He descended down to the stone floor of the mouth and pulled a torch from the band of his loincloth, along with his knife and a piece of flint. After a few minutes, the oiled cloth wrapped around the end of the stick caught fire.
Scattered on the floor were the bones of the dead, touched by warmth for the first time in centuries. Shadows clung to the backs of mountains made of skulls, gathering in the voids of their eyes. It was then Manwe realized how great the space was around him, less the bottom of a hole, and more a cavern. Rock formations melted off the ceiling in glittering stalactites.
“Toba?” Manwe called. He remained staked on the spot, waiting for an echo to return. Even the weight of the knife in his hand did little to calm the frantic beat of his heart. The rope still hung behind him, the last tether to the surface and the sun.
On he went into the bowels of the earth. The way narrowed and widened, diminished and grew, never once a clear path even with his bit of light.
Manwe did not know how far he had gone when he heard a drone beat in the distance. It wasn’t like the patting of a hand on stretched goat skin, but a knock, as if someone tapped a stick on a fence post. He went toward the sound. The passage snaked right for a long time before breaking hard to the left.
Around the next corner shuffled feet. Manwe tossed his torch back the way he came and stood perfectly still, shrouded in total darkness.
Four men carried a body by the arms and legs as they trod down the next hall. One of them, the leader, held up a torch to guide their way into the abyss. The white flames revealed his features, a brutish visage more apish than human, with his cheeks swollen and teeth sharpened to wedges.
Manwe could have only guessed at their actual skin tones, which was washed by the torch to the color of gray chalk. He stalked after the four and their captive, staying far enough behind so his own footsteps were lost in the noise of their march.
After a while they entered another cavern. Unlike the first, this one was not a space of pure darkness, but a wide cell lit by a great bonfire. Twenty men danced around the smoky blaze, hands above their heads as they spun and twirled in unison. A pair of percussionists on their own outcropping of rock banged ulnas on rows of skulls set out before them, continuing the rapid beat Manwe had first heard on the way to this hell.
Three corpses swung from the ceiling, their faces bloated purple and red from strangulation. The front of their bodies had been sliced open, allowing their viscera to fall down in great strands to be chewed on by the savages. The four men carrying their unconscious prisoner dumped him near the bonfire. The flames illuminated his face.
Toba, glassy-eyed and mumbling incoherently, convulsed in the throes of a horrified ecstasy. Powder covered his nose and mouth, a fine dust of yellow and green. A smaller man smeared in blood and dirt leapt from a hidden place and marched around him, his leering expression stretched wide as he paraded before the revelers. He held up the shard of a human rib in one hand, its point scraped into an edge. He shouted, and was answered by a chorus of disjointed chants.
Manwe looked from this witchdoctor back to the bodies hanging from the cave’s ceiling, knowing what the creature had in mind. He slunk into the chamber and skirted around its perimeter, dodging behind wide stalagmites. The witchdoctor screamed as the drummers fell into frenzy, spinning on his heels with his cruel bone-knife high in the air.
Manwe ducked behind another low rock formation and stepped into a dark patch between two rough columns of granite.
The witchdoctor crouched over Toba. He raised his knife up one last time, shouting at the bodies above him.
The drums stopped and the blade came down.
Manwe bounded from the shadows, the edge of his knife blazing in the flames of the bonfire. Blood sprayed as he sliced open the witchdoctor’s throat, knocking the wretch to the side. He gathered Toba in his arms and broke past the masses circled around them. They chased after him into the passage, crowding the narrow channel. Manwe collided with and bounced off the walls and corners until he could no longer hear the screams and growls of the cannibals behind him. When the silence grew steady, he stopped, hunkered down in a tunnel to listen for any sound.
Toba coughed, hacking bloody spit until it dribbled down his chin. “Manwe?”
“Shush, Toba,” Manwe whispered, holding the fence’s face. He brushed a thumb across his chapped lips. “Keep still. You’re bleeding.”
Toba shivered, his skin cold to the touch. “You came for me.”
Manwe blinked, snatched back to reality. All worry of being caught, the darkness, the question of whether he would ever see the light again—it disappeared, replaced by his own failure. “I couldn’t leave you. I would never leave you.”
“I’m so sorry.” Toba curled himself in Manwe’s lap. “I should have been more careful.”
Manwe rocked him gently. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll get you back to the light.”
“I know you will.”
They held each other until Toba gave away, his final breath a hiss. Manwe searched the corpse’s tattered tunic and drew out the gem. He brought Toba close and, for the last time, kissed the lips of the only man he had ever loved.
*****
Leomachus rolled the girl onto her back, spreading her legs. Her bright white body gleamed in the light of the lamps, the ringlets of her hair black and glossy.
For all his anger, Manwe stayed in the bedroom’s darkened eave and let them consummate their lust, allowing for one final moment of security. He had stolen into the house hours before—he could wait a bit longer to savor revenge.
Gonius’ daughter, the same girl who accused Manwe of rape, rolled atop the ugly merchant, moaning about how much better the father performed than her husband. Leomachus laughed as he held her bucking hips. Their joined climax came in a wild and untamed gasp, and the two collapsed on the mattress.
“Ah, my dear,” said Leomachus, a hand on her breast, “You truly are wasted on my boy.”
“Waste not, sighed not,” she said, grinning lustily. “And you will still give me my part of the money when The Panther returns?”
“If he returns. For all I know the heathen will never rise from The Maw’s darkness, lost like his idiot friend. Gem or not, I will be a lord one day, and you shall be basked in splendor.”
“A lie is often sweeter than the truth.” She scratched her nails across his hairy chest. “Just remember our deal.”
The pair talked a bit more until Leomachus, exhausted from his release, fell into a deep sleep. Creeping from the eave on hands and feet, Manwe snuck across the tile floor to the foot of the large bed. Gonius’ daughter let out a yawn and fell back into the crook of the merchant’s arm, humming a pleasant tune.
Manwe sprung onto the bed, covering her nose and mouth with his wide hand. He cut Leomachus across the throat with his knife, slashing with confidence. The merchant choked on his own life, gurgling as his stained hands tried to cover the bloody smile. Eyes rolled back in death, and a last gush of air escaped in the bubbles popping in his throat.
“Before, this was just thievery. I never harmed anyone for the sake of it.” Manwe wiped his blade on the girl’s skin, a streak of red across her white stomach. The girl flinched under the stroke. “You’ve made me do this.”
He removed his hand from her mouth. Gasping for air, the girl wrenched away from the corpse beside her.
“Are you going to kill me?” she wheezed, curled into a ball on the bed.
“Kill you?” He shook his head in disgust. “Not today. All I care is that you tell them I did this. Tell them I will no longer come to steal their treasures.” Manwe slid off the bed and headed for the window on the far wall. “Tell them I come to steal their lives.”
*****
Manyara birds chirped in the trees, their red necks puffed out while they sang to welcome the morning. Manwe watched the orb rise from beneath the horizon. The light spread across the plains, an endless field forever dancing in the wild wind. In the birdsong he did not
hear sweet melodies, but the beat of the cultists’ drums. He had left Toba’s body out on the plains, somewhere he hoped the spirit of his dead lover might find the way to his ancestors and a better light than the world where he remained.
Manwe crossed his legs and leaned back against the base of the jackalberry tree, waiting for the rebels to arrive. They appeared not long after sunrise, armed with iron spears and bronze-faced shields. Rangy and with a hungered look in their eyes, the three of them slowly approached.
The lead man, a tall and well-muscled youth stripped to the waist, called out. “Are you The Panther?”
Manwe raised his gloomy eyes at him. “What’s your name?”
“I am Kosey.” The man lowered his weapon. “I am Toba’s brother.”
“What is the password?”
“Hippo.”
Manwe slowly rose to his feet and dusted his bare backside. “Thank you for meeting me.”
Kosey smiled and gave a slight bow. “Toba has told me so much about you, and yet we have never stood face-to-face. I have been sure for a long while that this had to change. But tell me, where is my brother? I hoped to see him here as well.”
Manwe looked to the rebel-leader’s two companions, one a short but fit woman, and the other a teen barely grown into his body. “I ask that your two friends stay back. My words are for you alone.”
Kosey signaled to his friends, and they retreated.
Manwe struggled to find the right words until they came, clear and cold. “Toba’s dead.”
The man jolted. “Dead?”
“The Gypians killed him for this.” He drew the Gem of Acitus from his loincloth. He dared not to look at it, for he knew if he had, he would have thrown the stone to the grasses. “He was to sell it to help support the cause. The man he made the deal with killed him.”
“My brother.” Kosey dropped his spear and shield, hands over his mouth. Tears flowed, mingled in the thick beard on his narrow face. “All for a stone?”
“A very powerful stone, something with too much history,” Manwe said. “Take it. I don’t have a fence anymore, but you must know someone who can get you the money for it.”
“There are coins that I will never take, even for freedom.”
“Then for Toba.”
Kosey let his hands fall at his side, and after a deep breath, he took the gem from Manwe’s palm. “I will get rid of the damned thing as quickly as I can. But tell me, Panther, what of the people who did this? What of the man who took my brother?”
“I took care of him.” Manwe walked into the grass, off in the direction of Tolivius. “Just as I will take care of them all.”
THE END
Thief of Shadows is copyright 2016 by Jay Requard and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead is strictly coincidental.
About the Author
Jay Requard is a fantasy author from North Carolina. When he’s not writing he fences, lifts heavy iron, cooks, reads, and helps manage a publishing company. He has a fluffy cat named Mona and is a graduate of The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Night at the Museum - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella Page 12
