Chapter Nineteen
Boneyard
There was only blood, bones, and fire.
The blood came from the dozens of students who had fallen
down the obelisk, their withered bodies full of empty faces, shattered limbs,
the scars of parasitic magic. The bones came from his father’s ancient corpses,
the limbs and skulls littering the floor like reeds in a marsh. The fire came
from Soren, who had splattered dramatically into the stone, her leather armor
still tittering with flame, her black eye staring rimless and dull from the
flap of her broken skull.
Isaac’s boots filled with blood as he reached the bottom of
the obelisk. Swinging the torch around the blackened room, he found only more
signs of carnage, more of the innocent that Berith had sacrificed. He wondered
if he had seen any of these students before. He thought, for a moment, that
some of them likely lived outside the college dormitories, in the town of
Khador itself, where he might have spotted them from the vantage of his bedroom
window. He had never known any names, but he had often recognized the faces.
He couldn’t bring himself to look.
Somewhere outside the obelisk, a colossal tremor ripped
through the earth. The blood quivered at his feet. There was the sound of
collapsing rock, all of it brimming back and forth in intensity, seeming to
come from every direction at once. Isaac imagined the colossus flailing as it
was forcibly returned to life.
“Gods alive,” Zaria said. The hyena took her arm from his
shoulder and trudged her way over to Soren’s body. She bent down, unwrapping
the bunny’s fingers from the hilt of her sword. “Sorry, capt. You know the
rules.”
Isaac gazed over the blood and bones. “Father?”
“Isaac.”
A human skull lay against the broken arm of a student, its
eyeless socket stuck on the open bone. Isaac stumbled over, awkwardly grasping
the skull with his slinged arm.
“Is Berith . . . ?”
The skull squirmed in his hand, managing to nod.
A quake surged through the masonry. Outside, there was an
overwhelming deluge of rock, rumbling like the stampede of a million horses.
Isaac heard the sound of a roaring voice, and it was the worst sound of them
all, because the skull of the colossus had been above the surface, and they
were now very deep within the earth. Either the colossus could scream so
loudly, with such inhuman volume, that its voice could be felt through miles of
earth . . . or there was no longer any earth between them at all.
Isaac swayed with the torch, trying to brace through the
quaking earth. On the walls, he caught glimpses of ancient reliefs, all of them
depicting a bony, bipedal reptile smashing through cities and mountains. The
necromancer flag was draped over the dead and conquered. There was worship
mixed with fear.
“We got some plan worth sharing?” Zaria asked, now wielding
her captain’s sword.
“Isaac,” the skull said.
Isaac lowered the skull back into the blood. When he stood
up, his slinged arm shook inside the cloth, scraping the knife against the
fabric. He gasped, struggling to keep his balance.
“Isaac,” the skull said. Around it, the other bones
began to swim through the blood. Limbs tumbled, pelvises rolled, and all the
skulls twisted until their scarlet red faces pointed up at the ceiling. They
began to hiss his name.
“Isaac.”
“Isaac.”
“Isaac.”
“Isaac.”
“I’ll see you soon, father,” Isaac said, and made his way to
the exit.
The door to the obelisk stood open. It was made of skeletal
arms, and the space outside the door was as black as his uncle’s robes. Isaac
knew, from the stories told by his instructors, that Berith wore his sun-eating
robes so he could blend into the darkness of a tomb, leaving any necromancer
struggling to scent his life through the flowing void of energy. In this way,
he had killed many rogue sorcerers, all by decree of the Diet of Nine. His
colleagues did not refer to him as the Bone Hunter for little reason.
Another roar ruptured the earth. It felt like the planet was
being split in twain.
Zaria stopped him as he made his way through the door. “Hate
to break it to you, love, but I don’t think this,” she raised the cutlass, “is
gonna do much against a giant.”
“We don’t need to kill the giant,” he said. “Just the person
controlling it.”
“And how you proposin’ we do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“A lack of good ideas ain’t a cause for choosin’
bad ones.”
“Z,” Isaac said.
She looked at him, the knife in her eye glinting with the
torchlight. “Aye. Right. One of us had to say it, I guess.” She flicked her
head towards the darkness. “Ready when you are.”
Isaac thought of all the people that been sacrificed. The
students of a college, the citizens of the necropolis.
His father.
Himself.
He stepped through the doorway, and Zaria followed behind.
The air of the cavern was cool, dusty, and stale, like it
had never tasted a breeze. His torch barely managed to
light the ground in front of him. He noticed, immediately, that the floor was
made of concrete, the gritty aggregate having grown porous and cracked over the
millennia. There were no markings to form a path. He could see nothing through
the darkness. The only source of information was sound, and the sound that
reached him now spoke of unimaginable weight and purpose, of colossal bones
ripping through the earth as easily as a man emerging from a bath.
In the distance, he caught a flickering of purple, the same
color that stained the souls of the necromancers. There was a tiny figure
standing amongst the light.
Isaac clenched his fists.
The purple light shifted, growing in intensity, like the
waving conductor of a symphony. A tremor began to loose from every direction at
once. There came a shockwave of rushing air, full of dirt and sand.
All at once, orange light began to pierce the cavern.
Isaac looked up.
The bright rays, colored a hue somewhere between a stale
orange and a wine-dark red, stabbed through the cavern ceiling in soft,
slanting lines. Isaac squinted, feeling pain behind his eyes. He was so
surprised by the sudden illumination that it took him several moments to
realize he was seeing natural sunlight, instead of a trap or spell left by the
necromancers. As the rumbling continued, the sunlight grew brighter, scouring
the massive cavern of shadow. He could see, more and more, that the ceiling of
the cavern was being torn apart like a piece of cloth, and the orange rays of
sunshine were beaming down with a steady tumble of boulders, a gushing shower
of dirt, entire waterfalls of sand.
This was not a natural structure, he realized. The earth and
sand above their heads had only been a thin covering spread over the bottom of
the tomb, like a lid enclosing a pot. Someone had created this cavern
from a crater-like depression.
But why?
For what purpose?
Had the necromancers wanted to bury their work, once the
empire collapsed?
Isaac stood on the barren concrete, staring in awe at the
avalanches above. His mind was overwhelmed with scale. Slowly, the sunlight
illuminated distant structures on the cavern floor. At first, still squinting
through the intrusion of light, Isaac thought he was staring out at a bed of
white moss, some film of organic mass which clung to the bumps and hills of a
tree’s massive roots. It seemed to go on for miles.
When he looked again, he realized it was bone.
A sea of bone.
The white moss was composed entirely of ossein, the same
tangle of fibers that composed all skeletal tissue. Instead of being arranged
in a solid matrix, the bone had grown for miles, unlimited by the constraints
of organic anatomy, festering in much the same way that spindles of mold would
grow on a piece of bread. As far as he could see, there were thick fibers of
ossein, wrapping into streams, slithering like vines, collecting into knolls
and mounds and hillocks, all of it so thick and layered and vast that it
might’ve appeared, at first glance, like the head of a forest canopy.
Isaac remembered the pipes, the retention tanks. The
extraction chamber had harvested nearly every ounce of their victims, from
blood and meat all the way down to the indefinable essence of the soul, sparing
nothing but the bones. All of the drains had fed down into the earth. He had
assumed, perhaps naively, that these emulsified slurries had been used for the
refinement of souls. Now, staring out over the festering ocean of bone, Isaac
thought of fertilizers and crops and systems of irrigation.
He remembered the fibers of ossein growing on the walls of a
laboratory.
All at once, he felt sick to his stomach.
Meanwhile, around him, the cavern ceiling continued to be
smashed with great wounds of sunlight, illuminating more of the vast, empty
space. Aside from the overgrown blanket of ossein, and the thin crest of soul
light far off in its center, the cavern was devoid of anything but miles of
concrete. Its walls were carved from bedrock, rising as high as mountains. It
would take days to navigate the area.
“Good gods,” Zaria said, staring at a particular avalanche.
“What?” he shouted, barely hearing her.
“They shoulda fuckin’ left!”
“What?”
She pointed, wide-eyed.
And he saw, suddenly, in the middle of a heaping waterfall
of sand, there was a pirate skimmer, which had minutes ago been prowling close
to the tomb’s entrance. It was now bowing precipitously toward the edge of the
crater, caught in the wakes of destruction. The twin-masted sail was alight
with the sigil of wind as the crew desperately threw fire against the fabric,
trying to reverse their course. Moments later, another quake rumbled the earth,
the sandy waterfall belched, and the pirate ship was flung out into open air,
discarded like scraps from a kitchen table. The ship capsized, flipping end
over end. Bodies scattered like rain.
Isaac didn’t watch the pirates hit the floor of the cavern.
He didn’t even hear the sound of the skimmer’s hull smashing into concrete,