A breeze blew through the chamber, strong enough to make the torches growl and the lantern lights flicker. It blew from the surface of the blood.
“Deviltry,” croaked Bell. He said it often enough as a formula for the common wickedness of men, but this time he meant it. He stepped back, crushing the realization that the blood — if blood it was, or had ever been — was no liquid, but rather a gateway that flowed and eddied. If that realization ever became a thought of consequence, it would shoulder aside the columns of his wit and bring down the temple of his reason. Therefore, he ignored it, blinked it aside, and filled the space where it had briefly stood with thoughts of God, duty, and family.
“Deviltry,” he said again, louder now as fear and the fear of fear performed its usual alchemy in his heart and turned to anger.
In such a state, it was hardly surprising that he and his men had completely forgotten why they were searching the chamber in the first place. They were reminded when the hypothetical concealed door became a reality.
Beyond the coffin, the curve of the wall from the floor to a man’s height was plastered and whited. Along the edge of this alcove, a dark line formed and widened.
Owen saw it and cried a warning. Quickly it became clear that the whole section of the alcove was moving to one side. That it did so in short shoves, to the sound of stone grating against stone, indicated that it did not do so by the exercise of some subtle mechanism, but rather by the application of main force driving the wall along concealed runnels.
An opening widened, admitting naught but darkness. Bell moved back, almost relieved to have someone to face. Whatever godless citizen or citizens of York maintained this place, whatever apostates clinging to vile paganism might emerge, they would suffer immediate punishment for what they had done here and the foul murder they had committed upon Hensley.
The wall stopped moving and all was silence but for the breathing of the four men.
What stepped through into the light was not alive, but nearly. It was not dead, but nearly. It was ancient. It might once have been a man.
It regarded them through eye sockets filled with something too darkly red to be blood, too fluid to be flesh. There was no sense that it had any sort of presence at all in the way that a human possesses, no more than a statue or manikin or a child’s dolly does. Instead it presented the air of being an artefact or a puppet, made from old flesh and animated by a puppeteer a long, long way away. It wore scraps of armor scavenged from those it had caught and slaughtered down the years, an ancient Roman helmet on its head.
Afterward, Bell — when he allowed himself to think about the events of that night at all — would imagine how the Romans must have discovered the site and started erecting the fort of Eboracum there. How they had encountered the thing and, unable to destroy it, had drawn it into their pantheon, if secretly. They had sacrificed to it too. The construction of the tunnel and the chamber made more sense in that thought.
But had they truly never realized that their sacrifices were not to some local monster, but to something else? Something that lurked and writhed, almost visible through the pane of the dark blood? Bell would curtail his thoughts there, for that glimpsed image was never quite successfully driven from his memories. Sometimes prayer sufficed to calm his soul. Sometimes hard liquor.
He hardly knew how the sword got into his hand. In response, the thing slowly drew a straight-bladed sword that could not be a year under two centuries old. It looked blunt and mottled with rust, but there was fresh blood on it all the same.
“Owen, Green,” Bell murmured, “we are going to make a fighting retreat to the breach. Ryder, you’re fleet. Run like the Devil himself is at your heels. Get two barrels of blasting powder and short fuse them. Stand ready to light and drop them into the tunnel. Do y’understand me?”
“Sir?” said Ryder. “I can’t abandon…”
“You’ll do as you’re told. Go.”
Ryder hesitated at the command, but swallowed his reluctance and disappeared into the tunnel. They could hear the slapping of his boots on the soil floor for long seconds. The thing heard them too, and advanced.
“Owen, to my right. Green, to my left. I’ll draw it on. You wound it as and when you can.”
Bell only hoped that it could be wounded. As he put his lantern down by the tunnel entrance, and the men flung their brands aside to illuminate the chamber in a nightmare of low lights and high shadows, Bell took a moment to weigh their opponent. It was manlike, but whether it had ever been a man he sorely doubted. It was more in the nature of a device in the form of a man, as though some ancient corpse had been the pencil sketch and the final shape the inking of an artist who had never seen a man and allowed new fancies into the design. It seemed wet, but this was the strange ichor that had taken Hensley, an unblood that flowed as it willed and formed the strings by which the unseen puppeteer made sport of mortal terror. Bell could see it flow and ebb in the place of muscles across the skeletal frame and found himself so fascinated by its actions that he almost failed to grasp their import as the sword rose and swept down.
Green’s cry saved him, and he brought his saber up in a clumsy block. The thing was no swordsman, and the blow was as without guile as the stroke of a butcher’s cleaver upon the insensate flesh of his trade. It struck his blade square and he was preserved. Still, it was powerful, and Bell fell back with a shout.
He shook himself; he was a better swordsman than this, to stand amazed while the godless creature sliced him like mutton. With a new shout filled with wrath rather than astonishment, he pressed forward. The thing failed to defend itself effectively at all, and Bell felt joy as his sword found a gap in his opponent’s rusting cuirass and drove through its heart.
But the thing had no heart, and raised its sword once more. In a moment of terrible clarity, Bell saw the thing’s withered skin and saw it was crossed with centuries of scars where men at least as worthy as he had struck blows upon that abomination, and yet it still walked. Men at least as worthy as he, who now formed the ossuary around them.
He felt despair, but only for the merest moment, for despair is the death of a fighting man, and no one who knew John Bell would regard him as anything aught.
“Forget thrusts, men,” he ordered, “they trouble it not.” The imagery of a butcher’s shambles occurred to him again at that moment, and the spirit of war brought a smile that was half snarl to his face. “Hack it to pieces.”
Owen was the first to obey as Green harassed it on its flank. He leveled a scything strike at the nape of the thing’s neck and roared as he did, one cry amid the many that three of the combatants in that eldritch skirmish gave throat.
The thing switched attention from one man to the other as easily as if it had eyes in the back of its head, and with astonishing speed brought its massive blade up to block Owen’s attack. His saber did not break, which was a miracle in itself, but a chip of good steel flew wild, and he was momentarily stunned by the shock reverberating from the clash. In that moment, the thing twitched its blade as if it were a feather and opened Owen from chest to shoulder. He screamed, more in surprise than pain. That would come later, Bell knew. If they survived.