Chapter 20 #2
“I can only surmise,” I said, gazing down at the vast grave, and yet uncertain.
From those few ancient mummies I could clearly see, they had been tall, long-limbed people in their prime. There was something ever so slightly off about them, but perhaps the humans of today were far removed from their enslaved ancestors.
But, far more importantly, there were several fresh corpses thrown on top.
Fresh in comparison to the mummies, rather; dead flesh had bloated, marbled in shades of sickly green and bruised purple, and their skin had begun sloughing away in sheets. The stench was ungodly.
“How long, do you suppose?” I asked Marrion, who had clasped a perfumed handkerchief over her nose.
She cast an eye over the recent bodies. “More than a week, less than a month.”
That twinge of pity I felt for Rasmus grew stronger, though I was sure none of them were Alvar. “Do you recognize them?”
He started to shake his head, then nodded slowly, turning a greenish shade himself. “Cadell lai Heriot,” he said, swallowing thickly. “He’s one of the key members of the Spear of Justice. He was a front-line recruiter.”
Ah, yes. I peered closer at the young man, whose velvet coat was discolored by the liquids of decay, and found the glint of a tiny gold pin on his lapel.
“I don’t know the other man…but…that might be Dreu Galtus back there, in the black. Not of the nobility, but very respected—”
I held up a hand for silence, and Rasmus shut his mouth. Yes, I knew of the Galtus merchant clan, grown fabulously wealthy in recent years thanks to my policies. And now they sent their sons to work against me?
Oh, I would clean my house when I was above again. The lais would weep bitter tears by the time I was through wringing their necks.
Rasmus turned and was noisily sick against the wall.
“Use the Eye, if you please. I would like to know what killed them.” Not even I was willing to climb into that pit to examine their corpses, though there was no obvious sign of wounding or trauma to their bodies.
Marrion stretched out her hand, peering at the echoes left behind. I watched her watch them, noting how terribly pale she’d become once more. We needed to make more bloodpowder tea; I was raring to find Alvar, but not at risk to the women.
“I…they were already dead when they arrived,” she said distantly. “Alvar helped throw the bodies into the pit. He looked…unwell.”
She clenched her hand again, trembling, her face gone so white her lips were nearly grey. Marrion exhaled, closing her eyes with weariness.
I knew my niece wished to prove herself equal to her mentor, but I couldn’t allow her to push herself so far past her limits that she endangered herself. It hurt to see her so worn down, and yet that hurt battled with pride for her tenacity.
“We break here for a respite. Marrion, you must have bloodpowder tea, at the very least.”
The knights kept flasks of the tea on hand, by now congealed and bitter, but Marrion accepted one, sank to the floor and popped the cork.
Rasmus wavered, and stepped forward. “I know my actions…were cowardly, and my blood is unpalatable to you, but you can have it. If you want.”
Marrion, the flask at her mouth and her lips already curled with revulsion, cracked one eye to peer at him.
“Don’t take it to mean I like you any better than I do now,” she said, her tone chilly, but Rasmus simply shook his head.
“No. I know…my brother must be stopped. This is the first small step to making things right. Lord Wroth is right—we cannot lose you.”
Marrion corked the flask and stood, hunger flaring in her eyes. I knew then that she must be truly ravenous to submit so eagerly. She shifted a sleeve, withdrawing a tiny blood-letting knife, and Rasmus held out his arm. He winced when she latched on, but that was all.
I looked away, trying not to smell fresh blood, not wanting to be tempted. Both Nikos and Erland had wandered off, unwilling to watch as they sipped at their own flasks of congealed bloodpowder tea.
“Wroth, what about you?” Jesamin asked, her voice tentative, and I met her beautiful eyes. “I know you must thirst by now.”
“I…cannot risk it.” I was thirsting, yes, my throat aching like flames licking me from the inside.
The thought of her sweet blood to quench the fire was nearly overwhelming, but…
I liked her far too much to subject her to a hasty, rapacious feeding.
“The chance of losing control is too high by now, and you would be weakened.”
And my men’s morale would take a beating, to see me feed on fresh blood while they drank this swill.
Jesamin set her jaw, glaring up at me, but I took my flask of tea from my belt and raised it to her in a mockery of a toast.
She looked as revolted as I felt while I swigged the cold, bland liquid. I allowed a not-entirely-feigned shudder to run through my shoulders and spine.
“Gods-awful stuff.” I tied the empty flask to my belt.
Rasmus made a pained sound, and Marrion finally broke free from his wrist, her teeth painted red.
She straightened, color returning to her cheeks and lips, and dabbed at her mouth as daintily as any governess could wish.
“I appreciate the gift of your blood.” She said it stiffly, but she took the time to bandage Rasmus, ensuring the wounds would heal quickly and clean.
The knights had finished off their tea, which ensured that if we did not find Alvar within the next twelve hours, we would need to set up camp in this gods-forsaken hellhole to brew more, at the very least, and allow Jesamin and Rasmus to sleep.
I very much wanted Alvar so we could leave this place before we reached that point. There was a tension in the silence, the feel of something waiting, and I thought perhaps that something was what had happened to these men.
“Uncle, they left in that direction.” Marrion pointed at one of the many open doors surrounding the ledge around the pit. “I saw that much.”
“Then we follow.” I glanced once more at the mass grave, wondering again at the sheer quantity, and what had happened to cause them to kill so many slaves—
Something moved.
I stared at the tangle, immediately herding both Jesamin and Marrion behind me.
“What is it?” my lover asked, instantly alert, her hand dropping to her pistol.
Nothing was moving. The bodies were ancient, mummified to leather, practically fused into a solid form after so many millennia.
It had to be one of the fresh corpses, giving in to bloat and decay.
And as Cadell’s stained shirt shifted, that’s precisely what I believed, that his body was splitting from the built-up gases, until the moment his chest burst open with a wet squelch, and a slick, pale worm emerged, as long as my arm, a gelatinous eye peering towards us.
“Oh, what the fuck?” Jesamin asked, so shocked she sounded almost normal, as though corpse-feeding worms that could swallow her head whole were an everyday occurrence for her to question.
The worm reared upright like a snake, weaving back and forth, pale fins fluttering at its sides.
But worst of all was its face: a human face, if a human could be melted and stretched, their eyes merged and their mouth dragged into a gaping leer full of cilia.
The pupil in its single enormous eye was oblong and liquid-dark, filled with an alien intelligence.
It squirmed free, heading for the edge of the pit, and suddenly the other bodies began to thrash, coming apart at the seams to birth monstrosities. Dreu Galtus’s gut ripped apart to disgorge millions of tiny, crawling young.
“Move!” I roared, ushering Jesamin and Marrion towards the tunnel. Erland moved calmly behind us, withdrawing a bottle of Héllénic fire from his pack.
“No!” I pointed at him. “You set that pit on fire, we’ll all be choked to death on the smoke! Just move out of range!”
I saw the realization on his face as one of the worms crept over the edge of the chthonium ledge—clearly, the slippery-smooth metal of the Fae was no barrier to whatever creeping legs they had—and thrashed towards him.
It happened so fast, it was shocking, even to me. Erland stomped on the worm, sending a spray of white blood across the floor, and the young larva, each no larger than a grain of rice, swarmed his foot.
They vanished into the chinks of his armor, and Erland was screaming, even as they came boiling up through his shirt and over his throat. He was a moving statue, no longer visible under the tidal wave of hungry infants.
Nikos snarled under his breath and threw a knife, taking the knight in the eye. Erland collapsed, the rest of the worms covering his body in a moving, pale wave.
We ran for it, hard on the women’s heels as the sound of wet feasting filled the room behind us. Talos’s lumbering steps were thunder in our ears.
The tunnel was short, and opened on another room.
Another massive, egg-shaped room, with a pit of bodies in the middle.
“Oh, gods,” Marrion groaned, “What is this nightmare?”
“How…just how many of them died?” Jesamin stared at the pit with open trepidation and dismay. “How many humans lived here? This one single pit could hold the entire population of Argent. None of this makes sense.”
I gave it a glance only long enough to confirm that there were no fresh bodies, but we could not lurk about. If there were worms in one pit, they were here, too, hibernating or lying in wait for fresh meat.
The glance was also long enough to confirm that the bodies in this one were equally long-limbed, but so were their faces. The skin was little more than stretched leather over bone, but no normal human ever possessed a face like that, stretched beyond imagining into a mockery of a wolf’s snout.
Marrion saw it at the same time I did. “That’s a warg,” she said sharply.
“I know.”
“Uncle, this is a pit of ancient dead wargs.”
“Indeed. I strongly suspect if we look long enough, we may find one full of the original vampires, as well.”
Marrion’s green eyes were glued to the bodies. “What were they doing here? Gods, if only I had a few bodies’ worth of blood…I wonder how far back I could See. Maybe far enough to see the shadows of the echoes.”
“Absolutely not,” I snarled.
She shrugged, and flexed her hand. “I just want to know why. Why throw them into pits like this? We’ve only ever used pits when…when people were dying too fast to dig graves.”
We all stared with blatant disquiet. The words rose into my mind like sharks emerging from deep waters: Disease. Plague.
Jesamin placed a soothing hand on my shoulder. “It’s interesting, though, in a terribly macabre way. The worms remind me of the beetles the naturalists use to clean bones. I suppose they were meant to be used as a fast, natural way to get rid of such a quantity of bodies.”
“Indeed.” Marrion crouched a little, as close as she dared get to examine the tight, dry bones of the warg on top. “Though I believe they must have used a human body for the base of that particular hybrid. Oh, I wish Aunt Wyn was with us. She’d have a theory.”
I caught Nikos’s eye and we shook our heads. There must be something in the water of this country that made our women so mad.
One of my ears flicked as a low hissing noise emanated from behind us, and Jesamin immediately glanced over my shoulder. Talos aimed his light into the tunnel we’d emerged from.
“Marrion,” I breathed. She straightened up, flinging out her hand.
We all waited in tense silence, the hissing growing louder.
“He circled the pit,” she whispered, her hand shaking, and I knew then that she was so far gone, not even draining Rasmus of blood would have restored her.
Her eyes were flickering between green and gauzy white, her mind struggling for the energy to See.
Nothing but blood and rest would bring her back to full fighting form, and we had time for neither.
The tunnel now sounded like a living thing, the worms squirming after us, bloated from their fresh meal. It was only the sacrifice of Erlan that saved us now, slowing them down with their full bellies.
“Right,” Marrion said, shaky and somewhat uncertain. “He…he went to the right.”
She, Rasmus, and Nikos started towards the tunnel she had chosen, just as the first of the worms slithered into the room. The pit of wargs began shifting, the worms’ nesting kin answering the call of a hunt.
We all backed away, following Marrion. Jesamin’s breaths were quick and on the verge of panic, but she pointed her golem ahead. “Light the way, please,” she asked, and Talos strode forward to do her bidding.
If I could have taken that order back, I would have. The golem rushed everyone into the tunnel, too far ahead of us. Several hungry-looking worms flung themselves from the pit on the walkway before us, cutting us off from them.
These ones were much larger, their bodies as thick around as a log, and their eyes were focused on me and Jesamin. Their semi-human faces gaped stupidly, mouths rippling.
“Back,” I said, and Marrion whipped around at the tunnel mouth, horrified at our predicament. “Keep going! We’ll find you.”
She hesitated, nodded, and hurried into the tunnel behind Talos as one of the massive worms slithered towards her. I saw Marrion stretch out a hand, slapping frantically at the wall, and a door descended, leaving the worms to crash in a wriggling tide against the chthonium.
I pushed Jesamin towards the left tunnel. “Go, go. I’m right behind you.”
My woman pulled her pistol and dashed inside, and thank all the gods, I kept my word and was right behind her as the door slid shut behind us.