by Thomas Head
He wondered if they already knew.
Before long it was too much. He slunk into the church.
Inside was black as tar, with a single bar of living light, casting from a distant fire. The monk’s handsomely booted feet lay in the glow. He could hear the nasally breath of his sleep.
He eased closer. He stood in the dark, just feet from the snoring monk. Even asleep, the monk seemed worried. He whimpered, slight cries trailing into the snores. Then he would pant. Like a whipped beast.
But Ghelli could not slaughter them here, and so he waited. He trekked down the river road toward Gintypool, and slept for an hour atop a cliff that lined the road and river. It was fitful rest, every moment filled with a stranger dream than the next, dreams of things from the wilder fringes of hell. Hope faded with every minute he spent in slumber.
Even as he woke, he crouched in fearful anticipation of his meeting...
It was still dark. There was a glow in the west, reflecting in the haze of the sky. He rose, his breath stuck in his throat. And he did not have to wait long before he saw something that would haunt him more than the sight of his dead father.
The glow of his burning village.
There was no movement. No one running, fleeing the flames.
His blood seemed to drain as understanding washed over him: He had doomed them with his cowardice. The only noise was the distant, dim groan of collapsing fences and homes. The Dellish army of archers that had surrounded the hilly fields was now marching up the road.
Toward Arway.
A horse bolted down the road ahead of them.
Ghelli hid, numb. It passed under his roost, the main flailing as it sped along, the monk and the woman atop it.
Without letting himself think, he gathered himself. Then he ran. He ran without stop, without sleep, without thinking. For two days he ran. Both days passed without eating or even breathing enough, and soon, out of his mind, he found himself out into more feral tracts than he had ever been.
He stood on the fourth day before an odd tree, wondering where the two of them had gone. Standing in a weedy stretch, he listened. He was retrieving his dirk when someone said, “Hello.”
He jumped, half in shock, then turned.
The woman.
He was shaking, holding his chest as he looked her. As she began walking toward him, a profusion of thoughts flooded him. She was smiling, one of her breasts exposed. Blue flowers ringed her nipple. His cheeks burned crimson.
“What in the frozen hell?...”
Then a confusing rush overtook him. Suddenly something course was blanketing his skin. It was some sort of heavy rope, a net, woven with thousands of tiny barbs. They burrowed into his skin.
Someone grabbed him and spun him around. An exaggerated face was hovering inches from his own.
“Are you a ghost, lad?”
“Friar Basil?”
The monk raised a small club.
Ghelli only remembered him an instant of black pain. In his next conscious moments, he was on his back. Still in the same spot. But he was bound now at the wrists. The woman was tying his ankles with the same sort of rope.
He tried to talk, but there was something stuffed in his mouth.
The monk and the woman spoke together a moment. Then the woman began climbing the tree. She dropped a wooden block from the first bough, which dangled from yet another length of rope, and while she continued to work up some sort of rigging, the monk bound him securely around the ankles. He tightened the ropes until Ghelli could not feel his own feet.
The woman dropped from the lowest limb, continuing the work from the ground. Through his haze and dread, Ghelli scanned the rigging. It looked like the mast of a ship. Or a gallows. She came over and said something to the monk. They talked about a counterweight, and the monk looked at her.
“What?” she said.
He then clubbed her across the temple.
She grunted, and dropped, holding herself upright against the trunk. The monk rushed, seizing her around the neck. Her eyes bulged, and the freckled knuckles whitened around the club as he bashed her again.
Chapter 75
“Calm down? Most dead men will tell you: there is plenty of time for calming down.”
—Lord Uncle Fie Wyrmkiller
__________
Cullfor cascaded down the small, powerful falls, tumbling out of control. The water seemed alive beside him, and the noise of it was unreal. Then he was aware it was not water he was hearing. The muffled, foamy noise was air, swirling with the new pain.
He looked around, stunned. He was near the shore, and the current had slowed. He began swimming for the rocky edge in snaky undulations.
Suddenly, something heavy slammed onto his chest. It felt like a hot punch. To his horror, he realized it was water, mining into his chest. His gagging was loud and animalistic, lost to the all-consuming roar of the blood in his head. As he flopped, the water continued to burrow into his lungs. When he could finally feel his back on the shore, he flipped onto his stomach. He expulsed the molten water in a fit of shaking, clear strings dangling from his mouth
Slowly, he twisted and heaved into a more shallow pool, where he felt wet spray stinging his face.
He breathed. He rolled again and stared at the sky.
Oh hell.
Too exhausted to even turn, he began struggling further shore. He was still on his back when he paused. Water crowned his face, filled his ears. Creeping shrubs bordered the puddle and juniper reached over him with delicate purple tongues.
At intervals, he vomited more of the river water. It felt like some kind of a damn hot molten stem that ran through him.
He was still under the odd, weighty feeling of death.
The tangle of small trees seemed to cradle him. He snuggled under a blanket that he knew was not there, and shook.
__________
Lady Dhal was numb. The dwarves were silent, looking out at the sea.
No one was staring at her.
Some of the blood was returning to her hands and feet. She glanced again at the men. Something in the quiet made her situation swoop into reality a moment. But it blurred again from her mind. Instead she wondered how many days had they been at sea now. Seven. Eight maybe.
Gulls began crying overhead.
Then came the sounds of village living, rising faintly over the forgotten slaps of water on the hull. It was the sounds of oxen on planks, distant clanging, and it came from deep within the large castle. Then there more voices.
Ahead, emerging in the smoky shores, were nine ships of varying widths. The longest was much thinner than theirs, but there were also wider vessels. All were masted, alive with crews that scrubbed or otherwise scurried about with some business or another. Despite the haze, it was clear they were dwarven knights like these fellows. Beyond them was the village, little more than a cluster of workshops and stalls atop the docks. It spread thickly and irregularly, into a kind of overly embellished squalor. It was incredibly crowded, and it reminded her of some shaky wooden forest of cottages, thatched with what appeared to be pine and mud.
Already, it stank of fish and filth.
In time they reached the shore, the vessel steered now by dwarves on the docks. They guided it with a practiced tenderness into a small stone inlet, a canal, using long padded poles. A few of the dwarves nodded, guiding the others’ efforts even as they threw few iron shims among them.
The sight of her brought no reaction from their blurry faces.
Women were gathered there with them. Beside her, the enormous, bound dragon roared, much to the delight of those on shore. More were arriving in groups of three or four. They held smallish, iron bough wreaths, much like anchors, which they threw aboard. The crew then placed the wreaths atop their shields.
There was a feel here that made her think of home, but the feeling was quickly swallowed. They were no longer in Arway. Not even close. And this was certainly not the Yrkland she once knew. They were in the southernmost most
reaches of it, if she judged correctly. Albatron.
They went further into the green and barnacled canal, until she could see that the great serpentine ramparts rose into a castle. It was not an enormous thing, but she could not imagine why it would need to be, surrounded as it was by these canals.
As they neared the castle gates, she heard more murmurs in that peculiar accent again. It was Dwarvish again, but a different, more lively sort.
Suddenly a huge knot of rope shot from atop a wall
She looked up. It was a female who threw it, very much a elf. Her hair was long and braided, almost the color of blood. Instead of her face being completely painted in blue, there was an elaborate blue pattern curled up each cheek.
The elf was motioning for Dhal to do something, which she couldn’t make out, so the female elf down the wall a bit and hopped aboard. She looked regal, but not out of place handling a porter’s chores as she came and put the knot between two sturdy crampons and mounted it on a batten at the prow. She slung the remaining length over the dragon’s back. When she passed Dhal, she smelled of animal skins and mint.
She turned and watched her tie the vessel to the wall’s battened moorings, securing them at two more of the ship’s brass crampons before she began rolling the great canvas tarp from atop the dragon. Now the dwarves onboard fixed the iron rings they had caught to something horrible—there were hooks, imbedded right into the dragon’s skin.
Dhal covered her mouth in shock.
Suddenly,the castle walls rumbled a moment, and instead of opening, they began to lift.
The great scabrous slap of stone shuddered, then came the screech of unseen gears struggling for purchase in the slime-covered walls. Greening seawater bilged, flooding toward the castle as the boat began to rise. They lowered only slightly, just a moment, then the rush of water crashed as it split against a moat-like ring, and again they began rising into the interior of the castle.
As the vessel creaked downward again with the lowering seawater, she watched the woman jump from the wall onto the prow. Then she then came close, oddly close. Dhal turned. Even as the woman looked her up and down, as if inspecting her, she could not keep her eyes of the vast, stone interior they emerged into.
It was like a crew of ten thousand men had labored for centuries to carve out a cave in the shape of a castle.
In a word, it was wondrous, as if the walls rose and were held in place by some manner of magic far beyond even her comprehension.
Then the red-headed elf-woman turned to one of the dwarven knights.
Now a different crew stepped onto the ship. Some more elves with the stern, distant faces of slaves, helped everyone unload the cargo. No one was grabbing her, she noted. In fact no one was looking at her. When they did, it was with the same, inspective gaze in their eyes that she had seen in the female.
Nothing was said to the other members of the dwarven crew. They left out into the various halls of the cavernous castle without so much as nods, and they left strangely fast, walking the over massive chunks of squared rock. Their trails zagged and rose along the walls, through gnarled crowds and a thick barricade of stone columns. The halls themselves were like smallish, raised roads over the rough floor—someone had carved out a cave to make this place…
Soon after, the salt-bearded crew of dwarves was gone. She looked around to discover the blue-faced elvish guards watching over her for a while, grabbing at long rods, which supported the boxes of supplies from the ship, and turned.
She turned away from their stares and ventured a step onto the castle floor. The solidity was strange, more like being on the ocean than she had expected. When the feeling thinned, she looked up again toward the ceiling, and gasped.
A twinkled-eyed dwarf was staring down at her, grinning.
She held herself firm against his encompassing gaze: He was somehow larger than his frame, large as a nightmare. To Dhal’ wide eyes, it seemed he was a thing walking two worlds, only part dwarven. The other part was like some shadow of a monster, or the ghost of a beast of some lost and dangerous sort. The clothes were like the others, but more royal in quality. Perfect sable hair dripped onto his shoulders. His eyes had a powdery glint. And suddenly she realized she had seen him before, more than a decade ago, in the Trollwood.
It was Bhiers, the Dwarf-King.
Now the unnatural tide retuned, apparently from around the castle. It sloshed loudly under the vessel, rising toward the regal dwarf as if by his will, before it began to descend again, as if into the earth itself.
The king made a great sweeping gesture, at which the workers began leaping onto the boat, and they both watched as it took descended, the men securing it even as they freed it from the moors along the vessel.
When it was gone into the darkness below, she looked up at the Dwarf-King again. For the long moment that followed, they stared at each other, and for a great while it seemed both were making certain the other was real.
Then the king laughed, a slow and icy hoot.
“My dear, Dhal,” he hissed slowly, “Hellooo. Welcome to hell.”
Chapter 76
__________
Cullfor rises in a slow dream. He is standing. He looks down at his legs—falling into water had taken their use: but something in his bizarre ride downstream has returned them.
He looks around before he tries a step.
He halts. Looks around numbly. The night is tastefully draped in moonshine.
Finally he walks, bats swooping down in the water’s mist around him. He does not venture far from the water before he pauses.
Cullfor smiles, then notices his clothes. They are tattered. His belt is still bloody despite the water, and the right side of his back is also sticky with blood. His belted shirt has rips down the front. The holes go all the way through his shirt, into his chest. Finger holes. He still wears his lord’s scabbard, and cannot remember where he lost his cloak. The sword is gone, too. It is nothing short of miraculous that the delicate ring is still on his pinky.
He begins smiling at that. And he smiles thinking that a fire would feel nice, and there is an excellent one just downstream.
So nice.
He has to do something about his mouth, which feels as though he’s been chewing on wool. He pauses and kneels for a drink. For an age, he laps handfuls. By the time he is satisfied, he already has to pee.
Now, standing, he sees that his reflection is blanched. His eyes look back up from the river like a stranger that does not know quite what to say. Unruly hair. His beard could use a week of grooming. He pees, the image scattering beneath him, then turns again to the fire. There is some sort of flesh hanging over it. Pork. No, longer. Venison maybe.
As he laces his trousers, a woozy feeling streaks through his core, then passes.
There is the smell of burning hair. He looks again, this time at people roasting over an open flame. And Friar Basil, looking up at them. This, in his dream, seems appropriate The smoke from the fire rolls his way. It burns his eyes. He crouches under it. The ground is cold, feels so... Son of a pig-tickling bastard—this is no dream.
Have I damaged my head?
Cullfor crawled under a ragged tree. He felt numb and slow, but he could also feel the river mist lisping across the back of his neck. He looked, rubbing his eyes. People were tied up over a fire, yes. There were two, a women and a big male, hanging by their feet. And that was Friar Basil. He stood at the controls of a make shift pulley, frowning like a shark.
For another moment, Cullfor just crouched, morbidly fixated. The matronly woman with a square jaw was babbling something about mercy, and it seemed to work. The pulley brought her higher, ending the screams. Her hair was shorter now, irregular where the flames had eaten it. Her forehead and neck were scarlet with pooled blood.
He thought to rush the monk, but suddenly he questioned this. He was in the middle of nothingness. He must be dreaming. Or possessed by demons.
Hoo.
What the thundering hell else could l
eave a mind seeing this?
He looked at the thick woman once more. She looked familiar, like someone he had seen in a neighboring town or traveling carnival. Her impressive, smart head was starting to swell.
The young fellow seemed familiar, too. He was not conscious at all. All of their feet were stark white at the soles.
The monk lowered the woman this time. She screamed and flailed like nothing he had ever witnessed, so that she started spinning. Eventually she was vomiting with every turn.
He wondered how long they had been hanging like that.
He looked around for some sort of hidden ambush, and found nothing. No hidden path, or easy launch. And as the screams of agony rose once again, he cast his lot, rising from under the fallen tree. In strange spirits he ran toward them. He ran past a horse, which shocked him. Then an ashy wind began blowing into his face. He was all but blinded, pressing through the smoke. Then he was stumbling with a twisted ankle.
The next thing he understood was that he was falling, and dizzy, but his momentum carried him from the edge of the fire.
Rolling away from the glowing ashes, he glimpsed a second horse. This one was much larger, and it was bolting away.
“Oh thank merciful God!” someone said over him.
He stood and rubbed his eye. The world was spinning. Overhead they were saying thank God, thank God, then they screamed.
Suddenly something course blanketed him. Cullfor looked at his arms and chest. He recognized the material—starweed rope, woven with hemlock and venom on the barbs for stunning sturgeon. He could see only well enough to know the barbs were burrowing into his skin.
The monk was utterly off his guard, grunting to catch his breath. He drew a small sword from his robes and began to charge.
