by Darius Hinks
She was crushing the life from the Spirit King.
‘Wait!’ he cried, grasping her arm. ‘Think what Naieth said! You cannot harm him. The seasons will be heavy with blood. We must win back his allegiance. We must cure him.’
As Sativus began to rupture and snap Ariel turned to face Orion. Her eyes were red with grief and her whole body was shivering but when she spoke, her voice was heavy with power.
‘Sativus is dead.’
She closed her eyes, threw back her head and lost herself in the magic that was tearing through her.
Orion shook his head and was about to plead with her again, when Sativus gave an almighty bellow and charged, snapping free of its bonds.
The massive beast was making straight for Ariel and Orion realised that she was too consumed by her spell to realise.
The stag lowered its antlers as it thundered through the mud.
Orion bared his teeth in a grim smile and threw himself directly in the stag’s path.
It was like stepping before a falling tree.
Sativus smashed into him and they both rolled across the clearing, spraying blood, mud and leaves as they went.
Ariel howled in rage, drawn out of her trance just in time to see Sativus regain its footing and rear up over Orion’s prone form, preparing to dash his brains out with its hooves.
She summoned more roots and hurled them like spears, piercing Sativus’s flesh with knotted staves.
Sativus collapsed, covering the ruins with a spray of bones and viscera. For a moment, the spirit tried to rise, but its body was so badly torn that it collapsed as it did so. The torrents of blood became wisps of crimson light, bleeding through Sativus’s hide and mingling with the rain. Then the stag began to dissipate, becoming a spiralling mist of red and green.
Ariel watched in horror, shaking her head. Then, when Sativus’s remains had completely evaporated, she remembered her husband and whirled around.
Orion was lying at the centre of the clearing facing the sky. His back was arched in pain and there was bloody foam on his lips. His body was quivering and his eyes had rolled back into their sockets.
Ariel wailed and rushed to his side, but when she reached him, she was unable to touch his body. It was so torn and buckled that she could find no place to hold him.
She dropped to her knees a few feet away, with one hand extended, and began to weep.
She was so lost in her grief that for a while she failed to notice that the weather had changed.
The air was busy with silent, drifting feathers of snow.
Chapter Twelve
Ordaana lay in the dark, half asleep in the roots of a tree, imagining that flies were speaking to her. The words were amiable, soporific and lisping. ‘Hookworm, of fifteen varieties, emerging from the flesh of the joint cavity. Roundworm, of twelve varieties, covering the mucus lining. Lesser infestations of cankerworm, tapeworm, zeaspora, black pox, hair tongue and lung fungus.’
She ignored the flies, holding her child tighter for warmth and trying to regain the blissful nothingness of sleep.
The droning words continued, listing every conceivable fungal infection and disease. The voice was so lethargic that Ordaana might have succeeded in staying asleep if not for the other sounds that accompanied it. Nearby she could hear a clicking sound – bone, tapping against wood; an irregular pattern that caused her to flinch with every click. She clamped her eyes tighter but the sound drummed on. It was like a fingernail, tapping against her skull. And, in the distance, she could hear something equally jarring – a dull, repetitive clang, like two pans being banged together. The sounds combined into such an infuriating din that she accepted defeat and opened her eyes to glare at the insects.
‘Why can’t you just let me sleep?’
The endless clouds of flies were there, of course, but they were not speaking. She was being addressed by one of Alkhor’s servants – one of his muttering, shuffling lackeys. When she had asked, in disgusted tones, what they were, Alkhor had given her the name humans applied to them, seeming to find it incredibly funny. Humans called them tallymen, he explained, if they lived long enough to call them anything. This particular one was standing over her, fiddling with a tally stick and an abacus of finger bones. Like all of Alkhor’s brood, it was vaguely humanoid, but with an impossibly bloated stomach, a pair of ridiculous spindly legs, a single tusk sprouting from its skull and one, large cyclopean eye embedded in its forehead.
‘Ganglion,’ she muttered.
Ordaana would rather not have been on first name terms with such a being, but Ganglion’s particular gift made it quite unmistakable. It had explained, quite proudly to Ordaana, that Alkhor had blessed it with the blood pox. Constant bleeding beneath its skin made its body the colour of raw meat. The dark red was in sharp contrast with its eye – a lurid sack of yellow, laced with swollen veins and oozing a constant stream of pus.
‘Infinitesimal particles of white nose, loose eye and liver mould,’ it said, leaning so close that she could see the weevils rushing across its blackened tongue.
Ordaana groaned and backed away, struggling with the nausea that dogged her every waking moment. The thing spoke a language so base it hurt her ears, but Alkhor had cursed her with the ability to understand every loathsome word.
‘The tendons have erupted in thirty-seven places, Proctor,’ said Ganglion, using its counting stick to prod a lump of meat near her feet.
She hissed a curse and stood up. The moist white lump in her arms stirred and Ordaana gently stroked its tentacles, ignoring the way they reddened her skin. ‘Why must you tell me every wretched detail?’ She glared at Ganglion. ‘Build him his rivers. Keep working. I don’t care about anything else.’
A pockmarked lid rolled halfway down Ganglion’s eye. ‘The master’s work is meaningless if we do not catalogue it, Proctor.’ The daemon jabbed its counting stick into the piece of meat again. ‘The number and complexity of his gifts cannot go unrecorded.’ Ganglion tapped a thick, mildewed ledger, hanging beneath its swaying gut and continued speaking in the same, moist lisp: ‘Records must be kept, Proctor. Tallies must be made. Power exists only in the detailing of things. The forest is dangerously unkempt. We must bring order. By listing our successes can we–’
‘Where did you get that?’ asked Ordaana, pointing at the diseased meat.
The daemon in her arms stirred again and she patted its head until it withdrew its tentacles.
Ganglion’s blood blister face creased into a smile. ‘Another one of Ariel’s lackeys.’
Ordaana stared at the dripping mess, contorted by guilt. Then she pictured Ariel’s face and replaced the feeling with hate. ‘A lone scout?’
Ganglion had already returned its attention to the piece of flesh. There were white, glistening shapes moving through it. The daemon was deaf to Ordaana’s question as it counted them, clicking the beads of its abacus as it calculated the extent of the infection. ‘Flatworms,’ it said cheerfully. ‘And snail fever.’
Ganglion seemed oblivious to the fact that the worms were crawling from its own skin. The longer the tallyman examined the meat, the more infected it became.
‘Ganglion,’ snapped Ordaana, ‘was he alone?’
Ganglion smiled. ‘Far from it, Proctor. He was just the first. There are many more – guards, I think. We have been blessing them with our grandfather’s gifts. And those that were strong enough have now joined us in the work of counting and organising. We are now so numerous that we should complete the river before–’
‘Guards?’ Ordaana felt a cold dread in her stomach. ‘Guards of what?’
Ganglion frowned. ‘One of their haunts, I think. We will learn more as the river progresses.’
Ordaana clutched the silver knife fixed to her belt, itching to plunge it into Ganglion’s moronic eye. ‘What have you done? Show me quickly.’
The tally
men never moved with any great speed and Ordaana seethed as Ganglion sauntered through fly-crowded groves, down to the moonlit bank of a river. As she emerged from the shadows she pulled her tatty hood down low until her face was completely hidden.
The river was no ordinary waterway. It was a glut of steaming, yellow acid, eating its way through the frozen earth and spreading disease as it bubbled through the hoarfrost. Coiled, pale shapes moved beneath the surface. Ordaana grimaced as she made out vast, ridged monsters, burrowing through the earth and driving the river on.
Ordaana felt sick at the sight of it but Alkhor had explained its importance: for the daemon’s garden to resemble a working stomach, it must be fed by rivers of bile, pouring down from the north, flooding the groves Alkhor had cultivated to resemble a lower intestine. It was utterly, utterly insane, of course, but Alkhor had promised her a reward on its completion. The daemon had promised to reveal how Ordaana would take her revenge. She was clinging to that hope.
Figures were moving through the acid – rank, bandy-legged monstrosities like Ganglion. They each had the same cyclopean eyes and tusks, but there the similarity ended. Each of them was contorted by a different affliction. Where Ganglion’s skin was crimson, the others wore a whole rainbow of sickening hues. Some glistened with a pale sheen of white pus, while others were coated with a thick, yellow, fungal crust. All of them were working tirelessly, either widening the course of the river with their bare hands, or cataloguing the diseases that sprang up in their wake. Animals lay dead or dying all around them and as the tallymen progressed, their muttering, monotonous voices joined the buzzing of the flies in a nauseating chorus, punctuated by the dull clanging sound Ordaana had heard earlier.
While Ordaana slept, dozens more of the daemons had lurched into existence, each one born of a victim’s tormented soul. Ordaana shook her head in disbelief as she realised the true nature of her task: she was commanding an army of horned, muttering dullards. As they lumbered slowly onwards, they spread a variety of diseases, causing the trees nearest to the river to slump and split, like a platter of rotting food.
Ordaana peered through the gloom, following the course of the river. Its lurid yellow was easy to follow, even through the clouds of flies, and she saw that, as she slept, they had moved it on another half a mile.
‘Down there?’ she asked, jabbing her knife at where the river ended.
Ganglion had stooped to investigate a tree trunk. It was covered in fungus and Ganglion was nodding sagely. ‘Root rot. Water mould. Legweed.’
Ordaana gave the daemon a fierce backhanded blow that sent it sprawling across the grass.
Ganglion stood slowly and lidded its eye again.
‘Where is this “haunt” you’ve found?’ she demanded. ‘I’m not interested in your lists.’
The daemon gave her a lethargic, moist-lipped smile and pointed at the end of the river.
Ordaana hauled the daemon to its feet and shoved it on through the trees. ‘You might have ruined everything. If you have, your master’s wrath will be nothing compared to mine.’
Ganglion’s mouth trembled as it failed to find a suitable reply. The thought that it had failed Alkhor was enough to finally drive it into a slow jog.
They followed the course of the yellow river, past the diseased figures steering it onwards and climbed a small incline, just a few hundred yards from the end of the river.
Ordaana waved for Ganglion to keep low as they crested the hill and looked down across the trees. ‘Where did you see–?’ she began, but her words came to an abrupt halt as she saw what was happening below.
The tallymen had steered the river of bile into a broad, treeless basin and, as the yellow liquid pooled and tumbled across silver-clad rocks, arrows were raining down from the far side of the valley. Clouds of them were whirring through the air and thudding into the daemons.
Ordaana looked over their heads and saw a tower rising out of the darkness. It was impossible to see clearly but the arrows seemed to be coming from its walls, mostly aimed at an enormous, hulking figure, smashing its sword against the base of the tower.
‘What are they doing?’ she hissed, turning to Ganglion. ‘Why aren’t they fighting back?’ The daemons wading through the bile were ignoring the arrows piercing their bodies. As Ordaana watched in disbelief they carried on working with the same, plodding deliberation.
Ganglion gave her a blank look. ‘They are making the river, Proctor. And recording its effect.’
Ordaana closed her eyes, biting back a scream. ‘But they have been discovered.’ She pointed at the larger daemon – the one pummelling the base of the tower. ‘And what is that?’
Ganglion swelled with pride. ‘Bule is the Herald. He is the greatest of us.’
Ordaana stared at the giant daemon. It was vaguely the same shape as the others, with a protruding gut and crooked, ridiculous legs, but it was built on quite a different scale. Its back and arms were lashed with diseased, skinless muscle and even from a distance she could tell that it must be twelve feet or more high. With every swing of its black sword it smashed a little more of the tower’s foundations and summoned another wave of arrows.
Bule bristled with arrows but was oblivious to the danger. Every time a piece of the rock came free the daemon paused to examine it. As it turned the rocks in its fingers it made notes in a drooping ledger, ignoring the arrows thudding into its flesh. Rather than a single horn, this daemon had three great tusks and, dangling from the tallest of them, was a battered, brass bell. Every time Bule struck the tower the bell shifted, letting out another harsh peal.
Ordaana groaned as the sound rattled around her head. ‘What do you think those archers will do now?’ she hissed, wincing as she turned back to Ganglion.
Ganglion shrugged. ‘The Plaguefather’s gifts will affect them in different ways. Until we can calculate the potency of his blights I am unable to say how the archers have reacted to the river.’
Ordaana grabbed the daemon’s blood-infused head and hauled it to hers. The smell of sickness was overwhelming, but she gripped it tightly.
‘They will send news to their lord.’ She spoke in sharp, quick bursts. ‘Maybe they already have. Their kindreds will be arming themselves. Do you understand? They will come here in vast numbers. They will kill Bule. Then they will butcher the rest of you.’
A look of recognition slowly dawned in the daemon’s eye and it smiled, loosing a string of black drool from its mouth. ‘Bule will not die.’ It waved at the figures working in the river. It was true that most of them were ignoring the arrows embedded in their flesh and working on, but a couple were already so pinned with wooden shafts that they were struggling to move. ‘We do not die, Proctor. Our grandfather did not make us that way.’
‘And what about when they have dismembered you all, Ganglion? Or cast you all into a fire? Will you still be able to do your master’s bidding?’
Ganglion wiped the drool from its lips and stared at the distant, towering shape of Bule. Doubt appeared in its single, oozing eye. After a moment it spoke in a quieter, more hesitant voice. ‘What shall we do, Proctor?’
‘Kill them, you idiot. Kill every one of them. And pray you’re not too late.’
She shoved Ganglion back down the slope. ‘Tell them to stop counting for a minute. Make for the source of the arrows. Help Bule. I’ll do the rest.’ She pulled her hood down even lower. ‘And gods protect you if I’ve been recognised.’
Ganglion shook its head but stumbled down the hill, drawing a pitted sword as it went. An arrow whistled through the darkness and sliced into the daemon’s neck but, after a brief hesitation, it stumbled on, letting out a lazy, droning command. ‘Cease the count. Draw your swords.’
The workers below looked up from the rocky basin.
‘Defend Bule,’ lisped Ganglion.
As the daemons shuffled slowly towards the giant, Ordaana climbed t
o her feet, lowered her head and lifted her palms to the stars. Her voice rang out through the darkness and the forest buckled in response. Naked boughs heaved into motion, wood screamed in protest and the rings on Ordaana’s fingers flashed in the moonlight. ‘You will not take this from me,’ she hissed, bringing her arms down.
There was a deafening crash as trees exploded into life, sending branches and roots flying down into the murky pit. Dozens of tendrils spiralled through the darkness, speeding towards the source of the arrows.
Ordaana nodded as they lashed around the base of the tower. As the spindly-legged tallymen drew their swords and shambled through the gorge, she took her knife and levelled it at the face of the second moon.
The runes on her blade shimmered with green fire and the Chaos moon pulsed brighter, throwing a wave of sickly light through her weapon and splashing it up against the stone spire. Ordaana frowned as the structure was revealed. It was a crooked, ridged spike of basalt. It was clearly a natural phenomenon but its dozens of circular cave mouths were too uniform to be the work of nature. Ordaana recognised the hand of a powerful sorcerer.
‘I’ve seen this place before,’ she muttered.
An arrow thudded into a tree trunk just behind her and she dropped to the ground, feeling a growing sense of alarm. ‘Where are we?’ she said, peering through the grass.
She felt a rush of satisfaction as her torrent of roots and leaves slammed against the black tower, lashing around its frosty, angular walls, but her pleasure was short-lived.
As the vines and shoots snaked in through the cave mouths the tower began to defend itself. For a split second it simply vanished, sending Ordaana’s vines tumbling through the air, clutching at shadows like grasping hands. The vines had no sooner fallen to the floor of the basin when the tower reappeared, a few feet closer to the tallymen and completely unencumbered.
Ordaana gasped. She sensed sorcery, drifting towards her through the darkness. She could taste it – cold and metallic on her tongue. She grimaced and dropped back down into the grass, clutching her daemon child protectively to her chest. Someone was watching her from the black rock – a fierce sentience, charged with power.
