by Cebelius
Asturial chuckled, and Terry smiled, but he glanced over and saw that Yuri was holding very still. His tail was tucked firmly between his legs, and his hands were both clenched tight.
"Ease up, Yuri," Terry said. "You once said you'd be worried when the dragon found us, not before. You're early."
Yuri's eyes flickered from the horses to Terry, and he held the tiger man's gaze and nodded in encouragement.
"You may be right," Yuri said at last. "But some fears run deeper than others. I would rather the dragon found us, than even come close to Baba Yaga."
"You never know," Terry said, trying to sound more sure of himself than he was. "She likes Isthil, maybe she'll invite us in and feed us. I could do with a meal."
"You had better hope not," Yuri said, but then shook his head at Terry's questioning glance and waved a hand.
"Please, let us go and get this over with."
The horses were behind them and out of sight when they found the fence, and thoughts of food left Terry's head, taking his appetite with them.
"You gotta be fuckin' kidding me," he said as he reached out, but couldn't quite bring himself to touch the macabre bulwark before them.
It was made of bones. If that had been all, Terry might have been able to dismiss it as a Halloween prop, at least in his mind. But what he couldn't dismiss were the skulls. Every fence post he could see, and they were roughly every five feet, was capped by a skull. Each was unique, and bore the kind of scars scavengers would make as they picked the bone clean. The eye sockets of those skulls glimmered with eldritch light, and were all turned in his direction.
Even that, Terry might have been able to dismiss. He'd seen and gone through a lot. But what really set him back was the fact that every single skull on the fence was human, or had been, once.
"You see?" Yuri said, literally quaking as he waved a hand. "Baba Yaga hates my people. A fence made entirely of the bone souls of tigers is as clear a warning as I could receive."
"These are dragon bones, fool. How can a monster hunter ... ah. An illusion. Of course. There is no other way Baba Yaga would have so many hatchling skulls."
Glancing at Isthil, who was looking around in bemusement, Terry asked, "What do you see?"
Shrugging, she said, "White picket, lit with will-o'-the-wisp lamps."
"I will dispel the illusion," Asturial said, but hesitated when Terry put a hand out and shook his head.
"How would you feel if someone walked up to your place and started messing with your stuff?" he asked. "We aren't here to pick a fight."
"What do you suggest then?" the dragon asked.
Terry shrugged and said, "Well, no matter who's looking, this is a fence. Let's look for the gate."
"There is no gate."
The source of the voice was the skull closest to Terry, and it was a young woman's voice without any discernible accent. She could have been from any town in the Midwest.
Terry glanced around, then looked at Isthil and shrugged before addressing the skull. "I was sent here by Vlad the Dreamer, who I'm told works for Baba Yaga. May we speak to her, please?"
"You were sent. What of these others?" the skull asked, its eye-lights dancing from one figure to the next.
Terry said, "They are my friends. They chose to come."
"You must have some very good friends," the skull said. "The Wildervast is no place for idle travel."
"I guess. It seems nice enough actually. Bit weird, but nice," Terry said, not quite believing he was having a conversation with a talking skull on a fence, but willing to roll with just about anything at this point.
"I know why you are here, T-Mack. At least, why you are here in the Wildervast. I set this in motion decades ago."
"Ah, so you are Baba Yaga? Pleased to meet you," Terry said, keeping things polite.
"I doubt that," the skull scoffed. "I cursed you here. Why would you be pleased?"
"Well, for one thing, you're willing to talk to us. For another, you're not naked, trying to eat me, fuck me, kill me, or stuffing yourself into my head via my dreams. Far as I'm concerned, you're ahead of the game."
Isthil must have caught Terry's emphasis. He noticed her hiding her smile behind her hand.
"Careful T-Mack," the skull warned, its eye-lights brightening a bit. "I might not be the kind of woman who likes jokes."
"You're calling me T-Mack. Only my friends call me that, and not even many of them. So you're my friend, and I joke with my friends," Terry replied evenly. "If you don't like jokes, pick another one of my names to use."
The skull's jaw dropped, and for a long moment it just stared at him in silence. Then it said, "Fair enough. If we're going to tell each other jokes, I've got a bad one for you. See if you think this is funny, human."
It, along with every other skull on the fence line in both directions, tipped back and a mad cackling assaulted them all as the bones began literally howling with laughter.
It went on and on, and Terry felt it as an almost physical force. Each skull seemed to have its own pitch and cadence, some guffawing in a deep slow bass, others cutting loose with sustained howls of laughter, while still others tittered like hopped-up tweakers. The raging cacophony of sound clawed its way into his head and began to twist his mind.
Yuri screamed and fled, running madly away.
Asturial fell to her knees, clutching at her head as she moaned in panic, and Terry felt very much like he should be doing the same. His memories were being torn apart and rearranged. All of them were of people laughing at him. His parents. His siblings. His friends. His lovers. The people he'd saved and the ones he hadn't. All of them. They laughed from the stands as Asturial humiliated him in the ring. They laughed as he dug Ephe's grave. They laughed while he prayed for Shu's soul. They laughed at him as he fought to save a sister who didn't want to be saved, laughed as he sat in the pew at his brother's funeral. They laughed at his failure and mocked his success. His memories dissolved into an endless stream of derision and abuse. Everyone was pointing, staring, jeering, laughing. They were laughing at his efforts, at everything that meant anything. They were laughing, at him.
It's just an illusion, a spell, it's not real, he thought desperately to himself, keeping his eyes open. He'd closed them at first but that made everything worse. The world threatened to spin wildly out of control. He had faced shades of this mockery before but never so much, never so intense. It was as though everyone, everywhere, had taken time out to laugh at how utterly pathetic he was. It was psychic pain on a level he had never experienced, but only in terms of intensity. He had borne this mockery before. He had lived with it all his life, and though it was worse than ever, it was not enough to break him. Instead, it tempered his resolve into something indomitable. Rather than flee, Terry stared at the skull closest to him as it laughed and laughed, then did the thing everyone wishes they could do when being laughed at.
Reaching out with both hands, he caught the skull by its lower mandible and the top of its head, then slammed the gaping jaws shut.
The laughter stopped. All of it, inside and out.
Terry glanced up at Isthil, saw that she was not only unaffected, but was staring at him with a look of frank astonishment, and irritation flared. He jerked his hands up at her in open question, then thrust a knife-hand after the fleeing tiger man as he barked, "What are you doing?! Catch Yuri! Don't leave him alone!"
Isthil blinked, nodded, then reared as she turned and raced away into the woods.
Anger coiling in his guts, he turned to stare into those eerie eye-lights. As he looked though, his anger faded. He had courted disaster. Asturial had warned him to tread carefully around Baba Yaga, and he had not listened. Still, she supposedly needed his help, and he was in no mood to take any more shit. Not from anyone. He ground out through clenched teeth, "If you want my help, then you need to be helpful."
"What's the matter? Didn't you like my joke? It kills with most audiences."
Terry's fists clenched so tightly that hi
s knuckles popped, and the skull actually shifted at the sound, glancing at his hands, then back up at him. It rolled its lower mandible as though testing to see if it was still firmly seated. Apparently reassured that it was, Baba Yaga said in a tone that was almost apologetic, "You have an exceedingly strong will, T-Mack."
"People are depending on me. If I'm going to be a failure, it'll be on my own fucking time. Now if you wouldn't mind, tell us why we're here."
"Tell you, you mean?"
The skull glanced meaningfully down, and Terry risked a glance to see that Asturial was crumpled on the forest floor, blood leaking from her nose, eyes, and ears.
Biting back a curse, Terry crouched, set his fingers, and searched for a pulse. It was there, hard and fast. She was unconscious, but seemingly in the grip of sustained panic.
Not knowing what else to do, he checked her breathing and shifted her to ensure her airway stayed clear as the skull on the fence post commented, "You are interesting. It is rare to encounter someone who can take being laughed at by everyone ... always. Dragons in particular are vulnerable to the killing joke. Their pride makes them brittle."
"I've led a rough life. I might bend, but I don't break."
"So I gathered. Come inside then. Your courtesy, courage, and fortitude have earned my time. Leave your pet dragon there. I will allow no harm to come to her for the nonce."
"The fuck does 'nonce' mean?" Terry asked as he straightened and turned to find an archway of bone before him, with a little double gate of femurs lined with finger bones that swung inward to admit him.
"For this situation. Until we are done. Isthil will find your friend, but he is inconsolable. The spell is done with him, but its memory tends to do damage, and recent events have left him ... vulnerable. She will probably have to take him back to the waking world. A shame. On any normal journey he would be a worthy ally, but as Vlad learned many years ago, he could never have been the man to save those he loves. He ignored his destiny, and should never have come here. He was always afraid of magic, of responsibility ... and of me."
With a last glance down at Asturial, Terry stepped through the gate, and it swung silently shut behind him but for the sound — loud in the stillness — of a latch.
Terry didn't look back. Instead, he squared his shoulders and walked straight ahead, a hard knot of resolution to get this nonsense over with driving him on. He snuffed out his anger by an act of will. It wouldn't serve him, so he simply wouldn't allow it. Not now. What he had just been through had crushed his spirit down into a core of immovable strength, and the trees in front of him seemed to sway to one side or the other, as though reality itself were bending out of his way as he moved.
After perhaps fifty yards, the trees gave way to a clearing dominated by a small hill atop which sat the strangest building Terry had ever seen.
The walls and roof were thatch, but the grasses used looked to be alive. The roof of the odd little hut was covered with plant life, and flowers dotted the sloping face that he could see while trailing vines draped over the edges.
A living hut by itself would have been cool, but what made the building completely absurd was the fact that it was supported by a pair of legs. Chicken legs to be precise.
As Terry approached, the house tilted as though he'd caught its attention, then shifted around to face him with a door that had a small overhang suspiciously like the top half of a beak. Two windows flanked the door, capped with lunettes overflowing with plant life that made them look like strangely droopy eyelids.
The house crouched, bringing the door down to a small set of steps that seemed more permanent than the rest of the place they served, being made of roughly mortared stone and overgrown with thick vines that had little red, white, and pink flowers.
Terry stopped and glanced to his left and right. The flowers, and their attendant vines, stretched away to the left and right and seemed to surround the house, practically covering the otherwise bare hill it squatted on.
With a frustrated sigh, he looked at the house and said, "If you wouldn't mind, could you step over here? I'm not equipped to deal with assassin vine, and since the sun's up it'll attack me if I go near it."
The house tipped alarmingly to the left, then the right, then turned twenty degrees as though to look at him out of just one of its eye-like windows. Then it straightened and with a long few steps toward him, it left the hill and settled again, now outside the ring of deadly plant life.
The door latch clicked, swung inward, and revealed a rather prosaic farmhouse interior.
With a last look all around the frame to reassure himself he wasn't going to be walking into the jaws of something, Terry stepped inside.
The interior of the hut surprised him by being just as small inside as it was outside. By now he'd come to expect magic shit, and the fact that the house was just as small as it looked was a bit of a shock.
There was a small stone oven with a single opening that took up three-by-five feet in the back left corner, and there were a few bookshelves flanking the door he'd just come through. The shelves had as many knickknacks as books, and the rest of the room was airy and bright, with windows in all the walls and a door just like the one he'd come through directly across from him. That door was closed at the moment. A single, comfortable-looking rocking chair sat in the front left corner near the stove, and most of the right wall was taken up by a bed with drawers underneath and overhung by shelves that were home to jars and other, less recognizable things.
Several different kinds of herbs were bundled and hung from the rafters overhead to dry, and the place smelled strongly of baking and spices.
He did a slow turn, then lifted a hand to scratch the back of his head absently as he said, "So ... empty house?"
"What, you think if I could go home I'd need you? Psh. Over here, T-Mack. Second shelf from the top."
He glanced at the bookshelves on the right and saw another skull, its eye-lights bright and seemingly focused on him.
As he saw it, the skull said, "Sorry T-Mack, the princess is in another castle."
Terry blinked, confused. "What?"
"Strange, I was certain you were American."
"I am American."
"And ... nothing? You don't get that joke?"
He shook his head, lifting his eyebrows as he stared at the skull. "Should I?"
"I can only see the goings-on in your world through second sight and even I understand that joke. You are a very strange man."
He blinked, then started laughing incredulously as he spread his hands wide.
"I must be. I'm talking to a skull on a bookshelf. In a chicken-legged hut! ... That's hidden in a dreamworld, connected to a fantasy land full of monsters that all want to fuck me, kill me, or both! Yeah, for sure! I'm strange. That's the strange thing here, me."
The twin lights in the skull winked out for the barest second before coming back, giving Terry the definite impression it had blinked at him. Then it blandly said, "Touché."
Terry's lips compressed and he stared at the skull pointedly until it sighed and said, "I hope you'll forgive me, T-Mack. I'm just not used to dealing with mortals who aren't terrified of me. It's a bit difficult to find my footing here."
"I'm sure having feet would help."
"Ha ha. Think you're funny do you?"
"At least you get my jokes. Can we please get to the point? I'm not going to waste time raging at you for damn near killing Asturial, or driving Yuri mad. I'm also not going to point out how badly I want to wreck your shit for putting my friends through hell and maybe even being responsible for the death of all their people, but in return I would really like you to tell me how I can break your fucking curse and get the hell outta here."
The eye-lights winked out again — this time for a full second — then reappeared as she said, "Fine. I need you to kill Koschei the Deathless for me."
Terry's brow furrowed and he mouthed the name, then shook his head and asked, "Is he deathless, or isn't he? Because if he i
s I'm sure you can see the problem here."
"Well, he isn't called 'Deathless' for nothing, but there is a way. Have you ever read Harry Potter?"
"No."
"Lord of the Rings?"
"Nope. Saw the movie. That count?"
"They made it a movie? Who directed?"
"Peter Jackson."
"You're serious? The guy that made Meet the Feebles directed LORD OF THE RINGS?"
"I know right? How come you know so much about pop culture?"
"I've been imprisoned a long time, T-Mack. From the Wildervast I can see into all the various worlds. Earth is easily the most interesting, and I have a lot of time on my hands."
"You keep those with your feet? Planning to send me on a scavenger hunt?"
The skull paused, then asked plaintively, "Has anyone ever told you that you're an asshole?"
Terry grinned. "It's been said. Why bring up those two books?"
"Because both of them feature villains who are essentially rip-offs of Koshei the Deathless. He's unkillable because he's hidden his soul outside his body. In order to make him vulnerable, you must first acquire his soul."
Terry blinked. "You are sending me on a scavenger hunt."
"Hah! No. I will tell you exactly where his soul can be found. Your problem will be retrieving it. I have Koschei's soul. You must find me and free me. That done, you may face and kill Koschei."
"If I've already freed you, why would I need to do anything about him?" Terry asked. "I thought I was here because you needed something."
"He is the reason I am imprisoned, and I require his death to balance the scales. Not to mention that once I am freed, you will have Koschei's soul. As the source of his power, he won't just let you go wandering around. If you don't go after him, he'll come after you."
Terry straightened a bit and his back popped. His lips twisted as he looked around, then said, "The way I figure it, you'll owe me three favors for all this nonsense."
"Three?" the skull squawked indignantly. "How do you figure?"
"First, you want me to find and free you. Favor one. Second, you want revenge that you don't technically need. That's bonus work so, two favors. Third ... you didn't just ask me for help, Baba Yaga. You cursed me and you're trying to use circumstance to isolate and force me. Thing is, I'm done being forced. I'll require payment for that as well. So that's three favors ... which you will do if you're interested in balancing the scales, as you say."
