Oblivion Hand

by Adrian Cole

  “Destroy it! Destroy it!” snarled the monarch and a brand was quickly brought. When the severed hand refused to be burned, it was snatched up by one of the Werespawn and dropped into a brazier of blazing coals. Rammazurk watched the horrible relic smouldering, then turned away and staggered from the feast, his face a sickly pallor. He was so stunned by what he had seen that he momentarily forgot his grim visitor. The Voidal looked upon the incident with perplexity, as though it should have significance, but he could not understand it. His two seductive watchwomen were mildly disturbed by Rammazurk’s hurried exit, but soon turned their wiles once more upon the strange but handsome Voidal. They drew him away from the throng, and though he made no attempt to discourage their lascivious attention, he was soon deep in private thought.

  “What is it that you dwell upon so moodily?” asked one of the sleek-skinned girls.

  The Voidal gazed at her, forced a smile, then looked away into the middle distance of the smoke-hung pillars, ignoring the nearby hoots and bawdy laughs of the resumed orgy.

  “I can only tell you that I must have offended the Dark Gods. For that they have set me upon a stormy course for purposes I can only guess at. My presence here is as much a mystery to me as it is to your monarch. Yet I know that I am to meet someone familiar here. As I approached your city, I knew it instinctively. When we meet, he will direct me. In my wanderings I pick up small pieces of the mosaic. When I have them all, I will learn what my crime was. By then I may have atoned for it.”

  The two concubines listened with dreamy interest.

  “And what of your—severed limb?” breathed one of them.

  The Voidal’s expression soured, but he was not angry. “Perhaps it was my hand that pointed so irreverently at your king. I am minded of the word, Fatecaster. It has a ring to it. But I don’t recall having lost my hand—”

  “So what will Rammazurk’s fate be?” said the other girl, lips beside his ear.

  The Voidal drew back stiffly. “Enough questions!”

  “You wear a cloak of mystery,” the girl laughed.

  He nodded. “What I know of myself is not a matter for pride.” After that he said nothing.

  Rammazurk retired to the depths of his labyrinthine boudoir and deliberated between sleeping or pondering his grimoires in search of further information concerning the Voidal. He had thought merely of destroying the man, but on reflection had decided it may not be that easy, nor a permanent solution. No, this Voidal was a vessel for something greater. Irritably the monarch dragged from their hidden seclusion his dustiest and most damned scrolls and tomes, first securing his doors with spells that were old when Sedooc was but a dream. Then he began a systematic and thorough perusal of the blasphemous rituals and lores concerning curses. For two days and nights he drugged himself awake with heady and potent mixtures, losing himself in the deep and catatonic wilderness of sorcerous study.

  But at the end of it all he was no wiser. The Voidal remained a mystery.

  Grim-faced and despondent, he flung himself down upon his lavish bed and allowed the caressing fingers of sleep to slide over him. His sleep was like the sleep of the dead, and his snores were loud. The embers of the guardian fires burned low, so that only a dim glow suffused the sacrosanct chamber.

  Someone tapped gently on the thick, sigil-woven doors. Several times the inoffensive knocking continued, but the monarch was far out across the ocean of slumber, insensitive to recall. However, the doors suddenly bellied inwards as a horrendous blow was struck upon them from without: the thick wood splintered, the panels bursting like pulp and crashing into the room as though mashed by a giant’s fist. Rammazurk stirred fitfully and sat up, rubbing his eyes and gazing vacantly at the open doorway. He cursed vilely as he saw the shattered door, though at first he could see nothing or no one who could have wreaked such havoc.

  It was pitch dark throughout the fortress of Windwrack, as though the Dark Gods had clouded the very cosmos. Wan light seeped into the bedchamber from a single taper without, the black candle permeating the air with rich incense. As Rammazurk sat motionlessly, the enormity of this unwarranted intrusion disturbed him, for the spells that he had set in apposition to such sorcery were the most puissant imaginable. He frowned at vague movement. Something had scuttled across the threshold of the room, unclean and verminous.

  A single beam of dim light probed the marble floor from somewhere above, and into the beam came the thing that moved, as if taking its cue from the insipid light. Charred, shrivelled, it was a severed hand.

  Rammazurk regarded it with utter revulsion, and quickly recited a blasting cantrip. But the hand was immune and continued its revolting scamper towards the huge bed. The monarch called upon elementals and demons from all manner of nether hells, but the host that normally would have rushed to his aid was not forthcoming. The power of the Dark Gods was stronger. Rammazurk leapt up and grasped a rune-coated sword beside the bed, watched as the burnt hand crossed the first of the silken sheets. It stopped, its forefinger pointed directly at his chest. He struck wildly, again shouting some archaic, prehistoric curse, but to no avail. The hand ignored the protests and curses and evaded the sword with ease. Back into a shadowed corner the monarch retreated, his ugly face coated with perspiration as a sheen of terror broke out on those odious features. The hand drew inexorably closer, then pulled with sooty fingers at the hem of his nightshirt.

  Rammazurk screamed, calling upon every necromantic guardian he could name. They should have rushed to save him, but they did not. The hand clawed upwards: try as he did, the king could in no way dislodge it or hamper its dreadful progress. He beat at it hopelessly. Paralysed with fear, Rammazurk fell to his knees, gibbering, shrinking into a corner. Those foul, reeking fingers reached up and gripped his fat throat. They tightened. Rammazurk opened wide his mouth to give vent to another bellow. At once the hand moved upwards and the fingers clawed into the mouth itself, so that presently the gurgling monarch was desperately fighting to spit out the hand as it worked its way into his throat. Rammazurk tugged at it, gagging, but it possessed limitless strength.

  The screams choked off and the terrible instrument of Rammazurk’s torment slithered down deeper into him, passing to his very vitals. Soon he felt it working at him like a rodent, clutching his internal organs. Nothing he did could prevent its abominable workings. The hand began tearing and ripping and clawing as he twisted madly about, hands pressed to his vast gut. His screams and whines grew in volume, shaking the corridors of Windwrack. He rolled about on the floor, eyes bulging from their sockets.

  Two vulpine forms appeared at the shattered door of the chamber and gazed with incredulity on the hellish scene. Dennizor and Nazzim, the twin sorcerers, said nothing as they watched. They saw Rammazurk rolling on the floor in his death agonies, and to their horror they saw presiding over the frenetic form a naked woman, her arm buried to the elbow in his mouth, as though she were ripping from within him his very entrails. She turned a brief, ghoulish smile upon them and at sight of her eyes, they fled.

  Down a black corridor they rushed, and towards them from out of the darkness came a single, eerie figure. It was the Voidal. He had spent two days in Windwrack, trying to learn something about himself, hoping to meet someone who could help, but had uncovered nothing.

  “By all the hells!” snapped the gaunt man. “What is happening?”

  “She has returned,” blurted Nazzim, his face pale as he made to rush past.

  “It is the queen—back from the dead,” groaned Dennizor. “She takes an unspeakable revenge upon the king.”

  And the terrified sorcerers fled. The Voidal, appalled by the awful screams he had heard earlier, went quietly to the now still chamber of the king. A widening pool of sticky blood had run from the darkness of a corner, where something hunched and motionless slumped against the walls. The Voidal could smell the blood, but he felt compelled to examine the corpse. There was something grimly familiar about the scene.

  Rammazurk was sprawled in
a broken posture, his robes saturated with blood, his face a horrible mask of agony, his mouth gaping. From the shredded orifice hung the pulped end of an organ.

  The Voidal turned, a sudden look of revulsion and recognition on his drawn features. Here was the appointed companion—the unseen, the unattainable yet ever near. Death.

  Ahost of disorganised guards with stormhounds was making its raucous way through the passages of the gloomy castle, led by Dennizor and Nazzim, who had regained a modicum of composure. Their terror of the supernatural manifestation responsible for Rammazurk’s demise was overshadowed by their dreams of freedom from the tyrant’s will. As they led the guards towards the chamber of death, they again met the Voidal, who had evidently seen as much as he wished to.

  “Ho!” cried Dennizor, more boldly than he felt, for this enigmatic stranger made him shudder. “Is it over? Did you see Issylla?”

  “I saw no one save Rammazurk,” said the Voidal coldly. “Though one greater has been within.”

  Nazzim pointed at the Voidal, his hand trembling.

  “Rammazurk’s blood is on your hands! It is you who have brought Death here!”

  The Voidal looked down. He had not donned his black gloves: he stared in disgust at the two hands, cursing the deceit of the Dark Gods. As the rabble saw the restored appendage, they drew back in alarm, for not only had the missing hand been restored, but it was unburned, unblemished, whole. Yet as they watched, they saw blood well between the fingers and drip steadily to the begrimed floor.

  Swords sang out from scabbards and wavered, awaiting the command from the sorcerers to avenge the king’s murder. But Dennizor and Nazzim were in awe of this pale man, who seemed to bear upon his shoulders the weight of a greater curse.

  “I am cursed,” the Voidal whispered, ignoring the wavering steel. “I came here in search of an ally, one who would lead me to a closer understanding of my fate, yet I found only Death. It was another soul it took, for I have none, unless it is hidden among the intersecting dimensions of this vile omniverse!”

  Still no one moved against him.

  “Rammazurk’s followers will call for your corpse, if not your soul,” said Dennizor. “If you wish to survive the dawn, you must leave Sedooc at once. You’ll be hunted its length and breadth.”

  “And have you no wish to avenge your king?”

  “Not I!” spat Dennizor, and he was echoed by Nazzim. “We had cause enough to loathe him. We owe you a favour for his death.”

  The Voidal smiled wryly. “If that is so, direct me away from this wretched citadel.”

  They showed him a way out of Windwrack: a tortuous, secret route that led him through a maze of pits and reeking tunnels bordering on other realms of sorcery and corrupt power. But his mind was fixed on the deceit that had been played upon him, and the way in which the Dark Gods had used him. When he reached the outer walls and penetrated the last bolthole to the desert beyond, he paused, feeling the onset of a familiar, hated lethargy.

  The sands began to spin and presently had surged upward in a spiralling column of dust as the winds increased in power. The Screamers, Rammazurk’s elemental servants, gathered themselves in anger, eager for vengeance.

  As the Voidal stepped out on to the sands, his hand closed around the hilt of his sword. Mechanically he tugged it free of its sheath. It made no sound, and it was as light as air. Without knowing he had said it, he whispered its name. “The Sword of Silence.” Another of the Dark Gods’ games.

  But as the hurricane force of the Screamers began to swirl in the skies overhead, he was glad of the weapon, whatever its powers. And he was soon to learn. The twin sorcerers had been happy to show him the way out of Windwrack, oh yes. They had known the Screamers would be waiting.

  They tore downwards like the bolts of an electric storm, but as the Sword of Silence flashed in the wan light of dawn, the demonic winds felt the sorcerous bite of the blade. Not only did it slice into them, disrupting the course of their flow, but it drew out of them their shrieks, shattering them like glass on stone. The sword was like a vent into limbo, a gate through which the Screamers hurtled, unable to prevent the manic speed of their outflowing. And throughout the maniacal din of their passing, the Voidal heard nothing, as though suddenly deaf.

  The desert had been whipped up into a maelstrom of dust, blotting out all vision, so that the Voidal covered his face with his cloak. He held the Sword of Silence on high like a beacon. It drained the skies of their movements, the Screamers snared, dragged into the vortex, trapped in the very blade.

  At last it was done. The desert subsided and fresh clouds slowly eased their way across the heavens. The Voidal raised his head, studying the Sword of Silence. He thought he heard one last scream of defiance, locked away in the shimmering blade. Then he re-sheathed it. Unwittingly he had served the Dark Gods well.

  Tiredness overwhelmed him. Without a backward glance at the black walls of the citadel, he began the trudge into the desert and a fresh rendezvous with oblivion.

  Chapter II

  THE LAIR OF THE SPYDRON

  If you were to take a glass ball the size of a small moon and shatter it, I am sure there would be a sliver of glass for every poet that ever rambled the mazes of Phaedrabile’s twisted dimensions. I sing the praises of none, being myself immune to their art. Doubtless the fault lies in me: at any rate I am content to consider myself deficient in critical faculties on such matters.

  This next tale I had from a poet, Gnompathon, or, as he liked to style himself, Gnompathon the Wiser (there having been, presumably a Gnompathon the Less Wise). It was actually recited to me in couplets, the poet having devised his own rhyme for it. In recording it here, however, I will restrict myself to quoting the opening three lines, after which I will render the entire piece into my own prose, though you must forgive me for the occasional stylistic lapse. Blame that on the poet who is said to be dormant in all of us, striving for release.

  Gnompathon began thus:

  Beyond the walls of Night’s abyss, beneath a thousand hells:

  Behind the farthest depth of space, where writhing Chaos swells,

  Outside the laws of ordered realms, unchained by Reason’s spells—

  This from his “Songs of Life and Death.”

  —Salecco, Author of No Poetry

  I have already established that Phaedrabile is a somewhat accursed realm: in its cauldron of erratic confusion there are countless unspeakable marvels, many of which could only have been birthed in this infamous, appalling realm. Myths abound, naturally, for creation, no matter how debased, must needs attempt to supersede its creator. And although most of Phaedrabile’s myths are little better than mad dreams or passing whimsical invention, others have a grounding in reality. Of the latter type was the myth of the Spydron.

  It is a certain fact that even the Dark Gods scorned and derided this Spydron: they tolerated its malign intrusion into the warp and weft of Phaedrabile’s dimensions with open antipathy. However, the Spydron had power of its own, though from what inconceivable well of nightmare it had sucked this remains beyond knowledge.

  In its apartness, the Spydron brooded, protecting itself from the full wrath of the Dark Gods so that it enjoyed a solitary existence, for they could not destroy it utterly. Its black lair they twisted so that it wove through the interstices of numerous dimensions, being not wholly in any and only partially in many. Hence the rampant mythology that surrounded the Spydron.

  Locked inside its black bubble of night, separated from the remainder of creation by the unique bonds of its prison, the Spydron forgot about time and space: they no longer existed, save within the walls of its inner world. In the confines of its castle, it brooded, all traffic with the outer omniverse decaying into vague memories. Even so, its loneliness was like an infection, insistent and nagging. Its insularity became a sore, running with hate and self-pity.

  So the Spydron conceived a creation of its own, populating its Gargantuan castle with debased and ghoulish creatures, thi
ngs that slithered and scuttled in the dark, unseen and unfit for any other realm. For an age these hideous things amused the Spydron, but again it became bored, the weight of its isolation doubly unbearable. In desperation it sought to flex its power, testing the fetters placed upon it by the Dark Gods. And, turning sluggishly to the dimensions that held it, the Spydron called sibilantly, drawing into itself all those who came too near, incarcerating them in the inner world of its castle, from which there was no exit.

  Those wayward beings who found themselves caught up in the endless corridors and spans of the bleak domain soon learned to fear its two extremities. High, high up above them, in leaning vaults and huge lofts and attics there gathered the countless minions of the spiderlings. Most of these creatures were small, scuttling about in silence, secreting themselves in their numerous forms far and wide in the vast castle, forever seeking to link the entire maze into one webbed complex. Among them there were mutations, moulded by the bizarre mind of the Spydron, crawling things that flopped and hopped above the middle terraces, always hungry for news of the rival lower levels. And in the uppermost places of the dark there dwelt the awesome bulks of the spider overlords: massive, bloated denizens, whom it was whispered cannibalised their own minions when their appetites went unsated. One colossal monster ruled them all, the bristling Arachniderm, feared Spider Mother.

  While the lofty vaults of the Spydron castle housed the abominable army of spiders and spiderlings, the lower reaches held no less a terror; for it was far down below, deeper than any ray of false light could pierce, that the ratlings held sway. Here rats pattered to and fro in a perpetual chase, sniffing their way upwards with caution, being a cowardly tribe, devouring any tiny thing that had the misfortune to be edible. They, too, had their mutated masters, for their forms had been created by the Spydron, fabricated from an uneasy nightmare. Far down in the black wells there lurked the swollen ratling underlords, themselves prone to acts of gluttonous cannibalism, governed as they were by the primitive laws of survival, their yoke from the Spydron. Over them ruled the tyrannical Xalganash, he of the Thousand Teeth.