A Fire in the North

by David Bilsborough

  The bonds bit into his flesh, bit deeply, and he could feel warm blood on his skin.

  The animal sounds ceased abruptly, but the rank smell did not fade. Still it approached until it was almost upon him. Time slowed almost to a standstill, and so did Gapp’s heart. With an acuteness almost hallucinogenic in its vibrancy, his hearing picked up everything and magnified it tenfold: the fizzing from the jars, as loud as treetops in a gale; the muffled voices outside the door like the bellowing of Ettins in deep valleys; even the wood-boring larvae that macheted their way through the damp walls could, he fancied, be heard laughing at him between greedy mouthfuls.

  A low croak, barely audible, bubbled out of Gapp’s throat. He so wanted it to be louder, wanted so desperately to call out for salvation.

  One yard!

  Another croak from Gapp, a little louder but still scarcely more than a whimper. This was like trying to wake from a nightmare. Another croak, almost a moan this time . . . then another, and another, each louder than the last.

  Then, just as he finally managed to voice a demented howl, the thing was upon him!

  But . . . no, it was not upon him. It was beneath him! Gapp’s heightened senses detected it as clear as day: the monster was not in the stabbur but under the floorboards.

  Whoever owned the voices beyond the door had heard Gapp and called out sharply. Immediately the presence below him moved away.

  Footsteps, heavy and irate, sounded upon the wooden steps outside. A heavy lock rattled noisily, almost deafening after the stillness. Abruptly the door was flung open and someone stepped inside. With him flowed cold air and the damp smells of the forest, but still very little light.

  Gapp held his breath.

  All of a sudden all hell broke loose, and the night was filled with the tearing sounds of animal savagery – stifled grunts of surprise and fear – useless struggle – ruthless laceration – hot spray steaming against the wooden walls – shock – terror. Then two heavy thumps . . .

  And, finally, death.

  Eyes clenched shut to hold back the tears, and teeth gritted to stifle his cries, Gapp could only wait.

  Padded paws made their way softly up the steps, and, without hearing or seeing anything, Gapp felt an animal presence enter the hut. Without haste it moved over, then stopped right behind him. He could smell its stink and hear the drip, drip, drip of something pattering on the wooden floor.

  Then came that familiar worried whine, and Gapp, at last, could relax.

  ‘Shlepp . . .’ he sighed and fainted.

  When he came to, Gapp found that his bonds had been cut. Or rather gnawed through. All about him they lay in ragged, spittle-soaked clumps. And there, looking down at him with that particular expression of concern unique to dog-kind, stood faithful Shlepp.

  He was free. Come what may, for the next few minutes at least Gapp still had a chance. The blood that dripped from the forest hound’s mouth was still warm – scarcely more than a minute could have been wasted while he had lain unconscious, so they still had time before his guards were discovered.

  ‘Gotta leave!’ he hissed as he staggered to his feet and rubbed his chafed skin. ‘Gotta get outta town NOW!’

  And never come back.

  After his ordeal, Gapp had no plan further than this. He was in no state to give consideration to matters like provisions, exactly where he would go or even the present circumstances of his companions. The only thing on his mind was rapid and immediate flight. He would run as fast as he could through the accursed town and back into the woods, not stopping until all that remained of this place was a bad dream in his memory. Even starvation in the forest was preferable to remaining here for one instant longer.

  He hobbled towards the door as fast as his numb and tingling limbs would carry him. Pech, it’s freezing! He was dressed only in the saiga shirt that they had left him with when they had taken him prisoner. Everything else they had removed: his own clothes, his gear, his tinderbox, flint and steel; the bastards had even taken back the pelts Methuselech had just bought from them! Armholes!

  Presumably they had put the shirt on him solely to keep him from freezing to death before they came back to do . . . whatever it was they were keeping him for. It was a warm and sturdy garment, for sure, but apart from that and the sealskin boots that they had neglected to take, he was naked and horribly vulnerable.

  Well, it was all gone now, and that was that. He was leaving. Gapp reeled out of the door blindly, and then, with a cry of surprise, pitched forward into the dark and landed heavily on the ground.

  For a moment he lay stunned, the wind knocked out of him. Then he lurched to his feet and looked about in panic.

  It was dark and still, and there were trees all about. No houses or karst towers, only trees. There was only the faintest smell of that awful town here. He and Shlepp seemed to be alone in the forest. He stood shivering in the freezing night and listened to the sounds that filtered through the woodland. The furtive rustles and sudden squeals of night-time slaughter were giving way to the hesitant opening chords of a new dawn’s song. Nature’s sounds, untainted by humanity.

  It was the first night after the new moon, and what scant light managed to penetrate the pre-dawn mist was further diluted through the mesh of trees. All in all there was but the barest glimmer to illuminate his surroundings. But after his time in the stabbur, even this was enough to confirm that they were no longer anywhere close to the town.

  Gapp’s panic subsided somewhat, and hope of a more substantial kind began to swell in him. Rather than dashing headlong in any direction that presented itself, he allowed himself a few seconds’ pause and looked around urgently.

  There was indeed no sign, smell or sound of human habitation wherever he looked, apart from the stabbur itself and the narrow track that cut through the brambly undergrowth towards it. His prison, he saw now, was just a log cabin – some kind of storehouse maybe – raised about three foot off the ground on wooden posts. (Crawl space for a forest hound.) It had no windows and only one door, reached by a short ladder of three steps down which he had just tumbled. Though sturdy and secured by locks it seemed hardly an obvious place to hold prisoners.

  They probably don’t consider me important enough, Gapp concluded with grim relief, or that dangerous. It’s clearly nowhere near as secure as the Keep.

  The Keep! Only now did he fully recall what had befallen the night before. What’s happened to the others? Have they been taken prisoner too? And how come Shlepp’s wandering free?

  He almost wailed in confusion and frustration.

  They had to be still in the donjon. And if he himself had been held captive elsewhere it must be because they wanted to hold all of them in separate locations. Less chance of them helping each other to escape.

  Oh, Yeggeth’s Breath, what chance of finding them all? He panicked then immediately thought, None, so let’s go! He scanned the trees around to decide which direction to start off in.

  His recently reawakened (and by now sharply honed) instinct for survival was kicking in hard. It was not exactly selfishness (he told himself) but he had just been saved by what must surely have been a godsent miracle, and it was ungracious to offend the gods by declining their gifts. Even if that did mean abandoning one’s friends.

  ‘Nothing we can do to help ’em now,’ he pointed out to Shlepp. ‘Come on, dog.’

  He turned to head off behind the stabbur, in the opposite direction to the track that approached it, and immediately skidded on something slimy.

  The remains of the wire-faces – he could tell without having to look. Nothing else in this place could be so soft and steaming. He did not even look down at their mangled bodies, for he had had his fill of horror for the moment. But then he felt another thing underfoot that caused him to risk a careful peek downward, something long and rigid.

  It was a moonspear, whether Hwald’s or Finan’s, he could not tell. But there was no doubt this was one of the Paranduzes’ huge flint-crescented poleaxes.r />
  Yes, and there was the other one, now he came to look closer. The wire-faces had obviously taken these weapons for their own and had been standing guard at the stabbur door like a couple of palace sentries. It was possibly the spoor of these, rather than Gapp himself, that had drawn the forest hound to this place.

  An awful contraction twisted Gapp’s guts. This confirmed that Hwald and Finan had been captured also. But that changed nothing, in fact only served to steel his earlier resolve. He was utterly powerless to help them, and their capture pressed home the absolute necessity to get the heck out of here this instant.

  He briefly considered taking one of the moonspears to protect himself, then dismissed the idea as ludicrous; he would hardly be able to lift the damn thing, let alone wield it. But while he paused to think something else occurred to him: what to do with the wire-faces’ corpses. An unguarded storehouse night not attract the attention of passers-by, he thought, but two bloodied corpses definitely would.

  ‘Spend a second to gain a minute,’ he muttered to himself and heaved the dead guards in turn up into the stabbur. Having no time or enough light to find a better hiding place, he lifted the lid off one of the urns and proceeded to tilt it in order to empty the contents. He gasped as the smell hit him.

  Whatever had been popping and fizzing in those jars had obviously been doing so for a very long time, but rather than slamming the lid down and looking for empty urns, he decided to find out what was actually inside. In spite of the precious seconds ticking away, he resolved that he would unearth at least one of Wrythe’s dark mysteries. It might even shed light on some other of its secrets.

  Rolling up his sleeve and holding his breath, he plunged his right arm in up to the elbow, feeling around. Shlepp whined, his lips curling strangely. Mere seconds of morbid fascination later, Gapp slammed the lid back down and fervently wished that he had not been so nosy.

  ‘Pickled people,’ he uttered, backing away; it was all he could do to resist the urge to bolt out of this crypt of acetic aberration. But people they were; curled up, lifeless, foetus-like, in a soapy, effervescent ichor that could only be described as myrrh-gravy.

  What in the name of Forn’s fetid loincloth is all this about? Gapp wondered, aghast. They preserve their dead in storehouses?

  Five hundred years ago, he had been told, the Oghain had shared certain beliefs with the Torca who resided in the nearby Seter Heights, especially believing in the Circle of Life, the natural cycle of birth, life, death, fertilization and so on. Man was thought of as a natural extension of the land itself, as were animals, plants and even the sun, wind and rain. Death was natural: man’s return to the womb of the earth that bore him. This soil-based philosophy of the Torca made perfect sense to the Oghain in their harsh environment, and went hand in hand with their notions of the absoluteness of Fate. If a man were to fall ill, suffer serious injury, fall into the sea or go missing in the wilds, no attempt would be made to help him. It was considered a sign that the land no longer needed him; like a leaf in autumn, he had begun the slow process of death. Even if a man inflicted with a fatal malady continued to survive for several months he would be considered already dead.

  So this attempt at preserving the deceased, cheating Father Earth of what was rightfully his, puzzled Gapp greatly.

  It’s the influence of the Keep, or whatever dwells within it. He could practically smell the perversion of that place, even from here.

  But time was fast running out. He had to leave now, unless he wanted to end up in one of those urns himself. It was a sobering thought, and still he had not hidden the dead guards. Swiftly he went from one urn to the next, yanking the lids off and holding his breath against the stench of the myrrh-gravy within. Each one, however, was occupied, like a hive-cell of baby grubs nestling snugly in their sweet, creamy oil.

  Time, Gapp had decided, had run out completely. Yet there was one thing he could still do before he took to his heels – one last act of purging. Grabbing each urn by the neck, one after the other, he heaved . . .

  Halfway along Nettle Street, Yggr paused in mid-stride and looked up sharply. Something untoward had just happened in the stabbur, he could sense. He clenched his massive fists and continued on his way with grim intent.

  As soon as he was done, Gapp bounded out of the stabbur and gasped in the clean forest air. His eyes were stinging, his legs wobbly with nausea. During his loathsome task he had had to breathe through his mouth to avoid the unbelievable ammoniac fetor, but within seconds it felt as if his tongue were coated in drain cleaner. Even out here it reeked enough to wilt the branches of even the sturdiest deodar. But it was worth it, he smiled between shuddering. And now he really was finished with this town.

  He wasted no more time. Trusting to Shlepp’s guidance, he followed the hound’s lead, and together they tore off through the woods.

  Like unbaptized souls fleeing from the Wild Hunt they ran, leaping over boulders, splashing through streams, toiling up steep banks. No undergrowth was too thick to slow them, no thorns strong enough to snag them. Swift as the hart and silent as the lynx, they sprinted for their lives away from Wrythe forever.

  Or so Gapp had believed. He suddenly checked his pace as the dim shadows of three houses loomed up before them. What the heck? Not wanting to lose sight of the hound in this gloom, he continued after him through the gap between two of the houses, then saw that he had been led not deeper into the forest but back towards the town! They had come out of the forest and over a rutted mud track to a small field.

  ‘Shlepp!’ he hissed incredulously, glancing all around in extreme agitation, expecting to hear at any moment the primate-like moan of some alerted local.

  But Shlepp was equally agitated, and began furiously scrabbling at the earth in the far corner of the field. Great sods of wet soil went flying up behind him, and his eyes were rabid with fervour as he whined and snorted. The forest hound, it must be remembered, was four feet high at the shoulder and strong enough to pull down a bison, and he was currently tunnelling into the earth like a digging machine. Clearly, there was not a thing the puny little esquire could do to drag him away and back under the cover of the trees. Gapp had no idea what had got into the dog; all he could do was crouch beside him and keep watch for any sign of the Oghain – or worse.

  He momentarily glanced at the ground where Shlepp was digging and noticed a little wooden pipe about the size of a flute sticking up out of the soil. There were no crops evident in this patch, though the rest of the field sprouted a few sad, worm-eaten cabbages. Then Gapp noticed another pipe, just a few feet away, among a darker patch of freshly dug soil.

  A very uneasy feeling arose in him. He hopped over to the nearest pipe and put his ear to it.

  ‘Oh Ghod!’ he cried, and shrank back in dread, landing on his backside. Through the pipe he had heard the sound of frantic breathing. It seemed Shlepp was not digging for old bones after all.

  Resisting the urge to leg it back into the woods alone, Gapp heard a muffled voice from underground. Shlepp now dug even more frantically, and seconds later the boy’s eyes almost popped out when he saw the ground heave. Like a scene from Judgement Day, the earth was giving up its dead. A large hand, grime-covered and blood-smeared, wriggled out of the soil, soon followed by another, and then a huge head, complete with antlers. It spat out the long pipe from its mouth and spluttered fitfully.

  ‘Finan!’ Gapp cried in a mixture of fear and relief.

  The half-beast – half-dead, half-buried and as yet unable to utter anything beyond a strangulated gurgle – struggled madly in the earth. Maggots, orange-headed and pale-fleshed, writhed through his hair, around his eyes and mouth. As if the covering of soil had not been enough, Finan had been further weighted down by a heavy ploughing yoke. Revulsion threatened to send the boy’s body into convulsions, and he had to fight hard to control it. But how could he not be moved by the sight of his steed – no, his friend – buried alive in the local maggot patch with the paraphernalia of a draugh
t animal holding him down? It seemed a sick joke that was all too fitting in this town of the twisted. Did his tormentors wish for his Gyger-half to wrench itself free of his beast-half?

  As easily as if shaking the life out of a rat, Shlepp’s teeth bit through the yoke’s fastenings. The Parandus desperately lurched from the ground amid a cascade of loam, pebbles and grubs, rising like a conjured earth-elemental to stand proudly in the light of a new dawn.

  ‘Thank Pel-Adan, Cuna, Erce or whoever,’ Gapp stammered, only now getting a hold on himself and going to Finan’s aid. Several minutes later Hwald too stood free of his barrow and, for the first time since becoming sundered from Yulfric, Gapp knew he was among true friends.

  For once each Parandus seemed more interested in cleaning himself than the other. Shivering spasmodically, they frantically shook, combed and swatted their repulsive tormentors off their hides and out of their hair, squashing the ones that had caused them the most discomfort between thumb and forefinger with vengeful relish. In spite of their long ordeal, their blood was up and a fire was in their eyes. As he watched the great beasts cavort in a frenzied dance of twitching madness before him, the young Aescal stood back in awe of their sheer power and ferocity, and gleefully pitied any foe that must now face them in combat.

  Nonetheless, all this was taking up precious time; they could do their grooming later. What they most needed to do right now was to get under cover. What they also needed was to get tooled up properly.

  ‘Moonspears!’ Gapp hissed quietly and, miming as best he could, pointed back towards the stabbur where the two spears lay. That might at least get them going in the right direction.

  Then the dull thud of a door opening resounded across the field from one of the nearby houses, magnified in the dead stillness of the dawn. All four of them froze, then whipped their heads round and scanned the middle distance to locate the source.

  There was no one to be seen: they were not yet discovered. But night’s vestigial veil had already dissolved in the bleary pastel-grey murk of a new day, and the good folk of Wrythe were rising. Without a moment’s further delay, the outsiders disappeared back into the forest.