Hammer and Bolter: Issue Twenty-Six

by Christian Dunn

  Laban did not falter.

  Suddenly, his anger quenched, calm returned, and as fast as he had been dismembering the warrior that had wounded him, he was faster yet, swinging both of his blades in a perfect rhythm, crossing and recrossing their paths so that no weapon could penetrate, and every stroke hit a target: an arm here, a leg there, ribs smashed, shoulders dislocated, vertebrae dislodged, jaws separated, joints rent.

  Within seconds, they began to fall. Broken skeletal bodies began to tumble, clogging up the fighting stage so that they were kicked out of the way or hauled, unceremoniously, and flung to one side or the other by their comrades.

  Then it happened.

  He didn’t know how, or even why, and for what felt like minutes, he didn’t even realise that the state had engulfed him. He thought that some strange magic had occurred, that the rest of the world as he knew it had come to a strange, halting stop, that everything was happening in remarkably slow motion, as if the skeleton warriors were fighting their way through some otherworldly viscous substance and not through air, and yet, he could move freely and easily. He realised, too, that he seemed not to need to inhale for minutes at a time, or to blink for that matter, and that he had complete control.

  When he realised that he was shadow-fast, Laban almost lost control of the situation, taking the heads of two of the foe in one oddly satisfying, but far too exaggerated arc of his long sword. He reined himself in, smiled and looked to Gilead.

  When Gilead smiled back, moving at his own speed in this world that seemed so slow, Laban knew that his cousin, too, was shadow-fast, that they were kindred in that place, in that time, in that battle, and he knew that he had come home.

  As the two elves made their ways through the ranks of skeleton warriors to left and right of the sarcophagus, moving faster than he could register their movements, with Fithvael tidying up behind them, ensuring that every last warrior was truly despatched, the Liche Priest turned back to the sarcophagus, raising his arms once more, and with them a second maelstrom.

  A wind swept up around him, disturbing the remaining sands and lifting some of the lightest of the bones dislodged from the bodies of the skeleton warriors. The Liche Priest stepped into the fast-moving air, flexed the great cavity that was his chest and opened his mouth.

  First he must protect his king and then he must complete his rite of summoning.

  As Gilead and Laban fought the skeleton warriors, as Fithvael faithfully followed in their footsteps ensuring that their work was complete, Surn Strallan shielded Professor Mondelblatt in the lea of the pillar as best he could. The old man seemed not to grow any weaker, although he continued to cough and wheeze periodically, and Strallan made sure that he didn’t move, that he remained within the elf wards, that he didn’t cross them or smudge them or in any way disturb the magic that he knew Gilead had created around them. Without those words, he feared that they would already be dead.

  Then the Liche Priest summoned a new wind.

  Strallan heard it first. He heard it in the vibrations of sinew against bone. He heard it in the thrum of chest cavities and the squeak of cartilage, and he heard it in every movement of every skeleton that swung a weapon or wielded a shield, and he feared that wind.

  When he felt it, he feared it more, and when he heard the faint hissing and shushing of sand moving against stone, he feared it more than he could have believed.

  The insects had gone, flown away. Some had seemed to take other routes through fissures between the stones of walls below ground, or up through the ceiling above, but most flew clean past Strallan and Mondelblatt’s resting place and up the stairs that they had descended to this subterranean hellhole, for that was how the boy characterised it, that was how he would talk about it, if his ordeal were ever over.

  For long moments, he dared not look down at the floor around them, but when he did dare, he was not surprised by what he saw. The lines of the script that Gilead had drawn there were indistinct. The characters that the elf had made with the stream of sand had blurred and smudged, and, in some places, there were only random smears of sand, tiny drifts and streaks caused by the action of the wind on the dusty substance. The sand was dull too, having lost its gleam, its magic.

  Strallan did not draw attention to their predicament, he did not need to. Mondelblatt leaned in to him and coughed his ancient man’s laugh.

  ‘Ephemeral,’ he said. ‘Sand. That’s how I like it.’

  The last of the skeleton warriors were smashed and broken with none to collect the bones for burial, for internment, for another battle in another age. It mattered not.

  It mattered not, for the Liche Priest was prepared.

  As the last of the skeleton warriors fell, the lids of the reed pulp inner sarcophagus and the wooden tomb flew back to hover over the mummified remains of the Tomb King. His shroud of reeds had been decimated by the locusts so his jewelled and polished armour and weapons, his ornate and ornamented garments, his headdress and jewels of office would all be marred by dust and time and decay if the rites of summoning were not completed as planned.

  It was imperative that the Liche Priest complete the rites. It must be.

  The Liche Priest raised his arms, and allowed one last, long scream to emanate from his mouth, accompanied by the inevitable cacophony that radiated from his skeleton. It ended when the lids were back in place.

  When it was done, the Liche Priest stepped a little away from the head of the great casket to the north of the room closer to where Mondelblatt and Strallan hunched against the pillar, so that they could see him clearly for the first time.

  Then the Tomb Guards rotated away from their master, turning their backs on his closed casket, ready to defend his honour that he might yet rise.

  Laban was on the right of the tomb. His thigh ached and his vision blurred as he descended from the realms of the shadow-fast back to a more normal state. He blinked, and willed himself to maintain the strength and speed that had seen him destroy so many with such ease.

  The Tomb Guard appeared to be looking at him through sightless eyes, although his curved sword came up and his feet spread a little apart to enable him to swing effectively.

  There was nothing but blood in the Tomb Guard’s consciousness, nothing but vermillion, arterial blood, the blood whose letting would cleanse the filthy beast before him. He sliced at Laban’s neck, but it was narrower than he expected, and the elf was taller, but slighter of frame, and the strike was sorely misjudged. The whistle that accompanied the strike was shrill, but broken, as if there was some fault in the machine that was not a machine, as if there was already some weakness, as if the Tomb Guard had already suffered some injury.

  Laban ducked easily and adjusted for the second swing without attempting to make one of his own. When it came, it was to his groin, to the femoral artery, to where it might be had the elf been human. He was not human, and his artery was not so close to the surface nor so anterior to the joint. Again, a surefooted sidestep and a parry, and Laban was safe, uninjured. Again, the Tomb Guard’s body seemed to betray him, seemed not to be in tune with itself. There was a jarring squeak, but still Laban could not identify its exact source.

  The young elf guessed, rightly, that the next attack would be to his abdomen, to the iliac, and he adjusted for the undead warrior’s knowledge of human anatomy, and took the parry early, riposting effectively, and getting in a counter-attack and a second strike with his sinister blade. Now he had a fight on his hands. If he didn’t redress the balance soon, the undead creature might make an attempt at the mesenteric artery, and, even if he missed badly, his attack would be central to the elf’s body, and was bound to be messy, if not fatal for Laban.

  The Tomb Guard was fast and dedicated, but his approach was not subtle. He had no interest in disabling or disarming the elf, his aim was to spill his blood, his arterial blood, and nothing else would do. Laban could ensure that the beast had no hope of accomplishing that feat, while carrying out a long, slow war of attrition of
his own.

  He began at the Tomb Guard’s extremities, taking finger bones, a kneecap, a number of teeth, with the edge of his sword slicing across them, drawing them sideways, making them slant and whistle when he moved his skull through the air.

  Yet still there remained that strange, atonal, half-hearted squeak.

  Laban took some delight in detaching the radius from one arm and the ulna from the other, playing with the Tomb Guard who blundered on, aiming at the same three targets over and over again, and consistently missing them by several inches, when he could be inflicting any number of flesh wounds with considerable success.

  Gilead’s assailant was less ponderous and more versatile, she was also bigger and more brutal, but Gilead was faster.

  Gilead was shadow-fast.

  As the Tomb Guard hacked and swung and thrust at Gilead, as she parried and blocked and countered, he wove a dizzying array of sword strokes around and through her frame, with almost too much finesse. Only when he began to hack and slash, only when he swung and struck did he begin to disassemble the skeletal figure before him. When her left arm was gone, she wore her shield high at her shoulder. When several of her ribs were gone she adjusted the balance of her body. When she lost a kneecap she locked out her leg and did not bend it again, but as hard as she fought, and as long as she struggled, she could not defeat Gilead.

  Finally, he switched his balance from his right foot to his left, drawing her to one side and away from the sarcophagus so that he could get in behind her. There he tucked his sword close to his own body, his arm flat across his stomach, and, with all his strength, he drew his blade between her vertebrae, severing it between the pelvis and the ribcage. He thrust his knee up into her pelvis and kicked her broken knee, and the bottom half of her body disengaged and toppled. Her head turned and she looked startled as her upper body began to drop.

  Gilead pulled his sword arm back across his body, and a second solid stroke separated two of the Tomb Guards vertebrae just above her intact collarbones. She was still looking at him, surprise and horror on her face, when her skull fell to the stone floor, cracked and rolled away.

  Laban attacked at the Tomb Guard’s left shoulder joint, having dislodged the shield, which hung at a steep angle and was pulling his assailant off-balance now that he had only half of his major bones still intact. The humerus dropped and hung limply by a length of taut sinew that should have perished centuries before. The arm was useless, and as the Tomb Guard tried to bring his weapon around for another attack, this time to Laban’s femoral, his body squeaked once more.

  Laban had learned not to thrust, and yet his instincts told him otherwise. He was tired and his thigh was sore, and he wanted the battle to be over. There was more to do, there was still a city to save. The battle was not over, and the elf wanted nothing more than to despatch this creature and move on. His intuition told him to thrust, to lunge, and that was what he did. He avoided the golden girdle that hung from its pelvis, aiming higher, and he drove the tip of his sword squarely into the tenth thoracic vertebra. As he was about to strike it, Laban realised that the bone was a slightly different colour from the rest of the skeleton. It was browner and had a less solid appearance.

  As the tip of his sword connected with the bone, it shattered to dust. The vertebra above it dropped, suddenly, causing the bones below to jump and twitch and the pelvis to rock unsteadily. Then the remaining vertebra above the break cascaded down, creating a domino effect.

  The shock on the Tomb Guard’s face was palpable, despite him having no flesh with which to form a living expression. As the bones in his spine lost the memory of their placement, they had nothing left to cling to, and they fell to the floor like so many dice or runes, like the bones carried in some shaman’s pouch. Once the spine was gone, the ribcage fell and shattered on the floor, and then the skull, with its shocked expression crashed to the stone flags, breaking into three dished pieces.

  Fithvael stood before the Liche Priest at the head of the newly sealed sarcophagus. The undead monster was all but spent of his magical energies, his mystical resources. It was as much as he could do to continue to control the swarm that was flying out in two great arcs around Nuln, following, above ground, the course of the ancient city that had once belonged to the Tomb King, some of which remained in the undercrofts and cellars of the nether-city.

  The elf and the undead sorcerer faced one another. Fithvael’s eyes were locked on the shaman’s skull, where its eyes should have been, and he thought that he could read something there, some warning, some threat, something terrible.

  The warrior elf wanted to fell the undead creature, but he knew that he could not, should not, must not. His hand closed around the hilt of his sword, his warm, flat palm wrapping around the cool grip, the two becoming one with long years of familiarity in a moment. Then he let go his grasp, flexed his fingers and rested his hand at his side. He swung his shield across his back and stood before the creature unarmed and with no means of defence.

  The Liche Priest stood still. No sound emanated from him, not from his mouth and not from any of the joints in his bones and sinews that sang when he moved with the winds that he generated.

  The Liche Priest was generating nothing below ground, nothing in this chamber. The bones of the skeleton warriors lay cold and grey on the floor of the cellar, which no longer glowed with the golden light that had so recently suffused the atmosphere. The Tomb Guards had mounted their final stand, but were falling fast at Gilead’s and Laban’s hands, and their undead bones would soon be mingled with those of the ranks who had fallen before them. The room would soon be dark and silent, and the tomb would be inert, once more, so where was the energy being diverted to? Where was the danger?

  What was happening above while the elves were below?

  The great city of Nuln was like a ghost town when the creatures began to pour up from below the ground, from the cellars beneath the university. They divided and spread east and west. To the west, they crossed the Reik Platz where the market had broken up, the stalls and barrows abandoned, and followed the Commercial Way towards the Altgate and the old city wall. To the west, the route above ground did not so neatly follow the route below ground, and the creatures crawled and slithered and flew a less direct path, crossing roads at odd angles, cutting corners and traversing alleys, almost as if they were tacking, like sailboats catching the prevailing winds. The arc was less smooth, but the intent was to reach Temple Gate, creating an almost perfect semicircle with the Wandstrasse at its diameter, engulfing the university and the College of Engineering and encompassing most of Neuestadt.

  If the Liche Priest could resurrect the Tomb King, when the Liche Priest resurrected the Tomb King, he would control a vast power base at the heart of the city, and from there, anything was possible.

  Already the university was all but abandoned. The trickle of students leaving had turned into a steady flow and then a torrent, and by the middle of the afternoon, the professors were leaving on the grounds that if there were no students to teach, there was no reason to stay. They did not speak of the sand, of the piles and drifts of sand in all the rooms and the dunes that were beginning to ebb and flow in the quads. They talked of the old man, though, in whispered tones. They talked of Mondelblatt and his obsession, and they blamed him.

  ‘Water,’ said Mondelblatt.

  ‘There is none,’ said Strallan.

  ‘Stupid boy,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I can make water, if I can be trusted, of course.’

  Laban and Gilead exchanged glances and then looked at Fithvael once more. Gilead gestured, and Laban touched the old warrior gently on the arm.

  ‘What?’ asked Fithvael.

  ‘You are needed, te Tuin,’ said Laban.

  ‘I bear no title,’ said Fithvael.

  ‘You have earned it,’ said Gilead. ‘The boy is right. I have need of you.’

  Laban side-stepped into Fithvael’s position as the elf, reluctantly, stood down, tearing his eyes away from the Lich
e Priest’s faceless skull only at the last moment.

  Laban could not see what his mentor had been looking at. The skull looked inert to him, vacant, possessed of no thought or intent.

  Fithvael pulled the map from inside his shirt as he and Gilead stepped towards the two humans huddled against the pillar.

  ‘Water,’ said Mondelblatt, again. ‘You must trust me to make water.’

  ‘Water?’ asked Gilead.

  ‘Hand me the amulet,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘It is time to make use of the stone.’

  Then the wind came. It started with the cart. It started with the sand that had collected around the cartwheels, locking the vehicle in place. It started to whip up motes of dust and then it began to shift drifts of sand. It spread throughout the city, and then it spread beyond the city.

  A new wind came in from the south, from the road that the cart had driven in on. The wind collected up the sand, everything left in the wake of the cart, and it drove it into Nuln, sweeping it up the streets and boulevards, and whipping it up into clouds and mini-tornadoes. The sand hissed and shushed and tumbled. It collected and drifted and built up, and then it moved on again, driven by the warm winds, driven from the south.

  As the insects in the Liche Priest’s swarm found their sentry points, gathered in their ranks and prepared to attack and decimate the city and any inhabitants they could find, the grains and motes and specks of sand and dust rose into the air, swelled, and grew.

  Then they fell to the ground, slithered away as hatchlings, or pupated, grew wings and flew, or crawled away on six new legs or eight. There was no end to the numbers of new creatures that could be born of the desert sands and no end to the sands that could be resurrected from the dying buildings in the great city.

  The Liche Priest’s cold, eyeless stare did not falter. Laban’s face was no more than two feet away and he could detect nothing there, no movement, no emotion, no intellect. He could sense nothing.