Slowly, the murals and myths turned to laboratories.

  Cages were the first sign of experimentation. Many of the testing areas seemed indistinguishable from a dungeon. Centuries of rust had melted the metal like sugar in the rain, but Isaac could still faintly make out the foundations of manacles, claw marks in the bars where live prisoners had struggled and begged.

  He imagined what it must’ve felt like for them. Offered as a sacrifice to a city of necromancers, shackled like a piece of livestock, transported down through the catacombs and across the bony pavements of the necropolis. If they were lucky, their fate would be met at a local life extension center, their souls sucked from their bodies and ground down into medicine. If they were unlucky, they would be transported all the way to the pelvis of the giant skeleton, subjected to batteries of necrotic experiments, killed and resurrected endlessly until there was nothing but wisps of their essence remaining.

  He was very glad this empire had died.

  The flooded ruins of the noble district had ended somewhere around the lower abdomen. Now, they were making their way through testing grounds and research stations. The rooms were dominated by ancient sets of alchemical equipment and apparatuses for transmutation energy transfer. Many of the areas had an obvious martial nature. Zaria was quick to point out the positions of rotten weapon stands, reinforced doors and carefully designed chokepoints—he also noticed long-dead emitters for magical traps, the faded sigils of necrotic hexes in the masonry.

  These testing chambers had likely been funded by the city’s government. They seemed to have been designed both as a place to further the study of necromancy, and to serve as a last bastion for the ruling class, should some invasion or rebellion cripple the city. For an empire that sustained itself on the lives of its vassals, this was not an unreasonable concern.

  Of course, they saw no signs of conflict now. The laboratories were buried in dust rather than rubble. There was no indication of violence, civil unrest, famine, some type of plague, or any other calamity that had killed countless civilizations before. He had to wonder—how exactly had this city died?

  “Squire. Observe.”

  Isaac stopped reading a rotten notebook full of lab reports—he turned to see Zaria juggling several glass flasks, the flared bases and thin heads spinning unpredictably through the air.

  “Stop! By Oerin, what’re you—”

  “No, no, trust me, I can do this.”

  With a flourish, she tossed one flask into the air while catching the rest in her palms. As the flask completed its arc, she craned her head forward, trying to angle the flat of her skull underneath. The flask landed right-side up on her head, staying perched for a moment . . . and quickly slid off due to the friction-treated bottom. She tried to catch it, ended up losing grip on two more flasks, and three pieces of glassware shattered loudly on the floor.

  “Ah,” she said. “Shite. That usually works with ale tankards.”

  “Could you not destroy ancient relics of the past?”

  She brushed some of the shards with her foot. “Were you impressed, though?”

  “Incredibly. Now stop touching things.”

  He began to make notes of the chemical reagents lining the walls. Zaria retrieved her poleaxe from its resting position against a prisoner cell. She stopped suddenly, head swiveling back to the entrance. Her ears perked forward, hackles raised.

  Isaac paused. “Heard something?”

  She didn’t respond. The laboratory ceiling hung low, the tremendous weight of rock and earth seeming to bulge down just above their heads. Every sound felt ready to be crushed. Every scuff of their feet seemed to die when it hit the dust. And every noise they made seemed to be an affront to the very rooms themselves. These halls had laid in deathly silence for millennia, and thousands of souls had perished inside of them. Life itself would be offensive to such a place.

  “Thought I heard movement,” she said. “Might just be nerves. Unsettlin’ ain’t even close to describing all this.”

  Isaac grunted in agreement, continuing to write. Around them, the laboratory glassware was filled with skulls preserved in jars, cross-sectioned femurs still lying under primitive microscopes, and the walls were wrapped in the vine-like tangle of ossein, the matrix of fibers that made up all skeletal bones. He wasn’t sure if the ossein had been carved there for decoration, or if it had grown by some unspeakable festering process. He decided to leave that detail to the next archaeologists.

  Zaria examined the scratch marks carved into the metal of one particularly large cell. “Got a question for you, love.”

  “I’d be surprised if you didn’t.”

  “How did—” She paused. “You calling me stupid?”

  “Not at all,” Isaac said. “I’d characterize it as a vast inexperience in the matters of academic pursuit.”

  “Talking like a book is gonna get you pressed into the shape of one, squire.”

  “Ask your question, please.”

  She gestured at the cages. “So, these cannibal wizards—they sucked the souls from the prisoners and ate them, aye?”

  “I wouldn’t use those words, but yes. That was their practice.”

  “Why didn’t they do it the other way ‘round?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why didn’t they just put their own souls in the new bodies?”

  “The goal was to replenish their own soul energy. Extend their lives. Putting a soul in a new body wouldn’t fix that.” He continued to write. “It wasn’t just the souls, either. They’d use the corpses to increase their armies. Make furniture out of them. That kind of thing.”

  “You say that real casual-like.”

  “They weren’t the first, and they weren’t the last.”

  She blew a raspberry. “Well, you said they were warring constantly to get these bodies. War brings injuries. Soldiers would come back with missing limbs. They’d have burns, embedded arrows, shattered teeth. They’d be leaving a trail of shite behind them as they died of dysentery, and that’s only if blood sickness didn’t get ‘em first. Must’ve ended up with lots of cripples and invalids. So why did they never put their own souls into other bodies?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Isaac said. “It’s called core rejection. A soul can’t be implanted into a body that doesn’t fit, for lack of a better word. The effects are deleterious. Near-immediately fatal if it's a different species, and, even if it's not, most don’t last a week. They can’t bend their limbs. They can’t draw breath. Their organs starve from lack of nourishment. And the brain of the body almost always drives the soul insane from the incompatibilities of personality. Most attempts at soul implantation have ended in screaming and blood.”

  “If it’s so dangerous, how were they eating the other souls?”

  “How do people make bread? You take the wheat, husk the grain, grind it down to flour, add yeast and water, and cook it over a fire. Only then is it nourishing. They didn’t just eat them like fruit on a tree.”

  Zaria looked down the line of cages. It stretched to the end of the room. “Stuffing new souls into old bodies doesn’t work at all, then?”

  “It only works with family,” he said. “Close blood relations. And, even then, it’s tricky. The Diet of Nine hasn’t developed the proper technology to do the procedure without great risk. To date, few have survived the operation.” He flipped a page on his sketchpad, continuing to jot down notes. “That was one of the reasons my father was sent to this tomb, aside from slaying the sorceress. These necromancers excelled in manipulating soul energy, and the Diet hoped they might find some clues or machines that might improve the discipline.”

  “This sorceress—she’s the lone survivor of these cannibal mages, aye?”

  “Only one.”

  “That the kind of murderous cunt we’re making alliances with now?”

  Isaac pursed his lips while he wrote. “It’s going to be very temporary.”

  “I think so—check ahead.”

  He looked over his journal. On the stone floor of the laboratory, stamped through the layers of dust, there were footprints. Many sets of them, all human, all of them neat and ordered like soldiers filed strictly in place for a march. One set of footprints, in particular, seemed to be leading the way.

  “They’re recent,” Zaria said. “Dust’s still settling.” She sniffed the air, black nose twitching. “I can smell ‘em through the rot. Lots of humans.”

  Thralls. Puppeteer magic. The necromancer wouldn’t have asked for their aid against the rival sorcerer if the two of them weren’t in a position to help—namely, if they weren’t getting close to their mutual enemy. This interloper was standing between them, the necromancer, and his father. And, after following the bodies of thralls through most of the giant skeleton, they were finally closing in. A confrontation was coming.

  Slowly, Isaac stuffed his journal back into his pack. He flexed his arms, readying the muscles. “Be on your guard.”

  She nodded, keeping the spear-tip of her polearm pointed at the laboratory exit. He paced around her, noting with some disquiet just how many sets of footprints were stamped through the dust, and poked his head out through the door. The corridor beyond was empty, ribbed with the bulbous lamps of cartilage light. Above, the giant vertebrae running through the vaulted ceiling had stopped taking the appearance of lumbar sockets—now, they were sacral, probably leading to the base of a tail. They had reached the end of the spine. The start of the pelvis and groin.

  From the pelvis, they would have to descend down the legs. At the feet of the giant corpse, the necromancer would be waiting. So would his father.

  “The puppeteer’s thralls are magically capable,” Isaac said. “Each one of them is deadly. Ambushes and stealth are going to be our best chance here.”

  “Hey. Take this.”

  She was holding out her dagger sheath to him. The hilt of the knife would be like that of a shortsword in his hands.

  “Last resort,” she said. “I’ve seen how winded you get when the fighting’s thick. Might be vital in a pinch.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ll manage. Any human who tries to attack me in close quarters is a foolhardy sort.” She paused. “As you know.”

  He took the sheathed blade, stuffing it into a hip pocket. “Thanks, Z.”

  “What’s that you said there?”

  He had been determined to appear confident and nonchalant. Instead, he blushed again. “I, uh—you know—you keep, uh. . . .”

  Her waiting grin was surrounded by glassware and rotted bellow fans.

  “Well,” Isaac said, more firmly than he felt, “since you keep calling me squire, I thought I’d give you a nickname too. You know—Z. It’s short. Simple. Not horribly offensive.”

  She gave an exaggerated gasp that echoed down the dusty laboratory. “Is my squire attempting to give me a cutesy moniker like I’m his special missus?”

  “It’s just for convenience’s sake.”

  “Is it, now? Supposin’ I take this as a warning sign for your uncontrolled infatuation?”

  “By the gods,” Isaac said, “just forget I said anything.”

  “No, no, no. Look at me, squire. This is serious now. Ain’t no way I’ll be asking you to call me that in front of them grand wizards of yours. Not your father, especially.”

  Isaac took a deep breath.

  “Certainly won’t ask you to moan it lovingly while licking me from cunt to tail.”

  “Ivtarr preserve me.”

  “And I certainly—certainly—will not have you whisper it with tender affection while asking my hand in marriage. You hear me, squire? That is absolutely not the way to melt my heart to pieces. Woe be upon you if you attempt such a foolish endeavor.”

  He looked away. “I don’t know why I keep making this mistake with you.”

  She slapped her poleaxe to the floor like a guard standing watch. “You’re adorable, Isaac. Teasing you is just beyond my self-control. Can’t help myself in the slightest.”

  “I am not adorable. I am a journeyman of magical transmutation, trained to slay an ancient necromancer and her dark armies.”

  “You’re adorable, squire, and that’s final.”

  He cleared his throat, checking the corridor for threats.

  “It’s a fine moniker,” Zaria said. “Might be I like it, though you clearly were not looking for my consent on the matter.”

  “So,” he said, “how about those evil sorcerers? By the gods, we should do something about them. Right?”

  “Oh, aye. Heroes of ages, we are.”

  “Songs and titles when we’re finished?”

  “Fucking castles from the feline queen herself, more like.”

  “Good,” he said. “Of course. Definitely.”

  “Anytime you’re ready, sir mage.”

  “Yes, yes, onwards.” He rolled his shoulders, limbering his arms. “Stay behind me, Z.”

  She nodded, not trying very hard to hide her smirk.

  They emerged into the vaulted corridor, crouched and hugging the wall, following the stampede of human footprints. It was impossible to tell how many thralls the sorcerer had under their command—the broken dust didn’t look much different than the mud of a village street. Isaac did some mental math. They had seen two bodies before the necropolis, and then they’d watched Soren defeat a full assault from the sorcerer. Whoever this person was, they had already lost at least a dozen thralls, and it very much did not appear that they were lacking for more slaves and energy reservoirs. How had they amassed such an army?

  More importantly, how did this sorcerer find thralls who were trained in magic? They must’ve been guild members. The Diet of Nine held a monopolistic claim on elemental magic amongst the kingdoms and duchies of the region. With a vast desert restricting travel on one side, and a storm-addled ocean on the other, they effectively had total control of the discipline in this section of the world.

  Were these thralls apprentices and journeymen? Transmutation students like him who had been twisted and enslaved by a rogue sorcerer? Would he be forced to kill his own fellows?

  Isaac lead the way deeper into the government laboratories, tracking the footprints like a hunter, stalking past empty guard checkpoints and libraries of rotted books.

  Of course, he might not need to worry. Puppeteer sorcerers had a fatal vulnerability—themselves. They were incredibly powerful, as well as far more capable of withering the inherent attrition of magical combat, but they were still just a person. People can die very easily, and the parasite sigils would lose power once their caster was growing cold on the floor. A single spell might be all it took to end this unexpected threat. He might even save the thrall’s lives in the process.

  Possibly.

  Hopefully.

  Since he was focusing on it, Isaac began to notice that the dust coating these research areas was strange. It was extremely fine, almost to the point of being invisible, and it seemed to glint in the cartilage light like a precious metal. Furthermore, it was clumping in places along the walls—some parts seemed to be filling the cracks in the stonework like mortar between bricks, and, if he squinted at it in just the right way, he could’ve sworn it was moving, wriggling and breathing like moss in a—

  “Isaac,” Zaria whispered.

  He looked.

  The stampede of footprints curved off suddenly into an adjacent room in the hallway. It seemed to be a very abrupt detour. All the thralls had followed. Glinting dust curled in the air.

  The door was closed. He heard no sound. Isaac gestured, and they stacked up on opposite sides of the frame. Zaria pressed an ear into the wall, listened for a moment, and shook her head. Nonetheless, she raised her poleaxe up and out, ready to stop a charge with the length of the weapon. Isaac balled a tangle of flame into one hand and grabbed the finger-shaped door handle with the other.

  He looked to her. She nodded. He opened the door and rushed inside.

  A council chamber greeted him. That was the only guess he could make as to its function. In the middle of the stretching chamber, there was an open circle of knuckled stone, capped with a dust-covered husk of a podium and several fetid skeletons displayed like a college anatomy course. The corpses appeared to have been there for a research presentation. There were rotted papers on the podium, and faint resurrection residues on the bones. The open circle of the center stage was ringed on all sides with desks and chairs—some of the carved-stone furniture was decorated with faded adornments, illegible name tags suggesting titles and ranks.

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  This was a meeting auditorium for the head cabal of the empire’s government. Kings, judiciaries, nobles. Isaac drew this conclusion from the fact that the desks were made of bone. In the necropolis, all the skeletal buildings had merely been stone carved into suggestive shape. These desks were made of actual corpses, and he shuddered to think how many people it would take to craft each one. The room had many.

  “Clear,” Zaria said.

  Towards the back of the council chamber laid an open square of darkness. It took Isaac a moment to recognize it as a hole in the floor. At each corner of the square, thin metal beams rose up into the ceiling and deep down into the blackness. If he had to guess, it looked like an elevator.

  The room was empty. No sign of the sorcerer or their thralls. Zaria took a few tentative sniffs of the dusty air, glancing behind.

  “Smell something?” Isaac asked.

  For a long moment, she glared down the empty corridor, as if daring whatever lurked in the dust and shadows to attack. A few more sniffs didn’t seem to acquire any challengers.

  “Thought I did. Nothin’ now.” She gestured him on. “I’ll keep watch. Do your thing.”

  “My thing?”

  “Pulling ancient wonders from the arse of evil. Hurry on, now.”

  “Ah, yes,” Isaac said, heading in. “I can see my dissertation title now. ‘Archaeological sodomy’. Defends itself, really.”

  He made his way through the rows of old desks, towards the elevator. From the square hole in the floor, cool air rose up to greet him. A faint breeze was blowing from the depths of the earth. He thought of weather dynamics—temperature and air pressure. The elevator must’ve descended into a large cavern below. He couldn’t see the carriage, and he wasn’t entirely sure it hadn’t long ago snapped off from the rusted support beams. There was nothing but darkness.

  He grabbed a chair from a nearby desk and tossed it down the elevator hole. It disappeared like a comet in the night sky. After listening for half a minute, he heard no sound.

  The cavern below them was deep. Very deep. It might go all the way to the bottom of the tomb. Close to his father.

  Only a single set of footprints had been carved into the dust around the elevator. The tracks came to the precipitous edge of the open shaft and, oddly enough, widened into a full body print on the floor—all that was missing in the imprint was the head, like an executioner victim. It looked rather plainly like the sorcerer had dropped to their belly and stuck their head right through the floor. The rest of the footprints showed them returning to their army of thralls and leaving the room by a different door.

  It seemed that the puppeteer had entered the room solely to gaze into the black cavern below. Isaac felt compelled to do the same. He dropped down to his stomach, inched his shoulders out past the edge of the elevator hole, and bent his head down into the chilly air.

  There was only darkness—an enveloping void. Yet, somehow, he could feel the vast space around him. It was the gentle breeze on his face, the way his breath did not echo back. He felt as if he was about to fall into a black sky. The cavern must’ve been miles in diameter.

  Somewhere far off in the distance, he saw a crackling pillar of purple light. That was the only way to describe it. There were faint lines of purple peeking through the darkness like the scratch marks in the prisoner cells—some were long, some short, others were straight, many were jagged and wide, and they all combined together to give the faint impression of an obelisk. Something much larger than the tower he had lived in with his uncle. Something colossal enough to run down the full length of the giant skeleton’s legs, right to the bottom of the tomb.

  That was it. That was where his father was. Down there, at the bottom of the obelisk. He strained his eyes against the darkness, hoping to see more details, but there were none. The distance between him and the tower was vast, like gazing at the moon. Still, his mind raced with scenarios. His father, jailed in the sorceress’ lair. The necromancer herself, waiting for his arrival, surrounded by oceans of bone and equally large seas of treasure. The horded wealth and army of a long dead empire.

  He was close now. His life’s purpose was almost at hand.

  Slowly, he saw more details. It appeared that the lines he could see in the pillar were holes in the structure, the ancient walls having crumbled from millennia of disrepair. The purple color was coming from a very large light source shining inside. If he squinted just right, he almost thought that he could see the purple glow moving and churning, like blood through arteries. And, all at once, he noticed a faint sound in the chilly air. Some noise coming from the obelisk. Considering the distances involved, it must’ve been exceptionally loud to carry this far.

  It almost sounded like screaming.

  “Squire!” Zaria shouted. “Hope you’re not trying to fly over there!”

  “I can see the bottom of the tomb!” The cavernous air seemed to absorb his voice. It didn’t even echo back. “It’s an obelisk!”

  “A what?”

  “A tower! Big pillar! Very massive!”

  There was no response for a moment. “We’re near the legs, aren’t we?”

  “Yes. It shouldn’t be much further now. If we can navigate over towards—”

  “Does that mean you can see its cock?”

  It took Isaac a moment to pull his head out of the elevator hole.

  She had wandered over to the open presentation circle, grinning besides the skeletons. “Ain’t got my anatomy mixed up, have I?”

  “My father is down there,” Isaac said. “That is his prison. The evil lair of a necromancer.”

  “Big tower, you said. Long. Tall. Hard.”

  “Stop. Right now.”

  “Massive length. Piercing through the earth. Fucking it, you could say.”

  “It is an obelisk. I could see some kind of light inside. It’s purple, like soul energy.”

  “This cock’s filled with souls, is it? Aren’t all the others?”

  “Zaria!”

  She snorted. “Just playing, love. How much further do you think we’d need to—”

  The door to the council chamber opened. Something was thrown inside.

  Isaac couldn’t see what the object was through the circular rows of desks. But Zaria was standing in the central stage, close to the podium, and she saw it clearly. Her immediate reaction was to sprint away. Underneath her footsteps, he heard a fuse hissing as it burned down to the nub.

  An explosion ripped through the room. If some of the sound had not escaped through the open elevator, it would’ve deafened them. The blast upended several desks, splitting them apart in a shower of spraying ossein. Isaac was scrambling for the cover of a desk when he glimpsed the door opening again, the blurred shift of bodily movement. Zaria practically threw herself on top of him as another blackpowder bomb exploded, the shockwave slapping through his soft tissues. He had to gasp for air, his vision swimming.

  He tried to peak out from the corner of the desk, get a glimpse of their attacker, but Zaria pulled him back, and just barely in time. A throwing knife sliced through the spot where his face had been a second earlier. Several more embedded themselves through the weaved bone of the judiciary desk, the blades splintering through the skeletal remains, emerging like thorns in a bush.

  Through the ringing in his ears, a frenzied voice was shouting.

  “Zaria!”

  Isaac risked another peak out from cover.

  Captain Black Eye Soren stood in the center of the council chamber. The burnt flesh on the left side of her face was twisted into a snarl, and the other half was covered in lacerations and drying blood. Her patchy outfit of leather and cloth was now tattered and filthy, her cutlass visibly dented and dulled, and she had wrapped the exposed grey fur of her body with pilfered segments of bone, splinters and chunks draped across her wounds like the dry and cracked dirt of a desert gulch. She rather looked like a soldier lost behind enemy lines, alone and desperate, camouflaging herself in the blood of her enemies.

  “Gettin’ real sick of this shite,” Zaria said.

  “Zaria!”

  Isaac pulled his head back. Another throwing knife speared through the bone-weaved desk, spraying the two of them with splinters.

  “You bilge rat!” Soren shouted. “You sodding codpiece!”

  Isaac balled a hurricane into his palm, lifted his hand above the desk, and blind-fired it as a lance. The snarl that came in response told him he had missed, if only barely.

  “Sic your magic fucktoy on me, traitor! I fucking dare him to spit hellfire my way!”

  He began to perform more mnemonics, but Zaria clamped a hand to his shoulder, shaking her head. When he stopped, she shouted back: “Should’ve turned tail, Soren! I gave you that chance!”

  “You think I didn’t try?” Soren’s voice was rasping and wild, like she’d been fighting for her life for hours on end. “I’m not foolish! Fuck this tomb! Fuck the bony cunt runnin’ it!” Another knife stabbed through the desk. “She sicced her beasts on me! A bloody streamin’ ocean! Oh, but not my crew! Not a soul was harmed other than me! Only I’m condemned to death!”

  Zaria paused. “All the rest made it out? You sure?”

  “That better not be relief in your voice, traitor!”

  Isaac ran a finger along an embedded throwing knife, thinking. It was obvious by now that the sorceress was listening to their conversations. She might’ve heard their intentions to only kill Soren, and spare the rest of the pirates. But why had she done so herself? Their alliance was a matter of convenience, at best. It was not going to survive past the death rattle of the puppeteer. She had no good reason to show mercy towards any of the people invading her domain . . . unless it was part of her plan, somehow.

  Why had the sorceress spared the pirates?

  “My crew’s abandoned me!” Soren yelled. “All I got is sword and powder to fight a sea of corpses! I’m not stupid! I ain’t never seeing daylight again!”

  “That’s your own fault, capt! No one forced you down here!”

  “Shut your mouth! If my fate is sealed, then I’m taking you with me! You’ll never see that treasure so long as I’m drawing breath!” One more knife slashed through the bones around them. “Face me, you craven cunt!”

  “Zaria,” Isaac said.

  She turned to him.

  “Say what you want to your captain.”

  She blinked, splintered bone falling from her mohawk.

  “Say what you want to your captain,” Isaac said, “before I kill her.”

  Zaria gripped her poleaxe tighter. “Soren! Captain! Listen clear, now!”

  A guttural snarl traveled across the council chamber.

  “Join us!” Zaria silenced Isaac before he could respond. “That’s your only chance! If you want to live, stop being such a principled cunt and help us!”

  “You gonna cut me in on the treasure shares, are you?” Soren laughed like a prisoner facing the gallows. “You think a hoard of gold’s gonna buy your life from me?”

  “Fuck that! You’re lucky I won’t shove a fat goblet up your arse for all the pain and woe you caused me! You’re getting your life, and nothing more!”

  Another knife slammed into the desk, skittering out through the bone and falling down the open elevator. Isaac really had to wonder how many she had.

  “I won’t be insulted by your mercy!” Soren shouted. “Not after what you’ve done! My last earthly pleasure will be watching the light fade from your eyes!”

  Zaria shook her head, taking a deep breath.

  The bunny’s voice was hoarse and wild. “You’ll never last! Even if I’m gone, the others will know! Every ship of the fleet will be braying for your blood! That gold down there won’t protect you! You’ll be hunted to the end of your days! You’ll never earn a spot on any crew ever again! The stains of your sins will blacken your soul to the last putrid breath, you gutless traitor!”

  “Isaac,” Zaria said. “Would you kindly kill this cunt for me?”

  “Cover your ears,” he replied.

  She did so. He casted a spike of ice into his palm, the frozen point sticking out of his hand like the tip of a spear. He angled his hand up towards the ceiling, aimed carefully, and fired. A widening stream of ice erupted from his arm, fanning out into a flat, thin triangle whose base grew into crystal stalactites on the ceiling. He made sure those crystals were large and sharp. When he was done, the entire length of ice hung like a diagonal curtain from desk to roof, the dust in the air glinting off the shining surface.

  “What’s this?” Soren said, almost laughing. “You trying to scare me, human? Come on, love. Aim a little better. Poke that head out from cover. See how well it works for you.”

  Isaac pressed one of his ears to his shoulder, pointed his finger at the ice stalactites, and fired a salvo of raw sound.

  The ice exploded in a shower of glinting shrapnel. A good portion of the ceiling came with it. Human and hyena braced together as a spherical arc of ice and stone sliced through the room. Underneath the blast of sound, Isaac heard a scream of pain. Ears ringing, he leaped out from cover, pointing his finger like a cannon.

  He found Soren reeling, clutching her face in agony. She flung a throwing knife while stumbling back, blind and deafened, and the blade sailed wide. Isaac pointed his finger at the pirate captain, ready to reduce her down to pulp and mist.

  She ducked behind a desk right before he fired. The shot of raw sound blew open a wall of the council chamber, scattering rubble into the adjacent hallway. He could see glimpses of her scrambling along the floor, snaking her way between the desks, trying to close the distance. He changed the cast, balling wind into his hands, and slammed it into the floor. A surging wall pounded across the room, flipping every desk and chair in its path. Soren tried to leap out of the way, but did not quite make it—the edge of the wind caught her legs, and she was tossed head over heels across the floor. Another burst of wind slammed her into a wall, bouncing her off the fa?ade hard enough to crack the ossein veins. When she tried to stand, gasping and struggling, Isaac shot a third lance of wind against the wall itself, sending her spinning across the floor like a corner shot in a game of billiards.

  Captain Soren came to rest at the edge of the elevator. Zaria stood up from the cover of the desk, and, instead of advancing, stepped back. In her place, Isaac came forward, a small tornado of wind cocked in his hand.

  The bunny groaned on the floor, gripping the edge of the black hole. She had a graveyard of ice and stone splinters embedded in her burned flesh. Blood leaked down her armor of pilfered bone. As Isaac approached, her shaking hand reached across her chest for another throwing knife.

  She met his gaze. Her black eye reflected his face, the dark glass surrounded by fury. “Least I wasn’t gonna cheat.”

  “You should have,” Isaac replied.

  He shot the wind from his hand, almost as gentle as the hot breeze of the desert dunes, and Soren tumbled off the edge, disappearing down into the massive cavern below. He heard nothing. No screams, no sound of her bouncing off an elevator support beam, and, most of all, no sound of her body hitting the bottom. She vanished like a sailor sinking through the blackened depths of a stormy sea.

  Isaac sat down hard on the floor, panting. He kept his hand lightly aimed at the dark hole of the elevator, just in case. After a few moments of silence, a pair of hands wriggled under his arms, pulling him back to his feet.

  “You alright?” Zaria asked.

  “Sure. Catch my breath.”

  She nodded, walking over to the edge. After a moment, she spat into the darkness. “Goodbye, captain. ‘Twas a pleasure, for the most part.”

  She stayed over the hole a moment longer. Isaac noticed that his poultice had healed most of the torture wounds on her body. All that remained were a few scars, here and there.

  “Let’s keep going,” Zaria said. “Your father’s waiting.”

  He glanced around the council chamber. Most of it was now lying in pieces. A great number of the bone desks had shattered into their constituent body parts, and all the untranslated titles and ornamentation had been lost with it. It may now be impossible to discover the names of the last rulers and scientists that had lived in this empire.

  Isaac didn’t feel too sorry about that. He patted the dagger Zaria had given him, just to make sure it was still there, and lead the way out of the room.

  The hallways through the lower abdomen continued on. They passed by military barracks, the dust-covered offices of long-dead magistrates, chemical storage closets and vast prisoner complexes. More than once, they lost sight of the sacral vertebrae, and he was forced to translate some of the signs for directions. Many of them had rather sinister sounding names. Office to the Hegemon of Sacrifice. Department of Levies and Souls. The Maggot Prince. Her Holy Radiance of Exalted Death.

  Once he had oriented himself, the area they needed to travel seemed to be labeled rather plainly. Extraction Chamber. Isaac found that less than appealing.

  As they moved forward, he began thinking. He couldn’t get over the fact that the necromancer had spared the lives of the pirates. She had even gone out of her way to only attack the Silent Saber’s captain, apparently. It was another confirmation that she was listening to their conversations, but, more than that, it was a very poor tactical choice on the sorceress’ part. All the souls of the pirates could’ve been great fuel for her necromancy. They might’ve sustained her life for many centuries to come, as well as given her more power and bones with which to fight the intruders in her tomb. At this point, for her, sparing or killing the pirates might well have been the choice between life and death.

  Of course, there could be reasonable explanations. The necromancer did not have unlimited bones. She might’ve only sent a harassment force against the pirates while she consolidated her main necrotic mass deeper in the tomb. That might explain why Soren was able to escape the attack. The pirates were not her main threat—the puppeteer was. She did not need to place special care in making sure she killed all of them, even if doing so might benefit her.

  Still, it was rubbing Isaac the wrong way. This necromancer had not survived for millennia just through the strength of her armies. She was crafty. She would’ve faced similar threats before—many of them, in fact. And, over the course of her enormously long reign over this barren place, she had managed to prevail against every single intruder that had come knocking, including his father.

  He would have to be careful.

  The dust in the air interrupted his thoughts. It did so by moving, as if on its own. The glinting motes curled into a pointed stream, shifting like sand sinking through the hills of dunes, and this stream of dust pointed down an adjacent corridor. The air was sparkling like metal as Isaac peeked his head around the corner.

  Down the hall, there were more bodies. It was difficult to qualify them as human. They had been perforated with more holes than an ancient battle standard, the gaping punctures leaving jagged marks in the flesh, as if the process had been long, slow and excruciating. And, as he watched, bones began to wriggle their way out of the holes, white stalks squirming through flesh like maggots, tumbling to the floor, rolling and collecting.

  Ahead, the corridor widened, and he could finally see the sacrum, the central plating of the pelvis. It spread out like a porous cliffside, the beginning of the wings curving like mountain slopes—he could see the slight ridges and twin rows of holes in the bone, the places where the vertebrae had fused together. Each circular vent had been walled with granite and gold, carved intricately with religious iconography. In the middle of the triangular sacrum, a relatively small set of bronze doors stood closed, surrounded by stalks of glowing cartilage.

  That was the Extraction Chamber. The start of the pelvic cavity.

  Masses of bones had congregated around the bronze doors. They shuffled and undulated around it, agitated and restless, almost absently being absorbed into each other and sloughing off into new shapes. Human blood dripped down the preceding stairs like gentle red curtains.

  “Follow my lead, Z.”

  He pressed forward, and she fell into step at his back.

  Once they noticed him, the bones shifted their movements. At first, they wriggled faster from the fallen corpses, smearing blood across the knuckled pavement as they slid in his direction. He kicked them away without slowing. Next, the more locomotive of the masses throbbed into his path, the skulls embedded in their frames attempting to grind out words. Isaac cast the anti-necrotic light, eliciting shrieks of pain and fear as the bodies slithered back, burning a path through their ranks likes flames through a garden.

  The bones had smeared themselves across the door to the sacrum, creating a pulsing membrane of body parts that sealed the entrance shut. When Isaac stepped forward into a pool of blood, attempting to melt a hole into the writhing layer, the bones did not run—in fact, they remained defiant against him, bursting into blue flame, screaming softly as they died, and entire legions crawled into place to reform the seal. The actions seemed rather desperate.

  “Out of my way, necromancer,” Isaac said.

  Skull stalks grew from the wall like dandelions. The skinless faces chittered at him, swirling into a collection of eyeless stares.

  “I—I—Issssa—Isssaaaaaaac.”

  He stepped back just enough that his light was no longer burning the bones, but still an active threat. “Couldn’t kill Soren, could you? Or did you just let her ambush us?”

  Behind them, the squirming masses congregated together, sealing off any hope of retreat.

  “Well,” Isaac said, “thanks for sparing the pirates. Glad to see you’re upholding our alliance. Or, rather, glad to see you’re taking your delayed death with such good grace. It’s appreciated.”

  “Isaac,” the head stalks replied.

  He glanced at the dead humans behind him. “Is the sorcerer beyond these doors?”

  The head stalks nodded.

  “Do you want me to kill them?”

  On the wall, the crawling bones quickened like blood in an artery, and the skulls shook violently from side to side.

  “Why not? Isn’t that why you spared my life?”

  The skulls did not move. They only stared at him.

  “Is there something in this chamber that you don’t want me to see?”

  After a few long moments, the skulls nodded.

  “Are you planning some attack on the puppeteer that you don’t want me to interfere with?”

  The bones crawling along the door shuddered like a bird unfurling its feathers.

  “Ah,” Isaac said. “Well, I’m sure this is all very inconvenient for you, but I’ll be entering your torture chamber now, if you don’t mind.”

  “Isaac,” the skulls replied, shaking themselves from side to side.

  “What game are you playing, necromancer? Don’t you want my aid? This puppeteer is too strong for you to handle alone, aren’t they?” He glared at the skinless faces. “They’ll kill you if I don’t interfere.”

  Nearly a dozen faces stared back at him. They nodded, once, with a certain finality.

  “Then what do you want from me?” Isaac asked. “Do you wish me to simply leave and never return?”

  For a long moment, the skulls did not respond. The only sound was the dry scraping of bone across bronze. Then, the stalks extended, shunting more vertebrae into their lengths. He thickened his spell, creating a radiant shell of white, and he felt Zaria tense beside him, her poleaxe held firm and ready.

  The skulls stood at the edge of the lighted dome, peering into the brightness. Their gaze was silent and still. No facial expressions could be read from the ancient bone. Shadows danced through the empty sockets.

  Then, all together, the skulls nodded with the same heavy finality.

  “I am not leaving,” he said. “I will see my journey through. I’ll rescue my father, and I’ll cleanse your defilement from this place while I’m at it. However. . . .”

  Something made him speak. The way the skulls were looking at him, how the bones scurried to block the doors. It reeked of desperation.

  “If you surrender,” Isaac said, “then I will show mercy. I will take you back to my guild to face fair judgement. Your crimes are many, but . . . maybe some good can come from the knowledge you possess.”

  Her reaction surprised him. The skulls flailed along their stalks, some of the faces snapping from the vertebrae columns entirely, and the bones on the wall boiled like insects. Every skull he could see, either on the stalks or the wall, rattled their jaws as they careened from side to side. It was the most furious head shake he’d ever seen.

  “That is your only choice, necromancer. Death or imprisonment. You can try to stop me, but you will not dissuade me.”

  The skulls gathered around each other, chittering and gasping. “Isaac. Isaac. Isaac. Isaac.”

  “Get out of my way,” Isaac said.

  For a long moment, the head stalks swayed like flowers in a breeze. Flowing masses of bones congregated behind them, their body parts crackling with constant motion. Zaria’s hackles rose, and her snout curled back in a snarl.

  Then, the bones shifted away. Crawling ant lines of vertebrae moved back into the substrate layer as the head stalks retreated, and the glinting bronze of the double doors slowly emerged. A crowd of squirming masses grew behind them, silent and watching.

  The doors were clear. All that remained was a lone skull sitting on the knuckled floor, staring up at him. Its eye sockets shined empty in the cartilage light.

  “Isaac,” the skull said.

  Isaac pushed open the bronze doors and walked inside.