Chapter Eight #3
those who could not squirm fast enough were burned to ash under his white
light, all the acrid smoke rising in wisps and clouds. Another wall of bone
presented itself at a junction of corridors, forming a pulsing orifice of
limbs, and, without breaking his light, Isaac balled another hurricane into the
palm of his hand, smashing it like a bird’s nest. Splinters of bone flew past
him from behind, and Zaria’s groans of effort told him there was still a tide
at their back, only barely held at bay.
He took
a turn into an intersecting hall, still following the vertebrae. A few steps
in, he stumbled, having to lean his shoulder into stone. When he pressed a hand
to his chest, it came away shining red. The cocoon of bones had stabbed him all
over his body. He wasn’t sure which would weaken him faster—the magic light
burning from his hand, or the blood leaking from his body.
He had
no scrolls left. He could not defeat them all by hand. Even now, he could hear
the dead of an entire city slithering through the halls.
They
were going to die.
Zaria
pushed him from behind. “No slacking, squire!”
He
stumbled forward, a ragged gasp escaping his lips, continuing ahead with
brilliant light shining high above his head. Her presence, despite everything,
gave him some comfort. They marched together as one.
By now,
the vertebrae in the ceiling were a straight, curving line, but the paths that
followed them were circuitous and long, bending and turning, leading them
through burial chambers, mausoleums, endless sockets of loculi. The spinal
column frequently disappeared from sight. Every turn was a guess, every room a
hope, every vanishing a fear.
“Isaac!
Behind!”
He
turned, and a vaguely humanoid shape sprinted at them from the darkness, fast
and large and spiked with sharpened arms. He smashed it down to chunks with a
blast of wind, and the separating bones boiled beneath his light.
The
masses were growing bolder, fiercer. He saw them try to angle themselves into
ambushes, twisting into deadlier shapes, ones that could leap and slash and
skewer. They were still circling the edge of his light, like wild animals
around a raging fire. These creatures were intelligent. They were the extended
will of a sorceress who had survived the fall of empire. All it would take was
one gap for them to exploit, a single slip of weakness.
But, of
course, their ferocity could mean something else. It could mean they were
getting close to the exit.
They
had to push deeper.
He
reached a four-way intersection of halls. Each of them looked the same—narrow
walls, stone loculi, a ceiling of dirt and stone. Bones hissed in all.
Zaria
bumped into him from behind. “Which way?”
“Any
way!” Isaac hissed.
“Pick a
good one!”
“I
can’t see—”
The
bones sprung their trap.
From
each of the four halls, shapes and masses flooded from the darkness. They were
coordinated, their limbs sprinting, their bodies leaping and churning. He could
not pick a direction to cast.
“Zaria!”
A
bulbous mass of skulls leaped at him, but the hyena smashed it down from
overhead, scattering the screaming faces across the floor. Isaac pressed
himself into her back, seeing a torrential rain of bone flying sideways down an
adjacent corridor, and he just barely managed to encase the pathway with a
solid wall of ice, trapping the body parts like flies in amber. In another
corridor, cylinders of arms and legs spun across the ceiling, screeching and
flailing, and Zaria managed to angle a vicious slash of her axe, cleaving
through a knot of femurs. Isaac incinerated the uncoiling limbs as they
detached, watching the scattered pieces of bone burn to ash.
He
picked a random direction, continuing on.
He
stumbled.
He
gasped for air.
He
gritted his teeth, continuing again.
He
couldn’t sustain this pace for much longer. The arm holding up the light was
beginning to shrivel, all the energy visibly sucking from the muscle. His legs
were unsteady, and his vision was blurring. His body was draining so quickly of
lifeforce that it was becoming a conscious effort to draw breath.
He
pressed a hand to his chest, and it came back dripping with blood.
And he
was back in the yard again, the morning sun shining on his face. He had
attempted to cast the warding light dozens of times, and he was now only managing
sparks. He panted, leaned on his knees, and told his uncle that he could do no
more. If he tried again, he was sure he would faint.
And
just when he expected the cane, his uncle had pursed his lip,
and nodded, and kneeled beside him, and told
him that he must try again, he must push himself beyond his limits, because the
time would come when he would be in great need of this
spell, and it would not be a time when he could falter. He was only challenging
his nephew so harshly now because he needed to be ready for the task ahead.
Did he
understand?
Isaac
had looked at him, wanting all of it to be over. Instead, he had nodded.
His
uncle had smiled.
Now,
the light in Isaac’s hand began to flicker and fade. He no longer had the
strength to hold his arm above his head. Immediately, the swarms of bone seized
in, braying at the edges of the light, hissing and screeching.
Something
with seven legs and three skulls leaped like a frog. With a roar, Isaac
straightened his arm, concentrated the light, and shot
it from his hand like a ballista of energy. It skewered clean through the
flying mass, sending it flailing to the floor, its bones burned and flaked to
ash. Isaac turned and shot the light again, aiming at the crawling legions
behind them, focusing the beam into a lance of shining brilliance. The corridor
was scoured. Bodies and creatures screamed as they burst aflame, the writhing
layers of bone scattering into swarms.
He
swept his arm across the intersecting halls, listening to the screech of dying
bone. He waited for a new opponent. None dared.
“Come
on!” he yelled.
His
voice echoed down the dusty corridors, his words carrying through a legion of
festering graves. None made answer.
He
challenged the darkness to fight, and he found the darkness afraid.
He
continued on, bathed in radiant light, marching past empty tombs and silent
coffins. Ahead, a crawling layer of bone retreated into the dark like the white
foam of a wave. Twitching masses flung themselves to the ground as he
approached, falling over into their base components. Shrieks echoed from the
halls. Any shifting mass that did not retreat was burned to ash and smashed to
pieces with the heavy blade of a poleaxe.
Above
their heads, the vertebrae changed. They were no longer cervical—instead, the
blocks of bone began to sport the articulation joints of thoracic vertebrae,
each protrusion larger than the blade of a windmill. Gradually, the corridors
widened further and further until the walls disappeared from the edge of his
light.
The
catacombs had ended.
They
had made it through the neck. They were almost at the torso.
Almost
to the necropolis.
Almost
to safety.
He
stumbled through a wide entryway. A large stone door stood at the end of a
circular chamber, carved into the bulge of a massive sternum, which Isaac could
only compare in size to the gate of a high-walled castle. Vertebrae acted as
the central pillar of the chamber, the floor around it carved with religious
reliefs and mythological figures. Giant clavicles curved away from the sternum
into adjacent corridors, the shoulders somewhere far off in the darkness.
Zaria
ran across the chamber, pieces of splintered bone falling from her leather
armor. She bashed into the massive stone door as if she meant to knock it over.
All she received in response was a puffing cloud of dust.
“What
stupid idiot made a door out of stone?”
Isaac had only barely reached the vertebrae in the center of the
room. He had to lean on it for support.
“Isaac!
Work your book-learnin’!”
He
pushed himself off the vertebrae and made to speak. An instant later, he was
face-down on the floor, and the light was gone. A frantic heartbeat rang in his
ear. He tried to cast the spell again, but his arms were stiff and empty, and
he had to work the incantation like a wet campfire. When he got the light
shining from his hand again, Zaria was leaning over him, pulling him up to
standing.
“Fuck
me, love, you’re bleedin’ bad.”
He
couldn’t feel the punctures anymore. He knew that was a very bad sign.
She
leaned him against herself as they walked, their difference in height bringing
his head parallel with a breast. “Exit, right? Door leads to safety?”
Isaac
managed to nod.
“Well,
come on, open sesame and all that.”
He
flopped his arm towards the side of the door. “Lever.”
“That easy,
is it?”
He
grunted into her fur.
She
moved across the rest of the chamber, gently lowering him into a sitting
position at the front of the door. “Stay awake. Hey!” She snapped her fingers.
“Breathe. In out, in out.”
“Hurry
up—cutthroat.”
Zaria
raced over to the lever. It was located in the range of his light, but he could
not see very far. His vision was growing narrow and dim. Back the way they
came, the chittering continued to churn. It seemed to be growing louder.
He
heard some wrenching sounds off to the side, followed by a snarl. “Is any
blasted bit of metal gonna work right?”
He
could hear the bones coming again. The sound was heavy, full of cracks and
scrapes, punctuated with raspy screams and grinding roars. The chamber they
were in held many doors along the opposite end of the sternum. There were many
mouths of darkness. Every one of them seemed to twist and boil.
Zaria
was next to him again. “It’s not budging.”
He
concentrated on breathing.
“Isaac!
It’s stuck!”
“I
don’t—” He swallowed some saliva. “I don’t know. Do something.”
Zaria
stared back up at the massive stone door.
“Do
something,” he said. “I’ll cover you.”
“You
couldn’t cover piss in a blanket.”
He
grabbed the belt of her leather pauldron and pulled himself to standing. His
fists clenched, and the white light grew brighter. “I will cover you.”
She
studied the door, apprehensive. “I suppose I am the brute, between us.”
“If
we’re to die,” Isaac said, “I want you to know.”
She
looked at him.
“I hate
your snoring.”
She
snorted.
“Yes,
like that,” he said. “Fuck off.”
With a
toss of her poleaxe, Zaria walked up to the door, cracked her neck, braced
against the stone, and began to push with all her strength. Dust rained from
above. The sternum itself seemed to shake. Slowly, the door began to scrape
along its ancient path, moving inwards at a glacial pace.
A roar
came from the darkness. More joined it, warbling and torn, and the chittering
rushed into a frenzy of movement, like a thousand crackling fires combining
into an inferno. The roars became a chorus, a synchronized cry of battle.
Isaac
performed a new spell.
They
came through the entryways like a horde of beasts, sprinting from all
directions. He pointed his finger at the largest mass of bones he could see. A
gust of energy snapped through his arm, and the mass exploded in a burst of raw
sound. The noise was deafening, slapping his eardrums, and the shockwave
blasted through the nearest beasts like a blackpowder bomb. The shrapnel of
bone hit the back ranks, shredding many to their base components.
He
pointed again, shooting the raw sound at points of maximum effect, tearing
apart entire lines of galloping masses. Shattered bone flew through the air in
streams. But they were coming from every side, pouring out of every chamber
entrance in gushing tides, and they had staggered their lines, coordinated
their charges. He couldn’t cast fast enough. There were too many to kill. They
closed the distance at rapid speed.
He
performed new mnemonics, losing even more ground in the casting time, and
slammed two balls of hurricane into the floor. A tidal wave of wind erupted
from the ground, knocking back the edges of the horde like a solid wall of
force. The masses of bone were slapped into showers of arms and legs. For a
moment, their advance was halted. But the front lines
were replaced with new bone immediately, the new corpses almost stumbling over
each other in their rabid fervor. Isaac cast the wind again, sending constellations
of bone spinning through the air, but the lines only grew thicker with the
sprinting dead. It felt like beating the ocean with a broom.
Behind
him, Zaria had managed to push open a crack in the doorway. Yellow light
trickled through the gap.
Isaac
fell back, increasing the strength of his own light. The first swarm of beasts
immediately burst into flame, melting into puddles and ash at his feet. A
restless mob of skulls and fingers and limbs grew at the edge of the spell,
hissing and screeching. They swiped into his aura, bit at it with teethless
jaws, each thrust into the light boiling the skin of their bones.
The
light began to dim. He had reached the ends of his strength. As the casting radius
shrank around him, the horde closed in. He could see vacant skulls and sharp
ribs and twisted legs, piles of bodies squirming like slugs, entire waves of
bone splashing at the backs of creatures only vaguely shaped like living
beings. They came in, closer and closer. Dozens of arms grasped for his flesh.
Zaria
had widened the crack in the doorway to a small gap. He saw glimpses of
statues, buildings, roads.
They
were almost at him. The light was nearly gone. Each swipe of claws barely
missed his chest. The horde was frenzied, smelling blood and life.
And,
all at once, Isaac felt a sense of calm. There was a feeling of rightness, a
sense that he had achieved his place and purpose. Everything he had ever known had built up to his moment. As he pulled the
last bit of lifeforce from his body, a single sentence
flared in his mind.
His
father would have been proud.
The
light in his hand grew from a dim flicker back to a blaze, and the horde
scrambled as they fell and burned. The blaze grew into a shining beacon, and
the screams of the dead echoed down the chamber walls. The beacon erupted into
a second sun of light, far brighter than he had ever cast before. Every shadow
in the room was erased, every flicker of darkness destroyed, every line of
color fading into pure, radiant white. For a long moment, he felt like a star
shining in the night.
Then
his energy was gone.
The
spell ended. His light died like a flame. As it went, he caught a brief glimpse
of the chamber, and he saw only clouds of ash. The room was empty of bone.
His
heart skipped in his chest. His legs buckled.
He
collapsed.
Stone
on his face.
Movement.
Distant voice.
The
world flipped. He bounced, held off the floor. A
yellow light.
Running
and running.
The
world went black.