Ghost in the Seal (Ghost Exile #6) (27 page)

Caina tugged up the cowl of her shadow-cloak and the pursuit faltered, though it did not stop. The baboons broke into groups, sweeping back and forth in search of her. Caina sprinted forward in a straight line, leaping over roots and dodging past boulders, and came to the ruins she had spotted. It had once been a small Maatish shrine, rectangular and ringed in columns, though the jungle had pulled down the roof and made the pillars lean like drunken men. A plinth stood in the center of the shrine, supporting a statue of a man with a baboon’s head. Her head swiveled back and forth as she ran into the shrine. She didn’t care why the Maatish had considered the baboon sacred, but if she was right…

Her foot came down onto nothingness, and she almost fell, grabbing at a stone column to stop herself. A mat of rotting vegetation fell away, revealing a massive stone shaft in the center of the shrine, at least twenty feet wide and two hundred feet deep. Beyond she saw a dark passageway leading deeper into the earth. Her guess had been right – the baboons had indeed come from crypts in the nearby ruins. She didn’t know if the crypts connected to Kharnaces’s Tomb beneath the central hill itself.

And if her plan worked, she wouldn’t have to find out. 

Caina heaved herself away from the open shaft, her boots scrabbling for purchase on the slick stone of the shrine’s floor, and caught her balance. The baboons fanned out around the shrine, seeking for her. She needed them gathered together in one large clump. Caina suspected that the nagataaru could sense living mortals well enough, but did not perceive the material world itself with a great deal of detail.

She was about to put it to the test. 

Caina unclipped the grapnel from her belt, hurried around the shaft, and drove it into a gap in the stonework. Then she circled back to the other side of the shaft, letting the rope uncoil itself from her belt and fall loose to the ground. The baboons milled back and forth outside of the shrine, hunting for her. Caina ran a few paces from the ruined shrine, letting the rope uncoil further from her belt.

Then she threw back her cowl.

As one every single baboon turned to look at her. 

“Looking for me?” shouted Caina. “Come and kill me in the name of Kotuluk Iblis!”

The baboons charged, dropping back to all fours. Caina took several steps back, gauging their pace. If she miscalculated, if she judged wrong, they would overtake her before she could reach the shaft.

The baboons flooded towards the shrine, and Caina turned and sprinted for the shaft. She heard the rasp of the baboons’ nails against the stone floor, and leaped into the shaft. Cold air blew past her face as she fell, and after about thirty feet the line jerked taut. Her belt sawed painfully into her hips and waist, but the strong leather held. The baboons surged after her, leaping into the shaft.

Caina tugged the cowl back over her head.

And like antelope driven over the edge of a cliff by a lion, the baboons plunged into the shaft. Leathery, gray-furred carcasses tumbled past Caina, lashing and clawing at the air. She pressed herself flat against the stone wall, sliding her ghostsilver dagger into its sheath and tugging the cowl tight with one hand. If the baboons realized where she was, if she let the cowl fall, she had no doubt that they would swarm up the walls of the shaft like insects and tear her apart. Several times the falling baboons clipped her, one hitting her shoulder so hard that she almost lost her grip on the shadow-cloak. 

Yet the baboons continued falling past her. She heard them milling at the bottom of the shaft. It seemed that her guess had been correct. They did have difficulty perceiving details of the material world, such as the fact that she was hanging over a slender rope a hundred and fifty feet over their heads. 

Then the rope twitched. Caina whispered a curse, fearing that the grapnel was about to pull loose. Instead someone pulled up the rope, and Caina squinted into the sun and saw figures standing at the edge of the shaft. One final pull, and Kylon pulled her over the edge. Caina stumbled forward and fell against him, her hands against his chest. He didn’t even flinch beneath her weight, his hands taking her arms in a strong grip to steady her.

That felt…nice. Really, really nice. 

She didn’t dare linger, as much as she wanted to do so.

“Annarah!” said Caina, stepping away from Kylon. “Quickly. They’re in a confined space.” 

“A bottleneck,” murmured Nasser. “Clever.”

Caina pulled back her cowl and went to one knee at the edge of the shaft, yanking her grapnel from the stone.

At once the baboons started to climb up the shaft’s walls, gripping the slippery stone with ease. It reminded Caina of the way Kalgri had been able to climb walls like a spider. Fortunately, the baboons were still far down the shaft, and they were packed together.

Which meant Annarah could bring her powers to bear with ease. The loremaster stepped next to Caina, pointed her staff at the ascending baboons, and whispered in the Iramisian tongue. White light blazed from her staff and stabbed into the shaft, and the baboons recoiled from it. Gravity did the rest, and dozens of baboons fell into a writhing heap in the tunnel. 

Laertes produced a skin of oil from somewhere, and poured it over the edge. Nasser lifted a pair of torches, lit them, and then tossed them into the twitching pile of undead baboons.

The results were so impressive Caina wondered if the oil had even been necessary. The desiccated flesh of the baboons went up like kindling, and suddenly the bottom of the shaft transformed into an inferno. A thick plume of black smoke rose up, and within it Caina glimpsed the forms of dozens of nagataaru fading as they vanished back into the netherworld. She watched the shaft, fearing that the baboons would push past the flames and attack, but nothing appeared. Caina got to her feet with a sigh, coiling her rope and returning it to her belt. 

“So,” said Laertes, wiping sweat from his forehead. “Just what the hell were those things? I’ve fought in battles in three nations, but I’ve never been attacked by a horde of dead damn monkeys before.”

“Baboons,” Morgant corrected. “They were baboons.”

“Like it makes a difference,” said Laertes. 

“Undead baboons,” said Caina. “There were nagataaru bound within them. The Great Necromancers used to mummify animals sacred to their gods and raise them as undead.” She looked at the baboon-headed statue. “Kharnaces must have made his guardians in blasphemous mockery of the gods of Maat.” She looked at Annarah. “You didn’t see the creatures last time you were here?”

Annarah shook her head.

Morgant snorted. “Annarah might have removed my memory, but I think I’d remember being attacked by a horde of rotting baboons. How did you know to find that shaft?”

“No mold,” said Caina.

Kylon blinked. “Mold?”

“There wasn’t any mold growing on the baboons,” said Caina. 

Kylon shrugged. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Caina wiped some of the sweat from her brow. “It’s so humid here. All the trees have moss and mold growing on them, and there are mushrooms everywhere.” It was just as well that her leather armor was bulky enough to conceal her figure. A layer of sweat was making her shirt adhere to her skin. “The Maatish necromancers would have put preservation spells on their undead servants, but in this climate, some mold would have grown on them. So the baboons only came forth when their nagataaru sensed intruders on the island, and that meant…”

“That meant they spent most of their time underground,” said Nasser, “where the air would be drier.”

Caina nodded. “The shaft was convenient. I wasn’t expecting that – maybe a cave or a staircase to a crypt or something. Someplace where Annarah could raise a ward to hold them off.”

“That was brilliant,” said Kylon, his voice quiet. “You just saved our lives.” 

Caina blinked. The compliment pleased her. Not the compliment itself – she had no use for praise. Attention was hardly the sort of thing a Ghost circlemaster wanted. 

Yet the fact that Kylon had said the compliment made all the difference in the world. 

“Thanks for catching me,” said Caina.

“I promised I wasn’t going to let you get killed,” said Kylon.

Another surge of emotion went through Caina, and she had to look away. 

“Indeed,” said Nasser. “I suspect recruiting Master Ciaran may have been one of the wisest decisions I have ever made.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” said Morgant.

“Come,” said Nasser. “Let us try to reach the Tomb before we encounter any more of Kharnaces’s guardians.” 

They left the ruined temple behind and returned to the road, the necromantic aura growing stronger with every step. 

Chapter 16: An Open Grave

The jungle stopped at the foot of the hill. 

Kylon blinked at the eerie sight. 

The jungle just…stopped. It was like a line drawn upon a map. On one side was the jungle, lush and green and vibrant. It was quieter than it should have been, but likely the undead baboons had killed all the other animals. Nonetheless, the jungle was alive, filled with vivid greens and reds and yellows. 

On the other side of the line was death. 

The land at the base of the hill was simply dead. There were no trees, no bushes, no grasses, no flowers, no weeds, no lichen, nothing. Just dead earth that looked as if it would never support a plant again 

“Like cropland that’s been farmed to exhaustion,” said Laertes, looking around. 

“Or deliberately poisoned,” said Kylon. 

“The aura,” said Caina, looking at the jungle. Her face was blank, but her emotions were dark. “It’s stronger here. I think it kills any living thing that gets too close to…to whatever is generating that aura in the Tomb.”

Nasser looked at Annarah. “Are we in danger from it?” 

She gestured, whispering under her breath, and her fingers flickered with ghostly white light. “No. Not yet, at least. The aura…the aura is much stronger than when we last visited. But it’s not yet strong enough to kill a living mortal, only plants and animals.”

Kylon nodded and took a few steps closer to the Tomb. A dark archway stood in the face of the hill, elaborate Maatish hieroglyphs carved into frame. Twin statues stood on either side of the doorway, twenty feet high, muscular men in kilts with giant scarabs for heads. 

“Anubankh,” said Caina in answer to his silent question. “The Maatish god of…well, we would call it necromancy, but they would call it immortality.”

“I remember,” said Kylon, his memory flickering back to the dark ruins of Caer Magia, to the Great Necromancer Rhames taking up the Ascendant Bloodcrystal. 

“Poor choice of a god,” muttered Morgant. “Man with an insect for a head.”

“No stranger than a man with a baboon for a head,” said Laertes. “Though I hope we don’t find scarabs the size of those baboons.” 

“Indeed not,” said Nasser. “This is the entrance to the Tomb?”

“Aye, my lord Prince,” said Annarah. “There is a pillared entry hall, and beyond that a domed chamber. Six doors open off from the chamber, and the central one leads to the library where we left the Staff and the Seal.”

“Any defenses?” said Nasser. 

“None,” said Annarah. She hesitated. “Though we did not encounter the baboons a century and a half past. And the necromantic aura from the Tomb was not nearly as powerful.” 

“Remain vigilant,” said Nasser. “If those nagataaru-infested baboons awakened, then there is no telling what other defenses might have become active.”

“As if we were going to do anything else,” said Morgant.

Nasser did not dignify that with a reply, and they walked into the Tomb of Kharnaces.

###

The chamber beyond the entrance was magnificent. 

Caina looked around, ghostsilver dagger in hand, eyes and ears straining to find any sign of foes. Yet she could not help but admire the beauty of the hall. The polished granite floor gleamed beneath her boots, reflecting the bright light from Annarah’s staff. Massive square pillars rose from the floor to the arched ceiling overhead, carved in the likeness of the Maatish gods, muscled men in kilts with the heads of animals – scarabs and baboons and lions and falcons and jackals and others. Hieroglyphs covered the ceiling, shining with a faint light of their own. At first Caina thought that the hieroglyphs had been enspelled, but then she realized they were simply reflecting the light. They had been filled with silver. The overall effect made for a sort of cold, distant beauty. 

The air in here was much drier and colder than the jungle outside. Caina’s shirt felt cold and sodden beneath her armor, and she could just imagine the smell when she removed the armor later. She desperately wanted to strip out of her clothes and take a hot bath, but that would have been a bad idea in front of her companions. Stripping off in front of Kylon, though…

She pushed aside the thought with a mixture of sadness and amusement. Even in the midst of deadly danger, the heart wanted what it wanted. 

The body, too, come to think of it. 

The deadly throb of the necromantic aura reminded her of the deadly danger. 

“If Kharnaces was a heretic,” said Kylon, “a worshipper of the nagataaru, then why he is buried in a tomb adorned with the likenesses of the Maatish gods?” He gestured at the images of the animal-headed men. 

“Because he did not build this tomb,” said Annarah, the end of her staff tapping against the smooth floor as she walked. “He was imprisoned here, after he had become one of the Undying and turned against the gods of Maat.”

“Why didn’t they just destroy him?” said Kylon. “A Great Necromancer can be killed. Or…destroyed, rather, if all his canopic jars are found and the mummified organs within destroyed.” He glanced back at Caina. “I’ve seen it happen.” 

“I don’t know,” said Annarah.

“Maybe he was too powerful,” said Laertes.

“Doubtful,” said Annarah. “For all his power, the other Great Necromancers would have acted in harmony to remove a heretic from their midst. That was how the Kingdom of the Rising Sun ruled such a vast empire for so long. Once they became Undying, the Great Necromancers rarely quarreled among each other, and usually acted in concert. Kharnaces was the exception rather than the rule.”