Armiger tried to open his eyes. Something had changed. Deep within him, all his voices still mourned. But something had pulled him back into this body, where he had never expected to return.
His eyes wouldn’t open completely. The lids were drying to stiff leather, and the orbs beneath had shriveled. All he saw was ruined blackness. He was still in his niche, closed in on all sides with stone, as was proper. His neighbors were the dead, and he should feel kinship with them now. He was also dead.
Life to him had been so much more than this one body, that its own survival meant nothing. He was a god, composed of living atoms and enfolding within himself the power of a sun. His had not been a single consciousness, but the coordinated symphony of a million minds. Each thing he touched he felt in all ways that were possible; and each thing he saw, he saw completely and was reminded of all things. All was in all for him, and he had acted decisively across centuries.
He had been brought low by an army of creatures as thoughtless compared to him as bacteria. They were led by a woman to whom he was incidental, merely an obstacle to be removed. And when she killed him, she had no idea that something whose experience exceeded that of her entire species had died. All the questions she could ever have asked, he had answered long ago. She was ignorant, and so all of his wisdom was lost.
This body had no purpose without that greater Self. The fact that it still moved and breathed was irrelevant; the motivating soul was gone.
But lying here, senses blocked, embalmed and shriveling as was proper, Armiger had continued to think. He was locked in the paralytic cycle of grief; all his thoughts had turned on the higher Self, predicated by its existence, and with it gone, every thought hit an impasse and locked hard. He could have no notion, no memory, that did not run up against that barrier, so Armiger’s mind was now a chaos where no thought finished forming, no purpose completely crystallized. Jagged nightmare images, half-memories and monotonous fragments of impulse echoed on and on. The flesh of this body would turn to dust, but Armiger’s real body was a filamentary net of nanotech, and that would last for centuries. So would the echoes of grief.
And nothing should matter, nor disturb his rest. But his eyes had opened.
A faint vibration sounded—footsteps. The sound of someone walking in the catacombs had waked him. Whatever walked was bipedal, with the same period to its step as a man—but it could still be anything. Maybe one of Ventus’ mechal guardians, come to dissect him.
It didn’t matter. He tried to shut his eyes, but they would no longer obey him at all.
He couldn’t stop listening, either, as the footsteps approached, paused nearby, and came even closer. A second set of steps approached, then a third. Now he heard voices. The men were standing just outside his niche.
Anger emerged from the chaos in Armiger’s heart. He should be left in peace. Humans had no idea of his pain; they had killed him, and were they now here to desecrate the remains, play with his corpse? His throat caught in a gesture that would have formed a growl, if he still had lungs to breathe with. His fists rose at his sides, struck the stone overhead, and fell again, trembling.
The anger possessed him. It stilled the mourning voices. Armiger’s attention turned to the wall behind his head as the first blow of the hammer fell outside.
*
“He’s a general, he’s not going to have jewelry,” muttered Choltas. He looked around uneasily.
The oldest of the grave-robbers, Enneas, watched him good-humored. Choltas had been into a couple of mounds near Barendts city; the operations had consisted of surveying and tunnelling, based on the assumption that the burial chamber was at the center of each mound. They’d been right once, but the chamber had collapsed long ago. They had sifted through clay and stones in a suffocating tunnel by the light of fireflies tethered with horses’ hairs. The operation had taken weeks, but was worth it when they turned up some sintered metal, a little gold and a jade pendant in the shape of a machine.
Choltas had been scared then; how much more so was he now in his first catacomb. This hall was low and wide, so that Choltas’ lantern lit a spot of floor and ceiling, and only hinted at the rest of the space. He kept starting and looking around, because every now and then the lantern light would gleam off a slick surface of one of the pillars that lined the place. Enneas knew they could play tricks on the eye; he had been here before. If you let your imagination run away with you, the pillars looked like men, standing still and silent all around.
“He could have anything,” Enneas said. “You never know what a man will choose to be buried with. If nothing else, if he’s highborn, there’s the gold in his teeth.”
Choltas grunted. Corres, the third member of the party, waved impatiently from a ways down the gallery. His impatience, Choltas knew, was not due to fear, but a simple desire to get an unpleasant job done. Corres had no imagination, no apparent feelings, and seldom spoke. Enneas had no idea what he did with the money he made in these tombs.
They joined him near one wall of the passage. “It’s somewhere along here,” said Corres. He swung his lantern, making shadows lean up and down the hall. Corres was merely trying to get a good view, but Choltas watched the moving darkness with growing alarm.
“It’s okay,” Enneas said, patting him on the shoulder. He pitched his voice at a conversational volume. “This is our place of employ. We belong here.” Choltas stared at him wide-eyed. Enneas chuckled.
Well, it was almost true. Fear battled anger in Enneas’ stomach every time he entered a tomb like this. The fear was natural; he’d never reconciled himself to death. The anger was more powerful, though, and it had to do with Enneas’ legacy: his family had fallen from one of the highest positions in the republic. The deciding moment in his life had been the day his mother took him to visit burial mounds of some ancient warlords. “Your ancestors are buried here,” she had said, gesturing at the earthen hills, each surmounted by a fane of pillars. He’d imagined men and women with his family’s faces standing at attention under those hills, watching him. Their eyes had accused: you are poor, they had said. You are no longer one of us.
Enneas had naively believed that fortunes lost could be regained. His youth had been a comedy of failure; he could enter no guilds, influenced no inspectors with his painstakingly written political letters. Business ventures begun with pride and faith in his fellow man had ended in betrayal by his customers and friends. One day he had found himself wandering penniless near the field of mounds. He was damned if he would beg. And his ancestors’ eyes followed him as he walked among them. He decided to shut their eyes once and for all, and had started digging.
And now he was wealthy. Choltas, too, was from a fallen house, though he was too young to be bitter. Enneas had taken it upon himself to spare the youth the detours that had brought him to this point. Even now Choltas wasn’t sure he wanted to live this way, but Enneas kept at him. Tonight was an important test for the boy.
The wall was full of niches. They were not shallow and broad, as in most catacombs, but were deep holes into which a body could be inserted feet-first. The builders of this place had planned it to be used for many centuries, but their nation had been overrun sometime in the dim past. The city this tomb had served no longer existed, so it was seldom visited. The general’s army had been camped nearby, otherwise he would have been buried elsewhere. Good luck for the robbers, for although the heavy stone that covered the main entrance could not be moved by less than thirty men, there was another way in which Enneas knew about. It had been easy to convince Corres to come here—nearly impossible to convince Choltas.
“I don’t like this,” said Choltas. His round face bobbed palely in the lantern-light. He stared in frank terror at the bricked up niches Corres was passing his hands over.
“Quiet,” said Corres. “Look for new mortar.”
“The sooner we find him the quicker we can be out of here,” Enneas sensibly reminded the boy. He joined Corres at the wall. The floor around this whole area was scuffed. The burial party had come straight to this section of wall. No set of footsteps ventured into any of the other halls, unsurprisingly. The superstitious soldiers who’d put the general in here had wanted to get the job done as quickly as they could, and get out again. Enneas imagined they’d looked around themselves fearfully just as Choltas did now.
And his own pulse was racing. He wanted to leave—but each time he thought that, he remembered poverty and disappointment, and his feet remained planted right here.
“It’s none of these, they’re all old,” Corres complained. “And the letters make up other names, I think.”
“Yes.” The general had not been buried in any of the top or middle niches. Enneas lowered his own lantern and examined the row of low openings at floor level. Several were bricked over, and two of these fell in the center of the scuffed area. “It’s one of these.”
Choltas backed away. “We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said.
They both looked at him. Corres was unslinging the smith’s hammer he carried for this kind of work. “Getting traditional on us?” he asked.
“It’s—it’s wrong,” said Choltas. “There must be a better way to…”
“To live?” Enneas was annoyed. Choltas was shaking; this would not do. “You can be a beggar, Choltas, you can do that. Go on—leave us and take up your position on some rainy street. And every time a copper piece clinks into your cup, remember that for every one of those, a hundred gold sovereigns hang in the purse of a dead man, vaulted away underground where they’ll never buy any child a year of meals, least of all yours. And when they spit on you and call you useless, think how useless those sovereigns are. Now don’t be foolish. We have a job to do.” This was a rehearsed speech, but his delivery had real passion behind it, and it seemed to work. Choltas’ shoulders slumped.
Corres tapped against each niche. “The right one seems newer,” he said. “It’s hard to tell.”
“We’ll open it first, then try the other one,” said Enneas. Corres swung the hammer back, then glanced at Choltas. He stood and handed the hammer to the youth. “Go.”
Breathing raggedly, Choltas leaned over and swung the hammer with both hands. The hollow thuds it made didn’t echo, though all the stone around them should have promoted that effect. Enneas imagined the corpses in their bricked niches absorbing the sound, shifting a bit and settling with every blow. He glanced around uneasily.
One of the bricks dented inward, and on Choltas’ next blow it disappeared, leaving a black window. “Shit,” said Choltas as if he’d wanted the wall to stand firm.
“Good.” Corres knelt and, putting his hands in the aperture, pulled. The bricks around the opening twisted out, then fell with a clatter. Choltas dropped the hammer.
Enneas’ own fear reached its peak. This was always the hardest part for him—facing the body. He knew what to do from long experience, however: use his anger to deride the fear, make fun of it and thus extinguish it completely.
“Allow me,” he said. Corres grunted and stood up, dusting his hands fastidiously. Deliberately, Enneas didn’t shine his lamp into the opened niche. He knelt, and stuck his arm into it.
There was no real odor coming from this niche. It couldn’t be the general’s, then. Oh well, it might still have some valuables in it. Enneas kept a casual smile fixed on his face as he groped around. His heart nearly stopped as his hand fell on a rounded surface covered with lank hair.
Might as well have some fun. “Here he is,” he said. He got a good grip on the hair and pulled. The skull came away with a brittle pop. He stood up and thrust the skull at Choltas, not looking at it himself. “Meet general Armiger,” he said.
The other floor-level niche exploded outward.
Corres was standing right in front of it. For a moment he looked down in bewilderment at the brick dust covering his boots. Then his eyes widened impossibly, and his head ratcheted over a bit, down a bit, until he stared at the black opening that had appeared by his feet.
A black hand snapped out into the lamplight. It grabbed the edge of a brick and shoved it into the corridor.
Choltas began to scream. Enneas stepped back, raising the skull to his chest as a feeble shield. He wasn’t really thinking, and later he couldn’t remember fear. But he remembered Choltas screaming. And he would always remember Corres standing helplessly, watching coal-black, half-dried arms widen the opening they had made, and then clasp its sides to drag a foul-smelling, lolling thing onto the floor at his feet.
One of the black hands touched Corres’ boot, and he finally moved, stepping away quickly. “Hammer,” he said, but Enneas barely heard him over Choltas’ screams.
The general stood up. His dress jacket was open, and showed his split torso; there were no organs inside, only darkness. His eyes had dried half open. He swayed unsteadily, like a puppet held aloft without the use of its legs. His right arm swung out widely, then came back to paw at his throat. The fingers closed around a metal bar there, and pulled.
Corres had found the hammer. He stepped forward, shouting the name of a Wind Enneas had never heard him espouse, and swung. The hammer caved in Armiger’s split chest, banging him against the stone wall. The general’s head rolled around helplessly.
He made no sound as he stepped forward. His hand moved down, drawing a long T-handled spike out of his jaw. Now his mouth gaped open, but still he made no sound.
In the lamplight Enneas saw the black burns that covered his head and arms, and pale white flesh like ivory elsewhere. The image was burned into his memory in the instant Armiger stood with the spike in his hand, then the general moved, almost too quickly to follow.
He stepped up to Corres, and his arm came up and drove the spike into the hollow at the base of Corres’s throat. Corres’ eyes bulged, and his lips writhed back. No sound came, only blood.
Armiger took another step, his arm rigid before him, and the force carried him and Corres outside of the circle of lantern light.
Choltas stopped screaming, and ran. The wrong way. And that was too much for Enneas, who also ran. He banged into the stone jamb of the door to the hall, and swung himself around it to stagger in total darkness toward their entrance shaft. Anything could be waiting ahead, but he knew what was waiting behind. He heard Choltas start screaming again.
He tripped over a loose stone and fell, banging his chin and twisting his arm. Pain lanced up his neck. He stood anyway and lurched into the opening he knew was there. He expected fingers to encircle his ankle as he grabbed for each hand-hold in the rough stone shaft.
Enneas pulled himself out of a pit into starlight on the top of the hill. He ignored his sacks and supplies, and ran until he tripped and rolled over and over down the slope. He came to rest at the bottom, not badly hurt but bruised and shaken. When he stood up, he continued on at a limp, eyes fixed on the horizon where dawn was hours away.
And though the fear didn’t go away, as the hours passed, Enneas began to feel again all the anger of injustice and betrayal he thought he’d overcome years ago. When he wept it was from frustration, at the end of the only chapter of his life that had been in any way successful.
*
Armiger’s eyes had dried out, but he could see. His ears had withered in his skull, but he could hear the sough of wind across the top of the shaft as he neared it. Stars glowed above the lip of the pit.
He had already forgotten the humans. A deep passion they would not have understood moved him now. He climbed swiftly, as if chasing something, but what he pursued was his own meaning.
*
Choltas had heard the footsteps of the devil fade away. He knew it would be back unless he stayed very still. This was the thing’s home; it would never venture out into the world above. So though he couldn’t hear it, he knew it was there. If he stayed completely still, wrapped around himself in this corner in total darkness, it might not find him. But if he so much as sneezed, he knew it would be on him instantly.
Even now it might be creeping up on him silently. He wrapped more tightly around himself, and tried not to breathe.
Time passed, but Choltas did not move. When thirst began to torture him, he stayed still. He wet himself and shat in his pants quietly. And eventually, delirium overcame him; he heard his mother’s voice, saw drifting pictures of his home.
He kept his arms around his knees, and his face buried there against his own flesh. And he breathed weaker and weaker, aware at last only of the murmur of his own heart and the torment of cold and thirst, overridden by a fear he could no longer identify.
Stay still, stay still.
Its hand hangs above me.