Witchbreaker (Dragon Apocalypse) (6 page)

Trunk had been straddling the crack; he tumbled into the shallow pit of black earth left by the departing stones and landed on his feet, looking none the worse for the experience. She was deeply satisfied by the performance of the golem. The moons she spent on top quality lumber were an excellent investment.

“That was a lucky break,” said Brand. “What would you have done if the stone had split, but just sat there?”

“That wasn’t going to happen. I could sense the tension between the two halves of the stone. Each half was held in balance by the other, but doomed to fall once split. Once you know how to look at the material world, it’s not that difficult to understand.”

Brand shook his head as he looked down the hill to where half of the boulder had come to rest. “I think there’s a metaphor here about broken hearts, but I’m too deprived of coffee to piece it together.”

“I shall record in my journal that on this day you were at a loss for words,” said Sorrow.

Brand laughed. “I don’t think I’ve heard you make a joke before.”

Sorrow shrugged. “I’m not certain why you think I’ve made one now.”

She grabbed a shovel and carried it to Trunk, swapping it for the sledgehammer. The compressed earth beneath the boulder was broken and jumbled from the movement of the stone. There were no clues to guide her to a likely place to start digging, other than the fact that the other graves seemed to be laid out in predictable rows. Following from the row that led up the hill, the stone possibly covered a half dozen graves. She eyeballed the nearest grave and used it to locate what might be the first grave in from the edge. Brand used the same strategy to find a grave on the opposite side.

“Shall we race?” Brand asked as he pushed his shovel into the soil.

“It really wouldn’t be a fair contest. Trunk is far stronger and never tires.”

“You’re on,” Brand said, as dirt flew over his shoulder. Bigsby grabbed a shovel and joined his brother.

“Dig,” she said to Trunk, feeling a slight urge to complain that the brothers had a head start. But she’d never agreed to a contest. Why should she be concerned about who would win?

Of course, ten minutes later, when Trunk’s shovel struck something hard, she couldn’t resist the urge to shout, “Victory!”

Brand and Bigsby had barely dug a pit four feet deep, while Trunk was already in a hole down to his shoulders.

“Congrats,” said Brand. “What did you find?”

Sorrow knelt to see better. What
had
she found? Trunk continued to remove dirt, revealing a layer of flat black slates, looking for all the world like roofing shingles. The boulder had been as big as a house, but she hadn’t expected to find an actual structure under it.

Brand climbed out of his hole and wandered over.

“It looks like a roof,” Sorrow said.

The shingles were rectangles two feet long and a foot wide, with rough edges. Once Trunk had made the hole wide enough, Brand dropped in to help clear the dirt. It soon became apparent the slates were stacked into an arch. The structure was about five feet across, but she couldn’t guess how long as they hadn’t found either end yet. So far, about six feet of the arch was exposed.

Brand knelt and tested his luck at lifting one of the shingles. He let out a little grunt as he lifted it to his chest, then stood and pushed it out of the hole.

“Are those heavy?” she asked.

“They ain’t light,” he said.

“Climb out. Let Trunk remove the stones.”

Brand did so. Trunk lifted the shingles with no hint of effort, revealing another layer of stones beneath. Under this, something glinted through the gaps. Sorrow leaned low to be certain. As, one by one, the stones were pulled away, she could see that they were exposing what looked to be a coffin made of solid glass.

That wasn’t the only thing being exposed, however. For as Trunk stood to lift out a slate tile, a shaft of sunlight fell upon the first rectangle of open glass, illuminating the contents. While Sorrow had little personal experience with male anatomy, she couldn’t help but think that what the light revealed strongly resembled the naked crotch of a hairy man.

Brand and Bigsby apparently noticed as well.

Bigsby asked, softly, “Is that... what I think it is?”

“I’m almost certain it is,” said Brand.

Of course, there was more beneath the glass than preserved genitalia. As Trunk continued uncovering the glass coffin, he revealed the man’s torso. The body was covered in kinky black hair over skin white as cotton. Despite his deathly pallor, the man was an impressive physical specimen. He was muscular almost to the point of grotesquerie. Sorrow wondered if he might be a half-seed of some kind, perhaps a man blended with a bear. His shoulders were far broader than any she’d ever seen on a living man. His beastly appearance was compounded by fingernails at least four inches long, thick and gnarled.

Yet when his face was at last revealed, she abandoned any thought that the figure before her was anything other than human. Though his face was mostly concealed by a thick black beard, and despite the long hair draping around his head having the fullness of a lion’s mane, there was something deeply human about the man’s face. There was a gentleness to it, a look of peace that reminded her of a sleeping child.

“Is he breathing?” Bigsby asked.

Sorrow furrowed her brow as she stared intently at the man’s chest. It was perfectly still. She also noted the man didn’t possess an aura. All living things carried a faint glow of energy she’d been trained to detect, and this man was completely devoid of inner light. “I’m almost certain he’s dead.”

“Quite well preserved, isn’t he?” Brand asked.

“Perhaps he isn’t even real,” said Sorrow. “You can craft a figure out of wax that looks eerily lifelike. It’s difficult to believe anything that once lived has been buried for centuries without rotting.”

“He’s in glass,” said Bigsby. “Maybe he’s pickled.”

Sorrow suspected the light would refract differently if the coffin had been filled with fluid. But she did notice that the coffin didn’t appear to have any seams. Since she knew the art of glass weaving, she knew it was possible to craft a container, heat it to drive out air, then seal it before it could refill, creating a vacuum. The weaver who’d taught her this trick many years ago had used it to preserve flowers. Could the effect be scaled up to preserve a body? Were walls of thick glass enough to hide this corpse from Rott’s gaze?

“Well, as treasure goes, this is something of a dud. He’s not even wearing any jewelry,” said Brand.

“Really?” Sorrow asked. “We encounter something this mysterious and all you can think about is the lack of loot?”

“The Black Swan might buy him,” said Bigsby, now speaking in his normal, male voice. “She used to buy all kinds of weird stuff from Stagger.”

“I’m here for knowledge, not wealth,” said Sorrow. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to preserve his body. Aren’t you curious who cast the spell? For that matter, aren’t you even more curious who he is?”

Bigsby nodded. He said, once more in his annoying
falsetto
, “Maybe it’s the knight.”

“What knight?” she asked.

“You know. The knight from Knight’s Castle.”

“Stark Tower? The Witchbreaker?”

“Why not?” Bigsby squeaked.

Sorrow sighed. “You know, real women don’t sound like that. Just use your normal voice.”

Bigsby put his hands on his hips and pushed his voice even higher as he said, “This is my normal voice.”

Sorrow was sorry she’d brought the subject up. She returned to the topic at hand. “I can’t imagine it’s Tower. He was a hero to the church. They wouldn’t bury him naked in the middle of nowhere.”

“Do you want me to smash open the coffin?” asked Brand.

“No,” said Sorrow. “I can weave glass, so opening the coffin isn’t a problem. But I don’t want to tamper with anything before I get the chance to do some research. We’ll need to pull this coffin out and take it back to Commonground. I’m not selling anything to the Black Swan, but she might have some information as to who he is.”

“That sounds like a lot of work,” said Brand.

“I’ll see that you’re well compensated for your efforts. For now, let’s continue digging the hole you started. Perhaps our mystery man has a brother.”

The second grave went quickly, thanks to the combined efforts of both Brand and Trunk. They were aided by the fact that the soil of this grave was bone dry, starting a few feet below the surface, and crumbled easily beneath the assault of the shovels. Sorrow stood near the edge of the grave, chewing her nails. What if this grave held another preserved body? Of all the things she’d imagined digging up, a naked man had never entered her list of possibilities.

At the same depth as the first grave, they again hit a stone arch. The structure soon proved to be much larger. They spent hours clearing out an area twice the size of the original grave, and still had failed to find the final shape of the building.

Impatient that their efforts weren’t yielding results more quickly, Brand dropped to his knees and pulled away a layer of slate tiles. His efforts only revealed more stones. He was completely drenched in sweat as he kept pulling aside fresh layers. Finally, two feet down, he reached the last of the slate. Glass glinted in the now dimming light. He leaned in close to stare into the dark interior.

“What do you see?” asked Sorrow.

“Nothing,” Brand said, sitting up and pushing aside more stones. “I need more light.”

As he cleared away more slate, it soon became obvious that insufficient light wasn’t the problem. Instead, the coffin beneath the stones was made of smoked glass, almost tar black, hiding the contents.

Brand brushed aside dirt, cupping his hands to block reflections on the dark glass, but shook his head when this failed to produce results. He blew on the edges of his hands where they’d touched the glass. “Ouch. That’s kind of hot.”

“Hot?” asked Sorrow.

“Everything feels hot to me right now,” said Brand. “A side-effect of digging holes. But this glass is like an oven.”

“Climb out,” Sorrow said. She grabbed Trunk by the hand and said, “Lower me.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Brand.

“I’m a glass weaver,” said Sorrow. “I’m going to alter the glass to make it transparent.”

“Nice trick,” said Brand as he pulled himself out of the hole.

Sorrow dangled from Trunk’s grasp until she was a few inches above the stones. She dropped down and knelt over the glass. She touched it carefully. Brand had exaggerated its heat. It was far shy of an oven, more like a freshly poured cup of hot tea.

She placed both palms on the glass. Pulses of energy flowed into her shoulders, feeling almost like ants crawling just beneath her skin. “There’s extraordinary power here,” she whispered. “I’ve never felt anything quite like it.”

“That would have been a very funny thing to say when we first exposed the contents of the other grave,” Brand said as he sat on the edge of the pit.

Sorrow ignored him. She concentrated on the substance beneath her fingers. Glass was easy to manipulate. Ordinarily, it would yield to her fingers as if it were a slightly sticky dough. But she didn’t want to change the shape of the substance, only its color. There must be foreign material in the glass to create the smoky hue. Could she isolate this and draw it out?

Her brow furrowed as she found that the foreign material was caked mostly on the interior of the glass. The exterior parts of the glass she was touching were actually transparent already, but backed with a dark substance that swallowed all light.

She gave the glass a slight push, hoping to dislodge the darkness. She was pleased when it worked and a chunk of inch-thick sooty blackness fell away. Unfortunately, all this revealed was gray smoke swirling in the interior.

Suddenly, she was tossed a foot into the air as the stones around her jumped, as if they’d been struck from beneath. She landed as black smoke billowed up from cracks in the stone.

She tried to call out to Trunk, but wound up coughing violently. Her eyes clamped shut as the acrid fumes burned them. The ground beneath her surged again, throwing her onto her back.

A man’s hands closed on her forearm. With a tug that felt as if it would pull her arm from its socket the unseen man lifted her, rudely throwing her over his shoulders.

“Hold tight!” Brand called out, though not to her. She managed to crack her eyes open ever so slightly and saw that she was thrown over Brand’s shoulder. She twisted to see that he had one hand on a shovel thrust down into the hole. At the edge of the grave, Bigsby lay with his head and shoulders out over the pit, holding the handle of the shovel down. Brand grabbed the shovel and used it to climb. This resulted in an ungraceful tangle of limbs as Brand pushed Sorrow from his shoulder onto Bigsby’s back as he crawled out over both of them.

She was too weakened by her inhalation of smoke to protest as she was sandwiched between the two men. They were all tossed into the air by a powerful shock wave that sent huge stones flying straight up from the grave. Another jolt followed swiftly. There was a loud
SNAP
and a chunk of smoky glass that must have weighed a hundred pounds shot fifty feet skyward before falling back into the grave and shattering with a loud crash.