Witchbreaker (Dragon Apocalypse)

by James Maxey

  From outside the wall, the pygmy giggled.

  She scrambled to the door of the tent, wearing only her cotton slip. She ran around the canvas walls and found the pale pygmy glowing in the moonlight. He was standing a few feet in front of the heart-shaped boulder. He laughed harder as he saw her, tears running down his cheeks.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “You,” the pygmy gasped, pointing at her. He spoke in the Silver Tongue, but she didn’t recognize his accent. “The demons in the Forest of Torment told me I should bear witness to the return of the Destroyer.” He wiped his wrinkled cheeks. “I can’t believe they mistook you for something so dangerous.”

  “Demons? Forest of Torment? What the hell are you talking about?”

  The pygmy shook his head. “It’s precisely hell that I’m speaking of, but there’s no point in explaining. You’re nothing but a desperate and foolish girl.” He sighed. “Demons. I should have known they were trying to trick me. The dragon will devour you and return to his slumber.”

  “The dragon?” she asked. “Are you talking about Rott? What do you mean, he’ll devour me?”

  “You’re nothing but a tick, clinging to Rott’s flesh. You may feast upon him only a little while before he catches you between his teeth.”

  “Who are you? How do you know this?”

  He turned away, facing the boulder. He glanced over his shoulder and said, in a serious tone, “I’ve had my fill of conversation with the dead this day. At least those other souls accepted their fate.” He took another step toward the boulder before looking back again. “Struggle if it amuses you. In the end, this is all there is of life. Take some comfort in the notion that your death may serve as a cautionary tale for others. Now, I must depart. I’m late for the Inquisition.”

  There was the sound of leaves crunching from the left side of the boulder. Brand appeared around the corner and asked, “Who are you talking to, Sorrow?”

  Sorrow glanced at him, then back to the pygmy. But the pygmy was gone.

  She ran forward and placed her hands on the rock. “Did you see him?”

  “See who?”

  “A pygmy. He was albino.”

  “They’re all albino, I think,” said Brand. “They just dye themselves different colors.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No.”

  “But you heard us talking?”

  “I heard you talking, sure,” said Brand. “But I never heard the other half of the conversation. I thought you might be sleepwalking.”

  She shook her head. “I think I saw a ghost.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t sound so skeptical,” she said. “You’ve been to the Sea of Wine. You know that souls survive death.”

  “I don’t doubt the existence of ghosts,” said Brand. “But I’ve never met one. I have, on the other hand, met sleepwalkers. And crazy people.”

  “I’m neither.”

  “Just throwing out some theories.” He stretched his back and yawned. “What time is it?”

  “Time for us to dig,” said Sorrow, heading back to her tent.

  “Can’t we wait until dawn?”

  “You can go back to sleep if you wish. I’ve got things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “For starters, I’ve got to move this boulder.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I’m pretty sure the pygmy just walked into it.”

  “You think it’s hollow?”

  “I don’t know. But it occurs to me if it really did roll down the mountain and came to rest here, it’s probably sitting on top of more graves. Maybe no treasure hunters have ever dug here. With a house-sized rock on top of them, on this high ground, maybe these graves have been protected from rain. Maybe the skeletons haven’t rotted.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes. While you strike me as a person who generally gets what she wants, I highly doubt that golem of yours is strong enough to move this boulder.”

  “I have more tricks up my sleeve than mere brute force,” she said, looking back at him as she reached her tent.

  “Fine,” he said, scratching his head. “You can show me your tricks in daylight. Right now, I’m going back to... to...”

  His voice faded off as he stared at her. She followed his gaze and realized he was staring at her feet.

  “Are you... are you wearing...”

  “These aren’t boots,” she said. “I think... I think I might be turning into a dragon. I’m hoping I can find something in one of these graves that will help me avoid that. Perhaps you can grasp my sense of urgency.”

  “I see,” said Brand. He nodded, then headed back toward his tent. “Let me grab my shovel.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  CLATTER

  AS BRAND WENT to wake Bigsby, Sorrow ran her hands along the boulder. The surface was heavily weathered and cracked. Vines had dug deep into crevices in the rock. Sorrow closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the stone. She took a deep breath and calmly expanded her senses. Since tapping into Rott’s power, she’d been more aware of the decay that surrounded her. She’d noticed it first when she’d returned to the Freewind from the Great Sea Above. The second she’d stepped onto the ship, she’d felt the torn and broken wood fibers in the timbers beneath her feet and been keenly aware that the ship was doomed.

  Worse, when she’d looked at Gale Romer, the ship’s captain, she’d been able to see that Gale was dying. Not in an immediate, urgent sense, but Gale was well along the path of her inevitable fate. Gale was only forty, robust and active, strengthened by life at sea, but Sorrow’s new awareness had focused on the woman’s gray hairs and weathered skin. It was as if she could watch Gale’s life slowly but inexorably seeping away.

  Save for dealing with Eddy, she’d barely used her powers since returning to the material world. Her hyper-awareness of the creeping decay had faded. But it was time to summon that sense once more. Just as humans didn’t last forever, this imposing mound of stone before her was on a one way trip toward becoming sand. She spread her arms across the rock and could feel the veins of weakness that radiated through the seemingly solid surface.

  She closed her hands around the vines that corseted the rock. The roots and tendrils had weakened the stone over the centuries, but now the thick vines did as much to hold the boulder together as tear it apart. Fortunately, they were easily removed. She closed her eyes and found the dark doorway inside her, carefully opening it. The vines in her grasp crumbled to dust. She opened her eyes as the rot spread through the remaining vines, which twisted and crackled as they withered. In moments, the last of the vegetation peeled away, leaving a ring of dirt around the boulder. She took a deep breath and willed the portal to close. It wasn’t so difficult, when things were quiet and calm. But could she ever control the force during the heat of combat?

  “Not bad,” said Brand, who stood behind her holding his shovel.

  “I’m just getting started,” she said. She motioned for Trunk. He was now armed with a large sledgehammer. Sorrow pointed toward the top of the stone, where it dipped down into a narrow depression that formed the indentation of the heart-shape. “Climb,” she said.

  Trunk’s inhuman limbs had no trouble scrambling up the cracked surface. Sorrow guided him with a string of commands to what she sensed was the boulder’s weakest spot.

  By now Bigsby had left his tent and found his brother. He looked like he was still half-asleep. He mumbled, “Whash going on?”

  “Sorrow’s hunting for ghosts,” said Brand.

  “Ghosts?” asked Bigsby, rubbing his eyes. “That’s crazy.”

  Sorrow bit her lip to avoid responding. She couldn’t let the dwarf distract her. She finally had Trunk right where she needed him.

  “Strike the crack before you!” she shouted. “Use your full strength!”

  Trunk swung the hammer back behind him. It cut through the air with a loud WHOOSH and smacked into the rock with a deafening BANG. All through
out the waking jungle, monkeys and birds screeched in alarm.

  Sorrow turned and said, “Gentlemen, I’m fairly certain I know how the stone will fall, but I suggest you take a few steps back as a precaution.”

  Bigsby’s eyes narrowed. Sorrow could tell she was about to be scolded for addressing the two men as ‘gentlemen.’ She quickly added, “You also, your highness.”

  Behind her, the stone was popping and trembling as the shock of the impact continued to reverberate. She stepped away as the loudest crack yet made her flinch. She looked back in time to see the two halves of the heart-shaped boulder split, then tumble away from each other. Both of the top-heavy pieces flipped as they tumbled down the respective halves of the hill they’d been perched upon.

  Trunk had been straddling the crack; he tumbled into the shallow pit of black earth left by the departing stones and landed on his feet, looking none the worse for the experience. She was deeply satisfied by the performance of the golem. The moons she spent on top quality lumber were an excellent investment.

  “That was a lucky break,” said Brand. “What would you have done if the stone had split, but just sat there?”

  “That wasn’t going to happen. I could sense the tension between the two halves of the stone. Each half was held in balance by the other, but doomed to fall once split. Once you know how to look at the material world, it’s not that difficult to understand.”

  Brand shook his head as he looked down the hill to where half of the boulder had come to rest. “I think there’s a metaphor here about broken hearts, but I’m too deprived of coffee to piece it together.”

  “I shall record in my journal that on this day you were at a loss for words,” said Sorrow.

  Brand laughed. “I don’t think I’ve heard you make a joke before.”

  Sorrow shrugged. “I’m not certain why you think I’ve made one now.”

  She grabbed a shovel and carried it to Trunk, swapping it for the sledgehammer. The compressed earth beneath the boulder was broken and jumbled from the movement of the stone. There were no clues to guide her to a likely place to start digging, other than the fact that the other graves seemed to be laid out in predictable rows. Following from the row that led up the hill, the stone possibly covered a half dozen graves. She eyeballed the nearest grave and used it to locate what might be the first grave in from the edge. Brand used the same strategy to find a grave on the opposite side.

  “Shall we race?” Brand asked as he pushed his shovel into the soil.

  “It really wouldn’t be a fair contest. Trunk is far stronger and never tires.”

  “You’re on,” Brand said, as dirt flew over his shoulder. Bigsby grabbed a shovel and joined his brother.

  “Dig,” she said to Trunk, feeling a slight urge to complain that the brothers had a head start. But she’d never agreed to a contest. Why should she be concerned about who would win?

  Of course, ten minutes later, when Trunk’s shovel struck something hard, she couldn’t resist the urge to shout, “Victory!”

  Brand and Bigsby had barely dug a pit four feet deep, while Trunk was already in a hole down to his shoulders.

  “Congrats,” said Brand. “What did you find?”

  Sorrow knelt to see better. What had she found? Trunk continued to remove dirt, revealing a layer of flat black slates, looking for all the world like roofing shingles. The boulder had been as big as a house, but she hadn’t expected to find an actual structure under it.

  Brand climbed out of his hole and wandered over.

  “It looks like a roof,” Sorrow said.

  The shingles were rectangles two feet long and a foot wide, with rough edges. Once Trunk had made the hole wide enough, Brand dropped in to help clear the dirt. It soon became apparent the slates were stacked into an arch. The structure was about five feet across, but she couldn’t guess how long as they hadn’t found either end yet. So far, about six feet of the arch was exposed.

  Brand knelt and tested his luck at lifting one of the shingles. He let out a little grunt as he lifted it to his chest, then stood and pushed it out of the hole.

  “Are those heavy?” she asked.

  “They ain’t light,” he said.

  “Climb out. Let Trunk remove the stones.”

  Brand did so. Trunk lifted the shingles with no hint of effort, revealing another layer of stones beneath. Under this, something glinted through the gaps. Sorrow leaned low to be certain. As, one by one, the stones were pulled away, she could see that they were exposing what looked to be a coffin made of solid glass.

  That wasn’t the only thing being exposed, however. For as Trunk stood to lift out a slate tile, a shaft of sunlight fell upon the first rectangle of open glass, illuminating the contents. While Sorrow had little personal experience with male anatomy, she couldn’t help but think that what the light revealed strongly resembled the naked crotch of a hairy man.

  Brand and Bigsby apparently noticed as well.

  Bigsby asked, softly, “Is that... what I think it is?”

  “I’m almost certain it is,” said Brand.

  Of course, there was more beneath the glass than preserved genitalia. As Trunk continued uncovering the glass coffin, he revealed the man’s torso. The body was covered in kinky black hair over skin white as cotton. Despite his deathly pallor, the man was an impressive physical specimen. He was muscular almost to the point of grotesquerie. Sorrow wondered if he might be a half-seed of some kind, perhaps a man blended with a bear. His shoulders were far broader than any she’d ever seen on a living man. His beastly appearance was compounded by fingernails at least four inches long, thick and gnarled.

  Yet when his face was at last revealed, she abandoned any thought that the figure before her was anything other than human. Though his face was mostly concealed by a thick black beard, and despite the long hair draping around his head having the fullness of a lion’s mane, there was something deeply human about the man’s face. There was a gentleness to it, a look of peace that reminded her of a sleeping child.

  “Is he breathing?” Bigsby asked.

  Sorrow furrowed her brow as she stared intently at the man’s chest. It was perfectly still. She also noted the man didn’t possess an aura. All living things carried a faint glow of energy she’d been trained to detect, and this man was completely devoid of inner light. “I’m almost certain he’s dead.”

  “Quite well preserved, isn’t he?” Brand asked.

  “Perhaps he isn’t even real,” said Sorrow. “You can craft a figure out of wax that looks eerily lifelike. It’s difficult to believe anything that once lived has been buried for centuries without rotting.”

  “He’s in glass,” said Bigsby. “Maybe he’s pickled.”

  Sorrow suspected the light would refract differently if the coffin had been filled with fluid. But she did notice that the coffin didn’t appear to have any seams. Since she knew the art of glass weaving, she knew it was possible to craft a container, heat it to drive out air, then seal it before it could refill, creating a vacuum. The weaver who’d taught her this trick many years ago had used it to preserve flowers. Could the effect be scaled up to preserve a body? Were walls of thick glass enough to hide this corpse from Rott’s gaze?

  “Well, as treasure goes, this is something of a dud. He’s not even wearing any jewelry,” said Brand.

  “Really?” Sorrow asked. “We encounter something this mysterious and all you can think about is the lack of loot?”

  “The Black Swan might buy him,” said Bigsby, now speaking in his normal, male voice. “She used to buy all kinds of weird stuff from Stagger.”

  “I’m here for knowledge, not wealth,” said Sorrow. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to preserve his body. Aren’t you curious who cast the spell? For that matter, aren’t you even more curious who he is?”

  Bigsby nodded. He said, once more in his annoying falsetto, “Maybe it’s the knight.”

  “What knight?” she asked.

  “You know. The knigh
t from Knight’s Castle.”

  “Stark Tower? The Witchbreaker?”

  “Why not?” Bigsby squeaked.

  Sorrow sighed. “You know, real women don’t sound like that. Just use your normal voice.”

  Bigsby put his hands on his hips and pushed his voice even higher as he said, “This is my normal voice.”

  Sorrow was sorry she’d brought the subject up. She returned to the topic at hand. “I can’t imagine it’s Tower. He was a hero to the church. They wouldn’t bury him naked in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Do you want me to smash open the coffin?” asked Brand.

  “No,” said Sorrow. “I can weave glass, so opening the coffin isn’t a problem. But I don’t want to tamper with anything before I get the chance to do some research. We’ll need to pull this coffin out and take it back to Commonground. I’m not selling anything to the Black Swan, but she might have some information as to who he is.”

  “That sounds like a lot of work,” said Brand.

  “I’ll see that you’re well compensated for your efforts. For now, let’s continue digging the hole you started. Perhaps our mystery man has a brother.”

  The second grave went quickly, thanks to the combined efforts of both Brand and Trunk. They were aided by the fact that the soil of this grave was bone dry, starting a few feet below the surface, and crumbled easily beneath the assault of the shovels. Sorrow stood near the edge of the grave, chewing her nails. What if this grave held another preserved body? Of all the things she’d imagined digging up, a naked man had never entered her list of possibilities.

  At the same depth as the first grave, they again hit a stone arch. The structure soon proved to be much larger. They spent hours clearing out an area twice the size of the original grave, and still had failed to find the final shape of the building.

  Impatient that their efforts weren’t yielding results more quickly, Brand dropped to his knees and pulled away a layer of slate tiles. His efforts only revealed more stones. He was completely drenched in sweat as he kept pulling aside fresh layers. Finally, two feet down, he reached the last of the slate. Glass glinted in the now dimming light. He leaned in close to stare into the dark interior.