Chapter Seventeen #2
mean,” she continued, “I can’t rightly demand—he’s still your kin. He’ll be
watching for us. We can’t beat him head-on. I don’t know if it were a good idea
to keep going, here. Not into those depths.”
Out of
all the chaotic feelings, out of all the memories surging through his mind, a
new sensation rose inside him. It dominated the rest of his emotions,
smothering all his thoughts.
Anger.
Fury.
Hatred.
Her
hands moved to his armpits, coaxing him to stand. “Fuck it. Slag the whole lot.
Let’s just go.”
“No,”
Isaac said.
“Come
on. Fuck the lot of ‘em. Fuck the treasure.”
He
wriggled out of her grasp, kicking aside a shattered pipe as he stood. “I’m not
leaving.”
“Your
mission weren’t—”
“I
am not leaving!” He clenched his fists, broken glass falling from the
lining of his robes. “He’s not going to scare me away. Not anymore.”
Zaria
stood up beside him. “It ain’t about fear, love. He’s your blood.”
“No,”
Isaac replied. “It is about fear. It’s always been about fear.”
She
cocked a brow.
“I will not heed,” he continued, “a single one of his demands. This isn’t about my mission, my
father, or anything else. This is about me. He wants to be proud of me? He wants to call me his son?
Oh, he won’t be proud much longer. Not when I show him exactly what his
training lessons have earned him. Not when I—”
He
stopped. While talking, he had turned to face her, and now he could see that
something moved at the entrance.
A pile
of bone was spilling into the extraction chamber. He saw splintered arms,
flailing legs, showers of vertebrae, all the loose pieces flailing along the
floor, hundreds of bodies scraping and clattering over metal with the viscosity
of lava. Some of the cascades thickened into strands. Improvised tentacles
dragged the central mass. It slowed and solidified, rising like a wave,
smearing itself across the pelvic bone of the colossus, like it was struggling
against its own undulating shape.
All
this time, the bones of the necromancer had moved sloppily, like the person
controlling them did not have proper training.
Why had
he never noticed until now?
Isaac
pulled away from Zaria, his boots crunching on the glass. He watched the
formless ocean of corpses. They seemed to shy from his gaze.
“Oi!”
Zaria shouted. “Fuck off!”
The
pile of bodies flinched.
She
stepped in front of Isaac, brandishing her axe. “Clear out! Make tracks! Beat
your bones ‘fore I do it for you!”
The mass
quivered, slowly leaking from the pelvis.
Isaac
remembered the necropolis, how the ocean of bones had rushed around him. The
necromancer had helped kill the wyrm. She had tried to communicate. Outside the
doors to this chamber, she had seemed desperate to prevent his entrance.
“Fuck
off, kinslayer!”
For a
moment, all the bones slowed, leaving the pile of death as inert as a hunter’s
trophy. Slowly, with a whispering rasp, the mass churned itself back towards
the bronze doors, the same way a slug might crawl through a hole. There was no
attempt to speak. None of the skulls looked back at him.
All
this time, the only thing the necromancer had been able to say was his name.
“Wait!”
Isaac shouted.
The
mass froze in place.
He
began to approach.
The
bones spilled back into the chamber. As he closed the distance, the engulfing
mass spread out into a high semicircle against the pelvic wall, all the bones
congealing like a slick of oil across a table. When Isaac stopped in front of
the wall of bodies, it flexed like a diaphragm. Slowly, a single stalk, topped
with a skull, emerged from the churning layer.
“Father?”
Isaac asked, raising his hand.
The
skull at the head of the stalk pushed its cheek into his palm. The bone was
cold, dry, and brittle. It shuddered like a bug in his grasp.
“Isaac.”
The
wall of bone closed in around him, reaching out a dozen arms. Bony hands
grabbed at his shoulders, rubbed through his hair, felt at his face. He felt
swallowed by a grasping forest of limbs. Around him, the sea of bones seemed to
shudder and sigh.
He
closed his eyes, imagining a hug.
“Isaac.
Isaac. Isaac. Isaac. Isaac.”
The
bones were dry and old. They had no warmth. They were clumsy and smothering and
desperate.
“I-I-Issaa—cccc—Issaaaaa—”
“Was
what he said true?” Isaac asked.
Around
him, the grasping limbs froze in place.
“Did
you really mean to kill me? To save yourself?”
The
ocean of bones rustled and cracked, like a gust of wind slicing through a bush.
The skull stalk looked away, shifting its eyeless sockets to the floor.
“This
was all your fault,” Isaac said.
The
skull looked up, staring deeply into his face.
Isaac
took a step back, brushing his way through the thick nest of hugging arms, and
the ocean of bones nearly shrieked in response. Dozens of limbs reached
outward, stretching their skeletal fingers, spreading an ocean of ribs and
teeth and death.
An axe
blade came smashing down, splintering the arms. As Isaac took another step
back, Zaria swung her polearm back into the air, cleaving through a tentacle of
legs and spines. The entire mass shuddered back, reforming itself into softer
shapes. Zaria snarled at the tide of bones. She stepped forward, teeth bared,
and the mass squirmed against the pelvis, fleeing up the wall like a swarm of
bugs.
“Stop,”
Isaac said.
Zaria
glanced at him, still snarling.
“Z.”
She
narrowed her eyes, gave a reluctant chuff, and lowered her polearm, stepping
back to his side. Her weapon remained tightly in hand.
“Is that
still your plan?” Isaac asked. “Are you still going to sacrifice me?”
The
head stalk had receded down to a few stubs of vertebrae. Slowly, it lengthened
itself out of the central mass, just enough for the head to shake from side to
side.
“Am I
supposed to believe you?”
“Isaac,”
the skull said.
He
looked away, staring beyond the striped flag, the piles of blood and metal.
All his
life, he had heard stories of his father. Every instructor who had graced the
tower had known the man, in one way or another. He had been told stories of his
father’s bravery, his many expeditions into foreign lands, his humor and cheer,
his love for his wife.
How
happy he had been to become a father.
And, of
course, Isaac couldn’t believe any of those stories anymore, because how would
he know they were not a lie? Maybe Berith had asked these people to say what
they had. Maybe it was all part of the conspiracy, a carefully crafted
narrative whose only purpose was to ensure his obedience. All he had ever known was what he had been told, and what he had
been told was now, quite obviously, a far cry from reality. Maybe, in the end,
some of the tales about his father were actually true, but, at that point, did
it even matter?
Isaac
stared off into the extraction chamber, trying not to cry again.
He
heard the crack and shuffle of bone. When he looked, his father had shifted the
head stalk up through the substrate layer of bone, moving it to a slight
distance above Isaac’s head. Below, a gushing of bone began to spill from the
central mass, like a mother spider birthing hundreds
of children. They scuttled and leaped, snapping together on the floor.
Zaria
raised her axe.
“Hold
on,” Isaac said.
The
bones were not building another monster. Instead, they were linking together at
precise angles, forming letters from the connection of knuckles and ribs and
toes, all of it spreading flat across the floor. After a minute, the corpses
formed a phrase.
I LOVE
YOU
Isaac
stared at the gathered bones, unblinking. Above, on the substrate layer still
clinging to the wall, the skull began to leer from its vertebral stalk.
“Isaac,”
the skull rasped.
“Do
you?” Isaac asked. “Do you really love me?”
Above the
arms, the skull nodded so hard that it broke free of the vertebrae, bouncing
and rolling along the metal floor. A new skull grew from the central mass,
shunting out from a beetle-like swarm of fingers.
“Charming,”
Zaria muttered.
An arm
pointed towards the end of the chamber, where his uncle had gone. Next, it
pointed back at the central mass. Below, the bones scraped over the floor,
forming into a different phrase.
NOT
LIKE HIM
“You’re
not like your brother,” Isaac said, flatly.
The
skull nodded. Three arms emerged from the central mass. Two of them drew a
large circle in the air, while the third drew a triangle that pointed out of
the circle.
“Gettin’
real sick of this,” Zaria said. “Not sure how a pile of bones can go fuck
itself, but I suggest you get tryin’.”
The
skull shook from side to side. It repeated the gesture. The two arms drew a
large, horizontal circle in the air, while a third drew a triangle pointing up
from the circle, like the fin of a shark.
Below,
the bones said: TIME
“A
sundial?” Isaac asked.
The
skull nodded vigorously, as if growing excited.
“Time,”
he repeated, thinking of possible synonyms. “What about time? Years? Seasons?”
One of
the arms pointed at the central mass.
TIME
HERE
ME
“Time here.”
Isaac paused. “You’ve spent a lot of time down here.”
The
skull nodded again. It bent down, and one of the skeletal arms tapped a bony
finger against the side of the skull, where the brain once rested.
“You’ve
spent that time thinking.”
More
nodding. Below, the bones were scuttling furiously, squirming over each other
like maggots in a corpse. It was obvious, just from a glance, that his father
had spent a lot of time practicing how to spell the words. Even though many of
the words ended up awkward and misshapen, they were always simple to read.
FEAR
MISTAKE
One of
the arms pointed at Isaac. To the side, two of the arms gently folded together,
as if they were cradling a child.
IMAGINE
YOU
BORN
GROWING
The
three arms began to move, mimicking the mnemonic gesture of various spells,
from the simple motion of wind to the complex supination of sound.
YOUR
LEARNING
YOUR
STUDIES
One of