Bell stood, transfixed as if the stone beneath his feet had bled through his boots and into the flesh of his legs from sole to thigh. He could do naught but stare into the reflection of his own face cast into the dark mirror before him. His face was shadowed by the lantern held high, and he sought the humanity he knew to be within his own visage as a counter to the thing he had witnessed. In a moment, however, his reflection was gone, and not even the light shone back.
A breeze blew through the chamber, strong enough to make the torches growl and the lantern lights flicker. It blew from the surface of the blood.
“Deviltry,” croaked Bell. He said it often enough as a formula for the common wickedness of men, but this time he meant it. He stepped back, crushing the realization that the blood — if blood it was, or had ever been — was no liquid, but rather a gateway that flowed and eddied. If that realization ever became a thought of consequence, it would shoulder aside the columns of his wit and bring down the temple of his reason. Therefore, he ignored it, blinked it aside, and filled the space where it had briefly stood with thoughts of God, duty, and family.
“Deviltry,” he said again, louder now as fear and the fear of fear performed its usual alchemy in his heart and turned to anger.
In such a state, it was hardly surprising that he and his men had completely forgotten why they were searching the chamber in the first place. They were reminded when the hypothetical concealed door became a reality.
Beyond the coffin, the curve of the wall from the floor to a man’s height was plastered and whited. Along the edge of this alcove, a dark line formed and widened.
Owen saw it and cried a warning. Quickly it became clear that the whole section of the alcove was moving to one side. That it did so in short shoves, to the sound of stone grating against stone, indicated that it did not do so by the exercise of some subtle mechanism, but rather by the application of main force driving the wall along concealed runnels.
An opening widened, admitting naught but darkness. Bell moved back, almost relieved to have someone to face. Whatever godless citizen or citizens of York maintained this place, whatever apostates clinging to vile paganism might emerge, they would suffer immediate punishment for what they had done here and the foul murder they had committed upon Hensley.
The wall stopped moving and all was silence but for the breathing of the four men.
What stepped through into the light was not alive, but nearly. It was not dead, but nearly. It was ancient. It might once have been a man.
It regarded them through eye sockets filled with something too darkly red to be blood, too fluid to be flesh. There was no sense that it had any sort of presence at all in the way that a human possesses, no more than a statue or manikin or a child’s dolly does. Instead it presented the air of being an artefact or a puppet, made from old flesh and animated by a puppeteer a long, long way away. It wore scraps of armor scavenged from those it had caught and slaughtered down the years, an ancient Roman helmet on its head.
Afterward, Bell — when he allowed himself to think about the events of that night at all — would imagine how the Romans must have discovered the site and started erecting the fort of Eboracum there. How they had encountered the thing and, unable to destroy it, had drawn it into their pantheon, if secretly. They had sacrificed to it too. The construction of the tunnel and the chamber made more sense in that thought.
But had they truly never realized that their sacrifices were not to some local monster, but to something else? Something that lurked and writhed, almost visible through the pane of the dark blood? Bell would curtail his thoughts there, for that glimpsed image was never quite successfully driven from his memories. Sometimes prayer sufficed to calm his soul. Sometimes hard liquor.
He hardly knew how the sword got into his hand. In response, the thing slowly drew a straight-bladed sword that could not be a year under two centuries old. It looked blunt and mottled with rust, but there was fresh blood on it all the same.
“Owen, Green,” Bell murmured, “we are going to make a fighting retreat to the breach. Ryder, you’re fleet. Run like the Devil himself is at your heels. Get two barrels of blasting powder and short fuse them. Stand ready to light and drop them into the tunnel. Do y’understand me?”
“Sir?” said Ryder. “I can’t abandon…”
“You’ll do as you’re told. Go.”
Ryder hesitated at the command, but swallowed his reluctance and disappeared into the tunnel. They could hear the slapping of his boots on the soil floor for long seconds. The thing heard them too, and advanced.
“Owen, to my right. Green, to my left. I’ll draw it on. You wound it as and when you can.”
Bell only hoped that it could be wounded. As he put his lantern down by the tunnel entrance, and the men flung their brands aside to illuminate the chamber in a nightmare of low lights and high shadows, Bell took a moment to weigh their opponent. It was manlike, but whether it had ever been a man he sorely doubted. It was more in the nature of a device in the form of a man, as though some ancient corpse had been the pencil sketch and the final shape the inking of an artist who had never seen a man and allowed new fancies into the design. It seemed wet, but this was the strange ichor that had taken Hensley, an unblood that flowed as it willed and formed the strings by which the unseen puppeteer made sport of mortal terror. Bell could see it flow and ebb in the place of muscles across the skeletal frame and found himself so fascinated by its actions that he almost failed to grasp their import as the sword rose and swept down.
Green’s cry saved him, and he brought his saber up in a clumsy block. The thing was no swordsman, and the blow was as without guile as the stroke of a butcher’s cleaver upon the insensate flesh of his trade. It struck his blade square and he was preserved. Still, it was powerful, and Bell fell back with a shout.
He shook himself; he was a better swordsman than this, to stand amazed while the godless creature sliced him like mutton. With a new shout filled with wrath rather than astonishment, he pressed forward. The thing failed to defend itself effectively at all, and Bell felt joy as his sword found a gap in his opponent’s rusting cuirass and drove through its heart.
But the thing had no heart, and raised its sword once more. In a moment of terrible clarity, Bell saw the thing’s withered skin and saw it was crossed with centuries of scars where men at least as worthy as he had struck blows upon that abomination, and yet it still walked. Men at least as worthy as he, who now formed the ossuary around them.
He felt despair, but only for the merest moment, for despair is the death of a fighting man, and no one who knew John Bell would regard him as anything aught.
“Forget thrusts, men,” he ordered, “they trouble it not.” The imagery of a butcher’s shambles occurred to him again at that moment, and the spirit of war brought a smile that was half snarl to his face. “Hack it to pieces.”
Owen was the first to obey as Green harassed it on its flank. He leveled a scything strike at the nape of the thing’s neck and roared as he did, one cry amid the many that three of the combatants in that eldritch skirmish gave throat.
The thing switched attention from one man to the other as easily as if it had eyes in the back of its head, and with astonishing speed brought its massive blade up to block Owen’s attack. His saber did not break, which was a miracle in itself, but a chip of good steel flew wild, and he was momentarily stunned by the shock reverberating from the clash. In that moment, the thing twitched its blade as if it were a feather and opened Owen from chest to shoulder. He screamed, more in surprise than pain. That would come later, Bell knew. If they survived.
There could be no victory in this fight for them. Bell could see that now. How many of the dead there had encountered the thing in groups of three, or four, or more? Given time, it would triumph over a regiment. That was if they played the game on its terms, of course. If Ryder had obeyed with alacrity, a game new to the thing was about to begin.
“Green! Get Owen back to the breach and
get him out! You as well! I’ll slow it as much as I may.”
Green knew better than to disobey a direct order in combat. He ducked around to reach Owen, now leaning against the tunnel wall, pale and gasping, and half carried, half dragged the man toward the dim light of the brands above the tunnel breach, leaving Bell with the thing.
He knew he would not see the dawn. The knowledge gave him a clarity he only ever felt under fire, and he was satisfied that this was the last emotion that he would ever experience. Better this than to die an old man, toothless and confused.
For its part, the creature seemed confused by the loss of two of its opponents. Its head, the helmet rocking loosely across the hairless skull, swung this way and that way, before settling its gaze once more upon Bell.
“Aye,” said Bell, too at peace with his imminent extinction to offer house to anything as base as animosity. “Just you and I now. Lead on.”
The monster, however, did not wish to lead on. It looked at Bell with an expressionless countenance, yet with an air of curiosity. Then it spoke, and its voice was as empty of life as the gulf between the stars, and the syllables that came from a mouth without tongue and a throat without cords were too primal, too sophisticated for Bell to even guess at their meaning.
The words came, and the peace he had felt was stripped away to leave him naked and freezing before a truth too simple to be denied. A lifetime of faith was swept away as childish fancies. Before him was no puppet, but a priest of the one truth, the vicarious embodiment of it, the undeniable proof of it. No faith was necessary. No faith could ever prosper in the mind of John Bell ever again, an intellect sterilized of such fancies by the awful light of true revelation.
“Iä… Zschekerith… H’ethkyicin mu… ech Lloigor mar’Zschekerith… Zschekerith mu fhtagn…”
Bell had no memory of running, yet he must have. He had no memory of the explosion of two barrels of powder. He had no memory of being pulled from the sucking earth, and the touch of pulseless hands around his ankles that tried to pull him back into the churning soil. These he only recalled in dimly remembered nightmares for the rest of his life.
His first clear memory after that night was a day and a half afterward, when he awoke in his own bed in the hospitium, Captain Harker surprised in the act of leaving as Bell stirred. Harker called for the surgeon to attend immediately, before resuming his seat by Bell.
Harker told him how long he had been unconscious and raving, although he forebore to mention some of the dangerously blasphemous things Bell had said. Instead, he told Bell that Fairfax had attended him for an hour the previous day and had been very concerned by the major’s accident.
“Accident?” said Bell through cracked lips. “Did they not tell you of what we encountered in the tunnel?”
Here Harker had frowned at the prospect of an unpleasant duty to perform. “The powder brought down this tunnel you speak of, and the workings that led down to it. Your man Ryder who set the charge, he didn’t escape in time. I am sorry, sir.”
“But… the others. What of the others? Owen?”
“He was sorely injured, and never awakened. Green was smothered in the collapse.”
Bell was filled with horror. What he had seen in the chamber was well nigh unbearable, but the thought of no other trustworthy witness surviving to corroborate his memories was a sharp additional wound.
The captain was still speaking. “I am truly sorry, Major Bell. We’re searching the city for your attackers. They will be brought to justice, I assure you.”
Bell looked at him blankly.
“Royalist sympathizers, probably, or perhaps just common criminals. Whatever the case, they will not escape. Your foreman gave us good descriptions.”
“Foreman?”
The door opened and both men looked to the newcomer. Harker nodded, for he saw Hensley there. Bell screamed, for he did not.
Daughter of the Drifting
Jason Heller
Waves of mud from the Ocean Amorphous tugged at the hobnails of my boots as I trod the shore that morning. The soil undulated nauseously beneath my feet. It wasn’t a large quake. I trudged on.
The stench of rot, fetid and heavy, rose from the squelching sea. No gulls wheeled in the sky above its gray-brown swells; no fish wriggled in them, save for the lungfish that trawled its murky floor, occasionally to emerge, squinting in the dim light of the violet sun like an internal organ thrust into the cruel air.
I had partaken of such a creature the night before. Lungfish could only be eaten raw, as fire caused the meat to sublimate into a noxious vapor, and pickling it produced a mucus nigh on poisonous. Choking down its oily flesh, I had pondered my path thus far.
It was not a comforting path to retrace, nor an easy one. The small islands that comprised this world shifted constantly. There were no continents of which to speak, or islands so large they couldn’t be trodden across in a day. They roiled constantly, like blobs of sludge in the glutinous soup that was the Ocean Amorphous — the body of water, if indeed it might be called that, that encircled the world. One often awoke after a haunted sleep, adrift on a clump of slime and flattened ferns; it had been, just the night before, the promontory of an entire island. People lived upon these clots of muck, fought over them, died for them, only to have them dissolve and drift away before each sunrise.
It was a world that afforded no constancy, but my path was difficult to contemplate for another reason. Like the lungfish, I did not belong here. My body — its piebald skin, its pendulous breasts, its robust hips — was native to this filthy hell, all too true. But my spirit had long ago been hurled across the cosmic void and back by the hand of a Great Old One, whose immeasurable, skull-bejeweled hilt protruded from my eternal soul like some scabrous and cancerous growth.
My path, deformed as it was, had been prescribed by the arc of the Blade of Anothqgg.
My name is Y’vrn. I am a daughter of the Drifting. It was on the eighty-fifth day of the month of Ornuary, in the two thousand and eleventh year since the world was set Adrift, that the Blade of Anothqgg — as deftly as it had pierced the flesh of untold multitudes in battles both ancient and yet to come — entered my own life.
I know not why I remember the date. I do not linger on the past; sentiment, as L’kmi once taught me, is the swain of bloodshed. Of what consequence, he used to instruct, are the mawkish chalk-marks of the chronologist to a blade that can slice into eons long forgotten as keenly as it cleaves the dim mists of the future? Not that I was a woman — at least not at that tender age — apt to contemplate the finer points of philosophy. All the points that concerned me could be found at the ends of sabers.
Many blades had come by me over the course of my brief life. I’d even accommodated a host of them in my belly, my arms, my thighs. My many scars, tawny across my dappled skin, marked my history; they were the fossils of my intimacy. Swords, perhaps, were the only lovers I sought, not counting a quick fuck in the oozing mud-rain after battle. Or on the caked, quaking shore of the Ocean Amorphous, sludge mingling with the spent juices of our union. Like lovers, blades were neutral, utilitarian, to be wielded however one’s will might bend them. They could be friends or foes, stolen or won, relations or strangers.
None, however, was stranger than the Blade of Anothqgg. It came into my hands the way so many had before: I slew its owner, my lover. I plucked its hilt from the wilted worms that had been his fingers, even as his manhood — which had, only moments earlier, displaced flesh inside me — pulsed with the ebb of his final heartbeats.
That owner had been L’kmi.
His death, like our lovemaking, had come swiftly and with passion. Our nakedness only added to our savagery. But I had learned everything he’d had to teach, and more. He was no match for me. I knew his tricks; I knew his stance; I knew his every flinch and instinct. He knew mine, too, but he had failed to heed his own maxim. Sentiment killed him long before I did.
Gripping his sword for the first time, I noticed that it was not co
mmon. Moonlight shone through the greasy clouds, crackling with sparks, and each flash of luminescence was refracted from the steel in a different way. It was solid, surely, but it seemed to dance like a flame. Despite the fact that I held it in my hand, I was unable to tell how far it stood from my eyes. When I stared at it directly, its image writhed and blurred like a lungfish clambering back into the mud, caught by the corner of my eye and then gone in a blink. But when I looked away, the sword became more vivid, as if my mind projected the reality of it outward rather than the other way round.
It was then that my soul screamed.
The blade didn’t move, yet it entered me. It fractured like glass, everywhere at once, filling the air and the hidden space around the air that I had never before seen, or imagined, or imagined I could imagine.
The pain could have split the sun.
A voice came. Somehow I heard it over my own howl.
“You are neither the holder nor the wielder of this, my Blade,” it thundered and whispered and purred and ululated in a billion languages all at once. “You are but its Sheath. You will hold it in your soul, quenching its thirst for death, until I have need of it.”
I no longer felt confusion or pain. Or more accurately, I was no longer able to recognize them. It was then I realized the truth: L’kmi was no fool. He knew what I was, and he had trained me regardless, and he had led me to kill him, to release him from this curse.
I stared in bemusement. How L’kmi — an average swordsman in practice, truth be told, better at thinking about killing than killing — could gain such a weapon in the first place, I have never come to know. Perhaps ownership of the blade doesn’t pass from the strong to the strong, as it does in battle, but from the weak to the weak, like a plague. What that speaks about me, I don’t care to speculate. All I can state without doubt is this: that night my soul became the Scabbard of that dread Blade, forever to incubate its unimaginable mass like some teratoid fetus inside me.
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