“What can I do?” Ernst fell to his knees and beat his breast, “What can I say or do that will make you both go away and leave me in peace?”
“As I was telling our new friend,” said Ardanoi, “so long as you deliver me to the Forbidden Abbey, unlock the secrets held within, and then gain the FarForest and its treasures, I’ll gladly let you go. After that it’s up to...?”
“Oakscratch,” said the ghoul. “I give you my word, young master Ernst, that if you please me I will find my feast elsewhere—I think you’ll soon find I’m not such a monster.”
She batted her eyes at him, the lashes like thorns, the pupils like charred skulls set in flaming hearths, and Ernst gulped a particularly nervous gulp.
The rain had stopped, and so they camped for the night, Ernst offering the desiccated marshsow to the ghoul, who cracked the bones in her teeth and skinned the smelly hide into one long strip, which she then wrapped bloody-side in around herself, covering her blackened charms. As Ernst lay in the mud Ardanoi settled onto him, their faces brushing, and began making the moist purring noise again.
“What are you doing?” Ernst finally asked, the vibrations and bright light emanating from Ardanoi’s thorax keeping him awake.
“Kissing you, my pet,” murmured Ardanoi, and Ernst began to cry.
The following days were spent fording the fens, but thankfully no trees appeared in the barren marsh to facilitate a coupling with Oakscratch. Unfortunately, she made it clear that if a coupling was not facilitated, and a rather spectacular one at that, she would devour Ernst as soon as Ardanoi released him, which he was not so keen on either. The continued absence of a sword weighed heavily on his mind, and he offered prayers to Saint Tanz—patron intercessor of abandoned kittens, exploited orphans, and lonely necrophiliacs—that the crooked medium meet a creatively pestilential reward for his deception.
At last they came to the Forbidden Abbey, the listing walls and bell tower making it look like a ship-wrecked galleon beached on some desolate, demon-haunted shore. At the base of the bulwark Ardanoi and Oakscratch had a brief argument as to how best to gain the wall—they could both easily climb it but neither wanted to go first, leaving the other alone with Ernst.
A compromise was reached, but, sadly for Ernst, it was not one that involved them leaving him unsupervised long enough to jump into a pool and drown himself. Ardanoi and Oakscratch climbed the wall simultaneously, she hooking her chipped claws into the stone itself and Ardanoi propelling himself up in an even creepier fashion, unspooling a rope of sugar-silk from his bloated glands as he went. This gossamer line connected to the glob he had already applied to Ernst’s belt, and after they gained the rampart and tied off the tether, he began to climb, the stickiness of the spun line making him strangely nauseous.
He dropped down into purple and green forest of overgrown belladonna and pushed through the nightshade with Ardanoi back on his shoulder and Oakscratch at his side, she picking the almost-black berries and popping them into her mouth as if they were currants. Then came the squeeze through a low, narrow window set in the side of the abbey like the gill of some great stone fish, and at last Ernst was once more inside the Forbidden Abbey.
They had no torches, and no sun nor moon nor faint star ever shone down on the fens, let alone the interior of the once-hallowed keep, but Ardanoi had eaten half a dozen piglets earlier in the day and still glowed faintly from his meal, which allowed them to pick their way through the silent halls by spiderlight. Then they entered the cloister, the hanged monks ever swaying like inverted willow catkins, and for the first time in days Ernst felt afraid of something more than his companions.
He heard dripping nearby but realized it was only Oakscratch drooling at the sight of all the ancient corpses, thick ropes of spit hanging from her mouth. Without a word she dropped onto all fours and scuttled forward but paused at the edge of the priests, sniffing with her wide nose. She bleated like a nervous ewe and suddenly spun around on her backward knees, loping past Ernst and Ardanoi back the way they had come.
Ardanoi made another one of his phlegmy chuckling sounds and tapped Ernst’s hips with his two lowest legs, the little hooks in those appendages spurring Ernst forward. Ernst stared up at the hanged monks, remembering the less-than-convincing mask of bravado Corrine had assumed before disappearing forever into the copse. He might not have a sword, or even boots to keep the earthy mandrake-mold that only grows from the contents of hanged men’s death-voided bowels from squishing between his toes, but he did have his Conservatory training and his family’s honor to propel him to victory over whatever trial lay ahead. He made to push a priest aside to enter the cloister proper when Ardanoi pulled on his hair, halting him.
“When I was not so large as I am now,” Ardanoi murmured, “but large enough to have left my brothers and sisters behind, I would weave webs to catch my supper. Do you know how I knew if I had snared something?”
Ernst did—he had often caught grass pixies and tossed them into spider webs as a boy, a dark memory. He remembered how the little sprites had squeaked and writhed, and the spider would feel the vibrations in its web and creep over, and then.... Ernst shuddered, wondering if his current predicament didn’t have something to do with a pixie curse. He supposed Ardanoi was cautioning against disturbing the hanged men, but peering into the mass of bodies he had no idea how he could possibly squeeze through without bumping them. He sighed, thinking how nice it would have been if the Abbey lay in a drier climate where the waste would have turned to dust by now instead of serving as a bed for the moist yet crumbly mold that made his bare feet itch and—
Sighing again, Ernst looked down at his feet. There wasn’t much room, and none at all if Ardanoi stayed on his back. That was something, at least.
“You’ll have to get off,” Ernst whispered. “I’ll crawl under them, but if you stay on my back you’ll knock their legs.”
Ardanoi’s mouth-appendages fluttered against Ernst’s neck, leaving their familiar welts, and then he hopped lightly down. The glow emanating from him was slowly fading, and Ernst quickly lowered himself onto his stomach—the only thing that could possibly make things worse would be to lose his light. He began squirming forward through the muck, Ardanoi creeping beside him, and together they entered the cloister proper.
It was slow going, and became slower still whenever Ernst encountered one of the thicker heaps of mold that flourished under the hanged men. He glumly supposed their last meal must have been a hardy one as he pushed aside the fungal mounds and wriggled deeper into the forest of suicides. At one point he thought he heard something whispering above him in the twilight of the spiderglow, but he dared not roll over to look lest he knock against a dangling foot or cassock, and in the silence of the cloister he did not risk asking Ardanoi to investigate.
Finally he spied an opening in the ceiling of sandals and, hauling himself out into a clearing, spotted a gilt-edged lectern towering above him. Ardanoi darted forward and climbed the side of it as Ernst rolled onto his back, cracking his neck and popping his arms and legs after the arduous haul. As he did, he saw a monstrous shadow looming above them like some gigantic monastic bat.
Ardanoi, either oblivious or unconcerned, perched on the lectern and read from the open book atop it. Ernst tried to speak but his mouth would not obey. Ardanoi gingerly closed the book and coated it in several layers of sugar-silk to prevent it from being sullied on the floor, to which he slowly lowered it on a rope of his sweet excretion. As he did, light from his thorax flitted across the shadowy thing above them.
Ernst decided he really didn’t want to know what was lurking above him, and so rather than using the spiderlight to confirm that yes, indeed, something terrible was hovering just above, he instead scrambled backward with his eyes resolutely fixed on the floor. He was actually relieved when the familiar weight settled onto his back and around his chest, the known horror a balm for the alien one suspended from the ceiling, but then he noticed Ardanoi was still fiddling with the b
ook in the middle of the room, which meant that something else entirely was touching him from behind.
Before his terror-blasted mind could fully comprehend what was happening, the legs of the hanged priest he had backed into wrapped around him and hoisted him into the air, and through tear-veiled eyes he saw that the entire brotherhood had come to life, their wasted, long-dead eyes opening, their distended tongues wriggling, their robes flapping like cockatrice wings as they kicked and pushed off one another to gain momentum in swinging from their nooses. Above it all reared the gargantuan shadow, which, Ernst realized as it descended slowly into the spiderlight, was the abbot.
He was roughly the size of the one-room shack where Ernst had been born, a mass of marshlight-bright flesh bursting out from rips in the patchwork habit that draped over his hideous, bloated limbs like a thin, sodden handkerchief wrapped around an overgrown winter gourd. His habit was quite clearly composed of the skins of men and women, including, Ernst noticed with a dry heave and a sob, his own sister Corrine, her crescent-shaped familial tattoo recognizable even in the dim light of Ardanoi shining up from the lectern.
The abbot had a dozen nooses around his barrel-wide neck, and both his arms and legs were likewise suspended from thick ropes that disappeared into the gloom of the ceiling. The priests surrounding the abbot hung at varying heights, like holiday ornaments strung up by some celebrant afflicted with Ernst’s same ocular impediment, and as he found himself passed upward from feet to grasping undead priest arms to feet again he realized they were delivering him to this monstrosity, and that it was alive.
“Thieves!” the abbot gurgled, a substance resembling raspberry jam bubbling over his sausage-thick lips, but his eyes were not upon the unfortunate Ernst. “Forget the novice—bring me the arachnidan interloper!”
The priest gripping Ernst suddenly released him. Uncertain how long a drop it would be to the floor, Ernst clung to its waist as it began to swing itself back and forth with ever-greater vigor. He soon saw the reason for his being let go—Ardanoi had been caught, two or three of his long legs fractured and oozing a frothy, luminescent white paste, the rest of his limbs snatched by swinging priests who passed him higher and higher as they had Ernst himself but moments before. Again and again Ardanoi sank his dagger-long fangs into his captors, but the priests paid him no mind, and more not-jam splattered on Ernst’s face as the abbot chortled above them.
“Ernst!” Ardanoi called, his voice cracking as he was traded off to another priest, “be ready, boy!”
Ernst was close to vomiting, the stench emanating from the undead priests bad enough without the dizziness that swaying through the dim heights of the church had brought on, but he managed to blink away the tears—or maybe it was abbot sputum—and saw that while the tome lay on the floor beside the lectern, Ardanoi had a long glinting piece of metal adhered to the bulb of his abdomen. As he was slung closer and closer, Ernst clearly made out a pommel set with a black stone, and though the scabbard was obscured under the layers of gossamer that Ardanoi had used to stick the weapon to his back, Ernst was sure it was the very same sword his sister had carried into the cloister so long ago.
“The sword! Are you...are you Corrine?” Ernst called excitedly, already fitting together the strange puzzle of transformation and curses that must have led to his sibling changing into a spider and—
“Fool!” Ardanoi howled, now only a few priests’ breadths away[RD1] . “It was on the floor and I—”
His words were cut off as the priest holding him hurled him upward and the next caught him by a broken leg, leading to a terrible cry from him and another moist guffaw from the abbot. Before he could be passed on, however, he bit cleanly through his already damaged appendage, leaving the priest holding the end of a spider leg as he leapt away. He landed on the back of a priest swinging close to Ernst and from this new perch jumped again, crashing into Ernst’s shoulder and holding fast, the secretions dripping from his broken and missing limbs burning Ernst’s skin.
“Enough of this fiddle-faddle!” bellowed the abbot, and Ernst heard a sound like a river lock being raised. Looking up, he saw that the abbot was descending toward them, his habit billowing out and granting an unsolicited survey of the grotesque landscape of his groin. The other priests swung out of the way and then Ernst felt the one he clung to being pulled up, the impatient abbot reeling them in. “Fiddle-faddle!”
“Be ready to strike,” Ardanoi whispered in Ernst’s ear. “Draw and lunge in one go, no flourishes or feints.”
“But I can’t,” Ernst protested, “I’ll fall!”
“Fool!” said Ardanoi. “Look down.”
Look Ernst did, and with equal measures disgust and understanding he saw that Ardanoi’s gyrations upon his back had not been idle weirdness—he had coated Ernst’s lower back in sugar-silk, lashing him to the hanged priest’s legs. The red slurry thickened as they were raised closer and closer to the abbot, his yellow teeth and yellow tonsure looming above them.
“Hullo, hullo,” said the abbot. “What sort of naughtiness is this?”
“Now!” hissed Ardanoi. Ernst fumbled over his shoulder for the sword protruding from the spider’s back. It was stuck fast. As he tried to wrestle it free of the webbing, they were brought ever closer to the abbot’s leering, moon-like face. The abbot opened his mouth wider and wider until it unhinged like a viper’s, affording them an unobstructed view down his cavernous throat, and at that moment the sword tore free of the sugar-silk.
Ernst wasn’t expecting it to, unfortunately, and so he suddenly flopped forward, the blade bouncing off one of the abbot’s teeth. In the aftermath of this bungled attack Ardanoi sprang forward onto the abbot’s cheek, which sent the abbot into a frenzy of face-slapping. The rope from which Ernst and the priest were suspended was still wrapped around one of the abbot’s massive palms, and so his frantic efforts to squash Ardanoi whipped Ernst and the priest through the air. There was a blur of white flesh and brown habit, and then they landed heavily on the abbot’s back, the impact breaking Ernst’s left arm and snapping off the priest’s legs, which remained stuck to Ernst even as the rest of the priest was jerked free by the abbot’s continued flailing.
“Where are you!?” the abbot howled. “Foul demon, where are you!?”
Ernst did not see Ardanoi, either, and was unsure if the rocky pustules jutting up through rents in the habit of human hide were caused by the spider’s bite or a mundane skin condition. He also recognized that he had precious little time before the abbot became aware of his presence. Not knowing what else to do, he crept up to the base of the abbot’s head. The tonsure flopped as the abbot suddenly twisted his noose-ringed neck, as if listening to some distant murmur of heresy, and Ernst struck.
Gauging distance with only one eye was difficult in the best of times, and in his haste to deal a deathblow Ernst forgot his academy training and swung upon the abbot’s skull before properly ensuring he was within range. The result was that he fell short of his target entirely, instead severing one of the dozen stout nooses circling the abbot’s neck. Both ends of the cut rope immediately erupted jets of black blood, and the abbot went absolutely berserk, twisting and thrashing and spinning around from his ropes like the marionette of an epileptic puppeteer.
Pitching forward, Ernst attacked again, this time connecting with the back of the abbot’s head. His sword rebounded off the skull as if it had met iron, sending painful reverberations down his arm but not even breaking the abbot’s skin. Ernst tried again and almost caught his blade in the face as it bounced back at him. He slipped in the blood pouring from the noose he had accidentally severed, and as the abbot bucked beneath him he realized what must be done.
A great palm stretched around to swat him but Ernst cut the ropes holding up the mighty wrist, and the sliced nooses hosed him down with cold, stinking blood as the unsupported hand fell away. Ernst spun back to the ropes around the abbot’s neck and hacked at them again and again, the abbot’s throes weakening with each bl
ow. Cutting the last noose, Ernst had a single moment of triumph, howling out his sister’s name, and then every other rope in the cloister suddenly snapped, and Ernst rode the abbot to the ground and the darkness of death.
Or sleep. Ernst awoke to a ghoul licking his face, and started back—the realization that it was Oakscratch proved small comfort. His sword was still adhered to his palm with spider-silk but he hesitated, unsure if he had the strength to lift it and not inclined to make an obvious effort if it turned out he couldn’t. Instead of going in for the kill or a kiss, Oakscratch sighed unhappily.
“A pity—I thought you were gone,” she said, and Ernst realized she was bathed in a familiar pale white light coming from somewhere to his left. She resumed feasting on the fallen abbot, and as Ernst picked himself out of the pile of priests that had broken his fall he saw Ardanoi half-buried under the remains of a rather portly friar.
“Ernst!” Ardanoi called. He had lost another leg and three of his eyes, luminous white fluids coating his furry form, but otherwise he seemed hale. He wriggled out from under the priest, his mouth-feelers rubbing together like anxious hands. “We did it, my boy, we did it! Together we—”
Ernst stabbed Ardanoi as hard as he could, releasing a spray of caustic fluid from the wound that would have gone directly in his right eye, if only he still had it. Ardanoi thrashed and hissed, and Ernst brought his bare foot down on top of the spider again and again, stomping until the carapace cut his heel, a final hollow rasp escaping Ardanoi’s wooly maw. Then Ernst methodically hacked him into yet smaller and smaller pieces, offering a choice array of curses on his former rider as he did.
When he was satisfied, he turned to see if Oakscratch had an opinion on the matter, but she was still occupied eating the abbot, and by the look of it would be for quite some time. He noticed the edge of the smashed lectern poking out from under the abbot’s side, and after kicking aside cassocks and priest parts, he uncovered the sugar-coated tome that so many had died to recover. Within it lay the secrets of not only the Cataclysm and the FarForest but also the finer points of Holbrookian theology, for which Ernst had always harbored a vague curiosity.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #62 Page 3
