Return to the Necropolis: Chapter 4
Following is Chapter 4 of the long-awaited sequel to the Skirmisher Publishing LLC fantasy novel Swords of Kos: Necropolis! Herein our four companions descend into the catacombs, discover acts of senseless vandalism and defilement, and are forced to change the plan for retrieving their cached horde of treasure. Join alchemical rogue Paros, wizard Pumayo, Elven barbarian Parthenia, and moon priestess Selene in their Return to the Necropolis!
Read "Return to the Necropolis: Chapter 3"
On the landing they knew to be halfway down the flight of stairs they paused so that Pumayo could peruse the bas-relief of dread Thanatos, god of death, depicted as a handsome winged man armed with a sword. Paros had wondered whether the wizard would seem apprehensive during their first descent into the depths together but he seemed to be coping just fine and, as Pumayo regarded the carving, might even have been smiling slightly (although it was, admittedly, a little hard to tell whether his misshapen mouth was twisted into a smirk or something else).
Alert for danger, the party continued down the stairway and, as Parthenia stopped on the last step to scan the room, Paros stepped up beside her for a clear look as well. He took a foot-long iron rod from his haversack and scraped its gold tip on the stone of the wall beside him and, as he did, an unwavering light brighter than that of a torch illuminated the "chamber of the Styx." Immediately, Paros could that that it was not as they had left it and the first thing that struck him, with some panic, was that the sundered statue of Achilles, which they had battled here during their first visit to the necropolis, was gone!
Then, even as his jaw dropped and he drew his sword in alarm, Paros spotted something that in part alleviated his concerns: in the far right corner of the room, in the stepped pool filled by water from the stream that flowed across the room, the rogue could see a pair of stiff metallic legs sticking up in the air, his own dagger jammed into one of its heels. Perplexed, he and Parthenia looked in the direction of the secret door on the south wall of the chamber and north toward the narrow passageway that led off in that direction and, satisfied they were alone, walked over to the pool. Pumayo and Selene followed them down into the room, the former looking around in open interest and slowly following his two companions over to the edge of the water.
"It looks like someone picked it up and dumped it in there!" the wizard said, leaning forward to touch the leg of the upended construct.
"Careful!" Paros cried fretfully, causing Pumayo to momentarily recoil and then, smiling, reach over to the statue and touch the cool metal leg.
"Based on what you told me, Paros, there is little reason to think it will reanimate as long as that dagger remains embedded in its 'Achilles' heel.'" He withdrew his hand, damp from condensation beading on the metal skin, and regarded the steel dagger, now rusty from months in the humid room. "And it is corroded enough by now that it will certainly not come out very easily." They all regarded the somewhat grotesque spectacle of the upside-down warrior, immersed down to the waist in the water, with his crested helmet resting on the floor of the pool.
"What should be of larger concern to us is who would have done this," Parthenia said, looking down the wide passageway that led off into the darkness to the west.
"Why do we care if someone threw this statue into the water?" Selene asked flatly.
"It's not that someone threw it in the water," Paros sputtered, "it's that it suggests someone else might be here too ... ." Parthenia simply acted as if she had not heard the priestess's inane query, while Pumayo chuckled cheerfully at the rogue's consternation, rising from beside the pool and following the water to where it flowed out of the wall from the mouth of the wrathful female face carved into it. He briefly caressed the visage of the Erinyes, the Fury, and then rejoined his companions.
Guided by the light of Paros's sunrod, the party went down the narrow corridor the north. Even before they reached the room at the end, however, they knew something was wrong. A stench of bodily waste assailed their nostrils as Parthenia cautiously pushed the unsecured door all the way open, as did the sound of buzzing, and they were greeted with a scene of disorder. All of the cabinets and benches in the twenty-foot-square room had been tipped over, some smashed or lying haphazardly across others, many of the remnants of black ritual clothing appeared to have been smeared with defecation or urinated upon, and innumerable unwholesome flies swarmed around in the room. Not seeing anything else of note, Parthenia stepped back and pulled the door shut.
"Who in the name of Tartarus would have done this?" Paros asked. It all seemed so gratuitous and pointless; looting the unexploited treasure of this place was one thing, but this sort of vandalism and indecency was mystifying to him.
"You made that?" Parthenia asked Paros, indicating the sunrod, as they crossed the stream chamber once again. While the Elven women could see by starlight as well as a Human could in the noonday sun, they were no better able than the rogue to see in conditions of total darkness and also needed some source of illumination. With it, however, they could see about twice as far in the subterranean gloom as could their non-Elven comrade.
"Yes!" Paros said, appreciating the interest. "This and that tindertwig I used to light the incense in the temple above. I have learned to craft any number such things since we were last here. This device will serve us for about six hours before its light fades."
"It's magic?" she asked.
"No, not really," he replied. "Such things are made from substances found within the earth or distilled within my laboratory, but no spells are employed in their creation. The process is, in its way, not much different than crafting a sword or any other sort of item. I have also compounded for us several more vials of the liquid fire that served us so well in our battles with the mummified corpses."
When they reached the spot where the secret door was set in the wall, Paros had been planning on tracing its outlines for Pumayo and discussing with the others a plan for going through it. Parthenia, however, simply jammed her shoulder against the counterweighted slab and pushed it open, annoying the meticulous Paros.
"I could have searched that for traps ..." he said. "And something might have been waiting for us behind it."
"Yes, but there wasn't," Parthenia responded. Paros knew her mindset on this, that ill-considered actions were alright as long as they were not actually fatal, and knew nothing would be gained from arguing with or chastising her. She stepped through into the wide passageway beyond and began to follow its gentle incline upward to the south.
Coming to the open chamber that bumped out from the passageway to the right, the party could see that the equipment and supplies here had been disheveled but there was much less that could be done to things like casks of nails or paint powder than to cloth vestments. The boat-shaped funerary bier, which they had previously propped up in one of the corners, had been dumped onto the floor.
The party continued the rest of the way up the passageway to the door that led into the embalming room, which Paros had made a point of locking the last time they were here. As they approached it, they could see not just that the door hung ajar but that it had been smashed open and that fragments of splintered wood lay scattered on the floor. To Parthenia, it looked as if a heavy shoulder had been applied with great force to the door high along the edge with the handle.
Inside, the party was presented with a scene of devastation. On their previous venture to the laboratory they had left dozens of pots, jars, and other containers behind, not because these were worthless but because they simply had no room for them on their already-overloaded cart. Whoever had most recently visited this place, however, had apparently not thought such implements would be useful in any way and the floor was covered with fragments of crockery, chemicals and herbs that had either lost their essence or were too bulky to carry away, and the remains of other items. On the east wall of the room, the iron door that led into the empty mausoleum and thereafter to the outside was not open but was no longer bolted.
"Who would do this?" Paros asked in despair. As disturbing as the spectacle was on the face of it, the implications were even more troubling; something destructive and probably very unlike the four companions in most fundamental ways had been here and might well still be nearby or coming back. At the least, this haven had been compromised and would not be safe to use as a base of operations, as they had intended.
"This might be a clue," Pumayo said as the party spread out into the room, stepping over the remnants of things that had been trampled underfoot and pointing to a spot on the wall where something had been drawn large in charcoal. It appeared to be a cross of sorts, with three short arms, left, right, and down, the fourth and uppermost one curving into a rounded hook.
"As might this ..." Parthenia said, running her hand over something that had been gouged into the wood of one of the work tables in the room. Pumayo stepped over to look at it for himself.
"It is Dwarven script," he said. "It seems to spell out 'Wulfgur' ... probably a name of some sort."
"How do you know what something says in Dwarven?" Selene asked. "You're not a Dwarf."
Pumayo smiled, all the more so because he knew the priestess was bilingual and spoke both the common tongue of Greek and Elven. But, of course, she had Elven blood, and he could not similarly claim Dwarven heritage, so there was a certain logic — albeit one based on faulty and arbitrary assumptions — lurking behind her question.
"Let's just say that I have an affinity for phonetics," he replied mildly with one of his characteristic fleshy grins. It struck him that even if he explained this pun to her she would be no means understand it, and this made him smile even more broadly. "I can read Dwarven fluently; it's like Greek to me. Besides, who knows what blood I have got flowing through my veins? Even I might be surprised. The other thing, however, that writing on the wall, I have no idea what it represents."
"Nor do I," said Paros, who glanced over at Parthenia; she shook her head in the negative and, being unlettered, did not take much interest in any sort of writing anyway. From her silence, the rogue assumed that Selene also did not know what it represented. Pumayo, however, had been watching her, and saw her eyes flutter in a way that seemed to him as if it might be significant.
"Mistress Selene," the wizard asked mildly, "does this symbol mean anything to you?"
"No," she said. "It is the same as the symbol for Kronos, king of the Titans, but this is obviously not the same thing."
"What?" Paros squawked somewhat indignantly. "When were you planning on telling us this?" (He instinctively knew that she had not been planning to do so at all.) "In what ways does this symbol differ from that of the great Titan?"
"Don't yell at me!" Selene shrieked in response. All four of them then traded a series of indignant comments, the men trying to find out how the symbol on the wall differed from that of Kronos, Selene expressing displeasure at their tone and refusing to answer their questions, and Parthenia insisting that it did not matter anyway. Finally, Paros realized that logic would not prevail and, throwing up his hands in exasperation, gave up.
"Well, if this symbol has no significance then there is no reason that we should not remove it and can do so as the first step in getting this room organized," Pumayo said. "I have a minor spell that will neatly erase it in short order ... "
"Don't!" Selene said. "That might offend the god."
Pumayo paused, having elicited the response he was hoping for.
"Oh, I am sorry!" he said. "I did not realize that this was the symbol of Kronos and believed it to be, as you suggested, different in some way."
"Well, it is different, because I have never seen it drawn on a wall in charcoal," Selene said. "But it is still the symbol of Kronos and it would be impious to destroy it."
"Ah, I see!" Pumayo said, raising his hands and stepping back ceremoniously. "Thank you for clarifying that, priestess. I have nothing but the greatest reverence for Lord Kronos and will not do anything to defile his symbol now that I know that is what this is."
"Alright, so what are we dealing with here?" Paros asked. "Titan-worshipping Dwarves on a rampage? Selene, I know you worship a Titan, too," he said quickly to the indignation he knew was about to follow, "but I have never seen you do anything like this and whoever did is clearly not of a like mind with you. So, our problem is not with Titans, it is with whatever people have been defiling this place, making it unusable for us, and making the job of retrieving our treasure more difficult."
During their first venture into the necropolis, the party had collected a huge amount of treasure from the various subterranean tombs and vaults they had explored and looted and, before they had left, had sorted through and selected the most valuable items to carry out with them. What they had left behind, however, was still worth a small fortune. Their plan on this venture had been to have the three companions with ram-skull amulets cross over the stream of the Styx, collect as much as they could of the treasure from where they had hidden it while Selene waited locked in the alchemical laboratory, and then return to Kos with packs full of loot, repeating this process one or two more times until all of the hoard had been retrieved. Now, however, there was no safe place for Selene to hide and they were concerned that if she went across the stream with them that she would once again become trapped and unable to return to the other side.
"I believe I may have a solution to our dilemma," Pumayo said. "If the shaft you climbed out of is as you have described, I should have no trouble magically levitating Selene or anyone else up and out of it. The rest of us could then simply walk out, meet on the outside, and return to Kos as planned."
This seemed like a reasonable suggestion and, while the women were suspicious of arcane magic in general, there did not seem to be a better solution to their problem, and so they assented to it. With night and the need for a secure place to rest imminent, the party decided to cross over the stream of the Styx, make their way back to the Anemoi tomb where their treasure was stored, and camp there. Then, in the morning they would return to Kos City with their spoils and be back in time for supper and drinks at the Four Winds Bar.
Just before they left the room, Paros selected the bottom halves of a couple of large, broken jars, ground off their sharp edges on the stone floor, and then stuffed them into his backpack, along with several long strips of embalming linens.
Read "Return to the Necropolis: Chapter 5"
