Anomus was happy.

Well, happy wasn’t quite the word. He doubted he would ever feel true happiness as he had as a mortal man. But he definitely felt a sense of satisfaction, of a job well done. He had discovered a new ability, one that could give him an edge in the coming conflict.

He’d had little trouble increasing the potency of the wasps’ sting once he’d gained a scorpion to study. That was satisfying in itself, but it was a small accomplishment, really. And he knew that the alterations he’d made would breed true, which was also good, but not terribly exciting – he would only have a few generations bred before Irobus was due to arrive, even with their accelerated procreation. They were a good arrow in his quiver, but hardly the decisive weapon he sought.

The geckos were also an advancement. He had indeed been able to alter them so that their bite was venomous. Another arrow in his quiver. But still, they were wasps and lizards. Fierce, utterly under his control, yes. Dangerous, certainly. But small, and fragile. In short, not enough.

Not an army.

And so he had turned his attention and his intellect to one of the few other resourced he had at his disposal.

The skeletons.

Yes, they deserved their rest. The only cause he felt acceptable to disturb it was to bring down their killer. It was acceptable for that purpose, if no other. Irobus had made them Anomus’s slaves in death, but Anomus still rejected that state of affairs. He needed no slaves, no servants. But he did need soldiers.

And the skeletons? They deserved respect in death, but they also deserved justice. Who would give it to them? Only him, if he could. And he had a better chance of doing so if he could command the skeletons to march and fight at his order. So he set his considerable intellect to the problem of how to animate them, how to make them into warriors. In the process, he discovered new abilities and limitations, ones he never would have thought of had he simply left the bones to their rest.

He had become quite proficient in shaping stone, and doing so efficiently with a minimal expenditure of his mana. It was how he had shifted the skeletons to their niches – was still in the process of doing so, in fact. He did not move the bones themselves, but the stone around them, pushing them where they needed to go. For the first time, he tried to move a bone directly.

He chose the smallest digit on the hand of one of the skeletons already housed in its niche, and attempted by force of will and a liberal application of mana to get it to shift, even slightly.

He spent a shocking and unacceptable portion of his strength on the effort. His reward was the slightest of tremblings, small enough to be unnoticeable to mortal eyes, though not Anomus’s senses. It was an unacceptable outcome, in terms of what it cost him. But it taught him something. It was possible to move physical objects via magic alone.

In one sense he had already known it – he had caused the secret door to unlatch, after all. But that was different. It was part of the mechanism of the Tomb, and he had only commanded it to do what it had been made to do. It was, in some bizarre way, a natural function of his Tomb-body. Making a single bone shiver? No. that was different.

But it would take far more mana than he could gather even in a month to, say, hurl a weapon through the air. There might be other applications, but he could not simply will a skeleton to assemble and march on his order. The cost in energy would be horrendous, far beyond his means.

Anomus needed something else. Some other means to give the skeletons locomotion.

First, he considered somehow grafting living tissue onto them. He had much dead flesh, though it was more a soup at this point. He had a good grasp of how the human body was put together, but he did not know how to create whole flesh, or if it were even possible. He had no idea where to begin.

There were the insects and salamanders – he supposed that, given time, he might figure out a way to ‘grow’ tissue based on them, and then devise a way to ‘graft’ it onto a skeleton. But might was not good enough, not with the days slipping away. He might labor over the project until the day Irobus returned, and have nothing to show for it. Quickly he discarded the idea as immediately impractical, and likely impossible even without a time constraint.

He made a mental list of what was available to him, what he had claimed, what he might possibly marry with the skeletons to get them ambulatory. Stone? No. Insects and lizards? No and no. Iron? Again, no, though he might be able to fashion weapons for them. Badly decomposing flesh? Despite the natural connection, it was unworkable. He did not know how to regenerate muscle and tendon, nor how to re-attach it.

There were mosses and other plants in the funerary garden. Perhaps he could coax the roots to grow in such a way as to re-connect bones –

That was the moment Anomus knew what he would do. He wasn’t certain it would work, but the though excited him.

He would use roots. But not the roots of plants.

The spirit tendrils that now connected all of his demesne to the mana stone. That was what he would use to assemble and animate the skeletons. If he could coax them to do so.

He set to work.

Come the dawn, Anomus knew happiness. Of a sort. No mortal eye could see what he had done; the spirit tendrils were invisible to the naked eye, of course. But Anomus could see. More, he could direct the tendrils, and their growth and movement. At first crudely, but with effort and concentration with greater and finer control.

It helped that he understood how the human frame hung together, how sinew and muscle acted in concert to move the bones beneath. He labored through the night, and a short time before the sun rose, Anomus had his proof that what he wanted to do could be done.

He had assembled all the bones of a foot. And then, and then, he had caused the foot to wiggle its toes.

Yes, just toes. Yes, slowly and by any objective standard, clumsily. But Anomus didn’t see wiggling, slow, clumsy toe bones. He saw a marching host of animated skeletons, ready to slaughter an emperor.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

~ ~ ~

Krrsh ran through the night. He ran away from the place of no bones. Krrsh did not want to run so far from the place of no bones. If he did what he wanted, he would have gone there immediately after stealing the Man tool. But Krrsh was clever. Too clever to make such a mistake. He had seen Ngrum after the water horse attack, seen the hate on his face. Krrsh knew that Ngrum would send Ironclaws after him, to track him, to kill him. And so Krrsh led those who would follow deeper into the Great Desert, and further away from the place of no bones. The place of so much food. The only place he could defeat the hunger that was growing ever sharper-toothed in his belly.

Krrsh peeled back his black lips and smiled as he ran, holding his Man tool in both hands. Another ghoul joke. To stop his hunger, he must run away from food. It was a good joke. If you were a ghoul, at least.

Krrsh knew that if he ran far enough and long enough, the Ironclaws would eventually give up the chase. His kind were single-minded about one thing only – food. True, if they caught him, they would kill him and then he would be food. But with every day, every hour they didn’t catch him, and with every step they took away from the place of death and all its food, the less they would care whether they sank their claws and fangs into him. He knew his kind. Eventually they would give up.

But Krrsh was not content to run night after night until that happened. He was hungry, and getting hungrier. And he wanted to use the Man tool, to do what his mind told him he could, and what no other ghoul would. So he ran to the one place within reach that he thought he might be able to shake any pursuit.

It was old Wrna who had told him about it, long before. A place in the desert higher than the rest, all stone, little sand. Like a mountain, but flat. And big. Very big.

Krrsh would leave no tracks there. His pursuers would have nothing to follow but his scent, and with a little luck, that would not be enough.

He reached the flat stone place an hour before the dawn. It loomed above him in the night, blocking out the stars. It would be the work of a few minutes to climb to the top, but then….

Krrsh realized he had to make a decision. He could ascend to the flat place, but then the sun might catch him before he crossed it. Wrna had said there was no place to make a burrow there. Ghouls could tunnel through stone with their claws, given time, but even clawing through a stone sarcophagus to get to meat was the work of many claws over many nights. Krrsh would not be able to dig a burrow, no. And ghouls feared and hated the sun, the day. It blinded them, it hurt them.

But it did not kill them. Probably, it did not kill them.

The Ironclaws who trailed him would not follow during the day. If he could cross the place of stone while they burrowed, waiting out the day – then he would leave no footprints to track, and his scent would have disappeared by the time they rose from the sands to take up the hunt once more.

All he had to do was run through the last of the night and into the day, under the hateful gaze of the Burning Eye.

Krrsh was strong, and fierce, and clever. But Krrsh was also afraid.

Ghouls were creatures of night. They did not come out in the day, for good reason. Never.

Krrsh squeezed the wooden handle of the tool of Men, agitated and unsure. He looked down at his prize. And decided.

“I am ghoul. What I do, anything I do, is ghoul thing. Yes.”

He climbed the scree-littered slope and began to lope across the plateau. He ran into the dawn. And then he ran beyond it, snarling and stumbling, eyes stinging and watering, exposed, sensitive areas of flesh burning.

~ ~ ~

One skeleton. To any mortal eye, it would seem as if the bones hung together by magic. Certainly, there was nothing visible connecting them to each other. To a mortal eye.

What Anomus saw was an elegant network of spirit tendrils that mimicked all the functions of a living body’s muscles, sinews, tendons. He could manipulate the skeleton via his will to make any movement or gesture that a living body could. Almost any. He could make the skeleton walk, crouch, stand, sit, even jump. He could make it bend over, and make any number of gestures. It could even pick up fine objects as small as a pebble. It was a marvel.

It was also a failure.

For all that he could make the skeleton do virtually any physical thing a living person could, it was slow. Painfully slow. Ridiculously slow. Uselessly slow. If he used it as a soldier to attack an enemy, that enemy could escape at a moderately fast walk., no, a pace barely faster than a stroll. Not that any trained warrior would feel the need to flee his skeleton. There was no way anyone with a modicum of sense could be struck by the skeleton unless they were paralyzed, and the skeleton could not hit anything with enough force to even bruise flesh.

Anomus knew exactly what the problem was, but he had no way to rectify it. He had been able to detach tendrils from the greater root system and create the separate, smaller system that powered the skeleton’s movement. It was the only way he could make the skeleton ambulatory. If he hadn’t done that, the skeleton would have been a puppet rooted to one particular spot. But in separating the skeleton and its spirit tendrils from the mana stone, he had also severed it from its power source. All that was left to power it was the ambient mana in the Tomb. The skeleton’s tendrils were only able to absorb a miniscule amount of mana from the air, and they had no way to store any excess. That made the skeleton painfully slow, and useless during the day to boot.

If Anomus wanted skeleton warriors, he would have to find a way to create or reproduce mana stones. He saw no other way forward, and he had no means of creating the necessary component.

He returned his attention to the black mana stone that his physical crystal rested on. As ever, it was immune to his inhuman senses. He could not sink his consciousness into it, and so he could not claim it. He could ‘see’ the mana flowing into it via the spirit roots, and he could pull mana from it, both instinctively and deliberately, much the same a man of flesh and bone could regulate his breathing, or turn his attention away from his breath and breathe just the same.

So. He had some influence over the mana that went in, and the mana that came out. That was all.

Anomus saw only one point in the system that might allow him access to the stone. His studies in engineering led him to think of it as just that, a system. One of mana collection, storage and dispersal, not fundamentally different in concept from the system of canals, storage tanks and sluices that helped to feed the empire.

In practice, of course, there was a huge difference in that he could not access one part of the system, the mana stone. But every system was made up of its individual components, and each component in the course of things had to be connected to other components.

If he could not peer into the component that was the mana stone, then he could at least study the connections, and perhaps learn something of value.

There was no connection between himself, his physical, crystalline self, and the stone. Nor was he connected to it by spirit tendrils. He could direct mana from the stone into an action, as he did when he shaped stone, or when he had caused the secret door to unlatch and the bone to vibrate. He could also use the ambient mana in the Tomb directly. He was not sure what import that had, but it did lead him to wonder if he had any capacity to store mana in his physical self. He set the thought aside for later exploration.

With nothing to study about the connection between himself and the mana stone, he turned his intellect to the other connection, the one between the tendrils and the stone.

He had studied it before, where the roots emerged from the bottom of the stone. He had seen nothing but an abrupt transition between the two substances. This time he delved deeper, much deeper, as he had when he discovered the secret code that governed the flies and wasps, and every living thing. He concentrated on the place where spirit matter touched black stone, and he pushed in a way and to a degree that he never had before. His intellect was so taken up with his task that all awareness of the Tomb, of himself, faded away to nothing. Anomus was completely and totally thought and awareness in that moment, and all of him focused on the connection that had defied his understanding. He went searching in the realm of the infinite and the infinitesimal for a sign, a clue, and time and space fell away.

He found nothing. But something found him.