6 Chapter Six

When night returned, it did not bring with it to Anomus any decision regarding the final disposition of the workers' remains. In a sense there was no urgency to do so – they were in no danger of becoming more dead, and would go nowhere while he deliberated, except to slide further into decay. And while the wealthy and powerful of the empire went to great lengths to preserve their bodies for the afterlife, the common man and woman could not, and did not expect to be saved from the depredations of death on their mortal remains. Unlike the emperor's concubine, not a single one of the Tomb's laborers would have expected much in the way of formalities or funerary rites upon their deaths. Only Anomus himself could have expected to be interred in the small, family mausoleum that stood in the hills above the capital. He would have been laid to rest in a simple, unadorned sarcophagus, among three generations of his family – four, now that his son had gone before him.

He turned his thoughts away from his son, his family. He did not wish to think of his wife or the daughter he had never seen, and now never would. He might be able to claim existence of a sort, but to them, he was dead and gone, and that was unquestionably for the best. He was a husband, a father no longer. Now, he was a spirit of vengeance.

Anomus was vaguely, distantly aware that a great stench was building from the mass of dead flesh, but it did not affect him. He had no nose to be offended with, and no stomach that rebelled at the strengthening miasma.

The death-stench had begun to permeate the entire Tomb, and even waft out of the opening in the Well's lid. It had attracted a few of the ebon-carapaced desert wasps; Anomus pressed his will into them and claimed them, almost absently. There were differences between fly and wasp, to be sure, from the wasp's sting to its instinct to build nests, to its rather more complicated cycle of procreation. But having plumbed the depths of one, the other did not present any real surprises. He still had no firm designs for his enthralled insects.

Having secured the wasps, Anomus turned his attention to further exploring his ability to work with stone. Again, he noticed that there was an instinctual drive within himself to do so – to dig, to tunnel, to expand. He found it an almost trivial matter to penetrate with his will and consciousness the stone that surrounded the Old God's chamber. It made no difference in which direction; up was as simple and desirable as down, or east, or any other direction. The stone was him, and he was the stone, and the mana it took to expand was negligible – at least at first. He penetrated his surroundings, claimed dominion over tons of living rock, and while doing so, experienced the closest thing to satisfaction that he now seemed capable of.

After a time, he realized that the further he expanded through the stone of the Targus Cliffs, the more mana it cost him to do so. He paused when he reached the point where he was spending more mana to expand than he was collecting from his passive regeneration. He had little enough power stored in the black mana stone; he did not ever again want to reach a point where it was completely empty. He resolved to control the reckless impulse to expand. He could not afford it, however temporarily satisfying it was.

The Tomb lay wholly within his sway now, both the open spaces and the stone and supports, the interstitial masses that surrounded them and made them possible. He could now, if he chose, collapse the entire structure. But just thinking of doing so caused him extreme discomfort. It would be like crushing his own body, if he still possessed one. It would be a final, desperate measure, if he could force himself to do it at all.

In fact, altering the Concubine's Tomb at all was something he found himself loathe to do, though for other reasons. Ten years he had labored on its construction, and despite all, it was a thing of beauty, and a testament to his abilities as an architect. He decided that, while he was still learning his strengths, abilities and powers, he would not experiment in the Tomb. Instead, he would construct other chambers within the stone to test his ideas.

Accordingly, after waiting a time for more mana to gather in the black stone, he began to fashion a new tunnel in the god's chamber; one that led away from the Tomb and the river, and towards the endless ground beneath the open desert.

Anomus soon learned that while claiming volumes of stone used a variable amount of mana, dissolving or disintegrating it did not. It required a constant, roughly measurable amount of energy to do so; roughly an hour's worth of gathered mana was sufficient to tunnel through nine cubic yards' worth of stone. To a man who had dealt for years with construction schedules, such knowledge was comforting. It meant that, should he need to, he could plan and estimate his expansion with some accuracy. All knowledge was potentially useful to him.

Anomus spent half the night creating a short passageway that terminated in a small, square chamber. Mentally he dubbed the chamber his workshop. When he was satisfied with it, he set to work.

He first experimented with making a pit trap, which was just an extension of the tunneling he had already become familiar with, this time downwards instead of horizontally through the bedrock. He made only two modifications to the process. First, he left spikes of stone lining the bottom of the pit, which was a trivial matter for one of his experience and newfound abilities. With his fine control of the process, the spikes were wickedly sharp, if rather brittle. They would certainly wound any who fell onto them, but there were too many variables to guarantee a victim of such a pit would be killed by it. What he needed was some sort of poison to coat the spikes with. His thoughts turned to the recently acquired desert wasps, whose stings were painful, though not fatal. He wondered if it would be able to alter them, to produce a deadlier venom. He resolved to experiment with the creatures, but not until he had completed exploring his stone-shaping ability.

The second modification he made to his pit trap was to cause a thin skin of stone to form over its mouth. He could have simply tunneled downwards, leaving the upper end undisturbed to whatever thickness he wished, but Anomus wanted to know if he could create stone in desired shapes as well as remove it.

Indeed, he could. He knew the composition of the stone down to the smallest, most infinitesimal level. Reproducing it required only mana. Within a few minutes, his experimental pit trap would have been completely undetectable by any hypothetical observer; its paper-thin covering matched the rest of the chamber's floor perfectly. But anything weighing more than a rat would shatter the camouflage, and plunge to its spike-studded bottom.

Satisfied that he could kill from below, he turned his attention to creating a method of dealing death from above. Again, he used gravity as the linchpin of the trap. But unlike the passive pit trap, his initial design for the falling block would require his attention and will to trigger.

While he could work stone to his will much more quickly than a mortal mason, it still took time – more time than a man, or an emperor, would take to stride down a corridor, say. If Anomus wished to be able to drop a killing block of stone from above instantly, with precision and accuracy, it was necessary that he prepare the falling mass in advance.

He experimented with the ceiling of his workshop of death, cutting first through the four sides that would form four of the six faces of the death stone. The fifth was, of course, ostensibly part the ceiling of the chamber. Then, carefully, he cut away a portion of what would be the final, uppermost face of the stone cube, so that only a tenuous connection remained between the falling block and the mass of stone it was carved from. He labored to ensure that the connection was sufficient to keep the stone from falling on its own, yet small enough that he could sever it with a thought, in an instant.

Anomus had further ideas – he found himself almost eager to explore the creation of death traps, of ingenious ways to end lives. That told him, more than anything else, that he was not the same man he had been before his transformation. He had never designed such things while he lived and breathed, nor had he ever wished to despite his unarguable technical capability. As much as he would have liked to blame this dark turn of mind on the influence of the Faceless One, he knew he could not. Such darkness dwelt in the hearts of nearly every man and woman, awaiting only some brutal, horrifying condition or event that would bring it forth. Thankfully, most never experienced such misfortune, such violation.

He understood then that he faced a choice, one just as stark, if subtler, than the choice the Faceless One had presented him with upon his death. Yes, he was sworn to vengeance; he could not turn away from it even if he wanted to, which he certainly did not. The emperor must be made to pay for what he had done, for the evil he had visited upon thousands whose only 'crime' had been to labor for him successfully and well. Anomus would push himself to destruction, to see Irobus brought low.

But Anomus felt certain that he was in danger of becoming just as much of a monster as the monster he plotted to destroy. Between his newfound greed to claim territory, and his newly born fascination with creating ever-more ingenious engines of death, he hardly recognized the man he had once been. Where was the Anomus who wished only to bring forth into the world creations of both beauty and utility? Did he even exist anymore?

Anomus did not know. But he did know that if he simply followed his dark impulses, unquestioning and unchecked, his spirit would soon be just as dead as his body – and all that would remain would be the cold, crystal heart of a dungeon of horrors.

He looked into that possible future, and saw a… thing, ever-expanding down in the dark, creating ever more deadly and cruel traps to guard the territory that it claimed. Such a thing would be only a mindless creature of instinct, no more evolved than a spider in its web, and far less wholesome.

He rejected that fate. Better that had died for good and all, than that.

But it would not do merely to resist and control his dark impulses. There was no guarantee that he could do so indefinitely. Instead, he began to realize that his best course of action would be to channel them into something meaningful, something productive – even something of aesthetic beauty. Anomus ip Garma might be gone, for all intents and purposes, but the Architect remained. And now, with his peculiar powers, he could fashion and construct such spaces as would have been impossible as a mortal man.

Anomus reached an agreement with himself: He would prepare the Concubine's Tomb to 'receive' the emperor, and prepare himself to the best of his ability to exact his retribution. He would also continue to explore what his new existence might allow him to do – there was so much to explore and to try, so much he did not yet know, and much he did not yet fully understand about his strengths and their boundaries.

But he would not let his altered instincts rule his actions. Instead, he would channel them into the creation of something new. Who knew? In time, an entire underground city might take shape deep beneath the desert sands, secret and unsuspected by the world above.

Just as he began to imagine what such a secret, subterranean city might look like, something in the Tomb above intruded on his attention.

It was the simplest of things, the barest shadow of movement blocking, for an instant, the starlight that shone down through the Well's lid into the space below. It was there, and then it was gone. Anomus waited, but after a few moments dismissed it. Likely it was a desert hare, or a jackal or vulture attracted by the smell of decomposition that wafted up to the outer air from the undertomb.

But then it returned. Because of the imperial sorcerer's spell, he had not been able to claim the Well's ironglass lid. However, he could still 'see' through it. What he saw crouched on the edge of the lid was no desert hare, nor jackal, or vulture.

It was a monster out of nightmare.

There was something strongly jackal-like about the creature's face. It had a long snout, or muzzle. But its eyes were disturbingly human – and no jackal possessed the humanoid form of the thing Anomus now beheld.

Anomus watched it, fascinated.

It sniffed the air, then froze, it's jackal-like ears perking at some dimly perceived or imagined noise. Almost, it bolted, but slowly Anomus watched the creature's body ease once more. Even more slowly, the thing reached forth one vaguely human-shaped, but clawed hand towards the ironglass, to test its unfamiliar surface, Anomus supposed.

It was a mistake, of course.

The moment the beast's ragged, iron-hued claws made contact with the ironglass, the protective spells that had been laced into it activated, blasting the creature backward with a burst of kinetic energy. It disappeared from his sight, and its howl of surprise, pain and rage were chilling – or rather they would have been, were Anomus still a mortal man. Instead, he found them, and the creature itself, fascinating.

He knew what the monster must be, or at least thought he did. Based on the stories told to him as a child by a nanny with a storyteller's gift and a lack of concern for any nightmares she might cause, Anomus thought the thing must be a desert ghoul, an Eater of the Dead. He had not thought them more than the figments of his nanny's dark, if rich imagination.

In her tales, the high and mighty insisted on sarcophaguses of stone and lead to keep the ghouls from feasting on their freshly entombed corpses. All for naught, she had informed they young, credulous Anomus, whose eyes must have bulged. All for naught, because the claws of the Corpse Eaters were as hard as iron, and could burrow through the hardest stone, given enough time. She had painted word pictures of the things squatting on the broken lids of such coffins, gnawing hungrily on the detached, rotting limbs of their occupants – generally under a full moon.

If they were real – and apparently, they might well be – then he was not surprised that they were in the vicinity. Thousands of corpses were contained within him, and thousands more had been left to rot outside. Anomus did not know if the emperor had ordered the excess of his slaughter to be buried, or thrown into the river, or left to rot in the desert sun, but whatever the case, for creatures such as ghouls, it must have been a feast to end all feasts. With their supposed keen sense of smell, the stench of decay must have been like a beacon to the ghouls, inviting them to gorge.

Anomus felt no particular loathing at the thought. Yes, the things were hideous, or at least the one he had seen was; but they were in no sense eviller than the flies and other insects who had been drawn to the corpses for much the same reason, in much the same way.

In terms of what they might be able to do for him, however, they were orders of magnitude more fascinating. Assuming he could enforce his will upon them and claim them, of course. Flies, even wasps, would not make an army. But ghouls? Perhaps.

Such thoughts occupied him for the short remainder of the night. He waited, but the ghoul did not return to the Well's lid before dawn. Anomus went to his 'rest' determined both to further explore what might be done with living creatures, and to somehow lure a ghoul into the Tomb, if it were at all possible.