For some minutes, we wandered through an endless maze of chambers, each one lined with shelves holding the long dead. I shuddered at the thought of such bodies lying around. That they would be left to molder in these empty tombs instead of being committed flesh and blood and spirit to their families or to the surrounding environment.
I wondered if their spirits were trapped here in these places. If so, to what end? Would anyone actually come down here to try to speak to the dead?
"Here, take the ones going down," Derkeethus suggested pointing to another set of stairs.
"What makes you think it's further down?" I whispered, shivers riding up and down my spine at regular intervals.
"Men always put valuables at the bottoms of things. Lakes, rivers, chests, caves, pockets, ships... It's almost a guarantee that if you go down, you'll find what you're looking for." I knew Derk had a passion for caves and exploring them, though I definitely did not want to go down. We never had anything like this in Valenwood. Even in the chapels of Chorrol, the dead were buried in thin wooden coffins that quickly decayed and fed the grave site's flowers. This place left me feeling too big and boxed in, which is something my small stature did not normally experience.
Derkeethus opened his mouth, probably to continue on his theories regarding treasure, of which I now suspected he had many, but I held my hand up to stop him.
"Shh! There's something up ahead, don't you hear it?" We stopped, frozen, and then we both heard it. A gangling, slapping, rhythmic click. Slap slap click. Click slap click. Slap. Footsteps, but made by something I didn't recognize. It reminded me of bare feet pierced by hobnails.
Then, turning around a corner, we saw a man walking towards us. It looked like a man, anyway, but as it stepped into the light, I recoiled in horror. It was one of the dead bodies I had passed, and yet it walked. I was right, the spirits here were trapped.
It hobbled in a painfully slow gait, and the sound I realized was from the bones wearing through the thin, dried and stretched skin of its feet. A skull wrapped tightly in the flaking membrane stared emptily at us through eyes that glowed with chips of ice.
Stopping to study us, it gurgled something unintelligible. It was trying to speak through organs that were little more than magically supported globs of tissue. I was struck by pity for the thing. Slowly it gurgled again, as if trying to make us understand something, but whatever it was, we never found out as it charged us moments later.
My arrows did little damage to the dead corpse, as it had no means of bleeding and no vital organs to pierce. The creature merely shuffled towards us even faster, flailing an axe as it went. Derkeethus turned his pickaxes axe-side out and hacked off its arms and legs and head, leaving it gurgling on the ground after us.
We met more dead along the way, and I resorted to pinning their muscles and sinews with arrows to slow their movements before Derk or Jorin went in to finish them off.
At last we came to a large chamber that spiraled up through several levels. Here there were great urns and coffins. Some empty; others occupied. Derkeethus quietly puttered around, peering into the urns and turning up forgotten old coins and battered gemstones. These he pocketed for later. I had no use for such baubles and instead went to examine one of the coffins.
The body inside could be sleeping. Gingerly, I probed it with the end of my bow. It twitched and I had an arrow ready to fire so fast my hands moved in a blur, but then it lay still. Every sense felt so highly strung in this place. I was starting to feel like prey. Chased, hunted, overwhelmed, paranoid. Increasingly, every sound and movement became a greater threat.
The snare tightened further.
Then, so quietly I thought it might have been an echo of a sound in my mind, something I imagined and yet intended to make real in my present paranoia, I heard voices talking. Not the voices of the dead, but the voices of the living. They were speaking in barely more than a whisper. Whipping my head towards the sound, I found myself looking towards the way we had come.
"Come on, I think we have to go up first," Derkeethus stated, gently tugging on my elbow with the pick-end of his weapon.
Slowly, we climbed around in a great circle, dispatching the dead along the way. The more I released, as I refused to think you could kill something that was already dead, the less afraid of them I became. Instead, I found myself mentally uttering a constant psalm to Y'ffre and Mara to ease their passing. The song wove itself in and around my mind until every movement I made seemed to correspond to the tempo of the music.
When we passed along a narrow causeway caged by iron bars, I looked down into the room below. In the shadows, I saw figures moving, though I couldn't tell who they were. One of them looked up in our direction, but I stopped Derkeethus and we carefully melted into the shadows. We proceeded across the room as silently as possible, and from what I could tell, we garnered no other attention from the figures.
The path continued in a steady downward spiral after we left the causeway. There were occasionally more dead, but they seemed to be fewer the deeper we went. Or, rather, more of them were still asleep. And that was just fine with me.
Padding past a hallway lined with more drowsing dead than any other, we came to a narrow entryway. An antechamber. Here we stopped and ate what little food we had on us. I noticed Derkeethus was fidgeting and looking about.
"Derk, what's wrong?" I asked.
"Do you remember that mammoth graveyard after we killed that dragon?"
"Yes. Are you hearing something again?"
"It's the same voices. I feel something pushing against my head. The first time, I thought it was trying to push me away, but now I think it's something trying to get in." My friend massaged his skull carefully, shaking it and trying to clear it. "I'm not afraid this time, though. We'll go forward."
"If you want to stay behind..." I offered.
"No. Let's go."
Beyond the small room was a short hallway and a great iron door. Slowly, we pushed it open. It squealed on hinges hundreds of years old and unoiled. The archway opened to a large cavernous room. In the center, a great coffin squatted, guarded and observed by two massive stone heads. Their mouths hung open in an unending wail. Towards the back of the room, flickering in the dim light another stone wall etched with the strange words dominated all else. An emperor without a kingdom.
Behind me I heard Derkeethus groan, and turning, I saw him clutch his head. "It's louder here," he hissed. "Now it's a chant, but I don't understand..."
"Understand what?"
My question went unanswered as the coffin in the center cracked open at the sound of our voices and another dead creature arose from its slumber. This one stood up shakily, donned in armor that weighed many times more than it did, and shouted a challenge. From the edges of the room, more dead awakened to join the center one. They clanged their rusted weapons on shields or stone, chanting and jeering in discordant voices.
When we didn't move, they attacked anyway. The leader swung a greatsword that glimmered in the firelight. It looked somehow rimmed with the ice that persisted above. I called a wolf from the Void and Jorin joined us in the fight.
I ducked each swing from the various weapons the dead were flailing, though the leader appeared to still wield his with some skill. Drawing my knifes, I hacked at the others, rendering two of them limbless stumps on the floor. Derkeethus moved slower, the timing of his swings off, and the power of the impact of his weapons diminished. The Wall must be distracting him, I thought.
Suddenly, I found was face-to-face with the leader. I leapt onto its coffin, trying to gain some kind of higher ground advantage, but it did me little good. Jorin and the wolf spirit snapped at its heels, though it ignored them. They were mere flies.
As I prepared to take its head off, it inhaled deeply, the air rattling through its chest. Stones dribbling down the mountainside. The last breath of a dying man. Wind through the empty tundra. Then it wailed in a low-pitched, guttural chant and the force of the sound sent me tumbling backwards off the coffin. My still-healing ankle twisted painfully as I tried to maintain my balance. Winded, I lay there, prone, staring into the creature's cold sockets.
In a chattering exultation, the thing managed to laugh at me. Slowly it raised its sword, to lop off my head to be sure, but as the blade came down, I twisted to the left and shoved my knives upward.
Immediately my skin broke out into gooseflesh as it passed through the dead's chest cavity. I had touched many strange substances in my time, but this perhaps was the worst. The flesh was clammy and damp, chilly and yet warm. The tip of the knife blades stuck out of its face like misplaced horns. I twisted yanked, breaking the skull apart until the being collapsed and went still.
And as quickly as it had begun, the battle was over, and we stood in the empty room, which now rang with silence.
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So Derk is... more