I would think often about what I saw on those walls within the subterranean chamber. The ochre and cerulean paint daubed there, depicting events from over eight thousand years ago when the Ilner walked the Ruin.
When an SF ODA— Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha team—had arrived much too early to the party, and much too late at the same time. And what had become of them.
The rest of the team was busy securing the objective and getting us ready for the next breach. Kennedy and Soprano and one of the snipers got interested in what was in the bottoms of the fantastic golden sarcophagi. There was wealth untold just within this first room. Gems and tribal jewelry worked in silver and gold. The off-base pawn shops we weren’t supposed to hawk our gear at would’ve paid top dollar for this stuff. Any Ranger would have been Charlie Potatoes that weekend. There were sacks full of coins stamped with the image of that same tribal-looking SF skull and crossed arrows.
The Lost Boys entered the room—Kurtz didn’t want them involved in any fighting, so they were our perpetual tail. They stood, mouths agape, as they took in the treasure. But they made no move to touch any of it. That to me felt like a warning, but it was soon too late to voice the concern.
One of the snipers picked up a gem and died thirty seconds later, just falling over and going into sudden shock, his body convulsing for no discernible reason. Kurtz had no idea what was wrong with him but frantically worked to save the guy by hitting him with an anti-chemical agent injector to see if that would do anything. It didn’t, and after a moment the man’s body ceased its shaking and twitching.
It was Autumn who diagnosed the fatality.
“Poison,” she whispered. “He has… been poisoned.”
She was kneeling down, searching the treasure the sniper had been pulling out from the bottom of that sarcophagus. Using her small curved dagger, she separated one gem from the rest. It was the most vibrantly beautiful emerald I’d ever seen.
“This one has… a curse… on it,” she informed me.
I looked over at the dead sniper on the floor. He had turned purple.
Dead from an inability to consume oxygen. But not just through the lungs. All at once. Almost everywhere. As though his entire cellular structure had suddenly decided oxygen was poison. Every cell had been strangled. Individually.
“Maybe from the plague,” said Tanner. “Saw stuff like that on YouTube before they shut it down. Could be something left over from the nano- plague.”
“Leave all of it alone and let’s get ready to move,” said Kurtz angrily. “Sergeant Thor… your section good with leaving him until we’re mission complete? Then we come back down here later to retrieve. I’ll do it myself.”
Thor, standing wide-legged near the body like some weightlifter priest getting ready to pronounce the Mass of Rifle Blessing and Mass Gains, slung rifle hanging straight down across his massive chest and rig, large hands clasped over the deadly weapon, nodded that that would do for now.
The dead would be addressed. But they would be addressed later. After the killing and payback had been done.
I took in as much of the crypt wall frescoes as I could before it was time to move. Because what I was looking at was like looking at some future history of us. Of what the detachment could become.
If we made all the wrong choices. Tanner agreed.
“We’re lookin’ at us, Talk,” he murmured in the busy silence of objective-securing. Tanner. The guy who’d only come along for the ride because he thought it was a pretty solid way to ditch both ex-strippers and beat the inevitable Article 15 coming from that DUI last month and ten thousand years ago. Now he was waxing all philosophic at the dark art we were unraveling along the walls of a tomb.
It was clear that the dead in this chamber, the now dead again, the almost skeletal warriors PFC Kennedy had called wights, were servants of the Ilner. The pictures told their story.
Kings who’d ruled a seacoast to the frozen north.
Log houses like the hulls of ships against pack ice and jagged mountains.
Trade in grains with the south. Trade with dark-faced men wearing lion skins who carried shining spears. As though the men were actually lions
who walked like men.
That could be a problem, I thought. If we’re all out of bullets.
Then the Ilner came and made slaves of the Ice Kings. There was war and fire written on the walls. Battles that must’ve been huge, on the order of the old Civil War. The lower half of the wall was littered in stick-figure corpses done to death by the Ilner and their strange grim-faced warriors. And the host of warriors that answered their banner and call.
Study close enough and you began to see there were twelve recurring figures in all these scenes of conquest and violence. Twelve Ilner.
A Special Forces Alpha Detachment is made up of twelve guys. Tanner hipped me to that as we studied the drawings that were somewhere between Egyptian hieroglyphs and early Bronze Age cave paintings. Meanwhile, Kurtz kept up the hustle to get ready to crack the next door and keep moving. It was a simple door made of rotting wood that led deeper into the tomb. Whether we liked it or not, that was the only way to go.
Brumm was already on that door. Guarding it until we decided to give it a go.
There was a map on one section of the wall. A crude map of the world as they knew it then. The twelve recurring figures, the Ilner, had conquered far and wide throughout much of northern Europe eight thousand years ago before the Dragon Elves rose to power. Wars against some kind of ice men of the north. Wars against the orcs and trolls of the south. Orcs and trolls like savage pagans who worshipped an eight-armed god that otherwise looked like them. A battle in jagged mountains against huge slavering trolls with giant fangs.
Much death. Much fire.
But despite all this, they, the Ilner, carved out their own kingdom in the Bronze Age of the Early Ruin after all we had once known had gone the way of the dodo.
We followed the drawings around the wall, seeing where the Ice Kings, as the wights had once been in life, were defeated and sacrificed in battle to an almost Egyptian lizard that walked upright like a man.
I wondered if this was the Saur old Vandahar had told of. Saura. Foul.
Evil. Contemptible.
“Talker!” It was Kurtz hissing at me. Getting everyone organized. “If there ain’t a floor plan on that wall, then it ain’t important.”
Starting in the northwestern corner of the room, by the time I was halfway down the second wall of the fresco, the twelve Ilner not-men had gone from being what clearly looked like US Army personnel in contemporary gear similar to what we were wearing to sacrificing their enemies to the dark lizard pharaoh. Being rewarded with strange powers and weapons. Being treated like gods to the peoples they had put in chains and made slaves of.
There was time enough before Kurtz declared “guns up” for me to chance a glance at the third wall. Shadowy there. Or at least that’s what I thought at first. But no, the paints and pigments there were darker in tone. And what I saw along that section of the wall was death, destruction, and what looked like hell on Earth. Or the Ruin, as it was now known.
The twelve gods presided over that wall like grim death watching a mad harvest of corpses and destruction. The story on that wall was not good.
We’re lookin’ at us, Tanner had said. Was that prophetic? A guess? Or just the wisdom of a grunt who’d been there, seen that, and gotten the scar to learn from it?
Wisdom can be acquired regardless of rank.
