Swords v. Cthulhu

Without Within Jonathan L. Howard

It was unconscionable, and — he felt — a personal attack on his reputation and thereby his honor. Yet he held his temper, and instead communicated his great rancor to Stephen Hensley with a glowering stare of unmistakable threat.

“This is a simple matter, Master Hensley,” said Major John Bell with dangerous deliberation. “I surveyed the breach myself. The length of fallen wall provides its own materials and pattern; there is naught of brain necessary but that it be put back as it was.”

This was not quite honest; the mine had shattered many of the blocks of stone that had formed the base of the city wall at St Mary’s, and replacements would have to be found, likely by commandeering them from elsewhere within York. That was a trivial matter, however, and if some worthy woke up one morning to find their doorstep gone, then they were still getting off very lightly indeed.

The breach in the wall had been a matter of contention to the Parliamentarian forces even before the city had surrendered to them. The walls were far too well constructed for artillery to bring them down. Instead, the engineers under Bell’s command had excavated a tunnel leading under the wall at St Mary’s with the intention to breach there and simultaneously at a similar mine at Walmgate Bar, allowing an overwhelming force to swarm in and take the city. It had been slow, dangerous work, with the possibility of detection or collapse at every yard of the way. Yet Bell’s men had managed it, and he had been proud of them for it. Aye, even of Hensley, who now stood sniveling before Bell’s desk.

In olden times, the wall would have been collapsed by setting a fire in the tunnel to burn away the heavy timber supports the engineers had brought in to prop up the foundations they had themselves dug away. These days, gunpowder did the trick more effectively, and allowed better timing of the exact moment the breach would open, allowing the attackers to be in position and ready to take full advantage.

That had not occurred on this occasion, however. The St Mary’s mine was completed comfortably in advance of the one at Walmgate — largely the effect of the ground being stonier there, Bell conceded. Sergeant Major General Crawford of the Eastern Association under the Earl of Manchester expressed impatience, and one of his subordinates took this to mean they should press ahead with what was available to them. On the 16th day of June, the year of our Lord 1644, this fool took it upon himself to fire the charge.

Crawford had only six hundred men available to take advantage of the collapsed wall, the merest fraction of what was required. They entered the city, but Royalist defenders sallied from the nearby abbey postern gate and flanked the attackers from behind. Half the six hundred were killed or injured. Crawford claimed he had just discovered that the defenders had detected the Walmgate tunnel, and had successfully flooded it; he feared they also knew of the St Mary’s tunnel. That didn’t seem likely to Bell; the Royalists seemed to have been surprised by the breach, which argued against Crawford being right. It did not, however, preclude the possibility that he had acted in good faith. The Earl had taken him at his word, Cromwell less so.

After all their efforts, Major Bell was privately furious that the mine had been tossed away in such a manner. As it was, York eventually surrendered after most of the defenders marched out to join Prince Rupert in engaging the Parliamentarians. All they got for their trouble was slaughter at Marston Moor, before Rupert remembered pressing matters in the south and abandoned York to its fate. Sir Thomas Glemham was left as governor, looked at the sorry state of the forces left to him, and opened negotiations.

A month to the day after the disaster at St Mary’s, the Parliamentarians marched into the city at Walmgate, St Mary’s Gate, and Micklegate.

And here was Major John Bell, a month after that, trying to patch up the hole in the wall in whose creation he had been instrumental. It was a strange life, and not always an enjoyable one.

“The men don’t like the hole,” said Hensley. He had a shapeless cloth cap in his hands that he kept wringing incessantly. It was unseemly for a man of Hensley’s seniority, chief foreman and master of works.

“They helped make it,” said Bell. “Why would they show so much animosity to it now?”

Hensley stared at him.

Bell kept his anger in check. “Why are they so afeared of it, I mean? ‘’Tis just a hole in a wall.”

“Not that hole, Major,” said Hensley. “The one beneath it.”

The major’s eyebrows lowered. “They helped make that one too.”

Hensley shook his head, a desperately unhappy man caught between two intractable forces. “Not even that hole. The one beneath it.”

“What do you mean, a hole beneath a hole beneath a hole? You’re talking a child’s drivel, Master Hensley.”

“There is a tunnel not of our making below. The powder explosion damaged the bricks lining it. When we started the repairs and were clearing out the rubble, it collapsed altogether.”

Bell’s anger abated somewhat, and his thunderous brow admitted some curiosity. “Another tunnel? A counter tunnel?” Perhaps Crawford had been right after all; perhaps the defenders had been mining toward his tunnel with the intention of flooding or collapsing it.

“I... ” Hensley looked even unhappier. “I do not think it so. I believe it is an old place.”

Bell looked closely at Hensley; the man was sweating. It was a warm August day, sure enough, but Bell was sure that Hensley had not been showing any distress at the heat when he came into Bell’s temporary office of works in the ancient abbey’s hospitium.

“God’s teeth, man,” he demanded, “are you frighted, too?”

They were interrupted by the sound of footsteps ascending the wooden stairs outside the door, frantic and clumsy. No sooner had the unexpected visitor reached the head of the stairs than they were thumping open-handedly upon the door.

Major Bell started to call “Come in!”, but the door swung open before the first word was out of his mouth. Lindle, one of the foremen under Hensley, stood there. Normally a phlegmatic, somewhat dull man, he was wild-eyed and panting.

“The tunnel collapsed! It took Archer!”

“Took?” Bell climbed to his feet, plucking his jerkin from the back of his chair as he did so. “What mean you by that? It fell upon him?”

Lindle looked from Bell to Hensley and back again, as if realizing he had said the wrong thing and meant to repair matters. “Aye,” he said, but he sounded unconvinced by his own words. “It fell in upon him.”

By the time Bell arrived at the works, the other sappers had already dug the unlucky Archer out and laid him prostrate on the trammeled grass. Bell was relieved not to be able to see any blood beyond a few scratches, and no obvious injuries, but the group standing around Archer was sullen and quiet, and Bell suspected the man might have suffocated before he could be rescued. He was surprised, therefore, to see Archer stir.

“Give the man some air!” barked Bell. “Back away! Let him see daylight!” He knelt by Archer as the circle of men loosened. “Are you hurting, lad?” he asked more gently. “Are you in pain?”

Archer said nothing. His head lolled this way and that, and his eyes opened to show little but the whites. His mouth worked slowly, as if trying to speak.

“He’s mazed,” said one of the sappers behind Bell. “The hole’s had him. He’s mazed for good.”

Bell turned on the speaker in a fury. “Shut your damned mouth! I’ll have none of that superstition!”

That quieted them all, for “superstition” and “papistry” were the same in Bell’s vocabulary, and it wasn’t wise to be identified with either in his eyes. Bell was in the ugly state of having both sympathy for the king, and a loathing of what Charles had come to be. Charles had been corrupted and the kingdom defiled by the wiles of the Catholic harlot Henrietta Maria, this Bell knew to be true. With heavy heart, he had turned his back upon his king.

Quelling his anger, Bell turned back to Archer. “Archer, lad… can you hear me? Are you with me?”

“Did I… ” Archer’s voice was barely a whisper. His gaze wandered until it found Bell’s face, but barely focused on him at all. “Is it out? I tried to stop it. Is it out?”

Bell frowned. “Is what out? The tunnel collapsed on you, Archer. You’re lucky to be alive.”

“The tunnel collapsed…?” Archer sighed. His eyes closed slowly. “Good… good… didn’t think I was strong enough. Managed it, then… good… ”

Bell regarded Archer curiously. Did he understand the man correctly? In any case, if Archer was saying what he seemed to be, it was better the men didn’t hear it. They were like lions under fire, but the first hint of deviltry, and they would just as easily turn into old women.

They were behind schedule as it was, and Bell was tired of making excuses to My Lord Fairfax. The new governor of the city doubted the Royalists would try and retake the city, but if they did, he had no wish to defend it with a gaping hole in the wall. Every few days he would inquire as to the state of the repairs.

The truth was that Bell’s men had done too good a job of demolishing it in the first place, but they could hardly admit to that. So, Bell had a well worn rondo of reasons to trot out: the site was being made safe; the materials they gathered were unsuitable or inferior; they’d been commandeered for urgent work elsewhere.

The last was the truest: Bell and his engineers had done any number of small civil works, mainly to repair houses and shore up properties damaged during the hostilities. The York folk had been glad of the end of the siege, and Fairfax had gained a gold coin reputation for refusing to allow the rabidly Protestant members of his army to strip the city’s churches of their gilt and ornament, and to put out the stained glass of the minster cathedral. Thus, the occupying army was regarded favorably by the locals, and Fairfax was keen that long would that goodwill persist. Repairing a roof here and buttressing a wall there was thereby smiled upon by Bell’s superiors.

But all the goodwill within the city walls could not hide the gaping hole that might let in those without.

Bell had a litter made up, and Archer was transported back to the hospitium, where a bed was made for him on the bottom floor. Once he had ordered one of the boys to fetch an army surgeon (he certainly didn’t intend to pay a fee if he could avoid it) and ushered the rest of the men out of the door, he returned his attention to Archer.

“Archer? You may speak freely now. What happened in that hole?” He hesitated, then added, “Did you bring on the collapse yourself, lad? Did you do something to the props?”

Archer’s eyes were almost shut. “I did, aye. I put the mattock butt to the prop and levered it. All my weight. Did I do it?”

“You did. But why? We’ll just have to dig it out again.”

Archer’s eyes opened wide and he stared up at Bell with naked horror. “No!” He grabbed Bell’s sleeve. “No! You must not, Major! It mustn’t be opened again! Bury it! Bury it deep!”

The fear was unmanning Archer, making him whine like a child. Bell had seen suchlike before from men under fire or frighted by oncoming pike and sword. That a man usually as bloodless as Archer should find such bane in a pit in the ground was passing strange.

“This hole, you’ll be talking about the one that opened up under the tunnel we made, is that it?”

Bell’s measured tone seemed to reassure Archer. He fell silent for some moments, recovering his wits. Then he said, “It’s old, in there. The air even. It didn’t smell bad. Just old. Old as Noah.”

Bell considered; it was no secret that the city had a Roman history. Why, hadn’t Constantine, the first Christian emperor himself, gained his laurels there? It was not beyond belief that the sappers had found some ancient Roman cellar in their excavations. Bell’s men were countrymen by and large, and prone to a countryman’s fancies. He may have cowed them with his disgust at the very mention of the supernatural, but that didn’t mean they’d stopped believing in it.

Bell could now imagine the sequence of events, from the discovery of the old cellar or whatever it was, through the excitation of the men’s imaginations, and so to the womanish hysteria. He had some experience in dealing with such nonsense, and as soon as the surgeon came to tend to Archer, he would shame the men back into work by showing them what a gaggle of fools they were.

The sappers were at first blush surprised and then mutinous about returning to the hole to clear it. Bell was an old hand at commanding men who did not seek contact with the foe with enthusiasm, however, and had already settled on the strategy to use. First, he almost offhandedly mentioned how important fixing the breach was to My Lord Fairfax, who was popular with the troops. He leavened this statement of regret with a passing reference to mutiny and what happened to mutineers in that happy time.

Leaving the men’s clearly very active imaginations to envisage how unpleasant it must be to finish one’s days kicking the air before an audience of grim-faced comrades, Bell moved swiftly on to what a simple job it was, and how, when the fearful chamber was reopened, he himself would willingly be the first man in.

Here he smoothly moved into his third dialectic mode, by mocking a hypothetical bunch of wan cowards who could not bear the terrors of a shallow hole. The men grew quiet, and seemed shamed by the time he finished talking. He decided the time was right to shift from the oratorical to the practical.

“We start now,” he said, hefting a spade. “I’m tired of excusing listless work to the governor. This time tomorrow, I want the foundation excavated and surveyed, ready for repair.”

The men watched him start digging at the loose earth where the collapse had brought in the sides of the crater made by the exploded mine. The day was wearing on, and they knew the task would take them into darkness. Hensley told one of the lads to fetch brands for the evening, for they would surely need them. Then he gathered the other boys and set them to carrying earth in baskets to the spoil heap. Slowly and unwillingly, the men took up their tools and joined Bell.

The work was slower than Bell anticipated. It wasn’t purely through the reluctance of his sappers, although there was certainly plenty of that. The hole itself was awkward to work in, and the soil kept shifting as they went, sometimes eradicating the last half hour of excavation. Bell presumed the newly discovered secondary chamber was the problem, but he still had not clapped eyes on the damnable hole, so it was all supposition. Certainly the digging did not go smoothly. More than once, he had a sense of the malevolence of inanimate objects when small setbacks dogged their way every other minute.

The brands were lit, and work continued beneath a darkening sky late into the evening, the flickering light and stink of burning pitch being no strangers to men used to mining their way under enemy fortifications. It brought with it an association of hovering danger, however, and their low spirits sank further.

Presently, they touched upon the supports they had themselves placed there during the earlier part of the repairs, and Bell knew they must be close on to where Archer had been caught by the accident. An accident he had deliberately caused, Bell reminded himself.

Hensley cleared the men out so he could inspect the site more closely, and went down into the hole with a brand, one of the younger lads holding another behind him. He muttered and swore under his breath, and none could be sure if it was in dismay at the ruin of their work or at being in a dank pit at gone midnight.

Bell squatted by the breach to observe their progress. There was little to be seen but the yellow light of the brands and the shadows they cast. Hensley and the boy were little more than silhouettes themselves, despite being barely three yards down. Bell squinted and wafted the fumes from the pitch torches away. His eyes watered and he blinked hard to clear them.

“The earth is soft here,” called Hensley. “There’s a sink; I can see a wee valley in the soil where it’s drained dow…”

A pause and the light moved sharply.

“It’s subsiding, Major! Back, boy! Get out!”

Bell saw the nearest silhouette resolve into the lad as he turned and crawled up the incline toward him. Behind, he could see the other brand clearly now, but Hensley himself was little more than a fragmented chiaroscuro of jagged moments.

“Move yourself, lad! The floor is shifting!”

Then Hensley’s light was gone with a growl of ruffled flame.

Bell reached forward and grabbed the boy’s outstretched hand, pulling him clear to sprawl on the raw earth behind them. Bell’s attention was purely on the hole.

“Hensley!” he bellowed into the void. “Answer me, if you’re able! Hensley!”

There was no reply.

Bell was not a man given to vacillation. He shrugged off his coat and snatched the torch from the boy’s shaking hand. Without a second’s further deliberation, he descended into the pit.

Decisive was Major Bell, but not impetuous. He went slowly, testing the way with his heel as he went. In a moment he found himself at the edge of an open sinkhole, perhaps four feet across. Immediately he lowered himself onto his chest and lay prone at the hole’s perimeter, testing below the lip with his hand. It seemed solid enough, and that would have to do. If Hensley was buried in soil and unable to escape, every passing second would sour what breath remained in his lungs until it poisoned him.

Bell crawled forward to look down into the void.

“Hensley! Can you hear me, man?”

Only silence.

Bell looked back up the tunnel entrance. The man were milling around there, fearful and useless. The sight sparked fury in his breast.

“God’s teeth, what a damned crowd of old wives you are!” he roared at them. “Rope and lanterns! A man’s life is in the balance! Green! Ryder! Owen! Ready yourselves! Boy!” He glared at Hensley’s torchbearer. “Come back here and bring that brand with you!”

More afraid of the major than the dark hole, the lad quickly climbed down to join Bell.

“Cast your light into the hole,” ordered Bell. “Throw it in.”

The torch flared as it fell, and came to rest no more than a pike’s length beneath. In its uncertain light, Bell could make out stone walls, and a mound of earth directly below the breach. He narrowed his eyes and looked as far hither and thither as he might. This was no cellar, he concluded; it was a tunnel. An old, old tunnel. He had studied the city’s stonework enough to know the medieval style well, and even the Roman. This looked a great deal more like the work of the latter.

“Where is that rope?” he demanded, and then without waiting for an answer, crabbed himself sideways over the edge of the hole, hung there awkwardly by his upper arms and then, trusting to providence more than good sense, he let himself fall.

The stonework was ancient, but the floor was earthen, and the second thing Major Bell noted were the tracks.

The first was that Hensley was missing.

The earth mound was bedded on a layer of worked stone, the section of the tunnel’s arched ceiling that must have been weakened by the breaching explosion and subsequently collapsed during the repair works. The soil had spread out and to Bell’s eye scarcely seemed deep enough to bury a child, never mind a full-grown sapper.

By the time he was surveying the tunnel floor, a cry of “Heads below!” was halloed down, followed on the moment by a tail of rope. As Green descended, Bell called up to Owen: “Send my regards to Captain Harker and ask him to attend with a detachment of men. Make sure My Lord Fairfax is informed that we have discovered a tunnel here, one that has been used but recently. We are starting a search of it. When you’ve sent the messages, gather arms for we four, pistols if you can find them. My sword hangs by my coat.”

While Ryder climbed down to join them, bringing Bell’s sword and a pair of crowbars as weapons for himself and Green, Bell examined the soil floor by the steadier light of an oil lantern. The tunnel hadn’t simply been used, he could see; it had been frequented. Tracks led back and forth, creating a slightly hardened path in the earth, a path disrupted by the collapse. The tracks milled around the untidy heap of soil and fallen stones.

A flattening in the top of the pile showed where it had been struck by some weight: Hensley. It was plain to see where he had rolled down to the tunnel floor. The marks led southeasterly, in the general direction of the old Roman fort that had once stood more or less where the minster cathedral now loomed.

“Major,” said Green from the far side of the heaped debris.

Momentarily fearing the worst — perhaps he had missed Hensley’s body in his initial search — Bell joined Green. It struck him then: perhaps finding Hensley dead there wasn’t the worst eventuality. Perhaps the worst was what those damnable drag marks in the earth were suggesting to him.

That suggestion only grew in strength when he saw Green’s discovery. A pitch brand, very deliberately extinguished by being thrust into the loose earth.

Owen reappeared then at the lip of the hole above. “Major, Captain Harker is leading a patrol. I sent horse after him, but there’s no way to know when he’ll be fetched.”

Bell snorted vexatiously. “And My Lord Fairfax?”

“Has been informed, sir. I am waiting on his pleasure.”

“I regret we have no time for his pleasure. Master Hensley is missing, and may have been taken by Royalist sympathizers. Have you the weapons, at least?”

Owen brought down cavalry sabers with him, no pistols being found. Seeing his men there, filthy-faced with blades thrust into waistbands, Bell felt more like a pirate king than an officer of the Parliamentarian army.

“Green, stay abreast of me, Owen at our backs, and Ryder to cover the rear. Steady pace.” He looked deep into the darkness of the tunnel ahead and ignored his misgivings. “Advance.”

The small party moved off into the gloom of the ancient tunnel.

Aspects of the tunnel’s geography confused Bell. In the first instance, the end of the tunnel behind them must, common sense said, be close, for otherwise the tunnel would wind into the river. Bell had surveyed the area carefully for weaknesses during the siege; he was as sure as the nose on his face that no tunnel opened into the river. At least, not at the surface. Perhaps in Roman times it had been more shallow?

It also perplexed the major that a lengthy Roman tunnel had gone undiscovered. He was unclear how long ago the Romans had been in Britain, but they were in the Bible, so he guessed at somewhere around the first year AD. Since then, the Norse, the Saxons, and the Normans had left their mark on the city and raised many buildings. How had none of them ever found the tunnel?

This was answered when Ryder pointed out some markings on the wall the others had missed as they passed. It was a strange, godless series of scratches into the stone, angular and alien. Bell had seen similar before, though.

“That’s Norse. Seen suchlike up in Northumberland.”

That answered Bell’s question, at least a little. Perhaps the tunnel entrance opened into the home of a family of Royalists, who used it secretly. In principle, Bell did not mind this hypothetical family. A civil war is a strange thing, with odd enmities and unexpected sympathies. But they had Hensley, and that meant the major’s mercy was paper thin. If they had harmed one of the men under his command, they would be punished. If they had killed him, Bell would string them up himself.

He was steeling himself for such a judgment when the tunnel abruptly ended.

The chamber was more than a shrine, but less than a temple, and Bell could not understand the purpose of it beyond it being a place of pagan worship. The tunnel opened into what he gauged to be the southwestern point of a circular chamber five or six yards across. The brickwork was Roman, and also the simple stone altar, he guessed. Probably some of the bones too.

The sides of the chamber were stacked with human bones like an ossuary built by a madman. He’d heard the papists liked to make such things. The bones were old and untidy, ancient scraps of desiccated meat visible hanging from femurs and tibiae, humeri and radii. Scraps of cloth and even armor were visible here and there.

Other discarded items lay in an untidy pile by the entrance. Helmets Roman and Norse, Norman bernies, and swords from Plantagenet times. Armed men had come here, and they had died.

“Major,” said Green quietly, “mayhap we should go back? Wait for the captain?” His knuckles showed white on his sword’s hilt as he spoke.

“Not yet,” murmured Bell. It was difficult to speak much above a whisper in that chamber. “We still don’t know what befell Hensley.”

He saw Ryder glance at the skeletal remains and draw breath to say something before thinking better of it.

“I’d do it for any of you,” said Bell. “We never leave a man behind while I have a say in it.”

“He can’t have come this way, though,” said Owen. “There be no way out.”

This was also true, or seemed to be true. The tunnel through which they had gained entrance was also the only egress. Yet the drag marks in the soil indicated this direction right enough. Bell frowned; the floor being slabs of stone, the dry dust upon them was not enough to hold sufficient indication of Hensley’s fate, lost among the comings and goings of whoever else used the place.

“There’ll be a concealed door,” he said. “As the papists use to hide their plate and idols. Needs be we must find it.” He set the men to searching the chamber carefully by quarters. They set to the task diligently though poorly enthused.

It was Bell himself who made the discovery, having given himself the quarter farthest from the entrance, to lead by example. The slab-sided altar was a far better prospect than the piles of bones, and Bell approached it cautiously.

As he did so, he saw that he had been wrong about it being an altar at all. Its position upon a low dais and the shadows cast by the men’s lights had served to obscure the altar’s surface, until Bell grew close and realized that, in truth, it had no surface at all.

He’d seen Roman coffins before. During the siege, they’d turned up a couple on the Mount, a low rise to the west of Micklegate Bar. It seemed the rich Romans of York had been buried in great slab-sided sarcophagi that — viewed from the side, in poor light — might well be mistaken for an altar. Those coffins had lids, also of stone. This one had none, and the suspicion wiggled in Bell’s mind that perhaps it had never had one.

He climbed the two low steps formed by concentric ovals beneath the coffin and looked into it, holding his lantern high and away from him so that the light fell without shadow. The lack of ambiguity in what he saw made him wish he hadn’t been so assiduous with the light.

Hensley lay there. Quite dead, and curled in a ball like a frightened child. It was not the dreadful wounds in throat, torso, and limbs that appalled Bell to the merest fraction, as much as the expression on the corpse’s face. Bell had seen enough of violent death on the battlefield for it to retain little ability to shock or horrify. This was something else again.

Hensley’s eyes were open and rheumy already, the cloudy glassiness of death settled on them with unnatural rapidity. They were wide open, as was the mouth, settled in a scream that never reached expression. Bell had been hard after Hensley from the moment he fell, and the distance from the breach to the chamber could not be more than two hundred and fifty or three hundred yards, at most, of silent, stone-lined tunnel. A shout would have been heard easily enough, never mind a scream.

Hensley, then, had died rapidly, although not rapidly enough for Hensley. His very last quick second was struck upon his face, and would be until the worms took the flesh from him.

And yet, he could not have died with such alacrity, for there was blood aplenty, and dead men do not bleed.

They do not bleed, yet Hensley had bled a quart or more into the coffin, a tide of black that was creeping from beneath the cadaver as Bell watched.

They do not bleed, yet Hensley was bleeding.

An oath stronger than most escaped Bell’s lips and drew the attention of his men. “What is amiss, Major?” said Green as he reached Bell’s side. Then he looked into the coffin and had no words at all.

The blood covered the floor of the coffin, and then began to fill it. Pints. Gallons. More than any man might contain. It rose around Hensley and submerged him in its tide, a darker shade of red than blood had any right to be.

Green stepped away, and Bell wished he was able to do so too. But he could only stare as the coffin filled. The last he saw of Hensley’s face, he could have sworn the eye still above the rising meniscus rolled in its socket to regard Bell. The lips moved, the flood pouring smoothly into the open mouth, but Bell never understood what Hensley was trying to say, even if it had ever happened; Bell found many reasons to deny his memories afterward.

Then the blood swallowed Hensley altogether. It rose until it was at the very edge of the coffin’s lip, and there it halted, as if by a spigot closing.

Bell stood, transfixed as if the stone beneath his feet had bled through his boots and into the flesh of his legs from sole to thigh. He could do naught but stare into the reflection of his own face cast into the dark mirror before him. His face was shadowed by the lantern held high, and he sought the humanity he knew to be within his own visage as a counter to the thing he had witnessed. In a moment, however, his reflection was gone, and not even the light shone back.

A breeze blew through the chamber, strong enough to make the torches growl and the lantern lights flicker. It blew from the surface of the blood.

“Deviltry,” croaked Bell. He said it often enough as a formula for the common wickedness of men, but this time he meant it. He stepped back, crushing the realization that the blood — if blood it was, or had ever been — was no liquid, but rather a gateway that flowed and eddied. If that realization ever became a thought of consequence, it would shoulder aside the columns of his wit and bring down the temple of his reason. Therefore, he ignored it, blinked it aside, and filled the space where it had briefly stood with thoughts of God, duty, and family.

“Deviltry,” he said again, louder now as fear and the fear of fear performed its usual alchemy in his heart and turned to anger.

In such a state, it was hardly surprising that he and his men had completely forgotten why they were searching the chamber in the first place. They were reminded when the hypothetical concealed door became a reality.

Beyond the coffin, the curve of the wall from the floor to a man’s height was plastered and whited. Along the edge of this alcove, a dark line formed and widened.

Owen saw it and cried a warning. Quickly it became clear that the whole section of the alcove was moving to one side. That it did so in short shoves, to the sound of stone grating against stone, indicated that it did not do so by the exercise of some subtle mechanism, but rather by the application of main force driving the wall along concealed runnels.

An opening widened, admitting naught but darkness. Bell moved back, almost relieved to have someone to face. Whatever godless citizen or citizens of York maintained this place, whatever apostates clinging to vile paganism might emerge, they would suffer immediate punishment for what they had done here and the foul murder they had committed upon Hensley.

The wall stopped moving and all was silence but for the breathing of the four men.

What stepped through into the light was not alive, but nearly. It was not dead, but nearly. It was ancient. It might once have been a man.

It regarded them through eye sockets filled with something too darkly red to be blood, too fluid to be flesh. There was no sense that it had any sort of presence at all in the way that a human possesses, no more than a statue or manikin or a child’s dolly does. Instead it presented the air of being an artefact or a puppet, made from old flesh and animated by a puppeteer a long, long way away. It wore scraps of armor scavenged from those it had caught and slaughtered down the years, an ancient Roman helmet on its head.

Afterward, Bell — when he allowed himself to think about the events of that night at all — would imagine how the Romans must have discovered the site and started erecting the fort of Eboracum there. How they had encountered the thing and, unable to destroy it, had drawn it into their pantheon, if secretly. They had sacrificed to it too. The construction of the tunnel and the chamber made more sense in that thought.

But had they truly never realized that their sacrifices were not to some local monster, but to something else? Something that lurked and writhed, almost visible through the pane of the dark blood? Bell would curtail his thoughts there, for that glimpsed image was never quite successfully driven from his memories. Sometimes prayer sufficed to calm his soul. Sometimes hard liquor.

He hardly knew how the sword got into his hand. In response, the thing slowly drew a straight-bladed sword that could not be a year under two centuries old. It looked blunt and mottled with rust, but there was fresh blood on it all the same.

“Owen, Green,” Bell murmured, “we are going to make a fighting retreat to the breach. Ryder, you’re fleet. Run like the Devil himself is at your heels. Get two barrels of blasting powder and short fuse them. Stand ready to light and drop them into the tunnel. Do y’understand me?”

“Sir?” said Ryder. “I can’t abandon…”

“You’ll do as you’re told. Go.”

Ryder hesitated at the command, but swallowed his reluctance and disappeared into the tunnel. They could hear the slapping of his boots on the soil floor for long seconds. The thing heard them too, and advanced.

“Owen, to my right. Green, to my left. I’ll draw it on. You wound it as and when you can.”

Bell only hoped that it could be wounded. As he put his lantern down by the tunnel entrance, and the men flung their brands aside to illuminate the chamber in a nightmare of low lights and high shadows, Bell took a moment to weigh their opponent. It was manlike, but whether it had ever been a man he sorely doubted. It was more in the nature of a device in the form of a man, as though some ancient corpse had been the pencil sketch and the final shape the inking of an artist who had never seen a man and allowed new fancies into the design. It seemed wet, but this was the strange ichor that had taken Hensley, an unblood that flowed as it willed and formed the strings by which the unseen puppeteer made sport of mortal terror. Bell could see it flow and ebb in the place of muscles across the skeletal frame and found himself so fascinated by its actions that he almost failed to grasp their import as the sword rose and swept down.

Green’s cry saved him, and he brought his saber up in a clumsy block. The thing was no swordsman, and the blow was as without guile as the stroke of a butcher’s cleaver upon the insensate flesh of his trade. It struck his blade square and he was preserved. Still, it was powerful, and Bell fell back with a shout.

He shook himself; he was a better swordsman than this, to stand amazed while the godless creature sliced him like mutton. With a new shout filled with wrath rather than astonishment, he pressed forward. The thing failed to defend itself effectively at all, and Bell felt joy as his sword found a gap in his opponent’s rusting cuirass and drove through its heart.

But the thing had no heart, and raised its sword once more. In a moment of terrible clarity, Bell saw the thing’s withered skin and saw it was crossed with centuries of scars where men at least as worthy as he had struck blows upon that abomination, and yet it still walked. Men at least as worthy as he, who now formed the ossuary around them.

He felt despair, but only for the merest moment, for despair is the death of a fighting man, and no one who knew John Bell would regard him as anything aught.

“Forget thrusts, men,” he ordered, “they trouble it not.” The imagery of a butcher’s shambles occurred to him again at that moment, and the spirit of war brought a smile that was half snarl to his face. “Hack it to pieces.”

Owen was the first to obey as Green harassed it on its flank. He leveled a scything strike at the nape of the thing’s neck and roared as he did, one cry amid the many that three of the combatants in that eldritch skirmish gave throat.

The thing switched attention from one man to the other as easily as if it had eyes in the back of its head, and with astonishing speed brought its massive blade up to block Owen’s attack. His saber did not break, which was a miracle in itself, but a chip of good steel flew wild, and he was momentarily stunned by the shock reverberating from the clash. In that moment, the thing twitched its blade as if it were a feather and opened Owen from chest to shoulder. He screamed, more in surprise than pain. That would come later, Bell knew. If they survived.

There could be no victory in this fight for them. Bell could see that now. How many of the dead there had encountered the thing in groups of three, or four, or more? Given time, it would triumph over a regiment. That was if they played the game on its terms, of course. If Ryder had obeyed with alacrity, a game new to the thing was about to begin.

“Green! Get Owen back to the breach and get him out! You as well! I’ll slow it as much as I may.”

Green knew better than to disobey a direct order in combat. He ducked around to reach Owen, now leaning against the tunnel wall, pale and gasping, and half carried, half dragged the man toward the dim light of the brands above the tunnel breach, leaving Bell with the thing.

He knew he would not see the dawn. The knowledge gave him a clarity he only ever felt under fire, and he was satisfied that this was the last emotion that he would ever experience. Better this than to die an old man, toothless and confused.

For its part, the creature seemed confused by the loss of two of its opponents. Its head, the helmet rocking loosely across the hairless skull, swung this way and that way, before settling its gaze once more upon Bell.

“Aye,” said Bell, too at peace with his imminent extinction to offer house to anything as base as animosity. “Just you and I now. Lead on.”

The monster, however, did not wish to lead on. It looked at Bell with an expressionless countenance, yet with an air of curiosity. Then it spoke, and its voice was as empty of life as the gulf between the stars, and the syllables that came from a mouth without tongue and a throat without cords were too primal, too sophisticated for Bell to even guess at their meaning.

The words came, and the peace he had felt was stripped away to leave him naked and freezing before a truth too simple to be denied. A lifetime of faith was swept away as childish fancies. Before him was no puppet, but a priest of the one truth, the vicarious embodiment of it, the undeniable proof of it. No faith was necessary. No faith could ever prosper in the mind of John Bell ever again, an intellect sterilized of such fancies by the awful light of true revelation.

“Iä… Zschekerith… H’ethkyicin mu… ech Lloigor mar’Zschekerith… Zschekerith mu fhtagn…”

Bell had no memory of running, yet he must have. He had no memory of the explosion of two barrels of powder. He had no memory of being pulled from the sucking earth, and the touch of pulseless hands around his ankles that tried to pull him back into the churning soil. These he only recalled in dimly remembered nightmares for the rest of his life.

His first clear memory after that night was a day and a half afterward, when he awoke in his own bed in the hospitium, Captain Harker surprised in the act of leaving as Bell stirred. Harker called for the surgeon to attend immediately, before resuming his seat by Bell.

Harker told him how long he had been unconscious and raving, although he forebore to mention some of the dangerously blasphemous things Bell had said. Instead, he told Bell that Fairfax had attended him for an hour the previous day and had been very concerned by the major’s accident.

“Accident?” said Bell through cracked lips. “Did they not tell you of what we encountered in the tunnel?”

Here Harker had frowned at the prospect of an unpleasant duty to perform. “The powder brought down this tunnel you speak of, and the workings that led down to it. Your man Ryder who set the charge, he didn’t escape in time. I am sorry, sir.”

“But… the others. What of the others? Owen?”

“He was sorely injured, and never awakened. Green was smothered in the collapse.”

Bell was filled with horror. What he had seen in the chamber was well nigh unbearable, but the thought of no other trustworthy witness surviving to corroborate his memories was a sharp additional wound.

The captain was still speaking. “I am truly sorry, Major Bell. We’re searching the city for your attackers. They will be brought to justice, I assure you.”

Bell looked at him blankly.

“Royalist sympathizers, probably, or perhaps just common criminals. Whatever the case, they will not escape. Your foreman gave us good descriptions.”

“Foreman?”

The door opened and both men looked to the newcomer. Harker nodded, for he saw Hensley there. Bell screamed, for he did not.