by James Derry
A scrawny man in a tattered thawb reached out to grab Nemeah, and Jamal had no choice—he sliced off the man’s hand at the wrist. Both the commoner and Nemeah screamed.
The lady shrank away from him, but Jamal scooped her up with his shield arm. He spun around, scanning for the closest threat, and pressed Nemeah tight to his chest. She pressed her face against his breastplate.
“Don’t look. Don’t look.” Jamal could no longer afford to show mercy. His charges had been wounded; his comrades were fighting for their lives. With Nemeah pressed safely between his shield and his body, Jamal began to slash away at anyone who wasn’t dressed in bright colors or shining metal. Sygne’s vision tightened with his. Jamal didn’t see faces anymore; he just saw vital spots. Pulse points in the neck. Wrists and elbows. A femoral artery in the leg of an opponent who heedlessly lunged toward him.
Jamal moved with silent, fluid instinct, proceeding through the crowd. One guardsman was in his way, struggling with a big opponent. Jamal sidestepped him, sliced through the commoner’s ear, and continued to the next target.
Sygne was swept up in Jamal’s expanded, thoughtless awareness, but she registered that the mob was contracting backwards. They had lost their fighting momentum, and they were on the verge of retreat. They just needed one scare to send them fleeing. With his shield arm, Jamal locked Nemeah in a vice grip; then he lunged at the nearest, largest man in the crowd. He drove his sword into the underside of the man’s chin, and the tip of his sword emerged through the back of the man’s skull, spraying the onlookers with blood.
His sword was lodged in the man’s skull, but Jamal glared at the crowd, daring them to approach. The surviving commoners groaned and quickly fled.
Men in bronze armor rushed in to form a circle around Jamal. He realized that the noblewomen had all gathered behind him, seeking shelter in the wake of his destruction. Jamal let go of Nemeah and sunk to his knees. She remained standing.
Jamal heard her gasp. All around them, the street was covered in a thatch-work of bloody bodies. Jamal’s last victim sank to his knees, leaning forward so that most of his bodyweight was propped up on Jamal’s abandoned sword. His awkward way of dying had turned him into the corpse’s version of a tripod.
Jamal began to sob.
Nemeah knelt to look into his bleary eyes.
“It’s okay,” she said skittishly. “You saved me. I think you saved us all.”
Jamal sputtered, “I killed them… I never… I never killed people before.”
Nemeah hugged Jamal tightly, and a murmur passed through the cluster of noblewomen. Sygne could barely make out their words.
“He truly fights like a demon…”
“So fearsome!
“He weeps…”
“What compassion…”
“What a story!”
Sygne could not tell if Jamal registered their words. He continued staring straight ahead, his vision blurred through tears. In an awed tone, another lady remarked, “I’ve never seen a guardsman do anything like this.”
Eiglon stepped into Jamal’s stare. Jamal didn’t look directly at the vice-commander, but under the shade of his blood-splattered helmet, Sygne could see that Eiglon was glowering murderously.
10 – Awakenings
“Wake up. Wake up.” Someone gently shook Sygne’s shoulder. Of course it was Jamal who leaned over her. Not the teenaged Demon of Uhl-Arath—killing on instinct—but her Jamal, older and milder, if somewhat musically mistalented.
Groggily she asked, “Where are we?”
Sygne winced and touched her head. It felt like someone was trying to drive a wedge through the left side of her skull. The pervasive smell of smoke stung her nostrils. It was everywhere, making each breath caustic.
“The last thing I remember… I was falling…”
This was not entirely true. The last thing Sygne remembered was Jamal slaughtering a dozen Gjuiran citizens.
“You did fall,” Jamal said quietly. “You hit your head pretty hard on the way down. You were cut, but I think I stopped the bleeding. It’s hard to tell in this low light.”
“Did you jump in after me?”
“Of course.” Jamal pointed to a distant sunlit gap at the top of what looked to be a very convoluted shaft of rock. It was no wonder Sygne had survived the fall, and no wonder that she now felt torn up from head to toe. She had fallen through a confusion of overlapping branches (or were they tree roots?), and she had probably hit every single one on the way down. They had broken her fall. She hoped that they hadn’t broken her bones.
A new thought clawed its way up out of the aching haze in her head. She clutched Jamal’s arm. “Where is Ohbo?”
“He stayed above ground. The aqrabuamelus were closing in, but he was still more scared of what might be down here. He was sobbing. I’m pretty sure he assumed you were already dead.”
Sygne winced. “Now we’re safe down here, and he’s—”
“We’re not safe.”
“The aqrabuamelus…”
“They want us. Ohbo will surrender to them. They’ll probably just take him prisoner.” Jamal exhaled. “Sygne. Listen. We have to worry about ourselves right now. Do you see what’s around us?”
Sygne was lying on her back; she turned her head to look at the branching formations all around her. “I feel like I’ve seen shapes like these before. In a textbook.” She rubbed her pounding head. “But I can’t remember where.”
She felt groggy, and her vision was blurred.
Jamal sighed heavily. “I’ll tell you. But do you promise not to scream?”
“Good grief, Jamal. That definitely doesn’t make me not want to scream.”
“I know. I know.” Jamal put one hand on her shoulder, which was meant to comfort her. He put his other hand firmly over her mouth. “It’s bad.”
“What?” Sygne mumbled through his fingers.
“I think we found the… L. E. R. Q? E. R.”
“Are you trying to spell Lurker?”
“Shh! Yes. But don’t say it out loud. Not so close…”
Sygne’s heart began pounding, which set off a throbbing rhythm of pain in her skull. She asked, “Where is it?”
Jamal bent close and whispered, “It’s everywhere. I’m pretty sure we’re inside it.”
***
Jamal helped her to her feet. She had to wait through a surge of nauseous vertigo, but there was no overwhelming pain in her limbs. No broken bones or sprains. When the passage stopped spinning, Sygne glanced around to take in her surroundings. She saw the same runnels of rock that she had seen in the clearing between the graves. Layers of sinuous rock, emerging from the walls in lobes, or in branching antlers, or intertwined together into boulder-sized brains. The colors shimmered between very vivid shades of violet and blue and pink. Down here, underground, they hadn’t been faded by the sun.
She put a hand to her aching head. Jamal had claimed that they were in a cave made out of coral—the type of rock that formed on the floor of the ocean. Absurdly, she could see that he was right.
They were in the bend of an ‘L’ shaped tunnel. In one section of the ‘L,’ the passage climbed straight up to the desert floor, some thirty feet above them. Arms and arteries of lurid stone extended from the wall of the vertical shaft. Sunlight shown down from the top of that shaft, most clearly through a succession of holes that Sygne had left in the branching coral as she fell. She could see that, despite the fact that the shaft was busy with organic formations of limestone, there were several gaps in the rocks that were too wide or too high to traverse. It would be impossible to climb their way out without a rope.
She turned to the other end of the tunnel, where the passage moved horizontally for a dozen yards; then it banked left. A hellish, flickering aura of light hung over that bend in the tunnel.
“There’s a fire over there,” she declared. “And we’re going to walk toward it?”
“I don’t thin
k we have another choice,” Jamal said. “We can’t climb our way out.”
Sygne winced as a spike of pain passed through her right forearm.
Jamal asked, “What is it?”
Again she felt an urge to hide her injury, but she fought against it. This was not the time to be keeping secrets. She said, “There was a strange lizard above ground. It bit me.”
“Lizard?”
“You should have seen it… It scared me half to death. And it looked like something had scared it the rest of the way.”
Jamal grimaced, and Sygne could tell that he was thinking of the Lurker in the Void.
She pulled back her sleeve to expose two small, inflamed bumps on her arm. The two bumps were less than a half-inch apart, with a tiny, congealed droplet of blood stuck to the top of each. A sharp, steady pain emanated from the small bite. Sygne didn’t mention that to Jamal.
He asked, “Do you think the lizard was poisonous? I mean… venomous?”
Sygne grinned. “You’re learning.”
“I figured I might as well. Here in the latter minutes of my life.”
“We’re not dead yet,” she told him. “I don’t think we’re inside the Lurker. At least not exactly. Do you remember how messed up we felt when we were near the Dweller Under Dreams? We couldn’t tell up from down.”
Jamal’s gaze drifted from the frills of coral rock on the ceiling to the lacings of coral looping across the floor. “We can’t do that now.”
Sygne shook her head, although it set loose new waves of vertigo. “Let’s talk it through… Do a fresh evaluation of our situation.”
Jamal gestured to the limestone. “I told you I spent years as a seafarer. In the waters near every coast, we’d find living rocks like these growing underwater.”
“It’s coral rock,” Sygne said. “The rock itself isn’t alive.”
“It grows, doesn’t it? And if the Dweller was a large sea urchin… And if all of the Ancient Ones lived in the sea back in the First Times… It makes sense that the Lurker would take on the shape of some other strange sea creature, too.”
Sygne considered this for a moment. There was a sort of poetic logic to it. But had the Ancient Ones chosen to take on the shapes of the primordial sea life that evolved around them, or had they formed those creatures in their image?
“Think about it,” Jamal said. “When we get close to one of these things, we find pictures of sea creatures. And always the slimy and shelled ones.”
“Invertebrates.” Sygne said begrudgingly. “But listen…” Sygne patted her foot against the knobby floor. “This is not coral. Coral are invertebrates, like you said. They’re called polyps… They look like upside-down jellyfish. These rocks are accreditations that the polyp creates. The Lurker might be some kind of coral polyp, but it is not this entire cave. That’s like saying that a beehive is the same thing as a bee.”
“Oh,” Jamal looked genuinely relieved. “That makes sense. So you’re saying that these grasping rocks aren’t going to snatch us up.”
Sygne tried to return Jamal’s smile, but suddenly she felt far less relieved. Her head was aching more severely than ever before, and the migraine was making her vision blur, which made the coral rocks seem to wriggle and squirm, like fingers and tentacles emerging from the walls.
Past the bend in the funnel, she saw a flaming tree root entangled in the ceiling. Tongues of flames scurried all along its length, which had been blackened by the fire, until it looked like it had been reduced to a mineral, with nothing flammable left in it. And yet the fire burned steadily, showing no signs of flickering out.
They proceeded through a few more bends in the tunnel. The flaming tree root was joined by other burning, twining veins of wood. They had to stoop to avoid the fire above them. Still, the charred wood showed no sign of burning out. Sygne didn’t say it out loud, but she suspected magic was involved. Had they stumbled upon a true ‘eternal flame?’ If so, then who had created it, and who were they trying to honor?
The tunnel ended as the coral formations twisted outward, making room for what appeared to be a very large space lit with an orange haze of smoke and firelight.
Sygne slipped into a spot behind Jamal and peeked over his shoulder. A huge, subterranean dome stretched out before them.
“I still can’t believe it,” Jamal said in a low voice. “Ohbo was right.”
Sygne licked her lips. Her wooziness felt suddenly worse from the explosion of space, and her throat was parched. “I’m sorry, Jamal. I led us to Tallasmanak. And then I didn’t turn and run when you said I should. I made a horrible mistake.”
Sygne leaned against a rock to steady herself. She ventured a glance to the top of the dome, which she estimated to be forty yards high and two hundred yards across. The floor below the dome was covered in hillocks of sand that were broken by dozens and dozens of stone sepulchers and sarcophagi. Sygne’s attention was quickly drawn to a two-story stone edifice standing about fifty yards from the mouth of their tunnel. It was an ancient mausoleum, and there were two other mausoleums waiting at farther distances under the dome. Interspersed between the mausoleums and the raised graves were obelisks and seated statues that must have been monuments to long-dead kings.
Jamal said, “The climbing rock Ohbo spoke of… It was coral. It formed a dome over the necropolis, and all of it was buried under hundreds of years of shifting sands. Remember the giant dune we were climbing? We’re inside it now.”
Sygne nodded, “One gigantic tomb…”
Jamal pointed to the tomb’s expansive ceiling. More flaming tree roots ran across the limestone, converging on a huge burl of blackened wood at the dome’s apex. He said, “I bet that’s the base of the dragon blood tree we saw at the top of the dune.”
Sygne rubbed her forehead. A fever was swelling in her skull, pushing out all rationality.
Jamal continued, “If Ohbo’s story is true, then we have to watch out for…”
“I…” Sygne began to sway.
Jamal was saying something else, but the sound of his voice was fading.
“Jamal…” Sygne couldn’t finish her thought. Her consciousness had already slipped away.
***
Jamal heard Sygne fall hard against the sandy floor behind him.
Her eyes had rolled to the back of her head. Her lips were dusted with sand, and bits of powder fell into her mouth as she mumbled something to herself. Jamal gently slapped her cheek, but she wouldn’t wake up.
“Come on. Come on. This is not a good time to go unconscious!”
Jamal glanced around the dome for another means of escape. A large hole showed like an oculus in the top of the dome, close to the base of the dragon blood tree. Most of the smoke in the dome was escaping through that vent, but there was no chance of him or Sygne escaping that way—it was far too high.
A shushing noise drew his attention to a large crater in the ceiling, maybe thirty yards away and twenty yards up. This indentation was more than man-sized, but it wasn’t pronounced enough to break through the crust of the dome and out into the fresh air. At least not at the moment. As Jamal watched, a growing torrent of sand drifted down from the crater, floating momentarily in the phantasmal fire. The shower of sand crystals grew larger, coughing into clots of sand. Jamal heard a man screaming, but the sound was muffled—as if coming through a wall. Then a shaft of sunlight broke through the crater, impaling the gloom like a spear. The screaming continued, growing louder, more blood-curdling.
It was Ohbo! He tumbled through the hole in the ceiling and plummeted straight down through the shaft of light and struck the roof of the nearest stonework mausoleum. Ohbo hit it hard, and his screaming stopped immediately in a boneless, slumping impact. Jamal winced at the sight. The fact that he wasn’t crying out, after such a brutal fall, suggested that he had been knocked out. Or worse.
Shadows moved along the new hole Ohbo had made. Jamal scooped up Sygne and slipped back to the mouth of t
heir tunnel. All the while, he watched the hole in the dome’s ceiling. A corner of cloth dangled through the sunlit gap. Then a scythe-like object descended through the hole. A scorpion’s pincer.
A figure emerged from the upside-down portal, and Jamal had his first good look at an aqrabuamelu. The prowler had a normal man’s head and face. He wore a baggy thawb and large scorpion’s claws protruded from the ends of the wide sleeves. The pincers were large enough to clamp down on a man’s midsection. Tiny hairs glistened on the surface of the claw, which seemed to suggest an organic softness. But Jamal didn’t doubt for a second that the serrated inner edges of the pincer could cut through flesh. On the inside of the bounty hunter’s left pincer—at the crux where the two curved blades of the pincer came together, Jamal could see a lineup of malformed humanoid knuckles wrapped around an oversized war-bow.
The man-hybrid had six legs on the lower half of his body, all of them with bristled feet that helped him cling to the ceiling. Those legs were attached to a segmented abdomen that was as broad and as long as a second torso. Despite its uncanny scale, the thorax had the unmistakable physiology of a scorpion, and nowhere was that more obvious than on the aqrabuamelu’s tail, which was the last part of the aqrabuamelu to emerge through the hole in the ceiling. A few drops of yellowish fluid hung from the end of its curved stinger, but that gleam of venom wasn’t nearly as foul as the grin that passed over the man-hybrid’s face as he caught sight of Ohbo. The aqrabuamelu pulled his bow tight. Here was his quarry; gravity would make this shot particularly easy. Before he fired, the aqrabuamelu turned and called to his partner.
“Sunstabber! He’s here. Still alive! Come see.”
At first, Jamal thought he heard the second aqrabuamelu exclaiming in surprise and delight. Then the exclamations grew louder, and more urgent. And then, very quickly, the second aqrabuamelu plummeted through the portal, landing just inches from Ohbo.
