older and more sinister.
A forty-five-degree turn took them past an unmarred stretch of blank wall. Mouser trailed and, unobserved, reached out to brush his hand along the surface. It was ceramic, but not brick: smooth and hard, perhaps too hard to take frescoes, and easy to clean of paint or charcoal clubbings. Not quite vertical, it leaned back at five degrees or so.
The path turned again, and there were more graffiti carved painfully into soft stone. The symbols looked older than contemporary Mexican Mayan, perhaps. Angular, jutting faces and spear-carrying warriors in frieze. But the wall behind them, Mouser saw, was as smooth as glass and tilted at five degrees from vertical.
Virtual imaging his Thief's power showed him a small round door thirty yards down; but Bishop was leading them in the opposite direction.
Mouser brushed Tammi's elbow. He whistled a single, very low note and then pointed by shifting his eyes. Her gaze followed his and registered comprehension.
Her nod was barely perceptible, just a hairline tilt of her jaw. But it told him everything that he needed to know.
The floor beneath their feet throbbed with an odd, distant beat. Irregular and yet organically steady. Perhaps a stuttering piece of machinery. Perhaps something else.
They descended into night. What little illumination there was struck busts and statues lining the corridor and cast a tangled, prickly forest of shadows.
'I've seen this one before,' Bishop mused. The thing was five feet high, and balanced on a diamond-shaped brass stand. It was a warrior's mask, with a broad, curved axeblade ornament projecting from the helmet. The face was strong and severe.
'Where?' Prez asked. 'No, wait. My… citadel had a collection of art from the old world.' He squeezed his eyes shut, then looked again.
'From Gabon,' he said. 'A people called the Bakota.'
There was another a little farther on. This was a complete figure, squatting with its hands in a prayerlike position. Prez had no comment.
Bishop ran a hundred images past closed lids. 'Bayaka people. Zaire.'
Prez nodded approval. 'You know the motherland, my brother.'
Bishop's smile glittered, and it was too dark to see how devoid of warmth or humor his eyes truly were. 'Like coming home, isn't it?' He clapped Prez on the back, thinking, Jigaboo.
Prez held up a hand. 'We've got something up here-'
And there was a scream behind them.
They turned in time to see Mouser lifted off his feet, carried up and toward the ceiling by fanged shadows.
Instantly, Corrinda snatched her bow and notched an arrow. She aimed carefully and fired it into the shadow figures flitting around Mouser. It struck one, to no effect.
'Quick!' she yelled, and handed a fistful of arrows to Top Nun.
The little cleric screamed, 'You should pardon, God-no time for the whole shmeer. Bless these arrows!' and handed them back. Corrinda took aim and fired one after another.
The wounded shadows fluttered like crippled bats; they lowered the screaming Mouser back to the deck. He was covered with wounds, great claw marks that wept blood.
Top Nun immediately hunched over the wounded Thief and began to glow. Tammi asked, 'Healing?'
'I should be playing dominoes, maybe? Excuse me for asking, but is all this trouble worth it for a little nosh? Could we maybe find a nice deli?'
Prez examined another frieze and crooked his finger at Tammi. 'I don 'I like this.'
'What have we got?'
It was a collage of metal and plastic, an impressionistic rendering of a head with two faces, a braided topknot of hair linking the foreheads. Eyes were inset hollows; teeth splayed out from angrily parted lips.
'This looks like a burial symbol,' Prez said uncomfortably. 'Someplace in Nigeria, I think. I think we've stumbled into another cemetery. But every one of these statues and images seems to be from a different culture, as if… as if…'
Coral began to back up. 'Oh, grody.'
'What is it?'
'Look. This is like McCannibals, you know?'
'She's right,' Bishop said. 'They raid the other villages. But in Africa, the dead are never really dead. Their souls can haunt. So they bury the bones here and steal idols from their victims, sealing each soul in with its own familiar god.
Don't know what kind of spells they use to hold it together, butWatchit!'
It was too late. Coral shrieked as the frieze groaned and shivered. Dust and bits of plaster flaked from a thick, stubby arm as it grabbed her. 'Eeeooowww!' she screamed, flailing with her hands to no effect. It tightened its grasp, and there was a terrible crunching sound. It threw Coral's limp body aside like a Barbie doll, blinked thick, crusty eyelids, and groaned again, wrenching itself from the wall.
It was an immense, ragtag spectacle of flattened tin cans and human femurs and ribs, brass and copper tubes and wiring, with squat stubby arms and legs.
It climbed down out of the wall, shook itself like a wet dog, and lumbered after them, teeth dripping dust. It groaned in a voice like splintering bones.
Ponderous it may have been, but with Corrinda's damaged knee and Mouser's injuries, it wasn't much slower than they were. Without hesitation, Twan and Tammi went to either side of Mouser. Shoulders set in his armpits, they heaved him up and carried him at a scamper.
Their allies were paces ahead of them. Bishop screamed, 'Get it moving!' back over his shoulder, just before he rounded a corner.
Behind them they heard that ghastly cacophony, the splintering bone sound. The monster was at least twenty seconds back. The rest of their allies were out of sight. In gasps, Mouser began to whisper secrets.
'The stairway is blocked,' Acacia said. 'Bobo, what the hell is that creature?'
There had been something in the briefing, but it had gone clean out of Alex Griffin's mind. He would have been lost without the notes scrolling across his bronze shades. He read, 'We entered the burial ground of the Ikoi tribe without performing proper ritual-'
Now he remembered: it was scripted as a battle, with no tricky little puzzles except that winning would give them access to a small round door. 'We run, or we fight. There is no other option.'
Distantly, but growing closer, they heard crunch rriiip crrrunch…
The knot of Adventurers stood with swords and staffs and magical implements at the ready, everyone snarling defiance and trying to get behind someone else.
'I blink we can fight that thing,' Tammi said. 'We've got the Staff of Oranyan and-' another glance at Twan '-Oggun's Necklace. Let's go for it.'
Acacia shook her head. 'Not now. Not here. Let's find out more about combining the magic. We've lost too many people.'
Bishop leaned out over the balcony, dreamily peering down into the next level. Mist roiled below, and, beneath it, cackling human throats.
'Listen to me,' he said, spinning around. 'We're supposed to fight that thing, but we're not required to.'
Tammi frowned. 'What are you babbling about?'
Crrrunch.
He tapped the door behind them, a sealed stairwell emblazoned with a radiation sign.
Tammi grimaced. 'Nigel are you blind? That's a Nekro seal. Instant death for the person who opens it.' She lowered her voice. 'We're not supposed to go through that door. You know that. This is an encounter. We fight!'
'Think about it,' Bishop said urgency. 'If we have this encounter, we'll lose maybe two people, maybe half of our healing points. My way we lose one person, sure. But only one person. You have to think flexibly.'
Tammi paled. 'That isn't done. You never throw away a member of your team.'
'I'm not throwing him away. I'm investing him.'
