I prodded Lithaine with my dagger. He sprang upright.
“Roust the others,” I said. “It’s on.”
In a moment, the five of us stood backs together with weapons drawn. Malcolm cast a Dispel Darkness charm, and warm golden light glowed from his blade. The light threw the forest into stark relief. Their high voices cursing, the spider army shrank back into the shadows. Then their leader spoke, spewing black venom that pockmarked the tree limbs with smoking acid burns.
“Elf magic will avail you not, two-legs,” croaked the spider. “We will feast on your juices this night. The Dragon Lord has commanded it.”
“You can feast on my juices all you want, insect,” said Amabored, “When I pump them up your ass.”
“You dare call us insects?” hissed the spider. To an arachnid, there is no greater insult.
“I do.”
“Then prepare to die!”
We weren’t unduly worried. Giant spiders aren’t that difficult to kill; you take out a few legs, dodge the mandibles and stingers, and fight with your back to something so they can’t get behind you. We were unprepared for their numbers, however. Within seconds of Amabored’s taunt, fifty-score of them vaulted out of the trees at us, screeching enraged spider-oaths and trailing thick slime-coated cables of web. We drew steel and went to work.
The battle raged for half the night. Soon we were waist-deep in arachnid corpses, befouled with entrails, slimed from head to toe with their stinking black blood. No one spoke. Periodically, a spider broke through the ring of steel to clamp fangs on an arm or a throat. If the unlucky bastard failed the proverbial saving throw, then one of us would leap over and pour an Antidote potion down the dying man’s throat. Wilberd took a stinger in the heart, while Malcolm fell with a leg wound that nearly severed his femoral artery. We earned our fucking pay that night, and we ran through our Health potions in short order.
Still, we dealt more punishment than we took. After an eternity of battle, the remnants of the spider army fell back in a rough circle to spin webs of entrapment around us. It was a standoff.
“Is that all you’ve got, fuckrags?” cried Lithaine, brandishing Starfall. The elf was in high color. He was a refutation of everything that sensible people loathe about elves, which was why we loved him.
The spiders merely hung back and conspired in their clacking spider tongue. A violet haze began to fill the sky, emanating from a source just below the western ridge. The light grew brighter, accompanied by a throbbing vibration just out of the range of our hearing: a keening, off-kilter chorus singing somewhere deep within our skulls and filling us with vertigo. We were assaulted by a feeling of wrongness, a sense that reality itself had somehow splintered apart.
The unreality approached. The spiders scuttled aside to allow it passage. Light blinded us, the ground trembled, the chorus shrieked hate in our minds. The land around us seemed to quiver into nonexistence. Finally, we saw it—the biggest fucking spider we’d ever seen. It was the size of a jetliner, I shit you not. We couldn’t truly grasp its size until it surmounted the ridge line and towered above us in horrid violet majesty, corrupting the Woerth with its impossible presence. The tree line wavered though its translucent torso. Around the beast, the purple sky and green cloud formations of some wretched alien landscape bled into our world.
It wasn’t possible that such a thing existed, and yet there it was. When it spoke, it spoke with the voice of a woman.
“THOU SHALT TURN ASIDE, OR PERISH IN THE VOID,” the Violet Queen said, her voice invading our minds like a parasite.
We all knew about giant female spiders. Back at the Suds ‘n Shade, we used to laugh about the two bosom halfling buddies in Tolkien’s tale creeping terrified into a long, dark, moist tunnel to do battle with that horrifying eight-legged vagina. Odin knows that Tolkien had his hang-ups, but he didn’t make that shit up. That’s what giant spiders are: terrifying metaphors for female genitalia. Once you see one up close, and your balls shrivel into raisins, you don’t give a Balrog’s ass-crack about the subtext.
“So, what now?” I whispered to the others. “Run?”
“Fuck that,” said Amabored. “How tough can she be? Slide steel into her belly, and she’ll bleed.”
The queen laughed, and the trees in a wide ring around her exploded into gouts of flame. The shockwave sent us reeling back.
“DO’ST THOU DARE TO STAND BEFORE ME?” the queen raved. “I WHO HAVE TRAVERSED THE FLAMING DESERTS OF GROMM, TOUCHED THE RINGS OF BOLOCH, AND BOWED BEFORE SHE WHO WILL RETURN THE MULTIVERSE TO HER WOMB? STAND BACK, OR THE VOID AWAITS YOU.”
“See?” said Amabored. “She’s all talk.”
Then a curious thing happened. Lithaine, his eyes wide with shock, drew Starfall from her scabbard—or perhaps the sword drew herself. Lithaine raised her hilt. Cold white flames licked her blade. He took a step toward the abomination.
“My liege—what are you doing?” Malcolm shouted.
“It’s the sword!” Lithaine cried. “I can’t let go of the fucking thing!”
The blade rose higher, pulling Lithaine’s arm with it.
The Violet Queen’s reaction was unexpected. “YOU!” she spat. “YOU DO NOT BELONG IN THIS UNIVERSE, CELESTIAL. WILL YOU DIE IN EVERY PLANE?”
And then the sword spoke. Its voice thrummed like a bolt of lightning through our bodies. Lithaine stood with legs planted, sword held aloft, his silhouette limned in white flames, his blond hair a blazing yellow penumbra around his head.
“NOT BEFORE I SEND YOU BACK TO THE VOID, CHAOS-BITCH,” the sword cried. Like the Violet Queen, the sword spoke in the voice of a woman.
“Catfight!” said Amabored.
6
Starfall, we called her, after the elvish phrase Tahtidudai inscribed in fine elf-o-mantium filigree on its white, jewel-encrusted pommel. When she took Lithaine into battle, the light of a galaxy entire shone from her steel. She drove her enemies before her, and Lithaine had only to keep a firm grip on her pommel to reap the glory.
Sentient blades are a rarity on Woerth, but not unheard of. Besides Starfall, Garrin possessed the only other one I ever encountered—Soulreaver, the black-bladed, soul-sucking, rune-covered, devil-possessed scythe that bears no resemblance whatsoever to Elric’s Stormbringer, other than its nearly identical abilities. What can I say? Throughout the Multiverse there are echoes, and when you’re dealing with universes as closely related as Woerth and Melniboné, the echoes can become deafening.
When Starfall chose Lithaine to wield her, however, we had no inkling that she was another avatar of the Celestial Madrigel, who first spoke to Lithaine about imprisoned children when we were still camped in Doomtown. That’s how these things work. Not once have I encountered a relic that reveals its true import until it’s far too late to drop it down a well.
Lithaine entered that doomed marriage with his sword during the winter of 3961. We spent the season on the Goldvale: a windswept plateau perched high within the Wyvern Mountains and warmed to a permanent midsummer’s day by a network of hot springs. Bruised and bloody from the running fight through the Sorrowful Pass, we had been taken in by the Cloud Riders, Daakos Hashkeeji in their own tongue, the noble winged warriors and Pegasai who guarded the Celestial Stairway. Twice, Koschei came within a goblin’s nose hair of throwing down the Stairway: once during the first Quest, when the Cloud Rider Wanbli was murdered by Eckberd, and once again during our Quest. That they didn’t cast us out the moment they saw us coming marked them as true guardians of the Word—or as gluttons for punishment.
Their majestic nobility was belied, however, by prosaic reality. Wings are inherently unkempt; without regular upkeep, they resemble less angel wings and more a pair of moldy feather mattresses. The Cloud Riders themselves were largely a humorless race, devoted to cultivating an air of cultured superiority. Nothing got them more excited than a good compost pile. They sold dreamcatchers to each other and attended hot yoga classes regularly. Their smugness could be oppressive; after a mon
th with them, I wanted daily to punch one of them in the teeth.
Most visitors would tell you that the Goldvale was a paradise. Certainly, Amabored would, since he fell in love there. Here was a guy who would fuck anything that moved, who never parked his car in the same garage twice, and suddenly he was swooning like a schoolboy over a skirt. Not that I could blame him; given how hard I had fallen for Cassie, I certainly understood the impulse. Bellasa had skin the color of molten caramel. Her eyes were the green of Elysium. Her body was as taut as a young fawn’s at the dawn of the world. I don’t doubt that she was a monster between the sheets. She was funny, cool, and a princess to boot. I’d have never stood a chance with her.
Amabored met her while hiking the trails that wound up behind the Cloud Temple and skirted high alongside the imposing face of Guardian Peak. A few miles traipsing up the mountain found him poised at the edge of a fog-draped valley carpeted with virgin forest and graced by a pristine mountain lake. A waterfall plunging into the lake from a hundred-foot cliff tossed rainbows into the air. As Amabored crested the ridge, a winged Cloud Huntress soared over the waterfall. She dive-bombed the lake, plunged in her head, and rocketed upward with water streaming out behind her dark tresses like a comet’s tail.
Atop the ridge, Amabored watched her with arms akimbo and a grin plastered on his mug. The woman spotted him. She flew high over the lake, pausing in midair, majestic with wings outspread, then plummeted straight for him. His grin vanished. Then she had him, her strong arms lifting him by his armpits. Cruising twenty feet over the lake, she dropped him in.
He popped above the waterline, sputtering. “Try that again!” Amabored called, his grin returning.
“So may you dream, earthbound!” she called.
Anyway, that’s how Amabored tells it. Meanwhile, I met my first wife when she punched me in the face, my second after I was nearly disemboweled by a Skull Horde, and my third while rotting in Empress Wilomina’s dungeon. It wasn’t all sunshine and bunnies after I met them, either.
7
If asked to pinpoint the moment I became a full-fledged asshole, I’d go back to that sultry summer night when Melinda confessed her love for me. Or rather, the night I forced her to confess.
It was the day that Amabored, Lithaine, and I finally received formal membership in the Adventurers Guild, a reward from Saggon for gaining Melinda’s bed while remaining his spy. That I could be a double-agent never occurred to him. That I could join Melinda’s side was beyond his comprehension. After all, feeding children to a pit devil was just business.
To Melinda, it was a crusade—and when I bent the knee to her cause, she melted. I had discovered a breach in the fortress around her heart.
Hers was a familiar tale. It began with a wicked stepfather, who had staked a claim on the beds of Melinda and her younger stepsister after Melinda’s mother died. Creeping ever closer to deflowering both girls, stepdad ruled the tiny farmhouse with unique and perverse cruelty—until the night young Melinda stole a dagger from his rucksack and, when he slipped into her room to claim her maidenhead, stabbed him in the balls with it. Drenched in the vile pervert’s blood, she fled her village that very night, never to return. Like most lost souls in the Free Kingdoms, she was drawn to Redhauke. She was twelve years old.
As a young girl in the big city, she found herself dependent on a series of men. When her luck was running, she was simply used and discarded; when it wasn’t, she was beaten bloody or threatened with death. From each encounter, she took what she could, and she soon formed a hard exoskeleton of fierce determination. By the time she took her last lover, a bookie named Dwain, she had learned to use men in return. Through Dwain, she made connections in the Thieves Guild, gave out markers and collected them, until it slowly dawned on that dim-witted shit-sack that she was smarter than him.
Melinda took the beatings and bided her time. Finally, she sprang her trap. She hit a dozen of Saggon’s drops, pinned the robberies on Dwain, fingered him to the Over-Boss, and took Saggon’s charge to bring her abuser down. Dwain begged for his life—and, in a gesture of magnanimity, she only took his balls.
So did the young farm girl, who never told me her real name, earn her nom de guerre: Melinda the Blade. Here I was, just a kid but raised at court, possessed of some manners and at least a vague idea of how to treat a woman. In those first months we spent together, fucking every night and twice on Sundays, I could sense her giving in.
Never had I heard a woman tell me she loved me. I was determined to hear it from her. After a night of pub crawling with the boys, we returned to her flat and made love. Afterward, as we lay tangled up in her sheets, I could feel her glow. Rolling on top of her, I pinned her arms playfully to the mattress.
“Say it,” I said.
“Say what?” asked Melinda. She didn’t struggle.
“You know what I mean. Say it.”
A long pause. Then: “I love you,” she whispered. Her eyes shined in the candlelight.
“I love you too,” I said.
8
That was the first truly douchebag lie I ever told. It would be the first of many. Why drop the L-bomb on her, when I knew in my heart that it wasn’t true?
In my darkest hours of introspection, I tell myself that I meant it. As I sit here slumped on my throne, days before the grand fete to be held in my honor, I can tell you it was bullshit. I admired her, I cared for her, and I let her love me. For her sake, I maintained the charade, but I should never have said the words. There may come a time in your life when you find someone in your power—a lover who would die for you, a child who would die without you—and you’ll find that you have the whip in your hand. Will you use it? Or will you cast it aside?
When Melinda put the whip in my hand, I used it without hesitation—and was irrevocably transformed into a giant, hemorrhoid-packed asshole. In less than a fortnight, after forty years apart, Melinda will have the opportunity to call me such to my face.
9
That’s right—I invited her to my party. Why wouldn’t I? Won’t we have a lot to talk about, right before I kill her along with everybody else?
She’s in her dotage now, long retired as the Grand Duchess of Redhauke. Her second husband is long in the ground. Have the years been kind to her, or have they ravaged her body as they have mine? Is her mind still sharp? Forty years gone, and all we have left are the bleached white bones of memories, thrust up from the desert of the past like the fossils of ancient beasts. Even now, I dare not ask for her forgiveness.
Besides, she already forgave me by helping me sneak out of Redhauke with my balls still attached—and with Cassie at my side. It was a neat trick, when you think about it, jumping from one wife to the next with no downtime. Amabored enjoyed the more traditional meet-cute, but we do share one thing in common: Love kicked us both right in the teeth.
From the moment I awoke in the temple of Athena, I craved Cassiopeia like a drug. Cassie was everything that Melinda wasn’t: blonde, slender, ethereal, ivory skinned, a knockout. She was the kind of woman you assume is out of your league, unless you’re a douche who thinks that no woman is. If Melinda was an earth elemental, then Cassie was a woman of fire. Given the chance to explore a volcano, how could I stay down on the farm?
Before stumbling out of the temple battered but unbowed, I asked this stunningly intriguing priestess to meet me for lunch so I could properly thank her for saving my life. To my surprise, she agreed. Then I ran home and told Melinda everything about the return of the Screaming Skull, and not a thing about the priestess. The next day, I lied to her about where I was going. It would be the first of many bricks I would lay to build my cathedral of deceit.
First, I took the Skull back to Jaspin’s vault and locked it down. If the illusionist was alarmed to see it again, he said nothing, only pursing his lips beneath his Confucian mustaches; I failed to notice the burning look of delight in his eyes. The fucking Skull wouldn’t stay there for long, but the vault would buy me a day or so. Soon aft
er, I sat facing Cassiopeia on the patio of a cozy bistro near Hundred Fountain Square. While I drank spiced rum, she put away five beers in an hour. Those Athenians liked to get their drink on.
“So, what’s your story?” I asked Cassie. “How’d you end up at that temple? Enjoy the life of the mind, do you?”
“A life most foreign to you, I’d wager,” Cassie said.
“You have my number. Go on.”
“There’s not much to tell. My family grows olives on the Verdance Hills near the town of Prasinakti, on the coast of Collanna.”
“Collanna? You’re part of the Shield Wall, then. Growing up, we were practically neighbors.”
“With only the Hydra Sea between us,” Cassie said. “My mother died when I was young. My father lives still. I have eight siblings whom I miss or not as they deserve. I’m here because I had a choice: marry a landed noble or become a priestess. So, I took up the Shield. The Oracle sent me here a year ago.”
“Lucky for me,” I said. I told her as much of my story as I dared. Desiring her confidence, I also told her the abridged version of the Skull’s history. About Melinda, I said nothing at all.
“And you’re convinced it’s… a relic of Koschei?” Cassie asked. “Really? You haven’t just taken too many blows to the head?” She leaned across the table toward me, a move that suggested she was amenable to approach.
“There’s no doubt. When I find out who delivered the thing to me, I’ll beat the truth out of him. I need to know what it wants from me.”
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