Krrsh had known the sandstorm was coming well before it arrived. His kind knew such things. It was something in the air, the taste and smell of the dust. And even if he had not been able to sense such things, a hundred telltale signs were visible for any with eyes to see the desert. The tiny orb spiders laid no fresh nets for prey, knowing the coming storm would only destroy them. The frogs of the river did not sing their songs of mating and challenge. Many other ways to tell, yes.

Krrsh knew. The knowing had woken him from his day sleep, beneath a shallow mound of sand that did no more than keep the hated sun’s rays from his flesh. The sun did not burn him, not with his fur and thick skin, but Krrsh’s eyes were meant for the night. The sun blinded him, made his eyes water. It made him weak, and Krrsh did not like weakness. Weakness was death, in the desert.

The Ironclaw pack would also know of the storm’s approach. The pack would dig down deep into the sands, closer than close, body against body, and if the winds blew fierce enough to expose them, they would take their shifting turns to block with their bodies the lash of sand that often blew fierce enough to flay the skin. They would all take their turn, so that all suffered, but none unto death.

But Krrsh was of the Ironclaw pack no longer. And so he was forced to dig a burrow alone, in the hated, blinding daylight, and hope the scouring sands did not find him.

He rose from his sleeping place and, blinking and shading his eyes, began to search for another, safer location. Such a shallow burrow would not be enough for protection during the storm.

He loped further out into the desert, shading his eyes. Eventually he found a stone that thrust up from the sand, in truth no higher than his knee, but it would be enough to split the force of the wind. Or so he hoped.

Krrsh was strong. Krrsh was fierce. But nothing was stronger or fiercer than the desert when it was angry.

Krrsh dug down in the lee of the stone. The sand was thin here, so close to the pale-yellow cliff, and the soil beneath full of broken stone. The desert on the other side of the river held softer soil. But his claws were hard, and he was used to the harshness of the desert. And the other side of the river was forbidden him, now. It did not matter. He was strong, and fierce.

But. But, Krrsh was not as strong or fierce as he had been. Many cuts, many claw and bite marks pierced his thick, hairy skin. They burned, and some wept pus. A rumbling growl made its way up from his chest at the self-admission. His kind may hate bitter truths, but they did not deceive. Not each other. Not themselves.

Krrsh was strong and fierce. Enough that he thought he could overcome Ngrum and a contest for leadership of their pack. But Ngrum was strong and fierce… and cunning.

The Ironclaw pack roamed a wide swath of the Great Desert. They had to range far; the pack was large, far larger than Krrsh believed was best. They were more than two hands in number. That was one of the reasons Krrsh had challenged Ngrum. He believed the tribe must be split, for the good of all. But Ngrum would have none of it.

Numbers meant strength, to Ngrum. To Krrsh, numbers meant danger. Many kinds of danger, but especially Men. Men with shining skin thicker than any ghoul’s. Men with single, long claws, sharper than any ghoul’s. Men with claws attached to wood that could fly through the air, faster than any ghoul could see or run from. Men with Magic.

Men were death, until they themselves died. Then they were just food.

But that was another reason why Krrsh had challenged Ngrum. More Ironclaws meant more bellies to fill. And the Great Desert was not generous. His kind could go for a month without a meal, but even stooping to eating lesser carrion, and even insects, the pack was always on the verge of starvation. Or it had been, until they had discovered the place of death by the river.

So much meat, and the meat of men, not lesser carrion! More than they could eat at once, in a night, or a month, or even a season. Someone had buried the food, covered it with sand, but that had been nothing to the Ironclaws, nor any ghoul – could they not smell a corpse through the stone boxes Men placed them in?

Before the place of death had been discovered, others had listened when Krrsh voiced his worry about the pack’s size. Listened, but followed Ngrum still. Once they found the place of death, though, Krrsh spoke only to the wind.

“When this meat is gone. What then? Now we eat. Three of us are already heavy with child. When there is no more meat, how will the pups live?”

His growled questions about the future fell on uncaring ears. Ears that would lay flat whenever he spoke them. For the rest of the pack, now was all. Now, there was meat. Now, there was safety – no human guarded these remains, with sharp metal or spell. Now, they expanded their numbers, and grew stronger.

Tomorrow? Tomorrow there would still be meat. Look at it all, mounds of it buried indifferently by unknown hands.

The pack could not imagine such bounty running out. The pack could not imagine ‘someday’. Only Krrsh. Krrsh was strong, and fierce, and Krrsh was clever.

Ngrum was strong and fierce, but old. Ngrum was not clever. Ngrum could not count beyond the four claws of one hand – to Ngrum, the number after four was ‘another.’

But Ngrum was cunning, and that was not the same thing at all as clever. Not when words came to challenge, and challenge came to blows.

Iron claws had raked flesh, wicked teeth had punctured arm and cheek and tender muzzle, and Ngrum had taken more than he had given. And Ngrum had ceased struggling. He lay on the moonlit sand, panting, eyes glazed, tongue lolling. Then, just as Krrsh had bent down to take Ngrum’s neck into the bite of submission, the older one had scooped up sand and flung it into Krrsh’s eyes.

Ngrum was cunning. Krrsh would carry the scars of Ngrum’s cunning for the rest of his days. When Ngrum was finished with Krrsh, Krrsh lay in the sand, panting, bleeding, neck exposed.

But Ngrum had not taken him with a submission bite. Ngrum squatted over him, and let a yellow arc of piss splash down on Krrsh’s supine form.

Outcast.

“This one says we are too many,” Ngrum had growled at the pack. “Ngrum listens. Now we are one claw less.”

Krrsh dug into the difficult ground until the first blast of wind found him, and nearly sent him tumbling. Quickly he raked loose sand and stone atop himself, and huddled in his burrow as the desert howled its anger above, and remembered. Eventually sleep came to him.

It did not still his rumbling growl.

~ ~ ~

The twelfth night of Anomus’s new existence arrived, bearing with it the howling winds and stinging sands of a simoom. The desert storm dashed his plans to release his fly scouts, which made him gnash nonexistent teeth. But it also brought with it a certain change to the mana which flowed into the Tomb. It was not increased, but it was somewhat more potent. In a sense, it was a wilder sort of energy than what a placid night in the desert brought him.

Anomus did not lack for tasks to spend it on. From altering more flies and maggots, to altering the few wasps he controlled, to further shifting the bones of the slain, to continuing his excavations, it was difficult for him to decide what took precedence. He could even do nothing at all, and store the mana against future need.

No. If he had no purpose other than mundane existence, he might have done so. But Anomus was still as driven as he had been while his life’s blood had leaked out of him. He was incapable of idleness.

He decided that the first task he would address was luring the ghouls into the Tomb. They were not clever or powerful enough to find a way in on their own, so Anomus set to easing their path.

The most direct route would be to create a tunnel parallel to the entrance and the great hall, with an opening in the cliff face a few feet away from the Tomb’s entrance proper. But Anomus was mindful of the fact that his greatest weapon would be surprise. No one suspected anything was amiss with the Tomb – how could anyone? – and he meant to keep it that way. There was little boat traffic this far up the Great River, but little was not none. It would not do to have someone notice a newly created second entrance to the Tomb – to notice, and then speak of it. Who knew how fast or far such news might travel?

Instead, Anomus tunneled in the opposite direction, away from the river and out towards the open desert.

The tunnel he formed started in the undertomb, in the same wall as the entrance to the Old God’s chamber, and sloped gently upwards toward the surface. He expended as little energy as possible on it, not bothering to square it off or do any other sort of work that was not required for its purpose. It was a purely functional oval void in shape, four feet wide at its widest point, and a little more than five feet tall. He had judged the ghouls to be able to move through such a space with little difficulty. Whether they would remained to be seen, but he relied on the overwhelming stench of so much rotting, putrid meat to draw the ghouls to him.

Creating the far entrance to the tunnel proved something of a problem. The stone subsurface of the desert floor ended several feet below the desert sands, and he quickly discovered that the shifting sands of the Great Desert were impossible to claim, in a practical sense. He believed it had something to do with the fact that where the stone he penetrated with his will and consciousness was immovable, was in some vaguely understood sense a place, the sand was not. Like stone, he could sense it; but like air, he could not claim it.

Fortunately, he did not have to. He disintegrated the stone beneath his chosen entry point, and let gravity deal with the obstructing sand.

The sand poured in, but the slope of the tunnel was sufficient to prevent a complete blockage of the passage. Anomus trusted nature to do the rest. He could only create the opportunity, not force the actions of the ghouls, or of anything else outside the Tomb.

With the sand came something he had not anticipated, but perhaps should have – an increase in the flow of mana. At first Anomus was elated by this change. He had been hobbled in is efforts by his limited supply of energy, and now, he estimated, that supply had been doubled. But hard on the heels of his elation came another emotion, one that he had not yet felt in his new state: Fear.

It was not a debilitating fear. It was not mindless terror. But it was real, as real as if he had woken to find a scorpion scuttling across the floor of his tent, when he was still alive. Not an uncommon occurrence, but not a pleasant one, either.

It took him some time to understand just where the fear was coming from. He analyzed it, coldly and rationally, and decided it must spring from the same strange, inhuman set of instincts that drove him to expand his physical self.

After all the time he had spent on altering the flies, Anomus well understood that instinct was something that was meant to increase an organism’s chances of survival. The drive to mate, the fear of certain physical things or situations – snakes, say, or the fear of the dark – these were meant to give a living creature better chances of survival, by driving them away from potential danger. So where was the danger in what he had just done? That was the question that Anomus faced.

At first glance, having created a new entrance to the Tomb did him nothing but good. More mana meant more power, more strength. In fact, creating more entrances would in theory at least bring him even greater power.

As soon as Anomus gave serious consideration to that thought, he was gripped by what could only be described as panic, as if he had seriously contemplated thrusting his hand into a fire, or the mouth of a lion. Even as a portion of his intellect rebelled at the thought, another, cooler part found the reaction fascinating.

Whatever these strange, base instincts I have been married to are, they most emphatically do not want me to be more open to the outside world than is necessary.

He only partially understood why. True, no living organism wished to have more openings in its physical self to the outside environment than was necessary and natural. They would be considered wounds, after all. But why should that be the case for him? Beneficial mana became more available to him with additional entrances, after all. To extend his bizarre metaphor, it was as if he had given himself a second mouth with which to feed.

Eventually he arrived at a vague conclusion that he was not wholly satisfied with. For whatever reason, the outside world presented danger to him, and that danger multiplied with the number of entry points into his physical self.

What that danger might be, he simply did not have enough knowledge to determine.

Whatever the case, he had already determined to balance his drive with caution after his near-fatal clash with Mordun’s seal, so he decided to create no more entrances without cause, until he understood the matter further.

The simoom raged for hours, blowing sand and more powerfully charged mana in through the new entrance. Anomus seized on the opportunity while he could, and was able to complete the relocation of a portion of the workers’ bones, and store a not-inconsiderable amount of mana in the black stone before dawn.

Two thousand, eight hundred and nine skeletons. That was the total number. A little more than a quarter of the workforce that had built the Tomb. He moved dozens into their niches, but it would be the work of many nights to complete the task. He carved out the niches five high on each wall, but still he would have to expand the catacombs before he was done. Logic told him to leave the bones interred in the stone, to husband his strength, to spend it solely on the approaching confrontation with Irobus, but he stubbornly refused to do so. He would give the workers dignity in death. It might be an empty gesture, but to Anomus it was as much a refutation of Irobus’s evil as anything else he might accomplish.

Irobus had had thousands of men dumped into the undertomb, like refuse. He’d said they were to serve as slaves to Anomus in the afterlife, but Anomus knew that was a lie. It was a display of Irobus’s naked power. Life could be – was – taken on a horrendous scale, at his merest whim.

Anomus would spend the power necessary to thwart Irobus, to return to the murdered thousands the barest modicum of human dignity. The cost be damned; it was as important to him as anything else he could do. But he could not do it all at once, and there was much else he meant to accomplish besides.

When he went down into his day-slumber, the simoom still raged. It suited his mood.