Death After Death

Chapter 392 - Buried Treasure

Eventually, when the moment passed and Vatren’s grip on him slackened, Simon said, “Bring me the shovels. Let’s see what we caught.”

The boy looked at him uncertainly. He clearly thought that was a terrible idea, but he didn’t disobey, and a few minutes later, they were both shoveling away sand from where the screaming was loudest as fast as they could, but Simon’s leg began to ache well before he reached anything interesting.

At first, he thought it was just muscle strain from being pulled in two directions at once, but after a couple of minutes, when the adrenaline faded entirely, his left leg throbbed badly. Even with the shrieking, that was enough to make him stop what he was doing and have his squire help him remove his armor. After that came the pants, which were where they found an ugly burn in the shape of a monstrous hand.

Varten went white at the sight of charred skin and popped blisters, but Simon put him to work fetching bandages and alcohol to keep him from going into shock. It was serious, and it would scar, but as long as it didn’t get infected, he’d be fine. More disturbing was the fact that the Jinn had inflicted it on him in only a second or two.

What would it have done if it had held onto me even longer, he wondered, imagining his muscles cooking, and his bones charing in the fiery grip.

During the long break it took to bandage the wound, the keening never stopped, and eventually, despite his squire’s misgivings, they continued. They only had to go for a few feet before a hand reached for them out of the sand and tried to grab Simon’s shovel. They both stopped then and looked at the strange, grasping limb.

There was obviously a body attached to it. That went without saying, but was it worth digging down to it? After the burn he’d received, he had second thoughts about that. He would have thought it was a ghost save for the fact that the creature glowed red and orange and flickered like flames, and all of that said demonic to Simon, which made him nervous to get too close a second time.

He tried to dig a bit more, more after the creature left glowing claw marks on his shovel that only slowly faded back to the gray of cool metal, but he decided against it. Instead, he wondered how he’d gotten free of the thing without losing one or both legs.

Tired of its screeching, he and his squire returned to their horse, where he retrieved his dowsing rod and used it to try to find this thing’s home. It had been dragging Simon somewhere, and he was about to find out. He confirmed that the thing worked by having it find the Jinn. Then, he had it look for the robes of the silent sister who had died here the month before, because a concrete object he could imagine worked infinitely better than a vague concept of a den.

While he did so, his squire fired off a barrage of questions, but Simon silenced him, telling the boy, “I need to concentrate. I’ll tell you what we’re doing after I’ve found what I’m looking for.”

That kept him silent as they walked toward the ruins. Simon had suspected that would be the case, but even as he advanced, he worried there might be more than one, and other than speaking a word of nullification, he had no other cards to play.

The stories say people are taken one at a time, Simon reminded himself as they walked in silence. If there were a whole nest of these things, no one would be alive to tell stories in the first place.

While that made sense, things often didn’t make sense when it came to magic and monsters. So he kept expecting some freak ambush even after they reached their goal and started digging.

That was when he finally started to answer Varten’s earlier questions. Yes, they’d caught the Jinn. Yes, that meant that Sir Celenger had been wrong. No, he probably wasn’t lying. He’d just been optimistic. Those were the easy questions.

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“How do you know where to dig?”

“What’s the stick for?”

“What’s buried here?”

Simon explained that the dousing rod allowed him to focus his sight and find what he sought. “It’s just a stick,” he lied. “As to what we’re looking for…”

There, Simon had a harder time answering the boy. “Its nest,” he said finally. “Or a grave. Maybe a lot of graves.”

Despite such a dire pronunciation, they dug several feet without finding so much as a bone. Other than a break for dinner, they dug most of the night, without finding much. They only stopped because dawn was approaching, and his captive had begun to scream again. This time it sounded less like rage, though, and more like fear.

Simon supposed that the thing could destroy the amulet that was trapping it. If it were intelligent, it would have done that hours before. Instead, it acted like a caged wolf, clawing at a barrier it couldn’t understand. Simon didn’t really understand it either, but as the run rose, and its rays touched the pit, the thing grew louder for a moment, then it was completely silent.

Varten looked at Simon expectantly, so he eventually said, “It’s dead, probably. We’ll know come nightfall, one way or the other.” The two of them took a short nap, then, in the shade of a wall, while it was still cool. Simon had built his amulet to run for two or three days at steady output. If the thing was merely slumbering the day away, they wouldn’t be caught unawares.

Despite Simon’s worsening pain, after noon they started digging again, and Simon noted that his dowsing rod pointed under the building they were digging beside, not deeper. That simplified things; if the direction was just ever downward, he might have given up. It wasn’t safe to go much deeper without scaffolding, but they seemed to be digging toward some long-abandoned cellar. That was intriguing, and for an hour, Simon dreamed that he might find some long-abandoned magic experiment that could teach him a thing or two.

Then they started finding the bones. Most of them were chewed or broken; all of them were charred. Past a certain point, the terrain became more bones than sand, which was grisly, even for Simon. He sent Varten to find more dung for the fire, and leave this part to him. Then he used his dowsing rod to determine exactly where the sister’s remains were; those he’d take back with them. As he dug, though, he found little to make sense of.

There was no intelligence here. There was just enough structure to make him think of ants or termites, but that was it. It was like he was carving his way through a hairball or owl pellet made of the broken bones of a hundred corpses.

Simon did not share that metaphor when it was dinner time. Instead, they ate and waited patiently for their prisoner’s keening wail to resume. When that didn’t happen, he pronounced it dead and went back to digging, determined to get to the center of his charred ossuary.

By the time Simon reached the hollow, cavern-like structure in the middle, he was covered in sand and ash. Still, he pressed deeper with a torch and found a real horror show. It wasn't just the pieces of bodies here that he found disturbing; it was the symbols. They weren't words of power, not quite anyway. They looked like them, though, in places. It reminded him of the marks he'd see in goblin warrens, only there were clawed carving and burn marks instead of shit-smeared images.

Except for the lack of a summoning circle and the scent of sulfur, Simon would have been sure this was some kind of demonic den; likewise, the thing’s fiery nature ruled out some kind of undead wraith, which would have made a great deal of sense otherwise.

“What does that leave?” he asked himself. “Elemental? Fae?”

He was at a loss, and after using a mirror to take a few pictures for later sketches, he limped back to his guttering campfire and sleeping squire with the bones of Sister Elzbin in the shreds of her robes for a night of restless sleep. Simon was fairly sure that besides Helades, there were no gods in this world, but that didn’t stop him from saying a prayer for the poor soul as he tucked her remains into his saddlebags.

His leg spent half the night throbbing, but in the morning, they left at first light, heading back north. Even though Simon’s first priority probably should have been a healer for better herbs and a second look, what he really wanted was a good inn. A few stiff drinks and a decent bath would do more to help him than any medical treatment. He was absolutely filthy on top of everything else. He hoped for a quiet trip back through the desert, but those were rare enough, and he was sure they’d find some other trouble on the way.