The Faceless One appeared before the black block as he had before – suddenly and awfully present, with all his dread, in the space of an instant. The air itself felt somehow heavier, pregnant with the Old God’s power.

I offered you a chance, the Faceless One replied. Only that. Such was our compact. I am not the god chance, or fate, or destiny. Do not reproach Me, and do not seek comfort from one such as Me if you must struggle for your vengeance.

“Comfort? A chance? I have no chance, Reaper. All You have given me is cruelty. You allowed me to hope! But the truth is You have put me in a prison, for eternity.”

The Faceless One bent down and seemed to regard Anomus’s crystal more closely. He reached out with one shadow-sloughing hand and put a finger on the crystal.

Anomus shuddered at the contact. It was as if the void between the stars had brushed against his very essence.

That is only true if you insist on it being so. How badly do you want your revenge, Architect? Not badly enough, if you despair at the first hurdle. Perhaps I misjudged you. Perhaps I should withdraw My favor.

The Old God’s finger tapped lightly against the crystal’s surface, an implicit threat. What the Faceless One had made, He could unmake.

Did Anomus want that? To find an end, even if it was oblivion? Was it time to turn away from vengeance?

Some portion of him still howled at the thought, though he could see no way forward.

“I want Irobus to die.” That was the bedrock upon which his whole existence was founded, and it had not shifted.

Then kill him.

“Tell me, Reaper, how am I to manage that? Here I exist, trapped, immobile, by Your choice. The emperor sits on his golden throne far, impossibly far from my reach. Give me the power to relocate, and I will end him. Or admit our bargain was nothing more than a lie!”

I have given you all that is in my power to give. What you do with it is, has always been, and will always be up to you. The Faceless One withdrew His hand and straightened once more. You spent your mortal life consumed by the design and construction of things that had never before existed. If you now have greater hindrances, so too do you have greater abilities. Succeed or fail, struggle or fall – I have given you your chance. Ask nothing more from me.

He paused, shadows dripping from his hideous form like black gore.

In the end, He continued after a moment, a single death is not such a difficult thing to engineer. Life is far more fragile than stone and steel. Do not call upon Me again until it is done, Architect, for I will not answer.

With that, the Faceless One was gone.

“Reaper! Reaper!” Anomus’s screams became wordless, and the tomb trembled.

~ ~ ~

The pack was frightened. The walls and ceilings shook and sweated dust and sand. A muffled, intermittent scream of what could only be great pain was just audible to all the sharp-eared ghouls. Pups sought the comfort of their mother’s arms, while many of the adults bared claws and fangs in involuntary reflex.

Krrsh knew he had to go and find out what was happening, just as he knew he had to appear untroubled. Even if he hadn’t known, the furtive looks directed at him by Chrrk would have led him to understand it quickly enough.

The time for waiting was over. If Builder had been a stalking lion before, he was a wounded one now.

Builder had saved Krrsh, when Krrsh was bleeding to death on the sand and stone. He had to go, even though the lion was most dangerous when wounded. But only Krrsh, no need to risk others.

He tried to put some swagger in his walk as he left the ghoul-home to talk to Builder, like the walk of Ngrum before. A walk that said with no words, ‘everything I see and smell is mine’.

He was not sure he succeeded. But he tried.

The screaming had stopped by the time he reached the Place with No Bones. His swagger he had abandoned as soon as he was out of sight of the pack.

Krrsh looked on the destruction, his long jaw hanging open in surprise, and what he would have called dismay, if he knew the word. Many dead. Much blood, its smell sharp in his nostrils. There were bones, now, in the Place with No Bones. Many. Some were splintered and broken and poked out of ruined flesh, some were cut clean through, by what force he could not imagine. Men and altered insects littered the floor, broken, rent, dead.

For the first time in his life, Krrsh looked upon corpses and saw not at first meat, not sustenance, but death. Destruction. Involuntarily, he hugged his own ribs. He did not have a word for what he felt, but that did not stop him from feeling it. Builder was his friend, and Builder had done more for ghouls than anyone.

But Builder also had inside him a vicious killer.

It was then that Krrsh lost any remaining doubt that Builder had once been a Man.

Krrsh moved further into the cavernous, column-punctuated chamber, and spied a female human in a see-through box. It was much like the boxes Men made for their dead, but Krrsh had never seen one that was not stone or wood. The box was cracked in many places, and the woman lay on her side in it, her long golden hair spilling over her face.

He had never seen hair that color, except on a golden fox.

In another place, in a corner, he saw the only living things in the Place – a fat Man surrounded by Builder’s creatures. None of them were attacking. The fat Man stood trembling, and was saying something over and over, but Krrsh didn’t understand his words. Much meat and fat on that one. Also the smell of piss, and fear. Krrsh was not good at seeing emotion in human faces. His nose was much better. But the man looked very afraid.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Krrsh shook his head and continued his quiet way down the rough stairs to Builder’s chamber.

It seemed to Krrsh that Builder’s light had dimmed somehow. But it was still there. So was the giant scorpion. Krrsh tried to ignore that one, but it was hard. Very hard.

“You won, Builder,” he said, when he realized Builder would not speak first.

“No,” came Builder’s voice after a long moment. “No, Krrsh, I have lost.”

“All are dead or dying, Builder. Except the fat one who pissed down his own leg.”

“But not the emperor, not the pack leader. Not the one who matters.”

“Did he run away?”

“He never came. All of this was for nothing.”

“Maybe he will come later.”

“He will not. He will either seal this place for eternity, or send sorcerers and endless armies until it – until I am destroyed. He will never now risk coming here himself.”

“Why did you think he would come, Builder? This place is far from all the places of Men.”

“For his concubine.” Builder sounded very tired.

“Krrsh not know that word.”

“His mate. This place was built for her. He was supposed to come with her when she was brought here. He did not.”

“Is she the one in the box?”

“She is the one in the box, yes.”

“She was supposed to live here?”

“You could say that. And no, before you ask, I don’t know why the emperor didn’t come.”

“You could ask her, Builder. The Woman.”

“She is dead, Krrsh.”

“Builder wrong. Woman not dead. But she will be soon.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not enough air to breathe in the box. Even with the cracks.”

“What do you mean she isn’t dead?”

Krrsh scratched at his muzzle and shrugged. “Just that, Builder. Woman not meat yet. Ghoul know meat better than anything.”

Builder did not reply. Krrsh had the feeling Builder wasn’t paying attention to him any longer.

~ ~ ~

SILENT EVERMORE. That, the first line of the Subori hymn for the dead, was inscribed on the ceremonial knife that took the tongues of the Eternal Guard. They were the Silent Ones, the Tongueless. But they were also known as The Dead Who Fought, if only to themselves.

Those words were also worked into the Tomb’s façade, above the giant, bronze-sheathed doors that would not budge no matter what Nighteyes and the rest of the Fifty tried to force them open.

After the simoom had spent itself just before dawn, Nighteyes had tried to open them to report the funerary barges secured. At first, he had not thought much about not being to open the doors, assuming they had been secured against the storm. But when constant beating on the doors produced no response, he became concerned.

When he noticed that the thin line of wind-blown sand at the base of the door was discolored, rusty, damp, a sick sense of dread settled in the pit of his stomach. He took a few grains between his thumb and forefinger, sniffed, tasted, spat.

Blood, corrupted by some unknown agent.

He stood and turned to Rice Grain, who was closest.

“We must these doors open, whatever it takes.”

“What if we damage them?” Rice Grain asked, clearly worried about the disapproval of Little Tooth inside.

“We will destroy them if we must. Go and get tools. There were many across the river. Take three with you.”

They worked through the day, and were no closer to their goal as the light began to fade, though the doors looked as battered as if they had endured a siege.

Nighteyes knew he would have to give up this labor and return to the capital, to report what he knew of what had happened. But the moment he did so meant he had given Hummingbird up as dead. His men knew it as well, and though they stole glances at him, none suggested they abandon the effort.

No one, not even Nighteyes, truly believed Hummingbird still lived.

He had sent scouts to clear away the sand from the ironglass cap and report on what they saw in the Tomb’s interior. When they had returned, they were speechless.

“Best you see for yourself, Greatest,” said Bent Reed. And so he had gone around the cliff, past the ancient tomb with its suspicious flies and up the slope to the cap, and looked down into the Concubine’s Tomb.

Hell had come to the Targus Cliff. He had no other words to describe what he saw. Destruction, both of the Tomb and of those living souls who had entered it. The floor had collapsed, in many places, and it seemed as if the ceiling had been deliberately dropped on those places it had not. In the deeper gloom that filled the space beneath where the floor should be, it was impossible to see anything clearly, though he thought – or perhaps imagined - he could see dark, indistinct shapes occasionally moving in the darkness.

There was no sign of Hummingbird.

Nighteyes kept at the doors until the sun kissed the horizon, then dropped the scavenged pickaxe he had been wielding against the door, and signaled the others to cease as well.

“We must return to the capital,” he signed, “to report. And to return the grave goods still unloaded.”

“What happened here, Greatest?” asked Bent Reed, finally voicing that which they all wondered, but had not dared to ask while Nighteyes had been so ferociously intent on gaining ingress to the Tomb.

Nighteyes thought to correct Bent Reed – to tell him and the others that he was no longer Greatest of Fifty. But no formal order had been issued by Little Tooth. And he would need every scrap of power and authority he had, if he were to ensure that he and his Fifty were part of the force the emperor was sure to send against this place.

He looked at Bent Reed, but addressed them all when he replied. “The blackest of magic happened here. More I do not know. More I do not need to know, to want to see it destroyed. Prepare the barges, now.”

As the convoy took to the river in the still, star-filled night, Nighteyes stood in the stern of the trailing boat, looking back at the place that his second, his closest friend, his lover and his fucking heart had died. And he hated, more than he had ever hated before in his harsh, brutal life.

~ ~ ~

The barges were long away and out of sight when Vernith’s high priest crawled out of the false tomb on hands and knees and onto the starlit sands, and then stumbled his way to the river.

When he saw that all the funerary barges were gone, he knew he was stranded in the deepest desert, alone, and would probably perish there – but the fact that he was alive at all was already miracle enough for one day. He had lived, where hundreds of others had met terrible ends. His goddess had made sure of it. Unworthy though he might be, She had cradled his life in the palm of her hand, sheltered it when so many others had been taken by death, like chaff in the wind.

And he was certain that he knew why.

He did not know what dark, furious force now inhabited the Concubine’s Tomb, nor why it had cleared a path through the foul remains of the slaughtered workers for him to follow up to the living world. But he had seen the ironglass sarcophagus taken apart by some invisible power, and he had seen Hesia stir and then awaken, as if she had only been sleeping for a decade instead of being dead.

The high priest of Vernith, goddess of the underworld whose bailiwick was death and all that followed after, knew that that was flatly impossible. Which meant that the Concubine had not, in fact, been dead.

Which meant… many things, possibly. All of them terrible.

Hesia had sat up, eyes wild but the rest of her face like stone, and looked around at the horror of her surroundings, seemingly uncomprehending. And then she had uttered a single word.

“Free.”

And then Charn’s path out of hell had formed, and a disembodied voice, charged it seemed to him with impatience and sorrow and hope and fury all at once, spoke to him, like someone leaning in to tell him something of great import, in confidence.

“Leave now,” said the voice, “or you will never leave here at all.”

Charn had not required a second push.

When he made it to the bank of the Great River, Charn threw himself to his knees and put his forehead down onto the silty mud of the river bank, and gave heartfelt thanks to his patron deity. Then he drank deep and washed himself and his clothing as best he could. Then he sat down in the sand for a time, wondering what he should do next. He was not unduly concerned about himself. Vernith had saved him from certain death, and he now carried an unshakeable conviction that the desert would not be the end of him.

He had work to do for her, the Blessed Goddess; why else had she spared him?

That work frightened him far more than the open sands. It was not every day that an emperor offended the gods, after all, nor was it every day that a fat, venal priest was charged with bringing him to account.

Charn had no idea how he could accomplish what he was convinced was Vernith’s will. He only knew that the rest of his life had been bought at that price.

He stretched out his arms and back, stood, and began his long walk beside the river, towards his destiny.