4 Chapter Four

Anomus next came to consciousness with the sense of being wounded, perhaps grievously so. He feared as much, though without a body to probe for pain, he could not say where, or in what fashion. The integrity of the crystal that housed his spirit was undamaged, at least. But he felt weak, and shaken, and he ached in a way that he simply did not have the vocabulary to describe.

Fleeing the sigil's assault, it seemed he had instinctively retreated to the crystal that rested in the stone bowl. Slowly, tentatively, he expanded his awareness outward from it once more, confining himself at first to the Old God's chamber. Blood still trickled down to him, but the tide had all but dried up, and what still flowed was sluggish, old, its power nearly spent. Still, he suspected that the flow was all that had kept him from being destroyed by the thrice-damned sigil of Mordun. It likely had provided him a lifeline in the wake of the binding's assault. Anomus was both grateful for it, and upset at the waste of all the energy he might have spent in other ways. He had no idea where he would secure more power, and sensed what was left to him had been greatly diminished.

He had to learn to balance caution against his hunger for vengeance, or he knew without a doubt that he would fail. And he could not fail. He had sacrificed everything for his chance at retribution. Anomus would never be rejoined with his loved ones in the afterlife, now. He understood that. He had accepted the Faceless One's offer, and taken the Dark God's path. There would be no reprieve, for him. All he had was the single chance to destroy Irobus. He must not fail because he couldn't control his rash impulses.

So resolved, he expanded his consciousness upwards to the undertomb once more, careful to avoid the spot where what he had claimed came into contact with Mordun's seal. He quarantined a generous area surrounding it from his awareness, willing, in a sense, a blind spot in his consciousness, a protective cyst in his physical tomb-self.

He was not certain how much time had passed. He had only the decomposition of the corpses to indicate the advance of time, and he was no expert in such things. He sensed that rot was beginning to take hold; some of the bodies displayed the stiffness of rigor mortis, while others had already begun to bloat. He knew that a corpse's surroundings had much to do with the speed of its decay, but not how. He estimated that a day or two had passed, but knew it might be less, or more.

If he could see the sky, the phase of the moon, he would know. In order to do so – assuming he truly was limited to the Tomb – he needed access to the massive, cylindrical Well that was central to the Tomb, and partially open to the sky.

Three months, the emperor had said. Three months before he returned with the body of his beloved, to shut her away in the Tomb to await his death, and their subsequent reunion upon his passing. Anomus feared he might need every moment of that three months to fashion a trap for his killer. He could not afford to waste any more time lying senseless inside a crystal. He needed access to the Tomb above, if for no other reason than to find some new source of energy, be it beast, bird or insect, or some other unknown wellspring. There was nothing in the undertomb save blood, and soon enough even that would be gone.

He could not touch the seal. Even thinking of it sent metaphorical shudders through him. But he had penetrated the stoppage it was affixed to with his consciousness. If he wished, if he dared, he believed he could now claim it- and cause it to disintegrate. He still wanted the hateful seal destroyed, but did not see how he might manage it. But the stoppage itself, the material surrounding the seal – that he thought he could disperse. And if that too proved impossible, he hoped that he would still have enough strength to try and create an alternate entrance to the undertomb.

Cautiously he turned his attention to the stone and mortar of the stoppage. He chose a small area in a corner near the floor, and resumed willing it to transform from solid stone and nearly-set mortar into sand.

It was still difficult. It still taxed him. But now that the matter of the stoppage was claimed, he made swifter progress. It took time and effort, but eventually Anomus was able to bore a hole the thickness of a thumb through the barrier.

When he finally broke through, he was stunned by what greeted him, even before he tried to see into the Well itself.

Energy. Life force. Mana.

In the Old God's chamber and the undertomb, the only source of energy had been the blood of his fellow workers, and only when it reached the chamber floor. He suspected that was some residual ability, or stricture, of the Faceless One. The Old God had drawn strength from blood offerings, after all. But Anomus, whatever he was now, was no god, old or new. Having been transformed by the will and power of the Reaper, he suspected that he would share some affinities with Him. But the energy, the power that leaked in from his tiny breach in the barrier told him that he was not limited to the appetites of the dark god. Anomus could have wept from relief, had he still possessed eyes.

The Hin kingdoms of the far north, beyond the Circle Sea, believed that the world was awash in currents of energy, both light and dark, life and death, active and passive. They called such knowledge geomancy. He knew of it because he had studied their principles of design and construction, which incorporated the belief in geomancy. In many ways their building arts were more advanced than what the Subori Empire could lay claim to. Anomus had absorbed many of their innovative approaches to construction, but he had discounted most of the geomantic aspects. Taking into account such things as the month, day, and hour of the owner's birth had seemed to be mere superstitions to him.

But as the energy, the mana of the outside world seeped through breach he had made, Anomus understood that there was something to the art of geomancy, for this new energy felt cooler, cleaner and less clying in comparison to the blood strength that was all he had yet absorbed. This new energy carried with it the echo of the desert, the whispering wind across trackless sand, the endless flow of the Great River on its passage to the sea, starlight and shadow and a thousand other dimly sensed reflections of nature, of the living world.

He had been cut off from all of it in the undertomb, not even suspecting its existence. Like air or water, it flowed, but could not flow down to the undertomb because of the emperor's cursed barrier. Now that he had tasted it, he was coldly eager to claim as much of it as he could. It did not seem to be as potent as blood, nor did he yet know how to store it; but it was constant, and with its discovery, Anomus's fear of being trapped and powerless down in the dark receded.

Anomus threw himself into tearing down the barrier, disintegrating it as quickly as he could. But he remained mindful of Mordun's seal, and dared not touch any matter in a wide area around it. He confined his efforts to a rough hand span's distance from the thing of gold and godly magic.

He ate away the stone all around it, and let gravity dash it to the floor. It landed with enough force to crack the marble tile, then fell forward, golden plaque facing the floor. Exultation rushed through Anomus. It was his first victory against his enemy, however small. But dimly he sensed a smoking anger and resentment emanating from the sigil.

It had been circumvented, but it had not been destroyed.

Rage on, Anomus thought. You are impotent now. I am the Tomb, and I will say who shall or shall not pass; none other.

Part of his exultation, his near-euphoria, came from the energy, the mana that flowed in from the Well's open ceiling, far above. It was not equal to the strength given him by the blood flow at its height, but it did not ebb as it flowed down to him from the night sky. The clean crispness of it gave him a renewed sense of purpose.

He pressed forward into the Well, claiming it as his own, avoiding only the area immediately surrounding the fallen seal. It irritated him; it was like a blind spot in his vision, or a dead, unfeeling area would be if he still possessed a body. Irritation he could accept. He had no choice. He would not risk attempting to destroy it until he had some notion how to do so, and he had none.

The Well held new discoveries for him. Though he could not extend his influence beyond the ironglass ceiling, he was able to discern something of the world beyond. It was night, and judging by the phase of the moon, three nights had passed since his final offering of blood and milk and honey to the Faceless One. He was relieved; he had feared a longer span of time had passed. He needed every moment if he were to have a hope of being ready for the concubine's interment, and Iborus's return.

Anomus's second discovery was less welcome. No fewer than three seals had been placed on the massive, bronze-sheathed doors of the Tomb's entrance. Having learned a harsh lesson, he immediately retreated from the doors, leaving them spitting hate and wrath at him, but unable to pursue.

The third discovery was that the Well now contained living things. Pests. Flies.

Irobus's Eternal Guard had dragged thousands of corpses across the floor of the Well, to deposit them in the undertomb. Then they had apparently used water from the river to wash the marble floor clean of the bloody evidence. But no amount of scrubbing could have cleansed away all of it, as the presence of dozens, perhaps hundreds of black flies attested. They were the scourge of the desert, swarming wherever living things lingered for more than a few hours. They had made camp life an intermittent misery when Anomus was alive. Now, they filled the Well with a low hum as they swarmed over the areas that the Eternal Guard had not cleaned sufficiently – chiefly the narrow gaps between the marble tiles that lined the Well's floor. But they also filled the air, buzzing aimlessly hither and yon.

Anomus realized soon enough that they were somewhat trapped. Most had surely entered from the tomb's vast doors as the corpses had been hauled in. Those doors were sealed now. They had a means of escape via the small opening at the center of the Well's cap, but few seemed inclined, or able, to stumble upon that discovery. Instead, now that the entrance to the undertomb and its contents were unobstructed and the corpse-scent began to fill the air, the flies instead descended further into the Tomb, at first singly and then in droves.

Anomus knew that they would feast on the rank slaughter of the murdered workers, and then procreate. The Tomb would soon be thick with thousands, perhaps millions of maggots, and then in the course of nature, flies. A week, perhaps a little more, would see the beginnings of a swarm sufficient to produce nightmares.

Anomus did not know what, if anything, he could do to prevent it – or if he should even try. As disgusting as such things were, they were entirely natural. They were not evil. Death led to decomposition, which in turn gave forth the raw materials for new life. The worst had already happened to the murdered thousands; their spirits were gone, leaving only broken shells. Preventing the flies from doing what was in their nature, assuming he somehow could, seemed pointless.

His ponderings led him to a question, though. He had claimed physical spaces by inserting his consciousness, his very self into them. Could he do so with a living thing? If it were in his power to do so, then that would open up so many more possibilities for him, so many more opportunities to affect the world around him. He turned his attention to a single fly, one gorged on blood and lazy from it.

It was a starkly different experience from extending his influence into lifeless stone. Even such a simple living thing as a fly turned out to be incredibly complex, and the deeper he explored, the more complex it proved to be, revealing hidden depths. Anomus marveled at what an intricate thing life was, and wondered what architect had devised it, if any. He doubted any other mortal man knew as much as he did now about the functions of a fly, from its method of flight, to its dizzyingly fractal means of sight, and deeper, to how it transformed food into energy – so much knowledge lay in the simplest, basest of creatures. Still deeper he probed, discovering a double helix structure that contained the very language of life itself, that governed every aspect of the fly's physical body and habits.

Anomus eventually pulled back from the fly and considered all that he had learned, and its portent. This was knowledge available only to gods. Some lingering human part of him felt that to know such secrets would be to invite the wrath of deities – but Anomus was no longer mortal, and no longer quailed at mortal fears. He was not a god, but he had been reshaped by one, and had already thwarted the will, in small measure, of another. Knowledge was one of his weapons, perhaps the greatest of them, in his secret war against the emperor. Even a pest such as a fly had the potential to be wielded as a weapon in that war.

He turned his regard once more to the fly, and was faintly surprised to find that, in some dim way, it now recognized him. Spontaneously, he sent it a thought – rise – and to his delight, the torpid thing responded, lumbering its way into the air.

Higher, he commanded, and it acceded, rising toward the ironglass ceiling.

Land, he thought, and the fly immediately flew to the nearest surface, high on the Well's wall, and came to rest.

It was his creature. He was its master. The strength it had taken to make it so had been miniscule.

Anomus turned his attention to several more of the flies, and one by one he quickly pushed his influence into them as well, claiming them as his. But he decided doing so one by one was terribly inefficient, and so tried something new.

The Well was his, was now him. His influence over the space was absolute, save for Mordun's seal and the entry doors. Every fly in the space was surrounded by, and in a sense existed within him, his will. He knew their physical makeup down to its smallest, most secret detail. And so he sent a command rolling through the Well, the undertomb, and the Old God's chamber, directed to any and all of the flies' miniscule consciousnesses: Obey.

There was no resistance to his command. Every single fly, which he now knew numbered nearly three hundred, was wholly a creature under his thrall.

Anomus was learning. He was growing in knowledge, and thus in power. And while an army of not-quite three hundred flies was laughable when set against the might of an empire, he was determined that it would signal the beginning of Irobus's downfall.

~ ~ ~

Anomus, satisfied for the moment with his accomplishments with the flies, turned his attention to claiming more of the Tomb. He extended his influence into all the lightless funerary chambers at the level of the entrance. It became apparent that, the further from his center, his gem, that he pushed, the greater effort and energy it took him to extend his influence, his claim.

During the process, the power of the worker's blood finally failed him, and he was left solely with the mana that steadily trickled in from the outer world. Unlike the blood, which the Faceless One's chamber seemed to automatically store for him, the mana simply flowed through the Tomb; in through the Well's ceiling, then out through a multitude of tiny sources of egress -the hair-thin gaps between the Tomb's entry doors and the stone they were attached to, and infinitesimal fractures in the stone itself. When he drew power from the mana, it was as if he were a man dipping his hands into a stream. He could only catch what he was immediately using, and all the rest traveled on, unusable and, for his purposes, wasted.

In a strange sense, it was a problem for which he was naturally suited. Anomus had been both architect and engineer, and had learned to see the issues of the physical world as problems to be surmounted in order to achieve a desired outcome. He had built the small pond in the funerary garden above by harnessing and diverting a portion of the Great River's flow. Now he was faced with a flow of another sort that he wished to harness, another sort of potential energy that he needed to capture.

But as he pondered the problem, another made itself apparent.

In the sky above the Tomb, night was ending. The sun's first, faint stirrings were evident in the east, and the stars began to dim. The nature of the mana that flowed into the Tomb began to change, and the energy that Anomus was able to take from it steadily lessened.

At first he could make no sense of it. This mana, this energy from life and nature shouldn't be bound up in or affected by the cycle of the sun – should it? But he remembered that the geomancers held that life, that existence itself was dual in nature. Male and female, light and dark, birth and death, passive and active, and a hundred other binary distinctions were recognized by them. They did not, interestingly, recognize the natural energy, the mana, as good or evil – it simply was.

As dawn stole over the land above, and the mana flow became ever more inaccessible to him, he came to the realization that he was a creature of the night, of the dark, and so he could only make use of the energy that had its source in the night-world.

It made sense; he had after all been created by the Old God of the dark. But Anomus seethed under this newly discovered limitation. It made finding or creating some way to store mana even more critical.

Anomus retreated into the crystalline structure that was his core, and now the core of much of the tomb. He did not have enough mana remaining to proceed with the claiming of the upper floor of the tomb. He was forced to idleness until night once again returned, and with it that mana that he could access. He set to pondering the problems that faced him.