The Screaming Skull

by Rick Ferguson

“Now?” I cried.

  “Yeah, now. Have to move some merchandise.”

  “I told you to lay off the burritos, dumb-ass,” said Lithaine, as he loosed an arrow.

  “Sorry boys. Back in a flash.” Amabored fell back, then sprinted down a nearby hallway.

  “I’ll cover you,” cried Redulfo. He blew a short run of notes on his flute, holstered the instrument, and stretched out his hands. Out of the aether, a weapon materialized—a trigger-fired, barreled contraption with a wooden grip and stock and a round magazine. Stepping forward, the wizard squeezed the trigger, and slugs of hot lead leapt from the barrel. The imps squealed as the slugs penetrated their hellish hides—a most pleasant sound indeed. Black, brackish blood flew from their wounds. Those that died exploded in jets of hellfire that set the tapestries ablaze.

  That got their attention. The imps fell back to regroup, which gave us our opening. Lithaine emptied half his quiver into the horde, gave us a nod, and then fell back down the hallway after Amabored. That meant Saggon was dead meat.

  Melinda grabbed my hand. “Now!” She said, pointing to a nearby descending staircase. I nodded. Redulfo was busy mowing down imps, so we threw thumbs up to Malcolm.

  “Godspeed!” the paladin called to us. “Remember, we shan’t rest until we hoist—”

  8

  “—the cup of victory!”

  Nine years later, Malcolm finished his oath, stepped fully onto the massive floating island of rock upon which his boot had been resting, and disappeared. An echoing crack of thunder accompanied his vanishment as air rushed to fill the vacuum.

  “Holy smoking shit!” I cried.

  “Is he dead?” Amabored wondered.

  “Only one way to find out,” Lithaine said, and leapt onto the boulder. Another loud crack, and he vanished.

  “Fucking hell,” Amabored said to me, after a few seconds had passed. “That cocksucking elf always narrows our choices down to one. Shall we?”

  “It’s either follow them or go home,” I said, gripping my axe-haft in my gloved hands. “After you, cupcake.”

  “Eat my ass, fuckface,” Amabored said, grinning. Then he, too, leapt onto the boulder and was gone.

  That left me. I didn’t consider turning around, despite what you may think. Okay, maybe for a second, I did. But I jumped all the same.

  There was no sensation involved, no dematerialization or deconstruction—I simply left my universe and appeared in another one. I stood now in a vast orange desert. Rippled dunes like the scales of some long-dead würm stretched in every direction. A burning wind clawed at my flesh and licked my face like tongues of flame. The sky was purple and violent, with bruised clouds skidding toward the horizon. The light was low, diffused and ominous; somewhere behind my back, a sun might have recently set.

  I searched for my companions. Then came Amabored’s frantic cry: “DUCK!”

  I was tackled from behind, my face plowing into alien orange sand. I rolled over, sputtering, to find Amabored rolling off to my side. Above my head, what looked like a giant winged scorpion soared past—about the length of three men, constructed of armored bone segments, with claws the size of ponies and mandibles big enough to snap your neck like a chicken bone. It swooped upward, shrieking with rage, its stinger-shod tail missing my nose by an inch. Three more of the creatures followed in formation behind. As they sailed past, Amabored pulled me to my feet.

  “Where the hell are we?” I asked.

  “Somewhere else,” the barbarian answered.

  “Ho, gents! This way!” came Malcolm’s voice, from somewhere nearby. We found him about thirty chains away. He was pointing at a more distant object, a rectangular shape thrust up cockeyed from a tall sand dune.

  “What is it?” Amabored shouted above the wind.

  “Perhaps a way back!” Malcolm called.

  “Fore!” came Lithaine’s voice. The scorpion squadron had banked back around and was now bearing down on us with stingers locked and loaded. Lithaine stood a short distance away with his bow cocked. We hit the dirt, and the elf let fly three arrows with Oswaldian speed and accuracy. They clattered harmlessly off the scorpions’ armored plating. Two of the monsters peeled off formation and flew towards Lithaine, their wings beating the air like war drums.

  “Oh shit!” he cried, and took off running, plowing through the dunes toward Malcolm.

  We all raced toward the paladin. He stood with legs splayed, blade at the ready, as the other two scorpions barrel-rolled over our heads and rocketed toward him. He managed one swing before they were upon him. One of the beasts snared him in its barbed crab-claws and carried him off into the sky.

  “Goddamn it!” Amabored snarled. “There goes our paladin.”

  The barbarian spoke too soon. We saw only a frenzy of blurred motion as Malcolm battled the beast in midair. There came a horrid, cawing shriek, and the thing plummeted straight for the ground with Malcolm’s sword wedged between its armored plating. As its body convulsed, the paladin planted his boots on its underbelly, grabbed his sword hilt, and yanked hard. Beast and elf flew apart. The scorpion crashed in a clattering heap with its green blood spraying out in a glorious money shot. Malcolm hit the ground rolling, performed a double-somersault, and vaulted to his feet with sword in hand.

  “Fuck, yes, that’s how you do it!” I shouted, pumping a fist in the air.

  Lithaine kept running, blowing right past Malcolm and barreling toward the paladin’s distant rectangle. Cawing angrily for their dead brother, the three remaining scorpions flew in a wide ascending arc. Malcolm had scared them off—but not for long.

  “Now, lads, while our luck holds!” The paladin called. He ran after Lithaine, and we ran after him.

  We gathered together at the rectangular object. It was a mirror, as it turned out: man-high and man-wide, with a simple frame of porous gray stone. The mirrored surface, polished to a high gloss, threw fear and uncertainty back in our faces.

  “Convention would dictate that this is—” said Malcolm.

  “—a portal,” finished Amabored.

  “A portal to where?” I asked.

  “Only one way to find out,” Lithaine said. He flung himself headfirst at the mirror. His body melted into the glass, from head to booted feet, until he vanished.

  “Has he ever once stopped to consider the consequences of his actions?” I asked Malcolm.

  “Not in my experience,” said Malcolm, sheathing his sword. “Shall we?”

  We stepped through the glass in turn and vanished forever from the desert world. Only a single dead beast remained to tell that we had ever been there at all. What effect its death would have on that world, we couldn’t say.

  9

  We appeared back on the same rock from which we had vanished, the floating boulder now bobbing precipitously under our feet. We clung to it and waited for it to steady. After a long moment, we stood warily. The vast, mist-filled crevasse lay yawning open, two hundred chains wide, filled with floating mountains, hillocks, boulders and rocks. Somewhere on the other side of that crevasse, Redulfo waited. It would be easy for him to sally forth from the Workshop and swoop down upon us—so why didn’t he?

  “He’s chickenshit,” said Amabored.

  “It’s more than that,” I said. “He thinks this is all part of some clockwork motion of the universe that none of us can alter. If he thought attacking us now would change the outcome, he’d do it. He knows that we’re meant to confront him.”

  “Why attack us with bugbears and spiders?” asked Malcolm. “Why not invite us in through the front door?”

  “We lost two men in those fights. Maybe we were supposed to.”

  “Spare us the dime-store metaphysics,” said Lithaine. “Let’s go kill that fucking dragon.”

  I pointed to the closest boulder, about the size of a small keep, floating a few feet away. “Your move,” I said to Lithaine.

  The elf allowed a smile. He took a few running steps, leapt the short distance across to the next bould
er, and vanished with another loud crack.

  “You don’t suppose this next world will be populated by naked serving wenches and covered in oceans of beer, do you?” I asked.

  “Not a chance,” said Amabored, and made the leap.

  10

  You may rest assured that the next world was even more heinous than the last. So it went: With each step across the chasm, we entered another universe. Each time, we fought for our lives to reach the exit portal and return to our own world. Sometimes, the portal was nearby; other times, we traversed vast stretches of jungle, climbed mountain ranges, or sailed across churning seas to reach it. The shit that went down in these places could fill another book. We were often separated and forced to undertake solo quests; during this time, I was enslaved as a galley oarsman, appointed a queen’s champion, briefly ruled a small mountain kingdom, captained a pirate galley, and lived the same day over and again for about six years until I achieved enlightenment. Finally, I’d find the exit-mirror and return to my own world, precisely when I left it.

  These are tales for another time. If Redulfo hoped for our deaths in one of these other universes, then that was bad luck for him. In fact, the plan backfired—thanks to the amount of ass we kicked, we all went up a level. As Redulfo certainly foresaw this outcome, he must have wanted it this way. Or rather, he knew it was supposed to happen this way. To Redulfo, absolutely nothing could happen that hadn’t been preordained since the birth of the Multiverse; only morbid curiosity got him out of bed in the morning. Fate preordained or not, when we finally reached the opposite edge of the chasm and began our descent into the valley, we were ready.

  Redulfo’s unshakeable determinism used to drive Cassie insane—especially when the rest of us used him as cover, like we did when, five years before we killed Redulfo the Black, she told us about the latest appearance of Jo Ki-Rin. Even as Plague Knights marched on the city, we hid behind the wizard’s skirt. Okay, so we were supposed to save the world—but what was the hurry?

  “You have to move. Now!” Cassie told us. We stood on the battlements atop the Butcher’s Wall. Before us on the plain outside the city walls marched, to the ear-destroying heavy metal conjured by Eckberd’s war-bards, an army of ten thousand or more: mounted Plague Knights, Chaos dwarfs, war-ghouls, battle-trolls, a dozen imp tribes hoisting high their garish banners, great horned beasts pulling massive siege engines, iron-shod battering rams carved deep with fell runes, gargantuan catapults loaded with brimstone to rain fire upon the free city. Soon they would lay siege to Redhauke—and, if the siege broke, the Chaos army would rape the city’s women and put its men to the sword. Unless the city fathers gave us up, that is. Or more specifically, gave me up.

  Until that moment, I had managed to keep Cassie inside a hermetically sealed bubble built by my deceit. I only saw her alone; my crew knew nothing of her existence. Melinda was entrenched in my old life, which had become torture to me, and therefore torture to her. Of my new life, Cassie was the sole occupant. It was a universe made only for we two; slipping into it made me feel like the man I was always meant to be. These two worlds were matter and anti-matter, headed for a cataclysm of my own design.

  Now, Cassie stood before my mates, who regarded her with bald suspicion. She had just recounted a tale we could scarcely believe—Jo Ki-Rin appearing before her, blowing her mind in that black-light-poster way of his as he revealed the ten Phylaxes to her and proclaimed that the fate of the Woerth rested in the hands of my friends and me. Other than for its comedic potential, my mates didn’t give two shits about me keeping a woman on the side. But who the fuck was this blonde chick telling them to get off their asses and save the world?

  “So, you drank too much temple wine and hallucinated the apocalypse,” said Amabored. “How is that our problem?”

  Forty years later, Amabored would hallucinate his own apocalypse and start crucifying wizards. The interesting thing about irony is that it also works in reverse. Just to be an asshole, he also failed to mention that he had first heard of Phylaxes and quests when he encountered the dark elf Hamara on the steps leading to Saggon’s lair, four years earlier. Had he forgotten? Not a chance.

  “It wasn’t a hallucination,” I said. “I saw the Ki-Rin, too. Twice I saw that pain in the ass.”

  “Once after drinking a Flaming Telepath, and once after nearly dying,” Amabored said.

  “The Ki-Rin gave me the choice to die, or to do what needs to be done. And now the bill has come due. I believe her.”

  “Of course, you’d say that. You’re fucking her.”

  “I’m not fucking her!”

  Cassie, Odin bless her, got up immediately into Amabored’s grill, even though he towered over her by a foot. “Listen, asshole,” she said, “I don’t give a fuck what kind of shit-eating persona you’ve constructed for yourself. You can kiss my ass. But that army out there will raze this city to the ground if the city fathers don’t give you up. What do you think they’re going to do, genius?”

  Amabored only grinned. It was Redulfo who answered. “Nothing,” said the wizard. “At least, not for a while. With Sklaar manning the defenses, the walls will stand against anything they can throw at us.”

  “And the Mayor owes us for that lemming imp business,” said Amabored. “He told us they’d contact us with our next move. Why shouldn’t we hold tight?”

  “An army ten thousand strong approaches,” said Cassie, “and you think the Mayor or Sklaar give one holy fuck about what they owe you?”

  “Premature action vastly increases the number of universes branching off from ours,” Redulfo said. “It increases our possible futures, in many of which we fail. Success becomes probable only when our path becomes constrained—when we have no other choice. In this case, procrastination is a virtue.”

  “Your path is already constrained, you dumbfuck. What choice do you have now?”

  “Time out,” I said. “Look, I’m all for bold action, but stepping outside these walls now is suicide.” I turned to Lithaine. “What do you think, elf?”

  “You don’t want to know what I think.”

  “We don’t need to think,” said Amabored. “We can protect the Phylaxes here until Sklaar helps us figure out how to get rid of them. Fuck finding all ten of them. Let Sklaar deal with it. He’s a Fifteenth-Level wizard, for crying out loud. He’s supposed to be saving the world, not us.”

  The barbarian motioned to Sklaar’s tower, thrust up near the Stranger’s Wall far above the vast sea of rooftops. At that moment, the entire top of the tower exploded in a thunderous gout of rubble, smoke, and flame. A half-second later, we heard the boom of the explosion, followed by screams as the avalanche of debris rained down onto the school campus. We all stared horrified at the spot on the skyline where Sklaar’s tower had stood.

  Cassie turned to Amabored. “You were saying?”

  11

  In heroic adventure, as in everything else, it’s the women who make the hard choices. Men take the easy way out. Oh, we’ll advance civilization, launch wars, and build pyramids, if there are chicks involved. Give us a chance to keep our asses glued to the couch, however, and we’ll take it every time. Only a woman’s scorn can spur most of us into action.

  It was Melinda, for instance, who kept me on point beneath the Blue Falcon. Four years earlier, she and I raced down rough-hewn steps leading to the bowels of the inn. The stairs dropped us into a long stone hallway lit by capering torch flames. Iron-shod wooden doors lined either side of the hallway as far as we could see, until the hall shrank to a dark vanishing point. It was impossibly long, a funhouse hallway. It could lead to nowhere, we thought, or it could lead to Hell.

  “Any idea where we’re going?” I whispered to Melinda. It seemed dangerous to speak aloud.

  “Not exactly.” She squeezed my hand. “We have to keep going down.”

  We pushed on. The farther down the hall we ran, the longer it became, leaping away from us like a dark gazelle. We ran for a good fifteen minutes, and still
we found no end to it. There were no turns or tributaries—just doors. Hundreds of doors. We ran until we felt stupid for running. Then we stopped, panting like sheepdogs.

  “The Falcon is working against us,” Melinda said. “It doesn’t want us to succeed.”

  “For fuck’s sake, it’s just a building,” I said. “It’s wood and stone. I’m packing the strength of a goddamned stone giant. There isn’t a door or a wall here that I can’t get through. Hear me, you fucking mule barn?” I shouted to the walls.

  “Give it a rest.” Melinda glanced around. “Let’s start trying doors.”

  I stepped before one of the oak doors and pulled the iron ring bolted to it. The door swung in abruptly, yanking me forward. My boots dragged across the threshold—and found nothing beneath them but a black abyss. I plummeted. Blessed instinct kept my hand gripping the ring, which became my new best friend, and the force of the fall nearly pulled my arm from the socket. Thank every god in the Multiverse for that girdle.

  “Odin’s balls!” I cried.

  Below my feet and two million light years away, a spiral galaxy turned in a bed of stardust. The deep immensity of the universe lay beneath me. If I let go of the door, that galaxy was my next stop.

  “Throw up your sword!” Melinda shouted. I hadn’t realized I was still holding it. I tossed it up. Melinda fed a thin line of elvish rope through the door ring and dropped the end down to me. With my free hand, I pulled the line through the girdle and knotted it tight. She ran to a door across the hall, fed the other end of the rope through that door’s ring, and then lashed it to my blade. Within a minute, she was hauling me back up with a makeshift pulley. The rope dragged me across the threshold. We slammed the door shut again and fell panting to the floor.

  “It’s hopeless,” Melinda said. “I’m not even sure we can go back the way we came.”