They slogged on through the not quite daylight. The landscape drew increasingly parched and cracked, as though they had ventured onto a vast lakebed that had not know water in hundreds of years. Some places the fissures were feet wide and crusted with rock salt. Here and there a low hill rose, rocky and desolate save for a few scrubby bushes that clung to their summits. One of these hills appeared to support a large tree with great black leaves but as the drew closer a grislier reality was revealed. Vultures swirled around the tree, pecking at human corpses that hung from the gnarled branches. The birds scattered as Jocasta and Beren climbed the hill, fleeing with what last tasty morsels they could tear from their victims. The smell was awful even though the poor wretches couldn’t have been dead that long. Beren began to cut them down, though how he intended to bury them Jocasta couldn’t imagine. Her eyes followed the drag marks down onto the salt plain to where another swarm of vultures feasted. Jocasta raised her hand and spoke several words in one of the arcane languages she had learned at the university. The air Infront of her shimmered and contorted into a lens that brought the distant vultures into view.

 

“It was a caravan,” she said, the corpses of camels obvious through her spell. Various wares lay scattered about, mostly rolls of cloth, pots and iron tools.

“The Tar fiends work no doubt,” Beren observed sadly. Jocasta nodded absently, doing a few quick calculations in her head.

“They must have run across them on their way to the village,” she agreed. Jocasta felt a stab of guilt. All of this was her fault. If she hadn’t read the inscription these people would still be alive, peddling overpriced garments and trading pots for sweet smelling incense. She was only here at all because she had made a bargain with a demon and now destruction seemed to follow in her wake, even here where the demon’s influence was allegedly weaker. The alternative was Beren’s death but then she had never heard of a demonic bargain where the person striking it didn’t feel like they had a good reason. There was nothing to be done about it. All she could do was to try to mitigate the damage she had done by disturbing the Black Pharoh.

 Finding out what he wanted with the artifact from the village temple was the first step. Orienting herself she sketched a line between the village and the ruin of the caravan in her mind. The land was flat and featureless, and the tar fiends had probably headed straight towards the village. She followed her imaginary line of march east, noting a discolored area on the horizon. With a twist of her wrist, she turned her makeshift telescope to look upon it, revealing a fissure that widened out into a canyon that curved like the blade of a sickle.

 

“What have we here?” she asked.

 

There was no way to sneak up on the canyon, the terrain in all directions being uniformly flat save for the occasional unhelpful hill. Nor, given the nature of the foe, was darkness likely to be any boon. It felt extremely unnatural simply to stride across the desert to the canyon rim, but they made a virtue of necessity. The canyon was wider than it had appeared from the hill, nearly fifty yards wide at its broadest point and nearly that deep.

“This has opened recently,” Beren said as he moped his hair out of his eyes in a gesture that Jocasta always found endearing.

 

“How do you know?” Jocasta asked, to her it looked as though the fissure might have stood this way for a thousand years.

“The stone told me,” Beren replied unhelpfully. They found a section where rockfall made the decent practicable and slipped down into the canyon. It was cool within and very quiet. The walls were high enough to occlude the sunlight above filling the chasm with gloomy shadows. Their was no doubt this was the lair of the tar fiends, their odd vinegar and sulfur stink hung in the air like a haze that seemed to cling to the skin. They crept along the floor of the canyon until they rounded a sharp bend.

Jocasta stifled a scream and leaped into Beren’s arms. He caught her and held her with one hand, keeping the other free for his staff. Infront of them were two vast figures, they were carved into the rock in startling detail. One of them was a vast tar fiend, kneeling and offering a kopesh to a humanoid figure in the garb of an ancient Pharoh, only instead of a face contained with the head dress the Pharoh seemed to possess a mass of twisting tentacles coiled and curved in a perversion of a leering skull. Curled and twisted hieroglyphs covered both statues like unwholesome tattoos. Between the two figures was a linteled archway above a tunnel carved into the sandstone. A metallic taste of fear curdled at the back of Jocasta’s throat. Almost instinctively she drew one of her sketchbooks and began to copy the inscriptions, making quick sketches of the statues, calming herself with the habitual action.

“I suppose we have to go inside?” she asked reluctantly.