“We got some plan worth sharing?”Zaria asked, now wieldingher captain’s sword.
“Isaac,” the skull said.
Isaac lowered the skull back into the blood.When he stoodup, his slinged arm shook inside the cloth, scraping the knife against thefabric.He gasped, struggling to keep his balance.
“Isaac,” the skull said.Around it, the other bonesbegan to swim through the blood.Limbs tumbled, pelvises rolled, and all theskulls twisted until their scarlet red faces pointed up at the ceiling.Theybegan to hiss his name.
“Isaac.”
“Isaac.”
“Isaac.”
“Isaac.”
“I’ll see you soon, father,” Isaac said, and made his way tothe exit.
The door to the obelisk stood open.It was made of skeletalarms, and the space outside the door was as black as his uncle’s robes.Isaacknew, from the stories told by his instructors, that Berith wore his sun-eatingrobes so he could blend into the darkness of a tomb, leaving any necromancerstruggling to scent his life through the flowing void of energy.In this way,he had killed many rogue sorcerers, all by decree of the Diet of Nine.Hiscolleagues did not refer to him as the Bone Hunter for little reason.
Another roar ruptured the earth.It felt like the planet wasbeing split in twain.
Zaria stopped him as he made his way through the door.“Hateto break it to you, love, but I don’t think this,” she raised the cutlass, “isgonna do much against a giant.”
“We don’t need to kill the giant,” he said.“Just the personcontrolling it.”
“And how you proposin’ we do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“A lack of good ideas ain’t a cause for choosin’bad ones.”
“Z,” Isaac said.
She looked at him, the knife in her eye glinting with thetorchlight.“Aye.Right.One of us had to say it, I guess.”She flicked herhead towards the darkness.“Ready when you are.”
Isaac thought of all the people that been sacrificed.Thestudents of a college, the citizens of the necropolis.
His father.
Himself.
He stepped through the doorway, and Zaria followed behind.
The air of the cavern was cool, dusty, and stale, like ithad never tasted a breeze.His torch barely managed tolight the ground in front of him.He noticed, immediately, that the floor wasmade of concrete, the gritty aggregate having grown porous and cracked over themillennia.There were no markings to form a path.He could see nothing throughthe darkness.The only source of information was sound, and the sound thatreached him now spoke of unimaginable weight and purpose, of colossal bonesripping through the earth as easily as a man emerging from a bath.
In the distance, he caught a flickering of purple, the samecolor that stained the souls of the necromancers.There was a tiny figurestanding amongst the light.
Isaac clenched his fists.
The purple light shifted, growing in intensity, like thewaving conductor of a symphony.A tremor began to loose from every direction atonce.There came a shockwave of rushing air, full of dirt and sand.
All at once, orange light began to pierce the cavern.
Isaac looked up.
The bright rays, colored a hue somewhere between a staleorange and a wine-dark red, stabbed through the cavern ceiling in soft,slanting lines.Isaac squinted, feeling pain behind his eyes.He was sosurprised by the sudden illumination that it took him several moments torealize he was seeing natural sunlight, instead of a trap or spell left by thenecromancers.As the rumbling continued, the sunlight grew brighter, scouringthe massive cavern of shadow.He could see, more and more, that the ceiling ofthe cavern was being torn apart like a piece of cloth, and the orange rays ofsunshine were beaming down with a steady tumble of boulders, a gushing showerof dirt, entire waterfalls of sand.
This was not a natural structure, he realized.The earth andsand above their heads had only been a thin covering spread over the bottom ofthe tomb, like a lid enclosing a pot.Someone hadcreatedthis cavernfrom a crater-like depression.
