Chapter Nineteen #2
smothered as it was beneath a cataclysm of falling rock. Instead, he was
staring at the fleet of other pirate ships now visible over the edge of the
crater. He saw billowing sails, tangles of rope, draping black standards.
It was a fleet of pirate ships. Even a kingdom of the Nine
would balk at meeting such a navy in battle. Had they been waiting at the
entrance of the tomb?
“Soren said as much,” Zaria muttered. “Ain’t no escape.”
“What?” Isaac shouted.
She shook her head.
All at once, he saw a colossal leg rushing out from the
side, the femur slicing through the rock above like a meteor scouring the sky.
A single foot steadied itself on the concrete, surrounded by a shower of
spilling earth. Its ankle was digitigrade, the tarsals spiked with three
enormous toes. A quake heaved through the earth, splitting the cement in a
rushing line.
Zaria craned her head, taking in the full sweep of the leg.
“Xotra’s cunt.”
Isaac did not reply. Instead, he took his eyes off the
colossus, focusing on the soul light and the figure standing within.
Out there, past the sea of ossein, there was a pyramid,
composing the apex of an open-air temple, all of it surrounded by pillars of
granite and gold. Even from a distance, it had the appearance of a ceremonial
stage. There was a bank of metal devices, crudely connected with pipes and
copper and the merging clouds of souls.
He could see his uncle, working at
the controls.
“I’ve got a plan,” Isaac said.
“What?” Zaria yelled, still staring at the bony leg.
He pointed toward the pyramid. “I’m going to—”
The rumbling intensified. The ground heaved and roared.
Above them, behind the giant pillar of the obelisk, there was an avalanche
falling from hundreds of feet in the air, boulders the size of palaces tumbling
in a spray of dirt and stone. Isaac could see the remnants of the necropolis
inside. There were split-open skulls, broken statues, a pelvic-shaped building,
a shower of finger-like pavement, all of it coming down like a deluge of snow.
Beneath it all, the pelvis of the colossus began to rise.
“Run!” Zaria shouted.
They ran, weaving through the fallen rubble and splitting
cement. Isaac ran until his torch was dropped, until his wounds were forgotten,
until it barely felt like his feet were hitting the ground. He ran until all he
could see in front of him was a forest of festering ossein. Halfway to safety,
there was a volley of cannons, barely heard. Isaac glimpsed the flash of a
mortar. The air was peppered with exploding iron as the Crookspur fleet
unleashed a panicked fusillade at the rising colossus, the flare of the volleys
so high above it felt like seeing lightning within a cloud. The heavens raged
with a screaming of steel.
Isaac used the distraction to run even faster.
Zaria pulled ahead, racing directly for the bones. Without
slowing, she sprinted towards a large mound of bony vines, braced her shoulder,
and smashed her way into the tangle, disappearing beneath the canopy of fibers.
Isaac dashed as fast as he could, but the ground flipped beneath him as
something utterly gargantuan slammed into the nearby cliffs, rocketing the
ground with such immense strength it felt as if the world had been momentarily
yanked away, like a rug beneath his feet.
The pirates had learned why they should fear the tomb.
Shadows filled the sky.
Isaac stumbled, diving headfirst through an open curtain of
bone. As he landed, he scraped the knives in his arm against the floor. The
world became pain, blood, and gasps. He rolled himself along a thin, corrugated
sheet of metal, capable only of incoherent noise. It felt like ages before he
was able to breathe.
“On your feet, squire!”
He was yanked back to standing. A thick flail of copper wire
was dangling in front of him, dancing with the repeated shockwaves of the
colossus assaulting the pirate fleet. Isaac grabbed a fistful of the thin metal
lines, wobbling for balance.
He blinked through the shadows.
They had entered what could only be described as a metal
tunnel. It was both tight and small, forcing Zaria to stoop her height, and it
extended only a short distance ahead before ending in a small, bulging room.
Sections of the metal had clearly been disassembled, leaving only a thin,
skeletal frame. A few panels remained on the ceiling and walls, and they were
all veined with copper strands, much of it welded together with a thick, spongy
substance.
Despite the shade, Isaac could see a single word painted on
the wall of the bulging room. It was written in the old necromancer language.
By now, he had translated enough of their language to immediately recognize the
letters.
AIRLOCK
He had no idea what that was supposed to mean.
Outside, there was a roar. The frame groaned its age. Bones
splintered and snapped, draping the rays of a pale orange sun. Zaria grabbed
his wrist and yanked him deeper into the tunnel, bashing her way through metal
sheets and entire bushes of ossein. Around them, the tunnel began to pitch and
yaw, threatening to roll. She jumped into the bulging room, stood back to her
full height, and kicked the wheel on the circular door. It groaned against its
frame, barely opening through the dense layers of ossein, the fibers outside so
thickly woven it had almost formed a solid bone.
Zaria kicked the door again.
“Cunt!”
She bashed her shoulder.
“Cunt!”
The tunnel rattled in place, a panel snapping off its frame.
“Fucking cunt!”
She reared back, ready for another charge, and, before she
could take another step, the dense accretion of ossein returned to life. The
fibers quivered, cracking as they moved. Like the pull of a curtain, the matrix
of bone slithered away, pulling back into the larger canopy. Zaria kicked the
door again. The metal swung outwards, and the sound of the cracking ossein
reminded Isaac of the thralls breaking their limbs.
“Squire,” Zaria said, staring untrustingly at the open door.
“Explain.”
“My father? He controls the bones in this tomb.”
“You sure about that?”
Around them, the bristles continued to squirm. Beyond the
tunnel, a burrow was forming through the spindles of bone, clearly marking a
path. Isaac remembered the souls aiding him in the obelisk. He thought of how
many bodies had fed this growth of bone.
Perhaps—
He was yanked again.
They fell into a small undergrowth of bone, barely tall
enough for Zaria to stand. Sunlight glimmered through the canopy. Whoever was
pulling back the bone was obviously attempting to lead them toward the pyramid,
the one Isaac had glimpsed at the center of the osseous forest, but there was a
graveyard of metal buried within the white, osseous nest, and the tunnel was
often compelled to bend and curve around the ancient debris. As they ventured
through, Isaac caught glimpses of rigid metal hulls, hollow cylinders, thick
entrails of copper, remnants of machinery still festooned with spikes and pins
and poles. Once, he saw a hint of red stripes painted on the metal of a
glass-windowed room. The flag of the necromancer gods was chipped and fading
away.
Isaac had read about dry docks in the more prosperous
kingdoms of the Diet, places where old and damaged ships would be lifted from
the sea, or the sand, and laid beached upon the earth. There would be entire
fleets lying in piles of wood, iron, and canvas, withering away as the workers
butchered them for parts. The ships here seemed gathered for a similar purpose,
if in a strange way.
The questions rose. Why was there ossein growing over the
metal? How had it formed into a fungus-like fester? Furthermore, why would
anyone make ships out of metal? They couldn’t possibly float. The water
displacement alone—
The sunlight vanished. There was only shadow.
“Isaac!”
He looked up.
The sky was gone. In its place, a skull was leering down at
them, the empty sockets of its eyes loosing an avalanche
of dirt. The face of the colossus was bleached a chalky white, the contours
smoothed with wind and time, the temporal sockets shuddering out sand and chips
of withered bone. Nearly two days ago, Soren had blasted the skull with
cannonballs and barrels of black powder, and, now, the teeth within its jaw
were cracked like old porcelain, the edges glimmering with the purple light of
souls.
Isaac felt his stomach drop.
Seeing the colossus move on its own, seeing the twitch and
reaction of a creature whose scale was comparable to mountains, filled him with
an indescribable awe, even without the vestiges of flesh and meat and scales.
It had been a reptile, long ago, when it drew a natural breath. There were two
holes in the side of its skull. Isaac had been right. It was a diapsid.
He did not feel vindicated.
For a long moment, Isaac made eye contact with a creature of
unimaginable size, one that an empire of necromancers had worshipped like a
god.
Slowly, the titan shifted its head. Sunlight returned,
shining through the hinges of its fleshless jaw. The beast was scanning the
ground. Isaac realized, with his heart in his throat, that it hadn’t seen them
at all. They were shaded beneath a canopy of ossein, and the two of them were
small enough to be less than ants for such a titanic monster. The odds of the
colossus actually spotting them were slim. For a moment, he felt relieved.
The next moment, a gust of wind slammed into the canopy.
Ossein rained like a storm of arrows. The wind had come from above, caused by
the shifting air pressure of the beast turning its head. It created a localized
squall with every motion of its body. If it did not step carefully, the sweep
of its leg would brush away all the metal ships, like the shavings of a saw.
Isaac could only imagine the destruction it would sow if it actually wanted to
strike.
Being hidden would not save them. Their only chance was to
kill its master.
The moment the skull disappeared from the sky, Zaria began