by Dave Gross
I hacked at the hedge with the enchanted sword, but whatever its powers, it was no more effective against the thick vegetation than any common blade. I rushed through the circuitous path until the light of the sword revealed a wet black bench beneath an enormous topiary figure of what might once have been a giant boar. The beast’s head was missing, and long gouges ran along its nearest flank. I slipped on the wet path, and for a mad instant I imagined I had trod in the blood of the enormous vegetable sculpture. It was indeed blood steaming in the chill autumn air, splashed all over the path and the nearest hedge walls. Among the pools, I spied fragments of bone and ruined scraps of flesh. A hank of pale hair clung to the base of the bench, and nearby lay a tangle of narrow cloth strips that had been the chambermaid’s dress. Nearby lay my satchel, glistening with gore.
Hot and sticky fluid dripped upon my face. I raised the sword to fend off whatever hovered above me. The thing screamed in fury and levitated farther away. Past the blinding light of the sword, I perceived only a vague impression of a tangle of dangling gourds and vines, all slick with black blood.
More than the sight or the horrid smell, some invisible aura of the thing filled me with absolute abhorrence. Every nerve in my body was poised to flee, but an ineffable indignation fired my heart to deny the impulse. Before I could think of what I was doing, I snatched a scroll from my waist and riffled it upward.
The spell was born as a spark but soon grew to the size of a man’s fist before striking the monstrosity above me. There it blossomed into a blinding cloud of flame, throwing me to the ground and blasting the hedge walls away in every direction. Where the blaze touched the foliage, a hundred tiny fires raised their infant cries.
I scrabbled away, retrieved my satchel, and ran by the light of the sword to the maze’s exit. There I sheathed the weapon to conceal its light. I expended another riffle scroll to conjure a phantom steed, and then a translucent horse fearlessly stood beside the fire, allowing me to mount before bolting away from the conflagration. We ran south toward the ferry until I could no longer hear the baying of the pursuing hounds, whereupon I turned the steed westward, toward the mountains of Virlych and the object of my quest.
Chapter Twelve
Children of the Damned
When I snapped his arm, the boy’s scream cut deep into me. I felt the eyes of the old women on the back of my neck as he thrashed and wailed. Azra cooed and stroked his protruding forehead. Tudor moaned and looked up at her. Standing above his head, Azra signed to me, and I did my best to translate it into Varisian for him.
“Good, she says,” I told him. “You did good. Only a little more.”
I pulled hard on his arm, and he screamed to burst my ears.
The Sczarni werewolves had followed us to the accursed village, trailing Azra’s wagon in human form like a line of immigrants. I don’t know where they kept their clothes, but the morning after my fight with Dragos they were all dressed and waiting at their own camp about forty yards from ours. They had just disassembled a tent. I recognized the fabric as that of the one I had first seen in Oracle Alley back in the market of Caliphas. When I looked up from dousing our campfire, it was nowhere to be seen. None of them carried anything larger than the leather satchel borne by the big barrel-chested man I’d heard Malena call Cezar, and they had no pack animals, not even a pull cart. Another mystery of the Sczarni.
Uncertain how they would treat me this morning, I hesitated before approaching them. When finally I walked toward them, Azra emerged from the wagon and snapped her fingers for my attention and directed me to finish breaking camp. When she saw the Sczarni waiting nearby, she scowled. Within minutes, she harnessed Luminita and hitched her to the wagon. When she slapped the reins, I had to run catch the wagon and climb up beside her. Looking back, I saw the Sczarni following us on foot.
“You invite them along?” I asked.
She looked at me as though I’d again said something stupid.
“Why are they following us?
She snorted her derision. Prince of Wolves, she signed.
“It wasn’t my idea,” I told her. “I only hope it’s not one of those situations where you’re king for a month and then they eat you.” She didn’t smile, but it was only mostly a joke. The boss had told me wild stories about Mwangi tribes who proclaimed visiting explorers their new king. Most of these unlucky travelers figured Desna had smiled upon them until they noticed the ceremonial bath was getting awfully hot.
“Say,” I said. A bad thought had occurred to me. “This is the second time I’ve had a tussle with a werewolf. I got chewed up pretty bad both times. I’m not going to ...you know.” I made claws of my hands. “Grr.”
She laughed, and I counted it a triumph.
You ate chicken, she signed.
“Yeah, so?”
Full of demon. She pointed at me. No room for wolf.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said, but maybe I did. Maybe the werewolf curse only worked on proper men, not hellspawn.
“I’ll tell Dragos he’s still the head man,” I suggested. “Send them on their way.”
She gave me another exasperated look. Not prince, Dragos, she signed.
“Then who?” I asked. “Was it Vili?”
No more prince, she signed.
“Why not?”
Ask wolves, she signed impatiently. But do not trust. Show weakness, they eat you.
“I’ll stretch my legs,” I said. I was still stiff after she healed me again after the fight. I’d been surprised that she also healed Dragos. I wondered just how far this agreement between them went. Were they allies? I didn’t think so, judging from the looks she gave them, but then I didn’t expect a cleric of Desna to be on such agreeable terms with a pack of Sczarni werewolves, either.
I walked beside the wagon. The Sczarni kept up what looked an easy pace for them. Now that I knew what they were, it was no surprise that they were all lean and long-legged. I should have seen the clues even before Vili showed me his teeth back in Caliphas. Dragos had the same thick, converging eyebrows as his son, and I noticed several of the others, including Milosh the pickpocket, had slightly pointed ears with tufts of hair at the tips. There was no looking at them now without noticing how wide their mouths were, and how prominent their canine teeth.
Malena hastened to walk beside me. She offered me a burlap parcel.
I took the package. Inside were a couple of hares, skinned and gutted.
“For you,” she said in Taldane.
I nodded thanks. “Listen,” I said. “This might sound ridiculous, but your people don’t, say, eat your prince on the full moon or something?”
“Not so ridiculous,” she said with a breathy laugh. Her Varisian accent was every bit as sensual as I’d remembered, but at the same time it made pins of the hair on the nape of my neck. “But no, we are not cannibals. Should Dragos kill you in later challenge, you will not be eaten.”
“That’s comforting.” I thought about what she had said as we walked beside the wagon. And I thought about what she hadn’t said. “When you say you aren’t cannibals ...?”
“That means we do not eat our people.”
“Right,” I said. “So Azra, she is one of your people?”
“Of course not. She is a powerful healer. We respect her territory. She respects our ways. Sometimes we trade.”
Beside us, Azra slapped the reins. Luminita picked up her pace, and we had to step quickly to keep up. It was little effort for long-legged Malena, but I was on the verge of running.
“How do you know which ones are her people?”
“They mark their villages,” she said, drawing in the air. I recognized the wings of Desna, but then she added a coil.
“Desna and Pharasma?”
Malena nodded. “Birth, dreams, death,” she said. “All of life. She is very powerful witch.”
Although worship of some other gods is tolerated back home, all are subordinate to Asmodeus, the Prince of Law. Outside of Cheliax,
he’s more commonly known as the Prince of Lies. Either way, the people of my country are used to worshiping more than one god, even if one is the one you worship in public, the other only behind closed doors.
“Tonight, come to our camp. I have a tent,” said Malena. She threw a brief glance toward Azra’s wagon and then looked full into my eyes and added. “I would never make you sleep outside.”
Behind us, Dragos scowled at her. I resisted the urge to taunt him with a smile. Beside him were another man and young Milosh, imitating his elder’s expression. The other Sczarni—two women, two men, and another teenager whose sex I couldn’t guess—walked with their gazes on the horizon. I got the sense there were mixed feelings among the Sczarni about this whole Prince of Wolves thing, and it wasn’t hard to see who was on which side.
Azra slapped the reins again, and I got the message.
“I’ll think about it,” I said to Malena, thinking of hot baths. “Let’s talk more at the village.”
“No,” said Malena. “We do not enter that place.”
“Why?” I asked. She made that evil eye gesture and said no more. The wagon continued to pick up speed, so I dashed for the driver’s seat and climbed aboard. Flushed from the run, I smiled at Azra and showed her the hares.
She turned her head, lifted her chin, and ignored me for the rest of the journey.
Long before we reached the village, I knew we were entering cursed territory. We passed the burned ruins of a farmhouse, and from a nearby tree hung the corpses of an entire flock of sheep. Azra made the sign of Pharasma over her heart and encouraged Luminita to move faster. All I could think of was the time it must have taken for someone to tie all those nooses and pull them up into those branches. Then I thought of what would motivate a man to do that, and I felt queasy.
Our destination lay at the eastern foot of the Virlych arm of the Hungry Mountains, a craggy range of gray stone and black forests. Its tallest peaks vanished into the clouds. Low-lying mists pooled among the trees and through the precipitous valleys, their movements contrary to the prevailing wind. Strange colors lurked within those vapors, the sickening hues of gangrenous wounds.
The first signs of habitation were the lonely effigies mounted in the harvested fields. They differed from southern scarecrows in two respects: the sacks that formed their heads blazed with garish embroidery suggesting leering faces, and between their wicker legs jutted enormous carved phalluses. I’d seen enough fertility fetishes in the boss’s library to catch the gist, but it still made me chuckle. Azra looked at me, puzzled. I guessed she didn’t think it was so funny. We followed the road over a round hill and descended into a small valley blighted by the ugliest village I have ever seen.
To call the buildings hovels would be to give the term a bad name. About twenty ramshackle structures of weathered gray wood squatted within an irregular border formed by a fence painted with what must have been tar. Stuck all along the fence were glittering bits of broken glass, colored beads, feathers, chips of pottery, and all manner of colorful garbage. The nearby fields had all been gleaned down to the soil, which here was not the rich black I’d seen elsewhere in Ustalav but a ruddy brown mix of soil and clay. Sheep and chickens roamed the avenues between the shabby little houses. Pigs wallowed in a large pen, mercifully on the other side of the village, and up on the nearby hills I spied a flock of sheep. Among them was a figure I took at first for a giant. Upon seeing our wagon, he whooped and hollered a word over and over while running down toward us. He repeated it six or seven times before I realized it was Azra’s name mangled by a cleft palate.
As we drove near the fence, more villagers rushed out to open the gate. My first good look at them nearly turned my stomach. They looked like freak show rejects.
Many of them had the tiny pin heads I’d seen only in the sketches of bizarre Mwangi tribesmen in the boss’s library. The only difference was that these people were clearly Varisian, but with short, conical skulls and weirdly uniform facial features. Others had malformed limbs, including one legless fellow who waddled toward us on a pair of arms that resembled plucked goose wings. One was a walking skeleton, nearly seven feet tall but not a stone heavier than I am. His clothes draped over him like the canvas concealing a new statue.
They clamored for Azra, and their jumbled voices sounded like a dozen different languages. I had to concentrate to recognize the language as Varisian. Those who didn’t have obvious speech impediments seemed to have adopted those of their neighbors, but there was no consensus among them. The babble added a headache to the vertigo their distorted faces gave me.
For a second it appeared they would swarm Azra and pull her from the wagon, but she passed me the reins and went willingly into their arms. Each of them wanted to touch her hair or the cloth of her garments, and she didn’t so much as flinch at their hideous appearance. Women with faces like rotten squashes pressed root-like infants into her arms, and she kissed their cheeks as the crowd escorted her into the village. All the while they jabbered at her, but she seemed to understand it all, nodding and signing back or miming her replies.
I looked behind us. There was no sign of the Sczarni, as Malena had warned me. For a fleeting moment, despite the danger, I wished I had stayed with them instead of entering this accursed village. At least I had the donkey to tend to, a good excuse to stay well back from the freaks.
“Just you and me, sweetheart,” I said to Luminita, slapping her reins lightly. One of the larger buildings was a stable with several empty stalls. I drove there and jumped off, approaching Luminita in a wide circle. I hadn’t noticed Azra’s casting her calming charm on the beast this morning, and I wasn’t ready to take it on faith that the donkey wouldn’t stomp me into the mud when I reached for her harness.
“I hope you were watching closely when I beat the hell out of that werewolf last night,” I told her. “Not that I’m threatening you, Luminita, but you and I have a certain history of kicking.”
She remained motionless, turning her head to keep an eye on me. I reached carefully for her bridle, but she tossed her head out of reach.
“Damn it!”
An inarticulate voice called out. I turned to see that giant running up to me, one finger digging around in his nose. It was almost but not quite impossible to understand him. He’d said something like, “Let me get that.”
I waved a hand toward Luminita. “Be my guest.”
A string of drool dangled from the corner of his mouth as he came forward to remove Luminita’s harness. I stepped back to avoid getting any on me. Somewhat closer to seven than six feet tall, he looked like a husky teenage boy except for his jutting cliff of a forehead, a hare lip, and ears that could have been a couple of heads of shriveled cauliflower. His eyes were far too close together. He favored his left arm, which had an extra crook in it. At the time, I assumed it was just another of the hundred birth defects I’d seen among his neighbors. It did not seem to impair him as he unhitched the wagon and led Luminita into the stable.
“Huh!” said the giant, slapping himself on the chest with a sound deeper than a bass drum. His finger immediately returned to mining his nose. “Tudor!”
I tapped my chest. “Radovan,” I said in my best Varisian inflection. I still had trouble with anything more than simple sentences, but common phrases came to mind more quickly. “Thanks for help.”
He stuck out his sticky hand. While I’m not the squeamish type, I stepped back.
“Must go,” I said. “Azra ...waits.”
“Huh huh!” he said, bobbing his head and grinning.
Azra was nowhere in sight, but I guessed her location from the crowd of villagers beside one of the shacks. They peered through the window and relayed reports to those who could not see inside.
Most of them were women, I noticed, and despite my initial impression, not all of them suffered from obvious defects. That said, you couldn’t hold a beauty contest in this village. Even the least homely of the villagers would have sent a legless pirate fleeing.
Their faces appeared to have been slightly crushed from all sides. Something was grinding down on them.
I felt a chill from above and looked up at the mountains. There was no thunder, but queer lights pulsed in the shadows beneath the cloud line.
I strolled the lanes between the hovels to stretch my legs, and soon the local gang was following me. The eldest couldn’t have been much older than ten, but her face looked like a crone’s. Even the youngest had deep lines etched around her eyes. A fingerless boy clutched my hand between paddle and thumb, looking up expectantly. His irises were lozenge-shaped and the color of egg yolk. Tiny islands of the same color floated in the whites of his eyes. It took an effort not to withdraw my hand.
“Hello,” he said, tugging at me. He led me into the village as the other freakish children followed.
They showed me a puddle that smelled like equal parts rainwater and goat piss. Their intention wasn’t clear until I saw movement in the water. The children screamed and scrambled after the three-legged frog trying to escape their clutches. Sweet Desna, I thought. In this village, even the vermin are cursed.
Before the little herd could trample the thing, I reached in and snatched up the frog. It puffed its throat and blinked. I offered it to the flipper-handed boy, but he recoiled. The eldest girl took it from me. Her smile was that of any little girl, and I had to wonder whether she would die of old age before she turned fifteen.
Before I could make my escape, the children dragged me to another of their favorite sites. We crept up beneath a windowsill on which a pair of berry pies cooled. The children raised their noses to sniff the sweet aroma and took turns daring each other to stick a finger in. When I reached up to steal one for them, they squealed in protest. They spoke so fast I caught only “Tudor” something-something “hungry,” so I left it alone.
We made a circuit of the village, pausing to skip stones across the sheep pond or pat some friendly mongrels. We paused at a barn long enough for the eldest girl, Rusa, to recite the tale of the day a boy had gone missing until he was found trapped inside, “treed” by an aggressive goat but unable to call out for help because he was mute. She spoke slowly and clearly enough that I understood almost every word. Her tale renewed my appreciation for Azra, who not only communicated well without a tongue but somehow also still channeled the magic of her goddess. Or goddesses. I still did not fully understand what she did, and I’d never understand how she did it.
