The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [63]
It brought its great pick down, burying it a foot into the stone floor as Remy skipped aside and hacked at its arm. Once, twice, three times he struck as the great hulking zombie worked the pick free. On the third blow, he severed its arm just above the elbow. It swung the stump at him, spraying him with a foul black fluid. With its other hand it got the pick free and pivoted to gut him with a sideways swipe.
Remy ducked under it and dragged his blade along the underside of its wrist, cutting it to the bone. The pick flew from its hand and crashed into the other wall, crushing a smaller zombie against the row of wheelbarrows. The ogre’s severed arm still clung to the pick handle. It reached for Remy, its eyes infernally alight.
And then one of them went out, its light replaced by the gentle gleam of Keverel’s magic imbuing the steel haft of one of Kithri’s throwing knives. A moment later, the same happened to its other eye. Remy closed, swinging his sword as if cutting down a tree. He chopped through one of its legs and danced back as it fell. Behind him he heard Biri-Daar and Lucan shouting about something but he could not turn to see what it was; as the zombie hulk hit the ground, he struck again and again at its blinded head, eventually hacking away part of its skull and brain. Tremors ran through it, subsiding into silence.
Remy turned to see that everyone else had stopped fighting as well. All visible corpses were just that—corpses. Keverel was whispering blessings over them to permanently release those that had been rising again.
Ten or twelve feet outside the antechamber door, the last stones were being fitted into a new wall closing off the hall. The Road-builder’s crew were doing their jobs.
“This was a trap for wandering tomb robbers,” Paelias said. “Not hardy fighting folk such as ourselves. One wonders if the Road-builder left anything a little more interesting.”
“More interesting than being forced to go through the rest of the tomb and discover what joys await us in the Inverted Keep? Careful what you wish for,” Kithri said. She was eyeing the ceiling, and as soon as she spoke, she began climbing one of the walls, using the edges of alcove and sconce for footholds until she was within arm’s reach of the ceiling. Then out came a stubby, thick-bladed knife and she began to work it into the nearest of the star map’s constellations.
“Don’t,” said Paelias.
Kithri couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “These are diamonds, Paelias. What do you mean, ‘don’t’?”
“I mean don’t,” he said. “It is not for nothing that I chose the path of the starpact. Maps of the sky are sacred.”
“I’ll put something else in their place,” Kithri said.
“Kithri. Look around you. Is there not enough to carry?”
The argument might have gone farther, but the ogre corpse interrupted it by coming back to life. It reared up onto its single leg, wounds still gaping, the pulpy mass of its brain sliding out through the holes in its skull left by Remy’s sword. With the advantage of surprise, it struck with its remaining hand, the momentum of the blow toppling it off balance even as its open palm swatted Paelias flat against the wall.
Keverel jumped forward, his mace crashing into its head as it hit the ground again. He pounded it into silence, then spoke his blessing and release. The others were gathering around Paelias, who had fallen motionless across two of the wheelbarrows, his posture not unlike the vanquished zombie crushed by the hulk’s pick. Lucan slapped lightly at his face, and Paelias’s eyes slitted open. He said something in a language Remy didn’t understand.
Lucan answered in the same language. Elvish, Remy realized. Lucan looked up at Keverel, who was wiping his mace clean. “His mind is scrambled,” Lucan said.
The cleric squatted in