Exhausted beyond measure and harried by the sights inside the shrine of Uhl’Neph, the cohort had retreated back to the shelf on the wall of Neph’s Chasm. There they attempted to regroup, and take what rest they could in the inhospitable surroundings. One and all, the men of the cohort wore haunted expressions, sat slumped as if at the edge of utter defeat. Down to seven men from seventeen at their departure, demoralization outweighed their grief. None had it in them to mourn fallen Borden. Vhaasa lay on his side facing the wall, trying to convince himself the man’s corpse wasn’t still falling.
He could hear men murmuring amongst themselves behind him. They’d made no fire, either because the rock here would not burn or because none had the wherewithal to attempt one. Vhaasa didn’t know. His mind was tormented with visions of Uhl’Neph’s terrible fane. A floor all of limbs and slabs of mummified flesh, the bones and faces all out of order, senseless and abhorrent. He shook all over, and could not tell if he was even cold. He feared that he would take ill, some horrible sickness that had waited for him among the bones.
The nightmare floor of the shrine had been the least of the terrors, compared as it was against the grim centerpiece of that place. Dominating the whole far side of the chamber, and now the darker half of Vhaasa’s mind, was the hideous idol of the wight Uhl’Neph. It loomed in eldritch majesty behind Vhaasa’s eyes, flickering in and out of his vision with every blink. He fixed his gaze on the wall, eyes locked open, until they watered and stung. But the apparition would inevitably return.
The idol of Uhl’Neph was a tower of grotesque sacrifice. It was the most twisted amalgamation of disjointed parts imaginable to Vhaasa, made up of the severed bits and pieces of so many dozens of corpses. A thick trunk of braided spines supported it. The mammoth legs of a dozen Thari giants were folded beneath it in the posture of a meditating ascetic. Its triple-nested ribcage looked as if a host of torsos had engulfed one another, inseparable in their rotting repose. The whole frame was a mad profusion of limbs and hands and talons. The idol’s skull was unspeakably poised between the best of all-kith and the worst of the tribes of beast-kind. It was an atrocity of branching antlers, jutting tusks, a man-skull deeply encased in a gaping maw of bifurcated jaws, haloed by myriad rows of teeth.
At its feet was a squat leaden altar, encrusted with coat upon coat of ancient, soiled blood. Across that anvil of an altar lay a crude blade, tethered to the floor by a heavy chain blackened with age. That blade swung madly in Vhaasa’s mind, severing his memory of a time when he could draw more than a third of a breath, of a time when he was not covered in soot, when his tongue was not chalked with bone dust. It could barely be called a sword. Too primitive for that. It was as if some elder race had only just begun to grasp the benefit of sharpened metal. Crafted of some roughly hewn ore, ruddy and pitted, edged only along one side and that unevenly. The haft, as long as Vhaasa’s arm, was bound in some tattered hide, a jagged barb of unfinished ore for its pommel. It taunted modern swords from the shadows of their histories the way Tarnaghan apes mocked the laughter of man. It was the most unfathomably remote ancestor of a sword. Heavy, terrible, and old.
The quiet of the camp startled Vhaasa from his musings and he rolled over, clambering stiffly to his feet. All asleep. Not even a watch posted. He counted the men; one, two, three…
He looked around in panic. Four? There should be more. How many? Seven? No, Borden had fallen. The emptiness behind that thought didn’t shock him anymore. So, there should be six…
A noise, disguised by the moaning of the wind. He waited, scarcely breathing, listening past the wind, the rush of blood in his ears. When the noise came again it was a mewling grunt, a sound of struggle. It had come from the cavern.
The shrine…
Possibly trained too well by Mallock, possibly unhinged by circumstance after all, he stopped thinking and broke into a sprint. Shouting alarms as he leapt the sleeping forms on the ground, he ran straight through the cavern entrance and into the darkness of the corridor. Careening off the walls, trying to listen while he ran but hearing nothing over his own blood and breath, he made his way into the chamber of bone and blade. Uhl’Neph’s idol loomed against the back wall, staring down with grim approval on the scene unfolding at his feet.
Bandrell stood hunched over the altar with the old teamster, Ghetti, held down beneath him. The man was trying to lever that awful blade into killing position without letting Ghetti break away from his grappling embrace. Ghetti was fouling the stroke by tangling his leg in the black links of the blade’s chain. Something slammed into Vhaasa’s back and he was on his side in the bones, blinded in the plume of dust and slanting torchlight.
Mallock had collided with him in full charge, not slowing. He then crashed into his second-in-command and bowled the man over, bellowing,
“You traitorous mawk!”
They thrashed in the bones. Ghetti slid from the altar, the terrible blade clattering to the ground next to him. Two more figures blurred into the chamber. Oodo and Russk. The two thugs tripped their way across the bones, trying to make out sides in the melee. Mogrus came in on their heels.
Bandrell flung the fully armored Mallock sideways, displaying some previously unknown strength. He was on his feet, kicking the captain in the face and exposed sides with his heavy boots. Oodo tackled him. Bones rattled with hollow music in the commotion. Dust rose in the close, humid air. Vhaasa was on his feet, but could not seem to move. He struggled to understand the cause of the insane melee. Mogrus’ eyes were wild as he stared at the blade lying by the foot of the altar.
Uhl’Neph looked on.
Oodo stumbled away from Bandrell, clutching his side. So much blood there, and pouring from Bandrell’s chin. A madness was come over the sapper, and he fought with a feral will. He bellowed at Russk, who stood frozen.
“To arms, you rotter!”
Russk started to draw his bow, but was tripped by Mallock. Oodo, partly recovered from the bite he had taken to his side, drew his scimitar and closed doggedly with Bandrell again, swinging slow but strong. Mogrus crept round the side of the melee, making for Ghetti’s still form and the blade beside him.
Mallock had gotten back to his feet and had his long-sword swinging, wild, guided by his bloodshot eyes. Russk dropped the tangled bow and struggled to draw his soldier’s blade as the tip of Mallock’s long-sword bit into his face on a diagonal stroke that arced down and along the underside of Russk’s left arm. He made a weak counter-attack but Mallock had closed, driven a parrying dagger up under his ribs, riding the man’s collapsing form to the ground.
Oodo’s scimitar was buried deep in Bandrell’s right thigh, but the madman was still closing, frothing at the mouth now, his teeth clenched in a rictus of fury and pain. Oodo stepped back abruptly, wrenching the scimitar from Bandrell’s leg with both hands, wincing himself at the sound of splintering bone. The madman screamed through his teeth and launched himself at Oodo, running himself through on the hireling’s sword in the process. He throttled Oodo, digging his fingernails into the man’s throat.
Mallock had risen, spitting blood from his wounds, and staggered back toward Bandrell. The Captain’s long-sword slid along the side of Oodo’s neck on its way into Bandrell’s cheek, and kept going. When Bandrell and Oodo at last lay still, the broken point of Captain Mallock’s fine sword protruded behind Bandrell’s right ear.
Uhl’Neph looked on.
The shrine was suddenly quiet. Captain Mallock turned unsteadily, meeting Vhaasa’s lambent stare with his one remaining eye. He started toward Vhaasa with the broken long-sword, a dire determination writ across his features. As he approached, Vhaasa fumbled for his long-knives, willed some strength into his limbs. A few paces away, raising his broken blade, Captain Mallock tripped over a ribcage, spilling gracelessly onto the golgotha floor, twitching.
“What in unhallowed fu–“ Vhaasa began.
And then he saw Mogrus Un’Akuhl. The maven was stooped above Ghetti, who was barely breathing. The teamster had been stabb
ed low in the gut. Badly. Mogrus looked like the very spirit of scorn.
“It doesn’t work that way!” he said.
“What doesn’t?” Vhaasa asked.
“This fucking benighted altar. This sick sacrifice. It has to be willing, damn-all!” Mogrus railed.
“Dark-of-night, Mogrus. I have no rotting idea what in thirteen dawns you’re getting at with all – “
“No, you don’t. Shut up, Vhaasa. Is Mallock alive?”
Vhaasa stepped over to him, saw the shallow rise and fall of his back, “Aye.”
“So’s Ghetti,” Mogrus said, “Which one do you think you can save?”
“What?”
“Which. One.”
“You’re tilted, Mogrus. I’m no healer,” Vhaasa said.
“Aye, tilted. Just put pressure on ‘em. Gauze. That sort of thing,” Mogrus said.
“Truth!” Vhaasa yelled, “Uh, Ghetti. Probably Ghetti. Mallock’s crazed.”
“Get over here then. Something else needs my doing.”
Vhaasa crouched over Ghetti, studied the man’s bleeding gut, and promptly tore one of the man’s packs open to use the cloth. He bound it round the wounded man’s belly, packed other wads of cloth in under the wrap, and tightened. Ghetti grunted, wheezed. He passed out.
And then Mogrus began screaming…
Vhaasa turned his head at the moment the maven brought that ancient blade down on his own right elbow. Blood spattered his face and he blinked it from his eyes, unbelieving.
Mogrus Un’Akuhl’s scream hitched only slightly when the blade struck, a subtle shift of pitch. As the maven’s arm rolled off the altar, he fixed his mind upon a pattern, a channel through which all of his pain would pass, through which it would be carefully sculpted. Vhaasa heard the change in Mogrus’ scream, but was transfixed by the sight of the maven’s arm falling to the bone-littered floor.
There was a shift of pressure in the room, a tremor in the quality of light, and the burnout maven’s truncated arm seemed to pulse like the heart of the world. With the next gout of blood, the ragged wound shivered between states, and by the time the scream had died his arm ended in a smooth-skinned stump.
He collapsed.
Uhl’Neph looked on, and Vhaasa thought the abomination looked well pleased with itself.
* * * * *