Eye of Darkness (Part Twenty-Six)

As their eyes adjusted to the new illumination, their vision cleared and the light settled into a bleak, grey, even glow. It was cast by five softly shining crystal orbs, four sitting on plinths in the corners of the room, the fifth attached to the roof like a miniature moon. They revealed a starkly furnished room, perhaps fifty feet square, planed and smoothed with more precision than anything Ogre-made had ever been.

Belmok stepped cautiously inside, Thron at his heels with drawn sword, and both turned their heads slowly left and right, looking for any clues to the room’s purpose. There was little to see.

In the middle of the room there appeared to be a platform, rectangular in form, ten feet long and five wide. Its top reflected the light like a sheet of ice. All along the walls ran a raised ledge, like a shelf or a bench, about three feet deep. There was nothing on the shelf, or the center platform. The Morgs could see that from where they stood just inside the doorway. They started a little when the door swung quietly shut behind them, heavily pivoting on its weighted hinges, and closed with tiniest of sounds.

They paused, holding their breath, waiting to see if anything would happen. After a minute of nothing, Thron looked at Belmok. He reached back and pushed tentatively on the door. It opened easily, then swung back again with the same sigh and quiet thump. Thron shrugged. It was obviously not a trap.

Belmok sighed in relief. He gestured them forward.

“Let’s take a closer look,” he whispered hoarsely. “There may be some detail that will give us a clue about this place. Look for marks or carvings. Remember, touch nothing.”

“Don’t look like there’s anything to touch,” Thron muttered.

They began by examining at the shelf, starting at the right and moving to the left. There was little on the surface of the ledge except some round stains, as if bowls or beakers had been carelessly placed on it and never cleaned, and burns here and there like fire or acid. But Belmok’s keen eyes noticed something on the wall behind the shelf.

Every now and then there appeared on the wall faint scratchings, as if someone had written on it with a piece of chalk, and then erased it. There were single words, and sometimes clusters. They were in letters totally unfamiliar to his scholarly eye.

He pointed them out to Thron, who squinted at them and frowned. “Not like Ogre-scratch,” he said. “Not at all.”

Belmok took out a bit of parchment and a pencil. “Perhaps Leren will know,” he said quietly, and began sketching them down as they went along, the soldier watching impatiently as they paused at each new faded palimpsest.

“Will you hurry up? I want to get out of this room, this city, and this whole damn mountain!”

“I did not travel all this way not to be thorough,” said Belmok testily, making precise marks on the parchment. They had almost finished a circle around the room. “Besides, I am almost done. There is something, something important about this place, and we shall find it.” He made a copy of the last letters with a flourish. “Now, let’s look at that platform. There might be some clue there as well.”

As they approached it, the reflected light on the shiny surface seemed to move with them, and as they drew near, darkened with their reflection. They bowed in for a nearer look, then exhaled in shock at what they saw.

“Well, I’d say that’s an important clue,” said Thron, when he got his breath back.

The object in the center of the room was not a table. It was not a dais. It was a sarcophagus, covered with a sheet of material like glass, and underneath, taking up a little over half the length of the hollow within, revealed now in the shadow of their bending heads, was a body.

At first glance it looked like only another Ogre, and maybe just a thrall at that, except for its swollen head, which declared it to be growing to Great Ogre size. There was something about its body and limbs that was disconcerting as it lay still, its trunk swathed in coverlets of what looked like fine linen, totally unlike the dark rough iron-silk of all the other Ogres they had seen.

“What is it?” murmured Thron, in angry puzzlement. “What is this … thing? Is it a tomb? A shrine? Why would the Ogres honor this ugly little goblin, of all things? And in such secrecy, too!”

“I don’t know,” breathed Belmok, eyes transfixed. He studied the body carefully. “But look! Look at its arms, its legs.” He pointed slowly with one black nail, carefully not touching the glass. “They’re not spindly or crooked like an ordinary Ogre. The muscles are not long or ropy. When this creature stood, it stood like a Morg or a Man.”

Thron leaned in closer, eyes squinting.

“Mog’s beard!” he said in wonder. “Aye! And look. Its neck! Its shoulders! It has shoulders! This … this ain’t no Ogre I ever seen. This is some kind of misborn freak!”

“But it’s an Ogre, all right,” Belmok said. “That’s fairly obvious from the head.” He seemed distracted then, peering closely at the face, studying it. He frowned. “Although even that seems different somehow …”

“Ah, shit!” said Thron, drawing away in sudden disgust. “Ah, Belg’s pugging bunghole! It’s got eyelids on those buggy eyes! No Ogre’s got eyelids. What is this monstrosity? Shit!”

“So it does.” Belmok looked at it curiously, as he remembered that the usual Ogre had only a transparent membrane to moisten its bulging purple eyes. “Is this some sort of mutation?” he wondered. “What do they want with it? Why … Oh, ah!”

The big Morg pulled away. He glanced at Thron, and then around the room as if not knowing where to look. He put the staff stiffly into the crook of his arm, pulled out his ocular from the tunic under his armor, and began polishing it vigorously if absently on his sleeve, as if he hardly knew what he was doing.

“What? What is it?” Thron asked.

“It’s breathing,” said Belmok shortly, putting the glass in his eye. “It’s alive.”

For a few seconds Thron was taking aback, but then he narrowed his eyes and gripped his sword tighter.

“Well, we can soon fix that,” he barked in disgust, and before the big Morg could reach out or protest the soldier had raised his blade and put one black clawed hand on the glass to pry it open.

Belmok saw two things happen very quickly. The creature’s eyelids flew open, mindlessly, reflexively, and stared upward with blank purple glowing eyes. At the same instant Thron was knocked backward as if by an explosion and went sprawling across the floor to hit the opposite wall with a crash of battered flesh and clashing armor. The scholar looked transfixed in horror as the baleful bulbous eyes started slowly closing, and then as if released from that startling, transfixing gaze, rushed over to kneel down and examine his companion.

Belmok first made sure Thron had no broken bones and then helped him sit up. Thron was shaking his head to clear it, and Belmok was looking into his eyes to see if they were fixed, when both started with dread at a voice that suddenly sneered behind them.

Notes

The picture of 'Ferrus' began life as an effort to re-imagine Ogres into something not quite so spindly and mushroom-like, but when I came to write this story decades later, I incorporated the differences into the tale. More shall be explained in the next section.