Corvus Rex

by J K Ishaya

  “‘He is still hiding down deep,’ she said. ‘He will need much time to heal from his experience, being imprisoned in his own mind,’ she said. ‘Nyarlathotep still tortured him, as he did you.’

  “The thought of this torture clenched in my gut. Mine had been sporadic, mostly retaliations against me when I did not do as told. A sword through the head. Forced metamorphoses. Crippling memories, both close and distant, dredged up and thrown in my face. But to imagine what it was like to be trapped in my own head surrounded by the presence of such a powerful and vile entity did not compare. This led to the consideration that Lyrr had not even been able to escape into the Dreamlands where he might have at least sought some protection from Nodens.

  “She read these thoughts easily. ‘He is between the veils of his own consciousness and the Dreamlands, but he will find his way to the surface world again,’ she concluded, and then lowered her hands and turned her eyes upon me, ever calm and knowing. ‘As will Zyraxes.’

  “She was speaking figuratively, but I understood. My hand absently rose to touch at Malorix’s torque still fixed round my neck, and I looked down at Decebal’s wolf ring again. They were the symbols of two worlds, and I was not sure which I belonged to if any.

  “The decision came down that the gem would be transported to Egypt, where an answer to its security might lie in the sun. At first, I intended to go with them, but I asked for a little more time as I still planned to go back to the mountain and examine the ruin and if possible, recover Malorix from his prison. My mind changed entirely when, on the last evening, the lot of us but the queen sat before the fire and I, for once, was feeling able to relate more of my human trials to my now closest companions, Freytha and Kvasir, who were both sharpening swords, and I began to miss my falx as I listened to the slide of whetstone on steel. Calder, Kory, and Sten were in a huddle adjacent to us, discussing how to transport the stone so that no one would be tempted to look into it, while the sun would also keep it cleansed of Nyarlathotep’s presence.

  “‘Like blinding him,’ Sten was saying, obviously still resenting the loss of his own eye. By now the cloth that covered it had been replaced with a wide leather tie that dipped down over the offended socket. ’We’ll make that bastard stare into the sun all the way into Egypt.’

  “‘So you gained four inches?’ Freytha was asking me incredulously after I had told her of the crooked back that had plagued my human years and how my transformation had changed that.

  “‘At least,’ I said.

  “‘Or maybe you just felt taller,’ Kvasir said so casually in jest that I started to glare at him and then only rolled my eyes, growing more accustomed to the humor he had come to show with me. Then the smile dropped away from his face and he gazed across the fire, eyes freezing in place and glassy as if he did not believe what they saw, and his hand wandered up to nudge his sister in the arm. Now they both stared, as did Sten and the others, and I looked, too.

  “Stepping from the tent where he had lain in healing stasis for days, was Lyrr, with Queen Nara following him. He held a blanket around his shoulders, his loose hair tumbling down, his brow smooth and his eyes wide as if he were seeing the world again after a very long sleep. I had gathered that his possession had been brief in the scheme of the Boreans’ overall fight with the Crawling Chaos’ legions, but nevertheless, he seemed very dazed indeed. There was a rush of bodies rising around me and dashing around the fire to see him. Joyous smiles were circulating, Freytha embracing him, and Kvasir pressing his forehead to his brother’s in a show of camaraderie that I also missed with my own men now dead. As for me, I stayed in place and simply watched, my vision moving across the happy party to pause on the queen, whose countenance absolutely glowed.

  “But as Lyrr finally began to smile at his family, clearly an effort for him that soon after his awakening, that smile immediately dropped away when he looked across the fire, and its red prisoner, to me sitting there. His eyes widened, and I saw the not-so-subtle shift of his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed stiffly. The feline slits in his eyes, narrowed against the fire’s glare, suddenly opened wide under the glaze and I saw therein no more elation at his freedom but rather fear. No, terror. Suppressed, perhaps, but it was there.

  “I knew then that he recognized me. Although trapped within his own mind, he had not always been chased down into darkness but endured a view through his own eyes as Nyarlathotep had worn his body like a suit, manipulated and transformed it at will, and also when he had fought me.

  “Lyrr, I realized, had glimpsed me in far more than human form. I, personally, cannot tell you exactly what that form looked like, but he had witnessed it, and thus to see me sitting before the fire casually, rendered a shock that I felt across the way, and so, too, did the queen.

  “Ultimately, I knew then that I had to part ways with the Boreans. Although he understood that I had been part of his rescue, Lyrr did not need the reminder of what he had been through every time he looked at me, and in all honesty, I needed to separate Lyrr from Nyarlathotep just the same. I also felt too much like an outsider despite Queen Nara's gentle offer that I come with them, her assurance that I need not be alone in my ordeal. I needed to be alone. There was so much still for me to discover for myself, and I saw before me the quest to find a balance within, one where I could resist the call of Azathoth, for it was still there. To give in, to accept that which would supposedly make me whole would mean to no longer be Zyraxes.”

  “How did you feel about this, Mr. Freysson?” Howard asks.

  “By that point, I was quite fond of the freak,” Kvasir says. “That he had driven out Nyarlathotep and not left Lyrr’s body behind was a matter of great appreciation for me, as I had thanked him for beside the fire, but I could not make him come with us, and I was not going to try. When we said goodbye, I shook his hand as a comrade and told him to do what he needed to do and join us as soon as he felt ready.”

  “I did have other commitments,” I proceed. “I left the Boreans to their mission as they prepared to travel south, which would send them even further into Roman territory, and I certainly wished to avoid that.

  “I returned to the mountains and found the shaft back into the lair. This was only perhaps another two weeks later, and I hoped that had given the caverns time to settle, but what I found was not to be expected. The corpses of the sheq n’gai that Malorix and I had slaughtered were gone. All of them. As were any of Nyarlathotep’s human servants, or even the body of the witch. The place was virtually gutted of any signs that it had ever been used at all, seeming little more than a network of caves, but then I reached the place where Malorix had been trapped, thinking I would find the giant stone door still down, too thick and heavy and fitted to be opened again. On my journey in, I had been thinking about how I might get it open. First, I would find a way to destroy the symbols that gave the door its power. If the binding circles that I had experienced could be disrupted simply by breaking their edges from the outside, then perhaps I could simply break up the symbols’ definition with a rock. Then once they were decommissioned, perhaps, with proper concentration on my newly understood abilities, I might manifest the necessary tools to get a grip underneath the door and lift.

  “Neither scenario was meant to be, for when I rounded the turn into the greater cavern and looked into the tall alcove that had so fatefully captured Malorix’s attention, I froze in place, unable to fathom what I saw.

  “The door did remain, and fragments of the symbols were still in place on its upper half, but below, in its middle section, just above the floor level, a large, jagged hole had been blasted all the way through it. I could not think of any artillery that could break through that door, and upon greater examination, I stood further baffled for the pattern of the blast rendered a single, great and horrifying indication.”

  Howard sits up, gasping. “But someone got him out? Who?”

  “No one got him out, Howard,” I conclude, “for the evidence was there before me.
The blast did not reach into that ancient cavern of pain and transformation as of an outside force breaking through. No. The large and small pattern of debris spread outward, into the part of the main cavern where I stood. The blast had come from inside, and beyond the new opening, the laboratory was completely empty of any one or thing living.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Howard stares at me for a long time before a tiny head-shake bobbles on his neck and then grows into a full gesture of denial. “How did he get out? Where was he?”

  “I did not know, nor could I track any scent from the laboratory. Inside, I found the four altars completely destroyed and cleared away as if a giant hand had pushed through, breaking up and sweeping anything in its wake to the side. The old shackles, the pieces of glass and human bone were all crushed and left drifts that lined the edges of the chamber, and of the remnants of his old comrades there were none. All of them and Malorix, too, gone.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “There was nothing more for me to do. I left. The emptiness of that chamber haunted me to a point I could not stand to stay there a moment longer. It haunts me even now, even more than it did when it was filled with the poor mutated wretches that had been Malorix’s kinsmen. After gawking in disbelief for long enough, I ran. I bolted back to the shaft and up into the daylight which suddenly felt more welcoming than ever. With nothing else to do, no lead to follow from there, I could only set my mind on other things, other matters I still needed to confirm that filled me with as much desperation as the search for my missing sire.

  “The journey back into Dacia, now so overridden with the Roman presence that I did not remotely go hungry, was only three days long with short periods of rest. In sleep, I found myself upon the threshold, but I was in no way ready to go down those steps again yet.

  "On the fourth night, I reached my mother’s grave, where I broke through its pleasant little moss bed and dug down, and down within the vicinity where I suspected her head might lay in how Decebal and Diegis had likely placed her, and sure enough, I discovered a golden earring first, and it was like Decebal had told me as a child. The artistry was unlike any seen in this world of men, not from Dacia or Greece, or any Celtic nation to the west. It was not long before my fingers brushed over the smooth forehead of a skull, and from there I cleared more dirt and tiny roots until I found vertebrae, and around them another gleam of gold appeared. Upon brushing away more dirt, a torque took form and I removed it carefully so as not to disrupt the skeleton too much.

  “I snatched the one from my neck and aligned them, finding hers to be smaller and thinner than the one that belonged to Malorix, but the designs on them were perfectly matched, the ends capped in the heads of Celtic birds that were nothing short of the very same raven motifs.”

  “So you did confirm he was your real father.” Howard gives a triumphant ah-ha laugh on my behalf.

  “Yes. It was the last and only means I had to confirm anything then. I left the earring and claimed only the torque, hoping it is what she would have wanted. Then I covered her over again, pieced bits of the moss back into place and hoped it would grow back together quickly, and I departed. Days later I would find myself standing at the base of the mountain of Kogianon before the boulder that Decebal had described as looking like a woman’s head. My intent was to claim the inheritance Decebal had left buried there for me, but then I looked up at the mountain’s far peak, which was, at that time, hidden in a rosy haze, and thus its portal into the Dreamlands was wide open and I felt a new call. I imagined my mother escaping her world through that doorway, how hazardous it truly would have been for a woman heavy with a child that was only, technically, half-human. And then I began to climb toward the haze.”

  I stop there to take a slow breath and recenter myself, looking up to gaze around the parlor in which I have been sitting, but not really present, for hours now.

  “What happened then?” Howard asks. “Did you claim your inheritance?”

  “I did, later. Obviously, it did not go into rebuilding Dacia. The hoard was plentiful, but it seemed pointless to pursue raising a human army. I accepted that Dacia’s days were truly over. It was soon absorbed as a Roman province, and for me the wars of men seemed so insignificant now compared to what I knew of the greater, uncanny threat out there. I finally understood why Malorix had, despite his power, not interfered in the fight between Dacian and Roman when Sarmizegetusa fell.

  “There really is nothing else left to tell of my beginnings, Howard. I accepted that I was of both worlds, Dreamlands and Earth. I journeyed both physically, and in dreams, into and out of the lands of my conception. I searched many places to no avail for some sign of Malorix. I studied in the library at Ilarnek and other institutions where occult knowledge was accessible, and when it was convenient, I followed Malorix’s advice to track men’s ill-conceived wars, to find my sustenance on the battlefield amidst the carrion and better hide my footprint on the waking world. When that was not possible, I tracked my prey by the darkness in their hearts and minds, as I still do today.”

  “Well, but…”

  “Howard, it is time for us to go for now,” Kvasir interrupts. He nods to the little clock on the mantel which reads just after six-o’clock. It is still dark outside with the fog lingering robust for at least another two hours before dawn light will be strong enough to burn it away.

  “But how did you two come to meet again?” the boy insists.

  “Another time,” Kvasir laughs. “I do not know about you, but I would like some breakfast and sleep. You have all you need to consider for your own stories for now. Eh, shall we determine a new meeting place for next time?”

  I stand and straighten my shirt. “A hotel perhaps,” I say and gaze toward the little hallway and the bedroom where Howard’s mother will soon stir from her spell.

  “Ah, yes, that would help avoid similar awkward situations,” Kvasir agrees and darts down the hall to retrieve our coats from Howard’s room.

  “Howard, if you have any recommendations, that would be appreciated. Mr. Freysson will soon be in touch to work out the details.”

  “Uh, all right,” Howard stands hurriedly when he realizes he is the only one left sitting and it would be improper not to see his strange guests to the door.

  Kvasir returns and helps me shrug into my coat, hands me my hat, which I settle into place. “Howard, thank you most kindly for your hospitality and allowing us into your home.”

  “The pleasure is mine!” Howard scurries ahead to open the door. “It is so dark out, still, are you sure that… Oh.” He recalls that darkness is no stranger to our vision. “Right.”

  I give him a nod and tap the brim of my homburg. “Good day, Howard. Now, if you will, do not proceed down the steps just yet. We do still have much more to cover.”

  Howard nods vacantly, forgetting to give his own goodbye, and Kvasir is the one left smiling as the door closes behind us. The early morning air is much colder than the night it follows, the mist like comforting, cool hands on my face.

  “See, that was not so bad, was it?” my companion asks as we go down the steps.

  “No,” I admit. “Rather cathartic, I suppose.” I take another new breath and release the last of my hold on the young mind still lingering inside the door and thus any illusions I was presenting. The blood on my shirt would be apparent to Howard now were he looking. We turn and begin to walk up the street, heading west away from the river. Three blocks down, I pause a moment as we pass the old house that still haunts its former resident, and I sympathize with the boy one last time before we move on to a curb where we pause to wait.

  Kvasir plays with his breath on the chilly air for a moment and rubs his hands together. He looks back down Angell Street in the direction we've come. “Say, you don’t suppose he will try to go down the steps on his own, do you?”

  “I hope not,” I say dryly. “If mine is cautionary tale enough, he should not remotely consider it.”

  “To sleep percha
nce to dream,” he remarks. “Ah, here they come.”

  From down the cross street, twin head lamps appear, glowing yellow against the fog, burning kerosene as they grow larger along with the rumble of an automobile motor. There is a gleam of black outlines and the movement of tires swirling the fog around them before a new Packard rolls into view. Its dark interior touring compartment in the rear is covered but I see two young faces through the tall windscreen that shields the front seats.

  It rolls up beside us and Kvasir beams at the passenger and driver. “Hello, lovebirds!”

  His enthusiasm makes me cringe, but it is not a match I would ever argue against. “Freytha,” I say respectfully to his sister, who sits in the front passenger seat, clothed in the finest of current lace dresses, her flaxen hair pulled up under a hat and her shoulders covered in a fur-trimmed cape.

  “Aaron,” I continue to the young man who sits behind the wheel and closest to where I stand. His eyes linger on the bit of my shirt and torn collar showing through the opening in my coat.

  What happened? he sends, and I only answer him with quick visions of the yellow cloak that briefly interrupted the evening. He nods understanding, the entirety of the exchange taking only seconds.

  Having not yet noticed the stains, Freytha asks with amusement, “How did he do?”

  “Much better than expected,” Kvasir says with his brows raised in surprise. "I thought we would have to wring it out of him."

  It is a theme, I suspect, that I will be suffering for the rest of the day.

  “Really?” Aaron’s look of mock amazement needles me slightly, but just as quickly, it softens, and I marvel at the ancient light in his soft blue eyes. He is only a few years older than Howard but full of wisdom beyond his years, an old soul whom I love dearly. “I told you it would be good for you, Papa.”

  “Yes,” I mutter. “Yes, you did. The whole lot of you said as much. Now, may we do as Mr. Freysson mentioned earlier and get some breakfast? A good, ordinary breakfast. With biscuits.”