“Who does this sigil belong to?” I asked, a slowly mounting sense of dread building somewhere in my gut.
“An ancient creature,” my herald began quietly, “who until now was never confirmed as a proper ‘god’ in the universally accepted meaning of the word. It represented retribution and carnage,” he explained levelly, “but never developed a recorded following of any kind. In fact, if I remember correctly, this creature quickly slew any who actively worshipped it.”
My eyebrows went up. I didn’t like ‘retribution’ and ‘carnage’ in the same sentence when describing a foe I would inevitably come face-to-face with.
“Does it have a name?” I asked.
Pi’Vari chuckled somewhat ominously before answering, “They called it ‘The Iron Butcher’.”
Needless to say, that didn’t help alleviate the mounting dread I felt. Then another thought burst into my mind, and I could barely suppress a shiver. “I don’t think this is a museum, Pi’Vari,” I said softly as a lump formed in my throat.
He turned to me, eyes wide with incredulity. “Oh,” he challenged, “and what do you believe it is, Jezran?”
I looked around the cavern slowly, taking in the whole scene before answering. “I think it’s a trophy room.”
Chapter X: Formal Introductions
We catalogued the images of the Colossus and this ‘Iron Butcher’ as thoroughly as we could, and when our subsequent search of the cavern revealed nothing of further interest—including no additional exits—I decided we should go back and check the chamber containing the graves and the obelisks.
“I wonder if you can activate the obelisks, Master?” said Aemir as he walked alongside me.
I really didn’t know if I could. “That depends,” I replied after a moment’s consideration, “mostly on whether or not I can discern where their partners are located. If I can do that, then I’m guessing I can. But the bigger problem is whether or not I can reinforce the structure of the damaged transmitting obelisk long enough to achieve transport.”
“You are a mighty wizard, Master Jezran,” he said reassuringly, “I have no doubt you can do as you must.”
I laughed in spite of my best effort to avoid doing so. “For the nineteenth time, Aemir: I am not a Master,” I corrected him. “And I am not as mighty as you suggest. I’ve never attempted anything even remotely like what you’re suggesting, but as usual it appears we are out of options.”
Aemir shook his head. “Your modesty does you no credit, Master,” he growled, which was an unusual display coming from the normally mild-mannered Desert Knight. “You have never failed to accomplish that which was required, including finding a cure for my previous ailment.”
Aemir had been assigned to House Wiegraf generally before I had included him in my entourage. He had been suffering from a disease which had already begun to cost him a measure of his physical mobility, and within a few years’ time he would have become bedridden before finally succumbing to the insidious disease.
Through a series of maneuvers (none of which were originally my own idea, if I’m perfectly honest) I had cured him of this ailment, and he had taken it upon himself to swear an Oath of Brotherhood with me. Ever since then he had traveled as my Champion, averting unnecessary conflicts—or taking them out head-first—before they could grow beyond our ability to deal with.
“Aemir is correct, Jezran,” agreed Pi’Vari from behind me, “you have always been able to do what was needed when that need arises. Some might call it uncanny, in fact,” he said blithely.
“A great philosopher once said ‘I’d rather be lucky than good,’” I retorted. “I guess I subscribe to his way of thinking.”
Pi’Vari didn’t have an immediate reply, so we continued more or less silently until we were back in the room containing the obelisks.
I went about the task of assessing the transmitting obelisk using my Third Eye spell. I didn’t know what to check specifically, since I was no expert in teleportation or any other form of spatial manipulation, but the enchantments within the ancient pillar appeared to be intact. Its physical form was more badly damaged than I had originally suspected, but it did look like I could coax a final activation out of it if I was careful.
I placed my hand on its surface and could feel that its surface was slightly warmer than it should have been, which was another good sign. I closed my eyes and allowed a spark of energy to flow from myself and into the structures within the obelisk, and I was rewarded with a small flash as the spells within the device eagerly drank up the morsel of energy.
“Do you have any knowledge which might be useful here, Pi’Vari?” I asked hopefully.
My herald shook his head. “I fear my own expertise concerning complex magical apparatuses is extremely limited. I generally agree that it should, in its current state, be able to discharge its duties one more time—but it will almost certainly be destroyed in the process.”
It wasn’t what I had hoped for, but it was something. “How bad will it be if it does get destroyed?” I asked.
Pi’Vari’s eyes looked up, dancing back and forth as he was apparently performing some calculations. “Depending of course on the distance it is designed to cover, and the amount of extra energy you provide it above and beyond what it actually needs to fulfill its function…it could be anything from a shockwave which would knock all of us unconscious to something capable of reducing this entire chamber to rubble.” He shrugged casually, “It is impossible to say until you successfully activate it.”
“Why not attempt to repair the stone itself?” queried Aemir. “Might that improve our chances?”
Pi’Vari shook his head. “Modifying the structure in any way is likely more dangerous than attempting to activate it in its current state,” he explained. “All things are designed to decay in a predictable fashion, and if we interrupt that cycle the results could be catastrophic.”
I nodded. “Everything dies—including magic.”
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It wasn’t a sensation which came on me naturally, or without meaning, and I had learned to trust this sense since arriving in my new world. I then noticed that the very top of the undamaged, receiving obelisk was utterly black and featureless. It was obvious that someone had activated it somehow.
“Something’s coming!” I snapped, and we collectively ran down the steps of the dais containing the obelisks, with Aemir and Dancer taking up positions at the base of the steps while Pi’Vari and I stood behind them, with our backs to the tunnel leading back out to the surface.
There was a low-pitched droning, which was quiet at first but consistently grew in volume as vibrations began to shake dust from the alcoves. There was also a rhythmic noise which I couldn’t quite place at first.
“The bones move,” growled Dancer, and I looked to see that some of the skeletons in the alcoves were indeed moving. Their bony hands were gripping weapons, and they slowly shuffled out of their resting places en masse.
“Dancer, deal with them,” I barked. “Aemir, keep your eyes on the dais; I’m expecting more than a few old bones.”
Dancer broke away from our formation in a sprint and leapt into a nearby alcove, where a skeleton had almost completely extricated itself from its grave. He drove his spear into its upper chest, an act which was accompanied by a flash of orange light and kicked its head as he pivoted his weight around the shaft of the spear, which was buried in the corpse’s ancient metal armor. The skeleton’s head flew off into the alcove along with its sword arm, and Dancer removed his spear in a fluid motion as he jumped to an alcove above, where another skeleton was almost out of its resting place.
The droning sound grew and the deep, rhythmic noise accompanying it seemed to raise in pitch and volume, bringing its own vibrations to the chamber. The rhythm sounded familiar for some reason, but I still couldn’t put my finger on it just then.
I took out the small, metal, disc-shaped Spell Key and affixed it to my hand. I had used some of my ene
rgy already, but I was still fairly certain I could get at least half a dozen shots out of the thing if it came to that—which I suspected it shortly would.
Puzzlingly, the obelisk’s tip returned to its normal color and the droning sound ceased. But that rhythmic, pulsing sound persisted and continued to gain volume.
Dancer dispatched his second foe and leapt into a third alcove, this one even higher than the previous two. He was already almost fifteen feet above us, and only now had the first of the skeletons gotten their feet under them and started moving jerkily towards us. It was obvious that his acrobatics weren’t possible without ignoring certain laws of physics, and I knew it was more likely than not that his enchanted spear was the source of his abilities.
A quick head count put the skeletons at about twenty in total, which wasn’t in itself all that concerning if they were as easy to deal with as Dancer had shown. He did have an old, enchanted spear to help him which was easily the most powerful weapon either he or Aemir had. Aemir’s scimitar was laced with mythicite, so it would allow him to damage simple creations like these but likely would prove useless against anything stronger.
Pi’Vari had retrieved a small pouch from his belt and I gave him a stern look as I shook my head. I recognized the pouch, and I didn’t want him to use its contents unless it was absolutely necessary, especially in a confined space like this.
Dancer jumped from his perch and landed atop a pair of skeletons, the first of which collapsed into a pile of bones under his spear’s impact in another flash of orange light. I hadn’t seen his weapon flash like that before, and I made a mental note to investigate it later.
The second skeleton kept its feet and brought its sword around in a clumsy, overhand blow, which Dancer easily avoided by rolling between its legs. The ancient, rusty sword struck the stone with a clang, and in the next moment Dancer drove his spear through the corpse’s back and there was another orange flash accompanied by a soft popping sound. The bones fell to the ground in a formless pile recognizable as human only by the armor.
The rhythmic sound was no longer pulsing, but instead it had become a kind of screeching and I had a moment of foggy recollection—like remembering something from childhood that I just couldn’t identify.
Slowly, the tunnel leading toward the chamber of domes began to deform and waver, like those cheap special effects I remembered seeing in made-for-tv science fiction movies. The tunnel grew, and grew, and grew until it was at least fifteen feet across, which was fully twice its original diameter. Strangely enough, none of the rest of the room seemed affected, which I knew was impossible but then I also knew that many of the things I had experienced since coming here were equally ‘impossible.’
Deep in the tunnel I could see a shape begin to emerge, and my heart stopped. It literally stopped, and I knew this because my heart had been pounding in my ears until that moment and then there was nothing.
The massive object—which I now knew was a vehicle—came hurtling toward us accompanied by the rhythmic, screeching, pulsing sound which was finally accompanied by another sound; the haunted scream of a whistle, like you would expect from an old steam train. The rhythmic sound had been a screaming, scraping version of the familiar ‘chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug-a’ noise old trains made. Steam trains had been part of my summer entertainment when I was younger, and what was coming out of the tunnel was definitely a steam train.
At least, it resembled one in the vaguest sense. There was the familiar, circular grill, a cowcatcher, and a steam stack on the front of the engine. But this was a train from someone’s nightmares, as its entire surface was pitted and seemed to be made almost entirely of rust. Its cowcatcher was made of jagged, rusty blades and the circular grill looked like some kind of hungry maw with hundreds of foot-long teeth inside. Its smokestack looked like a giant fang erupting from the front of the engine, like a hellish rhinoceros’ tusk.
The train crashed into the room, shaking the entire chamber and Dancer had to jump to get clear of its path. The squeal of the engine’s brakes was overpowering, but it wasn’t just the sound of brakes on iron; there were screams buried somewhere inside the hellish noises coming from the nightmare vehicle. As it entered the chamber, a deep, purple light emanated from underneath the train’s frame like the ground effects packages all those wannabe pimp-mobiles had in high school.
The body of the locomotive ran along the nearest wall, crashing into the stone alcoves and pulverizing them as it as it sideswiped them. There was at least one car attached to the monstrous vehicle, and only a fraction of that car emerged into the room as the front of the train crashed headlong into the wall opposite its entry point.
Half of the skeletons Dancer was so efficiently dealing with were crushed under the engine’s weight, and only then did my heart resume its beating—this time at a far more frenetic pace.
Dancer wasn’t fazed by the entry of this horrifying contraption, and he went about the task of keeping the remaining skeletons away from us. But this time he did his work exclusively from the ground instead of climbing the walls for another of his patented aerial attacks. Courage was something the little man could never be accused of lacking.
“What in the name of all the gods is that?” whispered Aemir, his voice quavering slightly.
With the trailing car only emerging a few feet into the chamber, the doorway to the car behind the engine opened like an airplane door: hinged on the bottom. And just like an airplane ramp, it had steps carved into the inside surface. It crashed into the stone with a thunk and I could hear chains clinking inside the car itself, accompanied by muffled screaming.
Then it appeared at the doorway to the car and I knew exactly who—or what—I was looking at, even though I’d never seen anything like it before.
The figure was fully seven feet tall and covered in black armor of impossible geometry, which seemed to writhe and shift rhythmically in ways that strained my sanity. The surface of its armor was pitted with rust pockets, bleeding streaks of dark red all along its many surfaces. Its head was encased in a helmet which was like the old jousters would use: a nearly flat top with the only opening being a narrow slit between the joint of the cap plate and the face guard.
It gripped a two foot long, barbed hook in its left hand like those used for moving hay bales but much more vicious looking, with a blade protruding opposite the wielder’s thumb. In its right hand it held a three foot long, nearly foot wide blade which looked like nothing so much as a meat cleaver. The weapon had a large, triangular notch chipped out of its leading edge nearly a third of the way back from the tip. Its torso was covered with an apron so horribly stained that it almost appeared to be black, and I fully understood in that moment why people had dubbed this horrific creature the ‘Iron Butcher.’
The juggernaut turned its head toward us slowly, and I was almost overcome with panic. This thing was so terrifying that it probably wouldn’t have been allowed in a movie sanctioned by the MPAA, but here I was mere seconds away from a battle to the death with it. Parts of its spiked, bladed armor appeared to be composed of razor wire like what you see on top of prison walls, and that wire criss-crossed all along the surface of the armor like blades of a chainsaw, speeding up and slowing down with the same rhythm as the rest of the armor’s almost respiratory writhing.
Aemir was frozen stiff with his blade gripped tightly, and Pi’Vari wasn’t doing much better as he had dropped the pouch he had been clutching, his eyes wide with terror. Dancer’s back was mostly to the thing, but it was clear that even he had taken notice of this monstrosity as his usual panache was completely missing—but he somehow kept fighting through the suffocating fear which had filled the chamber.
Clearly, the Iron Butcher had exerted some sort of supernatural power to affect my comrades in such a way, and there was no certainty that I would be able to resist this effect indefinitely.
In what was purely a reaction without forethought of any kind, I reached deep within my mind and found a spell—or, to be m
ore precise, I found a name. Names and magic have apparently always been inexorably intertwined, and sometimes the most dangerous and powerful spells are those composed of nothing but a spoken name.
I had apparently decided somewhere deep within my subconscious mind—and against my own better judgment—that it was time to speak such a name.
“Co’Zar’I’Us!” I hissed, and the world went black.
Chapter XI: Negotiations
I was falling in every direction at the same time as powerful winds whipping across my naked skin with such fury that I was certain I would be torn apart in mere seconds, but somehow I wasn’t. I kept falling until I could finally feel light shining on my skin. I couldn’t see it because my eyes were too tightly shut, in order to protect them from the harsh, biting wind, but I knew the light was there.
Then, suddenly, the wind stopped and I was lying on a soft surface. I didn’t dare to look in case it was only a trick, but after a few seconds I took a chance and opened my eyes.
I found myself lying on what might have been a pile of cotton if I hadn’t known any better, but having already visited this place once before I knew that I was improbably lying on top of a cloud. There was even sunlight, as the world’s greenish orb was clearly visible through the dense nimbus clouds above me. I looked around and stood slowly, momentarily uncertain about the feasibility of standing on top of a cloud, but that particular bit of insanity wasn’t the worst of my problems.
Standing before me—or I should probably say hovering before me—was a vaguely humanoid cloud with perfectly defined facial features.
“You call my name,” its voice whooshed around me, and my unclothed body was battered by the blast of cold moisture which accompanied the sound. “Have you agreed to my price, or do you wish to discover firsthand the full meaning of the words ‘eternal torment’?” it asked in much the way a cat might while toying with a mouse.
Revelation (Seeds of Humanity: The Cobalt Heresy) Page 11
