Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths: And Other Tales Of Dark Fantasy

by Harry Connolly

  We did. When I made to climb past Elizabeth, Bonnie stamped on my hand with her thin slipper. After that near fall, I decided to be chivalrous and take up the rear. The keening came closer. Maybe it aimed to follow us home. Not that I much cared, so long as I was safely away when it arrived.

  We passed into the silver part of the tree, then reached the gray stone path. The keening was louder, almost screaming in my ears. The girls sprinted toward the tunnel and I followed them all the way up the stairs, feeling the nearness of the thing behind us like a tremendous pressure. We struggled up the last few steps, lungs burning and legs aching. Ruthanne pushed the trap door open and stumbled through.

  Grummond sat in a rocking chair, waiting. He had a scattergun in one hand and a whiskey bottle in the other. I pushed the other girls into the room and then stabbed Wallace Fielding's knife through the ornament and into the wooden door. I slammed the trap shut and moved away from it. The girls had collapsed onto the beds nearby, sweating and short of breath. The cloths had been thrown open to let in morning sunlight.

  "You did it," Grummond said to me, his voice husky. "You found where they were going and you brought them back to me."

  "No, Daddy." Ruthanne stared at him. Her sisters were wide-eyed and pale from shock, but she had the dead-eyed resolve of a hanging judge. "We aren't going to stay here with you. Not anymore. We always knew one of the men you hired would take away the only good thing we had, but we're not staying. You have lost us."

  Grummond lunged forward and slapped her face. Then he moved to the trap and stood over it. "I'm going to nail this up my own self. This ain't a job I can trust to anyone else. I have to keep you girls safe."

  The girls laughed. There was no humor in it.

  I felt Wallace beside me. As I suspected, with the ornament in the tunnel, the house was open to him. "Where's my knife? Where did you leave it?"

  "I'm sorry, Wallace. I didn't have a choice."

  I felt him move away. Then the trap door suddenly swung open and banged against the floor. The knife vanished, but I didn't feel the weight of it fall into my pocket.

  As Grummond gaped into the tunnel, a long, sticky tongue snaked out and wrapped about his neck. Luckily for him, he was standing in full morning light, and the sunlight shriveled and shrank the tongue in an instant. He make a choking noise and fell backward, snapping the long tentacle off. The creature retreated back into the hole.

  I grabbed the ornament, slammed the trap shut and laid the ornament across it. "Guess I put that on the wrong side," I said. Ruthanne had already picked up her father's scattergun.

  Big Bill tore at the thing around his neck, pulling it off like it was a thick, dry tree branch. Where it touched his skin, it burned him. I knew he'd carry a scar for the rest of his life that people would mistake for a botched hanging. He fell onto the floor gasping for air. No one moved to help him.

  I slept in the mud by the river that night. It was natural sleep, and I needed it badly. By the time I woke up the next morning, the scow had arrived and my lumber was being loaded. Wallace's knife had not reappeared in my pocket; I figured he was gone for good. He must have figured I'd betrayed him.

  Ruthanne came down to the dock, her hands demurely behind her back. "You could have said 'no' to him," she said. "I know you're one of them. You have one of the gifts."

  I reached up to tip the brim of my hat but of course I'd lost it days ago. "You overestimate my gift, ma'am."

  She didn't seem to think much of my answer. "You could have chosen a different path," she said, her voice low. "You could have done something other than this."

  I almost grinned. I almost allowed that she had the truth of it, but that I was just another sinner. I didn't. I didn't think she'd appreciate the implication and I didn't trust the way she was hiding her hands. Silence seemed best just then.

  "I thought I sensed something in you. Why did you come here and take away what we had? We weren't hurting anyone."

  I tried to think up the words that would explain how I felt when I saw how happy the girls had been, but I couldn't. How could I tell her that I hated to see a woman get so much joy that had nothing to do with me?

  "Don't bother," she said, as though reading my expression. "We always knew one of you would come and take it from us. That Father..."

  She didn't finish that thought. "What about him?" I asked.

  Her face didn't betray any feeling at all. "That Father has always taken care of us, and that we love and honor him just as the Bible instructs."

  The way she said it gave me chills. I made note of her words. I figured I'd be repeating them in court testimony soon enough. "Well, ma'am? Am I going to be allowed to leave?"

  She let her hands, and the revolver she was holding, fall to her sides. "It's too late now, anyway. I just wish I had killed you when it would have done me some good."

  The men finished loading the wood. I stepped onto the scow and she walked back up the hill to her house and her family and her fortune.

  Lord of Reavers

  When I play rpgs, I usually play fighter types because (confession time) I am way too lazy to learn a lot of fiddly magic-user rules. Fighters are straightforward and don't require me to read thirty thousand words on spell slots, casting components, and who knows what.

  But! It's rare for me to write about protagonists whose main skill is swinging a piece of sharpened metal, mostly because it's been done so often by so many writers before.

  Still, I had to give it a try.

  This story was originally sold directly from my website for a dollar. At the time, money was tight and I asked folks for help to raise money to buy new glasses for my son. The response was not terrible but not so great that I tried it again. It did help defer the cost of those glasses, though.

  It's also an exploration of the setting of The Buried King, a failed attempt to combine a police procedural with a second-world fantasy thriller. I hope to return to that book someday.

  ------ ---- ------

  Alleg the Terrible crouched behind a boulder picking his teeth with a dagger. He was unbearably bored.

  It was early in the spring of the 76th year of Temnok Imperial Bliss, and the Unorkan trading cart he was waiting for was supposed to have stumbled into his trap before midmorning. It was after midday now. Alleg stood and glared at the spot where the road crested the hill, as if a hard look could make the wayward cart appear. Alleg was in his mid-forties, short, pot-bellied, and so bulky with muscles in his arms and shoulders that he stood hunched over like an ape.

  His glare didn't cause the cart to appear. He waved toward the oaks on the slope above him.

  Otter and Crowhair ran toward him, their long knives in their hands. They were both barely 12 years old, as quiet in the deep woods as butterflies, and as merciful as serpents. "My boys," Alleg said, his voice light and friendly, "run quickly up the road and find out what has delayed our lunch."

  The boys returned a short while later with grim news.

  Alleg blew a long, sharp whistle that brought every man in his gang out of the woods. They looked unhappy, of course. They'd eaten nothing since the watery ghost squirrel soup of the previous evening. "Men," Alleg said, raising his voice for them all to hear. "Someone has stolen our prize!"

  They followed the road in a straggling mob over two hills and found what they'd been waiting for: an Unorkan carriage loaded with jars of wine, wheels of cheese, and baskets of early spring seeds. Three Unorkan farmhands lay dead in the road, the long, broad swords of their people in their hands. Two more swords lay in the dirt of the road that led back to the valley, presumable abandoned in retreat.

  And in the cart, leaning casually against the front wheel, was a reaver.

  Alleg wasn't impressed. Every man in his band was a reaver, and he was the most dangerous reaver in Three Rivers. Still, the stranger had the look: He stood nearly a head taller than most of the men, with long limbs and corded muscles, not unlike the dead Unorkans beside him. His dark eyes were simila
r to theirs, too, although his hair was long and black. It was difficult to read his age. Could he have been twenty? Surely no older than that.

  "That's my cheese he's eating!" Hasty Pik shouted. He charged toward the cart. The stranger stepped away in one smooth, lazy motion. Then he drew his sword.

  The men laughed. It was a short weapon, barely longer than Otter's knife, and rather than coming to a point it made an angle, as though a much longer sword blade had been chopped in two.

  Hasty Pik had his falchion in his hand and his shield high. Chundler, Pik's best friend, followed close behind with his shield and hatchet. The reaver stood his ground.

  Big Binj came up beside Alleg and said, in his mumble-mouthed way: "I recognize that sword."

  Hasty Pik would have done well to wait for his friend to take the flank, but he hadn't earned his nickname through clever planning. The reaver swept aside Pik's first swing, stepped in close and cut his throat.

  Chundler cried out and charged in, too, but within a second he'd lost his sword hand and his head.

  Colbi Diyree took up position on Alleg's other side. Big Binj and Colbi were Alleg's lieutenants. Both were good men, but as different as they could be. Where Binj was practically a hill giant--although he denied having any giant blood in him--and maintained the stinking leathers and the dull manner of a village idiot, Colbi styled himself as a pirate of the Southern Cape, complete with gold earrings and waxed, pointed beard. Colbi was never without a sly smile, and Binj gaped vacantly at everything.

  "He's quick," Colbi said.

  "Not as quick as me," Alleg said. "Although he does cover a fair bit of ground with those long legs."

  "I recognize that sword," Binj said again.

  "Yes, yes, my boy," Alleg patted his arm. The reaver had picked up Chundler's shield and slung it on his arm. "He has a good eye for equipment, too."

  "Sir?" The chubby archer the other men called Feathers stood on the crest of the hill, an arrow nocked and his bow bent.

  "Loose that arrow at me," the stranger said, "and I'll cut out your guts."

  "My boy!" Alleg called to him, coming down the hill with his lieutenants beside him. "You fight well, but we are thirty men."

  "You'll be a lot fewer when I'm done with you."

  "Brave words, yes," Alleg answered, "especially when you're standing over my dead men, with my shield on your arm. What's more, this cart belongs to me, as does everything on it, and this whole valley."

  The big reaver smiled at that. "You don't look like a lord. Where's your crest?"

  "I am a lord of reavers. They call me Alleg the Terrible."

  "I'm Kurlisk the Unimpressed."

  Alleg laughed at that. "These poor farmhands would not be dead if we had robbed them; they would have surrendered to thirty men. Now there are fewer young bucks to work the land." He waved his finger. "You don't know the rules, my boy."

  "I'm a reaver. I break rules."

  "Some rules will break you right back. Join us! I like bold words, and you fight well enough to back them up. So! Would you rather fight my thirty, or feast with them? Choose."

  The stranger--Kurlisk--seemed to think that required some thought. In the silence, they heard the huff of oxen and the creak of wooden wheels. A covered wagon crested the hill behind them, pulled by ghost oxen. Holding the reins was an ancient Goldrim, a female by its dress. Walking along either side were four more, casually holding the spear-handled swords their people preferred.

  Although they were a common sight in the lands around Three Rivers, Kurlisk stared as if he had never seen one before. They were small, about the height of a ten year old boy, but their muscles were bunched and thick. Their skin was lizard green and wrinkled, like clothes they hoped to grow into someday. Their heads were round like pumpkins, and their mouths huge. Their teeth were too small and too few for the size of their jaws, and their eyes were pupil-less milky gold. The guards walking alongside the cart wore the gleaming armor their people were famous for.

  The old woman riding in the cart nodded at Alleg. He nodded back. They went up the road with barely a glance at the bodies around them.

  * * *

  Kurlisk stared into the wagon: it held blades, mail shirts, spear heads, and who knew what else? Everyone knew Goldrim metal working was famed from the Southern Cape to the White Needle, and yet Alleg the Terrible and his men were letting them pass without demanding so much as a sewing needle.

  The boy looked up at Alleg. There was a tiny smirk on his face that seemed to say: Lord of Reavers.

  "Feast," Kurlisk said, finally.

  * * *

  Their camp was in a dry glen at the northern end of the valley. It was small but it overlooked the long, green valley full of Unorkan farms, and Kurlisk could see four deer paths at the western and northern ends. Presumably there were others, too, in case the band needed to flee into the mountainside.

  There was a pit at the northeastern end of the glen with no way in or out but a narrow path around the edge. When Kurlisk wandered near to see what it was, he saw four women chained together tending a cooking fire. All looked vaguely like the farmboys he'd killed that morning: tall and stout, with cropped hair the color of sand. Whip scars stood out on their bare arms.

  The wart-faced matron noticed him looking and swung the lash at him. He leaped back, avoiding the cut, then took the hint and moved away. At the edge of the pit beside its narrow path was a large tent, almost the size of a general's campaign tent. Alleg stepped through the flap and called for Otter, then ducked back in.

  Judging by the looks they gave him, the other reavers didn't like Kurlisk and didn't care to hide it, so he took his bowl of fire-roasted seeds and half melted cheese along with a jug of too-watered wine, and sat beside an oak to eat.

  It didn't take long for Alleg's lieutenants to introduced themselves. "The men are unhappy that you killed Hasty Pik," Colbi said. He stroked his long mustache. "Pik loved to gamble, but he was very bad at it. Not only did they win his shares, but whatever shares he could borrow from his friends."

  "No good thievery lasts forever," Kurlisk said.

  "Perhaps not, but that does not ease the sting of losing it. Where are you from, my friend?"

  "Saar."

  "A suitably distant land, but you don't look Saarin to me."

  "If you'd ever been there, you'd know it was a seaport. People from all sorts of lands settle there."

  "You look Unorkan to me," Binj said in his dull, thick voice.

  "Do you think so?" Corbi asked. "His hair is as black as pitch."

  "Hair can change color," Binj said. "He has the height and the face and the color. He looks Unorkan."

  Kurlisk didn't like that. "Do I look like I keep a chicken coop? I'm no Unorkan. They're farmhands and vassals."

  "Ah, now they are," Colbi said. "But once they were the most feared race of men West of the Icy Towers. They built a great empire and collected fealty from many of the peoples of Wayerund. Alas for them, they displeased the gods and only these few remain." Colbi gestured toward the valley. "Farmers, now. The Unorkan eagle has become a hen."

  "No good thievery lasts forever," Kurlisk said again.

  Binj leaned over him. "Tell us your story."

  "My father was a sea captain, and my mother his shipwife. A slave. When I was still a boy, a storm blew us off course and wrecked the ship. My father and mother drowned, and good riddance to them. Only the second mate washed up on shore alive, and he planned to sell me at the first slave market he found."

  "Did he?"

  "I didn't give him the chance. I cut his throat while he slept, stole his purse and took whatever cargo I could carry off the beach to the nearest town, which was Saar. The merchants offered me such a low price that it was practically theft, but no man ever tried to make me a slave again."

  "Then you have no concern, my friend. Now that you are one of Alleg's boys, you will either fall to the sword or swing from a rope. No one tries to make slaves of reavers."

  Ku
rlisk shrugged. "Usual camp rules, then? No stealing from each other, fighting, or going near the women?"

  "Tonight," Binj said, ignoring the question. With his muddled voice and gaping mouth, he looked as though he'd taken too many blows to the head. "Tonight you prove yourself."

  * * *

  Pruleloomot the Canal Digger was high in the northern sky when Alleg signaled his men to stream out of the glen. They didn't run; the distance was too far for that, but they did move at an easy jog. Kurlisk ran at the edge of the group, beside Feathers. "What is this?" he asked. "A midnight caravan?"

  The starlight lit Feather's fat face well enough for Kurlisk to see his scowl. "There are no midnight caravans. This is a raid."

  Binj tried to stay close to Kurlisk, but the big man didn't have the stamina to keep up, and he quickly fell to the back of the group with Feathers and a few other laggards.

  The band of thieves thinned out; Alleg stayed at the front of the group, with Colbi close behind. Both were cloaked in ragged black cloth that had tall, pointed hoods that made them look like shadow gaunts. Other men did their best to keep up, but before they reached the crest of the valley, only Alleg, Kurlisk, and Colbi had kept pace, and Colbi was breathing hard. The others trailed behind, singly or in pairs, all the way up the hill.

  Alleg clapped Kurlisk on the shoulder. "You cover ground well, boy."

  "Thank you, uncle," Kurlisk answered.

  Alleg laughed again. "Did you hear, Colbi? I am his uncle now."

  "Better uncle than grandfather I am thinking," Colbi said between gasps.

  "This is a risky time," Kurlisk said. He gestured back up the gentle slope at the thinned band. "Your men are vulnerable all spread out this way. It would be a perfect time for an ambush."

  "It would, my boy, if there were anyone to ambush us. The Unorkans are forbidden to move about in military units--even civilian militia is forbidden by ancient treaty. And there is no one in Fort Achlesdan who will care what we do tonight, as long as we do it here."

  "You have a free hand with the Unorkan farmers, then?"