by Cory Herndon
Fonn checked her belt and cursed her foggy head for not checking it sooner. The scabbard, along with the small pouches she used to carry food, medicine, and tools, hung empty. Her uniform and person were thankfully intact. Somehow she’d escaped the explosion with only a few scratches and bruises that might have just been the result of sleeping an undetermined amount of time on straw and stone.
The latch on the door clicked but didn’t open. This was followed by another click, then a third. Some kind of composite lock on the outer door, Fonn guessed. It would make sense if someone wanted to keep her inside.
Fonn needed a weapon. She considered pulling a piece of wood from the fire, but whatever was burning in there barely fit the description. It was more like dried rope.
The door clicked a fourth time, then a bolt inside the door slid into place. Fonn cast her eyes about the floor, looking for a rock, for something, but whoever had locked her in had also cleared the place of anything that could be used as a weapon.
Everything except the blanket and the tiny campfire. Alone, the twigs were useless, but Fonn had an idea.
The half-elf scooped up the blanket, held it by the corners, and twirled it. She stepped back and to the side, which put the fire between her left foot and the door.
Another pair of bolt-clanks, and the door swung inward. She caught a glimpse of a pale elf in the firelight, then kicked at the little pile of burning vines. Cinders and sparks erupted in a cloud before her, and she lashed out with the leather blanket like a fat whip.
A pale arm snapped out and clutched her makeshift weapon with the speed of a striking cobra. The elf easily jerked the leather from Fonn’s hands. In her weakened condition she simply couldn’t hold on. With nothing else left to try, she ducked her head, dropped a shoulder, and charged.
The elf stepped to one side and knocked her feet out from under her with a raised foot. The ledev slammed into the slimy stone of a dank, rotten hallway. Fonn managed to catch a glimpse of a half-dozen pairs of glowing eyes at the far end of the hall before the elf hooked his fingers under her collar and hauled her back into the small room. He pushed her against the wall with enough force to daze her for just a moment—long enough for him to stoop and let one of the spiders scuttling across the floor climb into his palm. He stood and held out his open hand.
“Forgive me,” the elf said politely. “This isn’t my usual style, but you need to sleep a while longer.” He cupped his palm and pressed it against her neck, and she felt a tiny pinprick as the arachnid’s fangs pierced her skin. A second later she collapsed, unconscious, in Jarad’s arms.
Above all other considerations, you must never create something you cannot destroy.
—Matka Tajini (331–612 Z.C.), from the Matka Scrolls
25 ZUUN 9999 Z.C., EARLY MORNING
“You can’t move your arm,” Savra said. “Nor can you move anything at all unless I will it. I am disappointed, Guildmaster. I’d hoped we could work together for the good of the guild.”
Svogthir snarled. “I was going to simply kill you and be done with it. Now I’m going to take my time. I’m going to consume you, girl.”
“That might be possible,” Savra said. “I’d have to let you get near, first.”
“You’re playing with a god,” Svogthir said. His voice had dropped several registers. “You think I can’t—”
The god-zombie continued to move his mouth, but no sound came out.
“You control the head, but I control the body. I command the lungs that pass air through your rotten voice box.” Her lips thinned into a cold smile. “You will not speak. You will not move. You will not breathe if I do not allow it. Your body, Guildmaster, is not yours. It is mine. If you do not do as I ask, we are through here. I will find another way to save the Golgari.”
Svogthir fumed silently, his mouth open in a voiceless snarl and his fist still high overhead, frozen in place.
“I see you’re not convinced,” Savra said. “Very well.” She gestured at the god-zombie’s arm and whispered a few words she’d found in an obscure passage of the Matka Scrolls—a document she knew Svogthir had never seen. The Scrolls were the legacies of every matka who had come before her, and the matka had guarded their secrets jealously.
Svogthir’s right hand uncurled and opened. His arm lowered, reached over, and gripped his left arm at the elbow. Another gesture from Savra and Svogthir’s right hand wrenched violently on the opposite limb until the bone cracked and splintered like a dry sapling. Svogthir’s open mouth could not scream, but it tried.
Savra gave him a few seconds to process the sound of his splintering bones and bid the arm to stop twisting. She held her staff aloft. “I could just control you like a puppet and use you to kill my way to the Sisters, but that’s not going to help me,” she said. “I don’t want the teratogens dead. I want to lead them. I want them united. This guild has gone all wrong with the Sisters in charge, but not all the chimerical races are like them. I can save this guild from itself. I can save it from the gorgons and make it great again.”
Svogthir finally stopped trying to scream and closed his mouth. He opened it again to speak, couldn’t, and bugged his eyes out at the priestess. She released the god-zombie’s lungs with a wave of her hand.
“All right,” Svogthir said. “You’ve made your point.” He drew a deep, rasping breath and sighed. “It’s better than prison. I’ll do it.”
“Without question?”
“Without question.”
“Good,” Savra said. She waved her hand a final time, and the god-zombie relaxed.
“Now what?” Svogthir said. “You’ve got me cornered. What would you have me do?”
“You’re heading up to take back what the Sisters stole from you,” Savra said. “Then you’re going to give it to me. With a Devkarin finally in control, the Golgari will be great again.”
“What if I decide to warn them?”
“You hate them, Guildmaster,” Savra said, “and they hate you just as much. Moreover, they fear you and distrust you.”
“With good reason.”
“Exactly,” Savra said. “It wouldn’t matter what you said. They’d have every teratogen in the labyrinth on you in a heartbeat. I do good work, but nobody’s that good. They’d destroy you, and I would be back to square one.”
“You’re not exactly my favorite right now either, elf,” Svogthir said, “but you do know me well. You’ve proven you can destroy me as easily as you remade me. There is no point in resisting your will. But listen. I have a proposal. Go along with this, and I won’t just do what you say, I’ll do it gladly.”
“What’s that?” Savra asked.
“Let me rule with you,” he said. “You’ll need a figurehead. You can run the guild, make it prosperous if you want, or run it into the ground and make every zombie in Old Rav tear his own arms off, I don’t care. That part I’m done with. But think of it: Savra, guildmistress and master of the lost parun.”
Savra smirked. Anything to stay close enough to the real power in order to make a grab for it someday. She wouldn’t have expected any less. Svogthir hadn’t lasted this long without learning how to make deals. Then again, neither had she.
“Make you a figurehead?” the priestess said. “Guildmaster, it’s as if you’ve read my mind.”
* * * * *
High above Savra and Svogthir, three sisters sat atop a small mountain range of gold and jewels. They and their assembled court watched the priestess’s movements in the mirrored surface of a calm pool, though they could not hear her words. They probably could not have heard Savra speak anyway. The lair was a noisy place when court was in session, and it had been in session for a thousand years.
The gorgons’ bodies were those of unnaturally tall human women, but the resemblances were superficial at best. The Sisters of the Stone Death were female, yet they were anything but human. Atop their heads they wore tangled, writhing nests of snakelike tentacles. Their eyes, which had no pupils, glowed softly, and thei
r mouths were filled with razor-sharp teeth.
Clicks, hoots, and roars filled the air as the gathered horde watched the god-zombie being reassembled. The teratogens were the most biologically diverse of the Golgari factions, divided and subdivided into a labyrinth of tribes and clans. They were connected more by what they were not than by what they were. They did not tend to go about on two legs like humanoids, and for that they had been lumped together for thousands of years, eventually forming a sort of supertribe within the guild. They, like all Golgari, answered to the Sisters. They loved their mistresses, and in return their mistresses loved them. Yet the sight of the ancient parun of their guild, a god made form, stirred in them an ancestral pride many of them had not even known existed.
Or maybe they just all loved a good show.
“Ssshe hasss found him,” the youngest sister, Lydya, said. “Ssshe hasss ressstored him.”
“Thisss game isss unwissse,” said Lexya, the middle child of the trio. “You underessstimate the priessstesss, Ludmilla. Do you remember what it cossst usss to defeat him the firssst time?”
“Oh yesss,” said the third, the oldest and wisest, the one called Ludmilla. “I remember. That isss why hisss sssecond death will be sssweet.”
“And the Devkarin?” the first sister asked. “What of the matka?”
“Ssshe isss a child, of no consssequencsse,” Ludmilla said. “When the god-zsssombie fallsss, ssshe will be crussshed beneath the weight of her hubrisss. We ssshall have a new matka, or perhapsss let the line die out. They are troublesssome.”
“And you are cssertain the god-zssombie will fall, sssissster?”
Ludmilla smiled and flashed teeth. “Watch.”
* * * * *
“Very impressive,” Savra said. “But you’re wasting time. Just kill them, Guildmaster. These mindless ones are in the way.” She looked ahead and behind and spotted nothing but darkness and carnage, respectively, in the narrow, winding tunnel.
“I told you, call me Svogthir,” the god-zombie rumbled. He snapped an elf-sized leg from the overturned giant beetle and cracked open the chitin over his knee. He brought the grisly thing to his relatively tiny mouth to noisily slurp bug flesh. “Ah, now that is refreshing.”
They’d already traversed up through seven levels of the labyrinthal pyramid, Svogthir in the lead and Savra behind, keeping watch for a possible attack from the rear that so far had not materialized. Svogthir knew what to do. Now the Sisters just had to do their part. So far, they’d had to fight their way through a pathetic assortment of bugs and mindless beasts, but soon the true teratogens—the creatures that walked as animals but possessed a human level of intelligence—would surely come after them. The Sisters were just as surely watching them. Savra could sense the scrying pool’s cold caress settle on her skin like a film of oil.
For now, they played the part of the overconfident invaders who had gotten lost, as so many had over the years, within the walls of the pyramid labyrinth. Soon, a believable challenge had to come along, and Savra would be truly committed to her necessary treason. She needed something halfway intelligent to attack them soon if Svogthir’s role in this was going to work.
As if she’d summoned them with her thought, harpies attacked from all directions at once, striking so fast Savra could not even get a head count before the first one was on top of her. Savra flipped the blunt end of her staff into the bird-woman’s face and smashed her gnarled, hooked nose to a pulp. The harpy screeched and careened into the wall of the passage, blinded by her own blood.
Svogthir roared and plucked an incoming harpy from the air with either hand. The tunnels of the labyrinth were large by elf standards, as many of the pyramid’s denizens were either the god-zombie’s size or needed room to maneuver in the air, like the attacking bird-women. “Guildmaster! Don’t forget to leave these ones alive!” Savra shouted over the sudden explosion of harpy cries. She fended off another swooping attack with her staff. “This is where we start taking back the guild, and we want a guild left to take.”
“Even these two?” Svogthir said, holding the kicking, flapping harpies up by their ankles.
“Yes,” Savra said. “But feel free to push them around a little.”
“Good,” Svogthir said and knocked the harpies’ heads together with a clop.
It started with the harpies but did not end there. The bird-women were beaten and bruised but alive at the end of the fight. Svogthir, as planned, ordered them to act as his heralds, warning the intelligent teratogens that the Sisters’ time was coming to an end. The parun was coming back, as so many had always said he would.
After another few encounters, the god-zombie no longer even needed to fight. Soon, a small mob of harpies, griffins, centaurs, nagas, and other teratogen species moved with them through the tunnels, acting as guides and trying to get a look at the giant. Anything that got in their way and refused to swear fealty to Svogthir and “his” high priestess was set upon by the mob.
* * * * *
“What isss he doing?” Ludmilla hissed. “He isss sssupposssed to be fighting them. Not winning them over to hisss ssside!”
“You sssaid ssshe would never get thisss far,” Lexya replied. “What will we do?”
“We are not without alliesss,” Ludmilla said. “We have the court that sssurroundsss usss.” She waved at the gallery around them.
A gallery that had become quieter than before.
“Sssissstersss?” Lydya asked. “Where did everybody go?”
* * * * *
By the time they reached the point where the expansive tunnel opened into a wide, high-ceilinged chamber that housed the Sisters’ lair, Svogthir had gathered a small army of teratogens. It would have been more, Savra guessed, but there was simply no more room in the tunnels.
This was what Savra and her hidden ally had counted on. The teratogens, once cowed, were subservient to the strongest in the tribe, whatever form that tribe might take. None of them, save the gorgons themselves, remembered Svogthir’s tenure as guildmaster or remembered the way it ended. All they saw was a legend, no, a god that had returned to them just as many were growing weary of the Sisters’ increasing disinterest in managing the affairs of the guild.
Savra sidled up to the giant zombie, who was obviously enjoying himself immensely. “We’re almost there,” she whispered out of the side of her mouth. “Get ready.”
“You sure I can only kill two?” the god-zombie said as quietly as he could, and the noise of the teratogen mob ensured no one overheard him. “That hardly seems worth the trouble.”
“Patience, Guildmaster,” she said. “They’re all with you now, but they respect honor as well as strength. You can’t just kill them. Eventually another gang will try and take over just as the Sisters did.”
“I didn’t know priestesses were so well-versed in the art of politics.”
“The priestesses you knew wouldn’t last a day in my sandals,” Savra said. “All right, you’re on.”
Svogthir tromped to the steps leading up to the lair—a structure that he had built himself as a temple to his twisted glory, now converted to the court of the gorgons—and impressively cleared his throat. The cacophonous noise settled down into a few random hoots and growls, and Svogthir raised both hands to acknowledge the gathering.
“Teratogens of the Golgari,” he began, “The Sisters of the Stone Death are not your guildmasters. There is only one guildmaster. Me.”
The bestial mob exploded into roars and cheers. A few chants of “Svogthir, Svogthir!” arose among the teratogens with the power of speech. The god-zombie basked in their adoration for a moment, then waved them into silence. “I created this guild from the bones and flesh of this world. Ten thousand years ago, I united the teratogen races, the zombie peoples, and the Devkarin elves—all of us. And in unity, we were strong. For nine thousand years, it was so. The guild was great in both wealth and power. Today? Where is that wealth? What has happened to that unity?”
Murmurs and unpleas
ant animal sounds reverberated in the chamber, and a harpy screeched, “They have it! The Sisters! They keep the wealth for themselves!” A chorus of agreement followed and eventually forced the god-zombie to quiet them again so he could speak.
“My people,” Svogthir said, “we can be great. If you turn your back on the Sisters, the usurpers, you will be rewarded. As I am strong, so shall we all be strong. As you are great, so shall we all be great.”
Savra smiled. Her god-zombie had them eating out of the palm of his oversized hand. Now he just needed to keep making noise until the Sisters could no longer remain hidden in their lair. Savra knew they were watching.
As if on cue, the heavy stone door to the lair slid aside with a low rumble. Undisturbed growth snapped and ripped apart, and Savra heard a familiar hissing sound from within, even over the noise of the teratogens. The Sisters emerged, their semireptilian bodies scintillating in the light of the torches and naturally occurring glowposts. They moved as one, Ludmilla in the lead, to the top of the steps as if taking the stage.
“What isss thisss?” Ludmilla said loudly enough for the entire crowded antechamber to hear. She eyed Savra, or at least Savra assumed she did. The Sisters each wore a chameleonic mask enchantment over her face, a spell with obvious practical uses when one’s gaze could kill. “The prisssoner walksss free. And our priessstesss walksss a dangerousss line.” Lydya and Lexya hissed their agreement.
Savra had been waiting for just such an opening. She strode forward and stood before Svogthir like a vassal, then chose her words carefully. “I serve the true guildmaster,” Savra said. “The strongest among us shall lead the Golgari. And the god-zombie is stronger than the Sisters. The god-zombie shall rule us!” She turned from the gorgons and backed up the steps just far enough to be seen by the teratogens. “We serve the strongest! The strongest must lead!” She repeated the phrases a few times, just enough for the crowd to pick them up and turn them into a refrain.
