Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

  He dreamt of it. Not often, thankfully, but now and then his slumbering mind would find itself lost on its labyrinthine paths, mired in its boiling swamps, or running terrified from one of its many deadly denizens. He would awake panting, sometimes screaming, occasionally sobbing, and Ginny would kiss his sweat-soaked forehead. She would whisper soothingly and stroke his face until the dreams receded. She never asked about them, and he never spoke of them out loud. It wasn’t the sort of thing you shared with someone you loved.

  But now the nightmare was real, the dream made manifest in the burnt-parchment leaves and the open sores weeping on the face of leprous trees. The air was thick with gloom, and every so often the dread silence was pierced by the screeches of hunters and their prey, killing and dying in the dark beyond.

  They split into pairs. Kit agreed to stay behind and watch over the ship, which they’d landed in a broad ravine to help hide it from eyes above. Gabriel, brooding like a child forced to go walking with his parents, stood with Moog. The wizard withdrew a tall wooden staff from his bag, the head of which was capped by a crystal globe clutched by silver serpentine fingers.

  “It’s a scrying device, like that old crystal ball of mine that Gabe …” He faltered. “Uh … that Gabe disposed of for me. Kindly. In the river.”

  Gabriel, agitated, waved him on.

  “It only works at close range,” he explained, then tipped his hat back and set his face so close to the orb his nose grazed its surface. His bushy brow furrowed, and Clay saw a wisp of purple smoke swirl inside the globe. After several long moments, however, the mist dissolved, and Moog stamped the base of the staff on the ground in frustration. “Blast this gods-forsaken forest,” he swore. “I never could get any bloody reception in here. Anyway, Matrick is that way.” He pointed east.

  “How do you know?” asked Gabriel, brightening somewhat.

  “Because that’s where he fell,” said Moog. He set off briskly, and Gabe skulked after him.

  Clay and Ganelon set out south and east, close enough to the others that a shout could alert them if need be. Clay spotted few living creatures as they went, but the ones he did see were deeply unsettling. There were fleshless owls crouched in hollowed-out trunks, tracking their steps with eyes that glowed like embers. Birds the size of crows with long, hooked beaks perched in rows upon twisted boughs. He saw something disappear down a hole in the ground that looked distressingly like a grubby child with a long, ratlike tail.

  They trod carefully through a stand of trees with writhing white snakes for branches. The serpents stretched toward them as they passed, and more than once tried lunging and hissing loudly, hoping to catch them off guard, or to startle them into stepping within reach of another tree. Clay had seen that trick work before, and so had died yet another of Saga’s countless bards.

  Once, Clay heard the snap of a twig behind him and turned to find a huge black warg an arm’s reach away, so close he could feel the hot gust of its breath on his face. The monstrous wolf was the size of a Kaskar plough horse, and Clay had just begun composing his death scream (he was thinking something high-pitched, sort of a falling from a great height meets I’ve just shat my pants, with a touch of petulant little girl doesn’t get her way thrown in to spice things up) when he heard a deep growling behind him.

  Two wargs, his mind told him. You’re gonna need a new scream, Cooper.

  But then Ganelon brushed by his shoulder. The warrior’s teeth were bared, his face a frozen snarl, and the growl was his, growing louder, until he and the warg were nose to broad, wet snout. Ganelon’s growl became a throaty yell, and then a wild, bloodcurdling scream. The beast’s ears went flat against its skull, and a moment later it slunk back a step, then another, before turning and fleeing with its tail between its legs.

  Clay stood openmouthed as Ganelon turned and walked back past him without any commentary whatsoever.

  Strangely, they heard nothing from Gabe and Moog after that, which meant either they hadn’t heard it happen or were in no position to respond. In any case, that was probably bad.

  The smothering forest gave way to marshland and they were forced to tread carefully. Pools of miasmic slime gurgled and steamed; one misstep and he’d soon be short a boot—or a foot, if he didn’t pull it out fast enough. Clay couldn’t help but remember the sort of things they’d usually found in places like this: quivering oozes that devoured flesh and turned metal to rusted scrap, scuttling beetles that exploded if you mistakenly stepped on their shells. He had heard it said by an exceptionally clever bard that if you tried to number the ways you could die in the Heartwyld you’d be dead before you finished counting.

  His least favorite was a carnivorous plant with a grasping black tongue that mimicked the terrified shrieks of its past victims.

  “Helpmegodspleasehelpme!” it howled as they went by, and then pleaded with the voice of a frightened young woman: “Pleasestopithurtsithurtshelp.”

  And just when Clay thought he couldn’t be any more freaked-out, a skeleton in a soiled white wedding dress came shambling through the knee-deep muck. It clutched a wreath of dead flowers to its bony breast, and its empty sockets gazed mournfully at Clay as it waded past.

  He suppressed a shiver. He really, really hated this forest.

  “Oh, it’s not so bad,” said Ganelon, indicating to Clay that he’d spoken out loud without meaning to do so.

  “Not so bad?” he scoffed. “It’s like the … baddest place ever. Name one place that’s even remotely as bad as this.”

  “The Quarry,” Ganelon replied instantly.

  Clay said nothing, mostly because he had nothing at all worth saying. The two of them plodded along in uncomfortable silence for a while. They plunged back into a thickly wooded forest. The trees here were bent and gnarled, squatting like a colony of rotters beneath ashen cloaks. Something that looked identical to blood wept through fissures in their knotted trunks, and Clay could have sworn he heard a few of them weeping in the gathering dusk.

  “You can see here,” said Ganelon eventually. “You can hear and smell, even if it smells awful. And you can feel.” He reached to snag a leaf from a tree overhead. It crumbled in his hand and he tossed it to the putrid wind. “You can’t feel anything in the Quarry.”

  Clay ducked beneath a spanning spiderweb, careful not to graze it, lest its occupant come scurrying down from the darkness above. “I guess so,” he said. “But you were just a statue, right? So at least you didn’t know what you were missing.”

  “Is that what you think?” asked Ganelon.

  Something about the other man’s tone stopped Clay in his tracks. If he didn’t know better he might have thought the southerner sounded hurt. “What do you mean ‘Is that what I think?’ You were stone. I saw you.”

  Ganelon slowed, then stopped. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked discomfited, like he wished he hadn’t brought up the Quarry in the first place. “Stone is stone,” he said, cryptically. “But when you’re petrified … I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I mean, it’s magic, so maybe Moog would know more about it than I do.”

  Clay felt a premonition of dread flower in his gut. “So what are you saying? You were a statue … but you weren’t stone?”

  “Not really, no. I couldn’t see. I didn’t feel. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. But I was still there, inside.”

  Inside?

  Clay shook his head. “That’s … no …”

  Ganelon’s laugh was a bitter thing. “I ain’t lyin’, Slowhand.” He wheeled and resumed walking.

  Clay stood dumbfounded for so long that he was forced to jog to catch up. “Are you telling me you were alive in there? That you were awake? For nineteen years?”

  “Pretty much.” Ganelon didn’t look back. “Well, I guess I sort of slept sometimes, or at least my mind just shut itself down. But mostly I was awake, yeah.”

  Clay couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He’d assumed, like anyone would, that when you turned someone to stone they were simply
that: a stone. Accordingly, he had thought the prisoners of the Quarry to be, in a way, fortunate, since the entirety of their sentence, whether it was ten years or a thousand, would pass in the blink of an eye. But now Ganelon was telling him that all those statues, those people standing silent in the dark warren of that terrible place, were still conscious.

  What became of a mind left to languish for a thousand years? Or ten, even?

  Or nineteen? Clay felt ill, suddenly.

  “Ganelon,” he said, but the southerner marched on without slowing. “Ganelon, wait!”

  The warrior glanced over his shoulder. “What is it, Slowhand?”

  Clay fumbled for words. “I … I’m—”

  “Sorry?” Ganelon turned on him. “Well, don’t be. Being sorry don’t change anything.”

  “You must have hated us,” Clay reasoned. You must hate us still, he left unsaid.

  Ganelon shrugged. “Yeah, maybe. For a while.”

  “A while?”

  Finally Ganelon stopped. “Yeah, like, ten years or so. I hated Matrick for wanting to settle down with that brat princess. I hated Moog for wasting time trying to cure the rot instead of spending time with the one person he was trying to save. You know what the cure for the rot is, by the way? Don’t fucking come here. Ever. I hated Gabe for buying into that monster-love bullshit Valery was spouting all the time, and I—actually, you know what? I never hated you, Slowhand.”

  Clay swallowed. “No?”

  “No. But I did wonder where you’d gotten to, why you weren’t there when the Sultana’s men came for me. I’ve had less friends in this world than I have fingers, but I counted you among them. You’re honest, and brave, and too damn loyal for your own good. Hell, you’re just about the best man I’ve ever known, and so I thought: What kind of monster must I be, that even Clay Cooper gave up on me?”

  Clay gaped, speechless. He cast his eyes to the blackened earth, overcome by shame and sweeping guilt. I was tired, he might have said. Tired of fighting, of killing. Tired of Kallorek’s greed, and Matty’s drinking, and Moog’s antics, and Gabriel’s insufferable pride. I wanted to wash my hands clean of it all. And also: I thought you deserved it. You killed a prince, and a lot of innocent men besides. And after ten years of trying to make the world a safer place, I thought it would be safer without you.

  He might have said all of this, but instead he said nothing.

  “Never mind.” Ganelon stalked off, with Clay plodding sullenly behind. Before long they heard a dull roar overhead and concealed themselves beneath the eaves of hoary trees as the Dark Star sailed past.

  Larkspur’s thralls were peering over the rail in hope of spotting their fallen mistress. Clay caught himself thinking they were looking in vain. He’d seen her fall, struck by lightning—but he’d seen Matrick fall, too, and yet here he was traipsing through the Heartwyld in search of his friend’s corpse.

  He had a vague memory of sitting at his kitchen table not so very long ago, telling Gabriel there was no way he was going to Castia and no chance he would set foot in this awful forest ever again. But then a half-asleep nine-year-old girl had asked him a single question and convinced him otherwise …

  Moments later they heard a woman cry out in pain. The sound had come from a thick copse of trees up ahead, and by the time Clay took three steps Ganelon had crashed through the brush and disappeared altogether. When Clay finally fought through the tangled branches and stumbled into the clearing beyond, he saw the southerner facing down a scrawny troll in a lumpy hat who’d been crouching over Matrick and Larkspur—both of whom, he noted, were very much alive.

  “Wait!” cried Matrick.

  The troll raised a hand in what Clay belatedly realized was a friendly greeting. Ganelon, however, realized no such thing, and so hacked the creature’s arm off at the shoulder. The troll toppled backward. Matrick threw himself between it and Ganelon, who was already hefting his axe for another swing.

  “Wait! Stop! He’s with us!”

  Ganelon froze. “He’s … wait, what?”

  Matrick had scarcely opened his mouth to explain when Moog exploded into the clearing brandishing an alchemical globe and howling, “Kill it with fire!”

  “No!” Matrick shouted, once again putting himself in harm’s way. “Don’t kill him with anything! Guys, this is Taino. He’s helping us. He’s a doctor.”

  “Wheechdoktor,” corrected the troll, seemingly unconcerned that Ganelon had just dismembered him. The wound hardly bled at all, and thanks to the regenerative nature of trolls the limb would likely grow back within the hour. He stood, brushing dirt from his behind with his remaining hand, then straightened his lumpy hat and clapped Matrick on the shoulder as if the two were old friends. “Me was jus makin sure your frens here were irie. He an she took a long bad fall, ya know.”

  Gabriel, who had trailed the wizard into the clearing, motioned for Ganelon to stow his axe. “We know,” he said. “Matty, are you okay?”

  Aside from a few scratches on the side of his face, Matrick looked better now than when they’d found him sitting on the rocks below the Teeth of Adragos after his bogus funeral. He spread his hands and chuckled. “Somehow, yeah.” He jabbed a thumb toward the daeva. “She sort of flew most of the way down. I just hung on for dear life.”

  The troll flashed a brown-toothed grin. “Ay, dis one’s proper fine. He’s an ironmon, no doubt!” He waved his hand at Larkspur, who was sitting with her legs splayed and her head lolling on her chest. “Dis one ain’t so lucky. She done took a fierce knock to da head, an she’s gotta busted wing, see?”

  Clay did see. Larkspur’s right wing was folded behind her, but the other jutted crookedly beyond her left shoulder. He looked around for her swords and was grateful when he didn’t spot them anywhere nearby.

  Matrick cleared his throat. “Oh, yeah, regarding that knock to the head …”

  He fell quiet as Larkspur stirred, blinking groggily. She looked around at each of them before her gaze settled on Ganelon. “Hi,” she said brightly, and to Clay’s amazement her smile bore no trace of malevolence whatsoever. “I’m Sabbatha.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Drums and Drugs and Dreams

  “Who the frigid hell is Sabbatha?” Clay asked it quietly enough that Larkspur, walking behind them with Ganelon, Gabriel, and Moog, wouldn’t hear him. The witchdoctor Taino, who had offered his home as a refuge to wait out the perilous night, loped a few steps ahead, humming quietly to himself.

  Matrick glanced over his shoulder before leaning in to whisper, “Kit said it used to be her name, remember? Before she became a bounty hunter and all that. She came to for a bit earlier, and she was … well, she wasn’t … Listen, I have no idea what happened to her. She broke more than just her wing, I think.” He rapped on his skull. “She’s crazy.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s hope she stays that way.” Clay glanced over his shoulder. Despite her injuries the daeva was smiling and chatting amicably with Moog. She laughed at something the wizard said and Clay felt his gut turn a somersault, which meant her powers of attraction remained intact.

  For the meantime, they’d sated her curiosity by telling her The Carnal Court was her ship, and that they’d hired her in Conthas to take them over the Heartwyld, to Castia. Thankfully, she’d believed it.

  “Clay?”

  “What?”

  “Do you think?”

  Better than I listen, apparently. “Do I think what?” he asked.

  “That maybe she’s like this for good? Maybe that bump on the head sort of … I don’t know … knocked the evil out of her.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” said Clay.

  Matrick rubbed at his jowls. “Okay, yeah. Wishful thinking, I guess. So, what do we do with her?”

  Break her other wing and run for it was his first instinct, but Clay only sighed. “I don’t know. Wait and see, I guess. And hope our new friend ‘Sabbatha’ sticks around for a while.”

  The troll made his home beneath the c
urtaining shroud of a mighty willow. It was dark beyond the draping eaves, though there were hanging clusters of pear-shaped fruit that gave off a queer violet glow. The troll led them on a meandering stone path between rows of tall, fragrant plants. When Matrick slipped and stumbled into one, Taino chuckled to himself. “Is dark ere, ya? Lemme getcha some shiny, fren.” He reached up to a low branch and plucked one of the glowing pods, at which point Clay realized it wasn’t any sort of fruit at all.

  It was a bat. Taino curled its talons around one of his long fingers and set off again, holding the sleeping creature aloft like a lamp.

  “Fascinating!” said Moog, and Clay recalled with a shiver the luminescent spiders scattered like stars across the roof of the wizard’s tower.

  The tree itself was decked with vibrant fungal shelves, beneath which were beds of what appeared to be perfectly harmless moss. The troll bade them sit while he shuffled about, pulling dry mushrooms from the pointed barbs of low-hanging vines and replacing them with fresh ones from an old leather bag slung over his shoulder. Once pierced, the mushrooms gave off a soft light, so that within minutes the lower reaches of the tree were festooned in colourful strands of phosphorescent fungi.

  When he finished Taino trotted over, grinning. “Sorry to wait. Is plenty more easy wid two arms.”

  Ganelon looked away and mumbled something that might have been sorry.

  “No worries,” their host assured him. “Everyting cool. Be gud as new soon, see?” He proffered the stump where his new left arm was already half-formed, growing like a dry sponge soaked in water. He then ambled over to where a big iron cauldron burbled above a bed of smouldering embers and withdrew a brace of fleshy lizards from his satchel. “You lot ungry?” he asked.

  Moog leapt to the rescue, removing his hat and taking orders: mildly spiced lamb for Clay, pie for Matrick, a fillet of pink trout for Gabriel, and steak for Ganelon, who had apparently decided that eating from a hat was preferable to whatever inhabited the witchdoctor’s master stock. Larkspur asked for a pickled banana sandwich and clapped delightedly when Moog produced it with a flourish. Lastly, the wizard presented Taino with a heaping plate of butter-string pasta, which the troll ate with his hand, slurping down noodles and very obviously enjoying himself.