Nineteen #3
“Sparrow, here!” Raithe ducked around a corner, then flattened himself to the wall. I followed his example, hearing the snorting
of the monster behind me as it charged recklessly around the corner. It continued past us, brushing so close I could smell
the sickly stench of decay that clung to it, see the bones and raw muscle poking through its fur. As soon as it passed, Raithe
doubled back the way we’d come. I followed, listening to see if the Tauryss turned around. But its footsteps continued away
from us in the maze.
“Are you all right?” Raithe’s voice was hushed. I nodded, and he stepped closer, one hand coming up to cup the side of my
head. “What happened?”
“I . . . saw something again,” I told him. “In the passage with us. Some kind of wraith or spirit. It showed me something.”
Meeka hopped up, swiveling his ears curiously. “When see spirit? Meeka saw nothing.” He shook himself and rubbed his paws
over his nose. “Felt cold, though.”
“There’s another chamber,” I went on, as the jair’oa leaped to my shoulder again. “Somewhere farther inside the temple, I
think. There was . . . a tree. It was covered in webbing or threads or something. There was something else in the room, too,
a presence, but I couldn’t see what it was.”
“A tree?” Raithe looked puzzled. But before he could say anything, the ghostly image drifted right through the wall farther
down the corridor. It stared at me for a moment, then floated down another passage and out of sight.
I breathed deeply and nodded. “Okay,” I whispered. “Right. I think I know where to go.”
Once more, we ventured into the maze. I led this time, searching for ghostly shimmers as we navigated the obsidian halls.
I still heard the clunks and scrapes of the Tauryss as they combed the labyrinth for us, and several times we had to pause
or duck into another corridor to let the rotting creatures shamble past. Twice, I had to stop at an intersection of the maze
and decide which way to go. But each time, I caught sight of the figure, shimmering into existence for just a moment, and
I hurried to follow.
We turned one last corner, and the narrow, claustrophobic walls of the maze suddenly opened into a large, circular room. Shattered
pillars, plinths, and statues lay scattered around the chamber, turning the room into a forest of crumbling stone and forgotten
heroes. The chamber was nearly pitch-black; only a few guttering lanterns flickered in the gloom, their light a ghostly blue
instead of orange. The eerie luminance cast the jagged remains of statues in an ethereal light.
“This must be the center of the labyrinth,” Raithe murmured beside me. “Is this the chamber you saw in your vision, Sparrow?”
“No,” I whispered back. “The room I saw was . . . full of light and much bigger than this. And there was this huge, web-covered
tree in the center.”
Sitting on Raithe’s shoulder now, Meeka twitched his ears. “Meeka not like this place,” he said quietly. “Smells funny. Like
bones.”
Well, that was disconcerting. But just as I was about to say so, I caught a ghostly shimmer of white in the chamber. It could have been a lantern reflecting off the pale statues and broken pillars around the room, but I knew it was not.
“Come on,” I said. “Whatever we’re looking for, it’s somewhere in there.”
We slipped into the chamber, which was eerily silent as we made our way around statues and over dusty pillars. Even the scraping
and shuffles of the Tauryss outside didn’t seem to penetrate the absolute stillness of the room.
“What are we looking for, Sparrow?” Raithe asked, his voice hushed in the eerie, almost palpable silence. I winced.
“I don’t know, exactly,” I whispered back. “A room and a tree. Maybe a door?”
“No tree here,” Meeka observed, gazing at the statues around us. “No doors, either. Sure Fateless is in right place?”
“I don’t . . .” I began, but then stopped, terror freezing the words in my throat.
We had reached the center of the room. I could tell because of the large square dais surrounded by broken statues, a flight
of shattered stairs leading up to the platform. Sprawled on that platform, gleaming in the lantern’s glow, was a massive skeleton.
It was not a human skeleton. The enormous, grinning skull of a bull stared down with empty eye sockets, huge, sweeping horns
framing the sides of its face. In life, it must have been over fourteen feet tall, almost twice the size of the undead Tauryss
roaming the maze. The skeletal body had a few dark patches of fur clinging to its arms and shoulders, but was otherwise stripped
clean of flesh and cloth. An immense, rusty axe lay near one giant bony hand.
“Oh,” Meeka said in a small voice. “Bones. Meeka not wrong.”
A sigh went through the room, smelling of dust and grave dirt. And, on the platform, the monstrous skeleton stirred. Green
flames lit its eye sockets, the skull lifted, and the huge undead rose to its terrible, horrifying height. The axe scraped
over the ground as the creature picked it up, then turned its bleached skull in our direction.
With a roar that made the statues tremble, the monstrous undead charged down the platform and came right at us.