by Jeremy Craig
“What did it say?” Aunt Milly asked, her voice heavy and low in the way adults get when the don’t want a kid to hear them. The old man merely shook his head then her and White Owl murmured and whispered and kept looking at me with faces full of concern and fear. Of me or for me I’ll never know, or want to know for that matter.
She finally walked over and knelt before my chair, long perfectly manicured and painted nailed hands adorned with gaudy antique rings gripping my arms as I sat in White Owl’s chair and stared back at her. I remember her hands shook. “Ben, this girl—”
“Her name is Morgan Le Fey,” I interrupted. It was the first time I’d spoken since I’d somehow burned the letter.
“What did you say?” she hissed almost hysterically as she gently shook me by the arms after a horrified moment where she just stared at me with dropped jaw and bugging eyes.
“Her name is Morgan Le Fey,” I repeated softly. “And she’s in trouble. She is being held prisoner in Camelot. She thinks her captors know everything about us. How is that possible?” Aunt Milly knelt there blinking as if she didn’t know how to process this. “Everything about what?” She shook me again, more urgently this time, fear thick in her voice.
“The blood curse.”
She went totally still and silent and seemed to be holding her breath as every drop of color abandoned her face at my answer. “It’s not possible.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself of this more than anyone else, but it didn’t really matter as a searing pain ripped me from reality and sent me spinning to a hell I had never thought possible that ripped and clawed tortuously at every shred of reality and every fiber of my being.
I heard shouting and laughter, my vision swimming and fading in and out from a pain hazed blur to a crisp clarity that was somehow worse than the haze as the dark dungeon I found myself chained, suspended from the ceiling in was the stuff of nightmares.
A woman was there, cold and beautiful and holding a strange, savage looking whip. The very same woman who had brought Morgan into the diner the first time I’d ever seen her. She was still dressed in scarlet, though this time it was a designer pant suit.
A masterfully crafted broach (that was quite obviously very, very old of a golden stag on a ruby shone brightly above her heart. She had the grimness of a trained, and well-practiced killer that hung about her like a deathly (but outrageously pricey) shroud.
Sir Becket was sneering up at me wickedly, wearing another god’s awful tweed suit with a pink shirt and bowtie that appeared terribly out of place in the skeleton littered dungeon. His hands were clasped behind his back as a large, muscular man in black fatigues, polished boots, and a dark leather executioner’s hood pulled on a crank that drew me higher and higher into the air. With each groaning, clinking turn it grew harder and harder to breath.
A door creaked open and another entered, this one wearing strange pointed hooded grey robes. It was leaning heavily on an iron staff topped with a glowing purple crystal that pulsed and hummed with power as it tapped sharply on the stone with each shuffling, rasping breathed step the figure took.
“You’ve been a naughty girl, haven’t you, little one?” A soft almost gentle voice asked sadly as the hood tilted up and peered at me, the shadowed face heavily lined and pale. I heard a whimper of fear that I didn’t make, and the hooded man with the staff nodded serenely and sighed. As if the whole thing pained him terribly but there was nothing, absolutely nothing he could do about it to help.
“Admit it. Admit it now and we can forgo this unpleasantness, my dear. Please don’t make me do this. Just tell me the truth now, or you will suffer for it and tell us later anyway. Please, my dear. Listen to reason. You needn’t suffer this way in this foul place.” He stared up at me kindly, which made it all the creepier, then sighed again and shook his head defeatedly. “Very well. Have it your way then, my dear.”
His eyes slipped meaningfully from Sir Becket and then to the woman who nodded her understanding and began uncoiling her whip (which horribly seemed to be made from sections of bone) as he walked away, staff tapping on the stone and rasping with each step like a dying man, mumbling about how he “had tried his best” and “it was for the greater good.”
With a snap of the fingers from Sir Becket as he sucked at his teeth the hooded man pulled one more crank on the chain wheel that leached the air from my lungs. He locked it in place with a rusted leaver break that creaked so badly it made my teeth grind and marched with purpose out of my line of sight.
There was a sound of rummaging, the jingle of rusted chains, and a creepy whistling of a jaunty tune. Then there were more footsteps followed by the eye watering sound of a wheeled cart of some sort that was badly in need of oil being wheeled slowly forward.
Ever heard a really bad shopping cart? You know, the ones where three of four wheels need oil and one is so far gone it spins round and about and wobbles like mad even as it screeches like a cat getting its tail runover by a pickup truck?
That’s what the cloth draped cart sounded like that the hooded, whistling one slowly rolled forward with. I breathlessly watched him lumber, hunched over back into view as I swayed from the chains. Vile, slimy water dripped on my face from somewhere high above where I dangled, swayed, and gasped for breath. When he finally came to a halt he wordlessly, with hair raising theatricality, drew back the cloth.
To my horror I found I couldn’t take my eyes off what he uncovered. The sickeningly dark stained canvas tool roll tied and set on the cart’s top shelf next to a neatly folded leather apron sent fresh thrills of spine shivering terror through me as I hung there helplessly. The hooded figure carefully unfurled and shook out the apron and carefully secured it about his neck and waist, then stared up at me.
All I could see was the black, Darkling eyes from the eyeholes of the hood as he almost lovingly patted the bundle on the cart. As, without taking his eyes off me, he untied the leather thongs securing it closed. Then carefully, section by section, very slowly and purposefully, he unrolled the well-used canvas tool roll, and with a sadistically ritualistic and methodical calm, exposed the cold, vicious tools of his trade.
I remember whimpering and my guts clenching when I saw the sharp, hooked, serrated, unforgiving, and pointy implements of very medieval torture. All lovingly oiled and sharpened to evil purposes that he revealed, section by section as he unfolded it. Running his fingers over each tenderly as he stared up at me unblinkingly. Something hungry, cruel, and angry sparkled in his glitteringly black eyes.
“Shall we then?” Sir Becket sneered as with the ear curdling scrape of metal on stone he dragged a stepping ladder behind me and peered up at me in a way that made my skin crawl. “Oh, this is going to be such fun,” he promised with a cackle as his hooded executioner/torturer selected a hooked blade and ran his dirty thumb over the keen edge experimentally as he continued his unblinking stare.
He climbed the ladder behind me as I struggled and screamed and yelled in a voice that wasn’t my own as his boots slowly and deliberately rang off the metal ladder rungs. There was a tearing sound and my flesh was assailed by a sickly chill as my clothes fell away, the constant slimy foul-smelling drip from above sending icy cold water down that riveted through my hair and dripped chillingly on my flesh.
I screamed, I felt shame and fear all at once, and then I both heard and felt the crack of the whip, and my back felt as though a dragon had run its claw across my back and sliced me open. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again, and again it landed.
I went from screaming to dog like yelps to moans, then to whimpers, then to numb blackness. All I could hear was the cruel resounding CRACK of the whip and Sir Becket’s perverse laughter as the woman coldly went about her work with frosty malice in her black eyes.
I awoke nauseated and in searing pain, still dangling from the ceiling by my wrists and being dripped on, the chains creaking and groaning as I slowly drifted in and out of reality. The eerily glowing arcane rune stamped into the
iron manacles about my wrists felt like they had rubbed my skin raw and bloody seemingly to the very bone even as they sapped at me in a way that left me tired, drained, immobile, and disoriented.
I eventually became aware that I wasn’t alone as I dangled there in misery. That somewhere in the torchlit dungeon something was watching me. “This pains me, little one.” The voice of the pointy hooded man with the staff emanated from the shadows in a harsh scratchy rasp.
The crystal atop his staff burst to life, bathing the room in low pulsating purple light as he stepped rasping into view. I squinted down at him in terror but couldn’t even gasp or cry. I could only just hang there and stare down at him.
“This is tragic.” He towed a pile of what looked like the ragged remains of a purple dress that lay beneath me in a heap amid the filth, then stared up at me with tears on his face. “Why will you not tell us what I need to know? Why do you insist on this barbarity? Why do you protect this boy? It is ever so inconvenient? He has power that threatens everything. Why do you ignore this? Why do you defy me when I’ve been so kind and gentle in raising you?” He glared up at me from the shadows of his tall pointy hood and shook his head with such dejection and sadness.
“You, who should have been murdered in your crib by my brothers had I not seen your beauty and value and taken action to secret you away. You, who have been as a daughter to me…” Of course, I was unable to speak, and now totally confused until it hit me. They had her—I was too late to save her, and now I was suffering along with her, likely due to our magically curse linked blood.
The man’s expression, at least that which I could see, deadened, and he stared, his thin bloodless lips pressed into a grim line as he studied me/her swaying in ruin from the dungeon ceiling. I felt a swelling of hate then, a loathing and rage that burned hot but impotent as the manacles responded and sent pain searing through me.
He tapped the pointed butt of his staff in frustration and anger on the stone floor, where it sparked violently. Then with an angry hiss he turned on heel and raspingly vanished back into the shadows. Seconds later my vision again swam, and I lapsed back into numb blackness. My last conscious thought before I slipped away was that I hoped she could feel through our bond that she was not alone.
I awoke with a start to fiery pain running along my back, sobbing, whistling and cold, high laughter ringing in my ears. Each moment bringing new fiery thills of agony as my/her trembling fists clenched tightly against the pain. It felt like she was holding my hand as we suffered together. Somehow that was a comfort as I felt like my flesh was being stripped from my back to a slow merrily whistled tune.
Just as I thought I couldn’t take another second and my mind began again to drift hazily into oblivion, I felt a smile on my/her lips and the tiniest candle of hope lit in the evil dark. And in that moment, I knew beyond any doubt that she knew I was with her.
We awoke with a start as the dungeon door rattled and clattered with a key then scraped and creaked then slammed open against the stone. Footsteps echoed and clicked on wet stone steps, and I felt the presence before I saw it, which some part of us knew shouldn’t have been possible. I also knew something had changed as a cold filled us that shivered at the flesh but steeled us as we dangled.
Again, the pointy hooded one with the crystal topped staff (that I realized was most definitely one of the four remaining Wizards) seemed to hover wraith like out the shadows, even as the hooded man stomped into view already in his apron. His cart of evil tools was ready and waiting where he had left it.
“You leave me no choice. You wound me with this betrayal, little one.” He paused then stared up at us, his hooded head cocked to the side as he stared. “Something has changed about you, girl. Do you perhaps wish to talk? Will you delight a very old man with a loving change of heart?” Loathing and disgust hardened in us as we looked down at him.
He frowned, then again slammed his staff’s butt on the stone amid a shower of sparks and glared up at his. Hope replaced with a violent anger that caused his eyes to flare white with power that in turn caused us to burn cold. He was so incensed he didn’t notice.
“Do it,” He hissed to the one in the leather executioners hood, who mutely nodded and started running his fingers along his toys and staring again. His hand seemed drawn, almost magnetically to a cruel looking set of pliers.
He plucked it up and sadistically held it up to us to look at. I felt like beneath his leather hood he was fiendishly licking his lips as he stared with wide, hungry black eyes up at us as he opened and closed the dully shining needle nosed implements again and again with sickeningly sharp clicks.
“Don’t stop until she talks. We run low on time.” The Wizard instructed as he turned away and slipped back into the shadows. The brutish torturer merely nodded up at us and clicked his pliers one more time, as if to say: here it comes then.
He advanced and grabbed hold of our leg in a crushing, clammy grip and after enjoying another long stare into our eyes carefully inserted the pliers with the lower, pointy end under our toenail. Then, with a sharp, jarring pain, clamped down on it and twisted.
We screamed, the agony and fear fueling something unexpected, primal, and infernal as the deeply etched magical manacles chafing our wrists sparked in protest. They were not, after all, designed to hold Darklings, and through our cursed blood bond, Merlin’s curse had seeped though, and the warding began to fail.
He all but dropped his tool with our gory toenail still in its toothed grip as he started and took a hesitant step back, staring up at us in disbelief. Too late he knew something was terribly wrong. We saw reflected in his wide eyes an inkiness that leaked and swam in our own which were beginning to glow an unholy yellow hue.
All the hooded torturer had time to do was blink before the whole chamber darkened in a greyish ethereal fog, the torches riveted to the walls flickering, sparking, and all but dying as it choked them dim.
The hooded brute fell to his knees, gasping and clutching at his throat as a bitter hellish cold filled the room and his lungs. His breath leaching away as the magic in the room containing us finally flared and died. We called out then. We called out to the one we knew could come for us. A friend of sorts.
“What do we have here?” The Doctor purred as he slipped from the choking, icy fog and stood towering over the hooded torturer. Both hands were on his skull tipped gentlemanly walking stick as he regarded with curiously arched brows the man with our toenail in his pliers, prostrated on his knees and gagging desperately before him. He bent down and plucked the instrument and its ghoulish prize from the horrified, trembling Darklings grip and studied it as if admiring the craftsmanship.
“How unimaginative and droll.” He spat disgustingly as he waved it about then tossed it to the floor with a disdainful clatter. “The uninfernal don’ know ’ow to torture. Hmmm… There’s an art to it, no? There’s an ambience, a courtship, a class to its execution, but this,” he gestured about with his hand as if insulted by the tacky amenities in a stateroom. “This is so crass and dull. You are an insult to the profession. Do I have the feeling soon you will learn well from the masters the error of your ways from the other side of the knife, no?”
He smiled predatorially and snapped his finger, and we dropped to the floor in a groaning heap as the manacles holding us clicked open. He stared at us impassively head cocked to the side and red flecked eyes narrowed as we gathered ourselves up.
“This won’ do.” He tisked as he eyed our nakedness with an offended shake of his head and again snapped his fingers.
We felt clean and warm as a black dress straight out of a gothic Venetian ball was suddenly about us hugging us with silk and lace. We stared down at the man in the hood and The Doctor ripped off the hood. I gasped when I saw Sergeant Blake who knelt there in terror as he stared at us.
“Make it quick, but not too quick, yeah?” The Doctor laughed as he tossed the leather mask away and leaned on his walking stick to watch, red flecked eyes alit with antici
pation as we stalked forward, seething rage boiling hot.
“I’m sorry, Ben. Thank you for this,” I/she whispered as I/she clenched lace gloved hands tightly. Pointed, black painted nails digging into flesh until they drew blood that dripped to the floor in thick pooling droplets of crimson.
“You proved yourself to me, and I shan’t forget it. Not ever, my love.” The last was a whisper softer than the dance of a falling rose petals in a summer wind as tiny, dark, wicked things with glowing eyes, wicked claws, and hooked teeth crawled laughing from the cracks of the bloody stones at our feet.
Sergeant Blake shrieked, cried, babbled, gurgled, and made less describable noises as his blood pooled and expanded at our feet. As with wet rending, tearing sounds the fiendish things ripped him to ribbons and carried the strips back down into the stone from whence they came with wild gleeful screams.
“They are all going to pay, Ben, for everything. For what they made me do to your family, what they made me do to you, for what they did to us here… I promise!” Her voice built to a trembling shriek of anger then everything went blank and spinning yet again for me as she sent my consciousness home to the echoing boom of The Doctor’s maniacal laughter.
Chapter Thirteen
The battle beneath the birch tree…
The Elvish High King, his dusky face drawn and deeply lined in concentration with his head bowed, was the first to note I was back as he was standing over me. A look of deep disgust, pain and concern lined his brow as his eyes scrunched tightly shut.
The ornate jade and gold ringed forefinger of his right hand pressed hard onto my forehead. He blinked then smiled down at me weakly as he stiffly lowered his hand from my forehead, a dull throbbing fading with his absence that was replaced by a biting chill. He appeared deeply troubled, a strained, tired pall hanging over his visage like a palpable weight that seemed to age him terribly.
I later discovered that the moment Fazool had figured out what was happening to me when an all by hysterical Aunt Milly had portalled White Owl and I (evidently, when he’d carried me over his shoulder through the portal and stepped unexpectedly into the living room Gramps had almost had another cardiac event and had to be sedated by the Halfling Witch) back to Craggmore, they had sent for the Elvish Wizard straight away.
