The Screaming Skull

by Rick Ferguson

  “As you know, I like my souls fresh, as the Lord of Flies commands,” the devil said. “But for you, I’ll make an exception. I’ll murder you here, and after you spend the next thousand years as my personal bitch, I’ll eat your soul. I’ll sauté it with some onions and garlic and serve it over rice. The Void awaits you, Elberon of the Isles.”

  So, this was how it was all going to end? The children lost, Melinda left to die, the Quest over before it began? I had just communed with my older self—didn’t that mean I lived through this? Or had it all been a fever dream, a final jest of the Skull?

  Suddenly I knew what I had to do. Was it the Skull itself that imparted to me knowledge of Infernal decorum—knowledge of which I had been heretofore ignorant? Or was it the Ki-Rin again? It didn’t matter. I knew now how to make Malacoda delay ripping my heart out of my chest.

  “I CHALLENGE HIS SATANIC HIGHNESS MALACODA, DIRE MALEBRANCHE OF MALEBOLGE AND VASSAL OF BEELZEBUB, KING OF THE EIGHTH CIRCLE AND LORD OF FLIES, TO THE JUDGEMENT OF MINOS!” I cried out loud.

  The devil lifted his talon from my back. I was able to roll over and stand up, more or less, with the Skull still sheathed in blue flame and sitting on my shoulders. Malacoda regarded me through narrow, contemptuous eyes. Far down the corridor, the Hellmouth doors now stood open again, framing a high rectangle of black-white light.

  “SO, YOU WANT TO PLAY GAMES, LITTLE MAN?” Malacoda roared. “ALL RIGHT—LET’S PARTY.”

  “AFTER YOU, TOUGH GUY,” I said.

  The devil reached out to touch my arm—and we both vanished from Woerth.

  21

  Up above, Malcolm stood on the staircase in the Grand Foyer waist-deep in imp corpses. Though the Star Maiden’s blessing had proven true, it wasn’t without cost; the paladin now bled from a dozen wounds. He healed the ones he could, until his store of Health blessings was spent; from that point he gave ground stubbornly, one step at a time, still drawing the never-ending horde of imps away from both Saggon’s tower and the catacombs below. As he did so, the quantum earthquake engendered by my battle with Malacoda rocked the Blue Falcon, sending splintering cracks racing across the foyer’s tiled floor as the walls rippled like sheets on a clothesline. If Malcolm prayed again to the Star Maiden, he did so silently.

  Farther above, atop Saggon’s tower, the younger Amabored and Lithaine found themselves emerging from the labyrinth outside the Over-Boss’s office, having avoided the sentient Black Sand pit, as well as the myriad other spring-loaded traps, spikes, and missiles lining the narrow stone passages. They brushed the debris from their shoulders created by the recurring tremors now rocking the Falcon. Entering the lobby, they found the dark elf’s desk upended, the bookshelves overturned, and the file cabinets vomiting parchment and scrolls. On the opposite wall, the large oaken door to Saggon’s office stood ajar; from the office interior came only dim candlelight, silence, and a cold so intense that the breath of the two men billowed before them like the sails of a trireme.

  The two men shared a glance. Amabored drew his blade, while Lithaine nocked arrow to string.

  “Lord Saggon?” Amabored called out. “A word with you, sir?”

  No answer came. Amabored shrugged at the elf, and the two men approached the door. Stepping inside the Over-Boss’s office, they found it much as they had found the lobby: in utter disarray, with tables and shelves overturned, books and scrolls scattered everywhere, pots and mugs shattered, and the stuffed heads of Saggon’s victims laying hither and yon. At his desk scribbling on a piece of parchment with quill and ink, looking for all the world as if nothing was amiss, sat Saggon the Large—bloated, corpulent, his multiple chins quivering, his pasty flesh shining as if slathered in lamp oil. From the twin stone bear-heads protruding from the wall over his desk, arctic air blew into the room. The Over-Boss glanced up to regard his visitors.

  “Tommy, Dick,” said Saggon. “Come in, boys. You hungry? I’ll have my girl bring in some sausages. I get the best, from a dwarf butcher I know near the Stranger’s Wall. Some mulled wine, then? Have a seat.”

  Lithaine responded by letting his arrow fly. The arrowhead bounced harmlessly off Saggon’s forehead, the shaft splitting as the arrow clattered to the ground.

  “What gives?” asked Saggon, looking aggrieved. He lumbered to his feet like an avalanche of round, fleshy boulders running in reverse. “You boys got some sack on you, I’ll give you that.”

  “Fuck this,” said Amabored, and charged at the Over-Boss with sword cocked. The barbarian charged only until he didn’t—after he had covered a few feet of distance, the frigid cold pierced his flesh, entered his muscles, and turned them to stone. Amabored froze in place, his sword still raised. Beside him, Lithaine had likewise frozen solid. His face now a leering, inhuman rictus, Saggon trundled around his desk to approach the two frozen men.

  “It’s my lucky day, boys,” the Over-Boss said. “Looks like I’m having a few friends for dinner.”

  22

  Nine years later in the time stream, Amabored, Lithaine, and Malcolm emerged stumbling again through the mirror that had transported them to the Blue Falcon. They rolled into a tumbling heap on the grass, disentangled their limbs, and leaped to their feet with weapons drawn. Across the plain loomed the Workshop, still rotating slowly atop its great timepiece foundation. There was no sign of Redulfo the Black. There was also no sign of me, nor of Redulfo the Younger, whom I was supposed to be dragging with me through the mirror.

  “Where the hell are they?” Amabored asked, scowling. In his hand he held the petrified dragon phallus from Saggon’s mantel. “We don’t have time to fuck around!”

  “I’ll check,” Lithaine said, and flung himself at the mirror. Instead of sailing through it back to the Blue Falcon, the elf bounced off it, stumbling back to fall on his ass.

  “That usually works,” Lithaine said, as Malcolm helped him up.

  “Sorry, gents—it was a single-trip ticket,” came a rumbling voice from above. “Now that you’ve returned, our battle can begin.” The three men cast their gazes skyward to spy Redulfo the Black spiraling fifty feet or so above their heads. Swooping down with alarming speed, the dragon loosed his jaws to spew forth upon them a firehose-strength stream of black acid. Were it not for the Antidote potions we had swallowed that morning, the acid would have turned all three of them into smoking pink goo. Instead, the hot solution drenched them and turned a wide, winding path of grass into sizzling black ash.

  “Nice try, you fucking ass-cactus!” Lithaine called.

  “My liege, the length of your sojourn in the company of low men has degraded the quality of your discourse,” Malcolm said, acid dripping from his nose. “Perhaps a higher quality of jape is in order?”

  “Oh, yeah?” Lithaine asked. “Give it a shot, Lawful Good.”

  “You’re no dragon, good Redulfo!” Malcolm called up. “You’re naught but a mandrake mymmerkin!”

  Amabored and Lithaine burst into laughter, which sent the paladin’s chest puffing with pride. Before Malcolm could figure out that they were laughing at him and not with him, the ground below the three men began to quake—and before they could blink, they were surrounded by a score or more of mirrors that had suddenly thrust themselves up from below. Outside the circle of mirrors, Redulfo glided to a smooth landing.

  “A mandrake mymmerkin I may be, good paladin,” said Redulfo the Black, “but I’m a still-living one. As I see you’re missing a certain young wizard required to vanquish me, I’m afraid that’s more than I’ll be able to say for you.”

  From the mirrors there emerged, one after another, dozens of scarlet-cloaked and hooded men—dressed identically, in fact, to the assassins who had attacked me on the streets of Redhauke five years earlier, when that mysterious dwarf presented the Screaming Skull to me again. As the cloaked figures raced toward our heroes, and just as they had done when they attacked me, they changed. Their torsos and limbs split open like hot sausages, spraying gouts of blood and tissue as insectoid mandibl
es, thoraxes, and segmented legs burst from their bodies. Casting aside their cloaks, they were now revealed as man-sized, beetle-like creatures with gleaming black carapaces and leg-segments tattooed with blood-red rings. The first of them crashed into the three men, who fell back towards each other swinging their blades wildly.

  “Just the appetizer, gentlemen,” Redulfo the Black said, picking at his fangs with one taloned claw. “Finish it, and I promise that you’ll enjoy the entrée even more.”

  23

  The insectoid attackers were Assassin Bugs sent by the Crimson Hand to stop us from extracting the Bad Brain from Redulfo the Black’s staved-in skull. Given that the dragon had just wiped out his own army as a demonstration, we may surmise that he didn’t ask for their help. Rather, the Hand had insisted on it.

  It was the second time they had attacked me. The first time was on the streets of Redhauke, right after a mysterious dwarf messenger returned to me the very same Screaming Skull that I had previously tossed into a lake of Hellfire. I had no fucking idea then who they were. Even now, years later, we knew little about the Hand; they were mostly a rumor, a secret cabal of mysterious origins with spies and assassins ensconced in power centers throughout the Free Kingdoms. Later, we would learn the truth: They had come from the Penultimate Universe, where they worshipped an avatar of the Violet Queen, to further the Queen’s plan to consume Woerth. In that aim they were sometimes allied with Koschei, and sometimes they worked at cross-purposes. Nearly 150 years earlier, the very fabric of the Woerth itself was rent by the sudden appearance of their Sky Ship in the upper atmosphere; the force of its appearance shook the foundations of the Shadow Mountains, damaged their craft, and sent it crash-landing into the Pustiu Waste several hundred leagues to the west of the borderlands. I’ve seen the Sky Ship in person—walked its corridors, marveled at its vast machinery of mind-bending construction and purpose, and fought terrified against the fearsome mechanical soldiers that defended it. We nearly lost the race against the Hand to recover the black mirror from the ship’s hold. If Cassie hadn’t found a way to convince the spirit of the ship’s captain, still haunting the vessel, to aid us, I’d be dictating this tome from Valhalla.

  The Hand also armed and trained Garrin, the Grimmreaper, whose fell purpose seemed to include the dark annihilation of my soul. At every inflection point on our Quest, he appeared to test me. Armed as he was with Soulreaver and the Shield of Sorrow, he was, to most mortals, effectively invincible. To me, his adversary, however, he was most strangely and evenly matched. No matter how many times we clashed, neither of us could ever get the drop on the other—not until I finally cut off his fucking head before the Black Mirror itself.

  That night in the Blue Falcon, the motherfucker appeared twice: once to my twenty-one-year-old self, after I had vanquished Malacoda in the Halls of Minos; and simultaneously to my thirty-year-old self, in the Red Library, as I was about to drag Redulfo the younger through the mirror to help murder his future dragon incarnation. Thanks to the Astral Telescope, I can see now that the Grimmreaper had slipped through the same mirror through which we had traveled to reach the Blue Falcon—he was ordered to do so by the Hand, so that their attack on the Quest occurred simultaneously in both timelines. I can assume only that they had ordered the hit on my younger self as well—tipped off by that fucking douche-canoe Jaspin, no doubt.

  As my younger self stood before the Hellmouth in the catacombs below the Blue Falcon, I was still reeling from Melinda’s sacrifice. Now that it appeared as if we had pulled off the impossible—Malacoda vanquished, the Skull trapped in Hell, the Saggon-golem dead, and the Blue Falcon itself shuddering through its death-throes—Melinda’s sudden decision to remain in Hell to save the souls of those poor kids sent my world crumbling into ruin around me along with Storm Stonegorm’s architectural triumph.

  I love you, she had mouthed to me as the Hellmouth doors slammed shut for the final time. And there he was: the dark figure I would later know as the Grimmreaper, his face concealed within his black cowl and his black scythe drawn. As it was our first encounter, I thought him at first some lackey of Saggon’s fleeing for his life before the catacombs collapsed. Then I heard his voice, echoing inside my head, and I knew—though we had never met, this dark figure was destined to become my mortal enemy, to haunt my nightmares, and to stand as the most fearsome harbinger of my doom.

  “Too late for the Skull,” came the figure’s voice. “But I’ll have that girdle off your stinking corpse, shitstain.”

  “Come and get it, assclown,” I said.

  The cloaked figure charged forward, his scythe a deadly whirling cuisinart in his gloved hands. I launched my own blade skyward to meet his blow. As our blades clashed, red sparks flew—and the resulting shock from our impossible meeting in this universe sent us both flying in opposite directions. I crashed into the now-inert doors of the Hellmouth, bounced off them, and rolled to a heap.

  Leaping up, I found a tremor in spacetime itself now roiling the catacombs. Around me, the fleshy, soul-laden walls of the Hellmouth rippled wildly, as if some cosmic giant had dropped a stone onto the surface of reality itself. So massive was the shockwave that its force echoed back and forth in time, forcing tremors to rock the building throughout our assault of it.

  Snarling furiously, the cloaked figure leaped up and raced toward me, only to find himself falling back as the catacomb ceiling collapsed in a thunderstorm of falling rock. We had one moment to glare at one another—though his face was hidden in shadow, I could feel his gaze branding me with enmity—and then the avalanche of rock sealed the tunnel, separating us for good. A rolling tumble of jagged boulders overcame me, and a large dog-sized rock caromed off my own now-ordinary skull. I saw blossoming star-flowers, and then utter darkness as I knew no more.

  24

  Up above and simultaneously, my nine-years-older self stood in the Red Library watching first Amabored, then Lithaine, and then Malcolm step through the mirror portal, presumably to return to the Wilderness of Mirrors to face down Redulfo the Black. My right hand gripped the upper arm of Redulfo the Younger, who stood blinking behind his spectacles as if he had just been bitch-slapped by a brontosaurus. In his free hand, he clutched his flute, having been told by us to prep a Magnet spell and be prepared to do what we told him.

  “Remember, don’t ask any questions,” I told the young wizard. “The less you know, the better.”

  “Chances are, I won’t even know what questions to ask,” said Redulfo. “Where did you say we’re going, again?”

  “That was a question,” I said, and turned to lead the wizard through the mirror—and then he was there.

  Perversely, I felt a thrill of recognition at once again seeing him, dressed as always in the red and black colors of the Hand. His face lay still concealed in the shadows within his cowl. In his right hand he wielded Soulreaver, the wicked ebony scythe with which Koschei had returned from his own sojourn into Hell. To his left forearm was strapped the Shield of Sorrow, which, should I roll a critical fumble in my duel against the assassin, would see me sucked immediately into its black depths and my soul cast irretrievably into the Void. It had been a year since I had seen him last, after he caused us so much grief in Helene; before that, on the Goldvale, where he poisoned the mind of Bellasa’s father, the Cloud Chief Hoyadi; before that, in the sewers below Redhauke, after Melinda talked down the Rat King; before that, in Hundred Fountain Square, leading Malacoda himself on a leash; and, the first time—nine years earlier, this very night in the Blue Falcon. Suddenly, I remembered: Even as I confronted him here, in the Library, I was also confronting him far below, before the Hellmouth.

  As if to punctuate this revelation, the Library shook suddenly from a great tremor. The floor of the room itself undulated even as the walls danced a jig and the high vaulted ceiling splintered asunder in an exploding web of jagged cracks. The force of the tremor sent the three of us sprawling—Redulfo rolling across the heaving floor still clutching his flute; me flun
g backwards into a display case, sending a ceramic bust of Elvis Presley thumping across the heaving floor; and Garrin back into the mirror portal, which flipped over with a crash as his shield skidded across the room.

  Before I could locate my wits, the assassin was upon me, his scythe arcing down towards my neck. I found the haft of my battle-axe and blocked the blow, just as I had blocked his blow nine years ago on this very night. Calling up strength from the Girdle, I planned to flip the asshole backwards and then drive the spiked end of my axe-haft into that negative space where his face should be. Imagine my surprise when I found that he was able to match my strength, and he began to push the pointed tip of his rune-covered scythe-blade back toward my own face. As the black tip approached my eyeball, I allowed myself a small measure of panic.

  “You think that girdle will help you?” came Garrin’s terrifyingly familiar voice, filling my head with spite. “You’re too much of a fucking pussy to beat me, you goddamned queef biscuit.”

  “You think so, you cock-juggling thundercunt?” No way I was going to back down from this shithead. Bending my will to the Girdle, I summoned from it every ounce of sorcerous strength it could muster, until the veins stood livid on my arms and forehead, and my muscles burned as if they were being deep-fried. Slowly, the assassin gave ground. Then, just as slowly and inexorably, he gained it back. His head closed with mine—and still, even though I could feel his hot stink-breath washing over my face, I could see nothing within that ominous leather cowl but the utter blackness of the Void. There we remained, two mortal enemies poised on the precipice of destroying the other, and yet neither of us able to summon the final act of strength required.

  “Who the fuck ARE you?” I cried.