The Screaming Skull

by Rick Ferguson

  “Everything you’re not,” Garrin returned.

  We might have remained there forever—or at least until the Blue Falcon finally imploded around us—but for young Redulfo, the resourceful good egg. Even as I raged against Garrin, I felt the assassin’s strength suddenly abate. He had frozen in place. Struggling mightily to comprehend my good fortune, I yanked myself away from him, leaped up, and readied an axe-blow designed to separate his head from his shoulders.

  “Don’t bother,” came Redulfo’s voice. The wizard cowered in a corner, clutching his flute with both hands. “It’s a Petrify spell. You have about five minutes, but you won’t be able to kill him. His skin will be as hard as dragon scales.”

  “Hot tuna!” I cried, running over to clap the wizard on the back. “That’s using the ole coconut.” Then I raced over to the mirror now lying flat on its face. Was it smashed to pieces, as I assumed it would be, thereby trapping me in the same time-space as my nine-years’-younger self?

  No, it was not. My luck had held, and I wasn’t about to give Odin time to wake up from his nap to start fucking with me. “Wizard!” I cried. “Over here—through the mirror. Now!”

  Redulfo complied. The wizard stepped one foot gingerly toward the mirror as if dipping a toe into an icy river. When his boot dissolved into the glass, he looked back to me, unsure.

  “Am I going to come back from this?” he asked.

  “No questions, remember?” I said. “But since you asked—probably not.”

  Redulfo blinked. Then he nodded. “Okay, then,” the wizard said, and stepped through the glass. Before I too, stepped through, I turned once again to regard my foe, still frozen and clutching his deadly scythe.

  “See you around, Freddie,” I said. At that moment, another massive explosion rocked the Falcon—this one from somewhere far above. Probably Saggon’s tower, I thought. Knowing that my younger self was now trapped in the bowels of the dying inn, I paused to send him my best wishes. Then I stepped through the mirror and left myself behind forever.

  25

  The explosion had indeed come from Saggon’s Tower, which had finally imploded in a horrific mushroom cloud. It was the final movement in the symphony of destruction that would bring to an ignominious end the long and storied legacy of Redhauke’s world-famous Blue Falcon Inn. Ten minutes or so prior to this violent allegro, Amabored and Lithaine found themselves frozen solid in Saggon’s office as the Over-Boss—or whatever the hell he was—trundled toward them. The office air was now so cold that every surface and object within was coated in a thin layer of frost.

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

  As the icy tendrils of Death Frost worked their way through their armor and garments toward their hearts, the boys could only stare with their unmoving eyes as Saggon changed. His exposed blubbery skin took on a corpse-white sheen. The pupils of his eyes turned ice-blue. When he spoke, his voice remained as gruff and course as ever—but its cadence had changed.

  “Do you think you ever stood a chance against me?” the Saggon-thing growled. “I, who have stood on the shores of Woerth before the first life even formed in its oceans? I, who have traversed the farthest reaches of the Multiverse? I, who have bowed before the Queen of Chaos Herself? Even now, seconds before your death, your Quest has failed. Your friends are dead or will soon die. The Skull and Girdle will be ours, and you will perish, your souls consigned to the Void.”

  Who was now speaking through the Saggon-golem, we would later vigorously debate. The consensus view was that the words had come from Koschei himself. Amabored, however, was convinced that it was Jaspin, as the illusionist must have been controlling the ice-golem that replaced the real Over-Boss. I’m still not sure I buy it—why would Jaspin spout off nonsense about bowing before the Violet Queen? Sure, he was working for the Hand, but it wasn’t as if he was a Twentieth-Level sorcerer, for cripes’ sake. Illusionists are low-rent wizards, bottom-feeders content to impress the chicks with their cute little phantasms instead of mastering truly badass sorcery. Why do you think the guy gave up adventuring to tend bar?

  As for Amabored and Lithaine, we can only imagine the colorful retorts trapped behind their frozen lips as the Over-Boss approached. Another tremor rocked the tower—this one so strong that a fault line erupted in the office floor, sending shards of wood exploding into the air. Still frozen stiff, both men toppled over—and the Holocaust potion Amabored was holding in his motionless fingers slipped out. With one-half of the office floor now jutting upward at a thirty-degree angle, the vial bounced past the Saggon-thing, rolled under his desk, and then shattered against the iron grating of the great stone fireplace jutting from the curved rear wall.

  The explosion was massive and instantaneous. Had the Death Frost not already frozen solid the two men, they would surely have been killed instantly—either incinerated in the fireball or crushed to death as the top of the tower exploded, sending a thundering avalanche of stone and wood raining down upon Halberd and Chainmail streets far below. Across the city, gawking onlookers witnessed the explosion. Within minutes, a phalanx of Redhauke Guards assembled outside the East Barracks to march on the Blue Falcon, while over at the Wizards’ College, Sklaar ordered a squadron of ornithopters to blast the area with sorcery dampeners. The city hadn’t seen such excitement since we sent a herd of terrified cattle stampeding through the Chimera Gate two years earlier—and had the city fathers any inkling of our culpability for both events, they would have hunted us down like rats.

  Atop the tower, the explosion had vaporized the turreted roof and much of the top floor. Miraculously, the outer wall and fireplace survived, but the rest of the office was gone. The remainder of Saggon’s lair was now engulfed in fire, with dragon-sized tongues of flame stabbing the star-strewn night sky. Rather than vaporize our heroes, the Holocaust potion had instead dispelled the Death Frost, allowing them to rise to their feet singed, bloody, and shaken.

  “Just a few drops—isn’t that what you told us?” asked Lithaine.

  “Not my fault, magic-boy,” said the barbarian. “Got us free, didn’t it? Let’s find that dragon-dick and get the fuck out of here.”

  “Urp—!” said Lithaine, as the Saggon-thing wrapped a massive paw around the elf’s throat and hoisted him high. The intense heat now found the Over-Boss’s flesh melting, running like beef tallow in a hot frying pan, dripping from his limbs in great looping gobs, his multiple chins sloughing away from his face to slide down his leather cuirass. As the thing strangled Lithaine, its face bubbled, popped, and then ran dripping away from the now-exposed skull, which glowed green with fell necromancy.

  Amabored might have taken a beat to marvel at this strange turn, but for the alarming purple shade his friend’s face had turned. Swiftly retrieving his sword, the barbarian charged.

  “COOOOORNHOLE!” he bellowed, and then brought his blade down on the golem’s arm. Instead of hacking off the limb above the elbow, the blade stuck fast in the gooey mass of burbling flesh.

  “Uuurgh—!” said Lithaine, his eyes bulging like bloodshot marbles.

  “Motherfucker!” Amabored cried. Bellowing inchoate war-cries, he pulled a dagger from his belt and threw himself at the Saggon-thing. Slashing and stabbing at its leather armor, he soon found himself stuck as well, the golem’s melting flesh capturing him in its deadly, asphyxiating embrace. The Over-Boss now resembled less an obese crime lord and more a gigantic, quivering mass of flesh-colored pudding. The mass closed around the barbarian. In its eagerness to crush the life from him it released Lithaine, who dropped to the floor and rolled away wheezing for his life.

  Slow to recover, the elf could only watch as the Saggon-thing absorbed his friend. A moment passed as the undulating mass burbled and belched, digesting its prey. The heat from the fire was becoming too much to bear; in a moment, the elf would be forced to abandon Amabored and fling himself back down the remaining tower stairs before the whole thing cam
e down.

  The elf didn’t flee. Instead, his eyes narrowed to slits. His jaw set, and he unsheathed his sword. Still gasping for air through his brutalized throat, the elf stumbled toward the golem.

  And then: The great blubbery pile of Saggon-flesh rent asunder as Amabored’s knife-blade slashed through it. With a ragged cry, the barbarian hauled himself from the thing’s grasp, his muscles straining against the flesh now pulling like taffy as it attempted to haul him back. In his right hand, he held his knife. In his left, he now clutched a head-sized, pulsing, bloody mass—Saggon’s heart.

  From within the quivering mass of flesh came the surprising and muffled sound of Saggon’s voice: “No hard feelings, fellahs! Let’s call up for some brandy, from my personal cellar. It’s from Collanna, they make the best. We’ll have it with a charcuterie board, my treat.”

  Amabored’s knife-hand was held back by ropes of gooey flesh. His left hand, however, was free. With a glance to Lithaine, he tossed the bloody heart at him. The elf swung his blade—and cleaved the flying organ in twain.

  The effect was immediate. The towering pile of flesh that was once the Over-Boss collapsed in a splashing, bloody pool of goo that then began to boil away from the heat. Whether the thing had always been Saggon, or whether the real Saggon was dead and replaced by the ice-golem at some unknown point in the past, we couldn’t say. Either way, the result was the same: The notorious Saggon the Large, who once consolidated underworld power by executing twenty-three key crime family heads during the Feast of the Fountains in 3930, was no more. His days of feeding children to Malacoda like so many pickled herring were over.

  Freed from the goo, Amabored fell forward, caught himself, and stumbled to his feet. “Now that’s some fucking teamwork!” the barbarian allowed, fist-bumping Lithaine. “That’s twice I saved your life tonight. That’s worth a lifetime supply of beer on your credit, elf.”

  “Your ass—seems like I just saved your life,” Lithaine said, allowing a rare grin. “Better stick a crowbar in your wallet and pony up.”

  “Fat chance. Let’s get that dragon-dick and get it back to me,” said Amabored. The two men turned—and found Amabored the Elder standing before them. In his hands he bounced the petrified dragon phallus once mounted above Saggon’s mantel.

  “No need, boys,” said Amabored the Elder. “For a couple of pikers, you did good. I’ll take it from here.”

  “You were watching the whole time?” asked Amabored the Younger. “Why the hell didn’t you do something?”

  “You pussies want me to do everything for you?” asked the Elder, grinning. “Now get the fuck out of here and let the grown-ups take care of business.” With that, the elder barbarian spread his wings, ran for the precipice of the now-exposed tower floor, and launched himself through the flames and into the night. With one great flap of his wings, he was gone.

  “Those wings are badass,” said Amabored. “Bet they smell like a wet sheepdog, though.”

  “As if you need another reason to jerk yourself off,” said Lithaine. “Ready, asswipe?”

  “Ready, Jerky. Let’s hope a few of our friends are still alive.”

  26

  Nine years later, Redulfo the Younger and I tumbled through the mirror in the Red Library and back to my present in the Wilderness of Mirrors. Immediately, we were assaulted by Hand assassins. Only my considerably older and more sharpened reflexes prevented one of the bugs from decapitating the young wizard as I instead shaved off the creature’s head with my axe-blade. My three companions stood in a rough triangle around the mirror as they fought off the onrushing horde of enemies with bow and blade. More of them were now emerging from the mirrors—so many that, absent divine intervention, we were as dead as Dillinger.

  “Ho, gents!” said Malcolm, calling back over his shoulder as he sliced a bug in half from crown to tail. “We feared you had been irretrievably delayed.”

  “Ran into an old friend!” I called back, shoving Redulfo the Younger behind me as five assassin bugs rushed into axe-range. “Stay behind me, youngster,” I told the wizard. “With your paltry supply of health points, you won’t last five minutes out here.”

  “Where are we?” the wizard asked as he cowered behind me.

  “We’re right here,” I said, and swung my axe. My blade bit into an insect head and sent it exploding like a ripe melon tossed from a parapet. Goddamn it, it felt good to go to work.

  Far above, Redulfo the Black flew in descending spirals toward our hopelessly outmatched party. When he spied Redulfo the Younger hiding behind my skirt, he flew over—and if a dragon could entirely replicate human expression, his face would have mirrored the withering disdain that his human incarnation reserved for such irony-laden situations.

  “Redulfo, my good fellow!” the dragon called. “So glad you could accept my invitation.”

  “Invitation?” The young wizard called back. “To my funeral, I suppose.”

  “In a sense, yes,” said the dragon. “As I mentioned to your older companions, my possession of the Bad Brain renders suicide impossible, as much as I might wish it. Given the rather singular nature of this universe, however, I have developed a hypothesis that you will help me test.”

  At that moment, every single assassin bug currently attempting to disembowel us stopped dead, frozen in place. We four fighters glanced around, panting and bleeding from our various wounds, unable to keep pace with the continually shifting tactical situation. Stepping around from behind me, Redulfo the Younger regarded his older dragon incarnation, now hovering in place about thirty feet above our heads.

  “Hypothesis?” asked the wizard, his interest piqued.

  “Indeed,” said the dragon. “As I mentioned, the Bad Brain prevents me from taking my own life. I have, however, engineered an encounter in which my death is inevitable. Either you will kill me, thereby completing my suicide attempt, or I will kill you, and negate my own existence. Either way, there’s nothing this universe can do to prevent my death. I will have proven that, after five thousand years of clockwork causality, free will now exists on Woerth. An elegant experiment, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “What does he mean, ‘negate my own existence?’” Redulfo whispered to me.

  Before I could answer, the dragon chimed in. “When attempting private conversation, good Redulfo, you must account for a dragon’s acute hearing. To answer your question: In five years’ time, by your own timeline, you will encounter a treasure egg in the Temple of Pain Eternal, on the Sunless Sea. You will wonder whether you should open that egg. My advice to you: Open it.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” Redulfo said.

  “You’re forgetting one thing, dragon,” called Amabored. “To get to the wizard, you have to go through us. You can’t kill him if we kill you first.”

  “Ah—empty bravado,” said the dragon. “I had so forgotten its peculiar odor. My retort, friend barbarian: It’s you who have forgotten ‘one thing.’ For, while the four of you have imbibed a potion that protects you from my breath-weapon, our young wizard here has not.”

  At that moment, two things happened simultaneously: Released from the dragon’s glamour, the frozen assassin bugs un-froze, and began their assault anew; and Redulfo the Black swooped down on Redulfo the Younger’s position to launch at him a blistering stream of black acid. It all happened so quickly that I could only wait for my sluggish brain to alert my limbs to do something, anything, to protect the young wizard.

  As insufferable as they mostly are, elves do possess a few useful traits. One of these is an innate ability to seize the initiative. Malcolm, for example, launched himself at Redulfo and tackled the young wizard, raising his kite shield over them both to deflect the torrent of hot acid now pouring like sizzling oil over the shield. Lithaine, meanwhile, bounded over and rocked me across the chops.

  “Wake up!” The elf shouted in my face. “And give me a lift. A power lift—you got me?”

  Miraculously, I got him. I dropped my hands into a cu
p, and the elf dropped his boot into my cupped hands. Calling up strength from the Girdle, I flung him skyward. Lithaine intercepted the dragon in mid-flight and wrapped his arms around his neck. As the beast rose higher, the elf twisted, wrapping his legs around also while mostly avoiding the beast’s razored spines. The dragon whip-sawed his long neck to and fro, attempting to unseat the elf, but Lithaine went nowhere. Instead, he crept forward toward the dragon’s head with one arm gripping the neck. With the other, he drew an arrow from his quiver.

  From a position near me, Amabored stopped killing bugs long enough to toss toward Malcolm a long, red, and barbed piece of stone—the dragon-phallus, procured from Saggon’s mantel nine years earlier. Malcolm caught it.

  “Give it to the wizard and tell him to stand by!” Amabored called.

  “It will be done!” the paladin called back. Emerging from beneath Malcolm’s shield, Redulfo the Younger patted the un-burnt grass in search of his spectacles. Finding them, he wrapped the wire temples around his ears. Malcolm then handed him the stone phallus, which the wizard regarded with mild distaste.

  “I know how it must look, young wizard,” Malcolm told him. “Unfortunately, this is the only object available to us that can penetrate a dragon’s hide. Now, be a good chap and stand behind me.” Three more bug-assassins slammed into the paladin, who ducked beneath their swinging scimitars and sliced open their black thoraxes with his own blade.

  While we fended off the insectoid assault, Lithaine worked his way to the crown of the dragon’s head. The dragon flew straight up, paused majestically so that his slender frame and outstretched wings were silhouetted against the setting sun, and then flipped over 180 degrees to descend screaming toward the ground. Gripping a handful of the dragon’s jagged spines so tightly that his hand bled, Lithaine raised up the arrow in his other hand—and then drove the arrowhead directly into the dragon’s right eyeball.