Chapter Eighteen
Chapter
Eighteen
Lamentations
The screams
of the dead rose from the blackened earth.
Over
the course of his journey, Isaac had heard many cries of pain—pirates burning
alive, bones hissing in fear, a massive wyrm beached upon a city. All of them,
in a way, had been born from his own hand, and, in that way, they had not
driven him to feelings of guilt, because they had come from enemies standing in
his path. With the guiding light of his mission, he had been able to harden his
soul against the suffering of others.
Nothing
could’ve prepared him for the ghostly wails emanating from the obelisk.
The
naked souls, severed from their bodies millennia before, screamed into the
stone and rock around them. Tens of thousands of howls swirled through the air,
echoing through the worn cracks of the obelisk and out into the black cavern
beyond. Their voices were ethereal, pure, unlimited by the constraints of
flesh. It was impossible to distinguish any individual, impossible to recognize
any species—there was only pain, circulating through the ancient walls, so
warbling and discordant it seemed to signify the fall of the heavenly spheres.
Isaac
passed through the stone archway at the top of the obelisk. Zaria and his
father followed behind. For a moment, Isaac stood at the peak of the tower,
gazing down into a cauldron of pain and despair. The voices washed upon him,
like the wind of a storm. The light of the souls shone in his eye.
The
screams were deafening.
He had
to make them stop.
Below, down
the length of the massive obelisk, a lattice of pipework ran from the walls,
where the souls extracted from the factory drained into a storage container.
The storage container was an enormous glass pillar hanging in the center of the
obelisk, like a bubble of air trapped in a hollow tube. The glass shone a
brilliant purple as thousands of beings swirled inside, the vast network of
pipes sucking into the structure from various sides, feeding and gorging the
prison. There were intake valves, energy threshers, circuits and junctions,
wicked devices whose purpose seemed only the further extraction of energy, the
optimization of death, the complete digestion of a soul. Through it all, the
songs of the dead rang loudly through the machine.
Isaac
remembered, as a boy, the first time he had crafted an elixir in his uncle’s
laboratory. He had sprinkled the wrong reagent, and the solution had grown
acidic, and the steam had fermented into a ghastly purple fog, one that seemed
to reach and pull for any expendable material within its grasp, like the souls
were doing now. Their limbs were wispy and feeble.
He took
a calming breath.
Back
then, when his uncle had come to investigate, Isaac had prepared to be struck.
After the initial moment of rage, Berith had surveyed the damage to his
beakers, and his face had softened, and he had told Isaac that the equipment
was trivial to replace, and, in fact, Berith himself had made the same mistake
when he was his age, so he was only glad that Isaac had not breathed the
caustic fumes. The young boy had been shocked at the kindness. He had been even
more surprised when Berith proceeded to spend the rest of the day in the lab,
running through different experiments, giving close instruction, showing Isaac
the proper way to brew mixtures that glowed and sparkled with magic. They had
laughed, and joked, and played.
Now,
through the pipework and blinding light, he caught glimpses of movement.
Between the machinery, there was the flowing of robes, the shadows of a
marching army. There were at least thirty sigils, each of them signifying the
control of a puppeteer. More than once, he thought he saw a shaved head over
blackened robes, a body so shrouded in darkness it seemed to lack any substance
at all.
Isaac
listened to the cries of the dead, feeling both pity and rage.
“Right,”
Zaria said, peering down next to him. “This looks proper fucked and all, but
we’re storming this cock like a gods-damned castle. Aye, lads?”
“It’s
an obelisk,” he replied. “There are carvings—”
“Silence,
squire. It’s long, hard, ‘tween the legs, and exactly where we’re gonna kick
your uncle.” She turned to face them, the soul light illuminating the fur of
her neck. “I appreciate you lot got more magic than I do, but I’ve fought a
lotta battles. Mud and guts sorta thing. Anyone got objections to me taking
command?”
Isaac
shook his head. On the wall, Caine pushed out a tentacle of legs, shaking it
like a tongue.
Zaria
glanced down the length of the obelisk. “We’re treating this like proper
soldiers. Ranks and divisions.” She pointed at Caine. “You’re gonna be light
infantry. You’ll engage close as you can, keep his slaves occupied, soakin’ up their fire. You got a lotta chaff to lose, so
you’ll be best to take the hits.”
Caine
twisted his embedded skulls towards Isaac, gasping.
“Berith
is a necromancer,” Isaac said. “He has anti-necrotics, and he can take control
of the bones themselves. My father won’t be much help against him.”
Caine
nodded all his faces.
“Aye,”
Zaria said, “not your uncle directly. I’m speaking of his thralls. They only
got ice and fire. You don’t stay to get slaughtered—you cleave yourself apart,
attack from all sides, rush at them quick and scuttle on back. The goal is to
skirmish. Keep them off-balance and distracted. It ain’t a sacrifice.”
Caine
raised a skull upon a stalk of vertebrae, gazing down the length of the tower.
Its jaw clattered in apprehension.
“Would
you rather expose your son?”
The
bones flinched, the skull jerking first to Isaac, then Zaria. It swung from
side to side.
“So
you’ll do it, then?” the hyena asked.
The
skull rose the wall, and five different arms emerged from the mass, all of them
slapping their fingers against the bony forehead in a chaotic attempt at a
salute. Below, two heaps of bone sloughed onto the stairs, quickly twisting
into the shape of beasts.
“Squire,”
Zaria said, turning, “you’re the artillery. While your father’s drawing their
attention, you’ll be picking ‘em off at a distance. Snipe your uncle if you
can, but focus on the thralls. If they’re his energy, they’re his ammunition.
Take away his ammo, and he’s got naught to fire with.”
Isaac
did not particularly like the idea of killing his fellow students of magic, but
he could not argue against the necessity. “What will you do?”
“Me?”
She hefted her poleaxe into both hands. “I’m your bodyguard. If he tries to
come for you, I’ll chop him to bits. My job’s to keep you safe and doing your
squirely duties. Sound good?”
He
managed a smile. “No other way I’d like it, Z.”
“Right,
then.” She raised her axe overhead. “Let’s conquer this cock!”
Caine
took the lead, his shuffling creatures leaping and spilling over the pipework,
his central mass crawling down the wall of the obelisk, moving like rain on
glass. At the side, there was a spiral staircase winding into the earth, the
mist of souls slightly obscuring the path. Isaac took the stairs at a marching
pace, the feel of Zaria’s heavy footfalls behind giving him strength and
courage.
He
patted the dagger in his pocket, just to make sure it was there.
As they
descended, the screams grew louder. Purple fog seemed to condense in their
wake, grasping for them, the shifting haze holding the residual shape of arms
and hands. In the central glass pillar, thick clouds of souls collected around
their position, following their progress. Isaac had never heard the language of
the necromancers spoken aloud, but he imagined he could hear it now, through
the ghostly wails and whispering moans. The timbre of the voices began to
shift. He did not need a translator to know the souls were begging to be freed.
He
could do nothing for them.
Not
yet.
Before
long, the sounds of combat began to pierce the screams. There was a shattering
of ice, the hollow clatter of bone. Through the pipework, Isaac glimpsed
movement and light, the shadow of falling bodies. He leaned over the edge of
the winding staircase, staring down the length of the obelisk. The mnemonics
came easily. Berith had drilled the motions deep into his mind, all with shouts
and strikes and pain.
All for
a purpose.
The
Archons. World domination.
Isaac
grew so furious he almost failed the cast.
He
pointed his finger down towards the fighting, waiting for a thrall to expose
themselves through the glass and pipes. A burst of raw sound would turn his
fellow students into mist and paste. If he saw Berith’s shaven head—
“Get
down!”
Zaria
shoved him forward. A moment later, ice crackled against the wall behind him.
Isaac sprawled against the staircase, searching for the enemy. He saw two
thralls crouching on the edges of the pipework beside him, their dark robes
obscured in the shadow of the machine. Isaac blasted one with a direct hit of
sound, and the resulting deluge of gore struck the other mage like a grenade of
blood and bone. The thrall, unflinching from the pain, continued to cast her
spell, but just as a gout of fire began to leap from her hand, a storm of bone
fell from above, the flits of femurs and ribs stabbing down like a flurry of
arrows. The flames sputtered and died. The human reeled, slipping stolidly over
the edge. Isaac watched her body crash through the pipes until it resembled
little more than a towel.
Beside
him, several masses of bones crawled along the wall, rushing to reinforce the
battle below.
“Thanks,
father,” Isaac said.
One of
the slugs grew a shell of arms, each giving a thumbs up.
“Fuck
me, then,” Zaria said, helping him stand. “He knows to leave a rearguard. Watch
for ambush.”
They
continued down the stairway, more cautiously than before. Isaac prepared a
hurricane in the palms of his hands. He kept his gaze sharp and alert. As the
wind seared and screamed in his grip, as the sickly glow of a necromantic cast