Another three nights passed before Anomus finally had a minion sufficient to his needs.

He regarded his creation with something akin to pride, though that wasn’t quite the right name for what he felt. After having spent so long tinkering with the inner secrets of the insect, there was affection mixed in with the accomplishment. Anomus surprised himself with the realization, and got a little amusement from the fact that he could feel affection for what was universally regarded as a pest.

Ah, but what a pest he had created! Its bright blue body was twice the size of the largest horsefly, with eyes of scintillating crimson. Spread out, its jeweled wings would span the width of a grown man’s palm. But the most radical and stunning changes were hidden within the creature’s mind.

He had been able to expand the creature’s ability to think. It was nearly as intelligent as, say, a dog. More, he had expanded its capacity to remember – for what good would it be to command it to fly outside the Tomb and then return, if it could not then show him what it had seen? But it still lacked what he thought of as self-awareness. Fortunately, he did not require it to be self-aware; its instincts were largely unaltered, save for the strong desire to return to the undertomb that he had added, should it somehow become lost in the outer world. It was a sort of failsafe he built into his creation.

Anomus suspected the fly would have returned in any event. The Tomb reeked; so many corpses now in full rot would have made the air unbreathable, if he still had a nose and lungs. But he did not, and to a fly, it smelled like a feast to end all feasts.

He sent it out with the instruction to search for water – it understood what water was, but the concept of a river was too complex – and then to return. It would do for a maiden voyage. Its first journey might take it five minutes. or five hours His little blue creation still had no concept of time.

Once it flew out of the Well’s lid, he set about remaking more flies in the blue one’s image, selecting those still capable of procreating. He was pleased to discover that the process, now familiar to him, did not consume such large amounts of mana that the original had. Once he had transformed all the useful candidates, he planned to next dive into the newly laid maggots. He suspected that altering such protean creatures would be less of a strain, but also expected to encounter new surprises.

Anomus had encountered a setback on another front, however.

He had continued to expand his domain through the bedrock towards the Great River. He had designs on claiming the ground under the worksite, for he felt nearly as much of a connection to that piece of land as he did for the Concubine’s Tomb. But when he had neared the river, his ability to claim the rock beneath became less and less potent, and consumed ever-greater amounts of his strength. This alarmed him, for the claiming of stone previously had only cost him time. Only when he altered that stone had he been forced to expend his precious mana. Now, mere feet from some dimly understood boundary that he thought was likely the river’s edge, an inch’s progress cost him more than an hour’s mana.

He came to the conclusion that the Great River was more than a conduit for the fresh water of most of a continent – that it was a powerful conduit for energy, for life-force, as well. He wished that he had studied with greater attention the writings of the geomancers. He knew that water had its own esteemed place in their cosmology, but he simply did not know more than the fact that they thought it important. Whatever secrets they might have imparted he had not taken heed of in his studies. He had more concerned with the unique views of the Hin kingdoms on carpentry and masonry, and all the builder’s arts.

Whatever the case, he estimated that it would take months, perhaps even half a year, for him to claim and then tunnel under the river to the worksite to connect it to the greater Tomb, and that was if he poured every ounce of mana available to him into the effort. He could not afford to spend the mana of possibly six months on the project. Not when Irobus was due to return in less than three.

Reluctantly, he had halted further river-ward expansion, and turned his attention downwards. He kept his attention limited to the footprint of the undertomb, but still soon enough he came to a limitation of a new sort.

Restricting himself to a downward penetration of the rock cost him no mana, but like a man trying to spy increasingly distant objects, his ability to perceive and claim the fundaments of the earth became increasingly weaker. It seemed that, even given an infinity, he would not be able to claim the whole of the earth. His instinct was frustrated by this newly discovered limitation, but his intellect was relieved. He was not so power-mad as to wish to control the whole world. That was more to the tastes of his hated enemy, he mused.

Still, to quiet his hunger for expansion, he set aside his work on the fly in the final hour before dawn each night, to tunnel in the stone. Creating, altering and shaping – in a word, building - was sufficient to scratch his new life’s itch as much as claiming volumes of the earth, it seemed.

On a whim, he converted his workshop into a stairwell, and then began the construction of a maze beneath the Old God’s chamber. Having no real need for further territory beyond quieting his drive to expand, he let his architect’s mind spend an hour a night at play, creating corridors and branchings on impulse, and making the walls into a gallery of sorts. As he had done in the funerary chambers adjacent to the Well, he adorned the walls with friezes. The maze became a memorial to all the things he had cherished in life, from the simplest – a cat he had loved as a child – to the most meaningful, a depiction of his son, his father, and his wife. He found that he could remember them in perfect detail, and that he could reproduce their images with great fidelity. He spent the last hour of two nights doing so, and found a sort of contentment in the work.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

But he could only imagine his daughter, having never seen her. He surprised himself with the depth of sorrow that pierced him when he thought about her, and how he never would see her, not in this life or the next. Irobus had stolen that from him as well.

The sorrow that pierced him at the thought hardened to bitterness, and following a bleak impulse, he wiped all the artwork from the maze’s walls with a thought and a burst of mana.

Let the emperor build memorials, he thought. I will build with sharper purpose.

Abruptly, he made a decision regarding the ultimate fate of all the slain workers. For the first time, he deliberately resisted the torpor that stole over him with the coming of the day and continued working, drawing from his scanty mana reserve to complete his task.

He refashioned the maze into a catacomb, thickening the walls and creating niches long and wide enough to accommodate a human body. Or, to be more precise, a human skeleton.

Let their flesh be consumed by time and nature’s will, he mused darkly. But let their bones rest. At least until I understand enough to set them against their killer. If such a thing is possible.

His nursemaid had told him stories of ghouls. She had told him stories of many fey, uncanny and fearsome creatures. Including skeleton warriors, animated by magic. Ghouls, it seemed, were real – so why not all the rest?

~ ~ ~

Anomus had altered a dozen more of his flies before the original blue fly returned, near dawn. He delved into the creature’s memory. It was uncomfortable and confusing – the eyes of a fly were so radically different from anything Anomus had ever experience that it took him time and patience to piece together a narrative of Blue’s journey. But slowly, painstakingly, he did so.

The vast majority of his spy’s flight revealed to him only stars and sand. Watching the memories from the fly’s perspective was like standing on the deck of a ship in a storm, but far worse, so wildly did the horizon dip and sway. Anomus found himself grateful that he had no stomach, for if he had, he would surely have vomited up its contents.

At first, Blue had traveled in the wrong direction, out towards the open desert instead of towards the river. But eventually it had realized its mistake, and taken a wide, arching way back towards where he’d wished it to go. As it sensed greater moisture in the air, it had flown with greater purpose, until finally the Great River had appeared in its view.

It landed among the rushes – and there its journey and its life had almost ended, for startlingly close, a frog hung from a reed. Quicker than thought, the amphibian’s tongue had shot out, but Blue’s reflexes had been up to the danger, and his spy had launched itself away from the threat, just as nature had designed, and Anomus had augmented.

Blue had then spent a goodly portion of the night doing what Anomus amusedly thought of as ‘fly things’ – investigating his surroundings, driven on by its olfactory senses, which made up a huge portion of its ability to sense the world. While Anomus appreciated the opportunity to interact with the outside world, even second-hand and from the perspective of a fly, he could not help but become impatient. He wished to learn more about the workman’s camp, and hopefully the ghoul or ghouls, but Blue’s memories stubbornly refused to yield any information about either.

Eventually Anomus’s explicit order to return to the Tomb and Blue’s instinctual desire to return started to assert themselves, and the fly began an erratic, weaving return journey. Anomus’s patience was finally rewarded with a clear view of the Targus Cliffs and the Tomb’s entrance – and two crouched figures at the base of the entry doors. Even though Blue’s memory of the pair of creatures left much to be desired, Anomus could tell that they were almost certainly the same as what he had seen a few night’s previously. They were hirsute and even as crouched and bestial as they appeared, they were still humanlike in form - except for the telltale snout and ears.

They were searching for a way into the Tomb. The Magic at the top of the Well had rebuffed them. Anomus had no doubt that the bronze-sheathed and magic-warded doors would do the same.

So he would give them a means to enter. He would let them feast on the flesh of the dead. And then he would see if he could claim them. As bestial as they were, they were still unfathomably more complex than flies or wasps.

But he would not let them into the undertomb until he had removed the bones. Ghouls eating the rotting flesh, that he could stomach. But he would not countenance them gnawing on the bones of the aggrieved. It would be wrong. And besides, he had other plans for the skeletons.

Anomus turned his attention to the mass grave, and with grim purpose did what he had heretofore avoided, barring a single brain – he claimed all the matter within it. All the rotting, bloated flesh, decaying cartilage, the spilled entrails, every hair and fingernail. And every bone. And once he had done so, he forced the flesh to part so that the bones migrated to the undertomb’s floor.

And then the stone began to absorb the bones, passing them downwards towards the catacombs at his command.

He realized that he did not have to struggle to keep track of which bones went with others from the same corpse. He knew them all, down to the smallest particle, and in a sense, they were all now a part of him. When he had been a man, he did not have to keep track of which finger went on which hand. So it proved to be with the tens of thousands of bones.

More than anything else he had experienced since his remaking at the Old God’s hands, this realization told him he was no longer Anomus. No mortal man could have kept track of such vast numbers. It might have been a small thing compared to his alteration of a living thing, but it was what struck him most viscerally.

Whatever he now was, he was not Anomus ip Garma any longer.

Keeping track of all the bones may have been effortless, but the physical moving of them was anything but. It consumed every iota of mana that flowed through the Tomb, leaving none for the filaments to absorb. And it was not a quick endeavor, either. He managed only to get all the bones down into the stone and away from any possible depredations before dawn returned and the mana faltered. Finishing their interment would have to wait for another night, or likely several nights.

He seethed at his limitations. There was so much to do, and so little strength with which to do it. And so little time. Eleven nights had already passed. Eleven, in the metaphorical blink of an eye. He had been working feverishly, using every ounce of his power and intellect, and he had felt moments of satisfaction. But when he asked himself what he had in his arsenal with which to kill Irobus, should he suddenly appear unexpectedly, all he had in his arsenal were pit traps and falling stones.

Pit traps, falling stones, and half-formed plans against one of the most powerful men in the world. Flies that could not bite. Bones that he did not know how to animate, and might never learn. Corpse-eating ghouls not clever enough to find a way into the Tomb, that he did not control and might not have the capacity to dominate even if he could lure them in.

Less than three months.

Anomus the Architect did not despair. He raged.