Deep in the lowest level of the Tomb, below the Place with No Bones and the other place, filled with bones that were not to be touched, down in the Ironclaw home, every ghoul felt… something. A sudden change. Not one for the better. Over countless centuries of being reviled and hunted, ghoul-kind had honed an almost supernatural instinct for danger.

Danger had arrived. They all knew it, the way they always knew where Mother Moon was in the sky, even when they could not see her.

The Tomb, which had been a safe and welcoming place since they had first set foot in it, suddenly was not. It was not a scent in the air, but it was like that, thought Krrsh, and it was undeniable.

Some great predator was loose in the den of the Builder, stalking its halls.

He glanced at Chrrk, who was showing old Wrna how to make fire. She had suddenly frozen over the small pile of wood scraps, body tense, her ears pricked forward and the lips of her muzzle slightly drawn back in the faint beginnings of a snarl.

“Danger,” Krrsh announced to the pack. “Grik, go and watch the entrance.”

“Why Grik?” asked Grik.

“Because Krrsh is pack leader, and say so.”

Grik opened his mouth to dispute, but apparently found the logic inescapable. He went. The other Ironclaws withdrew from the central chamber to the smaller, more defensible side dens they had chosen for themselves. All except Chrrk, who abandoned her fire tools and went to Krrsh’s side.

“What is it?” she asked him, voice low. “Feels like hunter near.”

“Builder’s enemies are here,” Krrsh guessed out loud, trying to make it sound as though it was not a guess.

“What do we do?”

“Nothing. Builder said do nothing. He said Ironclaws not fight.”

“And if Builder loses? If the hunter finds us?” Her eyes were on him, clear and deep and clever- and worried.

Krrsh was silent for a moment, then told her his feeling, his fear.

“Krrsh think Builder is hunter.” He flexed his claws. “We wait. We watch. If we have to, we fight.”

“We should go. Chrrk think maybe we should go,” she said, uncharacteristically unsure of herself.

Krrsh shook his head, sure of this if nothing else. As sure as he could be. Besides, Builder had closed the tunnel to outside, leaving only the big doors. The doors that Builder’s enemy would come through. Maybe had come through already.

“Krrsh talk to Builder now?” she suggested.

“No. We wait, quiet and still. Let the lion pass. Do not give it prey to see, or scent to track.”

Chrrk looked long at him, and then nodded once.

“As pack leader say.”

Krrsh only hoped he had said right. That the danger did pass. That it was not trapped inside with them.

A cornered lion would fight the fiercest.

~ ~ ~

Hummingbird watched as great square sections of the floor fell away, and quickly grasped that a pattern was beginning to emerge, like some massive checkered board. He estimated that where he stood would also fall, and quickly stepped back to the bronze doors where, if he was correct and the pattern bore out, the floor would remain stable.

All the while his mind raced to take in the situation, he fended off wasps, his sword arm beginning to feel the strain of constant exertion. He was lucky that he had not yet been set upon by one of the hellishly fast, agile lizards.

More like geckos, came the thought. As if it matters.

The treacherous ground offered the creatures no real discomfort; if the floor disappeared beneath one of them, they simply flung themselves away from danger. Vertical walls were perfectly traversable to them, even the ceiling itself. He was more than a little jealous.

Hummingbird could not see much of whatever lay beneath what had been solid floor. It was pitch black down there, and most of the lamps they had brought were now extinguished, leaving the low, rust-red light the bled in from the Well’s cap at the far end of the hall as the main source of illumination. But when the floor had begun to give way, the already awful stench of decay that pervaded the Tomb became a thousand-fold worse. He had no choice but to breathe in great lungfuls of it as he battled for his life, but it was an added misery in an already terrifying situation.

Why did I ever become an Eternal Guard? he thought as he cut another wasp from the air. Ah, yes. I’m a slave and had no say in it.

He could imagine Nighteyes scolding him. “Now is not the time for jokes,” his lover would say, ever-serious. But Nighteyes was wrong. Now was probably the very last time for jokes he’d ever get. If not now, then when?

I will miss that ever-serious face, though. Well. Being dead, I actually won’t. He flinched away from a wasp that flew straight at his eyes, body impossibly curved to present its stinger, already dripping with venom. It slammed into the door behind him instead, and he pivoted instantly and crushed it with the pommel of his khopesh. Death is a slave’s ultimate comfort, if you think about it the right-

Above his head, he heard something – a shifting, a grinding of stone against stone, loud enough to catch his attention over the hum of hell-wings and the screams of the dying.

Oh, great gods, what now? he thought as he glanced up, and saw a massive block of stone that had once been part of the ceiling descending towards him, gaining speed.

He wasn’t yet ready for the ultimate comfort. Not like that, at any rate.

He threw himself into the reeking blackness.

~ ~ ~

Charn was lost to his terror. It had thoroughly conquered him. Where once was a clever, calculating, far-sighted master of temple and court politics, now there huddled on the glass sarcophagus of the emperor’s concubine a man too frightened to even look up and see what might be coming to end his life. His eyes were tight shut, and all that kept him from screaming out his fear was the single thin reed of his faith – thin, but genuine. Instead of screams, what passed his lips was prayer. Shaken-voiced, it was true, but devout nonetheless.

Around him, around the Concubine’s sarcophagus, the floor had given way, and all the lesser priests had fallen, screaming, into the unknown. Most of those screams had found an end, though others in the tomb still shrieked out pain and fear.

He had thrown himself upon it instinctively, the way a drowning man might climb on and cling to the floating wreckage of a ship in a storm. It certainly seemed as if it had been the right action to take, considering the fates of the other priests. He did not know why the casket had not plummeted down into the depts blow the Well. He did not even think to wonder. He only praised Vernith for it.

Until the sarcophagus began to tilt.

His whispered prayer to Vernith gained in volume as the coffin increased its pitch, and he clung to the ensorcelled glass with a desperate strength as the floor beneath it, and him, completed its collapse.

He and the Concubine plummeted into the dark.

The coffin slammed into… something, presumably a lower floor, with a squelching sound and enough force to dislodge him from it. He was thrown a short distance away, and the surprise of it forced his eyes open. In the gloom, he found himself in a vast, man-made cavern. Rank upon rank of columns filled the space, and everywhere a column did not stand, man-high spikes of stone penetrated, like a deadly forest.

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There were many slaves and Tongueless speared on those spikes, some writhing, others lolling limp in death.

Charn looked down and realized he was half-submerged in what could only be rotting, oozing, partially liquefied flesh. The high priest of Vernith knew all stages of decay. The prayer passing his lips was pushed aside by the contents of his stomach. But even over his shuddering heaves, he could hear the harsh buzzing of wasp wings descending, and once more he took up the litany.

He saw bizarrely beautiful, impossibly large lizards darting toward him as well, jumping from spike to spike, and in the deeper, further gloom, bulky, indistinct shapes plowed their way towards him through the foulness. When one came close enough, he understood that they were beetles, monstrously transformed, massively enlarged, and unnaturally armored.

He did all he could do. He prayed; loudly, endlessly, he prayed, and hoped that Vernith held some consideration for one who had devoted his life to Her.

~ ~ ~

Hummingbird landed feet-first on one of the corpses of the slaves who had died by the doors. It was a good thing he did, for the corpse had landed on a brutal stone spike before him and been pierced by it through the stomach.

Hummingbird’s sandaled feet struck the dead man’s back on either side of the barely protruding spike tip, driving the corpse further down and the spike perilously close to his crotch; he avoided being impaled by the narrowest of margins, then descended to the squelching, reeking, rotting floor of the new, lower level of hell he had been trapped in.

He still had his khopesh, and his wits, and his life. All of it seemed terribly improbable to him, and a hideous amount of struggle for a bleak reward, but it was what it was.

The first of the geckos to find him was quick, but his blade was quicker; it ended up in two writhing pieces on the offal-smothered floor. He had no time to congratulate himself, as a swarm of half a dozen wasps immediately proceeded it, and had him ducking, dodging and slipping as he cut them from the air, one by one.

He did not notice the monstrous beetle until it was almost too late. He lashed out with his khopesh, but the beetle’s armored body turned it, drawing sparks. It swiped at him with a foreleg, and he cut that away using sheer force.

Another of the geckos threw itself at him from out of the gloom while he was about it, and he was forced to throw himself into the fouls sludge to dodge the attack. Immediately he forced himself back on his feet and brought his blade in line with the angle he guessed it would attack from next. He guessed correctly, and the blade’s edge split the creature’s head down to the base of the neck.

There was a reason he had been selected for the Eternal Guard. Even as a child, he had been viper-quick and level-headed in the tests administered in the imperial slave pens. Time, training and experience had turned him into a master bladesman, if only an indifferent leader.

Hummingbird’s battle became a running one – or rather a slogging one. Keeping his back against a wall had been an advantage when he had faced only wasps, but the geckos were more than happy to use any solid surface to get to him, and the hulking beetles could pin, and possibly crush him against a solid surface. So he moved, and kept moving.

It was not as graceful a dance as he might have had on the sand. The footing was treacherous. But his skill was extraordinary.

Hummingbird’s battle stretched across the length of the undertomb, from beneath the doorway of the Tomb to the far wall, near the Well – and near the hidden door to the Reaper’s sanctum and the Tomb’s heart. By the time he reached the far wall, dozens of his foes had joined the soup underfoot, wasps, geckos and beetles.

But Hummingbird knew something else also stalked the hellscape. He could hear it raging and smashing, though he could not see it.

His limbs were leaden by the time he found himself, suddenly and surprisingly, against the far wall of the hell-pit. His lungs worked like bellows, and the sweat of his exertion mingled with all the filth of death that had coated his golden skin and bronze armor during the battle. He did not know how long he had fought. Time meant nothing, and at the same time, he knew that his had grown very short.

His legs were trembling, and so he put his back against the wall. Not for protection, just to keep upright.

He had no idea that he was at his true adversary’s door. But the adversary noticed at once.

~ ~ ~

It was not Anomus. It was not the Architect, nor the Builder that was the cold, crystal heart of the Tomb now. It was a beast that operated almost wholly on instinct. That instinct commanded it to obliterate the creatures who had invaded its territory, and it did.

There was no guile, no strategy or tactics involved in its ferocious assault on the interlopers. It commanded its creatures to kill, and they killed. It activated the death traps, haphazardly, and more men died. And with each death, the Tomb absorbed, more energy, and pushed conscious thought and human emotion further into the darkness.

Everyone above the undertomb was dead or dying – two hundred slaves and as many Eternal Guard. Most were dead from the venom of his minions; the remainder had been crushed by falling stone.

In the undertomb, a dozen intruders had now been reduced to just two, two splinters in the nebulous flesh of the thing that did not think of itself in any terms, but only in terms of what it possessed.

One of the intruders offered no resistance, but the Tomb’s thralls nonetheless could not kill it. Some unknown force prevented them from doing so, though they surrounded the hated man and continually pushed forward to make the attempt. The Tomb tried to end the human directly, by means of a hastily created stone hurled at stunning speed, but the stone was deflected by that same invisible power before it met soft flesh.

The Tomb howled its frustration and beat at the intruder with fists of pure force, to no greater effect. Denied its satisfaction, it began to tear at the new corpses that decorated the spikes all around, and then turned to the ironglass coffin that lay in the muck nearby, and the corpse that lay inside it.

Here, too, it was frustrated; the sarcophagus resisted the Tomb’s blows nearly as well as the mysterious force that protected the living man a few paces away. The Tomb rained down blow after blow on the recalcitrant thing, blows powerful enough to crush skulls, to crush stone, to beat metal back into formlessness, into oblivion.

Eventually the ensorcelled coffin cracked.

The Tomb was about to finish the destruction of the thing when it sensed the other interloper, temporarily forgotten, had reached the very threshold to the chamber that held its heart.

A new instinct surged through it then, washing over and subsuming its rage: fear.

It was all the more dangerous for it.

~ ~ ~

There was no warning. One moment Hummingbird was summoning the strength to lift his khopesh once more as a lumbering beetle advanced, and the next, he had been seized by some giant, invisible, crushing hand. He could not breathe. He could not even struggle. His sword slipped from his grasp. He had found his end.

“Why?” he wheezed with brutalized, tongueless mouth, all joking lost at the end. “Why?”

And then, intelligible only to him, “Nighteyes.”

And then nothing.

~ ~ ~

Perhaps it was the threat to the sanctum being dispatched that brought Anomus back. Or, perhaps, it was the shock of the Tongueless asking that simple, almost plaintive question aloud.

Anomus awoke from the madness of violence, sickened by it yet buoyed by the tidal wave of energy gained from so many deaths. Never before had he held so much power. Never before, since awakening to his new existence, had he wanted it less.

He dropped the corpse. He surveyed his domain with his inhuman senses. He despaired.

He had no remorse about all the Eternal Guard he had slaughtered. They were nearly as inhuman as he, stone-faced dealers of death. Ten thousand skeletons in and around the Tomb were testament to it.

But the slaves, unarmed and unarmored, expendable pawns in the machinations of the powerful…

He would have spared them. If he had been in control of his faculties, he would have spared them. They had no more deserved to die than he had, than his workers had.

The blood on his metaphorical hands differed from Irobus’s only in quantity, and the realization made him wish he had the means to retch. The guilt of it and the misery…

Words and thoughts were weak things, when put to the task of facing up to his bloody deeds. He suffered for a time with revulsion-laden self-knowledge that passed beyond articulable thought.

When his thoughts began to clear, to become more orderly if no less grim, one question haunted him: Was this bloodlust a thing imposed upon him by his transformation, or was it something that had always lived inside him, never woken, a seed of evil that had never experienced, before then, the conditions necessary to germinate? He had always been a peaceable man. He’d never even been in a fight, beyond the normal childhood tussles.

He had no answer to his question. It was, perhaps, unknowable, though that made it no less important to ask. He only knew what he was capable of now. The evidence lay all around, in red ruin.

All were dead, save one – the fat priest of Vernith. The high priest of Vernith himself, judging by his clothing and jewelry. How had one such as him, cowardly and utterly without martial skills, survived?

When Anomus turned his attention more closely to the man, the answer became apparent. The priest was chanting a prayer to his patron, and she was answering it. Around the man, like a gossamer shield, or shell, the power of a divinity that was not the Faceless One existed. It was invisible, but he could sense it. So, too, could his assassins. Beetles, geckos and wasps surrounded the praying priest, still single-mindedly intent on carrying out his order to kill, but they were stopped by the protection granted to their prey by the goddess of the underworld.

Or at least he assumed it was Vernith who sheltered the terrified high priest. Anomus could not imagine what other god it might be.

He found himself unable to care. He was full and fit to bursting from the killing and the power it gave him, absolutely glutted – and crushed by the pointlessness of it. Irobus lived and breathed and continued to rule, and the deaths of these, his functionaries and slaves meant nothing to anyone except those who had been slaughtered. Irobus certainly would not care.

Anomus had failed. Now he would have eternity to reflect upon that failure, down in the dark, alone save for mindless insects and the primitive ghouls, while the emperor continued as a living god, no whim beyond his reach, and no accountability allowed to reach him.

Anomus contemplated a future as bleak as any afterlife the priesthood could threaten the living with, and there was one who was responsible for it all.

The Faceless One.

“Reaper,” Anomus whispered, knowing the Old God would hear him if He chose. “You have betrayed me. You offered me revenge, and gave to me instead a pointless lie. What have You to say for Yourself?” He paused, then said even more quietly, “What could You possibly say? You made me into a monster, and I did not resist. But it is You who is truly monstrous.”