Think of what she wants you to do. Desdemona’s lips thinned, and heat flooded her face. “I will never have a man think I owe him anything. Not again. Not ever. No man is ever worth my time, or any woman’s in this citadel for that matter.”
She walked toward her former teacher, eyes hard like frozen puddles. “Not as long as I’m in control.”
Alys tipped her chin back and looked down at Desdemona, jaw set, eyes hard. There was nothing she could do to stop what was coming, not in her current position, and she knew it. Desdemona laid her hand on the woman’s cheek, gazing up into her face.
Pain flared in Alys’ eyes as Desdemona used her new powers to pull her soul away. It was like holding a hot coal in her hand, the intensity of the woman’s spirit prickling at her palm and sending heat racing through her veins to pool in her chest. She closed her eyes, her breath rushing from between parted lips as the sheer force of Alys’ life pushed into her.
With a gasp, she staggered away, taking a few steps back before falling to her knees. She slumped forward, hair obscuring her face. The thump of the former matron’s body hitting the ground dimly registered, but she didn’t move, not even when Isana crouched beside her. She didn’t try to speak, just squeezed Desdemona’s shoulder until Kiran knelt beside them both.
“I did not expect that to work. My congratulations on your new position.”
Desdemona finally lifted her head, and her vision swam just a bit. “Thank you for your assistance, Kiran. I’m a woman of my word.” She pushed to her feet and held her hand down to help her bloody friend stand, Kiran following suit. “I’ll draft up our agreement right now. Though I have many plans of subjugation for the men of my own country, your desert tribes will remain untouched.”
Desdemona squeezed Isana’s hand and nodded back toward the study, her study. She offered her friend a small smile, one that Isana returned, albeit pained. “Come. It’s time to set our own plans in motion.”
The two women walked down the hall, Kiran following behind. Desdemona let the smile linger on her lips for a moment, just a moment, before forcing it away. She would never have to worry about being weak again. Never be subject to the whims of others. She would be strong. Like stone.
Haldiom
A Crater Short Story
By S. D. Howarth
Mellar’s whistling grated on my nerves. Not because of the atmosphere, or the location, or even the tune. He was just shite at it. Every single lift down and it was the same bloody tune. It was beyond irritating and I realised my subconscious had been harbouring the urge to hurl him into the shaft for some time.
“Quit it.”
“Huh?”
“Desist, or you’ll force me to feed you something blunt.”
“You wish, darling. What if I pick another one?” He caught the look I gave him out of the corner of his eye and shut up. I waited and his lips puckered as though for another tune. My hand moved. Grinning sheepishly, he spread both hands and hooked his thumbs onto his belt. I released my pistol and let out a long breath, expelling my irritation. It wasn’t entirely him, or the lift, or travelling up to the back of beyond without an army. It was everything. Maybe I’d been doing this too long. Mellar give me a considering glance and cleared his throat.
“What?” I snapped.
“I think you’re being unreasonable, your holiness.”
“Are you making me reconsider shooting you?”
“Hah, no, but we have been on the trail for a while. I appreciate The Order’s pay, Topan, but we are beyond your city empire and denying a man the right to whistle is just mean.” Giving him a flat stare I received one back. “I agreed to guide you to Mid Rim, Investigator. That was over a day back.”
“We are Mid Rim, why do you think the lifts descend? As I suspected, there’s a highway inside the caldera wall. For a mountain guide, you can be thick.”
“Piss off.”
Exasperated, I held out my hand, palm up, fingers raised to form a dish. I stabbed the middle. The Hub. “Crater city and the environs with the surrounding lake, you loathe.” He grunted, I suppose it was better than his fucking tune. I tapped my palm heading towards my ring finger. “Farmsteads, factories, foundries for the iron caterpillars sprawling to your new frontier with its coal. You make plenty of coin guiding folks, don’t you?” He gave me a ‘what the fuck are you on about look’, but he deserved my lecture. I tapped an arc on my ring. “Mid Rim. The iron mines and forests. Guiding those caravans and lumber trains between settlements is risky. Isn’t it?” Mellar’s disinterest evaporated, and he jerked his nose to my fingertips.
“Your order has driven many vampyres and other beasts into the higher wilderness. We clash when monthly caravans return hub-wards. If that interests you, why head here? No one lives on the High Rim. The air thins and the weather’s abysmal. You’re lucky we’ve missed the avalanches.”
“The mine is here for a purpose. The location matches the rumours where something dark forms. We spent two weeks climbing up, I bet you that bonus we cover the same distance down in as many days.”
“Then what? Of course it’s fucking dark, it’s been abandoned for centuries. Call it ancient history. Call it a mistake by the founding fathers, or haunted—who gives a fuck? You’ll never persuade folks to work here. You are wasting your time and I mean it about the bonus for entering here.”
“Yes, I doubt inners will live here and you will receive your coin.” I tapped the middle of my hand. “Civilization is here, twelve hundred ovoid miles of avarice and flaw.” I circled my finger around my hand through the middle knuckles, touching my callouses randomly. “Rumours exist here. And here. And here. Mid Rim, where industry wishes to flourish on roads of iron and stone. Where merchants seek their fortune, yet fear to tread. Why?”
“You’re asking me? Now? By the Seven Gods, Inquisitor, either you trust me, or don’t? No-one knows what’s happening.” Mellar’s voice rose, and the first flush of anger ruddied his nose in the lantern light. “Not one body has been found. The last incident was a column of militia from Low Crag. If they took off, they are still running. I heard in Bend before you hired me that vampyres are also scarce. Can you tell me if something connects them?” He flicked a lopsided sardonic smile my way. “No vamp’ bounty, makes the rimfolk unhappy, ‘specially when high and mighty inners come calling.”
“Unhappy as folk vanishing without a trace?” I could also be sardonic.
Our little cuboid world lurched, and something overhead gave a strident crunch and echoing screech. There was a rustle, then silence as we undulated. I exchanged a grim look with Mellar and shrugged. Conversation forgotten as we wouldn’t be progressing by lift. Still, we weren’t falling which was always a relief.
“Reckon they fed the ferrets?” he smirked.
“They’d need to be big fuckers to haul this mine crate up and down. Ogres perhaps, or worse. Are you hankering for a stroll?”
“We may not have an option. The timing’s bad as I dropped one before the clatter.”
“Gods! Not your guts again, that will attract things. I’ve been making regular prayers on your behalf for two days since we passed through the gorge. Could you not stick a rock in it?”
“Don’t be daft, do you want a lump of ore pinging around in here?”
I tapped the scuffed blackwood sides of the swaying chamber and conceded he may have a point. Stains and tiny scratches merged in mottled abrasions. Either it was damn hard stuff to resist mine workings, or this deep had irregular access. That much that I could discern in the lantern light.
“Stay, or go?” He pushed, breaking my thought. He withdrew a thin neck-slicer and poked at the seam between two close-fitting boards. Good luck prying them out I considered and looked for options.
“Deliberate, or accidental?” I tossed back to make him pause. The squeaking of his blade was grinding my nerves worse than the whistling.
“Either. We’re going down with a light load, so either a failure or someone pulled a lever.�
� Steady dark eyes bored into my own. “The hatch?”
“The hatch, better anchorage. I’ll proceed first.”
“I’m wounded.”
“Not as much as anyone near your arse. If we don’t remove the rumoured cultist threat, Crater will revolt.”
“Ha, what’s new. Four riots this year with iron and food shortages?” he muttered as he cupped his hands. Bracing himself, he waited for me to climb up him to the hinged square furthest from the gate. As our faces became level, he yawned. The utter bastard. I could taste, never mind smell the spiced crab he’d wolfed before our descent. Unable to resist, I kissed him. A light one, brushing my greying beard into his stubble. A mockery of a distant memory.
“What if it’s trapped?” he asked, pulling his head away.
“A little late to ask? Let’s crack on.” Leaning hard on his shoulder, I heard him grunt as I stretched, scrabbling for the chill iron. My fingertips brushed it before I clamped in a wanker’s clasp.
I screamed. Jerking and shuddering as though possessed, he dropped me like an anvil, his face ghost-white. An inopportune colour when two miles underground. After several seconds, I whooped in a breath and laughed, the pains in my back and arm fading as my voice rolled around the chamber and up into the shaft. Oops.
“Bastard! You diseased godfucker of a bastarding bastard. Your order will always be bastards, worshipping that whorish bastarding bitch!” He paused, lost for breath, his face flushing like ink spilt on parchment, darkening the weather-lines on his narrow face. It was a stupid thing to do in the dark when we may not be alone, but I laughed louder.
For once in maybe half a dozen occasions over thirty years of service, the rumour and location whispered into my ear for coin proved true. We found the last remains of a dark temple. Unknown hands had carved and caressed stone into angular forms when smoothing the contours. To civilise the rock. They’d also directed the seepage trickling in patters and streams on the walls towards the lift shaft in a neat central channel. It suggested habitation continued deeper and perhaps my superiors were wise to be cautious. To send me.
The tunnels here were older than the spent seams of iron, copper and coal a mile above and suggested a worrying organisation of labour considering we could breathe almost normally. I estimated we’d descended five miles below the High Rim entrance. More worrying, it was as cold as a brisk winter’s day. The earth gave off no heat and perhaps rimworkers were right to complain mine-work was cold work. Why?
Someone. Something. Some party, had made a deconstructive effort to collapse the tunnel leading to the portico we glimpsed in the swaying light of rolled glow globes. Once, might be the fickleness of age. Three separate locations suggested efficiency, or someone failing to drop the outer sprawl onto the subterranean temple.
Only the central collapse concerned me. The furthest I could see through an irregular gap led to an elaborate anticline, with a short flight of steps to the void. Half the roof had come down but tumbled into an airway instead of forming a final blockage. Once we cleared several large boulders, it would be navigable. The first rockfall we’d encountered took a quarter hour to clear. Backbreaking sweaty work, with every second an eternity as stretched nerves waited for the assault which never came. It never became easier trailing after obscure hunches, but I knew we were close to the source. I could taste the tension. We eased the smaller rubble aside with deft scrapes of shovel and gauntlet. A caress too kind for this place.
Once we shifted the detritus, we moved onto the principle obstructions. Higher than a man, there was no way we could move them stacked as they were. Sorcery was a lost art to humans, and a banned one to non-humans. I knew about the latter more than most, I’d hunted and executed enough until the scant few who embraced their dark art abandoned their obelisks and fled.
Working in silence, I wondered who’d performed the sabotage while we spread alchemical cutter paste with iron scrapers. We’d both lugged the canisters on our backs down the lift shaft, through winding passages and perspired up too many hogs backs to count. Silent of activity and barren of workers, the only noise was the echo of our laboured breaths. Every so often I felt his glance, but I kept my own counsel.
Crater was the pits, and we were well outside the arsehole, yet a million souls depended on the sanctuary and sanctity The Order provided. Twice that including The Rim. Archaic traditions married pragmatism, racism, religion and secular control. It could have been a paradise if humans controlled everything. We didn’t, only the base of the bowl and we needed the resources on caldera cliffs.
The land was ours, the skies a mystery and the depths the domain of every other denizen we sought to purge. There lay the problem to pardon the pun. For each mine we had to fight, scheme and betray. We had numbers, factions, but older creatures existed, whose survival depended on their cunning, speed and skill. Where people expanded and innovated; they dug and grew stronger. My thoughts turned as dark as to what might exist through that doorway as the paste etched its way to the heart of each boulder. Gods, it was diabolical stuff. We backed off a hundred feet just to gulp in breaths of foetid air, the acrid taint a barrage on our senses.
“I’m not liking this brain-fart of yours, Topan. I presume you’ve a plan beyond crawling into dark holes?” Mellar groused, tossing his scraper aside. I’d been smarter and left mine jammed in a crevice between two boulders. Taking care to tilt my wide-brimmed hat back with the back of my gauntlet, I saw his eyes crinkle at the crash of rock, shattering across the smoothed tunnel floor. Pings and pops followed in a discordant symphony of echo and vibration, with dust clouds holding onto their coattails.
We backed off another dozen feet to a widening in the corridor as though the dust cloud was alive. In reality, the particles could still contain active cutter and it could eat through us from the lungs outward. Neither of us chanced it, as there was no way either of us could haul the other back into daylight. A swift jerk of blade in flesh and that accompanying moment of white-hot agony wasn’t what either of us sought. Not this far from the light. I owed Mellar half his payment on purpose to maintain his vested interest in my return. Only the dead trusted another fully.
“It is what it is,” I shrugged. I’d needed a guide through the mountains. He was reliable muscle, with a passing familiarity with the area where the secluded adit overlooked the clouds and sheer cliffs down to Mid Rim. If I was guessing, things, he wouldn’t know the story of the mine, would he? People talked to the Caravanserai Guild, and it was slow, profitable work, built by decades of word-of-mouth business. I’d chosen him over two younger men and he’d earned my coin.
Yet someone was down here. Mellar’s lack of curiosity was odd now we’d descended. He’d gave me a slow nod and offered his price with nary a question, nor quibble in Bend. Someone had lit the lantern and disabled the lift and opened the hatch on every lift below. If disused, the chains around granite counterweights would have rusted long ago. Someone had applied the brake on the passage far above. A quiet and cunning sort. What was I missing on top of the delay? The climb down to the next lift had knackered us, yet we’d seen no-one. No spoor. Nothing. I looked hard at him and his humour faded.
We worked well together, knew the moves and survived the risks. That was it. We’d been deliberately exhausted. Exposed to claustrophobia and the humid depths. The caress of the unknowable as the earth pressed down. An invisible and inexorable threat, just like the cult. A day in the mine acclimatised me to the air becoming so stuffy, breathing was like swimming. So why the sidelong glances? Expose and trap us? I heard a coin drop. Not us, me. Had the rumours of a distant cult been a ploy? Shit.
My hand moved of its own volition, snatching the butt of my flintlock from my hip and dragging the hammer back with a deafening click. Mellar’s eyes widened in resignation and became huge as my arm drew up. I fired. He threw his glow globe. A grunt and a flash as I punched out in reflex. The pistol missed. The bastard elongated around my shot. Elongated! I saw the flash occur as though in slow moti
on as the lead ball slammed into the wall behind him and sparked orange and blue filaments. Our shadows danced. Fuck, he was close—way too close! Then I screamed as a hammer-blow crashed into my side, slamming me into the wall. Words formed on my lips, but the coppery tang of my blood bubbling cut me off with the suddenness of a noose. Darkness enveloped me, my light snuffed away like a candle.
Thwack. Thwack. Hard slaps nearby returned me to the land of the living. I pried at my eyes, but only one worked. That would be enough. Head buzzing and breathing shallow, I moved my arm through the dust. Soft, like a hand into a velvet glove and touched bruised contours. I rotated my eye on the noise which disturbed my enforced slumber and saw Mellar slapping the flames chewing through his right knee with my gauntlets. Ha! My wild swing had flicked the globe and the vicious contents back on him. How I hadn’t gone up in the inferno as he poleaxed me was a miracle to which I could only credit the great lady.
Why wasn’t he screaming? In the fading embers, I saw him for what he was. A vile image burned into my eyeballs past the smoke and leather and charred flesh. Brittle-looking, more like rotten wood than meat. Grey, the grubby colours of stone. Mellar wasn’t a human.
“You never were good at keeping tabs in these mountains of ours. Your precious religion never cared for anything beyond Crater Lake. The Hub will learn their mistake. The Darkness will see to it. We’ve prepared for a century while feeding the edifice. Learning the masters’ desires, while your holier than shit attitude stagnates throughout your inbred squabbling surface dwellers. Stifling change. The world beyond the rim could grind you to dust and you’d still be unchanged. Crater is no volcano and we’ve barely begun scraping a path to the light.”
“I can’t believe I kissed you!” I snarled, my mind whirling at his admission as my body sought an out. He might be right, as it explained the frigidity I felt from the unnatural cold. I reached under my chest and clasped the hilt of my short blade. Felt the warmth as my feet sought purchase.
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