by Ian Whates
Makin took a step back. For a moment in place of swirling smoke he saw a line of brittle blue sky. Come morning this place would be blackened spars, fallen walls. Years ago, when they had lifted him from that ditch, more dead than alive, they had carried him past the ruins of his home. He hadn’t known then that Cerys lay within, beneath soot-black stones and stinking char.
Somehow Makin found himself inside the building, the air hot, suffocating, and thick with smoke around him. He couldn’t remember deciding to enter. Bent double he found he could just about breathe beneath the worst of the smoke, and with stinging, streaming eyes he staggered on.
A short corridor brought him to the great hall. Here the belly of the smoke lay higher, a dark and roiling ceiling that he would have to reach up to touch. Flames scaled the walls wherever a tapestry or panelling gave them a path. The crackling roar deafened him, the heat taking the tears from his eyes. A tapestry behind him, that had been smouldering when he passed it, burst into bright flames all along its length.
A number of pallets for the sick lined the room, many askew or overturned. Makin tried to draw breath to call for the prince but the air scorched his lungs and left him gasping. A moment later he was on his knees, though he had no intention to fall. “Prince Jorg…” a whisper.
The heat pressed him to the flagstones like a great hand, sapping the strength from him, leaving each muscle limp. Makin knew that he would die there. “Cerys.” His lips framed her name and he saw her, running through the meadow, blonde, mischievous, beautiful beyond any words at his disposal. For the first time in forever the vision wasn’t razor edged with sorrow.
With his cheek pressed to the stone floor Makin saw the prince, also on the ground. Over by the great hearth one of the heaps of bedding from the fallen pallets had a face among its folds.
Makin crawled, the hands he put before him blistered and red. One bundle, missed in the smoke, proved to be a man, the friar’s muscular orderly, a fellow named Inch. A burning timber had fallen from above and blazed across his arm. The boy looked no more alive: white faced, eyes closed, but the fire had no part of him. Makin snagged his leg and hauled him back across the hall.
Pulling the nine year old felt harder than dragging a fallen stallion. Makin gasped and scrambled for purchase on the stones. The smoke ceiling now held just a few feet above the floor, dark and hot and murderous.
“I”. Makin heaved the boy and himself another yard. “Can’t.” He slumped, boneless against the floor. Even the roar of the fire seemed distant now. If only the heat would let up he could sleep.
He felt them rather than saw them. Their presence to either side of him, luminous through the smoke. Nessa and Cerys, hands joined above him. He felt them as he had not since the day they died. Both were absent from the burial. Cerys wasn’t there as her little casket of ash and bone was lowered, lily-covered into the cold ground. Nessa didn’t hear the choir sing for her, though Makin had paid their passage from Everan and selected her favourite hymns. Neither of them watched when he killed the men who had led the assault. Those killings left him dirty, further away from the lives he’d sought revenge for. Now though, both Nessa and Cerys stood beside him, silent, but watching, lending him strength.
“They tell me you were black and smoking when you crawled from the Healing Hall.” King Olidan watched Makin from his throne, eyes wintery beneath an iron crown.
“I have no memory of it, Highness.” Makin’s first memory was of coughing his guts up in the barracks, with the burns across his back an agony beyond believing. The prince had been taken into Friar Glen’s care once more, hours earlier.
“My son has no memory of it either,” the King said. “He escaped the friar’s watch and ran for the woods, still delirious. Father Gomst says the prince’s fever broke some days after his recapture.”
“I’m glad of it, Highness.” Makin tried not to move his shoulders despite the ache of his scars, only now ceasing to weep after weeks of healing.
“It is my wish that Prince Jorg remain ignorant of your role, Makin.”
“Yes, Highness.” Makin nodded.
“I should say, Sir Makin.” The king rose from his throne and descended the dais, footsteps echoing beneath the low ceiling of his throne room. “You are to be one of my table knights. Recognition of the risks you took in saving my son.”
“My thanks, Highness.” Makin bowed his head.
“Sir Grehem tells me you are a changed man, Sir Makin. The castle guard have taken you to their hearts. He says that you have many friends among them…” The king stood behind him, footsteps silent for a moment. “My son does not need friends, Sir Makin. He does not need to think he will be saved should ill befall him. He does not need debts.” The king walked around Makin, his steps slow and even. They were of a height, both tall, both strong, the king a decade older. “Young Jorg burns around the hurt he has taken. He burns for revenge. It’s this singularity of purpose that a king requires, that my house has always nurtured. Thrones are not won by the weak. They are not kept except by men who are hard, cold, focused.” King Olidan came front and centre once more, holding Makin’s gaze – and in his eyes Makin found more to fear than he had in the jaws of the fire. “Do we understand each other, Sir Makin?”
“Yes, Highness.” Makin looked away.
“You may go. See Sir Grehem about your new duties.”
“Yes, Highness.” And Makin turned on his heel, starting the long walk to the great doors.
He walked the whole way with the weight of the king’s regard upon him. Once the doors were closed behind him, once he had walked to the grand stair, only then did Makin speak the words he couldn’t say to Olidan, words the king would never hear, however loud.
“I didn’t save your son. He saved me.”
Returning to his duties Makin knew that however long the child pursued his vengeance it would never fill him, never heal the wounds he had taken. The prince might grow to be as cold and dangerous as his father, but Makin would guard him, give him the time he needed, because in the end nothing would save the boy except his own moment in the doorway, with his own fire ahead and his own cowardice behind. Makin could tell him that of course – but there are many gaps in this world… and there are some that words can’t cross.
The Lowest Place
Edward Cox
The beast’s scream shattered the icy air. Jurin’s spear slid through its body, pinning it to the rotting wall of a lean-to. Jurin twisted the spear, encouraging the beast’s wails to echo across the ruins of the village.
“There are two such creatures guarding that place,” the magician had said, back at the meeting. “I suppose you could call them mates.”
No one refused a summons from a magician. Unless you happened to be a person powerful enough to refuse, the type of person which Jurin was most certainly not. What Jurin did possess was peculiar knowledge of great interest to a magician; and so, without choice or defence, she had been transported to a dank and gloomy lair, forced to attend an incongruous meeting, which had, in turn, delivered her to this grim place...
The beast thrashed against the agony, clawing the air wildly, talons unable to reach its attacker. The screams had subsided to a sad mewling, somehow as questioning as it was pitiful.
“Why didn’t I see them before?” Jurin had asked, to which the magician replied, “Because when you last visited the village, the village wanted you there, Jurin. Next time, it will not.”
Now, beneath a sky the colour of bruised skin, devoid of sun or moons or stars, Jurin listened for sounds in the thin mist that crawled between broken buildings. The beast had ceased to struggle and its steaming breath came in short, sharp pants. Clawed hands gripped the shaft penetrating its body, weakly attempting to pull the spear free.
Jurin kept her weight pressed against the spear, locking gazes with her captive. Large eyes, yellow and black-veined, full of aguish, stared back at her. A hideous merging of human and dog, pale and hairless, the beast bared teeth like jag
ged icicles in the cave of its mouth.
Jurin felt no pity, and she waited.
“Where you find one beast, the other will never be far away,” the magician had said.
One did not ask for a magician’s name. It had been a bloated spider of a woman who had summoned Jurin to her lair. Nameless, ancient, poisoned by centuries of magic addiction. She sat in her nest: a sharp-walled cavern, perhaps far underground, perhaps in the heart of a mountain, but where no natural light shone. Her swollen mass concealed within a leather cloak, a patchwork of animal skins – probably including humans’ – she had been attended by corrupted acolytes, soulless apparitions with one foot already in Otherside.
“I’m a solider,” Jurin had told her. “I know how to deal with beasts.”
“What, like you did last time?” The magician’s voice had carried the distant undertone of breaking glass. “To kill the guardians, you will need more than the cunning and steel of a solider.”
In the village, from somewhere close, a mournful voice – almost a howl – drifted through the mist. Hearing its mate, the beast stirred, growling, and Jurin twisted the spear again. This time, the anguished screams were answered by bellows of fury that headed towards them.
“You will need a touch of magic,” the magician had told Jurin; and from the shadows of the lair an ungainly acolyte had appeared, blind, naked and sexless, carrying a spear which was laid at Jurin’s feet. It had a simple wooden shaft, but the head was made of clear crystal, shaped like a teardrop, the facets and point wickedly sharp. Inside the crystal, supernatural energy glowed.
“This is more than a weapon to defend yourself with,” the magician had said. “Keep it close, Jurin, and use it well.”
When the second beast emerged from the mist, it came fast, rounding a dilapidated residential dwelling, bounding on all fours through the mud, snarling, slavering, desperately racing to save its mate. Yellow eyes shone like torch fire in the gloom. The first beast screeched. Jurin held her nerve, heart thumping in her ears, holding her captive’s struggling weight against the rotting lean-to wall.
She waited until the second beast was within ten feet of her, and then she yanked the spear from the body of the first. Even as the crystal head released a sting of magic that reduced the human-dog to a pile of hot ash, Jurin spun and faced the second beast as it leapt for her.
With a howl, the creature impaled itself on the spear. The glowing teardrop slid through its body as easily as a hot blade through soft cheese and burst from its back. Jurin dodged a clumsy swipe from clawed fingers, and knocked the beast to the ground. Stamping a boot down on its stomach, she wrenched the spear free, and watched as the magic again reduced her foe to burning ashes that settled in the mud, hissing.
“I’ve been watching you for a long time... waiting.” That had been the first thing the magician had said to Jurin. The second had been: “We are of mutual benefit to each other.”
As the embers in the ashes died, the spear felt warm in Jurin’s hands, its weight perfect.
“Your friends need you, Jurin.”
She looked around at the village. Abandoned. Ruined. Unwelcoming. She looked up at the strange, bruised sky, neither knowing nor caring if it was day or night.
“You remember your friends, don’t you...?”
Yes, she remembered. She never forgot.
When Jurin had first happened upon the village, she had been travelling home after fighting for gold in someone else’s war. Three other soldiers travelled with her; the survivors from a company of mercenaries that had headed north several months before. Balia was the eldest by some years; she had led the group. Honn, taciturn and mostly humourless, he had been a mountain of a warrior, content to follow. Lastly, the youngest of them: Taalij, none too bright and the butt of many jokes, but a good soldier to stand beside in battle. They all were.
The group had thought to buy supplies at the village, perhaps spend the night in the soft beds of a tavern, before conducting the last leg of their journey home. The horror was supposed to be behind them. It had all seemed so simple. At first.
With mud squelching beneath her boots, the spearhead glowing like a torch, Jurin headed towards the village square. She knew how to get there; a map of this place had being haunting her dreams for more than a year.
“I know you have seen the monster that dwells in that village, Jurin,” the poisonous old magician had said. “You might be the only living person who has.”
Old Balia had always joked that she had survived so many wars because demons watched over her. She had been the monster’s first victim. Taalij had pissed his trousers, dropped his weapon, and wept in the mud before his death. Honn, that fearless mountain of a warrior, had tried to fight the monster, but he hadn’t stood a chance. As for Jurin...She had been the only one to make it out of the village alive.
Pushing her fear down into the lowest depths of her being, Jurin trudged on.
“That monster is a rare sort of creature, and it has piqued my interest.” Like some perverted virgin bride, the magician’s face had been hidden behind a veil of dusty cobweb that barely moved as she spoke with her broken-glass-voice. “But it has an innate fear of magicians, and would disappear if I came anywhere close to that village. The monster will, however, be drawn to your despair and shame, Jurin.”
Despair: a reference to the knife that Jurin had been holding in her hand when the magician first transported her to the lair; the knife she had intended to use on her wrists to end the nightmares, and the shame. Jurin remembered dropping the knife to the lair floor, and the magician’s laugh still chittered like a nest of spiders in her memory.
“Why would I agree to help you?” Jurin had demanded.
“Ah, now that is the question.” Although the magician had never once revealed her face, Jurin had known that her eyes were fixed on the knife on the floor. “You have given up, and that makes you valuable to me.”
For over a year Jurin had tried to rediscover the village, driven by thoughts of vengeance, a desperate need to slay the monster that had slaughtered her friends. To make amends. But the magician had waited until Jurin finally conceded that she would never find the village again; waited until she had lost all hope, succumbing to her torment, before offering revelations and an alternative.
“Jurin, you believe the spirits of your friends drifted off to paradise after they were killed, and from that place their spectral eyes watch you, always, heavy with judgement and wrath. You suppose that killing the monster will appease your friends, and banish your guilt. But you are wrong.”
The magician could have added that Jurin had no choice but to do her bidding, but she hadn’t. Instead, she had told the truth in a cold, matter-of-fact tone. “The monster is more than you think it to be. It is a collector. Of ghosts. Of spirits or souls – whatever your preference.”
Jurin remembered the spark of intrigue that had invaded her hopelessness. The first hint that not all was lost. “The monster has collected the souls of my friends?”
“Along with the countless others that have been lured to the village over time. As I said, it is a rare sort of creature.” The magician had sounded admiring, perhaps desiring. “What I’m offering you, Jurin, is the chance to save the ghosts of your friends. Help me, and I will return you to that village and show you how to end your nightmares.”
Of course Jurin had agreed. What other choice did she have? And she had asked the magician if she planned to kill the monster. Why did it interest her?
“Actually, I’m more interested in the bigger fish for whom the monster is collecting ghosts. But that’s really none of your concern, Jurin. Now, here’s what I need you to do...”
There were no signs of life in the village now the guardians were dead. Jurin’s footprints were lonely tracks in the mud; the clouds of her breath fleeting moments of warmth in the dead air; the magical light of the spearhead the closest this place would get to sunshine.
When Jurin, along with Balia, Taalij and Honn, had
first seen the village, it appeared normal, welcoming, peaceful. The only oddity had been the lack of villagers and animals, as though the village were a stage waiting for its players. But not until the mercenaries had reached the square did the village reveal its true visage. A site of rotting buildings, crumbling ruins, where nothing lived – at least, nothing until the monster came.
“You will have to go looking for the monster, entice it out of hiding,” the magician had said, as if this were an act of simplicity itself. “Please understand, the village is a façade. It conceals a gateway to Otherside.”
Otherside, the dark mirror image of the real world, where demons and the damned dwelt, where no one sane would venture, where despair gained true meaning...
“You will recognise the gateway when it reveals itself to you, Jurin.”
Reaching the village square, Jurin discovered something that had not been there before. An impossible building rose from the centre of the square. A bizarre parody of a house, of many houses, piled one on top of the other, twisting upwards, rising so far into the beaten sky that Jurin could not see where the structure ended. The building’s wooden beams creaked as it swayed; loose stonework rustled and clacked, tumbling down its length. There were windows – more windows than Jurin could count – and each appeared broken. Yellow tongues of silent fire licked out of them. Strange how the flames danced almost majestically without the menacing sounds of crackling and burning.
At the base of the impossible building, more fire spilled from the windows on either side of the wooden entrance door. But there was something almost homely about the yellow glow that glinted upon the wet and muddy ground. It was accompanied by a faint, cheery sound: the clinks of glasses, the clangs of tankards, and comradely voices laughing and jeering. The ambience of a friendly inn.
Jurin used the luminous crystal spearhead to push the door open. Leading with the weapon, tense and alert, she entered the impossible building.
