We crept around the room hunting for treasure, wincing at every crunch of stone and bone underfoot. I caught a whiff of something dead and rotting in the room. “Ugh. Do you smell that?” I said, fully expecting to find a maggot-ridden corpse. “Something reeks like a dead…” I caught Lynas’ guilty expression, and laughed.
“Whoops,” he said. “Sorry about that. I do not think dinner agreed with me.” He began poking through the ruins of the wardrobe, muttering about cabbage. I chuckled and picked up a length of petrified wood, whacking what I assumed had once been a bed. Beneath a crust of hardened slime, layers of rotten cloth and mould had fossilized into a hard shell surrounding something underneath. With my stick extended at arm’s length, I carefully started chipping away at it. My avaricious little heart hoped to find a skeleton still wearing jewellery. Not much else would have survived for long down here. I wasn’t squeamish when it came to money or corpses; Docklanders couldn’t afford to be.
Lynas sighed and grumbled as he sifted through his pile of debris. Me, I was filled with morbid curiosity as the shape of a person gradually emerged from its cracked coverings. I whacked it again and the whole shell shattered. I squeaked in surprise as three mummified rats plopped to the floor right next to my foot.
Lynas yelped in fright at my sudden noise. I leapt back, spun, stick whipping up. We looked at each other sheepishly. He padded up beside me, glancing back at the pile of junk he’d been investigating and then shrugging despondently.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the bed. There were no jewels or gold rings, but what we did have was a bloody huge skeleton. The bones were all wrong, surely too large to be human. Desiccated skin clung to it, and a mane of straggly white hair was still attached to a large skull with a strange hole right in the middle of a thick sloping forehead. It wore intricately crafted bronze armour that looked like it was designed more for show than out of any sense of practicality. Arcane wards the likes of which I’d never seen had been inlaid into the cuirass in untarnished silver that glimmered in the lantern light. A black hilt jutted from the chest piece, piercing wards and armour both to stab through the heart. I swallowed and exchanged a glance with Lynas.
He moistened his lips. “Finders keepers.”
“Hold up the light,” I said.
He held his lantern over the bed. We stood in silence for a few moments, staring at the skeleton.
“Who do you think they were?” I said, then after a moment’s silence added: “What do you think they were?”
Lynas shook his head. “Look at the armour. That exquisite workmanship was wrought by a master smith.” He pointed to the one side where the metal was melted and stained dark. Looking closer the armour had numerous gouges and scrapes as if it had seen battle. I tapped the bronze with my stick, then again, harder. The end of the stick snapped clean off. The armour was still solid, and might even be worth something.
“Do you think that there is still magic in it?” I croaked.
Lynas shivered, shrugged, and eyed the wooden door that was our only exit. I wanted to leave, badly. Standing in front of a weird skeleton in this horrid place was creeping me out; it wasn’t anything as ordinary as being back in the Warrens and coming across somebody that’d been stabbed. Lynas looked sick and terrified. What brave adventurers we were. But I refused to leave without a prize to prove Harailt hadn’t made us cry like babies and piss ourselves down here in the dark. Even if it was almost true. I placed my stick on the ground by my feet and wiped sweaty palms on my cloak.
My hand hovered over the black hilt jutting from the skeleton’s chest. Then I thought better of it, picked up the stick and handed it to Lynas. “Just in case,” I said, mimicking him using it as a club. You could never be too sure where magic was concerned.
My hand was back over the hilt. I extended my index finger and forced it down, bit by bit until it was almost touching the hilt, then that last little push. I snatched my hand back, heart hammering. Was my skin tingling? Was I imagining it? Was it magic? Was I being paranoid? Yes – my finger was fine. I took a deep calming breath.
“Don’t scare me like that, Walker,” Lynas complained, his knuckles white around the stick.
“Sorry,” I whispered. Steeling myself, I wrapped my hand around the hilt and pulled. It slid out easily in a shower of bone dust and curled bronze shavings.
We stared at the large barbed black iron knife in my hand. It was a hideous and crude weapon, but the sort of crudeness you could only get from a careful and studied artistry in brutality. I hefted it in my hand. It felt perfectly balanced despite the strange design. This was more like my idea of a magic weapon, not a poncy prettified sword all shiny silver and gold. To my mind, weapons were made for killing.
“Is it magical?” Lynas said. “It looks stupid.”
Each to their own, I thought. “I have no idea. My Gift hasn’t begun to mature yet. Yours?”
“Not yet, though I have high hopes it will happen soon.”
I examined the blade, carefully touching one of the barbs and finding it still sharp. I upended it to examine the plain hilt for sign of any maker’s marks. Nothing. I blinked, realising that blood was gushing from my finger and down the blade, dripping onto the skeleton below. When had that happened? Suddenly my finger started to throb. I hadn’t even felt it cut my flesh.
“Ow, this thing is sharp as–”
Fuck? a searing voice said in Old Escharric. I winced in pain, the word burning into my mind. I only knew what it meant because curse words were the first ones I’d researched after entering the Collegiate.
I brought up the knife and spun around, scanning the room. “Who said that?”
Lynas looked confused. “Said what?”
I glanced at the bloody knife and then to the skeleton. I froze in horror. The skeleton’s empty eye sockets and the hole in the forehead now pulsed with septic green light.
There needs be a pact, the voice said. Be quick.
“W- W- What?” I stammered. “I don’t know what you are talking about. Who are you?” The knife throbbed in my hand.
Runes on the skeleton’s armour flared bright. The hardened shell of slime dissolved into ropes of ooze that squirmed over the bed, snatching up and absorbing the dead rats as it went, transforming them into ribbons of pulsing flesh that twisted up the bones and across the crude skull. The huge skeleton lurched upright, at least seven foot high, eye sockets and the hole in the forehead blazing with eldritch fire. It reached for me while I stood like a statue.
Lynas saved my life. He shrieked and swung his stick. It crunched into the skull and caved it in.
The thing collapsed back onto the bed, into a mass of writhing flesh that flowed in and around it. Dust swirled up from the floor and into the corpse. Pink and grey organs formed, slurped through spaces between bone and bronze to pulse obscenely in its abdomen. A mutely screaming inhuman face of glistening muscle began to form on the skull. Jellied eyes oozed into sockets, one forming right in the middle of its forehead.