Ahead of them was a dirt-floored hall that continued farpast the end of the torchlight.The walls were lined with horizontal nicheslike the holes of a beehive—loculi, Isaac remembered.They were inlets built tohold the bodies of the dead.They rose in sequence towards the ceiling,stacking over each other.If the hall continued for long enough, there would beenough loculi to store hundreds of bodies.
Catacombs.
The tomb of an ancient necromancer.
“Nothing for it now,” Zaria said, holding her weapon tight.
There was no light ahead.The hall was blacker than night.Isaac took a deep breath, feeling a sudden chillin the air.
They ventured into the dark.
ChapterEight
Inthe Face of Evil
Thedarkness was too thick to be natural.
Rightnow, the torchlight in his hands felt like a bubble of air at the crushing depthsof an ocean floor.Blackness held at every angle, heavy and dense, seeming toclaw in at the edges.When he waved the flame across a random loculi, theshadows of a cobweb seemed to leap like a knife.He quickened his pace towardZaria, only to feel a piercing gaze on the back of his skull.When he waved thetorch behind him, there was nothing there but dust.
The darkness seemed to swirl.
Heturned forward, failing to control his breath.
It wasknown, of course, that necromancy was capable of sucking all life from an area,even to the point where no life could ever form there again, as Isaac had seenwith the windless shell of air surrounding the skull of the colossus, butrecent experiments by the Diet had confirmed that this lifeless scar evenextended to the presence of light itself, where a sufficiently powerful castingof necromantic suction had left an area permanently sheathed in darkness.Allthe souls who entered this darkness demonstrated symptoms of unease, dread,palpitations, nightmarish visions, and inevitable spells of fainting.
Was heexperiencing these symptoms now?
Was hemerely afraid?
Theancient literature also suggested that the worst of the necromancers, the oneswho had drunk the souls of innumerable victims, were so attuned to the presenceof life that they could smell a breathing person at a distance of miles, like ashark sensing blood in the vastness of an ocean.Down here, in the dark, noteven the spiders would survive the hunger of the sorceress.
Isaacforced himself to calm.
Hefound that, as his eyes struggled to pierce the dark, his other senses becamehighly sensitive.He could hear every scuff of dirt beneath his boots and everypoorly controlled breath at his lips.He could faintly smell the bodies thatused to be in the walls.He could feel the stiff and cool air on his sunburnedskin, seeming to wrap around him like a mist.
“Youneed to untie me,” Isaac said.
Zariawas leading the way, spear tip jutting into darkness, her every step as smoothand silent as a predator stalking through brush.Her ears swiveled at theslightest sound.
“Zaria.Untie me.”
“Not treadin’ there again, Isaac.Torch up, mouth shut.”
Heclenched his jaw and raised the torch overhead, holding it awkwardly in twooverlapping hands.His pelvis ached with every step he took.
Theycame into a rectangular room that was large enough to fit four coffins, laidend to end across the center.Isaac took a moment to identify it as a hypogeum,an underground burial chamber for the dead.The coffins were blocks of stonewith a shallow inlay for the corpse to rest.Loculi lined the walls like thesockets of teeth.
Zariabrushed dust from one of the coffin inlays.“You got a layout for thesecatacombs?”
“No.”
“Youknow which way to go?”
“Down.”
Shesnorted.“Terrific.Expert robber of graves, my squire.”
“Yousigned up for this.”
