The Screaming Skull

by Rick Ferguson

  After falling in love with Cassie, which happened the moment I left our first lunch together, I began to perceive Melinda not as my wife, but rather as a treacherous jailor from whom I longed to escape. Melinda hadn’t changed; she was still the same strong-willed, pure-hearted woman for whom I had pretended to fall five years earlier. Still, everything about her now bugged me. Her habits, once endearing, now grated. I turned sullen. Never mind that Melinda was equally tired of my indifference, my stink, my utter uselessness as a partner; she still loved me enough to forgive. I had become a raving narcissist, incapable of sympathy, empathy, or compassion. Nothing mattered to me but my own craven needs.

  The meltdown didn’t begin until I began to turn away from her in the bedroom. What can you do when your wife expects a good shagging, but the entirety of your desire is bent upon another? I wanted to fake it, believe me. I tried. Little Elberon brooked no dishonesty, however, and refused to rise to the challenge.

  “Maybe you should see an apothecary,” Melinda said, sitting cross-legged on the bed beside me after our latest pathetic attempt at lovemaking. My back was to her. I felt like a runny stream of troll diarrhea.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m just freaked out about the Skull, that’s all. I’m never going to be rid of the fucking thing.”

  “We’ve had sex no more than a handful of times the entire year,” Melinda said. “What does that have to do with the Skull? You know I want to try for another baby. Don’t you? Don’t you want me anymore?”

  No, I thought grimly. I don’t. “Look, I just need some breathing room, that’s all. I’m stressed out.”

  “I’ll give you breathing room!” Melinda cried. She jumped out of bed, grabbed her robe, and stormed out of the bedroom. I didn’t go after her. Instead, I lay in our marriage bed, breathed a sigh of relief, and turned my thoughts to Cassiopeia.

  16

  Six months later, I’d have more breathing room than I dared wish for. For nearly six years, Redhauke had been my home. During the fallow times when dungeon-scouring opportunities dried up, I would spend the afternoons wandering from one end of the sprawling city to the other: perched on the Mere Wall watching the stately processional of merchant ships on the Everdeep awaiting entry into the Under-Canals; braving the press of humanity in the Bazaar while on the lookout for some thoughtful trinket to bring home to Melinda; gambling in the Pit at one of the Guild casinos; strolling along the Grand Promenade with Melinda on midsummer’s eve, the air sultry and redolent with spice as the dying sunlight plated the city spires in gold. Tradewind was my home, and always would be; I missed it desperately. If Tradewind was my mother, however, then Redhauke was my lover. Live long enough in a place, and it gets in your bones.

  Imagine my surprise when it appeared as if I would be leaving the city for good by being catapulted over the Shield Wall into the clutches of a ravenous army of ten thousand imps, Chaos dwarfs, and Plague Knights beating their war drums outside the city walls. That I’ve been in tighter spots still speaks only to my dizzying procession of poor life-choices.

  Bound hand and foot, I now lay in the shallow bowl of a catapult. The Screaming Skull lay next to me, linked to my girdle by a chain. A year earlier, we had told the city fathers everything we knew about both the Skull and the Girdle; after the lemming imp incident, the Lord Mayor had instructed us to lay low, say nothing of the Phylaxes, and wait until we were contacted with instructions. As the months passed, we presumed that the city fathers had forgotten about us. We were wrong, of course—and the night before my impending execution, Farbrimm had dispatched the Guard to capture me as I attempted to flee the city through the Under-Canals.

  The guards tossed me into a dungeon cell beneath Shorestone Palace, where the late Lord Mayor had resided until he rode out to meet Lord Eckberd that afternoon and found his head spinning away from his neck via a single swing of Borg Hammerfell’s axe. Bad luck for him. How could anyone know that this time the horde outside the city walls was real, and not another illusion concocted by that treacherous fuckwad Jaspin Spellbinder? Eckberd had the Mayor’s head mounted on a stake near the Shield Wall, where the Bully Boyz threw so much shit at it that it now looked like a chocolate basketball.

  Despite the death of old Sklaar the night before, the remaining students and faculty at the School of Thaumaturgy still wielded sorcery powerful enough to turn the city into an impregnable fortress. That insurance wasn’t good enough for Phineas Bramann, the Chief Administrator, a spineless twerp who was, thanks to the deaths of the Lord Mayor, Farbrimm, and Sklaar, the last remaining authority in the city. He planned to follow the late Mayor’s plan by tossing me over the wall and into the waiting hands of Lord Eckberd. Could I blame him, really? I’d have done the same thing.

  For good measure, the Guard had nabbed my friends as well. Now Amabored, Lithaine, and Redulfo each lay bound in the bowls of catapults lined up next to mine in the palace courtyard. Did they blame me for their predicament? Bet your ass they did.

  “This is all your fault for finding that fucking Skull in the first place!” Amabored called over.

  “I didn’t find shit,” I said. “It found me, remember?”

  “Then it’s your mother’s fault for squirting you out of her twat!”

  “Did Elberon ever really have a choice but to find the Skull?” Redulfo mused.

  “Don’t start that shit again,” Lithaine said.

  “If I get out of here, I’m going to cut off your goddamned head,” Amabored called to me.

  “Empty words from a dead man.”

  “Then I’ll kill you in the next life, brother.”

  “Cease this pointless blather!” called Phineas Bramann. “Spend your last moments making peace with your gods. Guards! Prepare to launch the prisoners!”

  A guard stepped forward next to each catapult. Each one raised his sword, ready to slice the ropes and send us vaulting over the wall and into the arms of the waiting hordes. Overhead, storm clouds roiled. Outside the palace walls, the assembled throngs of city dwellers chanted for our deaths: Over the top! Over the top! I closed my eyes.

  When I heard a gurgling cry, I opened them again. The guard nearest me now sprouted a crossbow bolt in his gullet. He collapsed, blood bubbles spurting from his lips. Across the way, the guards preparing to launch my mates fell also with bolts to the eye, heart, or throat.

  Phineas whirled around wildly, his eyes bulging with surprise. “Wha—!” he began. A giant silver hammer coalesced out of the air above his head and bashed in his skull before disappearing again. He dropped like a drunk in the gutter. A spell—but from who?

  Beside me, Wilberd appeared with knife in hand. Giving me the thumbs up, he sliced through the ropes binding my wrists.

  “Wilberd!” I cried. My hands free, I scooped up the monk in a bear hug. “Praise Odin. Where’s Cassie?”

  “Here!” Cassie called, as the monk raced over to free the others. She stood on the roof of the palace armory decked out in Athenian war-maiden garb and clutching a morning star. Her blonde hair flowed like spun gold from beneath her quilted cap. “You didn’t think I was going to let you off the hook, did you?”

  And then, from the opposite side of the courtyard, another woman’s voice: “Who the hell is Cassie?”

  I wheeled around. Atop the courtyard wall stood Melinda, flanked by seven of her personal guard. Beside her stood Fiona, her Second, with a glint of knowing triumph in her eyes. She had been spying on me for months.

  “I am Cassiopeia, Shield Maiden of the Temple Athena,” Cassie called to Melinda. “And you are?”

  “Melinda the Blade, Over-Boss of the Thieves Guild. How do you know my husband?”

  Cassie turned furiously to me. Her face burned crimson.

  “Husband?” she spat. “This woman is your wife?”

  “Catfight!” said Amabored.

  17

  Give me a choice between facing Koschei the Deathless himself or the wrath of those two women, and I’ll choose Koschei e
very time. What’s more dangerous than a woman scorned? Certainly not an evil dark lord bent on world domination. Compared to these gals, he was a creampuff.

  I was in this pickle because of Jaspin; it had always been Jaspin. Had I known that I’d spend most of my career as a pawn in a chess match between Jaspin Spellbinder and my own father, I’d have spent the rest of my life as a hermit. The friendly barkeep, retired adventurer, brewer of Flaming Telepaths, and sage counsel was all along in league with the Crimson Hand. He had started out in the employ of my father, was turned by the Hand via some unknown process, and then planted in Redhauke as a secret agent with one goal: to find the Screaming Skull before I did. Even though he disappeared after the Showdown at the Blue Falcon, he kept turning up again to fuck with us, like a scorching case of herpes. No one was happier than me to learn that Amabored had nailed that fucker to a cross; a more fitting end for him I couldn’t devise.

  When Malacoda appeared in Hundred Fountain Square a year earlier, however, we had no idea that Jaspin was involved. We even met at his former inn to decide what to do about the curse the devil had placed upon the city.

  On a bed on the third floor of the Suds ‘n Shade writhed Melinda, attended by her trusted physicians. The miscarriage had ravaged her body; she was corpse-white from blood loss and carrying a high fever. She radiated heat like a forge. The physicians set blood-engorged leeches on her and cast the Reversal charms. The leeches began to pump their stored blood supply back into her veins. Slumping beside her like a poisonous mushroom, I held her hand for several hours. Then Amabored called up the stairs.

  “Come down,” the barbarian called. “We have a plan.”

  Not until her breathing steadied and her fever broke did I go downstairs. I found the droogs sprawled around the bar, their faces drawn. The flotsam of the wedding party lay scattered about. The candlesticks were burnt down to nubs. Lithaine slid a mug of ale down the countertop toward me. I drained it in one go.

  “She’s out of the woods?” Redulfo asked.

  “I think so. Sleeping, anyway. She scared the shit out of me.”

  “Thank the gods for that,” Amabored said. “That woman is tough as dragon scales, Elberon. Why she fancies you is a mystery.”

  “It’s my enormous prick, of course. What’s the plan?”

  The plan was to commit suicide. Malacoda had called us out, and we had to answer him. What we couldn’t figure was why the devil thought I still had the Skull. I wracked my brain for memories of our battle, but they remained elusive. I knew only that I had beaten him, and that the Skull was gone. Once a devil proclaimed a curse, however, then that was fucking that. If we didn’t produce the Phylax, then Malacoda would use Redhauke for a toilet.

  Twelve hours after the devil vanished in a thunderclap, he punctuated his curse. From the Stonesong Hills west of the city there came a low rumbling, which sent the Guard racing to the walls. While I sat with Melinda upstairs and Amabored stood guard below, Lithaine and Redulfo tore through the crowd clogging Fountain Avenue near the Dragon Gate. Bribing a guard, they climbed the crooked stone steps to the parapets, pushed past the grunts, and cast their gazes across the shallow valley bathed in silver starlight. Fires from the outlying villages flickered in the distance.

  Then, from out of the foothills, they came. At first, Lithaine and Redulfo could see only a black line on the dim horizon, growing thicker as the vanguard approached. Above the bass rumble of the marching horde, they heard now a high, keening buzz, like the complaints of a million angry hornets. The lights from the villages winked out, one by one. Then came the screams.

  “Fuck me,” said one of the nearby guards. “Would you look at that.”

  The horde approached the perimeter of the city’s torch line, where they stood revealed: lemming imps—ten thousand of them. We knew of them only by legend; Koschei had bred them, the tales told, to lay waste to rebellious towns and villages within his conquered lands. Lemming imps bore no weapons and indeed had no arms to hold them. No eyes, either. They stood waist high, gnome-size, and consisted almost entirely of mouth and fangs. They spoke in buzzing, guttural Hell-speech impossible to decipher.

  All lemming imps do is eat. If they continued their march unmolested, they would eat every living thing within sight: every man, woman, child, horse, dog, and rat within range of their jaws. The pit devil had set upon us a plague of locusts—and if we didn’t produce the Phylaxes, they would surge over the walls and strip the city bare.

  Elf and wizard slipped back to the bar to relay the bad news. Hours later, I heard the plan: We would seek an audience with the Lord Mayor of Redhauke, tell him our story, and volunteer to lead the imps away from the city walls. The Mayor would need only agree to a diversionary attack by the Guard to give us a chance to escape.

  Even if the plan worked, the odds favored a single outcome. The imps would find us, and we would die screaming.

  “I can leave on my own,” I told the others. “No point in all of you getting eaten.”

  “If I thought it would work, I’d throw you over the wall myself,” Amabored said, “but everyone knows we’re mates. They’d toss us all out anyway.”

  “Elberon, are you sure you don’t know where the Skull is?” asked Redulfo. “The simplest way out of this bind is to give them what they came for.”

  “I haven’t seen the thing in three years,” I said. “Melinda nearly died helping me get rid of it. If my death can save her now, then she’s got it.”

  18

  The next morning, we dragged our asses out of bed to enact our laughable plan. As Melinda had yet to wake, I asked Fiona to get word to the Mayor that we needed a meeting. That afternoon, a phalanx of expressionless Redhauke Guards arrived at Lady Haag’s house to escort the four of us to the palace.

  The streets were deserted. An exodus of fishing trawlers, merchant ships, and barges drifted out of the Grand Canal, through the Harbor, and into the safe waters of the Everdeep. For the remaining citizens, there was no escape. Some wags had secured perches on the walls to watch helplessly as the horde of lemming imps buzzed and milled about outside the walls. Everyone else now cowered in cellars or in the Under-Canals, hoping to ride out the storm.

  We were led through the Shorestone Gate and into the palace courtyard, where a platoon of peacock-channeling guards relieved the soldiers and perp-walked us into the palace itself. At our first sight of Shorestone Palace, we turned slack-jawed: The place would have impressed enough on its own without the added decor provided by the scores of chests, boxes, and barrels filled with coins, gems, gold, silver, and treasure stacked everywhere and more than man-high. As the guards led us on a winding path through the treasure, several brawny men entered through a side door and dumped more booty into the room.

  “The fucking nobles are bugging out,” Amabored whispered.

  Through the foyer, up a staircase that descended from the mezzanine like a marble waterfall, along the broad balcony festooned with portraits of the mayors of old, into a library stacked to the rafters with musty first editions, and we found ourselves standing before the three most powerful men in the city: the Lord Mayor himself; Sklaar, the Dean of the School of Thaumaturgy; and Lord Marshall Farbrimm, commander of the Redhauke Guard. If ever you’ve stood before truly powerful men, then you know what an unmanning experience it can be. As soon as we stepped into the room, our pricks shriveled to noodles and our balls ran screaming from our sacks.

  The guards shoved us forward. We huddled together like a litter of newborn pups.

  “You’re here under the protection of Melinda the Blade,” the Lord Mayor said, scrutinizing us from beneath his massive brow, “and that is the only reason you’re here. Speak now and make it short.”

  We looked at each other. Then Lithaine pushed me forward.

  “It’s about the devil’s curse, my Lord,” I finally said. “The devil demands the Screaming Skull and the Girdle of Gargantua. Both items have been in my possession. The Girdle I still possess, but the Skull i
s lost.”

  The wizard Sklaar stepped forward. Yes, he wore a beard and pointy hat.

  “You’ve found two of the Phylaxes?” the wizard cried. He turned to Redulfo. “You—apprentice. Can this news be true?”

  “We believe so, my Lord,” Redulfo said. “Koschei’s Rune is inscribed on both.”

  “Tell us everything,” the Lord Mayor commanded. “If you lie or leave something out, Sklaar will incinerate you.”

  And so, we told them everything—and our lack of incineration meant that the lords believed us. I’d gladly turn over both relics to them, I explained. The Girdle was now fused to my torso, however—an after-effect of wielding the Skull beneath the Blue Falcon—and the Skull was lost in the Hellmouth. So, we offered our simple proposal: If the lemming imps saw us flee the city, they would assume that we possessed both relics still, and turn aside from the city to pursue us. We just needed the Guard to execute a feint, so we could enjoy a sufficient head start.

  The three lords nodded solemnly and then conferred together out of earshot. When they returned, the Mayor motioned to the guard captain.

  “Seize them and lash them to the catapults,” the Mayor ordered. “Launch them over the walls.”

  “Sold out!” Amabored cried. “I’ll rip off your balls, you motherfucking—”

  “Stay your hand, Lord Mayor,” Sklaar said. “There may be a better way.” The wizard stepped to a heavy tapestry covering one wall of the library and drew it back. The tapestry concealed not a wall, but rather a balcony, overlooking the palace courtyard. From beyond the Shield Wall came the distant buzzing cacophony of the imps.

  “We shouldn’t be so hasty to turn these fellows over to the devil,” said Sklaar. “If the rumors are true and Lord Eckberd has risen again, then Koschei himself may be directing his old warlord’s actions. That this fellow here possesses the Girdle means he may yet have some part to play. Mayhap these men, as useless as they now appear, will form the foundation of the next Quest to throw down the Deathless One.”