Hammer and Bolter: Issue Twenty-Six Read online

  The Liche Priest continued with his incantations as the storm raged around him. The displacement of air in the room adding to the volume and intensity of his words as they swept through his chest cavity and out through his mouth, between his ribs, squeezing between the vertebrae of his spine, squeaking and squealing like a badly played viol-cello string, squawking and spitting like the ill-judged breath of a beginner trying to master a reed instrument.

  The words ended. The Liche Priest closed his mouth, but the squeals and squawks continued on, supplemented by similar sounds made by the configurations of bones and connective tissues of the two Tomb Guards, the differences in their bodies evident in the tonal qualities of the sounds they produced.

  The Liche Priest raised both of his arms high in the air, his staff wielded firmly in his right hand. The wind that had formed the sand and dust into an impenetrable cloud gathered around his figure in a tornado, and, as the air at its epicentre stilled, and as the air around it ceased to move, as all the movement was contained in that spinning vortex of gritty particulates, the sounds abated, all but the hissing and shushing of dust and sand particles moving through the air and grinding against one another.

  The Liche Priest leaned out high over the sarcophagus with his staff, and the tornado travelled its length before spreading out in a low flat-bottomed cloud above the tomb, the stilled sand suspended in the air by some unearthly magic.

  Utter silence prevailed once more, until the wooden outer casing of the ancient casket began to creak, its fibres so old and so dry it was held together only by the magic that suffused it. It creaked and spat like new wood being split as the lid of the vessel separated from the base and the top half levitated slowly up towards the sand cloud.

  The air did not move, so that no scent escaped from beneath the lid. There was no taint of the musk oils used to anoint the Tomb King, no aroma of the unguents used to prepare the skin for mummification, no scent of the bandages used to wrap the precious body.

  The Liche Priest lowered his arms and slumped slightly at the shoulders as if fatigued. Then he lifted his skull once more, and his arms came up, slowly and steadily, to shoulder height, and, with them, came the second lid, the top half of a second vessel, snugly fitted inside the first.

  This was richly painted and ornamented in turquoise and gold, arterial blood-red and black. It was covered in elaborate hieroglyphs, but also bore images of feet and hands and a face, and was recognisably masculine, handsome, warlike. The crossed hands carried weapons, one in each hand, and elaborate armour of segmented gold and turquoise adorned the majority of the figure, including its chest and limbs.

  The inner casket had been made millennia before of reed pulp, and was lightweight, but strong. The material was versatile, and could be sculpted and moulded, so more closely resembled the form of a human man than did the wooden sarcophagus that protected it.

  If the body inside the sarcophagus had ever been human it was a long time ago, a very, very long time ago, when the elves and dwarfs still ruled their corners of the world, and before mankind had prospered. If the body inside the sarcophagus had ever been human it was before the Empire had been founded and settled, in times unremembered by any human lore.

  Beneath the painted casket lay a mummified body wrapped in woven layers of ancient reeds, long since dried of any moisture they once contained.

  The Liche Priest lowered his arms again, but this time his shoulders and head did not drop. This time he signalled to the Tomb Guards, who stepped away from the vessel and strode back to the shelves that held the canopic jars. As they did so, the Liche Priest walked the length of the sarcophagus from head to foot, slicing his blade through the centre of the reeds. Where they were cut, the edges sprang up and separated, and began to curl away from what was beneath, as if shrinking from having been pulled too tightly across the body for too long.

  When all of the canopic jars were standing on the plinth around the sarcophagus, the Liche Priest cast his arms in the direction of the painted lid, which flew across the cellar to be caught by the Tomb Guards who placed it on the shelves. Then the wooden sarcophagus lid flew towards them, and they caught and stored that, too.

  As they took up their places again, at the shoulders of the Tomb King, the Liche Priest set the sands in motion once more, this time driving them around the perimeter of the room in a great swirling stream like a swarm or a comet. He stood in its path, at the head of the opened sarcophagus and opened his mouth once more, generating a storm of sound incorporating the chanting, fluting, bellowing and squawking made by his skeleton, and the shushing, hissing and scouring noises made by the action of the sand and dust on his bones and sinews. The music, for it was a kind of extraordinary, controlled tune, however discordant, filled the room, making the walls throb, making the canopic jars vibrate.

  One by one, they began to open. Some lost the mud and earth that they were sealed with. It simply disintegrated back to sand and dust, drawn to the great swirling mass of the stuff that careened around the room, finding its extraordinary path through the Liche Priest as he turned and writhed to control its path and the music he made with it. In other instances, it was the clay of the pots that desiccated first, the jars themselves that were too fragile, too friable to withstand the frequency of a particular note, and crumbled or shattered.

  Whatever caused the jars to break or to open, their contents were activated by the strange magic that the Liche Priest was summoning with his sands of time, and soon the room was full of more of them, more beings, more ethereal figures, more impossible, incomplete, undead warriors. They stood and turned, and they looked around. They stared down at themselves for a moment, or across at each other, and then they dressed ranks around the sarcophagus and prepared for their master to appear.

  They had been waiting for a long time, but as long, as impossibly long, as it had been, they had not forgotten. They had never forgotten what they had waited for, or why they had waited. They needed no words of reminder or of explanation. One look at themselves, one look at each other, one look at the Tomb Guards standing beside them, one look at the Liche Priest, one glance at the tomb or at the Tomb King that lay within, was all that any of them needed, and they were the least of them. They were the least of them and they required no order, no command. Their purpose was clear.

  The Liche Priest, all his preparatory work complete, stepped out of the swirling sandstorm that continued to chase its way around the perimeter of the room, tearing at the banners that hung in their sconces on the wall, shredding them to nothing. The chant of his mouth and the wailing of the bones and sinews of his skeleton ceased as he took his place once more at the head of the mummified body of the Tomb King.

  He turned to face the sandstorm as it raged past him, and he threw back his head and thrust his arms high into the air. The rush of sand was almost deafening. The particulates collided one with another, and with the walls of the room, scouring and sanding and buffeting for all they were worth, and then the tone changed from a shushing and hissing to an odd whispered squeak. The particles of sand changed colour from yellow to green, and some changed to darker browns and even to black. They grew too, and their movement in the air slowed.

  The sounds changed again to the chittering clicking of swarming insects, as wing cases buzzed and crashed, and a million insects beat a path around and around the room in a shrill cacophony. The flightless bugs, carried as far as momentum would take them, began to fall through the flying bodies of their winged cousins, dropping to the ground onto six legs or eight, springing into action: scorpions thrust their stings high over their backs and brought their great foreclaws together in threatening postures, and spiders flexed their leg joints and bobbed their abdomens, spinning silk in preparation of long climbs back to the surface of the city.

  Then the locusts began to do their work. They stopped flying around the room, and began to fly into the walls of the chamber, devouring the remains of the bricks and ragstones that separated this chamber beneath t
he university from others, giving the Tomb King and his minions access to all the underground rooms and byways of the city of Nuln.

  The lecture halls were empty, so were the seminar rooms, and the studies, and the libraries. The students stayed in their rooms or in each others’ rooms. They skulked nervously, unsure of where they should be. Some of the youngest and the most nervous, and some of the richest, left the city, entirely, by any means they could manage. Many simply slung a few belongings onto their backs and walked out of Nuln by the nearest gates, and some found that the nearest gates were not manned.

  All of the windows of the university had begun to turn to sand. The change was not visible from outside the buildings. Everything looked remarkably normal. No one glanced at the buildings, but if they did, where once they would have seen black windows, now they might see black holes where the window glass had, until very recently, been, and they would not have noticed the difference. A very keen eye might have realised that there were no glints or reflections off the glass, but there were no keen eyes left in Nuln, or anywhere else in the Empire. Fatigue had set in, fatigue and dread and apathy.

  The students standing and sitting in the rooms of the university had noticed. The students sitting at their narrow desks around the perimeter of the library, under the high windows, had noticed when sand had begun to trickle down onto the pages of their open books. The students sitting in tutorials had noticed the hissing and shushing of moving sand, and had turned when they had felt draughts on the backs of their necks from the glass-less windows.

  Every room in the university that had a window also contained a pile of sand, and some of the grandest lecture theatres, meeting rooms, libraries and refectories with entire walls of windows soon housed great drifts and dunes of shifting sand, but were, in all other regards, deserted.

  Once the glass was gone, the plaster began to crumble, the moisture leaching away, as if by magic, leaving nothing behind for the dust to cling to. When the plaster had drifted and trickled away into its own pale dunes, the naked walls remained, made of block and brick and ragstone, of flint and cob and render, made, in short, of dust and sand, and water.

  Fithvael still held the ancient hourglass in his hand, but Surn Strallan was pointing past him at the collection of instruments that stood, silent, on the table in the alcove. The glass bulbs in one or two of the smallest had already perished, returned to the sands from which they had been made, and the materials had commingled with their contents making strange marbled patterns of varying coloured sands: streaks of light in dark, and dark in light, yellow in grey, and black in orange, and pearly iridescent white in a rich sepia sand.

  ‘There!’ said Strallan, waving his pointing finger, or perhaps it waved because he was nervous; perhaps it merely shook.

  He tried to lick his lips, to moisten them, but he could find no saliva in his mouth, and could generate none in his throat.

  He had never thought that the inability to sweat could be such a handicap. He had a great urge to wipe the sweat that should have appeared on his brow away with his sleeve, but none had risen there. He wished that it had. He was filled with fear and dread that it had not, and the fear was increased when still the sweat would not come.

  A great, black, gleaming scorpion, its carapace grinding almost audibly against the dark, grey sand from which it emerged, crawled over the lip of the table, extending its sting towards them.

  Then a spider, cast in the brass of one of the tall, slender ornate frames of a particularly grand hourglass revivified, stretched high in its leg joints and began, almost lazily to descend to the sand below.

  Suddenly a locust, its wing cases clicking, flew from the same hourglass, and the flat, narrow head of a snake bobbed up from behind, glossy and golden, its eyes blinking, and a forked tongue darting from between lipless jaws.

  A host of black scarabs swarmed over the remaining timepieces as one of the largest of the old frames disintegrated into its component parts: hundreds of bugs, painstakingly carved from ancient bog oak that had been waxed and handled for hundreds of years, so that its patina was reflected in the impossibly glossy backs of the dung beetles as they dropped to the floor and began to scuttle around the room, looking for a route down, looking for their master.

  Then Strallan’s attention was drawn back to the ancient hourglass in Fithvael’s hand as the glass finally disintegrated, and he was left holding the symmetrical frame. The sand of the glass was so fine as to be the finest of dust particles, floating in the sunbeams that penetrated the glass-less windows of the room, and dancing in the air. Not falling, but apparently weightless, they drifted through the air like perfect, magical glitter motes.

  Strallan expected the sand, captured in the glass globes for a millennium, or perhaps longer, to shower to the floor to be ground underfoot, but more magic happened, as the boy gasped for another breath.

  Every grain of sand, every particle, every speck, expanded in the air like a sponge in water. Every one of the thousands of tiny grains trapped inside the globes of glass unfurled and blossomed, passing from the ovum stage to nymph to adult locust in the blink of an eye, except that Surn Strallan no longer had the ability to blink.

  Each grain became an entity a hundred times the size that it had appeared to be in the airtight, watertight glass globes that had housed them since before the dawn of modern memory. Each one exploded in size and colour and intensity. Each one squeaked and chittered, each one spread its wings and each one added to the yellow, green, speckled swarm that began to rise around the old elf warrior.

  He felt the flesh crawl across his hands, and a slight constriction around his wrists, and he looked down, but he could see nothing through the cloud of flitting insects that, with one mind, was forming frantic figures, exercising one consciousness, shaping one collective body with which to escape the room and find a way to the Tomb King.

  Fithvael was no longer holding the hourglass, and yet he had not dropped it. It had come alive in his hands, filled the air with dust and insects, and, when the swarm cleared, he found that his hands and arms were covered in more of them, in a crust of creeping scarabs. He raised his hands and thrust them away from his body, and, in that action, a host of the hard, black bodies fell away. Some of them spread their wings, mid-air and joined the other flying forms that were fleeing the room. Others fell to the floor and scuttled across rugs and over feet, clicking and scratching against the floorboards, finding the gaps between them and the fissures and knots that would allow them egress.

  The snakes that wove and coiled around Fithvael’s wrists and forearms, sprung newly formed from the ancient hourglass frame, flexed and constricted, but the warrior elf’s flesh was strong and firm, and no harm was done to him, other than a slight tingling of his fingertips. He pulled his dagger from its scabbard at his waist, and inveigled the tip of the blade between the first serpent’s scaly skin and the cloth of his shirt. The sharp blade cut cleanly through several coils of snake, rending the cloth against his skin, and slicing a long, neat, narrow line into his own flesh, just deep enough to draw a bead of blood.

  He repeated the process three times more, ridding himself of the snakes that fell in pieces through the air. As they were cut, they appeared to be as complete as they could possibly be, with perfect, glossy scales, gleaming eyes and the appearance of healthy, muscular bodies, but, as they fell, it became clear that they produced no blood, nor any fluids of any kind. As they tumbled, the scales petrified, the muscles withered and the bones desiccated, and, finally, only dust drifted to the floor.

  ‘It’s happening,’ said Mondelblatt.

  Surn Strallan, Fithvael, Laban and Gilead turned to the professor, who wheezed his strange, disconcerting laugh, and then Gilead, his eyes widening slightly, slowly drew his sword. Fithvael circled away to his comrade’s left and Laban looked from one to the other. Surn Strallan did not know what to do. He looked at Mondelblatt, at the table that seemed to heave under the weight of too much sand of too many colours and of t
he armoured bodies of far too many exotic insects. Then he looked, one by one, at the elves, who were circling the professor, all wielding weapons, but none actually attacking. Finally, he looked down at his body.

  He squeaked and jumped, involuntarily, and started a strange hopping dance, patting at his arms and torso, slapping and flailing to relieve himself of the creatures that, finding nowhere else to go had begun to climb up over his boots and breeches, and were finding their way up his shirtsleeves and jerkin. He had been so unnerved for so long, so immobile, so rooted, that to react, to respond honestly and urgently was a relief. He could not bear the notion that he might go the way of Mondelblatt.

  Fithvael had freed himself of the creatures that had materialised out of the hourglass he had been holding, and none had invaded Gilead’s or Laban’s persons. There was no apparent reason why, except that they were other, except that they were elf and not human.

  The insects were infesting Surn Strallan, though.

  They gathered and swarmed, and liked the collective consciousness. They sought to escape the confines of first the hourglasses and then the professor’s rooms, as the magic that suffused the air of Nuln, the magic that leached out of the cellar beneath the university, the magic that had travelled through time and space, through millennia and thousands of miles, animated the Tomb King’s familiars.

  They wove their inexorable pathways downwards between floorboards, through crevices, behind wainscots and under doorjambs. They circled the room, and when they could not find a way down, they found a way out through the glass-less windows, and followed exterior walls down to the ground level, and hence into storm drains and grilles and down through gratings and vents.

  Gilead signalled to Laban to follow the creatures, and the young elf first looked out of the window and then thrust Surn Strallan aside so that he could open the door and quit the professor’s apartments. As he did so, the swarm, with its single mind, took sudden notice, halted in mid-air, and changed direction, hurtling past a still startled Strallan and following the elf. To his surprise and delight, most of the bugs that still crawled about his person took the hint and followed their brethren out through the door.