Chapter LXX
LXX
THE HOLLOW WEIGHT OF QAbr’S THOUSAND ROOMS presses against me as I ransack them for anything that might be useful.
I search with methodical purpose, glad to have at least now found clothing enough to protect me from the oncoming chill of night.
Every new space I enter, I find myself scanning in trepidation for a body.
A sign that Caeror didn’t make it. But there is, to my still-tempered hope, no trace of my friend.
This section of the catacombs was where we parted, and the one in which most of the Qabrans lived—close to the gardens, far enough from the entrance to be able to conceal themselves if need be—but I wasn’t here enough to know which tombs were being used as quarters.
And as was the purpose, unfortunately, there is no obvious way to tell.
But in the rooms which were evidently occupied, I have found a few helpful things secreted away.
Clothes. A keenly bladed stone knife with a leather sheath, which I’ve tucked into my new belt.
A couple of half-full waterskins, too, though I decide these are to be for emergencies only.
I have no idea whether their contents will still be safe to drink after so many months, particularly given their source.
It feels doubly uncomfortable, pawing through the personal belongings of the people I watched die.
At one point I think I’ve found a better-quality tunic, only to discover that it’s far too small.
I replace it gently. There were few children down here, and the only one I remember who this would fit was Nofret.
I look around the shadowy room sadly. An awful place to live for anyone, but surely a nightmare for a child.
Bleak and dark and barren, the only excitement being the terrifying spectre of the Gleaners and all they entail.
I’m reminded again of the girl’s desperation in not wanting me to open the mutalis door, and suddenly I find myself searching the space with extra care.
As if, somewhere in here, she has hidden a legitimate reason for me to abandon my plan.
After a few minutes, though, I shake myself from the process. I found the clothes I needed an hour ago. The light outside is vanishing.
I clench my fists, leave, and start back toward the garden along the increasingly dim crevasse.
Though it’s been several months, my memory of how to get to the golden door is uncomfortably clear.
I light the torch at the entrance to the narrow tunnel system, grateful for its flickering defence against the rapidly encroaching night.
Press through long dark corridors of stone and obsidian and then stone again.
Only a few turns, only a few minutes. My still-sore legs and leaden feet make it feel forever.
Long before I can see the end, I hear it.
The hair on the back of my neck prickles as I feel the rhythmic pulse in my bones.
Steps slowing, despite myself. I came here so many times before the Gleaner attack.
Inoculating myself. And in some ways, it has worked.
I’m not going to run. I have control. Especially now I am certain, after Duat, that contact with the terrible power won’t destroy me.
Still, this is far worse than that escape into the city almost six months ago; without the deadly pressure of the Gleaners behind me, this time, the sound evokes something primal, and I find myself steeling desperately against the memories it conjures.
Thrum. Thrum. The naumachia’s there. Even with all the horrors I have seen since, I have yet to feel that same sense of terror.
The complete, helpless, suffocating purity of the panic that gripped a hundred thousand of us together as we watched a single man transform swathes of our number into nothing but a red haze in the thundering dark.
But it is a memory. A memory. I cannot help but bring it to mind but I am not there, anymore. I am not there. It is a past pain.
I round the final corner. The flickering image of the crossed crook and flail on the golden door shatters and fuzzes and re-forms, ethereally lit one moment and plunged into darkness that my torchlight does not breach the next.
Once again I find myself stopped. Staring.
Trying to make out those glyphs, even knowing I won’t be able to decipher them.
Then, fingernails digging into palms, a step.
Slot my torch into a sconce on the wall.
Another. Another. Closer than ever before and it’s a physical presence pushing back against me now, but I continue.
Ten feet. Five. I can see the intricate gilding on the face of the door.
Nofret’s words scream in the back of my mind.
I am there. Hand hovering over soft metal. My fingers flicker and fuzz in my vision. My breath is violently short.
I push.
The soft gold is hot beneath my hand, though not painfully, and nor does it quiver the way the stone stylus did at the naumachia. A tremor runs through my arm as I make contact with the metal.
The door solidifies, freezes in time for just an instant before it swings away from my touch. Immediately, the wild, frantic fuzzing around it begins again.
I wait, heart pounding, not sure what to make of it. But nothing happens. I am alive. Unharmed.
I step inside.
The room beyond is bathed in warm golden light and is as large as the massive door intimated.
The walls slope gently inward as they rise, eventually meeting at a point high above; the intricately carved ceiling has a glittering illumination worked into its design, highlighting the reliefs that cover both it and the walls.
More gilded symbols are inscribed everywhere, glinting and shimmering in the glow.
It would be beautiful, if it were not for the way the entire space wavers and judders and seems to threaten to break apart at any moment.
Aside from the elaborate carvings, there is only one thing in the room to draw the eye.
At its very centre—lowered from the entrance by four concentric triangles cut into the stone, stepping down—is a pool, surrounding and submersing a long golden altar.
Though everywhere in here shudders viciously, the water is particularly agitated, an ocean of shimmering, throbbing motion that scatters and breaks the reflected light above.
Shimmering with ethereal energy, dizzying even to glance at.
Even from here, several feet away, the immense force of that energy—the invisible crashing and grinding of it all around me—is nauseating, disorienting.
Flickers of concealing black streak through it at intervals, water and everything in it vanishing to complete and utter darkness for less than a heartbeat before returning.
Finally I adapt, steady enough to realise the boxlike gold in the pool is not a shrine at all. It’s tapered slightly, shaped. And while hundreds of intricate designs cover its sides, there is only a single, massively detailed image on top.
A man. Eyes closed. Arms folded over his chest. A long, gold-and-blue striped headdress drapes down past his shoulders.
It is a sarcophagus.
I frown at it as I carefully move around the edges of the pool. I’ve seen plenty of these in the other tombs in Qabr—even slept in one—but never anything approaching this extravagant. Beneath the fiercely buzzing water, the writing on it crawls to my sight as if alive.
I’m curious about it, about who in all the hells would be buried down here like this—assuming there is even a body in there—but the fact is, it doesn’t matter. Immune to its effects or not, I’m not about to step waist-deep into that. Not unless I’m desperate.
And thankfully, I’ve realised that it is not the only object of note in this tomb.
The golden crook and flail hang crossed on the far wall. The real thing, this time, not just a symbol. They have to be important, surely. And there is little else in the room to interact with.
I skirt the pool of sputtering darkness and stand in front of them. Beautifully crafted for such simple implements. Gilded glyphs on the handles of both, lapis lazuli inlaid to the gold. They do not pulse like the door and pool behind me.
Hesitantly, I reach out and grasp the crook.
I am bound, desperate and fearful and cold and pained, as I am carried on horseback toward the howls of battle.
My heart races as I try to calm a black-eyed man while he grips a panicked, struggling Aequa by her head with one hand.
My left arm screams. It is metal. It is gone.
And then with a shouting, panicked gasp I am back and though I am no different and the object in my hand looks dormant, I can feel the vibrating thrum within it.
I almost drop the crook but manage to keep my grasp, fearful it will bounce into the throbbing pool behind. I stare at it for a second. Five. There is nothing more.
Licking my lips, I take the flail in my left hand. I’m braced but there’s no reaction, this time. What did I just see? It felt like me. Not like a memory I never had, but like something I was genuinely experiencing, right then.
The other versions of me? That was Aequa, at the end. I’m certain of it. She looked older. Wearier.
In trouble.
I dwell for a little longer but in the end, I see no way to know, and though I let go of the crook and flail and try again, I cannot repeat the experience. Still. These have to be what Caeror—or his former mentor, anyway—was talking about. They must be something to do with my being Synchronous.
I take a last look at the submerged sarcophagus and then walk back outside, unconscious relief easing taut muscles as I leave the unrelenting visual pressure of the room behind. After a moment, I shut the door, too.
Caeror was probably right about Nofret and her “curse.” But there’s no point in taking chances.
Once I’m back in the obsidian hallway, I hold up the two implements. Examine them. Finely crafted, entirely impractical. Weighty enough to make good blunt instruments, perhaps, but whatever power they contain seems … internalised.
I tap the crook against the unbreakable dark stone of the corridor. Nothing happens.
“Rotting gods. Come on.” I try again, harder this time. I’m rewarded only with a metallic thunk and ricocheting vibration up my right arm. Not even a chip in the facade. “Vek.”
Caeror—or Yusef, anyway—believed there was a weapon in that room that could use mutalis to break even this surface. It’s the only reason I came back here.
I chew my lip. Examine the hilts of both implements, try to see if any of the glyphs stir a memory. My understanding of them is still shaky, but it has improved after my time in Duat.
I see the union symbol. The glyph that indicates the number three.
And then, father down, one more that I recognise.
Blood.
I look closer. It appears on both crook and flail.
Caeror and I had a long discussion about the possible importance of blood, once.
Why an Instruction Blade had to pierce the heart.
Why, during the naumachia, the stylus had needed my blood to protect me—and why, afterward, the man from Military took some of it to test.
I draw the stone knife I found earlier. Lightly nick the edge of my finger, so that a red droplet beads there. Surely this won’t work.
I smear it on the hilt of the crook.
There is a hiss. Steam, as if the handle is red-hot and the liquid is evaporating.
The crook pulses and flickers to life in my hand.
“Vek!” I shout it, startled, flicking the weapon away from me in instinctive panic. It strikes the polished black of the wall.
Thrum.
And the hallway explodes.
I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG HAS PASSED WHEN I WAKE, FUriously coughing grit from my lungs and groaning my way to my knees. I am covered with loose rubble, and wisps of fine dust still curl across through the last vestiges of the torch that threatens to gutter out on the wall farther down.
I use the sleeve of my tunic to breathe, and stagger to my feet.
Shards of obsidian ripped into my arms and legs, opening slices along them, but it’s all superficial, and my face seems to have escaped unscathed.
I blink more dust from my watering eyes and spot the crook poking from the crumbled remnants of the black wall.
No longer flickering. I stumble over to it and, with delicate caution, touch the glimmering gold.
Nothing happens.
“Rotting gods,” I mutter in a rasp, picking it up with great care not to brush it against any of my myriad cuts. It’s dusty, but no sign of damage. “Rotting gods-damned gods.”
Well. This is, I suppose, what I need.
I find my way back out into Qabr proper and practice for another hour, after that.
Cautiously at first but with increasing confidence as I test the odd weapons’ limitations.
They operate independently but in exactly the same manner, absorbing blood in order to activate.
The amount of blood seems to matter, with greater amounts activating them for longer, but not increasing their intensity in any way.
I soon find that if I keep an open cut pressed against the gold, it stays pulsing and buzzing and destructively potent for as long as I choose to hold it.
My tests against the obsidian of Qabr are careful and have the expected results; even a simple, light score across its surface creates an immediate spiderweb of cracks emanating from the point of contact.
Harder force, and the crook and flail slice through it without pause or effort, barely even registering the resistance.
They leave only dust in their wake each time.
The same goes for regular stone, I soon find. And metal. And cloth. And bone.
As far as I can tell, while they’re active, they will destroy anything they touch, except for me.
It’s unnerving, and exactly what I was hoping for.
Eventually I conceal the golden crook and flail beneath my cloak, and crawl my way out of Qabr into the frigid, silver-tinged sands of a moonlit desert night.
Head for Duat.