20 - The Scarab Mine
Whomp. Clang. Whomp. Clang.
Upon the grassy hummock, above the mine’s mouth, two veins of euhedral lead shine raw under the sky.
Whomp. Clang. Whomp. Clang.
The veins are polished by The Compass. Mancers. Erudite rustics learned in the features of the mine. They are, at this very moment, on the job.
Whomp. Clang.
Two stand under a tree of hanging men, chalking glyphs onto a door-sized onyx slate.
Whomp. Clang.
Two more straddle the vein, one applying polish, one laying out unguents beside a prepared flesh.
Whomp. Clang. Whomp. Clang. Whomp. Clang.
A quintet of the mancers has already begun the spell; a communal summons to a wraith through the lead.
As one they raise their mauls and pummel the earth.
Whomp.
As one they recite a deadspeech spell until, from a suspended nickel-silver gong, a sourceless vibration stirs.
Clang.
One mancer picks a route downhill around the mine’s mouth. He walks toward you.
“Still going-in bent, you? Going-in is never The Compass, but through the convenient, soul-conductive lead only, spirits drawing. “Spirits too-many. “Miners gone. Dead asylum for a while. Older Time. But started gathering any scarab, did keepers. Massing. Millions of mad souls lying. “Seasons? Who knows how many - thousands? “Try drawing your soul, when you die, from lead will The Compass.”
As the mancer, muttering, picks his way back up the slope, you turn your visor upon your Blue Lady.
Will you lead her there? That place is more mad-chrypt than quarry, where even men whose minds spark with deadspeech refuse to go. Will you repeat your mistakes? But you must lead her to Hornwater. This way is easier than the desert or the woods. You hope. The Scarab Mine. It is storied with ghosts. Even as far distantly as home. Rumor runs with erratic step, but regardless, it does you no harm to keep your Steel drawn an inch.
A strange phenomenon occurs. You see a low-gliding, small, detached cloud sliding across the sky, against the wind. Its shadow idles up the hummock. It drifts above the hanging tree. The shadow stops, settles, over one corpse especially, the corpse of a Compass mancer caught in sadism, who thus earned his noose.
The other mancers don’t notice, but your Lady does, when the glassy eyes of the hanged man flick in your direction. As you and your Lady approach the roots of the tree, the smell of putrefaction brings water to your eyes.
You meet the glazed stare. When the swollen mouth speaks, the voice is distinctly deep, distinctly resonant.
“It is Othelmedir, sir. “I petitioned certain of the dead – some of them rendered thus by that sword on your hip - and located you. “This is a remote necromancy, and I have no seconds for chaff. This reservoir mineral and spiritual holds one scarab of personal interest to me; an ancestor, one who has languished, in the Stope of the Ninth Ozone, on a white stone shelf, in a red scarab. “Shatter that scarab, and all your Lady’s debts to me are balanced. “Moreover, you will notice a special stone near that shelf. A quite special stone. A further reward. “One parting recommendation: be expeditious. There are too many lifetimes inside.”
The Ebon Opening
The mouth is open, doorless, with lips black and square. Carved ebony frames the mine’s throat. The two supporting beams are carved; one with a tall, thin man, with the head of a sparrow, and a long beard; the opposite with a tall, thin woman, with the head of a snail, and no compassion.
The architrave is painted amber and covered in glyphs. Passing under, one feels a static in the teeth.
Your Lady begs a pause, her breath rasping, the momentum of her run carrying her to a kind of blunt parapet, a railing formed from natural stone teeth. You feel the sting in your own lungs. You look back down the decline tunnel from which you’ve come, however, and are loathe to stop. The light of your Cat’s Eye Spear only extends a few yards; but in the black beyond, you still hear it.
That R**hythm.
BoomBoomBoomBoom*.* It is a pattern like footsteps. But each step sounds consequential, like a dropped weight in some higher loft of a storied and angled church. And somehow each step sounds singular, as if it were that one isolated crack of a stick in a strange wood, which says, “You are not alone.”
If you linger, The Alien Knight and his ghosts will catch up and surround you. You can try and fight again, but you will lose. Your Steel cannot cut ghosts. Your only option is to find a place to hide.
The long gallery onto which you’ve burst runs to your right for a hundred yards. It is one of several stepped ledges in this cyclopean stope. It is best not to glance over the fanged stone wall. Worse than ghosts abides below, in the world’s osseous stone.
To escape, pull your Lady along the parapet until you reach a broken portcullis, half-dropped before a tunnel, with a down-ramp beyond. Halfway along, you may be tempted by a circular stair. This is a deathtrap. One of the Alien Knight’s ghosts will cut you off when you are halfway up, and the others will by then have cut off retreat.
After ducking under the portcullis, follow the ramp for five hundred steps or so. You’ll eventually spot a small arch on your left, with billet molding of sparkling stone cylinders. Pass through, turn around, draw the translucent lead curtain closed, and knot it tightly to the jade rod on the wall.
You’ve bought yourself breathing room, but it won’t last long.
They gather on the other side of the lead curtain; the seven ghosts of The Alien Knight. There is the ghost in the coat of silent jingling bells. It dances up to the curtain. It presses its nose, ringed by a bell, against the reinforced cloth. Then there is the marmoset ghost, motionless, leering, sliding side-to-side, with stretched arms and fingers.
The seven sidle close, but can in no way pass the thin lead barrier.
Then comes The Alien Knight.
You can’t bring yourself to look at this nemesis. Not directly. Not all of its shape conjoined. In your brief earlier encounter, before you fled, you were able to follow the knight’s two bent swords, blocking, parrying. You tracked its footwork, the lift and step of its black sabatons, each lift portentous, each step booming.
Now it is the same. You see The Alien Knight step thunderingly to the curtain. You see its swords hack at the translucent barrier. Still, no matter how you wish, you cannot behold its pith.
“The curtain bends to soak those cuts. But reinforced though it is, will not last I fear. “We must find surer refuge. I know you would conquer, were the combat equal. “Where has this fell knight chased us? Scarcely can I imagine we’ve walked a fraction of this mine’s breadth, and already a disorder of twists lies behind. “I cannot- “No time! He sunders the curtain.”
Travel swiftly down the narrow access tunnel until you reach a quadripartite vault, with a roof of brickwork, and ribs of dull iron.
From here you can take one of a few routes.
| Left You’ll eventually emerge onto the brink of an unfathomed quarry. An underground lighthouse perches off to your left, necromancy-animated, its beam of crystal moonlight making sweeps of the quarry’s upper hemispheres. A dizzying screw stair within leads to higher tunnels via a connecting bridge. Beware: a skeleton with a sling guards the bridge. | Right Use the ‘all-rights’ strategy to navigate a burg of hex houses, quarters for the inhabitants of old. In this Time the only dwellers in the homes are the ubiquitous scarabs. They watch you from their lead-lined cavities. Only the deep-earth lead keeps the souls inside the scarabs from disintegrating. | Straight The Miner’s Stoa. A ceiling of dripstone impends right overhead, where each distinct stalactite has been carved with a bat’s-head termina, and each bat’s mouth holds one wooden scarab. If you happen to spot it, you might snatch the sack of stained-glass dust that sits in one of the mouths. It is worth fifty square coins. |
|---|
No matter which route you choose, your destination is the same. The bank of a subterranean river. The opposite bank lies beyond your sight, nor is any crossing apparent; which is troubling, as you hesitate to swim this ‘stream’.
It is a river of scarabs.
Baleful steps boom. You scan the shore, vainly, for a crossing. Across Time of Dying, the second-hand of every great clock judders under a single tick.
Then The Alien Knight attacks.
The knight slashes out from the tunnel, his curved sword arcing for your Lady. Caught with your eyes on the scarab river, you only turn in time to see your Lady stumble back. She trips, sinking to a knee.
Get ready for a short but intense melee. You’ll need to block or parry strike upon scything strike from this foe you cannot behold. The sequence of chops, jabs, and undercuts is entirely random. You only need to last for a half-a-minute, until your Lady rises. But your reaction time must be perfect. His swords will cut your armor like cheesecloth.
Your Lady rises just in time – you see the seven ghosts unfolding from the blackness behind their master. You have no choice now. Parrying a last cut, you backstep, swivel, raise your shield over your Blue Lady’s back, and slog backwards into the stream.
The wooden scarabs clink and clatter around your waist as you backpedal. The Alien Knight and ghosts chase you to the pebble-like bank. Then they stop.
They will not enter.
At the river’s deepest point its scarabs rise to your chin. You feel them slipping through gaps in your armor, their polished wooden shells rubbing your skin. Are these phylacteries full? The booming footsteps are gone at least; the crossing is silent but for the wooden clacks.
You will never know the cost.
When you finally reach the other bank, your Blue Lady collapses to the stone. She is wounded.
Toke’s Crossroads
The last long step of the stairway finally terminates, depositing you into a chamber with a roughly-flat quadrangle of stone floor. The stone roof, supported a few feet above your helmet by splintered wood beams, bows in the middle like a depressed arch.
You march a little to your right and, beside a low and uneven wall of dry rocks, settle your Blue Lady on the floor.
The room is diamond shaped, with diagonals of forty and sixty feet. At one of the acute vertices two sets of steps ascend from the room, meeting in a corner with an empty earthenware vase. The other corner is the same. All four sets of steps, one of which you entered by, are twelve times as wide and long as they are steep. Each step moreover is decorated with a semicircular ground-niche on either side, too short to inspect entirely while standing, big enough to fit a man or worse.
Each niche contains one of the following at random: a basin full of scarabs, a grotesque idol, noisy spiders, or something else.
A Mirror-calm Pond spreads over a large portion of the floor. The short wall beside which you lay your Lady girts this pond. You glimpse the reflection of your helmet in the pool. The water has too much lead to drink.
As you tend her wound your Lady’s voice is quietly audible above the noisy spiders.
“There is little pain. Only a cut, more shocking than catastrophic. “I have seen sorrier ruin. “That river, or rather an ocean it seemed, of the wooden beetles, finding and caressing every goosebump of my skin - that was worse. I feel as if I had stood for days before an assembly, always with eyes upon me. “That the strange knight has been detoured is our pearl midst the mud. “The weakness shames me, my knight, but my eyelids are so heavy. If you can watch… only wake me…”
There. The bleeding in her arm has stopped now. Let sleep work its medicine. To what end? You are lethally lost under a mountain of rock and lead. You brought her to this, you louse. She may starve, or fall to the bent swords of your pursuer. Why can’t you look at that knight?
The shapes and natures and desires of the un-dead are many. Some shapes, natures, and desires are more terrible than others.
| Mailed Flayer A blessedly deathless knight. This armored and skillful creature acts as a resurrectionist’s deterrent, in tohmbs and chrypts sacred to The Scratcher. | Halo of Worms Though it can take many figures, this collection of undead flatworms most often forms a circle around the plinths of statues. The worms do not feed; they kill for sport. | Lectergast “…Wraithish, worthy and wroth, he runs; Sidelong dancing, for strong sons; And under the ossuaries, there he dwells, and tells; Of the paladin’s dulcet funereal bells…” |
|---|
You have some hours to recover, but not forever.
One thing you should do; search the nearest stairway niches. One of the niches contains a marble statue, of a leering ballerina with a horned demon-head. If you pull the stone hand from the statue, a passage opens to a secret treasure room. There you will find a Ring of Perfect Leather.
Another alcove is of special interest. You will find, ringed by a circle of carefully laid scarabs, their antlers inward-turned, a book. It is a mancer’s journal. It is worth your time to skim the pages...
“…warding circles at regular intervals. They won’t last, removed from the lead. Must carry replacements, or replenish the soul matter… “…from Toke’s Crossroad and along the left-descending steps, until you reach that canyon of humming blackness. Then, crossing the bridge of withered wood… “…many scarabs, piles and piles, but all are empty. Stick to the wall of mildew-smelling bricks for at least a hundred notches, otherwise that beast will scent you. Cross the courtyard quickly, step into the third tower, and ascend the broken stair for… “…three ways through the basilica. The quickest is the corridor with the sky-mural floor, but my singing mushroom warns of at least one ghost in there. Better to take… “…Leper’s Curse on Othelmedir. Whysoever did I accept… “…slipped past the colony. Days gone, but The Stope of the Ninth Ozone is just ahead. There is the white stone shelf; on it…
Clap. With a noise like the beater of a wooden loom slamming against its beam, the red scarab, a fat drop of blood against the marble shelf, splits under your Steel. You also hear a soft gasp - but it may only have been your Blue Lady.
She steps off to your right. The preceding days of travel have stitched her cut. Her limp is gone, as is her bandage. She skirts one of the reflective, metallic pools that dot this dripping feretory. She extends a hand to a polished, flat stone the color of an olive pit.
Shelley Stone
From the first Time comes this relic of potent necromancy. Once and only once, place it on the throat of one who is not too long dead. He shall live again.
Water strikes your helmet. Looking up, you see the ceiling is a network of metal. Struts. Gears. Chains. One wide shaft ascends straight up. Another drop falls on you from this hole; rain which has trickled down miles of rock to wet your armor.
You see a lever on the nearest wall.
Following that first echo of a chain rattling somewhere miles above, you will hear, immediately on its heels, the fateful *boo**m. B**oom**. B**oom*.
The Alien Knight will enter the feretory anywhere between three and twenty seconds after you hear his steps. He attacks; his ghosts attack too. You will find that you still can’t look directly at him.
Before pulling the lever you should have formed a circle from the scarabs you took out of the basilica. If you didn’t it’s too late now, you must die. If you did, step inside the circle with your Lady. It will protect you from the ghosts.
The scarabs will not, however, protect you from the knight. He will stop for only a moment, then step into the circle.
The Alien knight fights with predictable attack sequences. Left cut. Right cut. Leap back. Lunge. Deflecting or averting these blows is relatively straightforward. Your foe likes to strafe, and setting yourself between him and your Lady can be more of a challenge. Keeping her near the center of the circle will make it easier.
All this is sufficient for a standstill, but in no way enables you to land a hit. The Alien Knight will parry every attack. You will tire before he does; you must find a way to see him...
Your first intuition will probably arise from the water dripping off the ironwork above – from the puddles. If you glance at a puddle, at just the right angle, you will see the knight’s “whole” reflection.
His reflection has no body. Only arms and legs. Even in a mirror, there is void.
There is ‘Blind-spot’ necromancy at work. The power animating The Alien Knight conceals his heart – his center – from any naked pair of eyes.
But with one eye shut…
He appears entirely, his armor black and with a thousand facets like onyx, but seeming to shine with inner stars. Once you can see your foe the fight will at once turn in your favor. Time your attacks, block his, and whittle this weird rival down to the marrow.
The Alien Knight falls.
The ghosts vanish.
The chain cage arrives.
You step inside.
The air is like a glass of cool water - the sunrise, like a father’s love - as you step onto the broad ledge on the eastern mountainside. Nearby is a scummy pond. A lone wooden tree, dead, almost branchless, shoots just from the middle of the water, the two twigs of its pinnacular fork framing a silver web. In the distance, through the web, you spy The Road.