From this vantage point, she could see the man searching for some sign of her in the main chamber to indicate which way she’d run. He knelt to the floor and touched something. Karigan glanced at her wound and discovered blood oozing between her fingers and dripping to the floor. He would track the droplets until he found her. She’d have to run again, and she wasn’t sure she had it in her. She could just give him the book, and that would be the end of it. She could rest.
But the real end would be how Second Empire put the information in the book to use. The end of Sacoridia.
She would have to try and hide it before the man caught up with her. And he would catch up. She knew it.
Before she took a single step, however, a strange sensation crept over her, a palpable shadow, though the passage she stood in was neither darker nor lighter. The tombs were, by their very nature, a still place, but they were too still.
The man stood erect, glancing over his shoulder and up into the dome. He appeared to sense it, too, whatever it was.
The air grew colder and a force pulled on Karigan, made her stumble from her place of hiding. Moans rose and echoed through the corridors of the tombs, like the opening of an ancient door that has lain shut for centuries and is forced open. The moans keened in layers, some far off, some close to Karigan’s ears. She wanted to burrow into a corner and hide, but she was being called. Raised.
Bones rustled beneath shrouds. The dead scrabbled at the insides of sarcophagi trying to escape. The linen-wrapped dead arose from funerary slabs. Spirits streamed by her, kings and queens, whole royal families with crowns upon their heads, some mere shadows with gaping holes where their eyes should be. Their passage was a chill wind.
A skeletal hand with a bejeweled ring on its finger skittered by her feet like a spider.
“Bad dream,” Karigan whispered, suddenly recalling her nightmare in the House of Sun and Moon.
She tried to hold onto the column she’d been hiding behind, but the calling forced her on, her trailing hand leaving a smear of blood on stone. The calling pushed her forward, compelled her to join the dead in their march toward the main chamber.
She was faded out, a ghost herself. She tried to drop the fading, but could not. Some greater power had taken command of her ability.
Karigan, along with the dead, spilled into the chamber. They were a ghostly sea that surged and receded in waves. The man spun around and around, aware of the spirits by the look of terror in his wide eyes, but there was no way to know how much he actually saw. The ambulatory corpses, royal mantles dragging on the floor behind them, were very visible.
Awakened, the spirits moaned. Why are we awakened from our sleep?
The man screamed when a corpse bumped into him. The scream attracted the spirits and they swarmed him. He thrashed and then crumpled to the floor, whimpering and throwing his arms over his head.
Why? the dead implored. Why are we awakened?
Karigan wanted to know why, too. Had the intruders triggered something?
Great pressure built in the air and the lamps of the tombs dampened to a weak orange glow, leaving the dome in darkness and the lower levels of the chamber in a sickly light. The spirits gusted around her in an even more agitated state.
Whyyy? they wailed.
A vibration crept up through Karigan’s feet, up her legs. As the throbbing increased, statues, armor, and vases shook and rattled. The tremors continued to intensify and all around objects crashed to the floor.
A queen’s pallid spirit came face to face with Karigan and screamed, her mouth opening into a cavernous void, before she drifted away in shreds.
The statue of King Smidhe on his horse quaked. His outstretched arm cracked at the elbow and smashed to the floor, chipping the horse’s mane on its way down.
The tremors increased even further and Karigan feared the whole of the castle would collapse upon her. If the tombs were shaking this much, it must be far worse above ground.
A powerful vibration almost knocked Karigan off her feet. The head of King Smidhe’s horse broke off and shattered into millions of pieces. The floor cracked open and she scrambled backward to avoid falling into it. The crack expanded, opening to impenetrable depths.
A wall of dank, even colder air rose from the abyss and the dead cried out around her. One of the shambling corpses fell into it, crown, scepter, and all, but something worse shot out of the void like flights of arrows, dark spirits whose painful shrieks added to the cacophony of the others. Karigan wanted to press her hands over her ears, but she held onto the book with a death grip.
The new spirits flew around her. They passed through other spirits leaving swirls of otherworldly dust behind them. Before Karigan could leap out of the way, one passed through her like a sword of cold steel sheathed in her ribs. She staggered. Another came at her and reflexively she batted it away with the book. Perhaps because it was a book of magic it deflected the spirit.
Ghostly voices wormed through her mind. She sensed great age in them, but could not discern the words. These spirits were far older than the oldest of those interred in the tombs. From the time of the Delvers? Maybe even older. Their graves must lie below the Halls of Kings and Queens.
The statue of King Smidhe, horse and all, finally weakened by millions of cracks, collapsed into shattered limbs and rubble. Masonry from above began to shower down. Karigan fought her way through spirits toward the shelter of one of the corridors, but found it in equal tumult.
She breathed hard, wishing away the destruction and the dead, wishing for balance and normalcy, wishing she were nestled in her own bed. No doubt that bed was being jostled hard right now. She could not imagine the chaos up in the castle.