Kali and Slowhand were sent hurtling towards the observation area wall, thudded into it and landed on the floor, stunned. But as its floor subsided beneath them, they knew there was no time to waste.
The whole place was going up.
They ran, exiting first the observation area and then the dome itself, the whole place quaking beneath them. Makennon and her party had already left but some guards remained. They were not concerned with Kali and Slowhand, however, as they were too busy screaming and running for their lives.
The reason for this was that the lava lake surrounding the dome had ceased its gentle bubbling and become now a seething, broiling mass that lurched and spat at the rock that contained it. Thick, liquid fire had even begun to spit above its lip and, as Kali and Slowhand looked on one last, unfortunate woman was engulfed in a burning tongue that fried her screeching form to a skeleton in less than a second.
Those same lava spurts hitting them wasn't their main problem, however.
It was the lava spurts that had hit the suspension bridge.
Because as they watched, their only way off the central island warped and twisted in the intense heat, and then its cabling snapped away with a sound like a whiplash.
Almost instantly, the bridge was gone.
"Hooper?" Slowhand said, worriedly.
Kali looked down, her brow beetling. "We're stuffed," she said, succinctly.
What she neglected to mention was what Slowhand had not yet noticed. Because she didn't want to worry him more.
The lava lake was rising.
Chapter Fourteen
Resurrection was a second coming. Somewhat more than a second, actually, but in the circumstances Merrit Moon thought it would be churlish to complain about the delay.
The sharp intake of breath with which he returned to life echoed around the cave of the ogur, empty now apart from the ogur themselves, gathered in a tribal huddle where, by the look of the cleanly gnawed bones around them — all of the bones of Munch's people — they had been sitting for some time. They stared at him in silence, their expressions a mix of fascination and fear caused by what was likely the strangest occurrence they had ever seen.
The occurrence was no less strange to Moon himself, this being the first time he had died.
Or not — as the case seemed to be.
That the artefact had worked — albeit in a way and on a subject he would never have anticipated — renewed his faith in the Old Races and the wonders, rather than the horrors, they had once achieved. He doubted, however, that the ogur that had triggered the amulet had found its effects wondrous in any way, and he sighed. Perhaps it was a horror after all.
The poor creature knelt before him, hand outstretched and touching the amulet, but it was not what it had been. Where moments before it had been indistinguishable from the rest of its tribe — solid and formidable, awesome — it was now a shadow of its brothers, wasted and drained. The same ogur that had attempted to approach Kali — likely the alpha — it had obviously been the first to approach his body and it had paid the price.
The creature still breathed, haltingly and raspingly, and stared at him in utter helplessness and confusion, but there was nothing Moon could do to help it, and he felt deeply sorry. It had not, after all, been greed that had motivated the ogur to touch the amulet, just primitive curiosity. It had yet to learn — and he hoped it would have the chance to do so — that all that glistened was not gloob.
Therein lay the simple beauty — and horror — of what the amulet was. Moon thought back to his hidden room in his cellar in Gargas, and the mixed emotions the sight of it had engendered in him. Sitting there on the shelves amidst other acquisitions he had deemed too dangerous for even someone such as Kali to see, its physical beauty was undeniable — a scintillating, perfectly faceted gem inlaid in gloob that could have been used to pay the ransom of a king. It was for that reason that he kept the amulet locked away, because if the wrong eyes were ever to see the gem it would be impossible to resist, taken from his possession with no knowledge of what it truly was and what it truly did. Not that he didn't trust Kali implicitly on that level, of course. It was just that by the amulet's very nature — the fact that in the absence of the direst circumstances it could not be tested — it was unpredictable and therefore potentially very, very dangerous.
He had found the amulet in an elven site many years before, certain as soon as he had that it was more than it seemed, because if there was one thing he had learned in his long career it was that Old Race artefacts generally were. It had taken two years of research following the find to identify what it was, cross-referencing a dozen Old Race manuscripts, until he finally knew that what he had acquired was an example of a battlefield boobytrap that the elves called scythe-stones. Products of their science or their sorcery — or both, he still wasn't sure — they masqueraded as spoils of war, prime to be plucked from the fallen body of an elven victim, but in actuality what they did was transfer the life essence from a victorious warrior to the defeated at the moment of death, reversing their roles and effectively turning the tide of many a battle. The psychological effect on the surrounding enemy was not to be underestimated either, because the host body fleetingly absorbed some of the features of the victim, looking almost as if its soul were being stolen from the body. In a way it was, Moon supposed, and to the enemy — the superstitious dwarves — the supernatural aspect was often far more disturbing than the truth of what had actually happened.
Moon looked at the ogur again, and frowned. The efficacy of the amulet couldn't be denied — he was, after all, alive — but nevertheless something seemed to be wrong. For one thing, the process was meant to be almost instantaneous, and for another he… didn't feel quite right. Whatever was happening here wasn't happening the way it was meant to, and apart from his own discomfort it was evidently prolonging the agony of the poor creature before him. As Moon watched, the ogur's body and features seemed to shrink in on themselves even more than they already had, the blue wisps that were still being drawn from it by the amulet seemingly extracting its essence still. Moon was, as yet, still too weak to move, and so he had no choice but to witness the process continuing for another few minutes, at the end of which time he turned his eyes away. For the amulet had taken everything from the ogur, and now, in the end, the beast all but disintegrated before him, collapsing into a desiccated heap on the cave floor.
The amulet snatched what wisps of it remained in the air with a sigh.
Wrong, Moon thought. That was wrong. And the other ogur in the cave obviously thought so, too, because now they were stirring from their prone positions, grunting with what sounded like growing confusion and agitation. What was happening? Now that their alpha was dead, had their deferment to him ceased? Was he now as exposed to their primal hunger as Kali would have been had she remained in the cave?
No, Moon thought, it wasn't that — but it made his situation no less dangerous. Something had to have changed about him during the revitalisation process — perhaps something as simple as his scent — and the reason that the ogur were no longer deferring to him was because to their senses he was no longer the man they had deferred to before. The end result, however, was the same. He was no longer welcome here amongst the ogur — not as anything but food, that was — and he had to get out of their cave before their slowly revising opinion of him resulted in his being ripped apart.
Moon rose from the cave floor, slowly and cautiously, noting as he did that his resurrection seemed to have booned his old and tired limbs with a renewed resilience and strength that he had not felt for a good many years. This was hardly the time to celebrate the fact, however, because while the ogur's state of confusion seemed to have passed, their agitation had grown markedly. Their grunts were becoming more frequent now, their mannerisms more threatening — and their gaze more hungry.