Magi Saga 1: Epic Calling (4 page)

However, the seventh word her eyes landed on wasn’t in hieroglyphs, it was in English, carved into the wall over the top of the markings that had been there for thousands of years.

Amy stared incredulously at what she was seeing, it was unbelievable. She stepped back a little and slowly ran her finger along the carved passage of writing trying to make it out. The passage wasn’t recent, clearly this was done a good few hundred years ago, and after several tries at reading it, she finally succeeded and reached the end of inscription. There were two short sentences, nothing more. It read;

Do not lift the Slab. Horlack lies within.

Amy stared, bemused and staggered at what she’d seen, so she read it a few more times to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. She quickly realised that someone had obviously beaten them into the tomb. Amy and her team weren’t the first ones in here since it had first been sealed, someone had been in here and with a sharp implement scraped this text into the wall, but why do that and nothing else?

The rest of the tomb complex had lain undisturbed; in fact the research the team had done had supported the hypothesis that they were the first inside it. The original seals were intact, no one could have got in here, well, no normal person at least. Which pointed to a Magi, and if that were the case, then the Magic that filled this final room started to make some kind of sense, if you ignored the Dead Magic Zone.

She traced her fingers over the text once more. The way the text had been written, its form, suggested a modern origin, someone who’d been in here not too long ago, but the carving looked much older. Time Travel maybe?

This discovery changed things for the rest of the team, if they saw this then things wouldn’t add up, after all, how did someone get in here, write this, and not disturb anything else? They would begin asking awkward questions which would need an answer.

Amy looked at the passage again and read it through. Who or what was Horlack? Clearly someone worth defacing this ancient tomb over, but this didn’t make much sense either. Why break in to this final room and write it here? Surely the thing to do would be to write this on an outer tomb, or on the main entrance into the complex itself?

For some reason she doubted that the name Horlack would be written anywhere else in here. Anyway, it wasn’t even an Egyptian name, it didn’t sound like any name she had ever heard of before. But if a Magi had written this, then maybe someone somewhere would have heard of Horlack, and if any Magi would know, Yasmin would. This needed to go back to Yasmin before they did anything else.

Her mind made up, Amy turned to the room just in time to see two groups of two lending their weight to crow bars to lever open the Slab on the Sarcophagus. The crow bars were inserted into the crack around the edge of the Tomb on the side closest to Amy and the four men where levering open the huge lid.

Amy’s eyes widened in horror and she lunged forward. ‘NO!’ She shouted as the slab lifted slightly with the four men’s weight.

Suddenly, something seemed to snap in the air around them. It wasn’t a sound, nor could they see it, but they all felt it. It felt as though something in their minds, like elastic pulled too tight suddenly gave way and snapped back. The Magic that had been so pervasive in the room only moments before, had disappeared, the lifting of the Slab seemed to have stretched it too much..

Everyone noticed something shift in the room, including it seemed, the thing in the Tomb.

Suddenly an ear splitting roar came from within the great stone sarcophagus, a huge, blood-curdling noise, and with that sound came a feeling that humans seldom experience, the feeling of being something else’s dinner.

BOOM!

The great slab on top of the tomb exploded up and outwards as the huge black shape within came to its feet like a rocket. Great chunks of stone flew across the room with tremendous force, slamming into the walls and exploding again. A couple of the team where unlucky enough to be caught by some of these missiles, they screamed in pain as they were hit.

One of the men who had been levering open the slab caught one massive piece in the chest, it lifted him bodily from the floor, slamming him into the wall right next to Amy. The stone flattened his torso, crushing his rib cage killing him instantly. Amy twisted from the impact covering her face with her arm to protect it from the flying stone, but a small pebble sized stone struck her on the head dazing her momentarily.

Pain shot through her skull and stars filled her vision, she held onto the wall with one hand to steady herself while she blinked the dust from her eyes. For a few moments there were colourful lights in her field of vision while her head swam from the impact trying to get a grip on reality, and then she realised she could feel a warm wetness moving down her forehead. Putting her fingers to it, she looked at them and saw deep crimson blood on her fingers, she was bleeding, but not too much she hoped.

The sharp stabbing pain intensified for a moment and she held her head in her hands. She became vaguely aware of movement and the sounds all around her, but it all seemed very far away right at that moment, as if it were on a TV in another room.

The pain lessened, so she opened her eyes again and noticed the splattering of bloody chunks of flesh over her left arm and leg. Looking left she saw the mangled remains of the scientist crushed by the stone. His mouth hung open in surprise as blood dripped from it and one of his eyes dangling from its socket, popped out by the sheer force of the rock that crushed him. As her senses fully returned to her, she realised that the events that she hoped had been on a TV elsewhere, where in fact very, very real and all around her.

She lifted her head and took in the scene before her. The dust from the exploded stone slab had started to settle in the room and dark shapes began to coalesce from the sandy coloured haze. She saw another of the team who had been hit by a stone; he laid before Amy on his back, his head no more now then ragged bits of viscera and skull. Other forms in the dust began to take shape; team members who were alive and nursing minor wounds stood or crouched, looking in shock and horror at the scene around them. Somewhere, one of the women of the team could be heard weeping. A couple of others were beginning to make more hysterical sounds as the thing in the tomb became clear for all to see.

What had been just a huge black shape in the dust now stood revealed, it might once have been a man, but it had been horrifically twisted by some form of magic eons ago. It must have been easily over twice the height of any man, even though it had to stoop because of the twelve foot high ceiling of this room.

Its body seemed to be pure muscle, huge rippling strength made manifest in a body made for killing. It seemed as wide as it was tall, its great arms hanging by its sides, thick veins running just under the black skin. Its legs were similar to a dog or wolfs, and it had evil looking black claws upon its hands and feet. One of its huge feet gripped the top edge of the tomb, ready to step out of it. The things body had patchy and course thick matted black hair all over it, and the head of this creature looked for all the world like a monstrous bat, its large nose flat upon its face while two huge hairy ears sprouted from its head. Its wide mouth had two huge tusks thrusting upward from its maw as it slavered madly. On its forehead sprouted a thick horn a good two or three foot long. A twisted mockery of a Unicorn’s it looked cancerous and deadly, etched with battle scars. Either side of this, its beady black eyes where flicking from person to person in the room in what looked like hunger and delight. Amy assumed that this must be Horlack. The thing suddenly moved so fast it appeared as little more than a blur, Amy wasn’t ready for such a show of raw power. Being a Magi she had been about ready to come forward and say something to it but it had moved before she had the chance, and that’s when the screaming started. 

One of the men next to the tomb was first, a sudden swing of its great fist flung the scientist against the back wall, bloody, broken and dead before he hit the floor. Horlack lunged forward with one hand to grab a man by the torso, Horlack’s fingers wrapping round his body. At the same time, with its fang filled Maw opened wide Horlack leant forward towards one of the women. Stephanie didn’t have time to scream as her whole head and part of her shoulder disappeared into Horlack’s mouth. Her body panicked and seemed to go into a fit, but when Horlack tensed his jaw and forced it to clamp down on her with a sickening crack of bone she stopped moving, while her head and shoulder came clean away in a spray of gore.

Horlack chewed, crunched and swallowed, reared back and roared at the heavens, it seemed to be revelling in its freedom. The man in his hand struggled and screamed until Horlack slammed his head into the ceiling. Like a raving mad dog Horlack lifted the quivering body to his blood filled mouth and bit a leg clean off before spitting it to the floor where it landed in the lap of the panic stricken Shannon, who still sat on her bum from when the tombs explosion knocked her off her feet. She took one look at the twitching leg and descended into hysterical wailing.

Jonathon, who stood at the back of the room, and seemed to have kept his head a little better, moved forward and kicked one of the lamps at the beast. It bounced off its thigh and landed harmlessly a few metres away, its light extinguished. He brandished one of the teams crowbars while Christopher, his assistant, stood next to him with the second one. The fear etched on their faces told Amy they knew they had no chance, but they clearly wanted to go down fighting. Horlack spun on them and took in what it saw for a moment. A guttural demonic sound came from the Demon, it seemed to be chuckling to itself under its breath, amused at the two brave but ultimately stupid little humans before it. Chris tensed up, holding his iron bar in a threatening manner at Horlack.

‘Come on!’ he barked, his voice breaking with terror.

Horlack moved. Its arm flicked out and the mangled body it held flew across the room and slammed into Chris, smashing him to the floor as the Iron Bar clattered away from his grasp. In the shock he suffered at this action, Jonathon didn’t see Horlack’s other arm snap out. Horlack’s fist clamped round Jonathon’s head and body and squeezed. Jonathon’s legs went into a spasm for a moment as Horlack’s grip crushed him like a grape.

Taking a step forward Horlack lifted up the limp form of Jon and advanced upon Chris who had barely come to his senses. Blood pouring from his head, he looked up just in time to see Horlack’s fist with Jon’s legs poking out from the bottom of it come slamming down on him, blood and viscera exploded from the impact that shuck the room. Horlack lifted his hand to his mouth and licked his dripping palm as his gaze fell on the hysterical woman in the corner, still wide eyed and crying at the torn off leg in her lap. The sound seemed to aggravate Horlack and he moved towards her. Shannon looked up as Horlack’s fist was driven into her so hard that he buried his fist in the wall.

Meanwhile Amy remained silent, keeping to the edge of the room she inched towards the door, trying not to draw Horlack’s attention to her. As she moved along the sidewall, she watched in fascination at this engine of destruction as it tore into the last few team members, clawing and biting and ripping them in two. It lasted just a few seconds. Horlack had killed the whole team in under a minute and with barely breaking a sweat. Amy had made it along the sidewall to the corner of the room, just a short stretch of wall to the doorway and escape. The room had become much darker in the chaos of the massacre as many of the lamps had been smashed. Horlack picked up the last one and gazed at it in fascination. The light bathed his grotesque features in an eerie yellow light in the otherwise dark room.

‘I can still smell that whore.’ It was Horlack’s voice, Amy recognised the same guttural sound that had laughed earlier, a deep resonating sound as if from hell itself.  Amy froze, for a moment she feared Horlack was talking about her, but Horlack had his back to Amy and seemed to be contemplating something. She could hear the air being sucked into his nostrils as he sniffed, and in the glow of the lamp, Horlack noticed something, the carved statement on the wall that Amy had found earlier. Horlack reached out with one great hand and traced a finger over the engraving. It seemed to anger him suddenly and his features began to twist with hate.

‘I’ll find you! I’ll find you and rip you limb from limb for what you did!’ He was talking to the carved script, or rather whoever had written the script, and with a sudden show of rage he punched the wall, obliterating the scratched warning.

This made Amy jump it was so sudden, she scrambled for purchase amongst the rubble but only steadied herself after a second of noisy movement. Had she yelped as well?

When she looked up, it was right into the black orbs that were Horlack’s eyes. The sudden intense and insanity inducing fear that racked her body and flooded her mind at that moment was almost too much. She managed to stop herself from calling out, but she couldn’t hold her bladder and she felt the warm liquid trickle down her thigh, but she wasn’t embarrassed.

Horlack moved forward on all fours from the other side of the room and eyed her curiously. Blood and saliva dripped and bubbled from his mouth as he seemed to be taking her in, measuring her up. Amy wanted to run, to flee from the room, but she felt rooted to the spot, her fear held her with a death grip.

‘A Magi huh?’ Horlack said.

Amy just stared up at it for a moment. She could smell its musk, she could smell the blood and gore in the room, it filled her nostrils and Amy knew at that moment that she wouldn’t survive this, just like everyone else in this room.