Temple of Cocidius

by Maxx Whittaker

  “The death wagon?” a man whispers. “Only way of stoppin’ it is for you to return.”

  “Just come back,” the woman agrees, and the words are shared on twenty more pairs of lips.

  “The way to stop it is to get my body, and to get my body…” Etain sighs. “You are my vassals. I command you.”

  The villagers clutch their heads. One paws at his temples. “Ewanach is lord and master now. And we make our tributes just as we should.”

  “Ewanach?” I dare.

  “That whoring, thieving, metal faced son of twelve bitches and fucker of all things–”

  They hiss her down, moaning like souls in Helheim.

  Finna’s lips form at her throat. “Someone please help me understand what the hells is happening here.”

  If the villagers are surprised by Finna, they don’t show it. “Lady Etain has returned. Ewanach’s madness will stop.”

  The even tone and unblinking stares make me shiver. I’m getting shades of Verdajln. Except these lunatics don’t seem to be hiding anything. They’re being pretty open; I just happen to be lost.

  “Lady Etain is taking back her lands,” Etain insists. “And you will help me.”

  Two men near the back weave, shuffling progressively further from the group. “They’re running,” I murmur to Etain.

  “Stop! Stop right–”

  Three bolt. With speed, but not agility, they bounce and flail away like skeletons. “Stop them!” Etain’s voice holds a note of panic, and it overrides my instinct to do the opposite of anything she says. “They’ll bring him here!”

  I lunge. With Kumiko’s gift it should be no problem to catch them. Twenty grasping hands drag me back. Callista’s gift, two couplings worth, surges through me, and I break through, dragging a few more stubborn villagers with me. Another falls in front of me, and I trip.

  Finna launches her passenger on a spout of ooze. Her trajectory is perfect; Etain’s head lands on the shoulder of one man and she sinks her teeth deep until he squeals. I tear through the crowd and grab another, tackling him at the hollow’s edge.

  The third disappears into the Tanglewood and in seconds the crashing of brush ceases. There’s no catching him in a dark unfamiliar forest.

  They circle, ambling toward Etain’s head and the man writhing in the dust, at the mercy of her teeth. I can’t push through, but Finna flows between them, recovers the head and mounts it on her body. Height seems to intimidate, and the villagers cower a bit.

  “Godsdammit!” Etain howls. “Go! Go!”

  “Which way?”

  “Just go! If they tell him, if he finds me…”

  Finna gestures to a path, almost obscured in the dark, and we run. Men and women give chase. “Stop! Don’t leave!” They shout, plead with us.

  “Gate!” shouts Etain. Finna yanks open one half of a wrought iron gate, black as night, mounted with spikes like weapons. We slide through and she bangs it shut, throwing over the bale and stabbing a pin through its ring.

  Bodies bang the gate. Arms thrust between the bars, hands raking.

  We back away. Two men try climbing. The gate and fence it hinges have only top and bottom rails, at least ten feet part. But the villagers seem determined, if a little mindless. I back away a few more steps. Etain follows. We slip into a tangle of fronned trees, willows, and creep from sight. The gate rattles, murmuring grows, then tapers. Sounds fade, and a quick peek confirms they’re wandering back down the path.

  Finna dumps Etain’s head into her arms. “What is going on with that village!” she pants.

  “Village? That’s not a village. Teme Hollow is the undertakers’ lodgings.

  “The what?” Finna and I exclaim in unison.

  Etain sighs, a sound that echoes from another dimension, and I think I’m starting to understand her attitude. Acerbic and irritating as she is, she seems the only sane voice in a lunatic asylum. “It’s easier if I show you.”

  We start along the path, slapped by branches. There’s no way we’re moving unheard. “Should we go slower?”

  “We’re safe for now, so long as we stay off the road.”

  “Ewanach?” I dare again. Eventually someone’s bound to answer, if just from annoyance.

  Etain makes an impatient sound. “Can I be up high, please?”

  “Since you asked nicely…” Finna puts Etain’s head back on her body, a sight I will never get used to.

  “Ewanach.” I’m telling, not asking.

  “My husband.”

  “So, not your husband?” I can’t tell if she’s jesting, or furious.

  “Glad someone asked,” Finna murmurs from somewhere below.

  “I took him as my husband when Eirenè was at her height. He was a warlord worthy of ruling my lands.”

  I don’t comment further. Obviously, they’ve had a falling out, and I’m not willing to risk another tongue lashing to ask what happened just yet.

  Finna’s body stops. “We’ve reached the end of the high road,” says Etain.

  “We’ve walked for three minutes!” Why do the rules of these places, or lack of, always throw me?

  “Are you complaining? Mortals always complain about manual labor.” Etain huffs. “I wouldn’t expect you to appreciate the greatness of what I accomplished. Men never do. But diminished as Eirenè is, she is still great, and I made that.”

  “What did you accomplish that made us walk faster?”

  “You didn’t walk faster,” she sneers. “I moved you. I negotiated with gods. Gods. My battle prowess was currency in the Pantheon. I bought my people safety, prosperity, greatness.” Her eyes flick over me and their flames leap. “You’ve subjected yourself to a single god’s whims for a thin hope of paltry gifts. I demanded their riches!

  “Hey! I’m a paltry gift!” protests Finna.

  “You’re a paltry gift, too, as it happens,” I drawl to Etain, who puckers.

  We pass two decapitated black plinths. And eagle rests at the base of one and the other is a heap of rubble and dead branches. Etain stops, caresses one with a hand, her eyes banked to embers. “These gates stood unbreached for a thousand years.” Her words are thick with pride and defiance. Then her eyes blaze and Finna’s hand jerks from the onyx. “I can’t feel them! It isn’t the same. I want my body. I want my lands!”

  Her last word hangs on the air as we break through the forest, and I gape. What a land it is.

  “The Boneyards,” says Etain, seeing my face.

  Moonlight turns a city on the hill to black and silver lines in the distance. Towers, cathedral spires, crenellations and belfries. Edairn, Loria’s capital and greatest city on the Amaranth coast, would fit easily inside Eirenè, a shining shadow that fills the horizon.

  What steals my breath is not the city. A cobblestone road runs beneath our feet, from the gates to where it disappears at the city’s black foundations. It is the only open space in sight. Graves made of the same midnight stone stretch head of us like dominoes frozen mid-tip. Now and then the domed or peaked roof of a mausoleum juts up like a tongue thrust between the teeth of graves.

  “How?” breaths Finna. “How did the villagers dig so many?”

  “The villagers don’t dig them.” Etain’s voice holds something like emotion. “They harvest them.”

  The word makes me shudder. “That was the tribute he mentioned, back in Teme hollow.”

  She nods. “They harvest the crops of death and destruction.”

  The entire population of Eirenè must be buried in the expanse before us. I ask the question begging to be asked. “How does anyone live here?”

  “They don’t. They pray for death.” She looks out over the grim landscape. “No one has lived in Eirenè for...I don’t know, anymore. A thousand years.”

  “Those people in the Hollow?” asks Finna.

  “Thralls. The last of my people. And now Ewanach has taken them, too.”

  “They’ve spent a thousand years digging up these corpses?”

  “No. Ga
thering the souls. Ewanach cannot enter the Boneyards.”

  Finna’s expression falls. Her frown would be amusing, set in the center of her chest, any other time. “So, he enthralled these poor people to do it for him.”

  “No.” Etain starts forward. “I enthralled them.”

  “Why?” I chase after her; she’s fast on Finna’s legs.

  “I thought I could restore them. Give them back their lives. What Ewanach took from all of us. Now?” The light her eyes cast on the cobblestone dims. “I can give them rest.”

  I don’t even know where to start. “What were you doing under that tree?”

  “Hiding. Waiting,” she offers quickly, then sighs. “And hiding. Ewanach keeps my body in the bàsachadh, his bone cart. He rides the road once a night up and back, to collect the souls the Temeres have gathered. Without my body I don’t know how to stop him, and if he finds my head…”

  I listen to her words, but I can’t answer. The magnitude of the loss here is staggering; I’ve seen plaguelands less filled with the dead. In denser patches, too many to comprehend, the grave markers are a hand span apart.

  “You taste like arcane sugar,” says Finna. “Does he possess you?”

  “No.” Etain’s denial holds a world of defiance. “Not exactly. I negotiated and fought for my people until we knew peace and prosperity. But Ewanach felt we’d left gold on the table when I didn’t want to bargain further or conquer more. He negotiated with–” Her sleek jaw flinches. “I would never have stooped so low, into such darkness.” Her bitterness tempers. “Ewanach brought the sword against the Galith’nor without my knowledge. An act of stupidity, even if he’d not been deceived at the bargaining table.”

  Etain stops and turns Finna’s body in a slow circle. “And I, ever the idiot, summoned my allies to help defend against the Galith. They cut us apart.” She smooths the bald arc of a head stone. “Quite literally. Ewanach’s bargain raised him as a lich. And he set about reconstructing me, but the pieces...there were so many pieces. Bodies of mortals and magical beings cleaved into anonymity. Ewanach found my head and what he thought must be my body, and brought it all to his necromancers.”

  She moves into a small clearing ahead, a circle between the graves paved with cobble. A dollhouse mausoleum stands in the center. Its stone front is a carved lattice of panels flanking a low arch. Roses climbed them once, but all that remains are the petrified clumps of stems. Weeping angels mourn on either side of the entrance. Etain comforts one of them with Finna’s hand on its sculpted shoulder. “He brought them the parts, and a life to be sacrificed.”

  The mausoleum is so small, and made with such love. I don’t have to ask.

  “But the body, most of it, was not mine. My mind despises him. The heart belongs to another. The guts throb with instinct that tells me to fight. And the fragments yearn for their own bodies, long decayed and lost.” She gentles the angel and steps away. “And the soul he gave me, tiny as it is, shrieks for vengeance. She would have been a true Landgravine. She would have been every bit my child.”

  Finna’s body brings Etain close. She rests her forehead over my heart; it’s not a sentimental gesture. She listens, to my heart, or something more. Etain pulls away and nods.

  “Thank you for putting me up high,” she says grudgingly, words angled down at Finna. “The dirt was humiliating.”

  I know this feeling too; being dragged, wounded and drunk enough to die, from a well of pig shite by two monks, hating the world, hating that I was alive, at what I’d let myself become. Hating that me, this, was all that remained to avenge my family. I think I might understand Etain.

  “All the gods,” she hisses at me, peering. “Are you crying? The tears of a man are shame incarnate.”

  Or I don’t understand her at all. “You need your body. We need to free these souls. What do we do?”

  “It’s not just the villagers. Ewanach is harvesting the dead to build an army of pride. He intends to fight the Galith in the afterlife.”

  “How do we free everyone?” asks Finna, looking more and more put out to have her own head displaced. Now it rests in the crook of her arm like Etain is carrying it.

  “Flood the land with light.” Etain shrugs. “The last arcanists of the Grith’nor hammered this inscription into our gates before their tribes moved into the mists and fell beneath the passage of time.” She raises Finna’s arms, gesturing. “There’s been no sun for centuries, so I assume it’s some insipid spiritual riddle, or it’s blatantly literal.”

  “What’s the blatantly literal?”

  “There’s a mirror in the observatory dome. Or there was; I haven’t been able to reach it in so long. But adjusted properly, at moon set, it would throw light equal to the daytime.”

  Moonset? “If there’s no sun, what happens when the moon goes down?”

  “Blackness.”

  “Why haven’t you been able to reach the observatory?” asks Finna. “I thought Ewanach couldn’t come in here?”

  “He doesn’t need to.” Etain smirks, eyes sparking. “There’s plenty already inside.”

  “Well,” I look out over the expanse ahead. “Now or never.”

  “Oh no. Not now.” Etain’s lips form an amused quirk. “First, we’re going to get my body, because neither of you stand half a chance alone in the Boneyards. Well,” she pokes a finger into Finna. “You might, but the mortal is dead weight.”

  “That’s not actually a funny term, considering where we are.”

  “You’ll be fine. Probably.” Etain guides Finna left where the graveyard roads intersect. This section of cobble is wider, bordered with elaborate fences and monument pedestals that reach out toward gates twice the size of the ones we first passed.

  The gates of Eirenè.

  Etain stops before them, murmuring. Through the bars I can see the whole road, past where we entered and beyond the Hollow’s cutoff.

  “Where does it go?” I wonder, mostly to myself.

  Finna yelps. Flames dance at her fingertips and Etain uses the hand to pass them over a shield sized dial mounted to the gate. It grinds, dust puffs up, and the gate shudders.

  “To hell,” says Etain, slipping out into the wilds. “It goes to hell.”

  -The Marbhán Road-

  Eirenè enters the Dead Road from an angle. To my right, the road stretches its path back the way we came, and to my left is a short remainder of a few yards that concludes at a gaping stone arch choked with brambles. It’s not walled off, but it might as well be. Beyond it is an absence of light, an energy that eats up even the glow of Etain’s eyes.

  “There?” I ask.

  “The gatehouse. Ewanach drives the bàsachadh from here to the village and then on to the harbor of Helheim where he unloads his cargo – all but my body – before driving back. He passes the arch on his return at the moment the moon disappears beneath the horizon.”

  Tension bands my lungs. His lair is right here. Can he see us? Hear us? Instinct goes crazy in my gut. “How long until he leaves?”

  The low, dull think of a death knell, a funeral bell, tolls out across the land.

  “About one minute,” says Etain. “I’d move into the trees.”

  There are no trees, not for the length of Eirenè’s gate and fence and a long dead patch beyond. I run. Finna flows behind me. Kumiko makes us fast, but fast enough?

  Thunk.

  Thunk.

  The bell tolls between my pounding boots.

  “Last one.” calls Etain. We dive, rolling through the undergrowth. Etain’s head comes loose and we spend the last low echo digging for it.

  “My body,” she grits out, hiccupping out a beetle. “I want my damn body.”

  There’s no visibility from inside the trees, half buried in the gulley. I choose a tree deeper in and climb. We’re at least a half mile from the city, halfway back to where we started. Eirenè rises into the night like shards. Mist settled in green silken strands over the road swirls outside the arch, first in the breeze
and then against it. It billows, filling the gatehouse entry. A swirl becomes a vortex. I can hear the friction singing over the land. The mist seems to heat, glowing until the green is acid-luminous and blinding.

  It ripples. Hooves emerge, white like pearl on legs of polished bone. The horse’s skeleton is riveted with iron, spikes and narrow pins that pattern it like a tattoo.

  It leaps from the portal in midair; for a second, I’m convinced it’ll lift into the air and take flight. The bàsachadh brings it back to earth. The bone wagon. Its cart is built of arm bones, skulls set in a line down the sides. Candles flicker inside their hollow eyes to light the path. The wagon’s wheels, attached by no mechanical or earthly devices I can see, are spoked with femurs, and it’s rims are the small jagged bones of fingers and wrists held in place by the same invisible force.

  As impossible as all this is, the rider, the thing mounting the horse, defies belief. No real horse could bear his weight. His massive black armor looks cut from cast iron. There’s no discernable face beyond the T-slit of his fanged helm but the eyes...They hover on tails of green smoke that are the same sharp glow as the portal shrinking behind him.

  He launches from the portal at breakneck speed and doesn’t slow down. The bones clack like kindling and on two or three deep trenches they half scatter, only to draw back on demonic will. Ewanach drives hell-bent along the road.

  My mind races, but I can’t think of a thing. The power of his flight still shakes the trees where he’s passed, and I can’t imagine stopping him by any mundane means. I doubt a direct confrontation will work, not with our current party; a head, a mortal, and a puddle of water, in Etain’s words.

  A puddle.

  I have an idea. I drop from the canopy into the forest without climbing or trying to break my fall. My ankles heal almost before the impact burns.

  Finna hunches in the mulch with Etain’s head.

  “How likely is, say, a lich, to sense your presence?” I ask Finna.

  “The mara aren’t much different so, not very?”

  “Perfect. There are two deep ruts in the road just past this stretch.”

  Finna smiles and plants Etain’s head on a branch. “Say no more.” She pools and disappears between the leaves.