“What?”
“Oh,that’s sweet of you, squire.I go weak for flowers.”
Helooked at her in silence, the rumbling growing louder.Finally, he made a soundthat might’ve been a laugh.
“There’sa smile,” Zaria said.“I’ll take it.”
“Behonest,” Isaac said, pulling her wounded hand towards him.“Have you annoyedeveryone you’ve ever met?”
“If Ihaven’t, it weren’t through lack of tryin’.”
When hepacked the chamomile and elderberry into her wound, she hissed.When he wrappedthe bandage, she snarled.When she flexed the hand, the cloth already stained aglistening red, she let out a shuddering breath.Slowly, both of them tremblingin pain, they made their way over to the edge of the pipes.The windingstaircase barely caught the edge of the torch.
“Canyou jump?”she asked.
Heshook his head.
For amoment, the rumbling intensified, groaning the metal, cracking the stone walls.There was a deepening thrum of an avalanche.
Zariabent down, scooped him up, held him like a bundle beneath her arm, and leapedinto the darkness.They crashed into the stairs.Slowly, he was let back downto his feet.She handed him the torch.Her arm wrapped around his shoulder,fingers squeezing between the knife in his chest.
“Pressure,”she said.
Henodded.She pushed.It hurt enough to make him gasp.He could not tell if thebleeding had slowed.He hoped it would be enough.
Carefully,never letting go of each other, they descended the stairs of the obelisk,heading into the darkness below.
Aroundthem, the earth began to shake and roar.
Chapter Nineteen
Boneyard
There was only blood, bones, and fire.
The blood came from the dozens of students who had fallendown the obelisk, their withered bodies full of empty faces, shattered limbs,the scars of parasitic magic.The bones came from his father’s ancient corpses,the limbs and skulls littering the floor like reeds in a marsh.The fire camefrom Soren, who had splattered dramatically into the stone, her leather armorstill tittering with flame, her black eye staring rimless and dull from theflap of her broken skull.
Isaac’s boots filled with blood as he reached the bottom ofthe obelisk.Swinging the torch around the blackened room, he found only moresigns of carnage, more of the innocent that Berith had sacrificed.He wonderedif he had seen any of these students before.He thought, for a moment, thatsome of them likely lived outside the college dormitories, in the town ofKhador itself, where he might have spotted them from the vantage of his bedroomwindow.He had never known any names, but he had often recognized the faces.
He couldn’t bring himself to look.
Somewhere outside the obelisk, a colossal tremor rippedthrough the earth.The blood quivered at his feet.There was the sound ofcollapsing rock, all of it brimming back and forth in intensity, seeming tocome from every direction at once.Isaac imagined the colossus flailing as itwas forcibly returned to life.
“Gods alive,” Zaria said.The hyena took her arm from hisshoulder and trudged her way over to Soren’s body.She bent down, unwrappingthe bunny’s fingers from the hilt of her sword.“Sorry, capt.You know therules.”
Isaac gazed over the blood and bones.“Father?”
“Isaac.”
A human skull lay against the broken arm of a student, itseyeless socket stuck on the open bone.Isaac stumbled over, awkwardly graspingthe skull with his slinged arm.
“Is Berith ...?”
The skull squirmed in his hand, managing to nod.
A quake surged through the masonry.Outside, there was anoverwhelming deluge of rock, rumbling like the stampede of a million horses.Isaac heard the sound of a roaring voice, and it was the worst sound of themall, because the skull of the colossus had been above the surface, and theywere now very deep within the earth.Either the colossus could scream soloudly, with such inhuman volume, that its voice could be felt through miles ofearth ...or there was no longer any earth between them at all.
Isaac swayed with the torch, trying to brace through thequaking earth.On the walls, he caught glimpses of ancient reliefs, all of themdepicting a bony, bipedal reptile smashing through cities and mountains.Thenecromancer flag was draped over the dead and conquered.There was worshipmixed with fear.
