by Toby Bennett
Grunting with the effort and pain, he regains his feet and draws his pistol.
“Stay back, Rugan!”
“You think that is any threat to me?”
Nathaniel lets the lich take two steps towards him before hammering him back with a succession of shots.
“Only two more bullets left in that gun and then what will you do?” The lich mocks. Nathanial’s eyes desperately scan the yellowed scroll in his other hand.
“Why couldn’t you just have died the first time?” Nathaniel asks, firing his last rounds in a desperate attempt to force the lich further back and at the same time murmuring the command to call his master’s construct back to him. The lich’s body rocks with the impact but the predatory expression on its ruined face never changes, not even when nearly eight foot of steel and undead flesh rears behind it and brings its whirring blades down into the lich’s nerveless flesh.
Rugan feels almost nothing as his shoulder and the leftside of his rib cage are sheered off to fall into the sand, there is hardly even any blood, the days in the desert have left him dry and all but cured. There is a strange sensation of his awareness bridging the gap between his arm and the rest of him and then the whip like limbs strike again, sending his head flying into the air. Rugan has little time to dwell on this new development, however, because he is already using his severed arm to claw at the Pardoner’s leg. Nathaniel’s triumph turns to disgust as he feels the hand on his ankle, a simple kick frees him from the assault but to his horror, the hand is but the first of many, from all corners of the dust ruins the dissected bodies of the fallen have responded to the lich’s call. Too late the Pardoner looks for his horse but it has already bolted and fallen victim to the maddened machine that can do nothing to hold back the wave of undead flesh bearing down its controller through shear irresistible weight. The hands and arms of more than a hundred men drag on Nathaniel’s fine clothes, using the strong fabrics to pull him down where each and every part of the fallen men of Silversnow capable of moving under their own power, scrabble to hold him down. Nathaniel dies with his mouth full of sandy fingers, unable even to scream, no coroner could have told you if it was his lungs or heart that ruptured first; though a tracker would have told you that, after he died, the Pardoner rose on stiff legs and picked up two things from the dust. Something the size of a man’s head and an old piece of parchment, a few small fragments of which tumbled through the dead man’s nerveless fingers; with these two items in either hand Nathaniel Teneichi crosses towards the doors in the side of the mountain, the silver construct in tow.
*
The tunnel snakes down, plunging into the ancient complex. As the small party follows the pulsing lights emanating from strips on either side of the passage floor, the rough grit and sand that spilled in when they entered is replaced by the fine powder of dust laid down over long years. At regular intervals there are side turns and strange rooms, some sealed by doors, others gaping dark and empty, thick with dust and the smell of stale air. As they reach deeper into the complex, only the main corridor provides any light and there is no temptation to deviate from it. In the shadows of one of the open doorways, Lillian is sure that she can see the ivory white of old bone. The thought that people might have lived here, even become trapped here in these strange smooth corridors, was quickly followed for her by the thought that here might yet be survivours or worse ghosts, still prowling the black passages that twisted, who knows how far away from the dim light. She cannot help but think back to her time beneath the earth in Pellan’s Tunnels and they seemed fresh by comparison to this dusty airless place, where footsteps echo and nothing moves but the light flowing like blood down the last living vein, in a long fallen body. They follow that vein in silence until they come to the pulsing heart of that forgotten place.
Kalip might have made something of the lights winking all around them, but to Leedon in his weakened state, slumped on the dusty floor at the back of the group, this did indeed seem like a sky full of stars winking high above him. Could it be that the Heavens were laid out here? He narrows his swollen eyes and tries to focus on finding a pattern in the flashing luminescence. Beneath the dust of years, metal still gleams silver and with a groan a panel at the other end of the room, slides back to reveal the indent of a human hand in the silver metal of the wall. Yorick gives Lillian a nod and the girl advances towards the wall with her hand outstretched. Leedon gasps at the thought of such presumption, if the Gate to Heaven lay somewhere beyond the wall were any of them worthy to meddle with it? He begins to struggle to his feet, his cracked lips parting in a strangled protest, but before he can make himself heard or Lillian reaches her goal the General is thrown forward by a sudden impact.
A thousand pounds of steel and undead flesh descend upon the General and the mutant standing next to him, only the limpness of his body prevents Angus from being snapped in half, like Aden, by the impact of the charging automation, which ploughs through the men waiting behind Lillian, as if they were insects. Warm blood spatters over the General’s face, brining a strange unholy clarity. Blinking through the red haze Leedon looks up at the slack jawed face of his Chief Pardoner, dangling from Nathaniel’s left hand is the severed head of his old mentor. Rugan spares him a grin before barking an order that the lack of lungs or vocal chords turns into the sharp clicking of enamel on enamel. The corpse holding him relays its master’s orders, though and the silver monster lunges for the screaming baron’s daughter at the other end of the room.
Chapter 18:
“Salvation”
In the flashing light of the dust filled room the silver monster moves like a dancer in a strobe, so fast that no normal eye could follow its movements. It throws aside the men in its path as if they weigh nothing at all and bears down on the target its new master has chosen. Lillian looks about desperately for even a momentary escape but apart from a few upended trolleys and bits of metal littering the floor, the room is empty. There seems no way that she can slow her attacker’s charge, or avoid the whip-like limbs. She gets a brief glimpse of the whirring appendages, still dark with drying blood as they whip towards her then she closes her eyes resigning herself to what must follow.
Something knocks her back, driving her to the ground but instead of the pain she was expecting there is a shriek of protesting metal as Samuel Blake, his eyes blazing with a light of their own, pushes Lillian aside and thrusts one of the discarded metal trolleys into the path of the descending metal tendrils. The automation repeats its frenzied attack, raising sparks from the old metal, which never having been meant to withstand such impacts, begins to buckle.
“Move!” Blake yells, but Lillian finds her limbs unable to function, she is shaking so hard that it is a struggle to get her legs underneath her, let alone move under her own power.
Just a few hundred meters away Aden is trying to do the same thing, but his legs will not respond either, it is not pain or panic that robs him of the ability to rise but a numbness that spreads beyond a single point of pain in his injured back. He chokes spitting out a mouthful of blood, unable to lift himself from the floor, he has no choice but to slump against the wall behind him and try to position his body so that the weight doesn’t force his broken rib any deeper into his lung. Resigned to his impotence, Aden looks back to the doorway where a man in a torn and bloodied Pardoner’s robe stands pale and bloodless as death, relaying the words of a smirking severed head.
“You may try to thwart me all you want, Captain,” Rugan mouths, his words taken up by the corpse holding him, “but you only waste your time.”
Blake, his mouth set in a snarl of inhuman rage and determination does not answer but twists the tortured metal frame in a blur of motion, so that he just manages to intercept another lightning blow.
“The girl must die! You have come so close to your precious Gate that I think you can see that there is no other option. I would be the first to admit that it did not have to be like this, but as you can see, I have paid my own price for my misc
alculation. I know how you fear death, Captain but take some comfort in the fact that you will be getting the better part of this deal.”
At an unspoken command the corpse of Nathaniel Tenichi raises the old scroll in his other hand so that his master can review the various instructions that the Tinker had so thoughtfully provided him with, then almost as soon as he hears the gun shots, Geoffrey Rugan’s world goes black. Across the room Aden slumps back against the cold wall, allowing his smoking pistols to fall from his hands. The third eye slowly closing in the middle of his forehead marks with grim satisfaction, that both bullets had found their mark, dead centre of the litch’s eyes.
There is no pain to prompt the soundless screams that, burst from Rugan’s mouth and find an echo in the bellows of the zombie carrying him. What little sanity had still lingered in the lich’s mind melts before a tide of darkness, as his last link to the living world is severed. Left aimless by its master’s plunge into madness the corpse of the Chief Pardoner allows the head to fall from its hand and begins to slowly meander off into one of the darkened corridors of the complex. Trapped in his own private cage of flesh and bone Rugan feels himself hit the dusty floor and roll, there is the dryness of the dust against his moistureless skin, the cold of the metal floor, other than that all there is left to him is waiting to rot.
Blake has no time to savour his enemy’s fate, without new instructions the silver monstrosity in front of him is intent as ever on breaking down his defense and reaching the girl behind him. Sparks flash from another impact then another as Blake struggles to bring the twisted hunk of metal in his hand on line for yet another parry. The weight of the mangled trolley and the effort of fending off the heavy blows are causing his arms to shake with fatigue but he maintains his defense, doggedly refusing to relinquish his last chance at salvation. Suddenly the weight lessens and the metal parts in his hand, a silver tendril, its momentum only partially diminished by the broken trolley lashes down tearing into the metal links sown into his long coat and throwing him backwards into the erratically flickering lights that flash on the wall behind.
Her protector gone, Lillian is left prone and helpless as her attacker rears over her, there is no way that she can replicate Blake’s speed or strength and nothing with which to divert the thing’s frenzied attacks with if she could. The first silver whip falls and somehow, she manages to move her legs in time, so that instead of slicing her in half the blow leaves a deep dent in the floor and causes a cloud of old, sharp-smelling dust to bloom. Lillian strains to see through the darkness and the dust, waiting for the next blow to fall but instead, she sees Angus Leedon throwing himself against the silver side of the monster and thrusting his sabre between two of the articulated plates that make up the construct’s over long torso. Split between the rage of the Strigoi trapped within the armour and the single mindedness of the machine, the automation pauses for a fraction of a second and that is all the half delirious General has been hoping for. Before any one else can act, he scoops up the orange covered book and bolts with his last remaining strength into the darkness. He does not need to look back to confirm his suspicion that the silver monster is following him, all that matters now it getting the demonic book away from the Gate. If Hell itself had been chasing him, he would have done nothing differently; the child had been a pawn like him, all of them manipulated by the foul undead that still hid behind his Crusade. If there is still a horse outside, something to drink, if I live I will redouble my efforts he promises himself, forcing his dying body back up the red lit steel artery that leads to the surface. If I can make it, the General promises himself, as the sound of the automation’s pounding legs grows louder behind him.
“General! Aden?” Yorick calls out into the dim corridor before making his way over to the mutant’s crumpled body and feeling for a pulse.
“No!” the dwarf mutters then more loudly. “No! Not so close! she’s won again!”
Before either Blake or Lillian can recover themselves enough to ask what that cryptic statement means, Yorick begins to become transparent, his form seeming to come apart, mingling and falling with the dust still swirling in the air.
“I am sorry, Samuel,” the dwarf says in a voice no louder than a whisper, “I will try again.”
The aftermath of the chaotic seconds spent struggling for survival is like the exhalation of a long held breath. The silence that has ruled the long forgotten passage ways rolls back, interrupted only by the breathing of the last two living people in the musty ruin. The dust settles slowly on the two survivours, who still sit staring in disbelief at the space that Yorick had occupied only seconds before.
“What now?” Lillian asks at last, at the sound of her voice the severed head at the room’s entrance begins to work its jaw in a vain effort to make itself understood.
“Nothing has changed, we still seek the Gate.”
“And what makes you think I ever wanted to find it?”
“If you are grateful for the many times I have saved your life, then you will help me find it.”
“And then what? You expect me to just wander back across the desert on my own?”
“I have come this far, Lillian I will not go back again! Now if you do not want to go on with me then you must indeed make your own way back but you must help me before you do.”
“Why should I? Because you saved my life? I don’t think it would have been in danger if it weren’t for this mad quest of yours.”
“You know that isn’t true, you are part of this.”
“Which only makes it worse, how strange do you think it feels to find your name in a book that’s hundreds of years old, to be able to open doors in this place?”
“We all have our crosses to bear, Lillian. I have lived a long time and done things I shudder to recall, I have done them all in the name of salvation, in the hope of finding this Gate and the redemption that I can find nowhere else.”
“And what if it isn’t here? What if this has all been for nothing?”
The Pilgrim stares into the shadows, his eyes that had burned in the half light now look like pools of tar, his face almost as drawn as the murmuring head of the confessor.
“Then Lillian I am more damned than you can know.”
“I don’t even know how to open the door, Angus took the book.”
“I think you know how to go about trying,” Blake says, looking pointedly at the indent of a hand in the still open panel.
“Alright, but it won’t work.” Lillian answers, getting to her feet and trudging over to the open panel. She hesitates for a moment then places her hand flat on the slightly larger imprint in the wall. As she expected there is another sharp prod in the tip of her finger and a whirring sound from within the wall.
“You see, nothing.”
“Speak again, use the words from the entrance.”
Lillian opens her mouth to comply but instead the second line of text springs into her mind. “Failsafe confirmation; quarantine override; ready Gate for evacuation status. Confirmation code Carter 33H-Z77.”
“What are you waiting for? You have to at least try.”
Lillian wishes she could do anything but try but as soon as she remembers the words the pressure to speak them is almost unbearable. “Why are you so sure this is a good thing?” she asks not moving her hand from the panel.
“I’m not, why are you so sure it is bad?”
“Because I know what to say and I shouldn’t, doesn’t that bother you? I couldn’t have seen the book more than twice but I know what to say.”
“Then you must say it,” the Pilgrim says softly, “I have run from fate for a lifetime, in the end I am still here and fear has nothing to do with going on.”
“You think we are meant to be here?”
“Why else would you know what to say? Open the door, Lillian, please.”
Nodding her acceptance, Lillian turns back to the panel and despite feeling stupid about talking into the wall, she repeats the phrase.
No soon
er are the strange words out of her mouth than the wall slides aside, to reveal the most massive chamber that either Lillian or Blake has ever seen. The lights are still powering up as they make their way into the room that must be big enough to accommodate a small village but already the many levels of the great chamber reflect the defuse light from perfectly smooth railings and pillars. Blake blinks in the increasingly harsh light, taking in the rows of benches and high counters that litter the massive hall. Here and there the skeletal remains of those trapped in the cavernous hall, sit slumped or huddled as far away from their fellow human beings as their numbers and the size of the huge room will allow. One or two of the crumbling mummies even have snub nosed objects that Blake guesses are fire arms of some type, clutched in their long, skeletal fingers.
In his mind’s eye, Blake replays the last tortuous weeks of these poor unfortunate’s lives. No doubt there had been food at first, perhaps even hope of leaving the place, if you knew the right incantation or the rules the enchantments worked by. The lights had probably not gone out at first, if they had even shut off while anyone was still alive, there might be a different reason for people to light fires that they would not share with their fellows. Blake had hunted Strigoi long enough to know of their hatred of flame. The bodies of the undead did not last long beyond their destruction so there was no telling how many battles there had been by those fires. The living had almost certainly won but even then without sunlight, they had no way of knowing if their victory was complete so they had all died alone, slowly in corners or beside their choking fires. Blake takes the fact that there has clearly been no attempt at cannibalism as a sure indication that the people trapped in the hall still feared contamination. From somewhere old recordings begin to play a refrain that has been copied and expanded on by musicians throughout the long sad history of the Bowl.
