Looking more closely at Oakscratch, for he thought it prudent not to keep his back exposed to her for too long at a stretch, Ernst started, gawped, then fell to his knees in the corpse jetsam of the brotherhood. The marshsow hide she had worn since first meeting him and Ardanoi had slipped, and there upon her back was a purple tattoo, one very similar to that worn by his sister, both before and after hers being worn upon the abbot’s grisly habit, and to the one Ernst himself wore on his inner thigh.
All the legends about ghouls that Ernst had heard from Corrine and his peers at the Conservatory returned to him then, little things that he had not bothered to think about whilst being ridden through the fens by a wicked spider. Little things like the idea that ghouls lose all memory of their former lives when they return from the dead, and name themselves from the first thing they see and the first thing they do to it. The changes that whatever plague or sorcery or curse that was responsible for bringing Ernst’s mother back as a ghoul had altered her appearance such that he never would have known her if not for the tattoo that branded his eyes with knowledge, his heart with horror, and his groin with shame for his thinking, if only for an instant, that coupling with Oakscratch might not be so bad as being molested by a spider.
Ernst tried to regain his composure, wondering if for honor’s sake he might should end her as he had Ardanoi, but the noises she made as she splintered bone and tore flesh led him to the conclusion that perhaps she was not so unhappy as a ghoul, without memory or regret, and he did not know how he would react if he saw her face again now that he might find some familiar feature lurking amidst the monstrous. That, and he did not wish to remind her of his presence lest she renew her interest in other diversions now that her hunger for dead flesh appeared close to satiation, and Ernst was unsure if he had the strength to fend her off.
And so Ernst departed, triumphant.
Even if the cemetery had not been on his way to the FarForest and whatever adventures he might find there, Ernst would have made the time to stop in and see Laidlaw, he who had set the whole affair in motion. As he banged on the coffin-lid door of the necromancy hut, Ernst rehearsed the proclamation he would deliver before avenging himself, but eventually he was obliged to postpone his internal speechifying long enough to break down the door. The hut was dark, all but one or two of the bottled marshlights dead, but through the gloom Ernst made out the horrible old hunchback slouched over his table.
“Go away,” Laidlaw rasped. “Whoever you be, run, run far from this place—”
“Shut the words, for I have them,” Ernst said, mangling yet another carefully prepared monologue as he advanced. “You were the one to blame, and now, vile gravesneak, you will be undone by that which you set in motion.”
Stifling the tinge of pity in his breast, Ernst raised his sword high over his head and brought it down directly into the old man’s hump. It felt less like chopping into flesh and more like assaulting a sack of beans and, holding his sword up to one of the marshlight bottles, Ernst saw only the faintest smear of blood, as well as a pale, luminescent streak. Looking down, he saw a stream of bright pearls pouring out of the rent in Laidlaw’s robe.
Before Ernst could run or even scream the legion of newborn ivory spiders exiting the punctured eggsack swarmed up his legs, the last thing he heard the dying medium giving a tired sigh at having lost his hump for the second time in his unhappy life.
Copyright © 2011 Jesse Bullington
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Jesse Bullington is the author of the novels The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and the upcoming The Enterprise of Death, which will be released in March 2011. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in various magazines, including ChiZine, Jabberwocky, and Brain Harvest, as well as in anthologies such as Ekaterina Sedia’s Running with the Pack, James Lowder’s The Best of All Flesh, and Robin Laws’s The New Hero. He currently resides in Colorado and can be found online at www.jessebullington.com.
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COVER ART
“Into the Unknown,” by Kerem Beyit
Kerem Beyit is a freelance artist born in Ankara, Turkey. He started drawing in his early childhood with the influence of comic books, and he trained himself from great fantasy artists like Frank Frazetta and Gerald Brom. He has won Master and Excellence Awards from Exposé 7, and his artwork has been used for covers of European editions of fantasy novels by Tad Williams and George R.R. Martin. Visit his website and gallery at www.theartofkerembeyit.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1046
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Copyright © 2011 Firkin Press
This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.
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