They closed the doors. Heavy though they were, the punishing wind threatened to force them open if they were left unattended; the primal fury of a desert storm was impossible to dismiss. Anomus watched with a sort of nebulous dread as the fat priest detailed a dozen slaves to bar them with their very bodies – there was a mechanism to seal them, but the seal would be permanent as far as they knew, and besides, it could only be engaged from outside.
Outside, the simoom had begun to rage and the emperor’s servants had closed the doors to the tomb. And the emperor had not, not at any time, shown his face.
Anomus felt as if he were suspended above a great void. Below him was nothing, forever. If he ‘looked’ down, if he contemplated or acknowledged what was beneath him, he had the sick certainty he would fall, endlessly.
Is this madness? he wondered. Is this despair?
He could accept neither. And so, for a little while, for perhaps the space of a dozen nonexistent heartbeats, he let all rational and irrational thought swirl past and through him, unacknowledged. It was almost like a numbness. It was almost like death.
But the hated fact lodged in his consciousness like a splinter, like a spear, poison-tipped and burning.
The emperor had not come.
That undeniable, terrible fact eventually scorched its way into the cocoon Anomus had reflexively put around his mind. When it did, he fell – but not into a void. He fell into a bottomless pit of rage, of fury.
There was little logic or reason to be found there, either. It was simply a different kind of escape from the intolerable reality of his defeat.
The slaves who pressed themselves against the doors to keep the simoom out knew only that, somehow, their task had become easier. They had no way of knowing the great bronze-sheathed doors had suddenly become fused together, or that a hundred men could not have forced them apart.
~ ~ ~
Little Tooth was signing something to him, But Hummingbird was not paying any attention. Behind the Greatest of Two Hundred and high up on the tomb’s wall, he had just seen something… impossible.
One of the diamond-shaped tiles had turned to dust right before his eyes. Then another. Then many. And then something worse.
Little Tooth was signing to him. Hummingbird gestured for imperative silence, heedless of his superior’s certain wrath, not even bothering to look at the commander. He pointed up at the new holes.
If Nighteyes’ flies were improbably large, the black wasps that issued forth from the diamond-shaped holes in black clouds could only be called gargantuan.
I should have stayed outside, he thought, drawing his khopesh, his palms suddenly sweaty. Why did I not stay outside?
Hummingbird heard a scream from one of the side chambers, and then another, and then everything began to happen at once.
~ ~ ~
Charn stood at the head of the Concubine’s sarcophagus. Half a dozen lesser priests knelt on either side of it, each with an oil lamp or censure in hand. The all watched him expectantly, waiting for him to begin the Rite of Entombment.
Charn was not paying them, or the corpse, or the ritual he was meant to be leading any attention. Instead, he was staring in confusion at a round brass plaque that had been affixed to the wall just to his left.
It was like a mockery of the Seal Against Evil. Such a seal could only be fashioned from the purest gold, not base brass. The glyphs were correct – ancient high Adambric, and the litany perfect – But Morn’s sigil was a crude mockery of the real thing.
The Tongueless commander had informed him that the entrance to the underchamber housing the slain slaves was in this general area, and that it had been sealed by them at the emperor’s order.
Was this the seal the emperor had commanded to be placed? Impossible. It made a mockery of the father of the gods. Only disaster could come of it.
Below the plaque the words ‘NONE SHALL PASS’ had been inscribed into a stone.
He reached out one fat, beringed hand to touch the plaque, and then thought better of it.
“Blessed Vernith,” he whispered, “what evil have we stumbled into?”
The first scream had him whip his head around as if pulled by a string. He saw a storm of wasps pouring from holes high up in the walls; impossible wasps as big as cats in their bodies. Guards unsheathed blades, which flashed yellow in the lamplight by the doors and orange in the simoom-blooded light that seeped in from the ironglass ceiling of the well.
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Screams of pain, perhaps death were sounding from all the far-flung portions of the tomb, now. Charn knew even the Tongueless could speak the universal language of agony, and his heart began to beat impossibly fast.
He backed away unthinking from the plague of wasps, until his back came up against the wall. The Guards were hacking at their winged opponents with skill, but the number of wasps made each fight desperate. They swarmed out of their holes and attacked the nearest person, be they slave or Eternal Guard. The slaves were defenseless and undefended, and when the monstrous wasps plunged their stingers into exposed flesh, screams of hellish agony were the immediate result, along with visibly blackening, corrupted skin.
The Well seemed to be free of murder holes. Few wasps immediately found their way towards the priests, who all followed Charn to the far wall in a panic, their sacred duties wholly forgotten.
Charn did not at first believe his eyes, when he saw a stony skull begin to materialize above the Concubine’s sarcophagus. Ink-like tendrils trailed away from the back of the skull. The thing’s dead, eyeless sockets seemed to regard the glassed-in corpse for a moment before turning its regard to the cowering priests.
“Where is Irobus?” The thing asked with a voice like broken glass. “Where is the emperor?”
“H-he did not come,” one of the lesser priests replied. Another threw his ceremonial stone lamp at the apparition; it struck the skull on the jaw, to no effect.
“Then you will all die in his place,” the skull said, and disappeared, inky tendrils dissipating like smoke and stony skull disintegrating into sand that pattered onto the ironglass sarcophagus.
The floor beneath them began to disintegrated as well. Underpriests screamed and clawed at each other and fell into an unknown blackness
Charn lunged across the writhing, flailing mass of his brethren, using their bodies as stepstones, and flung himself on top of the Concubine’s sarcophagus.
~ ~ ~
Hummingbird swung his khopesh in tight, controlled arcs, his back against the wall. The wasps, while far bigger than they had any right to be, did not seem to be tougher, quicker or any more intelligent than the common ones, and they employed no real strategy as they attacked. In that, their size was actually a hindrance: they offered his blade a larger target, and half a dozen of the creatures lay in a half-moon at his feet.
He could not afford to let even one through his defenses, however. From what he could tell virtually all of the nearly naked slaves had been stung, and they had died quickly, screaming all the while. Two of the Guard had fallen as well in the shock of the initial assault, but the survivors had all done as he had, putting their backs against the solid wall so that the winged tormentors could not approach unseen. And all of the Tongueless were fearsome with steel.
The wider fight was lost to him; he could not spare the attention to see how any others fared. Still, the Tomb was filled with a terrible, unignorable hum from the hundreds of wings of their tormentors.
Little Tooth was nearest him, and he was nearest the doors, which were now blocked by the corpses of half a dozen slaves. He gave the barking cough that signaled a request for attention, and when the Greatest of Two Hundred glanced at him, he motioned with his head towards the Tomb’s doors.
After a moment the man nodded his assent.
The Eternal Guardsmen did not have to like or even respect each other in order to work in unison. A lifetime of training had ingrained the ability to perform cooperative tasks. Hummingbird made it to the pile of corpses and began to clear them while Little Tooth defended both of them from the winged assassins, his gold-washed steel khopesh a blur in the lamplight.
Hummingbird dropped his sword and began dragging the still-blackening corpses away from the bronze-sheathed doors as quickly as he could. He could not hear the simoom over the buzzing of the hell wasps, but he knew that it certainly had not abated in the scant minute or so since the doors had been closed. He expected the doors, massive as they were, to be pushed open by the fierce winds once he had sufficiently cleared away the weight and blockage of the dead slaves.
They did not.
He found the recessed ring on the left-hand door, cleverly incorporated into the swirling design that adorned it, and pulled. The door did not budge. He pulled for all he was worth, to no greater effect.
Puzzled, verging on alarmed, he studied the door for signs of some secret lock – and discovered that the two doors had been fused together – two doors no longer, but one solid impediment. Impossible, but true.
Well, he thought, at least Nighteyes and the others are spared this hell.
Little Tooth coughed for his attention.
Hummingbird turned and picked up his khopesh, then looked the Greatest of Two Hundred in the eye. He shook his head. Then he resumed killing the wasps.
The jewel-colored lizard that fell on Little Tooth was as long as his forearm, and almost impossibly fast. It bit the older man on the neck and flung itself away before Hummingbird could do anything about it.
He put his back against the sealed doors and watched the Greatest battle on for a few moments, then crumple to his knees. Still he swung his khopesh, though drunkenly. Wasps descended and stung him once, twice, a dozen times.
You should have heeded Nighteyes, Hummingbird thought. We all should have.
Greatest of Two Hundred Little Tooth died on his knees, his skin blackening and swelling like overripe fruit, but his corpse refused to topple for long moments.
Then the stone floor beneath it turned to sand, and it tumbled into darkness, right before Hummingbird’s eyes.
~ ~ ~
He had released the wasps, giving them only the simple command to kill. Some quiet, logical portion of his mind knew that he might direct them to better effect, but that voice was small and weak and lost in the tide of frenzied hate and despair that gripped him now.
He had lost the chance to slay his slayer, and the only consolation given him was the chance to kill Irobus’s functionaries. When the priests had confirmed his worst fear, there was no reason or strength left in him sufficient to keep him from seizing that gory, bleak consolation, and he had embraced it fully. Anomus, Architect, Builder – that person was gone. All that was left was the Tomb, and the Tomb was savage.
The vestiges of humanity left him by the Reaper had, until then, been successful in keeping in check the new instinct that constantly prodded at him to destroy any interloper. But like a man escaping despair in the sap of the poppy, he ceased his resistance, spurned reason, and instead sank into the instinct’s embrace.
There was no need to think, only to punish, to rage, to eliminate the invaders.
Only to kill.
In every corner of the Tomb, death went stalking, and found its prey – and with every death, with every human soul released a surge of mana, of raw power came to him with such force and black pleasure that it would have made him gasp, had he lungs.