The Tyranny of Ghosts_ Legacy of Dhakaan - Don Bassingthwaite [87]
He nodded and jumped to his feet, snatching up Wrath and darting to the nearest open doorway in the walls. Ekhaas pulled a knife from her belt and tried to force the tip in between one of the shaari’mal and the stone that held it.
Tenquis brushed her hand aside. “Let me,” he said. “A daashor set this here.” Grabbing a pinch of dust from the ground, he narrowed his eyes, whispered a word, and let the dust sift over the stone around the disk.
Where the dust fell, stone crumbled like dry sand. The indentation it left was small, but it was enough. Tenquis hooked thick fingernails under the byeshk disk and lifted it free. He held it out to Ekhaas, but she shook her head.
“Do the other ones, then put them in one of your pockets. Keep them safe.” She stood—
—just as the pillars fell in a crash of stone. Dust billowed up in a thick cloud, and the reverberations of the crash brought more dust sifting down from the ceiling of the hall. There was a second crash from behind her, accompanied by a curse from Geth. Ekhaas turned briefly to see the shifter leaping away from a doorway that had become just another heap of rubble—but a new noise brought her attention back to the drifting dust cloud. A slow grinding noise like millstones turning. She heard Tenquis whispering frantically over the remaining shaari’mal, then that was drowned out by another wail.
A shape emerged from the dust cloud. Or rather, seemed to absorb the cloud as it advanced. Marrow whined and eased back a few steps.
The creature … the thing … towered twice as tall as a bugbear. It had the obscenely thick body of a massive serpent, bigger around than Ekhaas could have encircled with her arms. Instead of rising to a serpent’s head, though, that body became a woman’s leanly muscular torso and arms. The thing’s face was narrow, with a fine jaw, knife-edge cheekbones—and a smooth expanse where eyes should have been. Above that blank brow, thick tendrils longer than arms, with sharp pointed tips took the place of hair, writhing with an independent motion.
But for all that it moved like something alive, Ekhaas knew that it wasn’t. Its face was a statue, stiff and unemotional. Its skin was as black and glittering as the transformed bones of the skeletons that littered Suud Anshaar. The millstone noise that ground against Ekhaas’s ears was, she realized, the sound of its great body slithering forward, accompanied by the fine grating of its twining tendril hair. The thing was stone given mobility, a construct like a golem or a warforged, but more finely crafted and surely far older than any Ekhaas had heard told of in any tale. As it slithered into a patch of moonlight, she saw the scars of millennia on its surface—
Something about the flash of moonlight on that stone made her vision blur, and when she blinked, the weathered scars were gone and the stone was smooth and flawless. She blinked again, and the scars were back. The black stone crumbled into dust with every movement, only to drift across a new patch of stone and resurface it. Just looking at the creature made Ekhaas’s head spin and ache. It was as if time and space had only the loosest grip on the ancient thing. For all that it made her nauseated, though, the strange play of dust to stone and back again was captivating, the cycle of ages collapsed into moments …
“Look away from it! Everyone look away from it!”
Geth’s hand was suddenly on Ekhaas’s shoulder, shaking her. She wrenched her gaze away from the construct and staggered as reality crashed back around her. Geth caught her, held her up as she regained her balance, then turned her loose. Around them, she saw the others were also twitching and stumbling as if waking from sleep. Only Geth seemed fully alert.
The collar of stones around the shifter’s neck was so cold it steamed in the humid air. The gift of the Gatekeepers had saved them all.
As if realizing that its prey had broken free of its influence, the construct opened its stony mouth and let loose another terrible wail. It came slithering into the hall amidst a pattering rain of dust