Chapter Seven #4
meeting grand sorcerers so wizened and old they marked generations of people as
most do the seasons. He imagined holding audience with the kings and queens of
the realm, leading to a fight against fabled knights on the pitched field of
battle. Most of all, he imagined bedding many women, of all shapes and species,
showing them the wonders he had just experienced.
The old shame burned on his face. These were his usual
dreams. They had been a comfort to him all his life. Every night, he had lain
in bed, tired and wounded, imagining the things he might accomplish. But he
would always tell himself, bitterly, that these were only fantasies, something
he would be punished for if he ever spoke them aloud.
Year by year, he would sleep and wake and study, and the dreams had receded
from his mind.
Only his father mattered. Only his training mattered. That
was his purpose. That was his duty.
That was why he was born.
But now, lying before the altar of a mortuary chapel,
staring up into a ceiling buttressed with giant vertebrae, Isaac dreamed his
old dreams. They were just as rich and strong and vivid as they had been when
he was a boy.
On the edge of tears, he finally allowed himself to want.
Footsteps echoed through the chapel. Zaria emerged from the
darkness with her poleaxe in hand, which was still impaled into the screaming
face of the shibboleth. She was trying to yank the axe blade free. After a few
more attempts, she struck the human head into the floor, braced her foot
against it, and yanked the blade from its face.
“Come now,” she called, strolling between the pews, her sex
and thighs still exposed. “Up you go. Quit lyin’ about.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t feel ready to stand. She continued
to saunter across the chapel, pausing only to grab at the carpet lying in the
aisle. She wiped the ancient fabric between her legs. Cum streaked the fabric.
Isaac grimaced at the sight.
“What?” she asked. “Think the sorceress’ll be mad?”
He leaned his head back against the floor, returning his
focus to the present.
She came over and stood above him, the green firelight
shining on her leather armor. “Sheathe yourself, at the very least.”
He pulled his robes back to their proper position. She held
down an open hand, flicking her head upwards. He shoved it away and climbed
back to his feet, wincing at the pain in his groin. He would be amazed if his
pelvis wasn’t cracked. He was certainly amazed she hadn’t bitten through the
arteries in his neck. Frankly, he was amazed that he had survived the
experience at all.
“Oh, come on,” Zaria said. “Don’t look so mallow. I’m clean.
Won’t be no pus out your piss hole.”
He shook his head and looked away.
“Hey,” she said, clamping an arm on his shoulder. “You
fucked me first, and I had to even things. It’s standard business.” She paused.
“Well, mostly.”
He rubbed his bloody throat, unwilling to meet her gaze. He
tried to move away, towards the transept and the hidden stairway that must lead
further down, but she held firm to his shoulder.
“Isaac.”
He looked down at his sweaty and ragged clothes. He could
smell her scent on them.
“Hey. Look at me.”
He met her gaze, and he found the whites of her eyes
starting to show. It took her a moment to speak.
“Was that . . . really your first time?”
Isaac didn’t answer. He couldn’t stop blushing. He could not
stop imagining how disheveled and pitiful he must’ve looked.
She blinked, as if certain thoughts were only now occurring
to her, and released her grip from his shoulder. She stepped back out of arm’s
reach, holding up her hands. “You know I’m just teasing you, right?”
He wiped blood from his neck.
“Look,” she began to say, but stopped. She sighed and
cleared her throat. “I’m aware this wasn’t the best—”
An explosion shook the room.
It was felt more than heard. A wave
of pressure slapped through the chapel, shaking pews and quivering the organs.
Above, the ceiling quaked, old tiles of stone sliding loose and crumbling to
the ground. A segment of the vertebrae cracked open, and the weight of the
ceiling began to snap the fissure wider and wider, splintering the bone like
wood.
“What in the fuck—” Zaria began.
Another explosion tore through the building, this one a
cacophony of smaller bombs all erupting together. There was a great rumbling
above, carrying the sounds of deep thuds, cracking bone, and the collapse of
giant structures. One series of thuds, in particular, seemed to increase in
intensity. It was bouncing fast and hard.
“Get down!”
Zaria pulled him to the floor just as something rushed from
the darkness. He only caught a brief glimpse of a splintering pew before a
sharp wind gusted at his face, and the altar behind him shattered to pieces.
When he looked, he saw the crude, dull iron of a cannonball sticking out of the
carved reliefs. In the green light of a dozen burning fires, it almost didn’t
seem real.
He blinked, and the cannonball remained. It was black and
round and heavy enough to sunder a hull.
Or destroy a tomb entrance.
“Oh, no,” Zaria said. “No.”
Another cannon salvo began, and this time it was louder, as
if much of the structures between it and them had already collapsed. More thuds
echoed out. Stone shattered. A series of bouncing crashes came rushing down the
stairwell, almost too fast to react. Zaria forced him down again, and Isaac
clung to the floor, only able to brace and close his eyes and listen to
screaming balls of metal smash their way through ancient architecture, thinking
of geometry and angles of impulse and what direct hits did to soft targets.
When he looked again, the entrance to the chapel was little
more than piles of shards and dust. Multiple arcaded piers had been hit
directly, leaving shattered stubs that resembled the molars of teeth. Small
streams of light shone down from the stairway. If they could see sunlight all
the way down here, in the depths of the church, the destruction must have been
immense.
“They weren’t supposed to—” Zaria nearly gaped. “They never
come near this place. It’s cursed. It’s the blackest sorta
evil. I thought they wouldn’t—”
There was another explosion. A wooden pew was smashed to
pieces by a crumbling boulder. With his ears ringing, and his mind working
furiously across his studies, Isaac decided that the explosions sounded like
barrels of black powder, likely placed at the back of the skull. The pirates
must be using an ear-splitting amount of explosives to feel it this deep within
the earth.
Isaac tried to get up, but Zaria was still holding him down,
her body frozen in place. She watched the chapel entrance with wide eyes and
panting breath.
“We need to go,” he said. “Now.”
“Fuck me. Soren’s here. The Black Eye, the Saber, all
of her—”
“Get off me!”
And, above, echoing down the crumbled passage of the
stairwell, voices began to be heard. It was a multitude, a braying mob, an
overlapping tumble of shouts and cheers and roars. Some of them were singing
shanties. He imagined an entire crew of pirates gathering in the mouth of the
skull, cutlasses and daggers held beneath a snarling of teeth.
Then, all at once, they stopped. An eerie silence descended
through the wreckage.
“Zaria!”
It was a small voice, distant and singular. The hyena
immediately tensed.
“I know you’re down there! Don’t bother stayin’ silent!”
Isaac could not identify the species. Whatever Soren was,
she was too far away, her voice too obstructed by sand and stone. Even still,
the silence around her words made them echo through all the clearer. She spoke
like someone who expected others to listen.
“Were you not satisfied with the lives of my crew?” Soren
yelled. “Huh? Was it purpose or vengeance that drove you to sunder a ship of
the fleet? Did you really think I wouldn’t purse you, now, to the ends
of the waste?”
Zaria did not respond.
“You put thirty men to the groundwater, ya fuckin’ bilge
rat! That makes forty souls crossed by your hand! The entire fleet o’ Crookspur’s now wise to your blackened crime! All her
skimmers are bearin’ course to this place of death! And when the Crook
commands, you will fuckin’ answer!”
A few pirates shouted in agreement. Isaac cleared his
throat, feeling guilty.
“Listen here!” Soren called down. “I want no more pirate
blood on your hands! You come out with whatever hostage you’re dragging in tow,
and we fight proper! Dueling blades! Otherwise, I’m bringing this titan down on
your head!”
“There’s no way out,” Zaria whispered, almost to herself.
“No door down here. I can’t go up there. She’ll slaughter me. She’ll make it
slow. She’ll—”
“Zaria—” Isaac began.
“You got one minute!” Soren yelled. “One minute to bare your
furry visage, traitor!”
“This is a mortuary chapel,” Isaac said. “There are hidden
doors. It’s supposed to fool grave robbers. She’ll never know where we went.”
Zaria looked at him, terrified.
“Do you want to die?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Get the fuck off me, then.”
They stood up from the floor, shaking off bits of stone and
dust, and Isaac guided her to a transept over to the side. In the little
alcove, there were rows of friezes and cornices on the back wall, smooth lines
of stone rising and falling in subtle patterns. Isaac trailed his hand down
over the decorative grooves, searching for the hidden trigger. It would be a
pressure plate, something nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the
architecture.
“Best not be craven!” Soren yelled, clearly losing patience.
“I got enough boomin’ powder to split a palace!”
He found the spot. He pressed with his fists, and a small
rectangle of stone sank into the recesses of the wall, triggering a shudder of
mechanisms. The sound faded. No hint of a doorway emerged from the wall. It
remained as smooth and seamless as any other wall.
Zaria nudged him. “Hurry this along now.”
“It should’ve worked.” He pressed the square again.
“Something’s wrong.”
“Time’s up! Light the fuse!”
He bashed his shoulder into the
wall and felt the slightest bit of give. A fine crack of darkness emerged in a
vertical line. “It’s stuck. Help me push.”
They braced against the door, digging their feet into smooth
tile. The crack of darkness slowly grew into a thick line, and Isaac could feel
some bit of ancient and broken machinery audibly straining against their
efforts. It was taking all their strength just to budge it inch by inch.
Another explosion ripped through the chapel. The shockwave
pulsed through his guts, nearly knocking him to the floor. Around them, stone
and masonry crumbled. Two gigantic chunks of vertebrae snapped off the spine
and crushed an entire column of pews, including the statues standing upon the
altar. Isaac noted, almost absently, that he’d never studied the figures, or
the engravings on the altar itself. He had completely missed their
significance.
The crumbling increased, forming a quake of earth and stone
that was growing louder and louder, rapidly building upon itself. By now, the
crack in the doorway was almost as wide as a bookshelf. Zaria squeezed through
first, scrapping the cavalry hook of her poleaxe across the wall. She
disappeared into blackness. For a moment, Isaac was left alone with a growing
avalanche of stone. Then, like a corpse rising from a grave, her arm reached
out from the dark, grabbed his elbow, and yanked him bodily through the gap.
He collapsed onto a floor of dirt just as the roof of the
chapel split apart with another explosion. Large chunks of ceiling piled up at
the open doorway. The crashing shook his bones. In seconds, only a few slivers
of green light entered through the rubble. As the destruction of the chapel
continued, and more wreckage flooded to the floor, the door cracked almost
halfway open, but did not budge a single inch further. This time, it was stuck
for good.
Eventually, the rumbling ceased, and his ears stopped
ringing, and all he could hear was the gentle fall of dirt and dust, settling
into the cracks of wreckage.
His heart pounded in his throat.
Without warning, an orange fire blazed through the dark.
Zaria had lit a torch. She stuffed the flint into the pocket of her trousers,
handing him the flame. With his wrists still tied, he had to grasp it with a
doubled fist, fingers pressing awkwardly against each other. The hyena
unsheathed her poleaxe and turned away from the door.
Ahead of them was a dirt-floored hall that continued far
past the end of the torchlight. The walls were lined with horizontal niches
like the holes of a beehive—loculi, Isaac remembered. They were inlets built to
hold the bodies of the dead. They rose in sequence towards the ceiling,
stacking over each other. If the hall continued for long enough, there would be
enough loculi to store hundreds of bodies.
Catacombs.
The tomb of an ancient necromancer.
“Nothing for it now,” Zaria said, holding her weapon tight.
There was no light ahead. The hall was blacker than night. Isaac took a deep breath, feeling a sudden chill
in the air.
They ventured into the dark.