Page 23 of Fateless

I dug the blade beneath the gem. The stone came loose, popped out, and clinked to the floor as the echo of Halek’s warning died on the air. I bent down and grabbed it, then held it up to my face The gem was cool between my fingers, glittering with its own inner luminance. A breath seemed to echo through the chamber, wafting along the ceiling and dispersing into the unseen rooms beyond.

I held my breath and waited, but seconds ticked by and nothing happened. After a few heartbeats, Halek let out a puff of air and relaxed.

“Whew, okay,” he breathed. “Looks like we’re in the clear. Just be careful. You never know what will happen when you touch ancient treasure. I’ve heard stories of people who were struckdown or cursed just for opening the wrong door.”

I glanced at the gem in my palm. It seemed like a small, foolish thing to risk my life for now, but I closed my fingers around it and smirked. I was a thief. This was what I did, and not even the treasures of the Deathless King were off-limits. “I guess we got lucky.”

“Seems that way.” Halek ran a hand along the arm of the throne and shook his head. “At least the Deathless King isn’t too touchy about his throne.”

A hissing sigh rippled through the room, swirling dust eddies into the air. Along the wall closest to the dais, something moved.

I backed away, the emerald still clutched in my hand, watching as a bundle of rags and bones slithered over the rubble pile and spilled onto the floor. It wriggled for a moment, then started to rise. Bony hands emerged from the cloth, a rib cage gleamed through the rags, and a humanoid shape staggered forward on slender leg bones.

My stomach twisted so hard it felt like I’d been stabbed. The head beneath the tattered cowl was the bleached skull of some kind of canine, its narrow muzzle filled with sharp teeth. Hollow eye sockets fixed on me, and the jaws opened in an eerie parody of a howl, though no sound emerged.

Halek and I staggered back, as scraping, slithering sounds echoed all around us. More skeletons were crawling out of the rubble, dragging themselves across the floor before rising slowly to their feet. Bony jaws opened and closed with snapping, gnashing sounds that echoed through the chamber.

Halek grabbed my arm. “There!” he gasped, pointing acrossthe room, where an open doorway had once stood. It was half covered by a large rubble pile, but I could see the gap beyond. Unfortunately, there were also two skeleton creatures between us and the open door.

With a rattle, one of the skeleton creatures near us lunged, coming at me with jerky, almost frantic movements. A bony claw swiped at my face, and I leaped back with a yell.

“Go!” Halek cried, and we sprinted across the chamber. Skeletons lunged at us, but they seemed disoriented from being reborn, their movements sporadic and confused. We reached the doorway; the two creatures guarding it gnashed their teeth when they saw us and leaped forward with gaping jaws. I spun aside, barely dodging the fangs that snapped shut inches from my ear. Halek dove forward as the second skeleton raked at him, hitting the ground with his shoulder and rolling to his feet behind the guard. We darted through the opening into the darkness of the hall beyond.

The skeleton creatures chittered behind us. Sprinting down the hallway, we turned a corner and ducked into the first dark room we could find. At one point, it might have been a small library, perhaps filled with forbidden scrolls and ancient tomes. But part of the ceiling had collapsed, and books were scattered everywhere among broken shelves and rock. Halek and I squeezed under a bookshelf leaning against a corner and waited, listening to the scrape and scrabble of bones in the hall. None of the creatures came into the room, but we huddled there, our hearts pounding together, until their snarling faded away and silence throbbed in our ears once more.

Halek drew in a slow breath, cautiously poking his head out from beneath the shelf. “I think they’re gone,” he whispered.

I slid out behind him. My hands were shaking, but my fingers were still curled tightly around the gemstone. The thing that had apparently triggered the rising of the skeleton creatures. The meaning was very clear.Do not touch the king’s belongings. Even in death, he had cursed any who would attempt to steal from him.

I slipped the emerald into my satchel. No use in putting it back; the damage was done. We would have to avoid the skeletons wandering through the palace now, but at least they didn’t seem very intelligent.

“Where to now?” Halek wondered once we had confirmed that the room and surrounding hallways were empty.

I consulted my trusty map. Briefly, I wondered how the Circle knew so much about a city that had been lost for thousands of years, but the instructions on the back were crystal clear. Find the vault, the spidery handwriting said,in the crypts below the palace.

“Crypts,” I muttered, rolling up the map up again. “Fantastic. Nothing terrifying in the crypts, I’m sure.”

Halek chuckled, appreciating the sarcasm. “If we survive this, remind me to tell you about my venture into the burial mounds of the siha.”

The palace went on, an unending labyrinth of hallways, rooms, corridors, and vast chambers. Time, it seemed, had either been frozen or didn’t flow normally here. Carpets still stretched down corridors, intact except where the floors had cracked beneath them or the walls had fallen on them. Colorful tapestries lined the walls, depicting scenes of flowers, animals, andpeople, with a towering figure in white and gold looming over everything. Books were unchewed by rodents or insects, paintings unfaded. A bathing chamber still held crystal clear water that was icy cold to the touch, though the tiled floor around the pool was shattered. The air remained deathly still, as if the very walls and floors were holding their breath. But now we weren’t alone. Shambling skeletons wandered the halls, and a few times Halek and I had to duck into a room or find cover and wait until an undead monstrosity had hobbled past. They never stopped or paused to look around, patrolling the halls with mindless fortitude. Probably cursed to march a set route forever. I hoped nothing more intelligent waited for us in the shadowy halls of the crypts.

Following the main hall, we slipped farther into the palace, making our way past more wandering undead, collapsed hallways, and empty rooms until we abruptly came to a place where we could go no farther. An entire section of floor had fallen, leaving behind a huge, gaping hole, at least thirty feet wide and maybe fifty feet across, completely blocking our path forward.

I walked to the edge and peered down. The darkness made it impossible to see the bottom, but it wasn’t a sheer drop into the void. The sides were slanted enough that we would be able to make our way down, carefully. If we slipped, we would probably break our necks at the bottom, but the walls were scalable.

I looked at Halek. “The map says the vault is below the palace,” I said. “This is probably the quickest way down, but it won’t bet the easiest.”

He shrugged. “Not the first giant hole I’ve flung myself into.”

A rattle at the end of the hall made us glance up just as a skeleton creature shambled into the corridor. Without thinking, I stepped off the edge and dropped several feet into the gaping hole.

Halek followed, the light of his glowstone pulsing weakly in the gloom. The hole grew narrower the farther down we went, the air turning colder.

I dropped onto a ledge and came face-to-face with a skull, grinning at me from the wall. With a shudder, I continued picking my way down, the faint light from above dying around me, until my boots finally hit what felt like solid stone. Gazing around, I found myself in a partially collapsed stone tunnel with long, narrow shelves carved into the walls. A bony foot poked out of one, and a shattered piece of a spine lay on the floor beneath it.

Halek dropped beside me and took in our surroundings with a glance. He wrinkled his nose. “Well, we are definitely in the crypts,” he whispered. “Amazing that even this much survived when the city fell.” His gaze went to the skeletal hand poking out of the stone shelf. “We should be careful. This is most definitely a place that could be cursed. And there are alotof skeletons down here. If they start crawling out of the walls, it’s going to be interesting.”

With that lovely image in mind, we started into the crypts.

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