In the dark, ‘neath the stone, where the dead rot to bone, that was where spirit made lair.
By lantern’s light the boy stepped forth to what had once been a home. He passed through portals without doors and trode across carpets lost to gore. Murals yet colored the vaulted walls with haunted vistas and garden sprawls. No passage of time could change the colored tiles, but no artist’s hand had caked on blood as paint. With shaking fingers, some ancient had scrawled, “The essence of life is water.”
“The water of life is blood.”
“Drink of blood and ye shall live.”
“The sand devours it.”
“The land craves it.”
“Spill upon the altar not upon the ground.”
“Offer the blood as sacrifice.”
“Bring back the god.”
“The god must live.”
“The god is our protector.”
“Protect the god so we may live.”
“Sacrifice to survive.”
“Offer of yourself.”
“Offer of your enemies.”
“Spill the blood of your enemies.”
“Sacrifice them in the name of–”
The decaying grime of sacrificed bodies, human and animal both, shifted beneath Sieg. The sludge pulled back from the innermost chamber by some unseen force, drying out the skeletons and flowing across Sieg’s feet. Behind him, the mass pulled up through the core of the spiraling staircase as though it were a drip from a spigot falling to the sky.
Sieg ran on.
The force holding the muck reversed, flooding it back at him in a torrential flood. It hammered the walls behind him. It spewed through the door, giving him barely enough time to dive aside. The sickly sweet rotten blood frothed into the air and hammered across a heap at the center of the chamber. After the tide of blood came voices. “That’s a dead end. He’s trapped.”
“He’s killed three people already.”
“I’ll pledge myself to Muharib’s vendetta with Vassish blood!”
Sieg gritted his teeth and sucked in breath. The bandits couldn’t run after him, even at goading from their chief. The bodies wouldn’t permit such recklessness. It gave him a moment to look, and to hope. He swung his lantern from side to side. There had been paintings in this room, now torn to shreds. Ripped to tatters and thrown to the ground to soak and rot. Only gilded frames remained and in their place was more blood writing. Frantic and overwritten. The words layered upon themselves in shades of from sanguine to black.
“More”
“Blood”
“More”
“Sacrifice”
“More”
“Light”
Again and again, swirling around him the words repeated and at the center was the heaping mass: a pile of bones not human. Vertebra after vertebra with ribs on every one, the desiccated and withered corpse of a beast beyond any living animal. In life, it could have swallowed a horse whole, and likely had many times; but, now it had only one difference between it and the forgotten sacrifices.
Its bones were engraven in the language of the gods, and those runes still shimmered with power.
Muharib called out, his voice echoing through the chamber as he approached. “What a magnificent sight, is it not? Terrifying in its power.”
Sieg kept his composure. He knew the corpse of the Divine Beast couldn’t leap up and attack him, no matter how many humans were offered to it. Instead, he did as he had been commanded, and used his head. The air did not make him light in the head, it was not completely saturated with the gasses nor with the breath of animals devoid of plants. His lantern had not combusted the entire chamber, rendering an inferno and himself to ash.
That meant there was another way up. A crack or a chimney perhaps, but possibly a direct access tunnel for the enormous snake when it had lived.
Muharib continued, his steps deliberately cracking through skulls. “The great snake Vita, emissary of our goddess, angel of the city… she has been waiting here for a very long time and has given such wonderful counsel.”
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Sieg assessed the room once more. It had been in the design of a bedroom, one for a human but sized for the snake. Here and there structures of wood hinted at furniture they might have been. Trunks and armoires, a bed frame, and at last he saw one painting which hadn’t rotten completely. The canvas was dipped in the filth at the bottom, and black tendrils creeped up like fire across the cloth and oil. It gave the enormous artwork an impression of being burned away from the bottom up, as if the rot were consuming the depicted woman inch by inch. Her feet had already vanished, and her legs were crossed by fungal destruction. The humidity had seeped into the canvas itself, fighting with the paint and soaking the vibrancy from it year over year.
And yet the beauty of the woman remained, encircled by a turquoise snake.
It was also large enough to obscure a doorway. Sieg trudged over to it, the festering grime up to his ankles and snaring his every step. He had only just gotten his hands upon the frame and found it fastened to the ground by the sucking grip of mud when the bandits filed into the chamber.
Muharib took the center, fresh stitches in his chest for the stab but not the slash. He didn’t leap to battle, he did not pounce upon Sieg. He merely took the stage and let his subordinates spread to either side. “You know, we make it a bit of a habit to not pry into one anothers pasts here, boy. But, I should have asked you about your home. You see, I’m curious about whether you Vassish people still have emissaries from your goddess, or do you only have the sea monsters?”
Sieg glanced around. Half a dozen lanterns flickered now, filling the chamber with light. He dropped his own then reached behind himself to knock on the canvas. He hit it hard like a drum and the bandits scowled at him, but he had felt the wood behind it. “You mean a little child of the gods like this?” he asked, buying himself time as he tried to spot the bulge of the door handle through the painting.
“Time makes a mockery of all living things. All beauty sours.”
“Are you here to be philosophical? Or are you here to kill me? I’d appreciate it if you picked one.”
Muharib bared his teeth at Sieg in a mockery of a smile. “You’re not our man, are you? Calling you a betrayer was wrong. You’re an infiltrator.”
Sieg’s forced smirk vanished. A chill passed through him. “I assure you… what I said up there? About the knights? It’s true. They want your head. I was going to give it to–”
“Don’t try to lie to me. You know, you had me fooled for a while there. Was it the broken nose? I didn’t notice how wrong your voice was until now. How foolish of me… you’re a bounty hunter, aren’t you?”
And so the ruse began to shatter, but progress had been made. Of the fifty bandits, we had killed six in the well town already, and Sieg had added three so far. The injuries to Muharib would do him in eventually, by infection if nothing else. So a fifth of their fighting force had been removed.
Sieg wetted his lips and nodded, and began his next lie with a heaping of truth. “You know, it really was remarkable how quick you assumed I was your friend just because I took his clothes. We Vassish don’t look that alike, you know?”
Muharib snorted. “You certainly did the work to sell the masquerade. A real cut through the gut and a real broken nose.”
“For as much as they hurt, I’m glad they paid off so grandly. Look at me now, I have the great Muharib of the northern wastes right where I want him!”
The Giordanan cracked his neck. “Injured, yes. But, you’re outnumbered six to one. And you’re too young to be a blade master.”
Sieg gave the stolen blade a flourish. He twirled like a street performer between his fingers before flinging it into the air and catching it once more. “But, I was taught by one.”
One of the lesser bandits grunted. “We should have brought bows.” Others leveled spears at him and advanced. They took deliberate steps without taking their eyes off of him. If he tried to rip the door open, they were ready to pounce and run him through. But as they closed with him, they hugged the walls.
So Sieg jumped atop the bones of their god.
“Bastard!” Muharib roared as Sieg’s bloody sandals cracked the spine from the ribs, breaking the old cartilage like kindling sticks. It wasn’t their god that struck Sieg down, they had to do that themselves. The spearmen jumped forward, stabbing at him like they were trying to knock apples from a tree.
Sieg twirled, slashing with his sword and batting them away. He ducked and twisted, only letting the steel catch his clothes. Muharib raged that Sieg was but an injured boy, but that boy snatched one of the spears by the shaft. With a hand on it, he yanked the bandit closer and cut a line across his face. The bandit howled until blood choked in his nose and mouth.
The second spear scraped through his back, ripping his shirt and shoulder both before he could spin. With a roar, Sieg rammed his spear through the bandit’s chest. That left four, Muharib included, each with only swords like his.
They hesitated. Each had seen the cut and they could stare at the bandages over his belly. He was bleeding and sweating and panting. In time, having the high ground would mean nothing, profane or not. They thought they would let him bleed out.
Sieg laughed at them.
Then his blood dripped from his shoulder, down his arm and fell from his fingers. The ravings of old were true. Life does exist within the blood, and Sieg’s was especially potent. Like Muharib, he had been blessed by the gods and with a peculiarly strong stigmata. Power permeated his essence and lingered within the drips of vitae he shed upon the bones. It flowed within the engravings like ink to a printer’s block.
While the bandits dared to put one foot upon the pile that had once been a mattress for the divine beast, Sieg fended them off none the wiser. Their dancing of feet, shoving of bodies and shifting of weight obscured the shifts and cracks of bone knitting together with blood for mortar. Within the sockets of its hatchet skull, life sparked and smoldered and grew.
“Come on!” Muharib roared. “Kill him. It’s been far too long since we’ve had a proper sacrifice. Just think! Think what we’ll get for starting a vendetta with fresh blood like this? Get up there and run him through. I’ll give the man who does it a night with any woman in the camp he wants!”
Two of the bandits screamed, muscles straining and veins bulging. Then they dropped their lamps and charged the boy. He had been waiting for that moment. Years of practice with Leomund had transformed his muscles to weapons. The first one to reach him cleaved down, chopping overhead. Sparks flew as Sieg threw up his own blade and twirled it round his head. With half a sidestep, he evaded the attack just as he cleaved his sword into the bandit’s head. It chopped through flesh and bone and snapped his spine.
The warcry of the other had not ceased. Sieg had to wrench his blade free and spin around. Blood flew as he tried to parry but the world shifted around him. The vertebra he had stood upon lifted, pushing him up and back and off balance. His parry was suddenly not where it was supposed to be. It did not stop the bandit’s sword from plunging into his chest and skewering his heart. Blood sprayed out from the wound with each throb of pain, sprinkling the bandit and the mound with his life.
And then the divine beast spoke.