Free Pandora Gets Vain (Pandora (Hardback)) by Carolyn Hennesy

at her. She was about to scream when she heard a loud voice.
    “ Ah . . . fresh blood! ”

CHAPTER TWELVE
    The Chamber of Despair
    4:28 p.m.
     
    The entire chamber was now glowing murky white. Pandy stared at the unblinking eye, floating in midair. It was easily ten meters in diameter and the lines surrounding it gave it a fierce, enraged appearance. But after the first words echoed through the chamber, words Pandy did not understand in the least despite Egyptian 101 back at school, all was eerily quiet.
    Slowly, she began to look around, careful not to move too much should the eye see her and speak again.
    What she saw was terrifying. The chamber stretched into darkness on both sides, and there was a wall of dark bones about forty meters directly in front of her; finger, hip, and leg bones jutting out at every possible angle. But the floor of the chamber . . . that was something entirely different.
    Whole bodies. Thousands of them. Scattered. Piled. Stacked one on top of another forming dozens of small hills that faded into the black of the chamber. Most were already skeletons or severely decayed and as she looked, several leg and foot bones simply dropped off, crashing to the floor below.
    She closed her eyes tightly, wanting to block out the sight around her.
    Had she really just seen what she thought she’d seen? As a little girl, her father had told her stories of fierce battles, great scenes of destruction and death (before her mother had whacked him on the head and told him to stop), so she could pretty well handle the thousands of human bones strewn about. But had she really seen the . . . holes? Every body that she’d glimpsed, she thought, had a hole in its mid-section.
    She slowly opened her eyes and looked up. All over the chamber light radiated through the bones, causing spooky silhouettes. But in some places, small discs of filmy white, like little moons, could be seen as the light from the giant eye shone through the perfectly round circles in the bodies.
    Except, of course, for the bodies with huge wooden poles through the middle.
    Pandy gasped.
    Directly in front of her were the bones of a man lying twisted and curved around a thick wooden pole.
    There were hundreds of poles all over the chamber, their ends sharpened to fine points. Half had toppled over, but half were still upright. She had assumed that these were only support poles, shoring up the desert floor high above and keeping it from caving in. But each pole carried a human skeleton somewhere on its shaft. The pole she was lying against didn’t have a body. Then she realized the crunchy bits underneath her were the remains of a skeleton she had crashed into as she fell.
    Then, from off to her right, she heard the murmur of voices, very soft, but getting louder and talking fast. Turning her head she saw a small flash of white fur and three larger shapes burst into the chamber from a dark entryway.
    “Pandy?”
    “Kumquats! Pandy, where are you?”
    She was opening her mouth to answer when a pulse in the light made her glance back toward the horrible eye.
    The eye had turned slightly, rotating toward the new sound coming into the chamber. A beam of light shot out from the center of the eye toward the four figures and the same loud voice shouted again.
    “Enter not, dogs! You will wait until you are needed!”
    Suddenly, it seemed to Pandy that her friends had slammed up against an invisible wall. She could see Iole’s arms outstretched, her hands pressed flat against an unseen barrier. Alcie, trying to find some way around, was only succeeding in smashing her nose on something she just couldn’t see. Homer was throwing his entire weight against . . . whatever it was . . . again and again. Dido, Pandy saw, was rigid, barking furiously, his white eyes focused on her lying on the pile of bones.
    The eye turned back toward Pandy, now almost on her feet.
    “ You disturb the chamber. You are of flesh. This is not allowed. ”
    Silence.
    Pandy