Chapter Fifteen #3
Isaac a moment to recognize it as a hole in the floor. At each corner of the
square, thin metal beams rose into the ceiling and deep down into the lightless
chamber below. If he had to guess, it looked like an elevator.
The
room was empty. There was no sign of the puppeteer or their thralls. Standing
by the door, Zaria took a few tentative sniffs of the air, glancing back the
way they came.
“Smell
something?” Isaac asked.
For a
long moment, she glared down the empty corridor, as if daring whatever lurked
in the shadows to attack.
“Thought
I did,” she said. “Nothin’ now.”
“If you
keep hearing things. . . .”
She
gestured him on. “I’ll keep watch. Do your thing.”
“My
thing?”
“Pulling
wonders from the arse of evil. Hurry on, now.”
“Ah,
yes,” Isaac said, heading in. “I can see my dissertation now. ‘Archaeological
sodomy.’ It defends itself, really.”
He made
his way through the rows of desks, heading toward the elevator. From the square
hole in the floor, cool air rose to greet him. A faint breeze was blowing from
the depths of the earth. He thought of the dynamics of air. For a breeze to
arise, the cavern below must be very large, large enough that its size caused
an internal system of weather. He couldn’t see the carriage attached to the
elevator, and he wasn’t entirely sure it hadn’t long ago snapped off from the
rusted support beams. There was nothing but darkness.
He
grabbed a chair from a nearby desk and tossed it down the hole. It disappeared
without a trace. After listening for half a minute, he heard no sound. The cavern
below them was, indeed, very deep. It might go all the way to the bottom of the
tomb.
Close
to his father. . . .
Only a
single set of footprints had been carved into the dust around the elevator. The
tracks came to the precipitous edge of the open shaft. From there, they widened
into a full-body print on the floor. It looked, rather plainly, like the
puppeteer had dropped to their belly and stuck their head through the floor.
This confirmed that the rogue sorcerer had a corporeal form, at the very least.
It was said that the most powerful wizards could evolve beyond the flesh.
Isaac
took a breath.
Gingerly,
he dropped down to his stomach, inched his shoulders over the gap, and bent his
head down into the chilly air.
There
was only darkness. It was a perfect black, like the depths of the catacombs,
where no sunlight had ever touched. At the same time, even without a single
detail to focus the eye, Isaac could immediately feel the vastness of the space
around him, like he had somehow fallen into the night sky, where the three
moons were in their darkest penumbra. If he slipped now, he imagined he would
fall forever.
He
fought through the feeling of vertigo.
Eventually,
after some careful shuffling, he saw a crackling pillar of purple light, far
away in the distance. It was not quite a solid line—instead, the light was
composed of faint purple streaks, seemingly carved at random, like the scratch
marks in the prisoner cells. Some were long, some were short, many were jagged
and wide, and, together, they all combined to give the faint impression of an
obelisk. It was some kind of massive tower. Clearly, it was big enough to run
down the full length of the giant skeleton’s legs, right to the bottom of the
tomb.
That
was it. That was where his father was. Down there, at the bottom of the
obelisk.
He
strained his eyes against the darkness, trying to scrutinize the structure. His
mind raced with possibility.
His
father, jailed in the sorceress’s lair.
The
necromancer herself, waiting for his arrival, surrounded by oceans of bone, as
well as an equally large sea of treasure.
He was
close now. His life’s purpose was almost at hand.
The
longer he strained himself, the more detail he was able to discern. It appeared
that the lines he could see in the pillar were cracks in the structure, the
ancient walls having crumbled from millennia of disrepair. The purple color was
coming from a very large source of light, shining across the length of the
tower. If he squinted right, he almost thought that he could see the purple
glow moving and churning, like blood inside an artery.
All at
once, he noticed a faint sound in the chilly air. A whispering noise was coming
from the obelisk. Considering the distances involved, it must’ve been
exceptionally loud.
It
sounded like screaming.
“Isaac!”
Zaria shouted. “Get your head outta there!”
“I can
see the bottom of the tomb!” The cavernous air seemed to absorb his voice. It
didn’t even echo back. “It’s an obelisk!”
“A
what?”
“A
tower! Big pillar! Very massive!”
She
took a moment to respond. “We’re near the legs, ain’t we?”
“Yes. I
think, if I chart its position properly, I can navigate us through the pelvic—”
“Does
that mean it’s a giant cock?”
Isaac
pulled his head from the open hole.
Zaria
had wandered over to the open presentation circle, grinning beside the
skeletons. “Ain’t got my anatomy mixed up, have I?”
“That
is the evil lair of a necromancer,” Isaac said, sternly.
“Big
tower, you said. Long. Tall. Hard.”
“Please
don’t ruin my discovery.”
“Massive
length. Piercing the earth. Fucking it, you could say.”
“It is
an obelisk. It’s filled with light. I think it might be soul energy, a
vast cauldron of whatever souls the necromancers have amassed.”
“This cock’s
filled with souls, is it? Aren’t all the others?”
“Zaria!”
She
snorted.
“Awful,”
he said.
“Oh,
come off it, squire.”
Isaac
wiped dust off his robe, trying to track where the puppeteer had exited the
room. “Look, this is very good for us. We’ve found our way down to the bottom.
If we can get to the coccyx, I think the obelisk will connect—”
The
door to the room flung open.
Both of
them turned, startled. Something was thrown inside. Isaac couldn’t see the
object over the rows of bony desks. From the stage, Zaria raised her weapon,
took a look, gave a very loud curse, and sprinted toward the back of the
chamber, her long digitigrade legs pounding over the floor.
Underneath
her steps, he heard the hissing of a fuse.
An
explosion ripped through the room. The blast was deafening, the sound bouncing
hard, the shockwave slapping him over and upending several desks, the
stone-paved floor erupting in a shower of shrapnel and bone. Isaac was
scrambling for the cover of a desk when he glimpsed the door opening again.
Someone sprinted into the room.
By now,
Zaria had reached his position, and she practically threw herself on top of him
as another blackpowder bomb exploded, the shockwave slapping through the tender
meat between his bones.
For a
few moments, he gasped for air, reeling in shock.
After a
few moments spent gasping for air, he tried to peek out from the corner of the
desk, hoping to get a glimpse of their attacker. Zaria pulled him back. It was
almost too late. A throwing knife sliced through the spot where his face had
been an instant before. As he cringed back into cover, several more blades
embedded themselves through the woven bone of the judiciary desk, the steel
splintering through the skeletal remains, emerging like thorns in a bush.
Through
the ringing in his ears, he heard a frenzied voice begin to shout.
“Zaria!”
Isaac
risked another peak from cover.
Captain
Black Eye Soren stood in the center of the council chamber. The burnt flesh on
her face was twisted into a snarl. Her leather outfit was tattered and filthy,
her cutlass visibly dented, half her grenades missing from the belt. At some
point, she had wrapped the exposed fur of her body with pilfered segments of
bone, forming a grisly cage of armor.
“Gettin’
real sick of this shite,” Zaria said.
“Zaria!”
Isaac
pulled his head back. Another throwing knife speared through the bone-weaved
desk, spraying the two of them with splinters.
“Ya
bilge rat!” Soren shouted. “Ya sodding codpiece!”
Isaac
balled a hurricane into his palm, lifted the hand above the desk, and fired it
backwards, hoping to intimidate her.
A snarl
came in response.
“Sic
your magic fucktoy on me, traitor! I dare you!”
He
began to perform more mnemonics. Zaria clamped a hand on his shoulder, shaking
her head. When he stopped, she shouted back: “Should’ve turned tail, Soren! I
gave you that chance!”
“You
think I didn’t try?”
“It
don’t look that way! I’d say you’d gone mad!”
“I
have gone bloody mad!”
Soren’s
voice was rasping and wild. It had been close to a day since their
confrontation—if she was still in the tomb, she must have spent most of her
time journeying deeper, just as they had been doing. Unlike them, it seemed
like she’d spent the entire time fighting for her life, without food or rest or
pause. When he had taken a glimpse, her entire body had been covered in bone
chips and lacerations.
Zoanthropes
did not appreciate the term, but Isaac couldn’t think of a better word to
describe the situation.
The
bunny was going feral.
“I
ain’t foolish!” she yelled. “Fuck this tomb! Fuck the bony cunt runnin’ it! I
was happy to flee, because I do got some sense!” Another knife stabbed through
the desk. “But you know what? She sicced her beasts on me! It were a whole
streamin’ ocean! Oh, but not my crew! They get free passage! They get an escort
back to sunshine! Only I’m condemned to death!”
Zaria
paused. “All the rest made it out?”
“That
better not be relief in your voice, you fuckin’ cunt! You’re the reason they’re
here!”
“You’re
the reason they’re here!”
Another
knife skittered through bone.
Isaac
ran a finger along one of the embedded knives, thinking. It was obvious, by
now, that the necromancer was listening to their conversations. She could sense
their life, and she could smell their breath, and every pulse of their heart
would echo in her ears like a church’s bell, and it was only natural that she
would spy on her opponents.
But