The Mad God's Muse (The Eye of the Lion Saga Book 2) (36 page)

In which Aiul and Logrus enter
Torium and learn its terrible secrets. Logrus is injured by an
insidious trap the two barely survived.

The master stared into the
pool, amused by the suffering of the invaders.

The servant asked, “Does
it please you, Master? I thought it would be better this way,
slowly, instead of crushing them outright.”

“Yesss,” the master
agreed. “Their fear is sweet.” It dipped its claw into
the pool again, sending ripples over the image, and licked at it. “I
have changed my mind. I want them alive. It is fortunate for you
that you delayed.”

The servant shuddered, an
involuntary spasm of fear at the realization of how close it had
come to making a mistake. But it smiled, too, at its own cunning.

“I am a good servant,”
it crooned. “You are capricious. I try always to anticipate
you. To please you.”

The master tapped a claw on the
stone rim of the pool, thinking that perhaps it might still be
amusing to rend the servant, but dismissed the notion. It was
difficult to find a servant smart enough to anticipate. It would be
foolish to waste this one now.

“I am pleased,” it
said. “Bring them to me. I would speak with them and smell
their fear. Perhaps they have knowledge. Then we will rend them and
make them into art.”

The servant touched its head to
the floor, hissed its compliance, and scurried from the room.

Aiul made his way along the
wall, trying to build a map in his head. The room was similar in
construction to the smaller pyramids, but vastly larger, at least a
hundred feet to the side. On each of the other walls, he found
hatches, like the one through which they had entered, leading to
passages that were, likewise, all too familiar.

It took several minutes to make
the complete circuit. Logrus surprised him near the end, walking
toward him. Aiul shook his head in amazement at his companion’s
resilience.

“I told you I needed to
bind it before you walked,” he admonished, and immediately
felt foolish. Now that they were closer together and in stronger
light, it was easy to see that Logrus was most definitely not well.

He was trembling violently,
whipping his head back and forth, and muttering beneath his breath.
He clutched at his chest as he staggered forward

“Stop!” Logrus
cried out, a wretched wail more appropriate to a man on the rack.
“Make it
stop
! Elgar, my lord, it is too much!
Take
this from me!
”

“What?” Aiul
shouted, starting toward him in alarm. He grabbed Logrus by the
shoulders and shook him. “What happened?”

Logrus stared at him with mad,
uncomprehending eyes, and gibbered incoherently between ragged
breaths. Tears streamed down his face, mixing with saliva trickling
from the corners of his mouth and into his beard.

Aiul shook his head in utter
disbelief at the timing. Here, of all places! “You’re
having a heart attack,” he told Logrus, struggling to keep his
voice calm. Panic would make it worse. “I need to you lie
down.”

“Fool!” Logrus
snarled, twisting in Aiul’s grasp. He hammered his own fist
into his broken ribs, and, with a gurgling grunt, collapsed to the
floor, insensate. Aiul felt panic rise within him as he struggled to
decide on a course of action.

The physician stepped forward
in his mind and demanded calm, explained that, for the moment,
Logrus was still among the living, and that only cool heads could
ensure it remained so. Aiul smiled at the knowledge that the
physician was not, after all, dead. He had merely been sleeping
until he could be of some use.

He went through the process by
the book, counting, categorizing, comparing. In the end, he was
baffled. There was nothing obvious beyond the broken ribs. The
patient was pale, covered in sweat, and semi conscious. His
temperature was close to normal, perhaps a little high. His
breathing was irregular, his pulse strong but fast.

Pain could account for the
color, but the sweat was a clue. It looked very much like a heart
attack, but the pulse did not match. A seizure or stroke, perhaps?

“Not what you think,”
Logrus croaked, as if reading his mind.

“Keep talking, Logrus,”
Aiul said, and squeezed his shoulder. “Stay with me. Tell me
what you’re feeling.”

“Hate,” Logrus
whispered.

“I mean physically.”

“Pain.”

“Where?”

“
Everywhere
!”

“I know it’s
difficult. Try to be more specific.”

Logrus drew in a great, ragged
breath and let it out again.

“Flame burning me,”
he mumbled. “My head being sawed open. Cracking my chest with
some kind of vise. Cutting at my heart.”

“No,” Aiul told
him, even more worried now.
What does it mean that he's having a
complete break with reality, too? I don't know how to diagnose this!
“That’s not happening. You’re safe. Do you
know where you are?”

“Not to me,” Logrus
gasped. To others. Here. In Torium.”

“Take your time,”
Aiul told him. “Try to focus.”

Logrus’s eyes snapped
open and he raised his head, staring at Aiul in blind fury. “My
gift, fool!” he hissed. He let his head fall back to the floor
and sighed. “Wait. Just wait.”

Aiul did so for many long,
confused minutes, keeping watch of Logrus’s condition, which
seemed to improve by the second. At last, Logrus sat up, buried his
face in his hands, and began to sob. After a while longer, he rose
to his feet and wiped his sleeve across his wet face.

“Come with me,” he
said, his voice thick with emotion. “I need light.”

“Not much left of it,”
Aiul noted grimly as he followed Logrus into the dark center of the
room. “I saw some doors on the far walls. Maybe there’s
a way out. If we don’t find something soon….”

“I know,” Logrus
answered. “But I must do this. Then we can leave.”

“Tell me what the hell is
going on.”

Logrus shook his head. “You’ll
see. Just ahead.”

Aiul was doubtful, despite his
late experiences with the supernatural. Logrus had a tendency to
attribute mundane matters, such as his own prowess, to supernatural
causes. Aiul, however, was fairly certain that Logrus had suffered a
stroke.

Aiul felt a surge of fear as he
saw figures loom in the darkness, but quickly realized that they
were statues. There were hundreds of them, arrayed in the center of
the room, in as many different poses, each unique. The flickering
torchlight played over the still forms as Logrus and Aiul
approached. Shadows scurried over floor and statue alike, slowly
retreating from the advancing flame. Aiul marveled at how lifelike
the statues were, how well proportioned, but he felt a strange
disquiet, as well. There was something odd about the poses.

Ten feet from the nearest, he
realized what was troubling him. The statues were obscene depictions
of men, women, even children, in unspeakable agony. They were
incredibly lifelike. Missing limbs showed bone and muscle beneath.
Open chests showed the organs all in their proper locations. The
artist may have been mad, but his skill was unquestionable. He had
had captured the very essence of horrifying death and chiseled it
without a single flaw, over and over, and none the same.

“Mei!” he
whispered. “What madness drives a man to work such things into
stone?”

“They are not stone,”
Logrus said, his voice a cold monotone, fists balled in an effort to
contain his rage and horror.

“What are you saying?”
Aiul gasped, horror twisting in his gut as he moved forward for a
closer view. He touched a statue, and recoiled at the feel of pliant
flesh, the tacky, cold sensation of wet, dead blood. The world
seemed to spin wildly about him as he staggered away, close to
hyperventilation. He could
feel
the wrongness, the monstrous evil if it, as if it were a physical
force. He fell to his knees and vomited.

“So you have it, too,”
Logrus nodded. “Weaker, like my zombies. But you have it.”

“Yes,” Aiul moaned,
struggling to his feet. “Mei, how can you stand it?”

“It is necessary.”

Aiul glared at the garden of
corpses, his jaw clenched in hate.

“This one,” Logrus
said, pointing to a child’s body. “He died screaming,
begging not for his own life, but that they spare his mother.”
He choked back a sob, and pointed to a woman. “This one, they
forced to watch as they cooked and ate her husband. They made her
eat of him, too.” He covered his face with his hands, as if to
ward away the visions. “They are all like this.
All
of them.”

“How can the gods let
such things occur?” Aiul said in disbelief.

Logrus turned a grim stare
toward him. “Has not a god sent us here?”

Aiul’s reply died in his
throat at the sound of hatches closing in the distance. “What
now?” he wondered.

They waited, listening, the
dripping of water and the hiss of the torch loud in their ears, and
then came another sound, a shuffling, something large approaching.

A figure out of a nightmare
loomed from the darkness. It was fully ten feet tall, and shaped
like a man, but there, the resemblance ended. Overlong, arms,
proportioned more like an ape, ended in razor sharp talons. The
creature had no neck to speak of, merely a misshapen mound atop
impossibly broad shoulders. Two beady, reptilian eyes stared from
the gnarled head. Others, arranged seemingly at random about its
body, rolled in their sockets or cut back and forth in paranoia. A
snakelike tongue slipped in and out of a jagged-fanged maw, testing
the air. More mouths, smaller, but no less vicious, dotted its body
at irregular intervals, their tiny teeth chattering and gnashing at
the air. Small tentacles erupted from unlikely areas and whipped
about the creature, as if it were flagellating itself. Muscle
rippled beneath black, putrescent skin as the thing approached them.

“Playthings,” it
spoke, in a sickening, burbling rumble. “You are fortunate. My
master wishes you to live. For now.” Its laughter was the
hacking of a man dying from tuberculosis.

Logrus could not contain
himself. His face twisted into a mask of hatred and fury as he
charged the creature, a cry of abandon on his lips.

Aiul joined him, shouting
Elgar’s name as a battle cry. For the moment, they were
united.