dig so far underground? Then he noticed that the scraped away surface of the pit seemed older and more settled than the excavations they had seen closer to the base of the observation tower. This burrow had been here longer. It might have been eons old.
Some twenty yards below, the pit opened up into a bulb shaped expansion. Something was moving at the bottom of the pit. It was so large and oddly shaped that at first Jamal thought he was seeing a ring of water flowing around the edge of the circular chamber. The color of the water nearly matched the color of the tawny light in the room, and shades of amber shifted over the surface of the flowing ring. But not in the way that you would expect light to reflect off the surface of a subterranean stream.
Jamal leaned closer to the edge and squinted.
The fluid was flesh-colored, but not just the color of one flesh. Browns and pinks—wintery and olive complexions played together in a molten interchange of hues and shadows.
He realized that he had been fooled by a trick of perspective. He was not looking at a flat stream, but a tubular ring. Something that undulated and wriggled like a gigantic caterpillar. But there was no head or tail to this monstrous worm. Instead it was one continuous, moving coil of squirming human flesh.
“It’s the Un-God,” Pawn said in a hushed voice. “Urr-Ogshoth.”
Bristles protruded from the beast’s hide. It was hard to tell, based on the distant perspective and the creature’s improbable scale, but Jamal thought those were human arms and legs protruding from the back of the Un-God. The human limbs slid past each other, moving at different speeds, but always in the same general direction, like flotsam caught in a lava flow of melted human bodies.
Sygne tugged at Jamal’s sleeve. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve seen it. We have to go.”
Jamal nodded. He could feel that his mouth was hanging open, but he didn’t have the wherewithal to close it.
They were all preoccupied with the same hideous thought. Pawn was the only one to give it voice. “The Un-God is made out of humans. But are they victims of the cult, or members of the cult?”
“Let’s go,” Sygne insisted. She sighed heavily, but Jamal didn’t have time to focus on that sound. A new noise intruded. More insistent, more alarming. It drifted down from the open shaft above them.
The sound of sinister laughter.
They scattered backwards as a woman in a resplendent velvet cloak floated down from the top reaches of the shaft. She stopped in midair and stepped onto the floor of the tunnel.
A hood was pulled over her head, and she wore a veil of gilded scales. Jamal had seen this sort of adornment many times before—on new brides or on noblewomen in Embhra’s richer and more conservative city-states. Usually the scales were linked on fine strands of silk, hanging over the lady’s face like a beaded curtain. But in this case, the metal scales floated over the woman’s face, suspended in the air by magic. Pawn bared his sword and exclaimed, “A witch!”