He examined golden jewellery and silver chain and discarded as useless. He was searching for something. He picked up a sword from the floor. It was plain and functional, smaller than the great heavy ceremonial sword of the Tallman.... Swords were no use against the blood fire of the Tallmen..... it felt balanced and familiar in his hands. He swept it through the air this way and that..... unless you got close.....and he had.....He knew how to instinctively use it. It made the air sing, it made him happy, feel more complete, he would take it.....like they had taken him and forced him into a world of pain.
There where throwing knifes here too, in a shoulder scabbard, nine of them and the Turkanschoner knew this was right. His face darkened with recognition. These were trophies. He took them back into rightful hands.
Looking around him, the light of the fire illuminated a life-size relief of a Tallman. The Turkanschoner mimicked the pose as best he could, before hacking off its nose with his sword. He picked up a short leather tunic and put it on. It felt good, it kept away the chill of this place. A suit of finely linked chain mail was discarded - too heavy. He selected a leather helmet with huge, curling ivory horns and put it on, expertly tying up the complicated leather buckle beneath his chin.
A large leather belt was next to be donned, after he had bored extra holes so that it fitted around his thin waist. He recognised the sword's scabbard and attached it to the belt and slid the weapon home.
A brass bossed shield was soon slung over his back and the Turkanschoner felt relaxed. He felt at home with these swords, shields and daggers, they felt part of him, part of what he was... had been. He had lost so much.
Home, a misty memory came to him of open vales surrounded by tall, cloud topped hills and dense pine forests. Men, dressed as he was now, ran towards the columns of black smoke on the horizon, they shouted in fear. Bells tolled.
“To arms, the Gate has been breached!" Swords and shields flashed in red light of a rising winter sun. He was with them. He felt their fear and their excitement. They shouted and screamed as they ran.
For a moment he was there again. The memory faded. The Turkanschoner sighed deeply, tears welling in his eyes. Such memories had tormented him before, slipped away from his grasp and he had remained incomplete. But today they had been more vivid and prolonged. He knew that part of him was lost, buried within in him, the Tallmen had taken it in exchange for their gift of a colony in their empire of pain. He shrugged his bony shoulders and chipped away the rest of the Tallman's face from the relief. He stood silent and stared at the faceless Tallman, then spat on it.
“Bad, all bad.”
The Turkanschoner moved over to the bed and lay down. He was tired, today had been a strange day. His head ached. Something was happening to him he realised, doors had been briefly opened in his mind, doors that had been bolted and barred for as long as he could remember.
He sat upright and dozed, the past still filtering through from where it had been buried and now manifesting itself in the form of dreams, some which caused him to growl and hiss in his sleep, others which caused him to weep.
He awoke with a start. A subtle shift in consciousness alerted him to the fact that his new master was awake and moving. The now clothed and armed Turkanschoner trotted into the corridor and sniffed the air. He glanced once at the way which led back to his cage in the Towers of the Tallmen, then the hunched backed warrior turned and lurched into the dust and darkness which would lead him back to the well shaft, his shield beating like a battle drum against his bony shoulder blades. He knew he must not, could not, lose contact with his new master for he held the key to all the Turkanschoner had lost. Already precious memories had begun to escape into his consciousness. He had a vague idea of how he came to be here, who he was and what he had lost to the Tallmen.
But there was more. His master Jonathon would open new doors for him he knew and, in gratitude, theTurkanschoner had already sworn a secret silent oath of undying loyalty to him.
Chapter Thirteen
Rislo had woken from a fitful, nightmare-ridden sleep with a jolt. Slowly he realised where he was as the horrific images of teeth and talons faded from his mind. He trembled involuntarily, his teeth chattering, his breathing shallow and irregular as the physical effects the nightmares of the Turkanschoner lingered in his body. He remembered that the beast had gone. Jonathon had got rid of it somehow. He looked now to see the young man who had saved him slumped in a deep sleep against the alcove wall.
Collecting his thoughts, Rislo remembered why he was here. His plans had taken a detour. The moving of the machine from his hideaway had been the focal point of his arrangements. He had been intent on stealing the final component and then transporting it and the machine to a location close to an escape route in the shape of a dimension door.
Now his plans were in disarray. It would not be that simple. Jonathon's friends needed to be contacted up there, above the inferno. They might even be dead, but he knew Jonathon would need proof before they carried out their plans to the full; and then there was the problem of the Field Imploder's location.
It still remained back in his secret workshop, it needed to be dismantled and brought here. Then he had to take the Power Reservoir, that final and vital component from the city of the Tallmen. He decided while Jonathon slept, that each of them should attend to their own tasks. He would return to the Towers, steal the component and dismantle the Field Imploder. Jonathon would search for his friends.
That way each would complete their tasks in the places they where familiar with and neither would become a hindrance to the other. He still worried about the threat of the Turkanschoner, but the initial threat seemed to have passed. He would have to take his chances he decided, and hoped it was now safely locked up in its cage in the Tallmens’ vaults.
When his young human companion woke, Rislo informed Jonathon of his plans and, seeing the logic in his argument, Jonathon agreed. Rislo continued. They would meet again in Rislo's bolthole in two days time and then, all being well, they would take the machine a convenient location and finish the task they had begun.
If one of them did not return, the other would carry out the plan alone. If it was Rislo who did not return on time then he indicated to Jonathon that he would leave maps of the dimension door locations and details of the rate of travel through them. He would disclose the location of the Power Reservoir in the City of the Tallmen and how to assemble and use the Field Imploder. Rislo had planned thoroughly. Sixty years of careful research had been set into action by Jonathon's contact with the giant, but now, after a few hours together, they would part, with the chance that they might never see one another again.
The two allies hesitated at the edge of the well shaft. The upward air current had ceased, indicating that the inferno above had considerably lessened in intensity, if it had not been extinguished all together.
Jonathon looked up to see only a dim glow of pale daylight above and felt it safe enough to venture upwards and towards his darkest fears. He feared the worst, but had to know the fate of his friends. Without any evidence of their fate he could not give them up easily.
However, his strong his desire to fulfil his oaths against the city and Silus Flax suppressed any feelings of premature grief. There was a spark of hope though. If the fire had been accidental he felt that the Whisperers would have escaped it easily. But he remembered the vision of the High Hats, their necks inclined upwards toward the sky and the orange glow on the face of a rat faced man. A trap sprung?
Even then there was still a good chance that Milly, Dale and Tefkin could have used their superior physical abilities and knowledge of the roof tops to avoid capture, or worse. "Anyway" Jonathon asked himself, "Why would these High Hats succeed where the Tans had for years failed?" An unwelcome answer, a one-syllable name, echoed inside his skull. "Flax".
Rislo shook him gently from his private fears, with a large reassuring hand on his shoulder
“Let us go. There need not be any farewells for we sha
ll meet again shortly." he said, with a slight tremble in his voice, despite the optimism of his statement.
Jonathon nodded, smiled and launched himself up the well shaft. The Tallman watched Jonathon disappear rapidly up the shaft as he himself descended back into the abyss. Rislo descended slowly and cautiously, he was not a trained climber like Jonathon. The coarse, crumbling bricks cut into him as he moved painfully, hold by hold, downwards. A strange and repulsive odour grew stronger the farther down the shaft he went. As he neared the bottom the smell was nauseating and almost unbearable. He adjusted his light orb to send a beam of light downwards in an attempt to locate the source of the stench.
Sealing the exit at the bottom of the shaft was a heap of dead lepers. Their corpses were blackened and broken. The smell of death's relaxation and that of burned flesh were enough alone to prevent Rislo from moving any farther down the shaft without the physical problem of getting past them.
While Rislo and Jonathon had slept, the lepers had made their desperate plunges to escape the flames. There were perhaps a dozen or so, sealing the breech in the shaft, but the well probably extended hundreds of feet further into the ground. Hundreds must have leapt to their anonymous deaths to fill the shaft and neither he nor Jonathon had seen or heard a thing as the lepers had hurled themselves, in a silent resignation, to eternity.
Rislo was poised to begin another ascent when he heard the sound of movement from below. A shiver ran through him. Surely not, he thought. Surely none had survived. He watched petrified as a corpse slid sideways and out of the well shaft, then another and another. Then he heard a demented moaning, accompanied by a violent retching.
"Argh, bad smell, bad, bad” Words drifted up to Rislo. Someone was clearing the shaft. Another corpse exited and a hole appeared something entered the shaft. Rislo shone his beam onto it.
A horned head stared upwards, eyes narrowed in the orb's light, massive incisors glinting in the beam as they protruded from its snout. Rislo stared at the Turkanschoner. The beast launched itself towards a petrified Rislo, scrabbling towards his position at furious pace, tearing away bricks and mortar from the well shaft walls as it searched for footholds.
The Tallman braced himself for impact and a talon rammed into his thigh; his life now flashed before him. His bladder gave way.
The Turkanschoner had no intention of devouring Rislo. The creature desperately attempted to escape the vile odours of death Rislo had begun to retreat from, magnified a thousand times by his own highly sensitive olfactory equipment. Consequently it climbed as quickly as possible up the shaft and used Rislo's thigh as a useful foothold on its way up. The Turkanschoner disappeared into the dim light above him, retching and coughing as it went.
For a moment Rislo stayed still, then realised the beast had gone. He gasped and dropped downwards, landing softly on the dead bodies below and clambered out of the shaft and began to sprint as fast as he could from the smell of death and his personal nightmare embodiment of it, the Turkanschoner.
He ran and ran until he could run no more, until his heart threatened to smash out of his chest and his lungs explode. Eventually he fell to the damp stone floor in exhaustion and gasped in lungfuls of stale, but gratefully odourless, air. Then he threw up.
Slowly he recovered from his exertion and his shock in the well shaft. He had been sure that the creature he had encountered was the Turkanschoner, but why was it still here, was it still hunting? A grave thought slipped into his mind. Was it still hunting him? Had the stench of the leper's corpses confused it?
Rislo walked slowly back towards his refuge trying to regain his composure. If he had not met Jonathon he would still be back in the Towers - safe from the beast, he thought. He could have made this journey alone and slipped unnoticed out of a dimension door when he was off duty, he would have had plenty of time.
But now he was embarked on some insane and dangerous mission, allied in some maniacal cause which, when it came down to it, was not his own. His thoughts of regret gradually subsided. He owed it to Cornelius Postlethwaite for making him aware of the Tallmens’ unopposed slip into the vile pit of depravity and corruption the human population of Dubh was already immersed in. And, of course, Jonathon had saved him from death at the hands of the Turkanschoner or even his own suicidal hands.
He could not forget these things. He would endeavour to pay his debts. But the dark seed of doubt that had been cast in his mind by the stress and fear of the past hours remained, nagging him.
Rislo was not a brave soul. He was no natural hero. With these thoughts Rislo quickened his pace towards the place from where he had become an outcast and a dangerous rebel. He increased the intensity of the light orb, it seemed to be getting darker here, the shadows around him growing deeper, physically pressing in on him; and it was so cold, his breath turning to a nebulous vapour as moved onwards. Something in the darkness laughed, and Rislo shivered and began to run.
Chapter Fourteen
Jonathon crept out of the wellhead into a dim twilight that lit the remnants of the building that had been the Castle of Lepers. The great shell of the building still stood but its walls, blackened by smoke and cracked by the intense heat, seemed ready to plunge inwards at any moment.
Not one floor or even a piece of wood remained in the building. The fire had consumed all. Jonathon waded, knee deep, through a black and grey ash, unaware that the ashes of thousands of lepers lay beneath his feet, mixed with the carbonated remains of the building's one hundred stories. There was little sound here now, except the cracking of contracting brickwork as it cooled to its normal temperature. The great drunken crowd, which had gathered to watch and actively take part in ensuring that the diseased occupants of this place were properly incinerated, had drifted away once they were sure the last of the lepers had been consumed by the purifying flames or leapt hundreds of feet to the painless sanctuary of the
cobbled streets below.
For the few who survived the leap, the attendant mob gleefully helped them on their way to another hell with stones and clubs. All in a day's entertainment in Dubh. In the streets now, the lepers smouldering remains lay in the heaps where they had fallen. No one made any real attempt to remove them. A squad of Tans had been assigned to the task, but were more intent in rifling through the clothing of the dead for booty than attending to the job of disposal, despite the risk of disease. Eventually, when they had completed their pillage, they would attempt to carry out their task by soaking the bodies in oils and setting fire to them.
Jonathon peered up from the floor of the building. The concrete roof remained intact. He doubted his friends were up there now, but it seemed the right place to begin his search. He took to the blacked inner walls like a fly, his taloned gloves and bladed boots finding easy purchase amongst the cracked and fire damaged brickwork. Within minutes he was half way to his roof top goal.
Down below the Turkanschoner watched. From where the hunched and horned shape hid near the wellhead, Jonathan looked like a fly. The Turkanschoner watched in awe, his huge jaws agape with astonishment. His new master was indeed a talented one he mused. However, wherever he went the Turkanschoner would follow. He could not lose him, because to lose Jonathon was to lose the opportunity to continue to find himself.
Jonathon soon found himself close to the rooftop. He found a window and straddled the ledge. Down below he saw that several small fires now burned amongst the heaps of grey rags that surrounded the building on all sides and had once been its occupants. A group of Tans occupied with the cremation of the bodies below, laughed hysterically as one of their number accidentally set light to oil which he had spilled on himself and danced a frenzied jig as he attempted to extinguish the flames. No-one helped him, they stood and watched the new spectacle in state of intense, morbid amusement, as the unfortunate man slowly and noisily lost his battle with the engulfing flames.
Jonathon did not remain to watch the tragic outcome of a battle between man and this essential element. As the man's pained
screaming terminated he completed the final part his climb on the outside of the building and dropped on to the roof top.
In the centre of the roof the intense heat from below had burned everything combustible. The shack he had called home for so long had gone. The smaller tiled roofs around the rooftop had gone too, collapsing inward as their wooden supporting slats had burned through.
Slowly he skirted the roof edge where the concrete had not been so badly cracked. He found nothing to suggest that his friends had perished here. Despite the heat damage he knew that he would have found at least their bodies. Evidently, they had not been here, he decided.
As he prepared to leave the rooftop he checked that the trampet on the east side outrun was undamaged. It was not. Crouching and concentrating in preparation for his run up, he heard a stifled moan. Jonathon's heart pounded. He moved quickly around a chimneystack to discover a smouldering bundle of dark rags crawling slowly towards the roof edge. The charred, black coat and badly burned, still smouldering, hob-nail boots identified the man as a High Hat. Jonathon stepped in front of the man who peered up at him.
The luckless High Hat's hair had been burned away and his face was a mass of oozing blisters. His eyes widened in surprise when he saw the Whisperer and he managed to smile through painfully cracked lips.
“Flyer" he croaked. “We missed you then after all, ha ha."
Jonathon knelt down beside the man, holding a hand to his mouth and nose as the sickly smell of roasted flesh wafted up to him.
“What about the others?" Jonathon asked sternly,
although he felt some compassion for man. "Where are they?" The High Hat coughed raggedly, spitting up blood and black mucus.
“Escaped, captured who knows? I don't care" he coughed, pain racking his body. “Soon as we roused 'em by settin' fire to the place, they flew over there - then the bastards below forgot us! Let us burn!"
The Chronicles of Jonathon Postlethwaite: The Seed of Corruption Page 12
