Despite the strange spectacle, he still watched in a mixture of fear and lust. For a moment he had worried the water hid some great serpent, but instead it held a surprise the cutthroat not been prepared for. This was why wise men did not trust sorcerers, by Dagon. She was toying with him, he angrily theorized. This would not do for the thief, and so he sprang into action. With the grace of a panther, he scaled the incline of the stones and leaped off at its highest elevation, soaring over the water to splash and land right behind the voluptuous woman, pressing his knife to her throat.

By all the gods, he should have cut her slim neck then and there, but her scent overwhelmed him just as the curves of her form pressed to his. Her beauty was even more captivating up close, but truthfully, he was more curious than anything. Why would she seek him of all the theives in Xarame, and there were very many. Amal had the strength and ferocity of an ape, palpably apparent as he wrapped his strong arm about her waist and pressed the knife to her neck, giving her just enough room to gaze into his dark shemite eyes, the smell of poorly bought alcohol on his breath.

"Do not play games with me, Witch-priestess," he said in her ear, deathly calm. The waters began to recede about them, whatever magics she intoned draining away to nothingness. "What is it you want of me? Speak any words that do not answer my question, and you are dead."

His eyes glinted in the torchlight, and she knew he was serious. Amal would not let any sorcerer or sorceress speak any arcane words to cast a spell as long as he could help it, and so he was prepared for the moment she attempted it. But as he looked at her, he added: "Speak what may please me, and you will yet live." softly. She had either cast a spell on him, or he earnestly was too curious to let the matter drop with a slit throat and a quick run from the scene. Some god wished his presence for some reason, and it may prove beneficial to know why.

Plus, he had never had stygian woman before.

It had been said by irreverent that the gods had a sense of humor. As the blade pressed against her throat Sythemis wondered if it they had a point. She should still a desert statue, motionless save for the throb of her heartbeat in her supple body. For a moment they stood together in silence.

"I asked Ishtar to reveal a great thief to me," Sythemis said calmly and simply.

"I did not expect her to answer so swiftly," she admitted truthfully. That was something of an understatement, by Temple Law it was death for any man to set foot within this chamber. It should have been impossible for anyone to find there way into this hallowed space.

His strong hand grabbed her neck to cow her, though he doubted even he could do that. Here she was in his embrace, blade poking into her teasingly, and she seemed to have the power of him in the conversation. The slender, shining skin of her neck tantalizing in the firelight. "Well, I am a great thief. Ishtar did not lie on that count. But that is not the entire picture. You will tell it to me and more."

He readjusted his grip on her, hoisting her up in his arms, his eyes never leaving hers. He was afraid she could bewitch him in such a fashion, but he couldn't risk taking his gaze off of her. She had to ring her arms around his neck after he ascended the stairs and began climbing, the acrobatic rogue easily able to haul her up with his ape-like strength.

"Perhaps your bite is poisonous... Perhaps you have a hidden blade... I would not be surprised if you could slither out of my grasp despite your lush body, but kill me or escape, and you will fall to your death, serpent woman." He warned, breathing into her ear as she was lifted off the ground and sent to the roof of the temple. The women began to wail in despair and call after him to return her, but he ignored them. Soon they leaped from rooftop to rooftop, his biceps rippling like a constrictor as he grabbed ledges and nooks in the walls he scaled, until finally she was unceremoniously dropped onto her ass on a dusty floor within an old tower of shemite design, only used twice a year during the equinoxes to light the great fires of Xarame during their lavish festivals.

Amal crouched before her, his teeth shining in the dark as he grinned ferociously. He toyed with his knife on his left hand, the hilt and blade flipping as it undulated between his flowing fingers.

"I advise you to begin speaking. You are tempting to look upon, but even I am growing bored without an explanation. Now speak."

Sythemis worked hard to control her breathing and still the swell of her chest. Many times she had stood before the serpents of great Set, whose bit was death and who feasted upon fear. Many times she had delved into ancient tombs for hidden relics or fragments of arcane lore from creatures whose form and memory were lost to the minds of men. All these things she had done but never had she felt herself so surely on the edge of death. The glittering knife and hard eyes of the thief were a hot death, not the cold of a serpent’s fang or antediluvian spell. It thrilled her to consider.



“For three hundred and thirty three years a precious jewel has lingered in Xareme,” she began, her voice was melodic but lacked any suggestion of hypnosis of coercion sure to bring a swift hot stroke of the blade.

“It is no earthly gem, but a piece of the Moon itself, fetched back in the times before men rose from the mud of the southern jungles, from before great Atlantis was sunk beneath the waves. Strange beasts brought it in their black galleys which rode the stars on their thousand oars and silver sails,” she explained, gesturing up to the waning gibbous moon that hung above the spires of the city. It seemed to peer down at them like the lidded eye of a waking lover, warm and expectant.

“Once there were many such gems, prized by the Elder race above gold and silver, above even the glittering anthrax for which they traded armies of slaves and mountains of riches. They are gone now, taken up to the stars or lost in the abyssal depths to the hunger of things that lay below the ocean which men fear to even think of save in the dim recesses of dreams,” the stygian continued, her words redolent with forgotten lore and the blasphemous secrets of past ages which had been dredged from the ancient crypts, or drawn from the lips of things long dead but undying.



“Only one such gem now remains upon the earth, locked in a chamber within the Emir’s palace,” Sythemis continued, nothing the glimpse of hungry avarice on the thief’s hard face with pleasure.

“It is written that during the dark of the moon, in this auspicious year, a great thief will come to Xareme and take the jewel. The Emir’s astrologers have seen this written in the stars, as others have seen it in augury and dream. I have come to Xareme to make this prophecy come true so that I may lay my hand upon the Moon Stone. One who has touched it may ask a boon of the moon, and I have such a boon to ask.”



The air shivered as warm wind blew in of the desert, the smell of hot sand and the cedar of the distant hillsides that made Xareme famous throughout the cradle of the world.

“I asked Ishtar to reveal to me the thief that would take the stone, and you stood before me in a chamber where you ought not stand, in a temple which you ought not enter.”

There was no dark magic in her voice, and yet Amal could see the jewels of the outer void. Their glimmer in the light of the moon and the mesmerizing glint that begged for his fingers to grasp it. The thief almost reached out as if waking from a dream. He had never been one for histories, but the rise and fall of nations were in her tale, and even the sand beneath their feet seemed to stir as if in awe of the majesty of ages past. Amal was a reaver, slayer, murderer, and thief, but the last was the greatest of his talents. What manner of thief would he be if he did not steal the greatest jewel of the land?

His eyes snapped back to reality and regarded the pythoness, realizing he had almost fallen for her honeyed words. Stygians were ever a danger to those they put into their schemes or portents, and he did not trust her. He considered his options, and realized it would be far wiser to heed his perspicacity and cut her throat here, letting this legend die with her black blood spilled in this loney tower. And yet greed was too great of a seductress to him, and he was hungry for her despite his misgivings.

"My wont is to enter places I cannot go and and stand in places no man can. I have seen the serpent temples of your country, sorceress, though your kind did not know it. I saw what lay there, though I dare not speak it. I have been to the Scarlet Citadel of Koth, and escaped its clutches unscathed, though it nearly took my life." He looked at the blade of his knife as he spoke, the steel gleaming in the light of the moon. The light illuminated his dread eyes, the orbs as sharp as his whalebone dagger.

Beneath them, men had come out to bandy and drink, shouting to one another in their differing tongues and laughing with great mirth. Even the most remote places in Xarames had men stumble upon it, when taken to drink. The only dangers in the city were of Amal's ilk. A knife in the dark or poison in your cup. But beneath the Emir's palace, perhaps there were more dangers than those that men could pose. He would find out, he knew.

"I will play the role of what you say I am. I will take the jewel and more besides, but if you betray me, I will open your belly and leave you to bleed." He warned. Amal knew the Witch-Priestess knew the price for betrayal regardless, but he wished to make it clear. He stood up from his menacing crouch, and with a deft twist imperceptible to the eye his knife was sheathed within his shagreen belt, swathed within a softer sash that no doubt hid further dangers.

"Does your prophecy tell us of an entrance, or must I find one?"

Sythemis let out a weird shuddering sigh as he sheathed the knife. Behind her the stars seemed to grow brighter and the moon seemed to pulse for a moment like a living heart. She wrapped her arms around the thief, the motion oddly devoid of human warmth despite the soft and pleasant feel of smooth skin.

“There are more sources of wisdom than that which is whispered by the stars,” she told him. The priestess opened her mouth and breathed, and something silvery and smelling of sharp spices came from her mouth like a hot breath on a winter’s morning. Amal had time to stiffen before paralysis locked his limbs, and his vision dimmed down to the dark pinpricks of her eyes before finally going black.



When Amal awoke he was in a dungeon. Heavy iron chain had been fastened around his wrists with cunning locks. The cell was small and barred with rods of rusted iron. Festering straw, rank with filth and death covered the floor. Screams could be heard in the distance, the eerie repetition of them bespeaking madness rather than simple pain. Torches of rancid fat guttered and burned in the hallway beyond like snapping dogs. The Black Cells were immediately recognizable from legend, even if few had ever returned to describe them. The Emir’s personal dungeons, deep beneath his spire.



“Awake is it,” a paunchy jailor asked. He had a lazy eye and a wound on his right cheek that constantly leaked some foul-smelling exudate. He cuffed at it with a filthy tunic sleeve.

“The last two she brought down here died without waking,” the jailers told him conversationally.



“I guess this means we will have some time to have fun with you before we take your tongue and your fingers,” he went on brightly. The plump man got up and hurled a chicken bone he had been gnawing on at Amal. It struck him on the chest and dropped to the floor.

“That's your dinner, you should enjoy it while you still have teeth to chew,” the jailer advised, the pulled up his torch and headed off down the hallway, the light fading until Amal was left in near total darkness.

What he had initially taken as a carnal endeavor had turned into somehow both a fitful and yet deep sleep. He had let his guard down, and while he hadn't paid the ultimate price, it was a hefty one. His body ached, but he still had strength in him. He spat venomous curses at the woman, wanting nothing more than to get his hands on her, and not for anything pleasant. He had gotten out of worse, though this one had particularly caught him off-guard. Amal swore he would get out of here, and when he did he would do as he said and opened her belly with his knife.

Amal looked at the man as he casually tossed him a chicken bone, seeing the sneer and watching him walk away into the dank halls of the dreaded cells. As the moments passed, he felt his wrath go from overwhelming to a distant simmer, and he could think more clearly. The fat gaoler had a point. He slid his foot out of its sandal, and he felt around on the floor until his heel bumped into the chicken bone. Sliding the object between his big toe and secondary one, he lifted his leg up by its side and bit into the bone a dozen times with his molars until it snapped in half. He coughed and spat out the lesser side, and arched his back to reach his foot above his head, limber as the apes that lurked south of Kush. He did not know precisely how long he worked at the lock, but he knew the usual shemite mechanisms, and eventually the sharpened bone served as a suitable lock-pick.

He felt success flood into him as the manacle snapped open, and he grinned evilly.

He placed the bone in his freed hand and picked the lock of the other, and it was during this that he smelled something rotten and awful, followed by a raspy voice of one who seemed on the brink of dehydration.

"What know you of the Serpent woman?" It asked. Amal looked to where he heard the voice. A lean, gangly old man with a wispy beard gripped the bars and looked at him with sullen eyes. He looked so malnourished and weaselly, Amal felt a strong breeze would break his bones and rip the beard off his pointed chin. He looked at Amal as if he was the key to the world's redemption, and it both disturbed and confused the cutthroat. The smell, he realized, was from the old man's mouth. "Know you the secret of what she seeks?"

"What I know is she will die," Amal promised softly as his next manacle popped open. The bone was still sharp, and so he kept it in his hand as he got to his feet, the thews of his limbs were as ready as the day he had first murdered a man. "Do not get in my way, elder, or you will be first."

"All die, thief." He croaked, reaching for Amal as if he could touch him from across the cells. "But there is more to you and the priestess. More you have yet to finish. But my task is done, though my spirit yearns for life." His last word ended in a long breath, and to Amal's horror, snakes began to slither out of the aged vagabond, his mouth, nostrils, and ears like venom pits, and his form went from lean to naught but bones and skin like rags. Amal stepped away from the spent corpse, and to his left he suddenly noticed the door to his cell was open.

The old man was not reaching for Amal, but the door. He had opened it, somehow. The serpents coiled away into the darkness as Amal felt a chill run up his spine.

There was only one way up from the Black Cells. It wound up a set of basalt stairs, cut too tall for the easy tread of men, though whether to allow the egress of fouler things, or simply to make the passage harder was unclear. The stairs opened onto a room paved with the most intricate mosaic Amal could imagine. It seemed the whole of the city was picked out in tiny tiles of white ceramic, the variations from ivory to a dull brown barely enough to provide contrast. Amal realized they were human fingerbones, cut and polished flat. In the center of the room, perhaps thirty paces away, a man in a snow white robe and a blindfold as black as night sat cross legged. Here, where the Tower would have been, the fingerbones lost their flat cross section and regained themselves reaching up to grasp at the mans legs like drowning victims reaching for a hand. It was very bright, moonlight shafting down from some place impossibly far above through some clever trick of mirrors and engineering. The whole tableau seemed to glow like the stars on fresh snowfall.



“Welcome thief,” the robed figure said and lifted his left hand. Tendrils of light whipped around Amal’s wrists and thighs. They were no solid thing but they burned like fire. Smaller tendrils spread out from their parents, coiling and hooking.

“Long have I pondered the secret of the old man, and long have I wondered what this so called Stygian priestess sought. I have long known that she bent the ear of the Emir with her filthy trickery but to what end I had not yet divined,” he stated, making a gesture that lifted Amal into the air. The pain grew more intense, like standing too close to a fire that was flaring hotter and hotter.

“Little wonder a fool such as you should choose to aid her. You all see only how she appears on the outside, but a pleasant curve can hide things that a man might not want to see. Shall I tell you? You are after all going to die so the secret does you no good, and perhaps it might bring you some extra measure of torment in hell? Well…” The man’s voice suddenly cut off as a red line appeared from ear to ear. For a moment the man seemed shocked. Then the red line began to pour down his white robe in a torrent of blood, soaking the pristine fabric in moments.

“You always talked too much Antiachus,” Sythemeis stated. Her hand gripped the white robed man’s cowl and the knife in her hand sawed back and forth, the edge grating against the bone. The fingers on the ground spasmed as blood rained down upon them and their color darkened to black. The ebon hue began to spread from tile to tile like dye poured into clear water. The fiery ropes of light holding the thief aloft vanished as the old man, the Wizard Antiachus, coughed his death rattle. The priestess had not succeded in severing the head, despite her strenuous effort so she let the ruined corpse fall forward into the embrace of grasping fingerbones.

“Run!” she called to Amal as the stain spread.

“You must reach this side of the chamber without touching the black, move, for your soul dont tarry!”

Amal loathed sorcery. Somehow he had become engrossed with cabals of rival mystics, and he wanted nothing more to be gone from here. Or, nothing more save the jewel, and perhaps even the woman still if she proved faithful and as useful as she just was. By Bel, he would find the truth of this! The daring thief ran forward as the blackness spread, some of the liquid pouring down creases in the tiling but remained off the face of the tiles for the moment, giving him small islands to hop on. He leaped like a puncing jackal, and with the black quickly encircling him, he made a desperate jump to the left.

A normal man of comfortable living would have hit the wall and broken bone, but Amal landed on the sandstone and planted his feet as if he were right-side up, and launched himself off the wall like the spring of a lock. He spun mid-air and landed roughly against the solid surface of the ground at Sythemis's feet. He bled from a small wound on his leg, naught but a scrape but he grunted from the pain and rose before her.

Beside them, Antiachus's body lay still and bleeding uncontrollably, and the two thieves fled the room into the following tunnel. It was a dark corridor of dim torches and the screaming faces of demons carved into the walls.

"This way," Sythemis said, but she did not make it two steps before her slender throat was grabbed and she was shoved into the wall. Amal's eyes were not cold like they had been at the tower. Here they blazed with wrath, the torch-light dancing along his rippling muscles that were even now poised to snap her neck if she made a move.

"Using me, I can understand. Even respect. But throwing me into this pit without warning me first would have been your death had you not just saved me there." He told her, his voice like iron. Amal was clearly not a wizard or sorcerer of any kind, for if he could manifest his will, she would have burst into flame. "It will not save you again."

He let her go, and gestured with a small tilt of his head for her to continue. Bel curse him, he did enjoy seeing her walk before him, despite his rage.

Sythemeis gave that thief a look that said much without words but tempted though she was she chose not to argue. What good would it do to explain now that if he had tried to cross the wards the wizard had set he would have become the nine hundredth and ninety ninth set of finger bones in the collection of Antiachus the Mooncursed?

“Follow man,” she instructed the word ‘man’ laden with contempt. They climbed higher into the tower, the stairs lacking the larger than life rise of the dungeon. At intervals arched windows granted vistas of the palace gardens and the city beyond both illuminated with moonlight and winking with the cruder light of torches. They reached a great doorway and passed through. Inside a dozen guardsmen stood about a circular guard room, its floor tiled with alternating black and white wedges.

“Touch them not,” Sythemeis advised. The men were typical of the Emir’s guard, dressed in studded tunics with silk sashes over their shoulders and belted at the waist. High boots of woven leather gave their legs a rough and unhealthy aspect. None of the guards reacted to their presence as they all stared blind and bemused up at the waxing moon. Their eyes were monochrome and pearlescent like the nacre of a shellfish. One or two of them moaned softly as they passed.

“They looked upon the moon,” she told Amal as though that explained everything. There was an eagerness in her voice a yearning like a thirsty man at last in sight of a broad river.

“We must hurry, she swells,” she explained, reaching the stairs on the other side, atop the next flight they came to a door. It was of dark wood, inlaid with golden tracery and thumb sized gems which themself would have been worth a small fortune at the gem sellers and pawn brokers. A great lock was built into its center veins of gold and silver running away from it in a hateful imitation of the sun.



“No man has stepped beyond this door without a key,” Sythemis explained, reaching out and touching the wood with the palm of her hand. For the first time it was tentative and uncertain as she felt the grain of the wood beneath her smooth palm.

“A task for a master thief, one of three which are laid upon this tower,” she told Amal, turning to look at him, her dark eyes glittering in the moonlight.

“We must hurry,” she repeated, “if we are not gone when the bones return Antiachus from the depths, we shall wish for a death that will not come.”

Amal looked at the Priestess, and then at the door. It's bejeweled finery was enchanting, and had he been anywhere else, he would have pried the rubies and opals off with his knife without so much as a second thought on what lay behind the door itself until he required more money after much food and women. But as it were, the prize within was worth far more. Or so Sythemis said. He remembered Antiachus's words and was still uncertain of the woman. But, she had saved his life and promised him great wealth. He wouldn't throw such a promising future away, and so he crept forward.

His movements were controlled and yet feral, stepping like a stalking wolf in the brush. Every lower of his foot, a new spring to jump, every lifting of the leg, a new weight to throw forward or back. Luck was on his side, for there were no pressured traps, and so he stood before the lock and retrieved his sharpened bone from the folds of his sash. He crouched and began to slide it into the hole, twiddling with it, almost being able to see the bars that had to be lifted at the precise place and time to open the door. Seconds passed as he carefully operated on it, and a smile spread across his face once he heard a 'click.'

VWHCRKRKRKRKRK

Amal sprang backwards as the floor he stood upon shot up with the speed of a diving hawk. He threw his legs into a clockwise kick, turning his body sideways and parallel to the ground, his form spinning thrice in mid-air as sixteen square meters of stone slammed into the ceiling with the surety of an anvil's fall. It slowly lowered after he landed in a crouch, watching the mechanism reset. Amal had moved quickly, a testament to his superb reflexes. Once the slab was back and even with the rest of the floor, he saw his fallen bone key now turned to naught but pale dust. Amal breathed deeply, trying to slow his quickened heart.

"Bel, save me." He said, and let his mind linger on what he might have done wrong. The second bar had been stubborn, and the fifth one had been slow moving with the order of his pattern. But the bone hadn't served as a great tool, the mechanism of this door far more complicated than the manacles in his cell. He looked at the Priestess, who watched him like a raised cobra. Amal's eyes fell upon the armlet of the serpent she bore, and he reached toward her, the woman flinching.

"I will not hurt you," Amal said, and she relaxed as he gingerly took the armlet from her slender limb and examined it. Amal tapped the bronze three times, and a small sharpened point erupted from the end of the serpent's tale. He gave her a wink, having already seen such an item be used before during his time in Stygia. He went back to work, stepping tentatively on the slab, who looked wholly unified with the rest of the stone floor to the untrained eye, before crouching at the lock once more, reapplying his approach to the lock. Up, up, down, up, down, down, he wiggled when he needed to, yes, yes he had it...

Click.

There was another rumbling, but not of some dreadful trap. The heavy doors began to slide across the floor, sending old dust and stale air from the chamber within. Amal stepped back, set the blade back within the serpent, and carefully placed the armlet back on Sythemis' limb.

"You see how profitable it is when we work together?" He asked her, strong arms crossed as they stood before the opening portal to the prize they both eagerly awaited.

The sorceress trembled visibly as the door ground open. Beyond the portal was a large chamber that all but dripped with greenery. Its human origins were clear, in the center stood a column carved with strange mythological scenes which showed men in archaic armor speaking with strange creatures with many arms. In early panels they traded and exchanged knowledge, but as the column rose the panels became increasingly violent. Bas-relief axes split strange heads, and many armed figures used odd wavy knives to strike down their opponents. A stair wound four times around the tapering monolith before reaching its point, from which shone a jewel of clear silver moonlight. If the frieze told a coherent story, it was lost in the odd vegetation that obscured nearly every inch of stonework. Pale green moss grew on the column, across the floor of the chamber grew trees with soft purple leaves with opalescent bark. Fruits hung from their branches, deep black but oily looking and reflective. The soft buzz of unfamiliar insects polluted the night. The trees grew so thickly and the ropey intestine like vines which linked them hung in such profusion, that the walls of the chamber were all but invisible, save for the arabesque windows through which the light of the nearly full moon shone. Around these stone wrought openings the vegetation glowed with more than moonlight, seeming to pulse and throb with an internal phosphorescence which faded a few feet beyond the reach of the light.



“What magic is this,” Amal breathed as he stepped across the threshold. Sythemis stood frozen beneath the door arch, her mouth slightly agog. The first sign of true shock she had thus far shown.

“Come on woman, it was you who told me we must hurry,” Amal hissed. His words seemed to snap her back to reality and she stepped through in his wake, her face filled with an eager hunger that any man would die to see on the face of a courtesan. They moved across the moss, brushing passed the strange foliage. Each touch seemed to puff perfume into the air, an odd scent like cinnamon on the verge of burning, or the desert before a storm.



It came out of the trees without so much as a whisper of air to precede it. A vast black shape that arched through the air in eerie silence. It struck Sythemis and sent her crashing into the undergrowth with a flash of claws and a spray of blood. It landed and rounded on Amal, quick as a serpent. It was a vast black catlike beast, with membraneous flesh stretched between its forepaws and its mid section. Its face was a mass of scar tissue where six eyes had been gouged or burned with hot irons. Its four nostrils projected far forward like the snout of a vole and then quivered and flexed with fine hairs. Blind it might be, but it could clearly sense its surroundings by more than natural means. The thing was the size of a small bear for all the lethal stealth with which it moved. Blood dripped from its forepaws as it opened its mouth, revealing four rows of needle sharp teeth, none of which quite aligned with the others. Letting out a soundless roar that Amal felt in his stomach, it launched itself towards the thief, its jaw hyperextending.

Amal saw the sorceress fly, but did not have much of a chance to check if she was dead. It would sadden him, despite her use of him and their mutual lack of trust. Not many women kept him on his toes and he quite liked that. He could think on it later, as his mind was suddenly brought back to the present as the black cat-demon turned to face him. It was like a living shadow and yet wholly, disgustingly organic, and only the way it padded on the ground showed it continually remained in the physical realm.

The shemite thief high jumped, taking a thick vine in his grasp and using his strong core to swing his legs above his head. The beast narrowly missed the thief, who landed in a crouch, dagger out and flipped to a reverse grip as the moving nightmare regained its feet and stalked closer. By Bel it was fast, and even his keen eyes could barely keep up with the sinuous movements of the dark thing. It bared fangs like small swords, eyes filled with hatred.

"Come then and face me," Amal said, standing to his full height and brandishing his wicked dagger.

Silently it came, moving two steps as if it were to stalk Amal before it bounded forward, swifter than a horse. Amal readied himself to jump again, the bending of the knees and arching of his feet evident, even his eyes glanced upwards. But as it thing leaped, Amal went down and did not fly up, letting the creature fly over him with an ungainly hesitance. With tigerish strength, Amal held the huge thing up with his arm, the beast having yet hit the ground, fluidly stabbing into the demon's midsection thrice. The only indication one might know he did so was the jerk of him removing his dagger.

Now he and the beast grappled, Amal awkwardly keep its claws off of him as he desperately held the thing at bay. It was a losing game, even with its injuries, and after many moments he wriggled himself free and rolled out from under the thrashing beast even as it swiped. Amal planted his feet into the ground and bounced into the foliage, landing gracefully and making his way to Sythemis. The shapely priestess was prone and bleeding from a nasty swipe, but now so was Amal. Blood ran down his chiseled chest from a claw mark on his pectoral, a cut over his forehead bleeding down his cheek.

"Woman! If you live, you must wake up! Set, I beseech thee!" He cried out, for the first time in his life he spoke to the God of stygia. If this failed, he would not live to regret it.

Sythemis sat bolt upright eyes rolled back, white and staring. Her sightless gaze fell upon the thief and her face controted in a more than human countenance. Her lips opened and worked and a silibant hissing sound escaped her lips.

"Do not invoke my name in service of this apostate. She would use me as she uses..." the voice cut off as Sythemis' eyes came back into focus. She shuddered stiffened and then her eyes widened. The beast had staggered to its feet, blood dripping over its dark coat and glistening in the moonlight. It's clawed feet tore up handfulls of the strange earth as it charged, tongue lolling and jaws slavering. Sythemis lifted a hand and the odd plant life exploded into motion. Vines snaked out and seized the thing wrapping its legs and midrift and dragging it to the ground. The thing yowled and screamed as more vines entombed it. Rootlets burst up from beneath the earth and burrowed into its body, making it swell grotesquely as though filled with magots. The light left its eyes and the plants continued to grow until it was nothing more than a slightly lump in the ground where roots and moss hid what might have been a rock instead of a bloody mess of shattered bones and organs.

"We must... reach the gem," Sythemis gasped as far away a great black bell began a slow and terrible tolling.

"I wish you had done that earlier," Amal said, scooping his arm under Sythemis's own to help her to her feet. The snake woman clawed at him to keep steady, but it was more welcome than the beast's talons. The two stumbled across the undergrowth, the glistening foliage and the stuffy, sweet air of strange plants assailed them. It was something wholly alien to Amal, who had spent his entire life in the desert. He wanted nothing more than to be back at the bazaar, looting coin of fat shopkeepers and stupid noblemen, but he saw a gleam at the apex of the tower that caught his attention and desire.

"Hurry!" She said fervidly, the great bell ringing louder in their ears. Amal's muscles ached and bled, but he picked up the pace. His loping strides led them to the very edge of the eldritch jungle, and with his strength he leaped with Sythemis in his arms over a fern with a large spider scuttling over the leaves. The two hit the marbled floor of the tower, pitching over onto their hands and knees. Amal dragged himself up and helped the priestess as well.

"I hope I do not regret this," He said as he ascended the stairs, bounding up them with dauntless strength, Sythemis clutching him as they came to the very top.

A diamond stood on a plinth, flawless and shimmering in the light. It was exquisitely cut, and for all the riches Amal had seen, he was speechless before the item. He felt he could buy the whole of Kush with this, or make Aquilonian Kings beg for his favor.

"Take it! It is your destiny!" She cried, gripping his face and looking into his with her impossibly dark eyes. Without thought, his hands ran over her body, but he did not embrace her. The possibilities of all things flitted through his eyes, and he nodded after a moment of thought.

"You know, if it is my destiny to have this, I might need a queen to share it with." He said with a jackalish grin, and pulled away from her to approach the diamond. He did not slink or crouch, he was too tired and too mesmerized by the jewel and the woman for that. Without delay, as the bells roared and the superstructure around them began to shake, dust falling onto the forest floor, Amal took the diamond in his hand and held it before his eyes, losing himself in its brilliance.

"I don't ...have much left," Sythemis gasped as Amal half carried her up the pillar. Her skin had lost some of it's lusture giving her a wan and sallow look. A gasp left her lips as Amal's hand closed around the diamond, lifting it down from its pedestal. The bells hammering was so intense it could be felt deep in the stomach, physically painful against the eardrums. With shocking suddeness, the sound ceased and was replaced by a rumble. The pillar shook beneath them as though an earthquake rocked the tower. THen the soild stone disintergrated into gravel and slumped downwards in a shower of stone that swallowed at them like mud. Sythemis held on to Amal, spreading her body wide to keep from sinking to her death in what was now a mountain of small perfectly circular pebbles. The thief, by the grace of all the gods, kept hold of the stone as the careened down towards the forested floor. There was no dust and the grinding of stone on stone was like the hiss of a thousand blizzards. It took an oddly long time for the pile to come to rest.

"She is no man's queen thief," a cold voice declared from the portal by which they had entered. Antiachus stood framed by the arch. His body was nude and oddly mis-shapen, as though growths of some kind were stretching the skin beneath. Thin traceries, like old scars covered him from the neck down, forking and spreading like thin ivy. Only his face was whole and human, handsome and terrible with black eyes that gleamed with malice.

"Not that it need long concern you," the wizard declared, lifting both his hands palm upward. The jungle began to pulse and throb. Great humps began to appear in the forest floor. Clawed, skeletal paws, burst out in showers of dirt as creatures, like the one Sythemis had dispatched but long dead, dug themselves free, empty skulls glowing with red eldritch lights.

"By the dripping shit of Set!" Amal remarked acidly, secreting away the jewel into his pantaloons and rolling his head along his broad shoulders. His tanned torso dripped with crimson from the wounds, his defined thews and abdominals slick with sweat and blood. Amal had not climbed into this hellpit and braved shadow beasts and serpent gods to be baselessly slaughtered by a cheap conjurer! "Crawl atop me, woman!"

Sythemis balked for a moment, wondering if the shemite had gone mad from fatigue. But he knelt down, even as a skeletal hand clawed its way out of the ground a mere stride from his nose. She slithered atop him, placing her two thick legs along his shoulders. The deadly thief rose, his stygian priestess a yard taller than she was familiar with. Amal felt her put her fingers in his mane of thick hair to steady herself. He hoped she had some secret to hill Antiachus, or if a knife to the heart would do. Either way, he would make sure the man was dead.

"We must kill him!" Sythemis hissed with such venom and fervor, Amal was taken aback. He had thought she would order him to flee, but this would do. He was tired, but adrenaline pumped through him and tigrish rage enveloped his powerful form.

Amal leaped over the half-submerged skeleton of a dog beast, nimbly dancing past the specters that continued to rise from their ancient graves. The wizard cackled, his gnarled hands slowly floating upwards as he called forth more skeletal fiends to rise. Sythemis grabbed Amal's head and turned his gaze to a fallen tree trunk. "There!" She called, and he sprang for it. He felt claws rake his leg, but one more shallow wound did naught but fuel his ire and blood-lust. He scooped up the branch, and twirled, shattering the next skeletal beast with a powerful blow to the chest. Bones scattered and witchlight was snuffed out of the dirt-caked eyesockets. Amal grinned grimly, sidestepping the sailing skeleton of a tiger, the beast's form raking into the rubble of pebbles.

"Fool! You have destroyed one in ten dozen!" Antiachus cackled like a squawking bird. "How long can you keep it up!?"