The Last Tomb by Edward W. Robertson

Author:Edward W. Robertson [Robertson, Edward W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2022-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

13

Armed with this knowledge, Doddy found it in almost no time: a paving-stone set against the wall in an irregular angle to the rest of the pattern. He had merely to lean his weight on it, and with a grinding sound, a doorway opened in the wall.

The doorway was small enough I had to duck to get through it, but the passage beyond was much larger, and so dim that I had to stand inside it for a minute before my eyes were ready. The unpleasant but unidentifiable smell I'd picked up earlier wafted on the slightest of breezes.

I nodded to Doddy and started forth. The walls of the hall were scratched with graffiti like the entrance to the tombs had been. The floor was rough-hewn and the ceiling climbed and dropped irregularly. After a couple of bends, the tunnel led to another tomb, complete with another giant brass statue, though this one stood alone.

I froze mid-step. The floor was much clearer than in the earlier tombs—except for the body that lay directly between us and the statue.

It was dead, I could tell that much just by looking at it. And when I looked at the nether inside it, it acted no different from the nether in the floor beneath it. Yet I clutched the shadows tightly in hand as I made my way to it. It was lying face down, covered in a sheet or a robe that was grimy with age. It didn't smell, which was good, because I was about to touch it.

I reached for the body's shoulder. As I turned it over, the robe tore in my hand—or more accurately, it crumbled into brittle fibers. The body was as light as a dried leaf. It was quite tall and its limbs seemed too long. When I saw its face, I recoiled and kicked back from it.

Doddy let out a scream. I clapped my hand over his mouth.

"It's all right," I whispered, as much to myself as to Doddy. "It must have been dead for three hundred years."

"What is it?"

"Unless the Anasids were extremely ugly, I'm guessing it's one of the guardians."

"Well it's disgusting."

"Yes. Yes, it is."

The thing had been mummified, its eyes long gone and its nose and ears shrunken, so it was hard to say just what it had looked like when it was "alive." But its lips and teeth looked more like a beak than a mouth, and its nose bore a single wide nostril. Its eye sockets were long and sharply angled, while every element of its shrunken face was asymmetrical, some in subtle ways, some absurdly so.

Once I was done soaking in its ugliness, I shuddered and pulled away the garment from its remains.

"Gross," Doddy said. "Why do you want to see it naked?!"

"I'm checking for wounds," I muttered. "If any of these things are still crawling around down here, it's going to be very handy to know how to kill them."

If there were any on it, though, I didn't know what they looked like, at least not after a few hundred years of desiccation.

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