Chapter Six #3
now.
They
would have to tread very carefully.
“I
don’t like that thing,” Zaria said.
“Good,”
Isaac replied, keeping his voice calm. “You shouldn’t like it. You should,
also, have told me what it was.”
“How
the fuck am I to know what nightmare’s starin’ back at me? It’s a meat pie,
looks like. Like a bucket of skulls sucked down a drain.”
The three
human faces were arrayed in a triangle, with one at the apex and the two at
bottom corners. Their eyes were made of glass. Their cheeks were riddled
through with arcane symbols, like tattoos branded into skin. Each of them
seemed desperate to scream. The stonework was so intimately detailed that he
could track the deforming of their jaws as it spiraled into a vortex of teeth,
right in the center of the triangle. He studied the imitation sludge of their
meat as it sloughed onto the body of a dog, like the dripping of a candle’s
wax.
Isaac
shuddered.
Zaria
made a grunt. “Reminds me of a cougar’s den, when they’ve chomped all the meat
and left the bits in a pile. Like, why’s it got four legs? And the faces, for
that matter. Why’s it all twisted together?”
“Every
society uses resources,” Isaac said. “Necromancies use both the dead and the
living. People are their resource, like clay. And what do you do with clay?” He
gestured. “You shape it with your hands.”
There
was a pause.
“Why
not make it real, though?”
“It’s art,
Zaria, for fuck’s sake.”
He
tried to take stock of the situation. All the bodies were clustered around the
shibboleth, their positions suggesting they had been struck down where they
stood. His eyes could now make out scorch marks on the skeletal remains, which
suggested the statue used fire as its weapon. At the same time, the positions
of the dead also suggested that the sphinx had a limited range. It couldn’t
reach very far.
Isaac
stared at the entrance to the tomb. It was right below the statue. Between the
plates of the skull and the cracking granite walls, there was no other way to
enter the body of the colossus. They would have to pass below the shibboleth.
He had
a solution to this dilemma. His uncle had prepared him for just this sort of
obstacle. The letter he received was supposed to grant him passage.
At the
same time, something was catching his eye, in the open patch of ground just
before the start of the corpses. It was smooth. It was far too flat to account
for the natural accumulation of sand. There were faint traces of black ichor
leaking from the bodies, and, when they reached this area of the skull, the
remnants of liquid seemed to form—
Zaria
gripped his shoulder. “Isaac. What’s the plan?”
He
concentrated. The trails of ichor ended at the smooth patch of ground. They all
ended in a perfectly straight line. . . .
A
trapdoor.
He
blinked in surprise.
The
blood and rot from the ancient corpses had flown between the hinges,
disappearing into the depths of an earthen shaft. It made perfect sense. The
energy of the shibboleth was not infinite. It needed to conserve its magic
whenever possible. Because of this, the necromancers had supplemented the
entrance with mechanical traps. It was very likely that the trapdoor led to a
simple pit with metal bars wrapped around the bedrock. There was likely a
network of these pits running below the ground, built between the mandible
bones of the jaw, where the last necromancers could wait and rob the dead once
they had succumbed to thirst. He could imagine even more bodies littering the
dusty holes.
“Isaac,”
Zaria whispered, right above his ear. “Feel free to explain the corpses at your
leisure.”
He felt
a bevy of thoughts racing through his mind.
He was
not willing to enter the tomb with his hands tied as they were. He couldn’t
reasonably face the sorceress as the prisoner of a pirate. He didn’t want the
hyena accompanying him at all. She hadn’t listened to his pleas. She had proven
stubbornly willing to get in his way. And he wouldn’t take this kind of chance
with her when his father’s life was held in the balance.
He had
to escape. At the same time, he had no hope of overpowering her. He couldn’t
run away. She had proven his physical superior in every way that mattered. To
free himself, he would have to rely on his cunning.
He made
a split-second decision.
“The
statue is an automaton,” Isaac said. “It—”
“A what
now?”
“An,
uh, automated device.”
“Dove
ice? Like, some kinda bird?”
“No,
it’s a de-vice, as in,” he waved his tied hands, “a lifeless receptacle,
something animated with magic.”
“Still
lost me there.”
“Fuck
me,” Isaac hissed, “it’s a statue that shoots fire!”
“Right,”
Zaria said, keeping her poleaxe pointed in its direction. “There a way to stop
it?”
“No need.
It’s lost power.”
She
looked at him, then back at the shibboleth. Its six eyes continued to glint in
the shade. “You keen on testin’ that?”
“If it
hadn’t,” Isaac lied, “we would already be dead.” As casually as he could, he
slipped his pack off his shoulders and began to dig inside. “It’s called a
shibboleth. There is some fascinating history behind the name. Scholars believe
it means corn, or crops, or a wealth of grains, which offers a lot of
suggestion as to how the necromancers viewed their vassals. What’s more, the
construction of the statue is exceedingly intricate. Inside those three heads,
there’s a very fine network of vents and valves, shunting all of the—”
“Isaac,”
she said. “From now on, consider my interest to be practical. As in, shut your
mouth.”
During
his long rambling, he had grabbed his uncle’s letter, folded open the wax seal
on the parchment, and slipped it down his sleeve. He stood up, pretending he
had just been grabbing a waterskin. Zaria hadn’t looked his way. She was
staring down the statue like the three-headed dog
might leap for her at any moment.
His
ruse had worked.
“If you
insist,” Isaac said, shouldering his pack and sipping from his skin. “Well,
lead the way, madam knight. Your treasure awaits.”
She
turned her head, animal eyes reflecting the light. He could see the slits of
her pupils as they trained on him. “I think my squire deserves the honor.”
Had she
seen the trapdoor?
“Oh,”
he said, “surely I’m only fit to polish your steel and give girlish screams.”
“I
appreciate you learning your place, love, but you’re still going first.”
He
glanced at the shibboleth. “Why? Does it matter?”
“Said
it was fine, didn’t you? If there’s no danger, what’s the problem?”
Isaac
wasn’t sure if her mistrust was aimed at him or the statue. It seemed to be a
little of both. She wouldn’t insist on keeping his hands tied if she had much
faith in him, and the idea of walking past a fire-breathing statue was probably
not a reassuring task, either. The corpses were there for a reason.
It
didn’t matter. In fact, it worked in his favor.
He
began to walk across the titan’s mouth, making sure to keep his back to Zaria.
In the shade of the throat, the shibboleth’s eyes glittered like a pyramid of
pale sapphire. He received the distinct impression of being watched. As he
walked, his hands twisted as much as they could through the restraints, working
his uncle’s letter out from below his sleeve. He held it out like a protective
ward.
His
uncle had signed the letter with a symbol dipped in wax. The symbol was arcane.
No one was quite sure why it pacified the automatons. There was little detail
of its purpose in the archeological record, although some evidence suggested
that ancient cultures worshipped the symbol as a sort of emblem for their gods.
Some historians had pointed to the possible existence of an empire that
predated even the oldest known civilizations. Either way, the symbol itself was
not all that remarkable, consisting of an ordered collection of stars that
bordered a series of alternating stripes. Isaac had never been very impressed
with the iconography.
Whatever
the origin, the symbol always offered passage through the automatons of the
necromancers. His uncle had placed particular emphasis on keeping the wax
stamping in good condition. If the symbol melted, the protection would be
useless.
Isaac
stepped onto the trapdoor.
With a
startling swiftness, the shibboleth jerked its head, lowering the vortex of its
mouth like the bore of a cannon. All six eyes centered on him. Teeth swirled in
the mouth, each of the rows shuddering like a circular saw, rolling, spinning,
grinding out dust and sand like the slabber of a beast, the sound like bones
breaking beneath a heel. Slowly, a lick of fire began to boil from its mouth.
Steeling
himself, Isaac clutched the parchment and took another step forward.
The
fire receded. The teeth whirred to a stop, the sound of grinding fading to an
echo. The trapdoor stayed shut. The six glittering eyes of the shibboleth
watched him for an impossibly long moment before the heads rose together as
one, returning to their original position of stoic agony. Dust fell across the
entryway.
Isaac
continued to take calm steps forward, as if his heart wasn’t pounding in his
throat. When he reached the pool of bodies, he slipped his uncle’s letter back
up his sleeve and turned to face Zaria. He displayed his empty palms.
“See?”
he said. “There’s no danger.”
“That
bloody thing’s got fire in its belly!” Zaria yelled. “Gods, the noise it
made!”
“Sure,”
he admitted, “but it’s not enough to cast anything. Without a catalyst, it
can’t reach transmutation potential.”
“Don’t
use them made-up words on me, squire! Speak plain!”
“It’s fine.”
He gestured to the corpses at his feet. “It didn’t kill me. It’s not going to
kill you, either. It’s trying to scare you away.”
Her
poleaxe was still hefted toward the statue, as if fending off a charge of
cavalry. The fur on her neck was needle straight. All at once, Isaac realized
she was afraid. Not only was she now facing a giant skull and a sea of bodies