The Screaming Skull

by Rick Ferguson

  Nineteen years had passed since I first found the Girdle of Gargantua in the cavern beneath Chasm Falls. How was I to know that Jaspin had placed it there, at my father’s command, for me to find? Had I known that detail, do you think I would have touched the fucking thing? I would have run screaming out of that cave and never looked back.

  Down what a torturous path that seminal event sent my mates and me: fleeing Redhauke for our lives, charged with finding the remaining Phylaxes in a new Quest of the Dread Plain; seeing Redulfo, Malcolm, and Bellasa come to bitter ends; essaying epic journeys high in the mountains to cloud giant lairs, and far below the Woerth’s surface to subterranean oceans that never knew sunlight. We led great armies into battle. We fought and killed every manner of foul beast and denizen of evil that exists on this godforsaken rock. We journeyed to Hell and back. We were lost in other universes. As for me, I played the role of buccaneer, hero, warlord, spy, and slave, among many others. At the Quest’s end, that greenhorn fifteen-year-old kid who found the Girdle so long ago was as dead and buried as his most distant ancestors.

  Once we reached the Dread Plain, we survived everything Koschei could throw at us: Harvesters, Plague Knights, the Bridge of Terrors, and finally the hellspawn that guarded the Dread Gate itself. We fought our way through the Deathless One’s psychic assault, the united Phylaxes pulling us inexorably forward as the walls of the Dread Keep melted and flowed around us, forcing us to wade through blood and piss and suppurating flesh, the faces of the thousands of children whose souls Koschei had consumed crying out to us from the walls, the ceilings, the floors. Only our faith in our fellowship kept us moving forward. Had any one of us doubted that bond, our defenses would have collapsed. We would have been lost to madness and death, and the Woerth would have followed soon thereafter.

  When at last we reached Koschei himself, what did we see? A dread evil Lord in the full majesty of his powers, cloaked in dark glory, before whom it took every ounce of our will not to bend our knees and quail before him? Nope—we found a fucking kid.

  Overcoming every horror, we found ourselves at last in the Chamber of Eternity, Koschei’s seat of power on Woerth. The Chamber was an island of Law in a sea of Chaos, for even the Deathless One required a platform upon which to wage his wars for the annihilation of Woerth.

  “Come in, come in, friends, welcome,” Koschei said as we entered the Chamber. It was appointed as a modest wizard’s quarters: tall shelves lined with books and tomes, wooden globe of the Woerth in one corner, a wide desk stacked with scrolls, quills, and pots of ink. In the center of the room stood a simple upholstered throne positioned over the eight-pointed Star of Chaos made of marble and inlaid in the polished wooden floor. On the throne sat a child.

  At least, he appeared as a child, of no more than five or six years, with the androgynous features of a cherub rendered in oils. He wore a simple tunic and sandals. In one hand he bore a goblet, from which he sipped primly. As we crept into the Chamber, the child greeted us with a cold smile and a piercing gaze brimming with wry good humor.

  We spread out into the room, we survivors: Amabored, Lithaine, James, Andrigan, Lindar, and me. Cassie remained outside the Keep, for entering this fountainhead of Chaos would have warped our gestating son—had the boy lived at all, he would have been born a monster. Wilberd had remained with her. We didn’t bother to draw steel, as this wasn’t to be a fight with conventional weapons. It was psychic warfare: our collective wills locked in mortal combat with the will of a sorcerer who had last lived on Woerth five hundred years ago, whose consciousness now spanned a thousand universes and ten thousand centuries.

  “Shall we have a toast, then, to our parlay?” Koschei asked in the high, innocent voice of the child whose body he possessed. Our hands now held goblets of warm spiced brandy. The Dread Lord noted our wariness.

  “Surely you don’t suspect something as prosaic as poison?” Koschei asked, grinning his cherub’s grin. “Fear not, for our battle will be joined shortly—assuming, of course, that you mean to kill me. But our inevitable clash is no reason to forgo courtesy.”

  “To your health, then,” Amabored said, and raised his cup. We drank. It was good stuff. The ability to manipulate raw Hellfire had its advantages.

  “Now then, let’s to business,” Koschei said, stepping down from his throne. His little feet dangled above the floor for a moment, and I nearly laughed at the absurdity of it. Shouldn’t I just bend the little shit over my knee and spank his ass? Could it be that simple?

  “If I read our situation aright, then I may summarize it thusly,” Koschei continued. “I aim to give this world over to Chaos, and you five men aim to stop me. A simple, timeless dilemma enacted in infinite scenarios across the vast expanse of the Multiverse over many long millennia. Do I have it right?”

  “Master of the obvious,” said Lithaine.

  “As you are master of the cliché, young elf,” said Koschei. Then the child paused, passing a hand across his brow. Was this a moment of weakness? Reaching into his tunic, Koschei pulled out a pack of cigarettes—Marlboro Reds. He tucked a smoke between his lips and lit it with a snap of his little fingers. After a few puffs, he spoke.

  “Look,” Koschei said, and his voice had changed—still childlike, but possessed now of a decidedly jaded ennui. “Do you chumps know how sick I am of this scene? How many times I’ve given this same ridiculous speech?”

  “How many times?” asked Lindar. “If it’s confusion you’re sewing, Dread Lord, then you’ll need to do better than that.”

  “Again with the dime-store quips,” Koschei said, drawing on his red. He smoked it so fast that he had to light a new one with the butt of the first. “We can do this all night, or we can make it easy. Here’s the truth: You think that killing me will restore peace and plenty to the Free Kingdoms—but it won’t. Killing me won’t save the Woerth; killing me will destroy it.”

  That last bit gave us pause. “Okay, we’ll bite,” Amabored said. “Tell us how killing you will destroy the Woerth. If we don’t buy your story, then I promise you that I will eat you and shit you out again right here in this room.”

  “So mote it be,” said Koschei. Throughout this exchange, I had remained silent; now Koschei pointed to me and motioned me forward. I now bore nine of the ten Phylaxes that would allow me to wrest Koschei’s power from him: the Screaming Skull sat once again on my shoulders; the Crown of Chaos sat upon the Skull’s brow; the Horrible Heart beat in my chest; Soulreaver, taken from the Grimmreaper himself, rested in its sheath at my side. Etcetera. We lacked only the Awful Orbs, which we assumed were staring at us from the child’s cherubic face. Duly outfitted, I stepped forward.

  “Look at you,” Koschei said. “Do you know how ridiculous you look? Seriously, you look like an idiot. What did you think was going to happen here, Elberon? Did you think that you would yank the Orbs out of my head and then destroy me?”

  “UM… YEAH, I GUESS SO,” I said in the Skull’s booming voice.

  “What about the sacrifice?” Koschei asked. “The friends you’ve lost, the family members, the lovers, all the nameless soldiers who gave their lives in the war to get you six sorry-ass losers to me—you think that was the end of it? The victory is only as great as the sacrifice required to achieve it, Elberon—that’s how these stories work. This doesn’t end with you standing victorious over my corpse. It ends with you dead.”

  “Bullshit,” Amabored said. “He’s bluffing.”

  “Jesus, how dense are you morons?” Koschei asked, shaking his cherub’s head. “Here’s what happens: To find the Orbs and gain the power of the Phylaxes, you need to step through this.”

  With that, Koschei waved his hand. Behind his little throne, a pair of velvet curtains parted to reveal the Black Mirror—the same Black Mirror Andrigan, Wilberd and I would find in Lindar’s cave more than twenty-five years later. Immediately, we were filled with that same nauseating sense of wrongness that we felt when we first encountered the Violet Queen on the ro
ad to slay Redulfo the Black. We all took an instinctive step away from it. Whatever this mirror was, whatever horrors lay behind the negative space held within its obsidian frame, it didn’t belong in this universe.

  “Step through this, and you’ll find Her,” Koschei said. “You know who I’m talking about. She has the Orbs. Before anything else happens, you’ll need them.”

  “We’ll get them,” said Lithaine, “and then we cut off your fucking head.”

  “No. NO! WRONG!” said Koschei, pistoning his little arms around. “You don’t. As soon as Elberon returns through the Black Mirror, then I’m no longer trapped in this little package.” He slapped himself on the chest. “I become HIM. Don’t you see? HE becomes ME.”

  And then, as suddenly as if Koschei had flipped a light switch—had there been such a thing as light switches in our world—I did see. I saw. I knew what Koschei meant by sacrifice. By the looks on the mugs of my mates, they knew it, too.

  “Oh,” said James.

  “Ah,” said Andrigan.

  “Yeah,” said Amabored. “Okay.” The barbarian turned to me. “Look, Elberon, I told you outside the Blue Falcon that I would, you know… if you needed me to.”

  ‘YES. I UNDERSTAND,” I said in the Skull’s voice. “THANK YOU, BROTHER. IT DOESN’T CHANGE WHAT WE HAVE TO DO.”

  “Ah—but it does. It DOES.” Koschei stepped forward, animated, his smoke bouncing up and down between his fat little lips. “There’s another way—a way we can end this whole stupid charade once and for all. We can all go home happy.”

  “Do tell,” Lithaine said.

  “Easier to show you.” The Dread Lord stepped to me, took my hand in his tiny one, and led me before the Black Mirror. “Just take a look, Elberon, and everything will become clear. You’ll learn the identity of our true Enemy. And you’ll know that I’m not it. You’ll learn that we’re both on the same side.”

  The child stepped aside and bowed low, like a carnival barker inviting a skeptical audience to step into the tent and see the freak show. We all looked at each other. Then I shrugged and stepped forward.

  “ALL RIGHT, WIZARD,” I said. “IF THIS IS A TRICK, I’LL FIND THOSE EYEBALLS AND SEND YOU BACK TO THE VOID WHERE YOU BELONG.”

  “Yeah, kid. Sure thing,” Koschei said, and motioned me forward. Stepping before the opaque surface of the Black Mirror, I stared into its featureless depths. At first, I saw nothing but my own reflection: a haggard, gaunt, bearded bloke rocking the thousand-yard stare. Nothing I hadn’t seen before. It was me.

  Then the reflection rippled before my eyes, as if I had dropped a pebble onto the surface of a black pond. The image twisted and swirled like pulled taffy, clouding up and then resolving itself again. The reflection became a window, through which natural light bathed me.

  Then I saw myself—only it wasn’t the Me I had just seen in the Mirror’s black surface. It was the real me. I saw myself for who I really was.

  And I screamed.

  23

  When the Chimera Gate opened on ten-thousand hungry lemming imps carpeting the landscape outside the city, I also had the urge to scream. None of us had any illusions that we could stand against them long enough to find and slay their queen. We would die, and the pit devil would have the Girdle. We could hope only that the city would be spared destruction.

  A detail of Redhauke Guards had helped outfit us for battle. They had wheeled out a big steam-powered street sweeper, one of the same machines we had seen quash the riots in Doomtown five years earlier. The crawler bore man-high iron wheels wrapped in thick spiked treads, an iron-shod dozer blade ringed with sharp teeth forged of tempered steel, and four crossbows mounted on a high platform protected by steel-mesh nets lined with oversized fishhooks. There was a bridge with a clutch, accelerator, and steering wheel at the bow, a short mast with crows’ nest amidships, and a coalhouse topped by twin smokestacks at the stern. It was a badass piece of equipment. We would have jizzed ourselves at the opportunity to ride it into battle, if doing so would prolong our lives for more than a few hours.

  One of the guards showed us how to drive it by standing with Redulfo on the bridge while the wizard piloted it around Chimera Plaza. When the guard was satisfied that Redulfo could at least maneuver the crawler through the gate, he hopped down and motioned us aboard.

  “We’ll remember you lads in song,” the guard promised, with the air of a prison chaplain comforting a condemned convict. “Take as many hellspawn with you as you can.”

  “You have our word,” said Amabored. The barbarian hoisted himself onto the crawler. For a man about to be devoured by a ravenous horde, he was in good spirits. Falling in blood-soaked battle was certainly the preferred fate for fighting men; had I already chosen Odin as my deity, I might at least have looked forward to hoisting a flagon in Valhalla. As I was still an agnostic, I could look forward only to the oblivion of the grave.

  “You must enjoy the irony of dying out there with us when you could be chilling on the throne back in Helene,” I said to Lithaine as we climbed aboard the crawler.

  “I wouldn’t say I’m enjoying it, no,” said Lithaine.

  “You girls need to pull yourselves together,” said Amabored, grinning like a wolf at the sight of a lame deer. “How would you rather go out? Sitting on the toilet? Today is as good a day to die as any.”

  “Yes, I’d rather die sitting on the toilet than being eaten alive,” said Redulfo. “But that’s just me.”

  “Say, listen, your majesty,” Amabored said to Lithaine, placing a familiar arm on the elf’s shoulder. “I know how you feel about me. If you’d like to go to some quiet place for a few minutes where we could be alone, I’m game. I’d like to make your last moments on Woerth happy ones.”

  “Suck a bag of dicks, asshole,” Lithaine said, pulling away.

  “Do you have a bag of dicks I could borrow? Because, you know, you look like the kind of fellow that would have a couple of bags of dicks lying around.”

  “Let’s get this over with,” I said. Hopping onto the crawler, I examined our arsenal, which lay stored in a pair of large chests bolted to the platform. To aid us in our futile mission, the guards had procured for us an impressive array: Molotov cocktails, incendiary grenades, Holocaust potions, and a dozen spell scrolls requested by Redulfo. Lithaine had ten quivers of arrows at the ready—and if every arrow found its mark, his kill total would be no more than a rounding error.

  Redulfo positioned himself at the wheel, then nodded to the guards in the gate tower. They saluted us and cranked up the portcullis. When the wizard hit the gas, the crawler lurched forward belching steam from the stacks. The portcullis fully retracted, he nudged the crawler forward. Through the open gate we saw only darkness.

  The teeth-rattling clang of the portcullis dropping behind us foretold our doom. We could see no lemming imps, but despite the ear-pounding growl of the crawler engine, we could hear them: the high-pitched, buzzing whine of ten thousand hungry mouths all chattering at once like a swarm of angry mutant wasps. Fear rose in my throat like stomach bile.

  “BUTT-SCRATCHER!!!” cried Amabored, shouting one of the many non-sequitur oaths he brought from the North. He twirled his sword in a broad circle over his head.

  “We’re doomed,” said Redulfo. He gunned the motor.

  24

  No more than ten yards beyond the gate, the roiling see of lemming imps attacked. It was the beginning of six hours of hell.

  It was past midnight; a hunter’s moon hung in the sky, which we took as a good omen. First up: Redulfo, set to cast a Force Shield spell inscribed on one of the scrolls tucked into his shoulder pouch. He sang the incantation and blew the spell’s melody on his flute. Then the requisite sound of tearing paper as our universe collided with another, and the crawler was encased within a blue translucent globe.

  We slaughtered the imps inside the shield in short order. As Redulfo gunned the crawler forward and the snapping horde threw itself against the force shield, we started in
with missile weapons, Amabored and I manning crossbows while Lithaine rocked his longbow. We couldn’t miss. We dropped scores of them, piling one corpse on another until the corpses blotted out the moon.

  The shield afforded us progress away from the city walls; when it dissipated, we suffered the downside—a rain of snarling imps falling on our heads. Taking a few nasty bites, we chopped up about fifty or so. Then Redulfo cracked open one of the Holocaust potions, and the detonation incinerated every lemming imp within a hundred yards.

  “Cast the Detect Chaos spell!” I called. “Let’s see where we are.”

  The scroll was a secret weapon of sorts, a gift to us from Sklaar himself. Most Detect Chaos spells were limited to a radius of ten chains or so, but Sklaar had extended this one to a one-league radius. Since lemming imps lacked free will, any strong Chaos source in the vicinity ought to emanate from their queen.

  As the imps surged forward again, Redulfo cast the spell. We rained fire with crossbows again until the bodies began to pile up near the platform. Redulfo detonated the second Holocaust potion, which took out maybe another hundred. Small potatoes, but the blast cleared our sightlines enough that we could make out, far in the distance hovering over an abandoned farmhouse, a smoky nebula of fluorescent green light.

  “Bingo!” cried Amabored. “Gun it, wizard—let’s kill that bitch and go have breakfast.”

  Redulfo pushed the throttle forward, and the crawler plowed into the morass of imps. Those in our path were ground to hamburger beneath the tracks; soon the bottom half of the crawler was dripping with their black blood. Those that made it to the top of the machine were caught in the nets and hooks, allowing us to run them through with steel and push their corpses back into the pool. The few making it onto the platform itself, we swatted like flies.