“Just save me from the ghosts, tyl Loesp, please!” Vollird said, his knees buckling underneath him and the guards on either side having to take his weight. Vollird’s eyes were wide and staring, foam flecking his lips.
“Ghosts?” tyl Loesp said.
“Ghosts, man!” Vollird shrieked. “I’ve seen them; ghosts of all of them, come to haunt me!”
Tyl Loesp shook his head. He looked at the guard commander. “The man’s lost his wits. Take him—” he began.
“Gillews, the worst!” Vollird said, voice breaking. “I could feel him! I could still feel him! His arm, his wrist under—”
He got no further. Tyl Loesp had drawn his sword and plunged it straight into the man’s throat, leaving Vollird gurgling and gesticulating, eyes wider still, gaze focused on the flat blade extending from his throat, where the air whistled and the blood pulsed and bubbled and dripped. His jaw worked awkwardly as though he was trying to swallow something too big.
Tyl Loesp rammed the sword forward, meaning to cut the fellow’s spine, but the tip bumped off the bone and sent the edge slicing through the flesh on the side of his neck, producing another gush of blood as an artery was severed. The guard on that side moved out to avoid the blood. Vollird’s eyes crossed and a final breath left him like a bubbled sigh.
The two guards looked at tyl Loesp, who withdrew his sword.
“Let him go,” he told them.
Released, Vollird fell forward and lay still in the dark pool of his own still spreading blood. Tyl Loesp cleaned his sword on the fellow’s tunic with two quick strokes. “Leave him,” he told the guards.
He turned and walked towards the chamber.
The Sarcophagus had insisted the scaffolding be removed from around it. It sat on its plinth, the three black cubes around it on the floor of the chamber, one immediately in front, the other two near its rear corners. The Oct were still arranged beyond in their concentric rings of devotion.
Tyl Loesp and those around him got there just in time to see the transformation. The sides of the black cubes were making sizzling, crackling sounds. A change in their surface texture made them look suddenly dull, then they began to appear grey as a fine network of fissures spread all over them.
Poatas came limping up to where tyl Loesp stood. “Unprecedented!” he said, waving his stick in the air. A couple of tyl Loesp’s personal guard stepped forward, thinking that the wild, manic old man might be offering violence to their master but Poatas didn’t seem to notice. “To be here! To be here, now! And see this! This!” he cried, and turned, waving his stick at the centre of the chamber.
The faces of the black cubes showed great cracks all over their surfaces now. A dark vapour issued from them, rising slowly. Then the sides trembled and fell open in a slow cloud of what looked like heavy soot as the cubes’ casings seemed to turn to dust all at once, revealing dark, glistening ovoids inside, each about three metres long and a metre and a half in girth. They floated up and out from the gradually settling debris of their rebirth.
Poatas turned briefly back to tyl Loesp. “Do you see? Do you see?”
“One can hardly avoid seeing,” tyl Loesp said acidly. His heart was still thumping from the incident a few moments earlier but his voice was firm, controlled.
The ovoids drifted up and in towards the grey cube, which was starting to make the same snapping, zizzing sounds the black cubes had made moments earlier. The noise was much louder, filling the chamber, echoing back off the walls. The Oct ringed round the chamber’s focus were stirring, shifting, as if they were all now looking up at the grey cube as it shuddered and changed, its surfaces growing dark with a million tiny crazings.
“This is your prize, Poatas?” tyl Loesp shouted over the cacophony.
“And their ancestor!” Poatas yelled back, waving his stick at the circles of Oct.
“Is all well here, Poatas?” tyl Loesp demanded. “Should it make this sound?”
“Who knows!” Poatas screamed, shaking his head. “Why, would you flee, sir?” he asked, without turning round. The sound from the Sarcophagus died away without warning, only echoes resounding.
Tyl Loesp opened his mouth to say something, but the sides of the Sarcophagus were falling away too now, slipping as though invisible walls penning in dark grey dust had suddenly ceased to be and letting its powdery weight come sliding out, falling in a great dry wash all around the plinth, lapping to the inner fringes of the surrounding Oct. There was almost no noise accompanying this, just the faintest sound that might have been mistaken for a sigh. The last echoes of the earlier tumult finally died away.
The grey ovoid revealed by the fallen dust was perhaps five metres across and eight long. It floated trembling in mid-air; the three smaller black shapes drew in towards it, approaching as though hesitant. They tipped slowly up on their mid-axes, ends pointing straight up and down. Then they slid ponderously in to meet the larger grey shape at the centre of their pattern, silently joining with it, seeming to slide partway into it.
The resulting shape hung steady in the air. Echoes slowly died, to leave utter silence within the great chamber.
Then the shape roared something in a language the humans present could not understand, sounds crashing off the walls like surf. Tyl Loesp cursed at the sheer piercing volume of it and clapped his hands to his ears like everybody else. Some of the other men fell to their knees with the force of the sound. Only pride prevented tyl Loesp from doing the same. While the echoes were still dying away, the Oct seemed to startle and move, almost as one. Dry whispering noises, like small twigs just starting to catch fire, began to fill the chamber.
The sound was drowned out as the grey-dark shape hanging in the centre rumbled out again, this time in Sarl.
“Thank you for your help,” it thundered. “Now I have much to do. There is no forgiveness.”
A filmy spherical bubble seemed to form around the shape, just great enough in extent to enclose it completely. The bubble went dark, black, then quicksilver. As tyl Loesp and the others watched, a second bubble flickered into existence enclosing the first, forming two metres or so further out from the inner silvery one. A blink of light, brief but close to blindingly bright, came from the space between the two spheres before the outer one went black. A humming noise built quickly, a vast thrumming sound which issued from the black sphere and rapidly grew to fill the entire chamber, cramming it with a tooth-loosening, eyeball-vibrating, bone-shaking bassy howl. The Oct fell back, rolling to the floor, seemingly flattened by the storm of noise. Every human present put their hands to their ears again. Almost all turned away, stumbling, bumping into their fellows, trying to run to escape the pulverising, flesh-battering noise.
The few humans unable to look away — Poatas was one, on his knees, stick fallen from his hand — remained transfixed, watching the colossally humming black sphere. They were the only ones to witness, very briefly, a scatter of tiny pinprick holes speckling its surface, loosing thin, blinding rays.
Then the outer sphere blinked out of existence.
A tsunami of wide-spectrum radiation filled the chamber in an instant as the thermonuclear fireball behind it surged outwards.
The blast of light and heat incinerated Oct and humans indiscriminately, vaporising them along with the inner lining of the chamber, blowing its single great spherical wall out in every direction like a vast grenade and bringing what was left of the building above and the surrounding plaza crashing down upon the glowing wreckage.
The first waves of radiation — gamma rays, neutrons and a titanic electromagnetic pulse — were already long gone, their damage done.