Chapter 15: Chapter 7, Part 2

“It seems safe up here!” I yelled down the hatch. I’d somehow become the room-checking person, which did amuse me a bit. Besides, it gave me time to stare at things by myself, which I do enjoy. Tove came up first, and I offered her a hand (my left) to help lift her up, which she gratefully took. Alf followed, and I made the same offer, which was batted away with a mumbled complaint about him ‘not being that old’. I didn’t offer for Eoin. Call me petty, but it’s only because, deep down, I am petty.

They each stared at the room, before turning their attention to me. “How does this look safe to you?” Alf asked. I looked at him, honestly a bit perplexed.

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Hmm, now that’s a really good question actually, why don’t I take a while and think about it.” He paused, gazing into the middle distance and stroking his beard for dramatic effect before snapping his fingers (equally dramatically, I might add). “Well I think I’ve got it,” he declared, sweeping his hand across the room as he continued. “I daresay it’s: ALL THESE FUCKING BODIES!”

(Sidenote: I know I’ve been making jokes about the ear damage, but I was starting to worry about it and getting screamed at from right in my face didn’t help.) “I’m right here, you don’t have to shout” I said, digging a finger into my ear to try and dispel some of the ringing. “Fine ‘the bodies’, but what about them?” He just stared at me with a confused sort of anger.

“What about them? What about them?!” He turned around back to the others, gesturing vaguely at me. “It’s official,” he said, “they’ve cracked.” His voice trailed off into more muttering, which I didn’t catch but was clearly being rude about me.

“Indy,” Tove said gently, “is this another ‘don’t worry about bodies, worry about what makes them’ moments?”

“Well, yeah.”

“And so, don’t you think we should worry about what made these bodies?” She was using that very kind speech pattern that patient people use when they are trying to get someone to realise they are being silly or making a mistake. The one where you want them to come to the right conclusion themselves, but you definitely still want them to get there, ideally without them feeling belittled – just feeling a bit stupid is fine though.

I could hear it, but I still felt fairly immune to the underlying message. “Look,” I explained, “these bodies were made by time. You can worry about that if you want, but I have some bad news if you do.” I wandered around a bit, idly poking a corpse or two. “They were soldiers, or officers anyway. My guess is they had orders to ‘do their duty to the end’ or something patriotic like that, and then did.” It was an alien concept to me, but these were different people, and it had been a different time. You certainly wouldn’t catch me doing anything I didn’t have to for the King of Vigridr, stupid motherfucker that he was.

Nalfis piped up. “And these overturned chairs, burn marks, and general chaos then? Is that also normal?” I could at least tell that he was being jovial about it, but it seemed everyone was keen on getting a good answer. Sadly, I didn’t have one. “Maybe,” I said. None of them were pleased by that, but I held my hands up and continued. “Fine,” I conceded. “Maybe you’re right to be worried. Maybe everyone around us died a screaming, prolonged, unimaginably horrific death as their bones ignited from the inside. Maybe they felt every single moment in every single tiny piece of their body as their flesh charred and their blood boiled; as the air in their lungs turned to smoke and their teeth cracked. Maybe they have hollow eye sockets because they could do nothing but suffer as they burst and leaked down their faces; maybe-”

“Gods above, we get the picture,” Alf complained. “Now could you please make your point instead of indulging your disgustingly overactive imagination?”

“Though I have you credit you for the vividness of your storytelling,” Nalfis kindly added. “So palpably visceral.”

“Thank you Nalfis,” I smiled. I just made a rude gesture at Alf. “But fine. My point is, even if that was the case, then so what? These guys have been dead longer than any of us have been alive. Even him,” (no prizes for guessing who I pointed at), “and he looks dead himself!”

“So that’s it?” Alf asked. “We’re not to worry about why the people who commanded this still-functioning war machine all died, at a similar time, in the same place, and for unknown reasons, purely because it happened a long time ago?”

“Gang, I’m running out of quippy answers to give that amount to ‘yes’.” It looked clear to me that Alf at the very least wanted to continue this conversation on general principles, but it was also clear to him that he wasn’t going to get a better answer. Tove also seemed a little bit concerned, though Nalfis was fairly relaxed. I think he was a ‘go with the flow’ kind of character.

Eventually, after a few more uncertain moments, everyone broke off to have a proper look around. Eoin piped up as we did. “If it’s all the same to you, I’m going to wait down below, where there are fewer corpses.”

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“Why?” asked Tove. “You scared?” He just rolled his eyes and vanished down through the hatch. None of us particularly cared, so we went back to poking about the place. We all had different ideas, but I wanted to take another look at that command desk, since I had the major advantage of being able to read Gnomish. Even if most of what had ever been in here was burned, stained, torn, faded, or a mixture of those, I could hope for something interesting.

Tove had gone to prod some of the bodies. I watched with half an eye as she cast a clinical eye over each one, documenting their states, comparing any sort of injuries, and probably a few other things I didn’t understand. Her faint whispering as she worked provided a nice ambient sound. Alf took a cursory wander, aimlessly drifting, until his eyes alighted on the grand chair stood front and centre. His eyes lit with the reflected golden light, and he began a nonchalant stroll over to it, as if to make it look like he wasn’t interested in it whatsoever. Nalfis seemed happy enough just to watch everything, but he did so with a look of concentration and a great deal of muttering. His fingers made strange, abstract shapes, and occasionally he would shake his head, screw his eyes shut, and start over. Mildly weird.

I looked back to my table, and started shifting through the scraps of intact ‘stuff’. Some had been vellum, which stands up to time much better and was therefore a win for me. In fact I was having a whole sequence of wins. An old battleplan, complete with orders, corrections, and positions of enemy forces was nearly completely intact, and I was nearly salivating over it already. A few other sheets, although a bit burned, had survived with enough writing that I really had something to get my teeth into here. I had just started on one titled ‘Operational Reports’ when Alf spoke.

“Not to sound alarmist and repetitive,” he began, almost nervously, “but can I be worried about this body?” I looked up to see him standing just on the other side of the Captain’s chair, and belatedly remembered that not only had I not seen the front of it, but also that the seat of it was more than large enough to hide a dead Gnome. Still, if I’d said it once, I’d said it a hundred times: Gnomes that have been dead for many hundreds of years are not scary. I stood up from one of the cool spinning chairs I had claimed, and suppressed a sigh as I trudged the whole 2 or 3 metres over to him.

His tone should really have clued me in, but in this case I was willing to agree that this was, in fact, a worrying body. I suddenly felt this sense of very awkward guilt as I reflected on the monologue I’d made about the gruesome deaths of people in this room, and compared it to the pinched, gaunt face in front of me.

When I’d said the words ‘screaming, prolonged, unimaginably horrific death’, I had been working with the fertile soil of my brain to provide a mental image of what ‘unimaginably horrific’ might be. On the one hand, therefore, I was happy that I apparently couldn’t imagine something this bad. I felt like that painted me in a virtuous light. On the other hand, I was exceedingly fucking upset that I had to find out.

If you’re bored of my long descriptions, or don’t like to read about gruesome things in immense detail, then you can probably skip a few paragraphs here. I’ll put a little one-line paragraph in where the story actually starts again. For myself though, I think I owe it to the girl in the chair to share exactly what it is I remember of it – which is a pretty damn pristine recollection, on account of how it seared into my brain. If you’re on board with that, read on.

I nearly vomited. It’s an unflattering admission, but the first thing I experienced was the rebellion of my body, driven by how perversely unnatural this was. My knees gave. My vision flitted between blurry and double, doing its best not to focus on the seat. My head swam as dizziness overtook it. My breathing went off automatic control, and I could hardly find the willpower to start it again. My stomach turned and roiled, bile filling my throat instead of air.

She wasn’t a Gnome. She was a Human girl, and I mean girl – not woman. 14 at most. My heart nearly collapsed under the sheer weight of an unfamiliar empathy. I found it disturbingly easy to picture myself sat where she was sat, subjected to what she had been subjected to. Her body hadn’t decayed in the same way as the Gnomes’ had, but the scraps of clothing and other ‘accessories’ still proved that she was from the same time.

Her face wasn't the horrified scream I might have implied. Instead, it was a gentle serenity that I think was even more unsettling. Her cheeks were sunken but not rotted, her eyes closed, lips curled into the gentlest smile. Her hair was long and faded – it looked strawberry-blonde, but each strand had now dried out enough that they were petrified, as brittle and fragile as spun sugar.

The rest of her body was thin as well, but far from healthy. What remained of her clothing hung loosely off her, cut for a person who actually had flesh, instead of just skin and bones. The clothes themselves looked like they’d once been a boilersuit, and had barely any decoration apart from strips of leather holding it together in places. The sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, and I could glimpse a mess of scars on her right wrist. I know how that feels, I thought, absently rubbing at a wrist that no longer existed on me, remembering the trap that took it, and the flames that scorched it. A phantom itch flared up there, as if just to remind me.

You could be forgiven for thinking this wasn’t too bad so far. A teenage girl, dead from probable malnourishment, preserved far too well for her apparent age, of the wrong race for this place, and smiling even in death – all of this is awful and wrong, but still fell within a normal range of fucked-up. What broke the first barrier into the truly appalling was the blood. It had pooled beneath her wrists. It had run down her legs, emerging out from beneath the cuffs of her destroyed trousers to congeal around her bare feet. It had streamed out of her nose and stained her mouth with this macabre imitation of lipstick. It had even burst out of both her ears, where some had run along the underside of her jawbone, and some had dripped onto her shoulders.

The second part was the clamps. At forehead, wrist, and ankle, brass clamps had affixed this girl to the chair, holding her there until she had clearly expired. The skin at each of those points had been rubbed raw, but with how much the body had now withered, it seemed the limbs were small enough to slide right out. Still, it was obvious that she’d tried to free herself at some point. In vain.

Description over.