Chapter Eighteen #2
lit up the masonry below, he realized, suddenly, that he did not feel afraid.
He could feel Zaria at his back, and he knew his father was all around him, and
the feeling of their presence gave him more confidence than he could remember
feeling in his entire life.
It
occurred to him, all at once, how much his mind had been crippled by everything
Berith had done. All the guilt and loneliness he had ever suffered. . . .
More
and more, Isaac simmered with rage.
Below,
the battle grew closer. The elemental students had been placed in straight
lines along the winding staircase, watching Caine’s corpse-hewn monsters rush
down the curve of the obelisk wall. They made no attempt to loose
their spells.
As the
bones drew close, a sigil grew bright on a single thrall’s head, and Caine’s
beasts were flung from the stone, like crumbs brushed from a table’s edge. They
hung suspended in the air, beginning to twist and hiss as the connections were
ripped away by an invisible hand. The thrall collapsed, her body thin and
withered. Along the line of thralls, two more sigils grew bright, and Berith’s
spell grew stronger, shredding Caine’s bones all the way down into the
individual fibers of ossein.
Seeing
an opportunity, Isaac unleashed the hurricanes in his hand. The wind came in a
lash, slamming the line of mages into the wall behind them. They bounced and
tumbled across the stairs, their bodies falling broken and limp
into the pipework below. Even above the screaming souls, he heard a symphony of
striking flesh. Moments later, the necrotic force holding his father started to
weaken, and the slack in power was just enough for some of the bones to break
free, scuttling along the pipes in retreat.
A pair
of glowing eyes met his from below, clearly visible through the glass and
stone. He could not fail to recognize them. They were the same gentle blue as
his own.
Hadn’t
his uncle said they always saw eye to eye?
“Face
me!” Isaac yelled.
Berith
narrowed his gaze.
Three
of the surviving students turned rigid. As the humans drained of energy, the
obelisk started to rumble, the stone walls belching with dust. The souls began
to shriek. Isaac felt the temperature drop around him, which could only signify
a casting of necrotics, a swift genocide of warmth and light and life. Below,
the students fell from the stairs, their robed bodies toppling like wheat
before a scythe.
“I told
you to leave!” his uncle shouted.
There
was a great sound of clattering, rushing up through the glass and stone, as if
a thousand hammers were banging against a drum. Pipes rusted. Darkness
splintered the air. He saw a boiling whiteness emerge through the complex
network of machines, as if, inexplicably, a flood of milk was filling the
tower. The sound grew into a cacophony of snapping twigs. Isaac only realized
that Berith was launching a salvo of bone when he saw the sickly green aura of
necrotic propulsion, rimming the tidal wave of corpses like the aurora of a
sky.
“Fuck!”
Zaria yelled.
She
tackled him across the stairs, her heavy weight knocking the breath from his
lungs. An instant later, the bones erupted through the tower, spurring the
souls to scream in mortal fear, so many arms and legs and teeth and jaws
flooding through the air that, for a moment, it felt as if an entire graveyard
had been loaded into the shot of a cannon. Isaac stared over Zaria’s shoulder,
wide-eyed, as the bones splintered against the surrounding machines, leeching
so much necrotic energy that the impact melted pipes and boiled glass and
chewed viciously through stone, puncturing the cloud of souls like a burning
storm of hail.
Screams
filled the air.
Fear.
Terror.
Agony.
Moments
later, there came a hail of splintered bone, tumbling through the hollow
cylinder of the obelisk. The geyser had reached its peak—now, it was beginning
to fall. Chips of ossein rained like the smoldering embers of phosphorous,
burning everything they touched, smoking and hissing with a malevolent flash of
green. Zaria flinched, crying out in pain. Half of a skull had landed on her
back. Isaac scrambled out from beneath her, batting away the sickly bone with
the sleeve of his robe. The contact withered his garment halfway to the elbow,
the material hissing into flakes of ash.
By the
time the geyser receded, the machinery of the obelisk had become a slag of
metal, so twisted and rent that it was almost unrecognizable as a pneumatic
series of pipes. Glass dripped from the pillar, molten and bubbling. Through
the hissing smoke, his father slithered up the walls of the obelisk, fleeing in
naked fear.
Below
the screaming souls, a voice rose from the depths.
“You
insolent child!”
Isaac
felt a stab of fear.
“You
think you can challenge me?” Berith shouted.
Another
rumbling shook the obelisk. Inside the glass pillar, the souls quickened into
clouds, almost condensing into a solid accretion. Faces gasped through the fog.
An instant later, the mashed souls were shot into the surrounding pipes, sucked
away like water through a straw, causing the entire obelisk to dance with
bright light and racing shadows.
Berith
was a necromancer. He could control the souls as much as the bones.
The
screams reached a crescendo.
“Get
down!” Isaac yelled.
This
time, he tackled Zaria, sending them sprawling across the stairway as the
network of pipes exploded beside them, all the overloaded pressure of souls
erupting in a geyser of valves, junctions, and fittings. Isaac felt a storm of
metal screaming around his flesh. A short distance away, the winding stairway
crumbled from the blast, a curtain of broken masonry raining down into the
depths of the earth.
His
ears rang. For a moment, all sound fell away, and Isaac could do little else
but cringe flat to the stairs, coughing at the acrid smoke.
Eventually,
he raised his head. The path in front of them had been destroyed. There was a
fissure in the winding stairway, creating a gap that lasted almost half a
revolution around the circumference of the tower. It was far larger than Isaac
dared to leap.
There
was no way down.
“Isaac!”
Berith yelled, his voice distant and small.
Isaac
clenched his jaw.
“This
was never your mission!”
Isaac
rose to his feet, smoldering in rage.
“I gave
you a chance, boy! You’ve wasted it! I promise, if you come any closer—”
“Do
it!” Isaac yelled. “Kill me!”
He
looked down. Once again, he saw Berith’s glowing eyes, looking up through the
distant machines. His gaze was locked and steady.
“I’m
still alive!” Isaac shouted. “If you want to kill me, you’ll have to do it
yourself! No more hiding behind your slaves!”
The
eyes glared.
“Face
me, uncle!”
The
eyes narrowed, then disappeared.
“You
coward!” Isaac screamed. “You liar! You are nothing but a puppet of the
Diet! Do you hear me? You are as much an
instrument as me!”
The
only response was a haunting melody of souls, still swirling through the pillar
of glass. For a moment, Isaac was so furious, so utterly consumed with rage,
that he nearly flung himself down the length of the tower, hoping to land
directly on his uncle’s head. The only thing that stopped him was the sound of
Zaria groaning in pain.
Reason
took hold.
He took
a long, simmering breath.
When he
felt somewhat collected, he began to examine his situation, like a man standing
in the eye of a storm. Peering over the edge of the stairs, the obelisk seemed
to extend an incalculable distance below, much further than he could see
through the tangle of pipes and souls. It was likely as tall as the legs of the
colossus, which would mean certain death if he dared take the plunge.
A short
distance ahead, stone continued to tumble from the broken stairway, including
several other spots where the necrotic bones had melted through the brick. The
air was filled with hissing smoke and the wisps of severed souls. Through the
fog, he could see the rest of the stairway spiraling down the tower’s length,
the unbroken path beginning somewhere on the other side of the glass pillar. It
seemed as if the damage was mostly centered at their location.
If he
could get to the other side. . . .
“Xotra’s
weeping cunt,” Zaria said, picking herself up. Isaac saw a naked circle of skin
on her back, where the skull had landed. She swiped awkwardly at the pinkened
flesh. “Did he just spew a volcano of death?”
“Yes,”
Isaac said.
Zaria
breathed out, her ears flicking with dust.
Isaac
pointed. “Look.”
Below,
in the destruction left by Berith’s geyser of bone, there were several crumpled
humans, their black robes peppered with falling dust and shards of rusted
metal. They were so withered and drained their corpses had not even bled.
“He
killed nine people to cast that spell,” Isaac said. “Not including the souls.”
Zaria
spat.
“It
means,” Isaac said, “he can’t do it again. That kind of magical display is
unsustainable. He was only trying to intimidate us.”
“I
ain’t dandy about callin’ that bluff.”
Isaac
leaned over the edge, his mind racing. The revolution of the stairway continued
below their feet, but the distance was so large that dropping down would likely
break their legs. It was also impossible to leap from one end of the tower to
the other, though Zaria could likely use her zoanthrope strength to leap across
the broken stairway in front of them, if she wanted to. Caine could crawl
across the wall as easily as a beetle.
Isaac
needed a path for himself.
If he
could just. . . .
He
stared down at the tangle of pipework surrounding the glass pillar, knowing
that every moment he wasted was more time for Berith to gain a lead. His uncle
was heading directly for the bottom of the tomb. Once there. . . .
The air
shuddered.
For the
first time, Isaac noticed the dust.
It
mingled with the wisps of smoke and souls, dancing through the slight currents