by James Derry
Unlike Ohbo, the scorpion-man did not remain still once he hit the roof of the mausoleum. He writhed with his multiple legs, and his tail slashed the air. There was something else writhing across his body—small bluish gray creatures darting across his legs and abdomen. From the way the aqrabuamelu screamed, Jamal assumed they were biting him. The man-hybrid plucked a snake off of one leg and flung it across the cavern. A swarm of beetles flew over his head. Jamal saw lizards and rats—and what might have been a horribly maimed and very disturbingly tenacious desert hare. There was something ‘off’ about all of the creatures. Their hides were too monochromatic; they were too skinny. Jamal thought of Sygne’s story about a strange lizard attacking her—a creature that looked like it was more than halfway dead.
“Windsplitter!” the second aqrabuamelu cried. “Help me!” His call echoed across the tomb. Jamal took a step back into the tunnel. The scorpion-men were being far too loud.
The aqrabuamelu named Windsplitter began descending the curved ceiling of the dome. He had his bow drawn and his attention on his comrade. He didn’t notice that larger horrors were beginning to stir among the graves of Tallasmanak.
Jamal hissed and retreated a few more steps into his tunnel as he saw movement at the head of a rock-hewn sarcophagus, some thirty feet away. Part of the vault had been cracked, and over the ages a hillock of sand had gathered over the debris.
Now that sand moved. Undulating and shifting. A miniature landslide. At first Jamal thought he was seeing a large spider emerging from its burrow. But no…
He was seeing fingers on a gnarled hand, clawing its way up out of the cracked tomb.
At the same moment Windsplitter rushed into a trio of mummified corpses. Perhaps they had been there the whole time, standing as still as statuary among the graves. They were easy to mistake for sculpted stone, because their skin was blue-gray, like copper that had been left out too long in open air. Now they leaped into action—and onto the scorpion-man’s back—with uncanny speed and ferocity.
Windsplitter swung wildly, on instinct, and knocked down one of the zombies. The corpse shattered against the hard edge of a sepulcher, but its ragged arm stayed attached to the aqrabuamelu’s collar. The arm bent at the elbow and rammed its shoulder stump into the scorpion-man’s face. Windsplitter didn’t have time to focus on that. He viciously cut through the remaining two zombies with his pincers. But even as he slashed them apart, the parts of the zombies that were latched onto Windsplitter’s body (their claws, their gnawing skulls) were still attached and drawing blood.
The corpse in the sarcophagus had pushed its head up out of the sand. It was a naturally preserved mummy, desiccated by the sand and desert heat—no need for chemical curing, or wrapping in cloth. For a moment Jamal thought the mummy had been buried with a crown. Then he realized that crown was a tiny atoll of coral rock, rising like antlers from the mummy’s withered head. If the Lurker was a magical form of coral, then this was its mark on the dead.
Although it was close, the mummy did not turn its blank white eyes toward Jamal. It seemed to know instinctively where to go. It pulled itself free from its burial plot—Jamal noticed that it was missing one leg—and it rushed toward Windsplitter in a sort of three-limbed dogtrot.
All across the necropolis, more corpses were clambering over the tombs and monuments to get at the scorpion-men. The zombies were shockingly agile, despite their mangled anatomies. The corpses were mottled in shades of blue and gray. In some places, their desiccated skin shimmered in the light—in other areas their skin turned matte and ashy. Prongs of coral protruded from their bony frames. In some places they were as fragile and detailed as the fins of decorative fish. Other coral prongs bulged in club-like growths that resembled needleless cacti.
The undead scaled the colonnades of the nearest mausoleum and pulled the second aqrabuamelu, Sunstabber, off of the roof and down among the graves. Jamal couldn’t see what was happening to him, but he cringed as the bounty hunter’s screams grew louder and more urgent. Here and there—the cries broke on gargled notes.
More corpses had piled onto Windsplitter, creating a thicket of coral growths and gaunt limbs. Windsplitter never screamed, but his tail lashed out frantically at the pile of bodies. One mummified corpse leaped onto the swinging tail and flapped around like a pennant as the aqrabuamelu shook back and forth. Nevertheless, the mummy kept its grip while also slipping fingers into a joint right beneath the tail’s stinger. In a slow, implacable motion, the mummy pulled the stinger off of the tail in a mess of snapped tendons and jetting fluid.
Windsplitter let out a great snarling curse; then he fell silent. The tangle of gray corpses on top of the aqrabuamelu was starting to turn red. Taloned hands coated in blood. Snapping jaws slathered in gore.
As far as Jamal could tell, the undead hadn’t noticed Ohbo on his perch on top of the mausoleum. As he backed away into the relative safety of his tunnel, Jamal nodded to the unconscious cameleer. He had to acknowledge the possibility that Ohbo had been right again.
Maybe the Lurker in the Void was worse than the Dweller Under Dreams. It seemed certain that the scorpion-men would have agreed with that—if they weren’t already dead.
11 – Floating in Limbo
‘No! Not now! Not another flashback in the middle of the action!’
Sygne found herself standing in a beautiful garden. It was twilight, and thick tropical vegetation loomed over her —flowers and vines—all of them undulating on a sluggish breeze. A candlelit gazebo rose out of the greenery on a tall hill, and Sygne could tell by its polished cedar frame that she was back in Gjuir-Khib. She suspected she was in the city’s world-famous aviary garden.
Brightly colored birds flew past the hill, but their wings moved far too lazily. Their gliding motion seemed too slow, too buoyant. They moved like schools of fish.
‘This is… the Lurker,’ Sygne said to herself, ‘manipulating my dream.’ She dragged her arm through the viscous atmosphere, and the grass rustled as her feet left the ground. Before she could grab onto anything solid, she was being carried into the air by a rip current of wind.
Her arms wheeled in slow-motion, and she realized they were her own arms. She wasn’t trapped in Jamal’s body, but now she missed the relative safety of being sequestered in Jamal’s head. The phosphorescent light of the moon pierced a bank of foamy clouds, and Sygne watched her shadow move in ripples across the surface of the garden, which was twenty feet below her.
She floated past terraces of lush vegetation, moving uphill until she was bobbing in the air next to the gazebo at the hill’s summit. She wasn’t surprised to see Jamal and Nemeah standing there—nor was she surprised to see that they were standing too close. They had their hands clasped together, over some bundle of cloth and string. They seemed undisturbed by the thickness of the air—and oblivious to Sygne’s presence. Sygne wasn’t surprised by this either. They were a part of this vision. They weren’t really there. Or she wasn’t really there, depending on how you looked at it.
She dragged her hands through the air and stroked her way closer to the young lovers. Even if they had been in the same plane of reality—even if she had floated into their gazebo like a Hinterland witch—Sygne wasn’t sure if she would have been able to break their attentions from one another.
Young Jamal had a blissful, stupid smile on his face, but his eyes were crinkled and sad. “They said their children were starving.”
Nemeah’s voice was warm but firm. She pressed her hand over Jamal’s. “No one is starving within the boundaries of Gjuir-Khib. They were lying to themselves—and to you—to justify their hate.”
“They really seemed to believe it…”
“Jamal.” Nemeah batted her luminous violet eyes. “Do you remember that bearded lech who tried to tear off my dress? Do you truly think he has kids waiting for him to bring food home? If he has children, he hasn’t seen them in years.”
Jamal glanced away. “I don’t know…”<
br />
Nemeah and Jamal had both let go of their bundle of cloth. Sygne saw that it was a panel of the lightest silk, connected by catgut to a small bronze bowl with a candle in the middle. Some type of votive?
Jamal heaved with a sigh. “I wish there wasn’t so much trouble and fakery in the world. Confusion and misunderstanding. And it leads to blood. The gods know that we all have justifications in our own stories. Why can’t they come down, just once, and help us see the other person’s side of the story? Help us keep our stories straight?”
“Jamal. I adore you.” Nemeah hugged him tight. “You are the most idealistic, most openhearted person I know.”
Sygne was proud to see that young Jamal’s smile was slightly skewed. He knew when he was being condescended to. He said, “You mean I’m naive.”
Nemeah’s delicate curls swirled and floated across her face as she shook her head. “No, I don’t mean that. I wish… Sometimes I wish I could believe in the Specularity as wholeheartedly as you do. Most days, I can’t shake the feeling that they aren’t interested at all in the lives of mortals.”
“You’re a royal lady. And the greatest beauty in all the city.” Jamal paused for a moment to let his compliment sink in; Nemeah grinned gamely. He continued, “Do you know how much it would devastate your scullery slaves to hear you say that the gods aren’t even interested in you? What hope do the rest of us have?”
“I’d tell those slaves—or anyone else—that they should stop measuring their worth through the perspective of a stranger, whether that stranger is a luckily-born royal or a head-in-the-clouds god.”
“Now you’ll devastate our priests.”
“Not at all,” Nemeah said. “I am religious, Jamal. You don’t have to believe the parables to know they speak truth.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Think about it, Young Demon. What do the priests tell us? That Gozir and his brothers and sisters watch our every move. They nod when we follow our convictions. They cheer when we are bold. They applaud when we bring something beautiful or new into the world. We trust what the priests say, and we stay on our best behavior—as often as we can. We are noble and brave and considerate, and because of that, the world becomes a better place.”
“I see what you’re saying.”
Nemeah touched Jamal’s shoulder. “If the gods don’t care—even if they aren’t there at all—just be faithful to the truth of what you learned in church. Just bring good to the world. Just bring glory. Even if the gods were never watching, act like they are.”
***
Jamal carried Sygne as far back as he could into the tunnel. Now that the undead hordes were out of sight, he could fixate on the potential disastrousness of Sygne’s abrupt fainting spell. His eyes tracked upward, where the tunnel abruptly turned and climbed up a vertical shaft to sunlight. If only he could use that way to climb out. But that was impossible without a rope.
“What do I do now?” he asked Sygne. Partly he asked her this because she was unconscious and he knew she couldn’t tell him anything he didn’t want to hear. Instead, Jamal’s own conscience piped up and delivered the dreaded answer. As was often the case, his conscience had the voice of Lady Nemeah, and it said, ‘Just bring good to the world…’
Jamal glanced from the crystalline sunlight above him to the blood-red glow at the other end of the tunnel. The way back to the tomb of Tallasmanak. And toward Ohbo.
“Ohbo knew what he was getting into,” Jamal argued at both women, ignoring the fact that there was no chance that either of them were hearing him at the moment. “We told him about the danger, and he chose to come. And he is fodder. If anyone is meant to die here…”
He gazed at Sygne. She crinkled her brow in her sleep.
“No. Don’t,” Jamal said. “I’m here to keep you safe. The two of us, we’re the ones who know about the Threefold Key. We need to get to Albatherra, even if that means…”
Sygne grimaced and mumbled something pitiful and incoherent.
“That’s not fair,” Jamal protested. “I… Okay. Fine!”
Jamal cursed himself. Then he did a quick scan for any zombified vermin that might nip at Sygne while he was gone. The tunnel was woefully quiet. Jamal broke into a run—back toward the dome where he could check to see if Ohbo had been ripped apart yet.
A few stealthy peeks showed him that the undead weren’t anywhere near the mouth of the tunnel. They were still thronged around the two aqrabuamelus. There had to be at least a dozen in each cluster. The zombies lifted the dead trespassers over their heads, and the sight of their carcasses was a truly awful thing. Gnawed bones and sickly white insect pulp. The undead suddenly also seemed quite insectile—with their gaunt, gray arms, they looked like a team of ants carrying a much larger piece of food back to their queen. Where exactly were they taking the bodies?
Jamal scurried behind the partly crumpled sarcophagus that the coral-crowned, one-legged mummy had emerged from earlier. He wanted to get a better look at the undead, as they moved away from him, toward the center of the necropolis. They weren’t quite marching in a right-left lockstep—that might have been because some of them were missing right or left feet—but there was no question that they were moving as one, operating with a singleminded focus.
Jamal darted behind another grave, then another, always moving closer to Ohbo. He could see that the undead were marching toward a smoldering fire-pit at the center of the necropolis. Sunstabber’s pallbearers reached the fire first. They swayed under the weight of the body, back and forth, back and forth. Then they heaved the man-hybrid into the glowing embers. Soon Windsplitter was also resting in the pit.
Mutilation and a shared cremation. It was far from a glorious ending. Jamal swallowed and glanced to Ohbo’s position. He was closer to the mausoleum now, so he didn’t have an angle to see on top of its roof.
The zombies remained standing in a ring around the fire pit, watching the flames rise higher, and now they looked less like an ant colony and more like a cult. More than ever, Jamal felt sure that this had something to do with the Lurker in the Void. These things were following its commands, and apparently the Lurker liked to burn things. He remembered that it had been memorial fires that had incited the Lurker in Ohbo’s tale.
A scrabbling on the sand drew Jamal’s attention down to his feet. A camel spider hurried toward him. A nodule of coral rock rose from its back. Jamal quietly squashed the bug with the thick sole of his slipper-boot.
He couldn’t stay here long. The human undead were distracted, but the camel spider had been an excellent reminder that Tallasmanak was teeming with hundreds of little guardians. Eventually one of them would find Ohbo, and it would begin gnawing at him. Then the cameleer would wake up, and Jamal felt certain that he’d start screaming, which would draw in zombies. Sygne would never forgive him if he let Ohbo die like that. Jamal set his jaw and prowled closer, grave-by-grave, to the mausoleum.
***
Something changed in the viscous atmosphere of Sygne’s dream. A slow swirling of warmer currents. She looked away from Jamal and Nemeah, out to the city of Gjuir-Khib where it was sprawled up and down the crags of the Sjayl River Valley. The gloaming light hung thickly over the city, and she felt like she was staring out at a city built on the bottom of the ocean. Gjuir-Khib was illuminated with hundreds of points of light; they sparkled on the roofs of every manor, and on the balconies and the curtain wall of the royal palace. Thunder boomed, far off in the distance, and to Sygne it seemed like the rolling of a faraway tidal wave.
For the first time, Sygne felt the weight of the dreamtime atmosphere settling down upon her. It was a building pressure—the Lurker in the Void spinning itself into this world. She could feel it just out of sight and far, far away—a twisted knot in the thin veil of the firmament. An inverted star that pulsed with a brilliant black energy that Sygne could only call anti-light. It was an infernal darkness that could burn your retinas—in the same way that ice from t
he Standing Sea could burn your finger, simply from its intense cold. Sygne could only watch it from the very edge of her peripheral vision, but even that little splice of the Lurker made her eye sting and her head throb. She turned back to Jamal and Nemeah.
“The Tribute Celebration is starting,” Nemeah said, and to Sygne’s ears there was a rumble of menace in her raspy voice. “Everyone is lighting their luminaries.” She plucked up a candle and used it to light the tiny votive on the railing.
Sygne could hear the flames on the tiny spark of kindling. Her senses were drawn right to it—dangerously close. ‘No! Don’t start that fire!’ She tried to scream these words, but they were lost in the ether. She was like a drowning woman screaming from under the waves.
‘You’re going to draw it here! Can’t you see that?’
Jamal and Nemeah stared into each other’s eyes. They saw nothing else. Then they closed their eyes and kissed. They were oblivious as the golden ember heated the air between them.
‘Jamal! Stop! Look!’
Sygne couldn’t turn her head. A rictus of fear had her locked in place, staring at the flames of the luminary—and at the teenaged lovers locked in a macabre, slow-motion display of affection. Sygne immaterial eyes watered at the searing light of the fire—the sight of Jamal kissing another woman was repulsive to her—but anything was better than glancing at that singularity gathering in the dark. Sygne could feel the pressure of it on the edge of her vision, like a metaphysical stye.
‘It’s here…’
The air lazily flowed past the gazebo, moving down into the valley. Sygne could feel the arc of it, as if the channel of air was one limb of an immense spiral, miles wide. Birds glided past, and she could tell that they were also moving to the contours of that gyre. A massive whirlpool in the dreamtime sky—the center of which was pinioned to a black spot just out of sight.
Sygne remembered this same sort of power radiating from the Dweller Under Dreams. Inevitable and incomprehensible. Flat-out toxic to anything that existed. In reality, in dreams, in memories, in death. The Lurker could touch them all, and spill out the pollutions of the void and spoil them. It was not here to bring good into the world. Or glory. Or light.
