Chapter Eight
Chapter
Eight
In
the Face of Evil
The
darkness was too thick to be natural.
Right
now, the torchlight in his hands felt like a bubble of air at the crushing depths
of an ocean floor. Blackness held at every angle, heavy and dense, seeming to
claw in at the edges. When he waved the flame across a random loculi, the
shadows of a cobweb seemed to leap like a knife. He quickened his pace toward
Zaria, only to feel a piercing gaze on the back of his skull. When he waved the
torch behind him, there was nothing there but dust.
The darkness seemed to swirl.
He
turned forward, failing to control his breath.
It was
known, of course, that necromancy was capable of sucking all life from an area,
even to the point where no life could ever form there again, as Isaac had seen
with the windless shell of air surrounding the skull of the colossus, but
recent experiments by the Diet had confirmed that this lifeless scar even
extended to the presence of light itself, where a sufficiently powerful casting
of necromantic suction had left an area permanently sheathed in darkness. All
the souls who entered this darkness demonstrated symptoms of unease, dread,
palpitations, nightmarish visions, and inevitable spells of fainting.
Was he
experiencing these symptoms now?
Was he
merely afraid?
The
ancient literature also suggested that the worst of the necromancers, the ones
who had drunk the souls of innumerable victims, were so attuned to the presence
of life that they could smell a breathing person at a distance of miles, like a
shark sensing blood in the vastness of an ocean. Down here, in the dark, not
even the spiders would survive the hunger of the sorceress.
Isaac
forced himself to calm.
He
found that, as his eyes struggled to pierce the dark, his other senses became
highly sensitive. He could hear every scuff of dirt beneath his boots and every
poorly controlled breath at his lips. He could faintly smell the bodies that
used to be in the walls. He could feel the stiff and cool air on his sunburned
skin, seeming to wrap around him like a mist.
“You
need to untie me,” Isaac said.
Zaria
was leading the way, spear tip jutting into darkness, her every step as smooth
and silent as a predator stalking through brush. Her ears swiveled at the
slightest sound.
“Zaria.
Untie me.”
“Not treadin’ there again, Isaac. Torch up, mouth shut.”
He
clenched his jaw and raised the torch overhead, holding it awkwardly in two
overlapping hands. His pelvis ached with every step he took.
They
came into a rectangular room that was large enough to fit four coffins, laid
end to end across the center. Isaac took a moment to identify it as a hypogeum,
an underground burial chamber for the dead. The coffins were blocks of stone
with a shallow inlay for the corpse to rest. Loculi lined the walls like the
sockets of teeth.
Zaria
brushed dust from one of the coffin inlays. “You got a layout for these
catacombs?”
“No.”
“You
know which way to go?”
“Down.”
She
snorted. “Terrific. Expert robber of graves, my squire.”
“You
signed up for this.”
“Aye.
Suppose I did.”
She
glanced at the cobwebbed loculi around the walls, and Isaac used the
opportunity to move in front of her, blocking the exit across the room. “We
need to follow the vertebrae. The base of the tomb is at the feet of this
creature, and we’ve barely reached the neck. The bone is our path.”
She looked
up at the dirt-packed ceiling. “Don’t see no bones, now.”
“We
should go find them, then, shouldn’t we?”
“Your
genius is stunning, love.” She made to move past him. “Try not to hurt me with
it.”
He
stepped in front of her. “Have you not noticed anything?”
“You
mean, besides the smell of us fuckin’?”
He
waved around the empty room. “We have not seen a single skeleton in those
combs. It’s just been empty walls and empty graves.”
“So?”
“So
what do you think happened to them? What do you think I’ve been trying to warn
you about?”
“Speak
plain, then. Enlighten me of my peril.”
He held
up his wrists, the torch blazing overhead. “You need to untie me. We’re in the
sorceress’ lair now. Her domain. You need my abilities.”
She
stepped forward, towering over him. “You had your chance to earn my trust. You
squandered it, and it’s a testament to my good mercy that you still got your
lifeblood about you.”
“Zaria—”
“No,
Isaac. You got destruction at your fingertip. You’d end my existence with a
flick of your wrist. I ain’t risking that at my back.” She shoved him with the haft of her poleaxe. “You lead the way, you call out the
threats, and I decide whether they warrant your freedom, not you.”
He
exited the room with the torch held close to his chest, trying to wriggle out
of his restraints. The torch would be capable of burning them off, but that
would likely destroy his hands in the process, and he couldn’t risk losing his
spellcasting ability. He rubbed the well-worn cuts on his wrists and continued
through the darkened hall.
They
ventured through corridors and burial chambers, following a series of curving
paths that seemed to twist and bend without any warning or reason. The ancient
culture that built these catacombs deliberately made them like a maze, which
included dead-ends, looping hallways, and an endless series of turns. Isaac was
growing increasingly certain that they’d passed the same sepulchral chamber
multiple times. Everything looked the same. It was impossible to develop a
layout in the mind’s eye. There was only darkness and dust and vacant stone.
He
could not get over the feeling of being watched. There seemed to be an
unnatural stillness to the air. Every sound they made was swallowed in an
instant.
He kept
his eyes peeled for traps, remembering the necrotic hex on the surface. He
thought of sigils carved into dirt and stone, ready to unleash a raw bolt of
entropy. He imagined hexes on the walls, deadfalls in the floor, a lurch of
animated machinery, a shunt of shooting spikes, a belt of swinging axes. He
even thought, perhaps, that they would see the necromancer herself, a cocoon of
darkness surrounding her, waiting patiently for the moment to strike.
“Stop,”
Zaria hissed.
Isaac
froze, nearly fumbling the torch. “What?”
“Something
up ahead.”
She
nudged him forward. Isaac raised the torch high, steeled himself, and continued
down the hall.
He saw
the blood first. Its redness was vibrant compared to the ancient stone around
them, pooling in the shallow grooves of the dirt. Next, the torchlight peeled
open the image of boots, tattered cloth, and the vague suggestion of legs and
arms. It was another fresh body, half fallen into a loculus. It was very
similar to the one Isaac had spied on the surface.
Zaria
stepped forward, maneuvering her bulk awkwardly through the tightened hall. She
poked the foot of the body with her spear tip. It sank through the flesh. When
she pulled it out, there was not a single speck of blood.
“Drier
than straw,” she said. “Odd.”
Isaac
paced over, squatting down and balancing the torch on the edge of a loculus. He
grabbed the shoulder of the corpse and found the flesh just as stiff and
uncompliant as the body before it, which only suggested to him that they’d been
killed at similar times.
He
flipped the corpse onto its back. A screaming skull stared back at him.
“Fuck!”
he yelled, falling so far back in surprise that he ended up wrapping himself
around the fur of Zaria’s knee.
“Now,
now,” she said. “Mother’s here.”
“Shut
up!”
He stood
to his feet and examined the corpse from a distance, his heart pounding. It had
a human face, with the same sigil of parasitic control carved into its
forehead—unlike the corpse above, this thrall’s life force had been sucked
clean to the marrow. All his muscles and organs had deflated down to a set of
wrinkled folds, and the skin around his bones gave the eerier
impression of fabric stretched over furniture. It was impossible to determine
any sort of identity.
What
was possible to discern, however, was the last expression on the man’s face,
which was locked into a rictus of terror. His eyes were shriveled and wide, his
lipless mouth opened like a hollow in a tree. Isaac thought, briefly, that if
he had managed to make that expression, the sigil
controlling his brain had failed just as the necromantic magic sucked away his
essence. He had woken only a moment before death.
“We’re
not alone down here,” Isaac said.
“Healthier
looking, though.”
“No.”
He pointed at the parasite sigil. “There’s another sorcerer who entered this
tomb before us. I found a body like this at the surface. They have multiple
human thralls under their command.”
“You
only mentioning this now?”
“I’ve
been distracted.”
Zaria
glanced behind her. “What happened to him?”
“Necromancy.
The sorceress attacked whoever controlled this man. Clearly, she emptied one of
his thralls like a skin of wine.”
“Lovely.”
“We’ll
meet the same fate, if we’re careless.”
She
grunted.
“I
don’t know,” Isaac said, almost to himself. “This is very surprising. No one
should’ve come here but me. It’s a strict Diet mandate. Although, considering
the use of parasitism, I can’t imagine this sorcerer cares for the morality
of—”
“Quiet.”
Her
ears swiveled back and forth. Slowly, beginning to feel a chill on his skin,
Isaac grabbed the torch back into hand.
It
began as a soft chittering sound.
For a
moment, Isaac thought he was hearing a swarming cloud of insects, rustling
their way through grass. It seemed to bleed from the walls, coming from every
direction at once. Slowly, the noise shifted, the quiet shuffling growing
sharper with its susurration, sounding now like the clattering of chimes.
“Untie
me,” Isaac said, fighting down panic. “Untie me right now.”
A moan
trembled out from the darkness, rasping and thin. Behind it, the chittering