Ephrem of Eukrate, a professor with a penchant for taking risks
Ephrem had been lost in the barrow for hours. When he descended, he would have sworn the down was large enough to house two rooms. He had found none, only endless passages. He would long since have deserted the search and left the place, if he was able to. He couldn’t find the exit was the problem.
He’d been down here long enough to begin to worry about the fuel left in his lantern. A part of him felt as if he should have been panicking, but he was filled instead by curiosity at this supernatural interlude. It wasn’t optimism but a sense of reckless daring.
He turned a final corner and felt an impression of vast space. He didn’t have time to look because his light was snuffed, plunging him into primal darkness. He hesitated on the threshold of what he suspected was the chamber he’d been looking for, asking himself how he was supposed to examine the place in the dark.
As if in answer to this need, light swelled. It wasn’t warm or welcoming, being tinged with sickly green that cast an unholy luster across the piles of swag he had hoped to discover. It was dim but plenty bright enough to show him the desiccated corpse seated against the rear wall, robed in garments whose colors had faded, legs splayed, clutching a sword like a child might clutch a doll.
Only now did he feel afraid. It struck him that he had wandered a maze, whether physical or magical, and one of the reasons people built mazes was to trap something inside them. It felt ominous, rather than fortuitous, that a light came on when he entered. It made him think he had awoken something.
Ephrem didn’t consider himself a superstitious man, but in that moment, he believed all of this with every fiber of his being. Gasping so hard he choked on his wind, he swung away. Then he took off walking at the fastest pace he could manage with only his hands to guide the way. Steps beyond the entrance to the burial chamber, he reentered the blackness, perfect and impenetrable.
A wind gusted across him, and he knew it was the breath of the terrible being that was imprisoned here. When it gusted back the other way seconds later, he laughed wildly, feeling a sense of madcap triumph because he had predicted it would do that. “One last chance to be clever!” he muttered.
He couldn’t tell if it was yet aware of him. It had been dormant for a very long time before he came bumbling into its cage. He couldn’t have said why he was so sure this barrow was haunted by an ancient, evil spirit that would do worse than kill him the instant it noticed him: the truth was part of this place, saturating its dusty sandstone walls, its stale air. Even the light had borne witness to it, and he was grateful to abandon it for the primordial dark through which he crawled.
He came around a corner and there was another person with him. He knew it was a fellow human being because he could smell their fearful perspiration, hear their labored breathing. When a fumbling hand caught his, he could have wept for the tactile proof he wasn’t venturing this nightmare in solitude.
There was a noise behind them, the rasp of metal scraped across stone. Ephrem’s heart, leaping with hope, stuttered. Both of them were running, still clutched hand-to-hand like children, pelting heedlessly into the dark because broken bones had to be better than whatever that was.
Ephrem ran headlong into an obstruction and didn’t rebound from it: the surface was firm but yielding, soft against his skin. A spiderweb spun by a spider as big as he was, was his first fantastical thought, and he didn’t have a more rational theory to replace it with. He had let go his companion’s hand in sheer surprise, and there was a heartbreaking moment when he thought he was alone. He even wondered if he had imagined it.
Someone spoke, though, close to him. A human voice coming from right at his side and not behind him. He couldn’t understand what the man had said and couldn’t draw meaning from his incomprehension. When the surface that had held him gave way suddenly, he fell on his face.
“Come.” The hand on his shoulder was too urgent to be a reassuring pat, and once it found his arm, it closed and tugged. “I get through, um, um, liabela, we not out yet.”
He didn’t understand what this meant—no wonder, since the fellow seemed to be a foreigner and couldn’t find the words to explain himself—but when the import of the man’s words sank in, he understood it didn’t matter. He pushed himself staggering to his feet, running bent-over and one step away from another collapse. They only had one more short length of corridor to go, though, and he could see light ahead. Blessed daylight, which burned off fog and mysteries.
Around a final corner and the entrance was revealed. The ordinary stone lintel he had entered what felt now like a lifetime ago. There was only room for one to pass, then at a crouch. His companion urged him to go first, and later he would remember the eager way he leapt ahead with a stab of shame, but all he could think of at that moment was escape.
Outside, the air was chilly, the wind brisk, so that his skin dimpled and tears rose in his eyes. He didn’t know how much that was cold and how much gratitude at the incredible feeling of the sun against his face. The beauty of the grasslands, endlessly expansive, horizons stepping graciously back in every direction to promise him he need never be hemmed in.
Only after he had turned a full circle did he give in to the shaking of his knees, sinking slowly to the turf beneath his feet. His companion—his rescuer, he realized he should say—lay where he had collapsed, spread-eagled on his back and gasping for breath. He had his eyes fixed on the sky and was talking to himself, low but fervid: almost certainly praying.
While Ephrem studied him, he felt a new unease creeping in to replace the old. His terrified sweat was cooling on his skin but his stomach turned over. It hadn’t yet struck him to wonder what became of his porters, who had dug out the entrance to this tomb for him and ought to be present. It was his companion who made him nervous.
The man was ten or fifteen years his junior, with full lips, a pert nose, long, graceful limbs. His first thought had been, Well how about that, rescued by a handsome stranger. The man’s skin was the color of ancient ivory, though, cheekbones high and far apart, and his head had been shaved bald. Ephrem recognized the sensuous rhythms and sibilant consonants of the language the man was muttering.
So his second thought was: Shit. A druda.
from The Shuttle that Weaves the Shroud
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