"Very well. Which way do we go from here?" asked Thindhul, his tone sardonic.
Telarian rose and studied the wider streets and half-collapsed ceiling. A score more Knights issued from the tunnel out into the streets to set up a temporary perimeter. From the diviner's vantage, he counted at least five side streets, each as wide or wider than the street they'd emerged upon, though at least a couple were choked by shattered walls, collapsed ceiling sections, and fossilized bodies.
"We'll continue to follow the street we're on. Since it led to the tunnel, this was likely once a main thoroughfare. It should lead to the city's center. From there, we'll decide where to go next."
Thindhul nodded, and shouted orders for the Knights to form up behind the vanguard. With the streets so wide, the Knight Commander judged the space adequate for five Knights to easily ride abreast. Telarian left him to his duty and joined the vanguard as it picked its way forward, stepping around the twisted, stony corpses that littered the road.
As they progressed, the crushing weight of the fallen ceiling gradually lessened, revealing more of the city's architecture. Thick foundations gave way to arching white balusters, fluted columns, and slender balconies. The upward construction did little to draw the eyes away from the grisly, hardened remains of the city's former citizens, whose numbers increased the farther they moved.
By the time the vanguard entered the central city hub, the forms underfoot were as thick as cobbles. It was easier for the horses to trod those unfeeling backs than to pick their way through. Telarian was riding the vanguard, judging the Knights' confidence would be bolstered by his presence.
The ceiling arched up into a great dome, at the center of which a violet flame burned dimly, like the ghost of the sun. Beneath the flame rose a jumble of rock-hard bodies rising some forty paces from a broad base to a narrow tip. The cone-shaped cemetery mass was surmounted by a blood red throne of rough-cut crystal.
A lone, bone white figure sat upon that throne, unmoving and lifeless as the hundreds of fossilized forms who made up its court and supported its high seat.
Telarian called a halt. The vanguard paused some dozens of paces from the mound's lower edge. He waited for Thindhul to catch up as he continued to observe the panorama.
When Thindhul rode to Telarian's side, the Knight Commander asked, "Do you sense a threat?"
The diviner shrugged, "Perhaps we have stumbled upon the epicenter of some terrible genocidal ritual. However, that heap has the look of something assembled after the bodies were petrified."
"Either way, nothing to do with us, correct?"
The Keeper replied, "If that statue sitting on its pretty seat maintains any cognition whatsoever, perhaps it can provide us with directions."
Thindhul's mouth opened with a surprised gape. He said, "Is that wise?"
Telarian fixed the Commander with a wintry look, saying nothing.
Thindhul stuttered, shook his head, and finally declared, "I shall send someone to inquire."
The Knight Commander turned and gestured to one of the vanguard. "Knight Dilthari, ascend that heap and investigate."
An elf woman dismounted, gave the reins to a companion, and approached the heap.
She walked the periphery of the cone, looking for the best route to ascend the pile of rigid bodies.
The figure on the throne suddenly stood from its seat and looked down at Dilthari, just as the violet flame on the ceiling flared to three times its original luminosity. The figure, as naked and roughly preserved as all the other figures, absorbed that light across its hard surface in discrete patterns that resembled regalia and clothing. It was revealed as wearing a crown of light and a luminescent cape, and it brandished a long staff of streaming effulgence.
It coughed a plume of dust, then mumbled something to Dilthari in a language unknown to Telarian. The tone made it seem a question. The diviner quickly essayed a charm of language comprehension, as the figure spoke again.
This time, Telarian caught part of its question, ". . more subjects whose salvaged essence can fuel my elaborate mechanisms?"
Dilthari continued to stare up, uncomprehending. Telarian shouted, "Stand away, Knight!"
The figure, despite its fossilized limbs, pointed down the slope with its intangible staff. Dilthari scrambled backward. The other Knights of the vanguard unlimbered crossbows and fumbled to fit bolts.
Dilthari gasped as if punched in the stomach and ceased moving. She half turned her gaze back to Telarian, surprise dawning across her features. To the diviner's eyes, it seemed as if the Knight exhaled a thin streamer of mist from her nose and mouth. The streamer flowed through the air toward the crowned one, who snared it with his blazing staff. Dilthari's flesh instantly cooled and paled to the color of salt. She toppled, becoming one more rigid carcass among the thousands of inert, fossilized bodies. As she struck the previously hardened corpses, her outstretched arm broke off at the shoulder with an unnerving report.
Even as Thindhul screamed, "Attack!" a volley of bolts battered the creature with such force it overbalanced and fell from sight off the back of the heap.
Telarian waited to hear the creature crash down, but several heartbeats of silence dashed his expectation. Instead, the dusty, dry voice mumbled from behind the heap. "Wake, wake, wake my sleepy ones! Open your dull eyes and stand-your prophet commands it! Dream no more in lonely exile!"
"By the Sign!" screamed Thindhul. The rubble on which the Knights rode began to shudder, heave, and crack. Every fossilized corpse scattered across the buried city's central hub, and all the way down the road along which the Knights were assembled began to twitch. Each became a terror of eon-hardened hunger.
A tsunami of screams scratched from a thousand rock throats. The noise slammed through the Knights, threatening to break even their renowned valor. The howls were of damned souls thrust suddenly back into bodies completely foreign to them. The hellish sound was one the survivors would hear echoing through their trances all the rest of their days.
Nis was in Telarian's hand a moment later, dashing his rising panic as water to a flame. Logic, cold and untethered to emotion, become his only companion. As Knights pulled their weapons and began to slash at the stoic undead that rose as a pale tide all around them, Telarian made for the throne. Clearly, even if a few Empyrean Knights were to survive the next twenty or thirty heartbeats, the puppeteer of this ghastly city had to be eradicated.
A dozen stony hands, blunt with erosion, pulled his screaming mount from under him. Telarian leaped free, his ebony blade pulling him up and away from the sounds of ripping horseflesh. Then he was on the central mound, dashing up the steep slope of solidified carrion, even as it began to shudder and separate. Each unit of the cone-shaped structure became a screaming zombie whose flesh was hard as bedrock.
He stepped on a writhing arm, a yowling head, and into a palm and out of it before the hand could clutch and hold him. He batted away a face whose gaping mouth threatened to bite him, turning the pallid stone into so much sand. Then he reached the apex, just as the perpetrator of the uprising surmounted the opposite side. Unlike his own uneven ascent, the energy-wreathed lich was raised securely in the hands of its newly animated followers.
Telarian and the relic lich faced each other from across the crystalline throne. The diviner looked into a countenance so weathered that only a shallow concavity faced him, incapable of displaying the least hint of feature.
The obscene crater that once housed a mouth worked, and it somehow spoke without tongue to shape its words. "The mechanism requires fresh infusion. Blood is too sticky and prone to clotting. Souls serve best." Telarian's spell of translation allowed him to understand the creature's supernatural utterances, but the lich's allusion to a mechanism escaped him. In any event, the context implied nothing pleasant for him and the Empyrean Knights.