Suddenly,the bones shifted away.The bone crawled from the door like a column of ants,severing the stalks as they fled.Bones poured down the bloody stairs,retreating beside his feet, tumbling into rivers and streams.The bonescoagulated together.They stood silently behind him, watching.
Thedoors were clear.All that remained was a lone skull sitting on the top of thestairs, staring up at him.Its eye sockets shone empty in the cartilage light.
“Isaac,”the skull said, quietly.
Isaacpushed open the doors.
ChapterSixteen
Inheritance
Isaacfound himself on the outskirts of an industrious facility, one composed ofutterly massive proportion.The Extraction Chamber was vast enough to encompassthe entire pelvic cavity, each of the wings rising in peaks and troughs, thethick curtains of bone rimming the expansive room like the caldera of avolcano.From the entrance, it was almost impossible to see to the other side.
Isaacblinked through the gloom of cartilage light.For a moment, he could notbelieve what he was seeing.
Thiswas a factory of death.
Itbecame obvious, almost immediately, that the entire facility had been constructedas an automated apparatus.There was a sorting area shortly in front of him,filled with a rotten pile of jewelry and what had once been clothes.There wasa conveyor belt.There were buckets full of teeth.There was another conveyorconnecting to the first, stretching up to the ceiling.Above his head, therewere endless rows of coffins, hanging like the chrysalis of a caterpillar.Eachof these coffins was doored with glass.There were skeletons inside of them,most of their forms broken beyond recognition.
Onceabove the floor, there were tracks for the coffins to slide.Along thesetracks, there were articulating automatons, metal poles composed into theimitation of limbs, forming a snarled webbing of metal and wires and joints.Each of these limbs were tipped with strange devices.There were pincers,scythes, and needles.There were tools for injection, threshing, mastication,filtration, dilution.There were cauldrons for the emulsification of flesh.There were scoops for organs.There was a vat of jellied eyes.
Therewere many of these patterns, these woven machines.There were other sortingpens, other conveyors, other automations.They filled the room.They webbed thesky.There were so many other sites for the procession of bodies that Isaacstruggled to humanize the number, to not lose the arithmetic in all the horrorand gore.
Themachines repeated, on and on and on.
Slowly,he noticed that every automated line was connected to a complex lattice ofpipework, conjoining itself with the tangle of piercing limbs in the same waythat nerves, in the flesh, will creep along the pathway of veins.The pipeswere not a separate system—instead, they were clearly fed by each step of theextraction process, pumping whatever excretions came from the mutilated bodiesdown into a snarl of valves, junctions, and shafts.From there, the souls wouldfeed deeper into the earth, irrigating the rock and stone.
Isaacremembered the obelisk, teeming with the light of souls.
Henearly gagged.
Despiteits age, the air still reeked of mortality.The death of thousands had left anindelible stain.Blood and viscera caked the metal extractors, like a grislylayer of rock.There were metal drainage gates at regular intervals, theirgrills stained black with rot and pulp, their shafts littered so heavily withbone that the sewers briefly resembled the straw matting of a barn.
Hechose to focus on what was in front of him.
In theoutskirts of the extraction chamber, before the sorting of the corpses, a largestandard of the stripes and stars hung limply in the cartilage light, displayedabove a stage.Below the standard was the puppeteer and his army of thralls.
He washuman.He wore flowing black robes, the material so utterly dark that it almostseemed to devour the light, to make him a flowingform, a void between the stars.He was standing in the center of the stage,working at a bank of metallic devices.His back was turned, and wisps of purplelight coiled around his body, obscuring his features in haze.
At thesorcerer’s back, a ring of thralls surrounded the stage.Their bodies werestill, their expressions limp.In the distance, through the dust and metal, hecould see more of the robed thralls moving along the drainage shafts andretention tanks.Zaria’s hand came to Isaac’s shoulder, pushing him down.Theentrance to the chamber had a tiny foyer that was shielded from the cartilagelight.None of the thralls seemed to notice them.Their attention was plainlyfocused on the pipes and drains, places where the bones might return to life.
“Isaac,”Zaria whispered, grabbing the flat of her axeblade.It took him a moment torealize she was preventing the steel from glinting.“Do it.Now.”
“What?”
Shepointed at his hand, mimed a mnemonic cast, and flung it toward the puppeteer.
Theblack-robed man had not noticed their entrance.His back remained turned,crawling with purple fog, his attention focused on the metal devices upon thestage.Isaac thought he saw lights blinking over the panels.
“No,”Isaac said.“The thralls are in the way.”
Zarialooked at the ring of humans surrounding the puppeteer.“They’re already dead,aren’t they?”
“No.They’re alive.That’s the point.He uses them as reservoirs for energy.”
“Cuttin’ them down’s a mercy, then.”
“If Ican kill the sorcerer,” Isaac said, “they could be saved.”
