Swords v. Cthulhu

by Jesse Bullington

  The prince wriggled in her grasp and she could feel his rising hysteria. It was like holding a small, writhing worm that couldn’t understand the difference between flesh and dirt in its need to hide itself away.

  “If you promise to leave my son alive, I can tell you the location of the Ma’ah Steed.”

  The prince gasped and struggled to rise.

  “Father — no! We have been pursuing the Steed for years!”

  “Your life is more important than any trophy or glory.” The shah seemed to have shrunk in stature as his aged hands stroked his graying beard.

  “More important than the welfare of our people? The Ma’ah could sustain our kingdom with water for the next fifty years!”

  “We will find another way. We always do,” the shah said, in a resonating, peremptory tone that banished all argument. “One such as you —” he gestured to her webbed fingers as all traces of the parasites burrowed back into the depths of her body, “ — one with your abilities would benefit greatly from the powers that the Ma’ah Steed is said to possess. You are familiar with the Great Water Horse of the shifting sands?”

  “I am,” she croaked. “A hundred thousand drops of water for a hundred thousand years for the man who can capture and tame the water beast of the sea-sands. Even in my faraway childhood in a faraway place were such tales told.” She looked at her now normal hand, seeming to try to see through the layers of skin and muscle to the bone, before speaking again. “I accept your offer, but I require three things if I am to leave without violence: my weapons, a flask of water — a mouthful will be enough — and your son.”

  “What?”

  “The word of the shah is law, but what is your law to one such as me? I require your son so that I know you will not pursue me in the desert after I leave. I will need no map, no faulty directions, if I have something precious of yours to ensure my continued survival. I promise not to harm a single hair on his body and to return him to you whole after we find the Great Ma’ah. With these conditions, I will leave peaceably, never to return to your kingdom again.”

  “The word of a thief carries no great weight either, I am afraid.” The sigh escaped from deep within his chest and fell, heavy, into the room. A small light crept back into his eyes as he rose to greet her grim face. “But I accept. Now, release my son.”

  She nodded and threw the sword to the ground, taking a step back. Servants scrambled noiselessly to find her belongings and to assemble a suitable pack of clothes and provisions for the prince. The thief slunk into the shadows, disguising the unsettling feeling in her stomach that would not go away until she could make her way to the winding sands outside of the capital. The prince argued in a low voice with his father that distracted some, but most of the harried glances carried her way were piercing and swift. No one dared look her in the eye, lest her tainted being somehow slither over to them. She had to check to ascertain that her skin was, indeed, its normal dark brown and her curly black hair no longer touched by green or webbing. Their gaze was heavier than it had been at the glistening drops of life-giving water, and it unsettled her; she wished once again to be alone.

  Within twenty minutes she had an escort of fifty guards in a phalanx to the wall. At the gates, the prince pressed his forehead to his father’s, heaved a gravid goodbye, and then accompanied her past the border. Once she was on the other side, her small daggers and a sloshing flask were chucked over the stone wall to land in the sand at her feet. As she strapped on her belt and adjusted everything, she raised a tattered piece of black cloth to cover her face from the rising sun, leaving only her eyes exposed. The parasites didn’t like the beating orb any more than she did, and they pulsed with displeasure.

  “We’re leaving now? As the sun begins to boil?” the prince asked in disbelief. They were his first words to her.

  “Every servant was bustling within the city by the time we left. Many more than required to find my belongings and to equip you for a journey. The shah intends to go after us under cover of darkness, despite his promises otherwise. I intend to put as much distance as I can between them and us. So, the faster you lead me to the Ma’ah, the faster you can find your father’s men and be back home. He will see that the word of a common thief holds more honesty than a rich man’s.”

  She gestured for him to walk in front and into the blazing fury of the sunrise. Slowly, he plodded westward and began their journey to find the Great Ma’ah.

  As the sun grew, their steps became thoughtful and paced; the parasites inside of her delved deep, trying to find some solace from the burning heat. The prince fared no better, but he dared not ask for them to stop.

  Relief came as the sun began to sink, and she looked back to see their winding trail of footprints slowly being eaten by the ever-present, wind-fueled dust devils. The city was a small dark spot below the mounds of the hills they had crawled to the top of around midday. Flashes of shining light off spears and helmets greeted her as she ordered the prince to stop and build a fire. He obliged, happy to sit and engage in something else other than staring at the orange horizon, sun-blind and burned.

  Once the fire crackled, illuminating their faces and keeping their hands warm from the encroaching chill, the prince found a satchel of food in his pack and began to peck at the rations. After a few bites he looked at the thief, and then, with downcast eyes, offered her a small piece of dried meat. His hand lingered in the air for a few moments until he took it back and scoffed.

  “You don’t eat?”

  “This is all I need,” she replied, opening the flask at her hip and quickly draining it of its contents. As soon as the water passed her teeth, she grabbed the shocked prince and dragged him, screaming, into the other, chaotic world.

  Once there, the clouds thundering and the sky an even darker shade of torturous green, she stayed still, holding the struggling prince in her scaled arms. Large tentacles burst out of the sky and plummeted toward them, until they blotted out the haunting, ethereal light. They grabbed hold of the proffered prince and drew him into the low clouds, until she could no longer hear his shrieks. The small piece of dried meat fell to the ground as she slipped back to the fire.

  The prince was sitting across from her, his eyes blank as if they were clouded with cataracts. His jaw was slack. A faint bit of drool pooled before staining his shirt. She rose, leaving the inert prince there. His only movement was a fluttering protrusion that was slowly growing somewhere within his torso, just barely visible through his clothes.

  Taking only the flask filled with water that had been provided for him and furtively hidden, she went westward in the direction they had been traveling all day. The army sent after them was hidden in the folds of the sand dunes, but she knew that their small fire would reveal the prince’s location and he would be reunited with his father, not a single hair out of place.

  The Great Ma’ah awaited her and the parasites she carried. She was positive she could find her way to his slumbering presence from the prince’s directions. The thief set off in the soft sand under a full moon and a clear, cloudless sky.

  Without Within

  Jonathan L. Howard

  It was unconscionable, and — he felt — a personal attack on his reputation and thereby his honor. Yet he held his temper, and instead communicated his great rancor to Stephen Hensley with a glowering stare of unmistakable threat.

  “This is a simple matter, Master Hensley,” said Major John Bell with dangerous deliberation. “I surveyed the breach myself. The length of fallen wall provides its own materials and pattern; there is naught of brain necessary but that it be put back as it was.”

  This was not quite honest; the mine had shattered many of the blocks of stone that had formed the base of the city wall at St Mary’s, and replacements would have to be found, likely by commandeering them from elsewhere within York. That was a trivial matter, however, and if some worthy woke up one morning to find their doorstep gone, then they were still getting off very lightly indeed.

 
The breach in the wall had been a matter of contention to the Parliamentarian forces even before the city had surrendered to them. The walls were far too well constructed for artillery to bring them down. Instead, the engineers under Bell’s command had excavated a tunnel leading under the wall at St Mary’s with the intention to breach there and simultaneously at a similar mine at Walmgate Bar, allowing an overwhelming force to swarm in and take the city. It had been slow, dangerous work, with the possibility of detection or collapse at every yard of the way. Yet Bell’s men had managed it, and he had been proud of them for it. Aye, even of Hensley, who now stood sniveling before Bell’s desk.

  In olden times, the wall would have been collapsed by setting a fire in the tunnel to burn away the heavy timber supports the engineers had brought in to prop up the foundations they had themselves dug away. These days, gunpowder did the trick more effectively, and allowed better timing of the exact moment the breach would open, allowing the attackers to be in position and ready to take full advantage.

  That had not occurred on this occasion, however. The St Mary’s mine was completed comfortably in advance of the one at Walmgate — largely the effect of the ground being stonier there, Bell conceded. Sergeant Major General Crawford of the Eastern Association under the Earl of Manchester expressed impatience, and one of his subordinates took this to mean they should press ahead with what was available to them. On the 16th day of June, the year of our Lord 1644, this fool took it upon himself to fire the charge.

  Crawford had only six hundred men available to take advantage of the collapsed wall, the merest fraction of what was required. They entered the city, but Royalist defenders sallied from the nearby abbey postern gate and flanked the attackers from behind. Half the six hundred were killed or injured. Crawford claimed he had just discovered that the defenders had detected the Walmgate tunnel, and had successfully flooded it; he feared they also knew of the St Mary’s tunnel. That didn’t seem likely to Bell; the Royalists seemed to have been surprised by the breach, which argued against Crawford being right. It did not, however, preclude the possibility that he had acted in good faith. The Earl had taken him at his word, Cromwell less so.

  After all their efforts, Major Bell was privately furious that the mine had been tossed away in such a manner. As it was, York eventually surrendered after most of the defenders marched out to join Prince Rupert in engaging the Parliamentarians. All they got for their trouble was slaughter at Marston Moor, before Rupert remembered pressing matters in the south and abandoned York to its fate. Sir Thomas Glemham was left as governor, looked at the sorry state of the forces left to him, and opened negotiations.

  A month to the day after the disaster at St Mary’s, the Parliamentarians marched into the city at Walmgate, St Mary’s Gate, and Micklegate.

  And here was Major John Bell, a month after that, trying to patch up the hole in the wall in whose creation he had been instrumental. It was a strange life, and not always an enjoyable one.

  “The men don’t like the hole,” said Hensley. He had a shapeless cloth cap in his hands that he kept wringing incessantly. It was unseemly for a man of Hensley’s seniority, chief foreman and master of works.

  “They helped make it,” said Bell. “Why would they show so much animosity to it now?”

  Hensley stared at him.

  Bell kept his anger in check. “Why are they so afeared of it, I mean? ‘’Tis just a hole in a wall.”

  “Not that hole, Major,” said Hensley. “The one beneath it.”

  The major’s eyebrows lowered. “They helped make that one too.”

  Hensley shook his head, a desperately unhappy man caught between two intractable forces. “Not even that hole. The one beneath it.”

  “What do you mean, a hole beneath a hole beneath a hole? You’re talking a child’s drivel, Master Hensley.”

  “There is a tunnel not of our making below. The powder explosion damaged the bricks lining it. When we started the repairs and were clearing out the rubble, it collapsed altogether.”

  Bell’s anger abated somewhat, and his thunderous brow admitted some curiosity. “Another tunnel? A counter tunnel?” Perhaps Crawford had been right after all; perhaps the defenders had been mining toward his tunnel with the intention of flooding or collapsing it.

  “I... ” Hensley looked even unhappier. “I do not think it so. I believe it is an old place.”

  Bell looked closely at Hensley; the man was sweating. It was a warm August day, sure enough, but Bell was sure that Hensley had not been showing any distress at the heat when he came into Bell’s temporary office of works in the ancient abbey’s hospitium.

  “God’s teeth, man,” he demanded, “are you frighted, too?”

  They were interrupted by the sound of footsteps ascending the wooden stairs outside the door, frantic and clumsy. No sooner had the unexpected visitor reached the head of the stairs than they were thumping open-handedly upon the door.

  Major Bell started to call “Come in!”, but the door swung open before the first word was out of his mouth. Lindle, one of the foremen under Hensley, stood there. Normally a phlegmatic, somewhat dull man, he was wild-eyed and panting.

  “The tunnel collapsed! It took Archer!”

  “Took?” Bell climbed to his feet, plucking his jerkin from the back of his chair as he did so. “What mean you by that? It fell upon him?”

  Lindle looked from Bell to Hensley and back again, as if realizing he had said the wrong thing and meant to repair matters. “Aye,” he said, but he sounded unconvinced by his own words. “It fell in upon him.”

  By the time Bell arrived at the works, the other sappers had already dug the unlucky Archer out and laid him prostrate on the trammeled grass. Bell was relieved not to be able to see any blood beyond a few scratches, and no obvious injuries, but the group standing around Archer was sullen and quiet, and Bell suspected the man might have suffocated before he could be rescued. He was surprised, therefore, to see Archer stir.

  “Give the man some air!” barked Bell. “Back away! Let him see daylight!” He knelt by Archer as the circle of men loosened. “Are you hurting, lad?” he asked more gently. “Are you in pain?”

  Archer said nothing. His head lolled this way and that, and his eyes opened to show little but the whites. His mouth worked slowly, as if trying to speak.

  “He’s mazed,” said one of the sappers behind Bell. “The hole’s had him. He’s mazed for good.”

  Bell turned on the speaker in a fury. “Shut your damned mouth! I’ll have none of that superstition!”

  That quieted them all, for “superstition” and “papistry” were the same in Bell’s vocabulary, and it wasn’t wise to be identified with either in his eyes. Bell was in the ugly state of having both sympathy for the king, and a loathing of what Charles had come to be. Charles had been corrupted and the kingdom defiled by the wiles of the Catholic harlot Henrietta Maria, this Bell knew to be true. With heavy heart, he had turned his back upon his king.

  Quelling his anger, Bell turned back to Archer. “Archer, lad… can you hear me? Are you with me?”

  “Did I… ” Archer’s voice was barely a whisper. His gaze wandered until it found Bell’s face, but barely focused on him at all. “Is it out? I tried to stop it. Is it out?”

  Bell frowned. “Is what out? The tunnel collapsed on you, Archer. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “The tunnel collapsed…?” Archer sighed. His eyes closed slowly. “Good… good… didn’t think I was strong enough. Managed it, then… good… ”

  Bell regarded Archer curiously. Did he understand the man correctly? In any case, if Archer was saying what he seemed to be, it was better the men didn’t hear it. They were like lions under fire, but the first hint of deviltry, and they would just as easily turn into old women.

  They were behind schedule as it was, and Bell was tired of making excuses to My Lord Fairfax. The new governor of the city doubted the Royalists would try and retake the city, but if they did, he had no wish
to defend it with a gaping hole in the wall. Every few days he would inquire as to the state of the repairs.

  The truth was that Bell’s men had done too good a job of demolishing it in the first place, but they could hardly admit to that. So, Bell had a well worn rondo of reasons to trot out: the site was being made safe; the materials they gathered were unsuitable or inferior; they’d been commandeered for urgent work elsewhere.

  The last was the truest: Bell and his engineers had done any number of small civil works, mainly to repair houses and shore up properties damaged during the hostilities. The York folk had been glad of the end of the siege, and Fairfax had gained a gold coin reputation for refusing to allow the rabidly Protestant members of his army to strip the city’s churches of their gilt and ornament, and to put out the stained glass of the minster cathedral. Thus, the occupying army was regarded favorably by the locals, and Fairfax was keen that long would that goodwill persist. Repairing a roof here and buttressing a wall there was thereby smiled upon by Bell’s superiors.

  But all the goodwill within the city walls could not hide the gaping hole that might let in those without.

  Bell had a litter made up, and Archer was transported back to the hospitium, where a bed was made for him on the bottom floor. Once he had ordered one of the boys to fetch an army surgeon (he certainly didn’t intend to pay a fee if he could avoid it) and ushered the rest of the men out of the door, he returned his attention to Archer.

  “Archer? You may speak freely now. What happened in that hole?” He hesitated, then added, “Did you bring on the collapse yourself, lad? Did you do something to the props?”

  Archer’s eyes were almost shut. “I did, aye. I put the mattock butt to the prop and levered it. All my weight. Did I do it?”

  “You did. But why? We’ll just have to dig it out again.”

  Archer’s eyes opened wide and he stared up at Bell with naked horror. “No!” He grabbed Bell’s sleeve. “No! You must not, Major! It mustn’t be opened again! Bury it! Bury it deep!”