Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy

above them now.
    No one would hear them cry out or scream. No one would ever know what happened to them . . . Brett felt like whimpering. He glanced across at Rose, and took some comfort from her customary calm, cold, implacable expression. Whatever she might or might not be feeling, it wasn't affecting her as it did Brett.
    He was glad she was with him, surprising though the thought was. But the ELFs were so scary that even Rose Constantine seemed like a comfort in comparison.
    The corridor finally came to an end at a solid steel door that filled the tunnel from wall to wall. It had no markings, and no sign of any lock or handle. Brett looked at the distorted reflections of himself and Rose in the shining metal, and shuddered suddenly. There was something really bad on the other side of the door. He could feel it, in his bones and in his water. And something was pressing increasingly strongly against the mental shields he'd only learned so recently to construct, to keep the world's thoughts out.
    Something beat against the walls of his mind, something almost unbearably huge and alien and hungry.
    Brett screwed his eyes shut, like a child afraid of the dark and the things that might be in it. His hands clenched into fists as he fought to hold his mental shields in place. Something laughed softly, soundlessly, and as suddenly as that the assault was over, and the pressure was gone. Brett let out his breath in a long ragged sigh. He opened his eyes, and found Rose was looking at him curiously. Clearly, whatever he'd felt hadn't affected her. Before he could say anything, there was the sound of a dozen or so heavy locks unlocking, one after the other, and the door before them swung slowly open. It swung outwards, into the corridor, and Brett and Rose had to retreat from it.
    The smell hit them first. Brett screwed up his face and made a disgusted sound. It was a thick, rank, organic but somehow dusty stench, full of age and decay and dead things. The kind of stench that had to build or accumulate over years, or maybe even centuries. There were noises too: rustling, crackling sounds, and wet, slippery smackings. Brett could feel his heart hammering in his chest, and he was breathing so heavily he was in danger of hyperventilating. Whatever was waiting in there, beyond the door, he just knew he didn't want to see it. He looked almost desperately at Rose. She had a disrupter in her hand, though Finn had forbidden her to take any weapons with her. Brett made himself breathe more slowly, the first step to composing himself. First rule of the con; never let the mark see how on edge you were. Never let them know how much making the deal mattered to you.
    "It seems we're expected," Rose said easily. "Let's go in and say hello."
    "After you," said Brett.
    Rose strode majestically forward into the gloom beyond the door, and Brett sauntered in after her.
    Inside, it was worse than he imagined. It was worse than he could have imagined. What little confidence he'd managed to wrap himself in was gone in a moment. The place could have been a chamber or a cavern, carved out of the solid rock. It could have been some old storage room, long abandoned. It could have been the antechamber to Hell. There was no way of telling just how big the space was, because it was entirely stuffed and choked with webbing.
    Thick gray and pink strands that stretched from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling, crossing and intertwining in delicate intricate patterns, so labyrinthine and diverse that they hinted at infinity. Bodies, dead human bodies, hung suspended in the webbing, here and there, low and high. Some were half consumed, with white shards of broken bone showing in the pale red meat. There were older, more mummified remains too, and the occasional clump of bare bones wrapped tightly together. In one corner, human skulls had been piled up, picked clean, and smeared with webbing, reaching almost to the
    concealed ceiling. The air was thick with death and decay, almost unbreathable. And everywhere, the pink and gray strands vibrated gently, constantly, never entirely still.
    A narrow tunnel had been left open, a gap in the webbing, that led from the door to the center of the place, or chamber, or whatever the hell it might once have been, to where the only two living inhabitants sat side by side on old-fashioned chairs. Webbing crawled over and clung to them too. It was immediately obvious that neither of the beings had moved from their chairs