Chapter Fifteen #5
veins, the more Isaac was able to properly navigate the corridors. Things were
silent now. They were alone, and they had time to prepare for the next battle.
He left
the rumination to Zaria.
At one
point, he lost sight of the sacral vertebrae above, and Isaac was forced to
venture over to a pair of signposts, using his cipher to translate the ancient
language. Many of the destinations had sinister-sounding names.
Office
to the Hegemon of Sacrifice.
Department
of Levies and Souls.
The
Maggot Prince.
Her
Holy Radiance of Exalted Death.
Isaac
decided that he was really beginning to hate these people.
Once he
had properly oriented himself, he was able to deduce the shortest path down to
the obelisk below. It would take them through what appeared to be a large
complex of rooms, at least according to a local map. A lot of the surrounding
architecture seemed to converge around this area. For all its importance, it
had a rather plain-sounding name.
Extraction
Chamber.
Isaac
grimaced. He knew exactly what this meant.
Their
path was soon to be grisly.
Oddly
enough, as he continued on through the halls, he found himself thinking less of
the atrocities committed untold centuries ago, as well as the fight he had just
survived with Soren. Instead, his thoughts turned again to the necromancer, the
one who had survived the fall of empire.
Something
was rubbing him the wrong way.
He
could not figure out why she had spared the lives of the pirates. According to
Soren, the necromancer had gone very far out of her way to not only isolate the
bunny from her crew, but to make personally sure the crew themselves made it to
the surface. She had escorted the crew with a fraction of her necrotic mass. In
other words, the necromancer had protected them.
Why?
It made
no sense at all. Isaac remembered the fight against the wyrm, when the
sorceress had parted the sea of bones around him, and he felt a sense of
disquiet bubbling up through his belly, because sparing all these lives had
merely denied her a form of nourishment, when she likely needed it the most.
What
was she doing?
Why, in
the world, would she spare all these people?
He
tried to tell himself that there might be a reasonable explanation for all
this, that the sorceress was trying to intimidate the pirates into fleeing in a
panic, that she wanted them to spread the word about her power and myth and
curses to the lands above, that what she was really doing was lulling Isaac
into a false sense of security while she consolidated the worst of her strength
deeper within the tomb, hoping to catch him off-balance after defeating the
puppeteer. None of these explanations were obviously wrong, but they all rang
hollow. None of them felt like the truth.
Something
was happening here, and he did not know what it was.
His
sense of disquiet only grew worse.
Slowly,
the dust interrupted his thoughts. In the air,
surrounding him, the specks were drifting and twisting, as if recently
disturbed. When he concentrated, the glinting motes suddenly curled, shifting
like sand sinking through the hills of a dune. They formed an arrow. It was an
obvious point of direction. It was, quite obviously, a wholly unnatural
phenomenon.
The air
sparkled, like metal. The more it glinted in the light, the more Isaac was
convinced it was not dust at all.
He
gazed in the direction it wanted.
Down an
adjacent hall, there was a pile of human bodies. Even from a distance, it was
obvious they had been perforated with holes, the gaping punctures leaving
jagged marks in the flesh. As he focused his attention, bones began to wriggle
their way out of the holes, the white stalks squirming through the flesh like
maggots, tumbling to the floor, rolling and collecting.
Beyond
the massacre, the corridor widened. He could finally see the sacrum, the
central plating of the pelvis. It was no longer above his head, but curving
down toward the floor, spread out before him like a white, porous cliff, the
beginning of the pelvic wings curving like mountain slopes. On either side, he
could see the slight ridges and twin rows of holes that signified where the
vertebrae had fused together. Each circular vent had been walled with granite
and gold, carved intricately with religious iconography.
In the
middle of the triangular sacrum, a relatively small set of bronze doors stood
closed, surrounded by stalks of glowing cartilage. Here, the walls were covered
with even more growths of ossein, like white mold upon rotten food.
The
Extraction Chamber.
As the
masses of bones slithered from the fallen humans, they congregated around the
bronze doors, wriggling into the same undulating shapes they had adopted in the
catacombs. The masses shuffled and tossed around the door, agitated and
restless, absently absorbing into each other as they passed and strolled. Isaac
could see human blood dripping down the stairs before the doors, like gentle
red curtains.
“Follow
my lead, Z.”
She
slapped his back.
He
pressed forward, marching fearlessly toward the chamber. Halfway across, he was
noticed by the bones. The masses flexed in surprise. At first, they wriggled
down into individual bones, smearing blood across the pavement as they slid in
his direction. He kicked them away, continuing on. Next, the more mobile masses
throbbed into his path, the skulls in their frames attempting to grind out
words. Isaac cast a dome of anti-necrotic light around himself, eliciting
shrieks of pain and fear as the bodies slithered away. He burned a path through
their ranks, like flames through a garden.
By now,
the rest of the bones had smeared themselves across the door to the sacrum, creating a pulsing membrane of body parts. They were
sealing the entrance shut. When Isaac stepped onto the bloody stairway, the
bones did not retreat—in fact, they remained defiant against him, bursting into
flame as his light seared through their hollow frame. Even in death, they
refused to yield.
All of this,
he thought, felt rather desperate on her part.
“Out of
my way, necromancer,” Isaac said.
Skull
stalks grew from the wall, sprouting like dandelions. The skinless faces
chittered at him, swirling into a collection of eyeless stares.
“I—I—Issssa—Isssaaaaaaac.”
He
stepped back, just enough that his light was no longer burning the bones.
Molten bone flowed like candle wax. “You couldn’t kill Soren, could you?
Apparently, you tried very hard.”
The
skulls clacked their jaws.
“Or
maybe,” Isaac continued, “you left her alive, hoping she would ambush us, like
she just tried to do.”
Behind
them, the squirming masses congregated together, sealing off any hope of
retreat.
“Well,”
Isaac said, “thank you for sparing the pirates. I’m glad to see you’re
upholding our alliance. Or, rather, I’m glad to see you’re taking my delayed
killing of you with such good grace. It’s appreciated.”
“Isaac,”
the head stalks replied.
He
glanced at the dead humans behind him. Their robes were black, their faces
young and vacant. “Is the puppeteer beyond these doors?”
The
head stalks nodded.
“Do you
want me to kill them?”
On the
wall, the crawling bones quickened like blood in an artery. The skulls shook
violently from side to side.
Zaria
pressed herself to his back, baring her teeth at the bones.
“Why
not?” he asked. “Isn’t that why you spared my life?”
The
skulls did not move. They only stared at him.
“Is
there something in this chamber that you don’t want me to see?”
After a
few long moments, the skulls nodded.
“Are
you going to attack the puppeteer yourself? Is that why you don’t want me to
interfere?”
The
bones crawling along the door shuddered, like a bird unfurling its feathers.
“Well,”
Isaac said. “Either way, I’m sure this is all very inconvenient for you, but
I’ll be entering your torture chamber now, if you don’t mind.”
“Isaac,”
the skulls replied, shaking themselves from side to side.
Zaria
waved her axe at the surrounding masses of bone, as if daring them to approach.
“What
game are you playing, necromancer?” Isaac demanded. “Don’t you want my aid?
This puppeteer is too strong for you to handle alone, aren’t they?” He glared
at the skinless faces. “They’ll kill you if I don’t interfere.”
Nearly
a dozen faces stared back at him. They nodded once. There was a certain
finality to the action.
“Then
what is this?” Isaac asked. “What do you want from me? Are you simply going to
beg me to leave?”
For a
long moment, the skulls did not respond. The only sound was the dry scraping of
bone over bronze. Eventually, the stalks extended, shunting more vertebrae into
their lengths. He thickened his spell, creating a radiant shell of white, and
he felt Zaria tense beside him, her poleaxe held firm and ready.
The
skulls stood at the edge of the lighted dome, peering into the brightness.
Their gaze was silent and still. No facial expressions could be read from the
ancient bone. Shadows danced through the empty sockets.
Then, all
together, the skulls nodded again, with the same sense of finality.
“I am
not leaving,” he said. “I will see my journey through. I’ll rescue my father,
and I’ll cleanse your defilement from this place, for the good of all who’ve
perished here. However. . . .”
Something
made him speak. The way the skulls were looking at him, how the bones scurried
to block the doors, even the leering sway of the masses behind him.
It
reeked of desperation.
Something
was very wrong here.
“If you
surrender,” Isaac said, “then I will show mercy. I will take you back to the
Diet to face fair judgment. Your crimes are many, but . . . maybe some good can
come from the knowledge you possess.”
Her
reaction surprised him. The skulls flailed along their stalks, some of the
faces snapping from the vertebrae columns entirely. The bones on the wall
boiled like insects. Every skull careened from side to side, nearly losing
their jaws with the force of motion. It was the most furious head shake he had
ever seen.
“Do you
have some personal vendetta against the Diet?” Isaac asked.
The
skulls nodded briskly.
“The
Diet is barely a generation old. You’ve lived for millennia. What quarrel could
you possibly. . . .” He trailed off, not finishing the thought. The skull did
not answer. All of a sudden, he did not care if it ever did. “Well, regardless,
that is your only choice. Death or imprisonment. You can try to stop me, but
you will not dissuade me.”
The
skulls gathered around each other, chittering and gasping. “Isaac. Isaac.
Isaac. Isaac.”
“Get
out of my way,” Isaac said.
For a
long moment, the head stalks swayed above him. The flowing masses of bone
leered closer, their bodies crackling with constant motion, their forms growing
angled and sharp. Zaria filled the air with a snarl.
Suddenly,
the bones shifted away. The bone crawled from the door like a column of ants,
severing the stalks as they fled. Bones poured down the bloody stairs,
retreating beside his feet, tumbling into rivers and streams. The bones
coagulated together. They stood silently behind him, watching.
The
doors were clear. All that remained was a lone skull sitting on the top of the
stairs, staring up at him. Its eye sockets shone empty in the cartilage light.
“Isaac,”
the skull said, quietly.
Isaac
pushed open the doors.