Relics of the Desert Tomb

by James Derry

  It did not breathe, but the aqrabuamelu grated its teeth, which created a painful sound that almost seemed like taunting. Jamal roared back at it. The aqrabuamelu ducked its shoulders, bowing to make way for its tail.

  Sygne cried, “Jamal!” But there was no time.

  Jamal closed his eyes and waited for the deathblow.

  The tail struck his chest with a hollow thump. Jamal opened his eyes timidly, waiting for an immense pain to rush through his body—biological lava flooding through the chambers of his heart. There was nothing. No sting. No stinger.

  Jamal realized that this particular aqrabuamelu was Windsplitter, whose stinger had been ripped off by a mob of zombies. Apparently it hadn’t grown back or reattached after Windsplitter had succumbed to zombification.

  Windsplitter’s corpse raised its tail and considered its stump. Its head was still pressed low to the ground, like a cat hunched over his prey. Jamal snapped at the waist like a trap and caught Windsplitter’s head between his knees. Then he wrenched and pulled until he felt bones pop loose.

  With a twist of his spine, he pulled the aqrabuamelu’s head off of its spindly neck. In shock the aqrabuamelu released him, and Jamal rolled to a safe distance. He drew his sword and crouched there. Windsplitter’s head was still clamped between his knees. The undead-hybrid flailed about wildly, its blackened claws slicing through the air.

  “It… can’t see,” Sygne stepped close to him. “Because you pulled off its head?”

  “Yes,” Jamal said. He swept Sygne behind him with one arm, as the aqrabuamelu charged forward like a furious aurochs. With its claws outstretched it had a reach that was nearly twelve feet wide. Jamal rolled away from its path, taking Sygne with him. With a grunt, he landed against a shoulder of rock. It was a portion of the top side of the Lurker’s coral dome, not quite hidden by a hillock of sand.

  “But that doesn’t make sense… Shouldn’t it die without its head?”

  Jamal shrugged, “It’s magic.”

  Windsplitter’s corpse had charged past them. Now it turned to point itself directly at them again.

  Jamal scrambled to his feet. He held Windsplitter’s head so that it faced the ground. “At the very least, its body shouldn’t be able to see us.”

  Again Windsplitter charged. The multiple joints in its legs clicked faster as it built up speed. Jamal pushed Sygne away to what he hoped would be a safe distance.

  Windsplitter’s corpse abruptly stopped in mid-scuttle and swiveled in a way that would have been impossible for a two-legged assailant. Jamal had been ready to strike and dodge; now he was thrown off balance as he tried to adjust to the aqrabuamelu’s lateral movement. Windsplitter lashed out with one snapping claw—and nearly cut open Jamal’s stomach.

  “Wait,” Sygne cried. “I remember reading something in the Vault.”

  Jamal parried another blow. The headless aqrabuamelu had a rough idea where Jamal was, but its attacks were still wild and unfocused.

  Sygne was spouting on about something, but Jamal couldn’t focus on what she was saying.

  “Scorpions… other senses… sensory organs… find their prey through vibration…”

  Windsplitter’s corpse stabbed one pincer forward, and Jamal barely had time to thrust his armored forearm into the crux of the claw. With that, he stopped the claw’s forward momentum. Or, more accurately, he had slowed it to a crawl. The razor-sharp pincer was moving toward Jamal’s chest, one fraction of an inch at a time.

  Sygne continued, “…not all of its sensory organs are centered in its head!”

  “What’s your point?” Jamal spat. The tip of the aqrabuamelu claw hovered just inches from his chest. “No,” Jamal grumbled to the scorpion-man. “Not your point.”

  “Get away from the thing!” Sygne shouted. “And then stay very still.”

  “Get away? I’m too busy trying not to be killed.”

  The aqrabuamelu released Jamal; then it scuttled backward and unleashed a vicious flurry of snaps and slashes. Jamal rolled backward, batting away the pincers whenever they came close to him.

  Sygne cried, “Throw me the skeleton’s head!” She shook her head and sputtered. “I mean the skull! Throw me the skeleton’s skull!”

  “No!” Jamal rolled under another attack. “You don’t want it! It bites.”

  “Then break it, Jamal!”

  Jamal remembered the chunk of coral butting up from the sand. Windsplitter’s clicking head was still clutched firmly in his left hand. Jamal dodged and cartwheeled and came up into a run. In the corner of his eye he could see that the undead-hybrid had paused. It was tracking his movements. Jamal skidded to a stop on his knees in the sand. He raised the skull over his head and brought it down hard on the limestone. He felt it crack. Its jawbone flew off. The aqrabuamelu rushed him.

  He pounded the skull again. A second time. A third.

  One side of the skull crumpled against the rock. The rest of Windsplitter’s corpse jolted and slumped to the ground in mid-charge. Legs, segmented abdomen, tail—they all rolled together so that it came to rest in a big ball in the sand.

  Sygne trotted to him. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” Jamal exhaled heavily and smiled at Sygne. “I see what you were thinking. The thing moves with imaginary muscles, so why not bash in its imaginary brains?” Jamal held up the cracked skull.

  Sygne shrugged. “It was using some sort of magical nervous system to move. It made sense the source of that magic would be in the same place where its brain used to be.”

  Jamal stood straight and puffed out his chest. “Whoa. An aqrabuamelu and a zombie. It’s like I spanned the Monster Slayer’s Checklist, A-to-Z, all in one blow.”

  “Congratulations,” Sygne said flatly.

  They found the aqrabuamelu’s tracks leading downhill to the hole that Ohbo had created in the dome of Tallasmanak. Apparently, Windsplitter’s remains had climbed up the inside of the dome and come through the hole in an attempt to bring Jamal and Sygne back to the necropolis.

  Sygne noted, “It’s a good thing that the human zombies can’t climb out of there.”

  Jamal said, “Let’s fill in this hole so that nothing can climb out.”

  16 – The Passage

  They filled the hole that Ohbo had made in the dome of Tallasmanak, but besides that they found no other holes that night. In the morning, Sygne felt certain that the smell of smoke had diminished over the entire swell of desert land.

  Jamal walked past and patted her on the shoulder. “Maybe the you-know-what will stay buried this time.”

  Sygne nodded slowly. “At least for a while.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Sygne showed him a small pouch filled with ashes and two crusty lumps of rock. She said, “These are specimens of coral from the aqrabuamelu’s exoskeleton.” She showed Jamal the nodules on her own forearm, which were already beginning to wither and flake away. “I might add my own growths to the bag, once I can scrape them off.”

  Jamal’s upper lip curled. “Ew.”

  She tucked the pouch into her pocket book, next to her Dweller’s quill. “I know. I’m disturbed by it too, but these are important specimens, Jamal. You can’t disagree with that.”

  “Are they specimens?” Jamal asked. “Or are they relics in a witchdoctor’s spell book?”

  Sygne frowned. She hadn’t slept a wink, and her head felt hollow—easily filled by a sudden rush of frustration and anger. “Do you remember what Princess Ilona said? If someone could find all three Ancient Ones and reunite them… Then who knows what they could do? Unseat the Fabled Pantheon? Probably get rid of all of these corrupt ‘higher powers’ that are ruining the world.”

  She thought she saw Jamal shudder.

  “You sound like…” Jamal stopped himself before he could say more.

  “Sound like who?” Sygne asked. The tone of Jamal’s voice had shaken her out of her anger. She could see that Jamal didn’t want t
o answer, so she didn’t push him. She had her own ideas. Did she sound like a militant anti-theist, trying to force her (non)beliefs on everyone else? Or did she sound like a power-hungry mortal dabbling in hurtful magics—like Sessuk had done? She probably sounded a bit like both. She started, “Jamal, I—”

  “Help!” Ohbo called from the far side of the camp. He stumbled awkwardly around the large splint that Sygne had constructed around his leg. “Come see this!”

  “Ohbo! Stay there!” Jamal shouted. “What is it?”

  He held out a slim object. “I found it in the aqrabuamelu’s bag!” He threw the thing down onto the sand. “I should have checked it earlier.”

  Sygne could see now that it was a wooden totem, finely crafted, but unpainted. It was lying facedown in the sand.

  Ohbo wailed, “We slept with it in our midst… all night!”

  “It’s a woman.” Sygne started to nudge the statuette with her foot.

  “No!” Ohbo and Jamal shouted.

  “It’s Bliss,” Jamal said. “I’d recognize that backside anywhere.”

  They all took a step back.

  Sygne ran her hand through her hair. “If the Issulthraqi gods can see and speak through their graven images, then the aqrabuamelus must have been using this to communicate with her.”

  “We should smash it,” Ohbo rasped. “She could be listening to us right now.”

  Sygne felt even more tired than she had before. In a benumbed voice, she asked, “Maybe we should try to speak to her.”

  Jamal was shocked. “What?”

  Ohbo moaned, “Why are the beautiful ones always crazy?”

  Sygne settled onto her knees and flipped the totem over. She carefully brushed sand from its face; then she looked imploringly to Jamal. “The Pantheon is afraid of the Firstspawn. In this place… I think we could have the upper hand.” Then she turned back to the statuette and said, “Bliss, we call to thee—”

  Jamal’s sword slashed straight down and split the totem in half. A few more equally brutal chops, and the totem had been reduced to a handful of splintered pieces.

  “We bury it,” he said.

  Sygne spotted a piece of wood that showed part of the goddess’s face. Bliss’ right eye and right ear. Before Jamal could scoop it up, she bent close and asked, “Why won’t you leave us alone?”

  There was no answer except the wind.

  ***

  Ohbo led them directly east, across the Cursed Quarter, in a straight line for Albatherra.

  “If we’re lucky,” he said, “we’ll meet the Bedotan where the Slash flattens into floodplains. I think we can be there in three days.”

  Three more days in the midst of the shifting sands. Sygne forced a smile on her face. Ohbo deserved to be happy, after everything they had put him through. To him, the desert felt empty and safe. But Sygne did not feel safe. Her memories of the Lurker were still lingering. There was something else there as well—a looming presence that she felt mostly in her chest. She had to sit up straight in her saddle to manage the ache of it—to keep it from settling on her lower organs.

  They rode on, through empty leagues of orange land and blue sky. The wind surged in gusts that kicked up stinging sand. It ruffled Chloe’s hair and knocked loose flecks of spittle onto Sygne’s face.

  The wind grew stronger and more constant as night approached. Ohbo clucked as they erected his silken tent liner, in lieu of a real tent. “See how the fabric is so much thinner—how it bows itself to the wind? I was a fool to buy this.” He eyed Sygne accusingly.

  She forced her tired face into a grin. “And to let me convince you to leave your tent back in Tallasmanak?”

  He chuckled back at her. “I could never stay mad at you.”

  But Ohbo was right. The tent liner was a horrible shelter on the windy night. At any moment Sygne thought the roaring onslaught of wind might catch the silken fabric and rip it into the air, like the luminary that Jamal and Nemeah had toyed with in the Gjuiran aviary.

  Sygne had these thoughts in her head when she drifted off to sleep, so it probably wasn’t surprising when she dreamed of Jamal and Nemeah alone in the grasslands between Gjuir-Khib and the rest of the Golden Empires. Her dream moved fast now; the subaqueous lethargy that had followed the Lurker in the Void was gone. She remained separated from Jamal’s point of view—outside of his head and floating near the couple like a phantasmic voyeur. Perhaps that was a permanent aftereffect of the Lurker’s influence mixing with the Dweller’s. She saw Jamal and Nemeah sweating under the noonday sun, salt drying to the creases of their skin. Their nights were milder and sweeter, and they spent them in a tent that was just as impractically silken as Ohbo’s. The fabrics writhed around them, and they intertwined their bodies together for warmth.

  In the morning Sygne woke with a sore jaw. Her molars were aching from a night’s worth of grinding together. At least the rest of her body felt somewhat rested. She hunched in a spot beside the tent and slowly chewed a breakfast of flatbread and date skins. The wind rushed at her, kicking up a prickle of sand across her food.

  Jamal asked her, “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Hmmm?” Sygne couldn’t meet his eyes. “Oh. Yes. I’m just vexed by this wind.”

  “It’s strong. Have you noticed the winds are blowing from the southeast? From the direction of Issulthraq.”

  Sygne wanted to scoff, but she stopped herself. A sort of flat darkness had settled over the southern brim of the desert. A heavy grayness, almost like a wall.

  She said, “Let’s help Ohbo get the camels ready.”

  ***

  It was a long day, and at night, Sygne dreamed again of Jamal and Nemeah in the savanna.

  Their cart rolled over a ridge, and Nemeah pointed to a plume of dust in the distance behind them.

  “Trackers from the city,” she said.

  They changed course and came to a dusty caravansary clustered around a springtime creek. There were over four-dozen tents gathered there. Stares followed them from every direction, and Nemeah insisted on buying supplies and getting out of sight as soon as possible.

  “We should stop and eat a proper meal,” Jamal said.

  “No. We should avoid being seen.”

  Jamal grunted. “But it’s been five days since we’ve had fresh food.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Nemeah put her hand to her stomach.

  Jamal leaned close and put his hand over hers. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  A woman in a black shawl strolled close, holding a baked-clay platter filled with an assortment of figs. The only part of her that was visible were her deep brown eyes gazing intently from above her veil. “Here. Take this food. You are guests, and guests do not go hungry here.”

  Sygne thought she recognized the matron’s voice.

  ‘Bliss?’

  The veiled woman turned to Sygne and stared right at her. “I am here,” Bliss said. “Everywhere and everlasting.”

  ‘It can’t be… You’re not…’

  “When love takes bloom, I am there. When love dies, I am there as well.”

  ‘You made…’ Sygne stared hard at Jamal and Nemeah. They were graciously eating figs. They didn’t seem to notice that their benefactor had turned to talk with an invisible woman. Sygne wondered: What was she seeing? Had Bliss truly been there when Jamal and Nemeah fled Gjuir-Khib? Or was she simply insinuating herself into Sygne’s dream now?

  She decided to stand firm. ‘You are not here. And you don’t scare me.’

  The woman’s eyes changed color, flashing brilliant green. For a moment Sygne thought she saw fear there at the mention of a second Ancient One. But in the next instant, Bliss growled. “I will teach you to fear, stupid mortal. I have been scorned, and you know what they say…”

  With that, Bliss held up her platter of figs, and Sygne’s perceptions were sucked downward into the fruit, past the most detailed level of the Academy’s newest magnifying tubes. Sh
e saw germs as large as monsters, flailing with alien appendages and squirming with a sort of absent-minded malignancy. She couldn’t help thinking of the Ancient Ones.

  Then she was back in her normal frame of reference, watching the delicate Lady Nemeah greedily devouring her figs.

  “I don’t have to tell you what’s next, do I?”

  Sygne knew what happened to travelers who ate poorly cleaned foods in foreign lands. She’d seen far too many people fall victim to dysentery. Some of them ended up dead—dried out and twisted like a well-wrung rag.

  Was this how it ended? Was Nemeah about to die?

  ***

  The next day the southern sky looked even darker. Sygne didn’t mention that Bliss had visited her dream, but she felt the need to ask Jamal about Lady Nemeah. What had happened to her? Before she could, Ohbo hobbled up to her with a wretched look on his face.

  “I’m worried about the sky over there,” he said. “We should be turning southeasterly now, but that would bring us closer…” He waved vaguely at the darkness that had settled on the southern horizon.

  “Why do we need to head southeast? Isn’t Albatherra directly east?”

  “Yes, but traveling straight toward it will lead us to the deepest reaches of the Slash. It’s hundreds of feet deep, no way to cross it. Unless you have wings.”

  Sygne examined the strange bruised color of the sky. The edge of it had turned an unseemly brownish violet, and that violet flared to the raw pink color of an infection where it touched the horizon. “It’s getting uglier, but at least the storm isn’t getting closer. Maybe by tomorrow—”

  “It is moving though,” Ohbo said. “Back and forth. It reminds me…” He put a hand over his mouth and shook his head.

  “What?”

  “Do you know there are rogue lions who stalk the edges of the desert? In the western Tawr. They rove about, pacing the same stretch of land, waiting for the right kind of prey… That’s what that storm is doing, it’s roving about, east and west.”

  “So you’re saying that’s a rogue storm.”

  “I hope it’s just a storm,” the cameleer said. “And I hope it doesn’t decide to come hunting on our side of the desert.”