“Comeon,” Zaria said, snickering.
“No!”
On thewalls, several arms rose up to the skull, covering the eye sockets with a palmand shoving spindly fingers into the cavity of the ears.The skull vigorouslyshook its head.
PRIVACY
IPROMISE
“Mightykind of you,” Zaria said.“So, you approve of all this, then?”
Theskull stalk reared back, like the rising of a wyrm.It nodded deeply.
“That’sa yes?”
A graveyardworth of arms squirmed out of the central mass.They held themselves straight,closed their bony fingers into a fist, and raised a forest of thumbs.
PROUDOF YOU SON
Isaacthought he might die of embarrassment.
“Well,”Zaria said, grinning wide, “best permission to fuck I’ve ever seen.Think he’llgive some bone thralls as a dowry?”
“Ivtarr,gods above, strike me down, please.”
Sheslapped him on the back.“Three merry band of men, we are.On our way, then.World-ending cunts to kill and all that.Come on, you—” She paused, looking athis father.“Hold on.Never got your name, actually.”
Theskull looked to Isaac.
“Caine,”Isaac said.“His name is Caine.”
Zariabowed.“Pleased to make your acquaintance.Fine son you got here.”
Cainegave a firm nod.Somewhere below the earth, in the device that trapped hissoul, he imagined his father was smiling.
With aturn of his heel, Isaac began to march through the extraction chamber, headingtoward the sound of screams and rumbling.To his left, there was a zoanthropepirate who had taken him hostage not three days prior.To his right, therecrawled a legion of bone that clattered and hissed like an army of death.
He feltlike nothing could stop him.
ChapterEighteen
Lamentations
The screamsof the dead rose from the blackened earth.
Overthe course of his journey, Isaac had heard many cries of pain—pirates burningalive, bones hissing in fear, a massive wyrm beached upon a city.All of them,in a way, had been born from his own hand, and, in that way, they had notdriven him to feelings of guilt, because they had come from enemies standing inhis path.With the guiding light of his mission, he had been able to harden hissoul against the suffering of others.
Nothingcould’ve prepared him for the ghostly wails emanating from the obelisk.
Thenaked souls, severed from their bodies millennia before, screamed into thestone and rock around them.Tens of thousands of howls swirled through the air,echoing through the worn cracks of the obelisk and out into the black cavernbeyond.Their voices were ethereal, pure, unlimited by the constraints offlesh.It was impossible to distinguish any individual, impossible to recognizeany species—there was only pain, circulating through the ancient walls, sowarbling and discordant it seemed to signify the fall of the heavenly spheres.
Isaacpassed through the stone archway at the top of the obelisk.Zaria and hisfather followed behind.For a moment, Isaac stood at the peak of the tower,gazing down into a cauldron of pain and despair.The voices washed upon him,like the wind of a storm.The light of the souls shone in his eye.
Thescreams were deafening.
He hadto make them stop.
Below, downthe length of the massive obelisk, a lattice of pipework ran from the walls,where the souls extracted from the factory drained into a storage container.The storage container was an enormous glass pillar hanging in the center of theobelisk, like a bubble of air trapped in a hollow tube.The glass shone abrilliant purple as thousands of beings swirled inside, the vast network ofpipes sucking into the structure from various sides, feeding and gorging theprison.There were intake valves, energy threshers, circuits and junctions,wicked devices whose purpose seemed only the further extraction of energy, theoptimization of death, the complete digestion of a soul.Through it all, thesongs of the dead rang loudly through the machine.
