The artifact barely drew a glance from Logan. He was far more interested in the room's other occupants.
Between him and the altar, lining both sides of the room, stood two ranks of dead Mayan warriors in full regalia. The weapons and feathered headdresses they wore looked as fresh as the day they had been placed there, but their bodies were dry and desiccated with mummification.
Logan had seen his share of dead bodies--what necromancer hadn't?--but something about these particular corpses left him feeling unusually unsettled. Before he could figure out why, however, the rest of the party caught up with him and stepped into the chamber to make room for them all.
"At last!" Hale exclaimed, pushing past Logan to stride between the silent guardians on his way to the altar.
Logan felt something shift in the air around them.
He glanced about, taking in his fellow acolytes as they examined the stalwart warriors. He watched Hale climb the steps of the altar and examine the necklace, but he didn't see anything particular that would set his alarms ringing.
And yet . . .
Something had changed. He was certain of it.
Unable to figure out what that something was, however, Logan turned his attention to the mummified warrior standing in front of him. He stepped closer, peering into the dead man's face, wondering who he had been and what had possessed him to give up his life to stand here in this chamber for the rest of eternity.
What prompted such a sacrifice?
Logan turned just in time to see Hale lift the necklace free of its bone stand and carefully place it in the silk-lined wooden box held by one of the other acolytes. Hale spent the entire time berating the other man, telling him to hold the box steadier, to lift it higher, to stop staring at the artifact with such greed--a litany of failures, Hale's hallmark response to those he considered inferior. Logan couldn't wait for the day when he was powerful enough to best the man . . .
When Logan turned back, he found the dead warrior's eyes had opened; the corpse was staring directly at him. Or would have been, had there been eyes left in the dead man's sockets.
Logan froze, staring back, wondering if the figure was actually looking at him. Had the dead man's eyes opened of their own accord? Or had the eyelids flicked open as a result of the disturbances Logan's party was generating in the air of the chamber after all this time?
However, when the warrior turned his head to track Hale as he strode past Logan on his way to the exit, there was no longer any doubt.
"Look out!" Logan cried, even as the warriors surrounding them all sprang to life and attacked.
Two of their number lost their lives in those first few seconds as the Mayan warriors lashed out with their spears, both men impaled through their chests before they even knew what was happening. Logan used the torch in his hand to parry the strike of the warrior in front of him and then swung it like a club, crushing his skull.
Logan's exultant cry of victory died stillborn in his throat, however, as the warrior picked himself back up, spear in hand, just as dangerous as before.
In seconds, the room was utter chaos. Acolytes were fighting for their lives against the undead guardians of the necklace while at the same time doing their best to protect their leader. Hale, meanwhile, was preparing to cast a spell of banishment; Logan recognized the hand motions even as he did his best to keep the creature in front of him from skewering him like a piece of meat.
A horrified scream burst from the man next to Logan as one of the other warriors managed to sink his teeth deep into the flesh of the man's arm. Logan looked on in horror as the life was literally sucked from the other man, his flesh shriveling right before everyone's eyes as the Mayan warrior drank his fill. In seconds the acolyte was reduced to little more than a shriveled husk, not unlike the guardian itself.
Now that he understood the consequences of letting the Mayan get his hands on him, Logan redoubled his efforts to keep his attacker at bay, mentally screaming at Hale to hurry the fuck up!
Logan didn't know if Hale heard him--who really knew the extent of the man's powers?--but in the next second a powerful wave of magick burst from the council leader's fingertips, washing across the room like a miniature tsunami, sweeping over everything in its path. Logan could feel the tug of the magick as it swept over him, but it was looking for the dead, not the living, and so it didn't have any effect on him.
As for the Mayan warriors, that was another story.
The spell had been cast by a master necromancer, with all of his power behind it. Rather than attempting to control the creatures, it was designed to rip the life force animating them from their dead flesh and cast it aside, leaving nothing more than inanimate husks in its wake.
One minute Logan was feverishly fighting for his life, the next the Mayan warrior in front of him collapsed to the floor like a puppet that had just had its strings snipped.
Turning, Logan found the same was true for all of the other warriors; the room was littered with their desiccated corpses.
"Quickly now," Hale said, clutching the wooden box to his side as he stepped over the shriveled body in front of him and headed for the door.
Logan didn't need a second invitation to follow suit.
He was almost at the entryway when the sound of something dragging itself across the floor behind him drew his attention.
He spun around to find the dead men littering the floor stirring back to life, the force that had animated them visibly rushing back into their bodies like smoke sucked into their mouths.
Logan couldn't believe what he was seeing. For the dead men to resist a banishment spell cast by one of Hale's ability was so utterly outside Logan's experience that it was like waking up to find the inmates had taken control of the asylum. He stared in horror as the corpses began to move with a bit more alacrity, dragging their limbs behind them even as they sought to follow those who had dared to disturb their sleep and steal the precious artifact they had been placed there to protect.
"Run!" Logan shouted, then took his own advice.
The next several moments were a blur as the group of artifact seekers fought their way through the narrow twists and turns of the tunnel leading back to the bridge. As they hurried along, Logan was aware of the sounds of pursuit growing behind them, and he knew it wouldn't be long before the warriors caught up with them. He wanted to move faster but was hampered by those ahead, just as the man behind him was hampered by Logan's progress.
Things came to a head when they reached the bridge, as the man behind Logan tried to shove his way past, sending them both sprawling. Logan managed to catch himself against the tunnel wall, but the other man wasn't so lucky; his scream seemed to go on forever as he slipped over the edge of the bridge and plummeted into the darkness below.
The man's death barely gave Logan any pause; he had a horde of undead Mayan warriors at his heels that would have been just as happy to throw him off the bridge as his companion had been, and he wasted no time in scrambling back to his feet and heading out onto the bridge. Never in his life had he been so thankful for his foresight in stringing the guide line, for none of them would ever have been able to make their way across without it.
The fall had cost him precious time, though, and the horde at his back had gained on him as he reached the opposite side. He glanced back, saw the dead men rush onto the bridge without slowing, and knew his lead was dwindling by the second. With his heart in his throat, he rushed after Hale and the others.
He'd barely gone another twenty yards beyond the chasm when one of the Mayans tackled him from behind. They crashed to the floor, though the dead man lost his grip on Logan in the process. Not about to let the small blessing go to waste, Logan scrambled to his feet, snatched the torch he'd dropped off the floor, and ran headlong down the tunnel even as the dead man behind him was crushed beneath the feet of the rest of the undead rushing forward.
When Logan reached the cliff face his team had descended, he found those above rapidly pulling the ropes
up behind them.
"Hey!" he shouted. "You can't leave me here! Throw me the rope!"
A glance back down the tunnel showed the horde closing in on him.
"Hey!"
There was no reply from above; they continued working in silence, ignoring his pleas.
Fuck!
Logan looked frantically about, searching for another way up. He grabbed the rock face in front of him, tried to pull himself up with his bare strength, but there were too few handholds, and he slid back down in seconds.
Turning, he put his back to the wall and watched the pack of mummified warriors getting closer with every step. If he didn't get out of here, he was a dead man!
The Mayans were less than twenty feet away when he spotted it--a small hole in the wall at floor level to his left. He hurried over and bent down to check it out; it was a tunnel, leading heaven knew where, but wide enough that he could probably fit in it if he squeezed his shoulders tight.
Without another thought he threw himself into the opening, squirming forward as quickly as he could, reaching out and pulling himself forward with his hands while pushing with his feet.
The Mayans didn't hesitate, either. The lead warrior followed him right into the tunnel; Logan could hear it scrambling along in his wake.
If he didn't do something, the creature was going to grab his feet, and it would all be over pretty quickly after that. Even as the thought occurred to him, he felt the thing's fingers scramble across the sole of his boot; another few inches and it would have had him.
Logan did the only thing he could think of. He relinquished his hold on the spell illuminating his torch, pointed his hands back down the tunnel behind him, and sent a bolt of power into the ceiling just above his feet.
The walls shook around him as the little tunnel was plunged into darkness, and Logan prayed to every dark god he could think of that the entire rock wouldn't come crashing down on his head. He scrambled forward as the ground beneath him bucked and swayed and the tunnel was filled with the rushing roar of falling rock.
And then, silence.
Logan lay still, the neck of his shirt pressed over his mouth, doing his best not to breathe in all the dust filling the narrow tunnel around him. He listened for pursuit but didn't hear anything beyond the occasional settling of the stone behind him. He could see nothing.
Hopefully this tunnel went somewhere and he hadn't just entombed himself beneath hundreds of feet of solid rock. Escaping one horrible death to suffer another wasn't his idea of a good time.
First things first; he needed light again. He felt around ahead of him until he located the torch he'd been carrying, then reached deep inside and tried to call forth a bit more power to light it up.
Nothing happened.
Uh-oh . . .
He tried again, but the well had run dry. The bolt of power had depleted his energy reserves. He wouldn't be able to conjure up a light for some hours now, not until his body had a chance to rest and regenerate its energy stores.
Crawling around down there in the dark was not his idea of fun, but at the same time he didn't want to just sit still and wait for his mojo to return. If any of the Mayans had survived the rock fall--and why not, they were already dead, right?--they could have been digging through to him at that very moment. He didn't want to be there when they managed to dig themselves out from under.
Best to keep going and look for a way out while he still had the strength to do so.
Inch by inch, foot by foot, Logan slithered forward as best he was able. The darkness was absolute, and he began to feel like it was a living thing, surrounding him, hemming him in, pressing against every inch of his body until he wasn't certain where it ended and he began. He wanted to scream and shout in fear and frustration but was afraid the second he opened his mouth the darkness would swoop down inside him, diving deep into the depths of his very soul, and that would be the end of him.
So he gritted his teeth and clamped his mouth shut and kept crawling, ever forward.
After what seemed like forever, the tunnel slowly grew wider, enough that he could get up on his hands and knees and move forward a bit more expeditiously, but the lack of fresh air combined with his physical exertions soon pushed him into a haze of dizziness despite the extra space. All he wanted to do was lie down in the middle of the tunnel and go to sleep, but something inside told him that if he gave in to that urge, he might never rise again, so he pushed on, moving forward little by little. He lost track of time and then lost track of the fact that he'd lost track of it, until it felt like all he'd ever done was crawl forward on his hands and knees, feeling for a way out.
When the tunnel floor disappeared from beneath him, it was almost a relief.
He reached forward with his left hand, just as he had a thousand, maybe ten thousand times before, except this time there wasn't anything there to hold him up. His hand went down, down, down farther still, and by that time the weight of his body had tipped forward and he fell right out of the end of the tunnel he'd been crawling along and dropped into nothingness.
He let out one short, sharp cry and then slammed into the stone floor many feet below, knocking himself unconscious in the process.
Logan woke to excruciating pain, his right leg broken in two places. He screamed when his hand accidentally brushed against the shaft of bone sticking out of his shin and promptly passed out again.
Time passed.
When he came to a second--third?--time, he found that though his leg was still broken, his pain had settled into a low-grade hum in the back of his mind. He wondered, briefly, if he was dying. Had he perhaps lost so much blood that his body no longer had the capacity to feel the pain? If that was the case, then why was he thinking so clearly?
It didn't make sense, and so, with no facility to puzzle it out, he just let it go.
He focused instead on the cavern around him, which, he realized with no small shock, he could actually see. A thin shaft of moonlight was shining into the chamber from a hole in the ceiling high above. He glanced upward to its source and then followed it down as it slashed through the darkness to land on the face of a figure seated on the other side of the room. Logan jerked in surprise at the sight and was struck with such an overwhelming sense of danger that he raised his hand in front of his face to shield himself.
When several seconds passed and the figure failed to move or speak, he sheepishly lowered his hand and gave the other a longer look.
Whoever he'd been, it was clear he'd been dead a long time. Like the warriors in the hall of the necklace, this man's corpse had shriveled and blackened with age. His lips had pulled back from his teeth in a death's-head rictus, and his eyes had sunk so deep in his skull that they were all but invisible. He was dressed in the remains of some kind of primitive robe, and a necklace of small round stones hung across his chest.
Logan stared at the necklace, a suspicion growing in the back of his mind.
Those aren't stones . . .
The notion that he'd found the missing eyeballs of the dead Mayan warriors in the hall above wouldn't go away.
His gaze drifted from the necklace to the throne on which the man sat. What he'd first taken as whitish stone revealed itself in the moonlight to be a massive collection of human skulls. Iron bands, looking strangely fresh after what was certainly ages beneath the surface, bound the man's extremities to the throne itself.
He might once have been a king, but he ended his life as a prisoner, Logan thought, trapped down here where the darkness dwells, just like I am now.
He must have drifted off for a bit, for when Logan came to again he found that he was a bit closer to the throne than he'd been before. Had he crawled forward in his sleep?
The idea was a bit unnerving, he had to admit, but not as unnerving as the sense that the man--thing?--on the throne seemed to have moved since he'd last looked at it. Where before it had appeared to be sitting up and staring straight ahead, now it appeared to be leaning forward, its head cocked a bit t
o the side so that it could look directly at him.
It's a trick of the light, he told himself, but deep in his heart he didn't quite believe that.
Not really.
But as with his injuries, his mind didn't really want to dwell on who, or what, he thought the thing on the throne really was.
Logan was looking about in the dim light, searching for another way out besides the hole in the ceiling three stories above, when he heard the voice.
Simon . . .
It was faint, almost at the edge of his hearing.
At first he thought he'd imagined it, but after a moment he heard it again.
Simon . . .
"Who's there?" he called out, and was shocked at how weak his voice sounded even to his own ears. It was little more than a whisper itself.
I'm here, Simon.
"Hale? Is that you?"
No. That murdering bastard deserted you, Simon, left you to suffer for his own mistake.
The thought sent a spike of red-hot anger pouring through Logan's frame, jolting him a bit into greater awareness.
"That fucking bastard," he mumbled to himself, no longer wondering just who he was talking to, but focusing instead on the subject of the conversation.
Yesssss. He must be punished for what he's done to you, stranding you here.
Logan laughed, a high, cackling sort of laugh with more than a touch of madness in it.
"Punished?" he said. "I'm not going to punish him. I'm going to rip his lungs out and kill him."
The voice was silent as Logan went on mumbling for a bit, ranting really, talking about how he was going to fuck one Jonathan Hale nine different ways from Sunday if he ever made it out of this godforsaken place . . .
I can help you with that, you know.
"Help me with what?"
Getting out of this forsaken place. Isn't that what you just said you wanted? To get out of this place so you can make that bastard pay . . .
Another laugh. "In case you haven't noticed, my leg's pretty messed up. I'm probably bleeding to death right now and I don't even know it. Probably making you and everything else in this place up in my mind, just figments of my imagination as my brain gets starved for oxygen and my veins pour out on the ground."
I assure you, I am quite real.
For whatever reason, Logan believed him. And he played the only hand he saw before him.