The Poison Princess (39 page)

“Nothing can stop the two of us, Scarlett,”
the princess replied. “Come on. Let’s get it open.”

Ruby walked up to the bronze door, placing
her hand on one of the wood planks. Before the poisoning, there was
no way the weak princess would have been able to yank the piece of
makeshift barricade out of the secured place over the entrance, but
with its power running through her darkened system, she had no such
weakness left. She snatched the wood off the frame and tossed it to
the side. Repeating the act several more times, while Scarlett
stood at her back, the princess soon cleared the planks from the
entrance. All that remained was the lock. She had dealt with such
things before. Hardly giving the padlock more than a thought, Ruby
spit her acidic flavor of venom onto the metal, melting it away and
causing it to congeal in a liquid mess on the ground.

Pressing down on the latch of the door’s
handle, Ruby swung the heavy bronze slab backward, releasing an
awful stench into the air. A musty, stagnant breeze billowed forth,
managing to even catch the princess off guard. All her own noxious
poisons seemed like child’s play to the smell of death from inside
that mausoleum. After coughing the nasty air out of her lungs, Ruby
looked into the small chamber. All that was inside was another
heavy cover over the stairs leading down, but in the years of its
disuse, it had become decrepit. Layers of cobwebs covered the
corners of the room, strange black liquid leaked from the ceiling,
and some of the vines from outside had found a way to creep through
the thick walls.

The princess waved her hand in front of her
face, brushing the stagnant air from her nose, as she stepped into
the small chamber and looked at the sealed stairs. A thick stone
slab lay over the path into the crypt to prevent anything from
getting up or down. Even with her strength, she suspected she
couldn’t move it.

Ruby turned back to Scarlett and asked, “Can
you grab my hammer?”

The horned demon nodded. “Of course, my
princess.” Scarlett reached into the void and retrieved the war
hammer Ruby had become so accustomed to as of late and handed it to
her master.

The princess took the weapon, spitting some
version of her poison onto the mallet at the end and turned back
into the mausoleum. The height of the ceiling gave her just enough
distance to raise up the hammer and bring it back down. The sound
released was a deafening crack, as her metal hammer met the hard
stone slab. The poison that she had laced the weapon with sunk into
the splintering crack and into the fissures she’d created. The
toxin began to eat away at the stone, but she raised her heavy war
hammer toward the ceiling and swung back down again. The poison
inside the stone sizzled like it was meat over a fire. A third
strike followed, but then the princess paused. She had felt the
stone slab nearly give way after the last blow, so she waited for
the acid to finish tearing its way through. Ruby felt connected to
it, just like she could reach out and control the people she had
killed with her poisonous gift. Guiding the venom through the
porous holes of the stone, she caused it to seek out every weak
point in the slab, until she could finally break through. When she
thought she had accomplished this, the princess held the hammer
vertically over the stone. Ruby let it slip through her fingers,
until the head collided with the slab and broke through, causing
chunks to tumble down the steps and away from the hole. She grabbed
the shaft of the hammer just before it slipped completely through
her fingers and raised it, resting the weapon on her shoulder.

Ruby turned back to Scarlett with an eager
grin on her face. “Ready?”

Scarlett had used her magic to generate a pair
of torches that each woman held out in front of them to guide their
way through the dark crypt. In their other hands, they had their
weapons - Ruby with her war hammer and Scarlett, her scythe. Though
they hadn’t yet seen these undead that supposedly roamed the
undercroft, the path to the castle was long, and they wanted to be
prepared. The crypt was more than a simple sepulcher with a few
caskets or tombs; this was a sprawling labyrinthine series of
chambers built to contain generations upon generations of Ruby’s
family line. Though much of it remained empty and yet unused due to
the necromantic spell, there were plenty of bodies that had been
stored within before it was sealed.

The pair of women had passed by a number of
caskets and, disturbingly, found them to be empty. The lids lay to
the side with claw marks and scratches on their inside covers. The
proof, however, of the undead had yet to be seen. Centuries had
passed since the spell was cast on the bodies of the undercroft,
and not even Scarlett knew if the magic could sustain itself for
that length of time. She was pessimistic that there was any chance
of making it through the crypt without finding out though.

The underground tunnels were quiet. The only
sounds the women heard were from themselves - the clacking of their
shoes on the stone below, the crackling of their torches, and their
own breathing. The princess listened intently for any sign that
there was some undead creature stirring beneath Lavidia, but still,
she heard nothing to denote a presence beyond their own.

The caskets they had passed thus far had
belonged to friends, staff, and important members of the kingdom,
but none were the final resting places of anyone from Ruby’s family
line. Turning a corner, the princess found the chamber offshoot
where such people had been interred. She found herself unable to
resist the urge to see what remained of them. Holding the torch out
in front of her, Ruby examined the more expensive caskets that
lined the wall. The first she found had words engraved just above
the tomb, but they were covered in layers of dust and old cobwebs.
She leaned her hammer against the wall and raised her empty hand to
the writing, brushing the years of neglect away.

“King Cyrus Willow,” she said aloud, reading
the words she found underneath.

“This is your ancestor?” Scarlett asked.

“The first king of Lavidia, yes.”

Looking down, below the words to the casket
itself, the princess saw that her ancestor was not still within his
coffin. Just as the others had been, the lid had been shifted to
the side, and nothing remained where the body should have been.

“But he appears not to be here…” Scarlett
said.

That was when they heard a sound begin to
echo throughout the chamber. Ruby raised a finger to silence her
servant. Scarlett’s eyes widened as she listened as well,
attempting to breathe as quietly as possible, and they both stood
quite still, waiting to hear the sound repeat. It echoed down the
hall again. Still, neither woman could place the sound to an
action, but they knew it was something else causing it. They
weren’t alone down in that undercroft. The sound grew closer. Ruby
picked her hammer up from the ground, the metal softly scraping
against the stone floor, and she turned to face the direction she
believed the noise to be coming from. They now identified the sound
as a combination of a soft and hard scraping. Something that
shouldn’t have been dragged along on the ground of the floor was
limply pulled, as this thing stumbled closer to the women’s
location.

Around a corner came the barely held together
decaying body of a man’s corpse. Its head should have been nothing
but bone after all the time in the ground, but the skin remained,
stretched terribly over its skull. A red glow from deep inside
empty eye sockets glared at them, and its intermittently toothed
jaw hung down from its skull, held there on only one side under the
ripped and stretched skin. Somehow, single, long grey hairs hung
off its scalp. Held clumsily in one hand was a relic of a sword,
being dragged along the floor with it, and the thin fingers of its
other hand were looped through the handhold of its shield that fell
down to its side, grating against its leg. Ancient battle armor
adorned its desiccated corpse, marking what was once a man as an
important warrior. The sigil on its chest was Lavidia’s brown
willow tree on a green fabric, as would be expected, but it was an
archaic variation that had not been used in many years.

The wight struggled to raise its sword up
toward the women, but Ruby stepped forward to deal with this
threat. She was quicker than the slow undead creature, animated
only through a spell of old. The princess dropped her torch to the
ground and gripped the shaft of her weapon, swinging her heavy war
hammer before the skeleton could bring the sword along any path
that might harm her. She knocked the wight’s head clear off its
body, ricocheting and echoing noisily down the hall. Its body
slumped over, dropping its ancient blade to the ground and leaning
its shoulder against the wall.

Ruby looked back to her horned demon with a
cocky smile. “See? They’re not so tough.”

Scarlett shrugged. “I guess not. Maybe I was
worrying for--”

The demon stopped and stared intently at
something behind Ruby, causing the princess to turn and see the
wight’s skull sliding through some unseen force back to its
decapitated body. The red glow of its eyes did not wane at all, as
it was pulled back to its neck. The undead thing stared with the
same intensity, as ever, as the wight stood, picking its sword back
up from the ground and beginning to readjust itself. Rather than be
afraid or worried as Scarlett seemed to be, Ruby found herself
annoyed at its persistence.

“Can’t!” She raised her hammer. “Anything!”
She swung it into the wight’s skull. “Ever!” The head crashed down
the hallway once again. “Be!” She brought the hammer back into the
skeletal creature’s chest. “Simple?!”

Ruby continued to pummel the wight’s undead
body with her war hammer, its various bits and limbs flying off, as
she vented her frustration. Behind her, Scarlett winced at the
carnage and violence she brought down on the wight, fearing it
wouldn’t be enough. The horned demon thought she could hear
something over the sound of the princess’ frenzied cries, and she
turned around to see more of the shambling corpses - brought to
them by the noise of Ruby’s hammer clashing against the ancient
bones and armor of the wight.

Despite their long captivity in the
undercroft, some of these corpses still had most of their flesh
intact. The magic that held them together also seemed to prevent
them from further decomposing. None of these new wights had been
warriors in life. The women were dressed in expensive but
deteriorated gowns, while the men wore hole-filled tunics with
Ruby’s family crest stitched into the fabric. Elaborate rings were
on some of their fingers. One woman had a sapphire gem necklace,
and one of the men’s brow was holding up a golden crown embedded
with jewels. Clearly, these were some of the members of the royal
line. What all these wights had in common with the warrior that the
princess continued to smash was the red glow in their empty eye
sockets.

“Ruby!” Scarlett shouted, not turning her
head away from the new undead. “Bit of a problem!”

The princess’ violent rage was stopped, as
she heard the panic in her demon’s voice. Ruby looked toward her to
see more of the wights shambling toward them. The skull and various
other body parts that she had knocked off began to come back
together behind her.

“Alright,” Ruby said through heavy breaths.
“Time to go.”

Picking up her torch from the ground, the
princess turned back toward the reassembling wight and kicked its
head down the hall, preventing it from piecing itself back together
too quickly. Scarlett followed behind her, looking back to the
slowly moving corpses. As she passed the soldier wight, its hand
reached out and grabbed her bare leg. At the simple touch of its
fingers, the horned demon could feel her life force being drained
out of her. Through their connection, Ruby could feel even her own
energy slipping away but not as strongly as her demon. The wight’s
skull that Ruby had kicked down the hall came barreling back toward
her, hitting her hard in the knee, bouncing off behind her and
nearly knocking her over. She looked back to see a spectral blue
energy being sucked from her servant and flowing into the
wight.

“Scarlett!” she shouted back.

No response from her horned demon. Her eyes
were transfixed on empty space in front of her, glazed over by the
wight’s draining touch.

Ruby tossed aside the torch once again and
gripped the hammer with both hands. She brought the heavy weapon
down on the skeleton’s elbow, cracking it in half and releasing its
grip on Scarlett’s leg. The horned demon stumbled forward and
collapsed a few feet away from the wight, her body under her own
control again.

“Are you alright?” the princess asked,
turning and leaning down to her servant.

“Don’t let them touch you,” she warned.

Ruby nodded. “We need to keep moving.”

The horned demon picked up her torch, but
folded the scythe back into the void, not having the strength to
even hold it anymore. The princess helped Scarlett upright, and
they headed back down the hallway. The wight’s body once again
began to repair itself via the magical energy the elf necromancer
had imbued it with centuries earlier. The other undead shuffling
caught up with it, and the undead thing stood to join the mob of
cadavers. Though not quick, the wights were persistent.

Ruby left her torch on the ground, not having
enough hands to carry it, the hammer, and to support the weakened
demon. Scarlett’s light would have to do for them both. The
undercroft was practically a labyrinth, and neither woman knew
which direction to travel. They picked their hallways at random,
hoping to be going toward the castle rather than back to where they
had started. As they moved, they began to hear more of the wight’s
groans and shuffling, scraping sounds. The tombs were full of
bodies, and it seemed that they had all returned from their graves
at the necromancer’s order.