Once Upon a Time in Babadür

by Matthew Davis

  Once Upon a Time in Babadür

  The chase had been going on all day, ever since a masked burglar burst from the top-most window of the Warlock’s Spire and went tearing across the crimson-tiled rooftops and swaying suspension bridges of grand, ancient Babadür’s Wizard’s District all the way down to the fabled city’s lowest wards, its ghettos and necropoli.

  One did not steal from the Brothers of the Wilted Lily without grave consequence, as the young thief Emsin had discovered.

  “It’s just a damn stone,” she hissed to herself between breaths, tearing the hood back from her face. Her heart pounded like a beast behind the cage of her ribs. Her lungs burned and her muscles screamed. “A hundred-hundred more like it and still they give chase? Greedy, pig-headed bastards is what they are.”

  She ducked behind a piece of crumbling statuary in an equally crumbling corner of a forgotten necropolis in the lower city. Emsin pulled the stone in question from the satchel slung from her shoulder and squinted at it in the guttering light of some candles set upon a nearby tomb, the name of its inhabitant long since faded away like all the others around it.

  She had to admit, her prize was remarkable. A jewel of an iridescent purple, it rested comfortably in her palm, and flickered with sparks of orange and yellow and deeper reds that teased the eye. It was as if some secret fire burned in its heart. It was heavier than she had expected it to be, for something so small. She’d found it in the highest room of the Warlock’s Spire, amongst riches she’d never dreamed possible, and had been drawn to it immediately. Its beauty called to her, the way it caught the light though it lay almost carelessly in a pile of other treasures and jewels. Ancient artifacts and other relics that the Brotherhood had acquired in their millennial tenure as the ruling tyrants of the city, a reign they secured through fear, horror, and arcane might. The other rogues and brigands, the misfits of the lower city had called Emsin mad and said a raid on the Spire was suicide. Before disappearing into the early gloom, her friends had bid her a final farewell.

  She thumbed her nose at them. “I’ll show you all,” she had said. And she had, too. She did what no one thought was possible.

  Now all you’ve got to do is survive till nightfall and make your way back to your nest, she thought as she caught her breath.

  The sun had already crept down behind the towers of the upper city and the sky had turned from blue to burnt purples and oranges as night fast approached. It would be dark soon. In the necropolis the shadows had already deepened to pools of spilled ink that crept along the ground and walls. The gloom thickened, until the only light came from tiny points of sputtering candle flames and the occasional lamp ensconced on the wall of a familial mausoleum. Down among the dead everything felt far away. The chaos and clamor, the raucous life of Babadür above seemed like a different world. Emsin spent a moment slowing her breath and collecting her thoughts, watching the colors bleed out of the sky.

  Is that the sky..?

  The voice was a sibilant whisper that for a moment Emsin thought had been the wind as it rasped between the alleys and walkways.

  Until she heard it again.

  Wondrous. I never thought I would see it again.

  "Who's there?" Emsin hissed. She clutched her pilfered prize to her chest and reached with her other hand for the slim, curved blade tucked into the sash at her waist. She ducked back further into the shadows, eyes shifting about, searching.

  Something like laughter fluttered through her thoughts and tickled the inside of her skull like kisses from invisible wings. The jewel flared with sudden warmth and sent an electric shiver through her arm that blossomed across her nerves and made her gasp and almost drop it. Emsin stared at the stone. The light inside it danced, no trick of the nearby candles and their flickering flames. Tiny motes like stars formed and swirled around each other in a curious, beautiful dance. So entranced by the light, Emsin didn’t hear the nearby shuffle of feet and the low, vicious growling that accompanied them.

  "What are you?" Emsin whispered to the stone and stifled another gasp when she got an answer.

  Dulath iyn Fela'bogros, but you child, may call me Fela, the voice spoke in a sing-song lilt in her mind, and with it came a fleeting image of crystalline, violet eyes. They were the same color as the stone, and like the stone, motes of light danced in them.

  Emsin felt like she could stare into those eyes forever, and somewhere at the edge of her mind she heard a song. A song that seemed almost familiar and that made her heart clench and swell at the same time, matching its rhythm. But as she strained to hear the notes of that song, she heard something else instead: footsteps. Heavy and uneven, drawing closer, accompanied by a deep, hateful rumbling.

  Shuffling back in alarm until she bumped up against the wall of a tomb, Emsin stuffed the stone back into her satchel and held her breath. She clutched her knife tight and waited, listening.

  The footsteps drew closer. The rumbling turned into a chorus of growls soon accompanied by sharp, short barks from what sounded like half a dozen or more monstrous throats. The young thief tried to will herself into the wall, to still her heart and become stone.

  “Close,” one voice grated as if unused to speech, “soft-thing is close.”

  “Soft-thing is scared,” another voice joined in.

  “Mother of mercy help me,” Emsin whispered.

  She watched as shadows moved along the passages and across the walls of the necropolis, man-shaped things that were not, could not be men. Bent and crooked, she counted six of them, with bulging shoulders and deformed heads. The shadows turned into nightmares of teeth and angles and snapping jaws, and Emsin knew the truth of it, what it was that had come for her down among the dead, and that the shadows belonged to creatures more terrible than any nightmare the mind could conjure.

  The Brotherhood of the Wilted Lily had released the Hound-Men.

  What is this? The sing-song voice fluttered through Emsin’s mind again.

  “Be quiet, be quiet,” Emsin muttered and screwed her eyelids shut.

  “We hear you sweet, sweet soft-thing,” one of the Hound-Men rumbled, close enough that the thick reek of rotted meat on its breath could be smelled.

  A new sound emerged. High and curious, disturbing. It Emsin a moment to realize the Hound-Men were laughing.

  “We can taste you,” a Hound said, “taste your sweat, taste your fear. So close, so sweet.”

  She thought for a moment of tossing out her satchel, giving up the jewel and making a break for it. But after taking a look at her surroundings, she realized with rising dread that she had backed herself into a killing box between two tombs, her back against a moldering wall. The in her chest swelled. Her heart pounded, hard enough to feel its beating inside her skull. Darkness crept around the edges of her vision. She thought of the quiet place she called home, her little nest not so far away at all. A short run if only she could make it, beneath the tavern with no name in the lower city where the other urchins and pickpockets had fought and scraped to build a safe place in a city of monsters and men who would be gods.

  “They were right,” Emsin whispered, voice thick as she worked to choke back her sobs. “I’m going to die over a stupid jewel.”

  She felt the growling and the sickening laughter in her bones, smelled the rot on their breath as the Hound-Men came at last around the corner. The pack pushed at each other to be the first to sight their prey, and some sick urge peeled the lids back from her eyes so that she might see death as it approached. The Hounds wore the vague shapes of men, as if they had been made by a maker that knew the shape only from horrors and nightmares. Their limbs were distorted and bulged with muscle. Each hulking monstrosity loomed over seven feet tall. Their f
orms were all the more fearsome for the grotesque protrusions of bone and layers of twisting scarification that covered their bodies. But it was their heads that finally broke Emsin’s already fractured courage. It was their faces that caused the tears to well up.

  Whatever madman had shaped the bodies of the Hound-Men had given them the visages of monstrous dogs. Furless, with gaping maws of teeth too big for them to properly close which left them with a permanent grin. Their eyes were too large as well, and bulged from their sockets. Those horrible eyes all swung around to look at Emsin with undeniable hunger in their gazes.

  “Soft-thing,” the Hound-Man in the lead cackled and stepped forward, its fang-filled mouth worked strangely to butcher language and make every word a thing of menace. It wore a crude harness of studded, boiled leather plate, and raised a gauntleted fist to beckon at Emsin. “Come to us, sweet, soft-thing. No more running.”

  This magic reeks of madness, the voice in Emsin’s mind said with an obvious displeasure. This simply will not do.

  And from her satchel warmth began to spread, as if a fire had been kindled inside of it. Emsin struggled to pull out the jewel before some curse the Brotherhood had set upon it devoured her in flames. The Hound-Men laughed as one in a hideous cacophony. The sound grew louder as the jewel was brought forth and flared to life with a burning light.

  For an aching moment, all Emsin could see was that light and she thought surely she was going to die. That the jewel would erupt in magical flames and consume her. She thought she would never see her home or her friends again. Never run along the rooftops of Babadür in the moonlight. Never sit upon the ramparts of the gentry’s palaces and dream of a life of luxury in her own high tower.

  Then everything changed, and Emsin was looking down on a curious scene: a pack of Hound-Men, cowering and whimpering before a goddess made of gems and starlight, terrifying and beautiful. She stood head and shoulders above the Hounds with lambent, violet skin that shone from within. The goddess had six arms, and they wove around her tracing light through the air. The goddess’s hair spilled over her shoulders and down her back like a river of night, and she wore armor of fluted black steel plate that covered her torso and shoulders and legs, with fine black chain beneath and between.

  “Witness your destroyer, abominations,” the goddess spoke and her voice boomed like thunder. “Witness the coming of judgment.”

  Emsin gave no thought to how she was seeing it all, or how she had been transported above such an amazing scene. Or why she couldn’t seem to move away.

  You are safe, child, and it was the voice of the goddess, who called herself Fela. I promise.

  Emsin watched as the six-armed woman danced towards the Hound-Men and from her hands sprang six blades of curved, searing light, and purple-skinned Fela strode into the midst of the abominations. As she did, the Hounds went berserk with terror and became a snarling mass of fangs and claws that sprang upon the goddess. But Fela danced and her swords sang, and where they passed blood and death went with them.

  In the space between heartbeats it was over and the walls of the tombs were painted in streaks of red and the corpses of the Hound-Men steamed in the cool of the coming night. Fela stood among the fallen and her arms lowered, the light of her swords faded, and she looked up at the sky. She looked up at Emsin, her violet skin stained with scarlet, but her eyes shone brightly through that beautiful mask of death.

  And then Emsin was standing back in the necropolis between the two tombs, in the midst of carnage and the stink of offal. She doubled over, head spinning, and released the contents of her stomach onto the ground in a short, violent burst of retching.

  When it was over, Emsin looked around through watery eyes. It took a moment to realize she still held her knife in one hand and the stone in the other. The stone radiated a gentle warmth that seeped into her bones and soothed the ache in her gut.

  It is over, Fela’s voice whispered.

  “What in all the forty-seven hells was that?” Emsin gasped and rushed out from between the tombs, desperate for air. Desperate to be away from the massacre and its stench.

  I think you meant to say, ‘thank you.’

  Emsin looked at the jewel and was struck again by the image of eyes, star-filled eyes that swam with ancient power.

  The jewel-like eyes of the goddess.

  I am no goddess, though once I thought to ascend to such. I told you, I am Dulath iyn Fela'bogros, sorceress of holy Babadür.

  “This is madness.” Emsin stuffed the jewel into her satchel and marched through the necropoli, heading for the steps that led up and out, to the sanity of the lower city. “Some wretched warlock’s trick in the tower, and I’ve gone mad. Or the stone…” She stopped dead in her tracks. “The stone is cursed. That’s it! I’ll hurl it into the River Kreshne and to all the hells with this miserable night.”

  Emsin? Fela asked and Emsin noticed for the first time the hint of fatigue in the disembodied voice. That is your name, yes? This is no trick, no curse, and you are not going mad. I promise you that on unspoken name of the Maker. My name is Dulath iyn Fela’bogros, once sorceress of the Holy Ran’i and defender of Babadür, before the cretins of the Brotherhood murdered my beloved queen and her family and laid claim to this city, its people, and its riches.

  The words came with images and a flood of emotion that nearly toppled Emsin sent her to her knees. She saw a regal woman of unearthly beauty sitting upon a throne elaborately carved from a single, massive purple gemstone, wearing a crown that radiated light. Then another scene. The same crowned woman and another, who must have been Fela herself, who bore a striking resemblance to the six-armed goddess that had slaughtered the Hound-Men, watched children tumble and laugh and play in a moonlit garden. Then robed men, their faces obscured by the shadows of heavy hoods, their hands upraised and crackling with bloody, crimson magic. The sorceress, Fela, screaming. On her knees in the blasted ruins of a garden, surrounded by small, burnt bodies.

  The torrent of emotion seared Emsin’s soul, scorched her like a blast of air from furnace. The last thing she saw was Fela disappearing into a fragment of the shattered throne made from a single, precious jewel while the life faded from the eyes of the queen who sat upon it, while the hooded men stood by and watched.

  “Mercy, please,” Emsin choked. “No more. I can’t take it.”

  For a thousand years I have been a prisoner within this stone, with only my rage and my hatred to sustain me. I beg you. Do not damn me to eternity in the dark. Not when I have seen the sky again and spilled the blood of my enemy’s servants. Please.

  The sorceress’s voice was pained, and Emsin thought if it were possible that the woman would have been crying if she only had a body and tears to cry.

  “Be quiet.” Emsin started walking again, ascending the steps that led out of the necropolis, and took a heavy lungful of the air that blew through the street they emptied onto. She walked, forward and staring straight ahead, not at the sky that had faded and burned from bright day to gentle night and the scattering of stars that had begun to wink across it. She tried to empty her mind of visions and voices.

  It was only a few blocks to home, if she could make it that far, and the moon was already edging into the sky, making its slow ascent. Yet Emsin could not shake the feeling of being exposed, that she was being watched and at any moment dog-faced men would come snarling around the next corner.

  Fela persisted, calmer, her voice almost seeming to come from beside Emsin, as if the sorceress walked next to her. You need never be afraid again, Emsin. Never again.

  “What are you talking about?” Emsin said as she cut onto a side street, grateful for the deepening shadows and comfort of walls nearby. “Do sorceresses not know how to speak plainly, or do you toy with me for pleasure?”

  As you wish. Become my vessel and together we shall enact vengeance upon the Brotherhood for the murder of the Ran’i and my banishment into this accursed stone, and all the atrocities they have committed on this ci
ty and its peoples for a thousand years. Do this, and my powers will be yours, within certain…limits.

  “What limits?” Home was near, the scent of cooking meat drifted along the breeze to Emsin and she could hear voices. Actual voices, not ones in her head. Voices raised in song and chatter.

  In exchange for taking the fight to the Brotherhood, for dismantling their organization and its stranglehold on this city, you will be granted all the powers at my disposal but not for selfish means--not for personal gain. I was once the defender of this city, and whether I am a disembodied shadow of myself or not, I will not have my legacy tarnished.

  Laughter overtook the thief, and she leaned herself against the wall of a nearby building, within sight of home. She watched the silhouettes in the windows of the tavern she lived above.

  “You realize I am a thief, yes?” She managed to say between laughter and gasps for air. “Not for selfish means? You say you can make me powerful but only if I play by your rules? If you are trying to convince me I am not going mad and that I in fact should not hurl this damned stone into the river, I should tell you that you’re not doing a very good job. So, Dulath iyn Fela’bogros, speak truly now, why should I agree to anything you say?”

  Because you’ve always wondered what else there is, haven’t you? Because this life is a wretched thing and because you hate what the Brotherhood are and what they have done to Babadür. Why did you choose that tower, on this night, and take that stone of all things? Don’t you see? Emsin, none of this was an accident.

  As she crossed the street to the tavern, Emsin reached a hand into her satchel and clutched the jewel. “Let’s entertain for a moment the idea that I agree to your proposal. That would make us partners, yes? So then, mighty sorceress, what would our first order of business be?”

  The warmth in her palm became a flare of heat and with it power coursed through her. It was a wild, strange thing that flowed through her veins and made her feel for a moment as if she were soaring through, and she heard again that distant, familiar song of magic.