The Tyranny of Ghosts_ Legacy of Dhakaan - Don Bassingthwaite [84]
The skeletons were different in two other significant ways from the others they’d found. They were clad in the ragged remains of clothing—and they were human.
“You said the last time someone came looking for Suud Anshaar was about thirty years ago?” Ekhaas asked Tooth. The hunter nodded, his eyes fixed on the black and glittering skeletons.
“Those are Cyran clothes,” said Chetiin. “I think we’ve found the last people who came here.” He walked up to the skeletons, paused a short distance away, and pointed at a faint dark stain on the floor around them. “That’s what’s left when flesh rots and liquefies.”
“Do you think—” Ekhaas hesitated, words catching in her mouth before she forced them out. “Do you think whatever did this killed them? Or did they—?”
The words caught again, but this time Chetiin anticipated the question. “If I had to guess,” he said, “I think they might still have been alive after it happened.”
Ekhaas’s stomach rose. She had to clench her teeth and fight it down. Tenquis shuddered and closed his golden eyes. Even Geth and Tooth looked a little bit green. Marrow whined and curled her tail low. Chetiin turned away from the skeletons—
—just as the wail broke over the ruins for a third time. Once again it was strangely sourceless, but in Ekhaas’s imagination it seemed closer than before.
“Tiger’s blood,” murmured Geth. “Whatever that is, I don’t think it’s a ghost.”
Tooth’s broad face had gone from green to pale. “It can’t be the same thing that killed Suud Anshaar, can it? Why wouldn’t your stories mention something like this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the empire suppressed what really happened before the story could circulate,” Ekhaas said.
“I would,” said Chetiin. He’d drawn both of his daggers, the one from his left arm sheath with the nasty curved blade and the one from his right arm sheath with the blue-black crystal that winked like an eye from its ugly straight blade. He looked at Ekhaas and Geth. “What do we do?”
Ekhaas exchanged a sharp glance with the shifter. His jaw tightened and he nodded. Ekhaas put her ears back. “We go on,” she said. “We keep looking for the shield fragments. We watch, and if whatever is making that noise shows itself, we try our best to kill it.”
“If it can be killed!” said Tooth. There was an edge of madness to his voice. “What if it can’t? How—”
Tenquis reached out and slapped him hard. “We’ll fight it,” he said harshly, “when we fight it.”
Tooth stared at him. Tenquis slid his wand into a pocket and calmly readied his crossbow. “You’re harder than you look,” said Tooth.
“I’m a tiefling,” said Tenquis, “and I want my revenge on Tariic. I’m as hard as I need to be.” He looked to Ekhaas. “How do we get to that hall?”
“This way, I think,” she said. She led the way out of the other door in the ruined corridor, trying hard not to look at the remains of the last expedition to come this way.
Since she had become aware of them, Ekhaas spotted more of the skeletons as she climbed through the ruins. A few were whole or almost whole, blending into the shadows. Some were just weathered heaps of bones, collapsed over time just like the fortress. Others were no more than broken bits of glittering black stone tumbled among fallen rock. Not all were hobgoblin. Ekhaas recognized goblins and bugbears, a pair of dogs, varags—how many of them had wandered onto the Wailing Hill before they learned their lesson?—even the fragile skeletons of birds, hollow bones broken as if they’d fallen out of the sky.
If not even birds on the wing could escape the curse of Suud Anshaar, did they really have a chance?
No, she reminded herself, they weren’t dumb animals, and they wouldn’t be taken by surprise. Whatever waited in the ruins, they’d fought and survived worse. They would find the shield fragments. They would escape the fortress. The fragments of the shattered shield would provide the key to destroying the Rod of Kings.
Because if they didn