The White Towers

by Andy Remic

  “It’s dark, Mummy.”

  “Yes, Torn. It’s still night. There’s no need to be scared of the dark.”

  “I had a dream, Mummy.”

  “That’s okay. I had a dream as well.”

  “Was it a bad dream, Mummy?” The girl lifted her head a little, eyes searching.

  “Yes, Torn.”

  “What was it about?”

  Imagining the screaming face in the flower, Chalandra gave a little shudder. “I don’t remember, dear. Now shush. It’s time to go back to sleep. I have to get up early to help at the market, remember?”

  “But it’s dark, Mummy.”

  “Yes, dear. I know that.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Do monsters live in the dark, Mummy?”

  “No, Torney. There are no monsters.”

  “But I saw the monsters!”

  “In your dream? That’s fine as well, my sweet. They can’t hurt you when they’re in your dreams. They’re just made-up. Shout go away bad monsters and they’ll disappear. I promise you.”

  Again, a long pause. Outside, there came a shout on the street. Then a clatter. Chalandra gave a frown and hugged her girl closer to her breast. She would be the first to admit they were not wealthy; especially after what had happened to her husband-to-be, Kanda, and the shame that followed.

  They lived in one of the poorer districts inside the walled city of Zanne, the most westerly city in Vagandrak. And whilst they had not yet been cast into the Haven, they were still only one-step removed from the happily and misleadingly named slums, living above a cobbler’s on the edges of the Factory Quarter, as they did. During the night-time hours all kinds of nefarious activities took place below their window, for this street was a thoroughfare between the Haven and the heavily working class Factory Quarter. Acts of sex and the sale of sex. Honey-leaf peddling, consumption, and the hallucinations and violence that often accompanied the leaf. The trade of illegal weapons, or slaves, or children. So it came as no great surprise to Chalandra when she heard a cry, a smash of glass, the crash of impacting weapons or the scream of an unfortunate.

  “Go away, bad monsters,” whispered Torney, placing her hands over her eyes.

  Chalandra smiled grimly. She knew, in her world, in the real world, the monsters were men and women of flesh and blood.

  There came a crack as something struck the window, and Chalandra’s head snapped up. Her eyes grew wide. For there, nose pressed against the glass, there really was a monster… twisted and broken, skin more moss and bark than skin and hair. And the head moved back, then slammed forward, crashing through the window and scattering sharp shards of glass across the bare boards of the room.

  Chalandra bit off a scream. A scream got you nowhere. A scream was a sign of weakness. A sign didn’t crush the evil strong.

  “What do you want?” she hissed, as the horribly disfigured monster climbed in and swayed across the room. It had one leg shorter than the other, and limped a little, although this did little to alleviate the horror of the situation.

  The lips formed into a horrible snarl, like brown snakes in a vat of fish oil. “Why, my sweetie, simply your obedience,” said the creature in a voice that was frighteningly human.

  Torney opened her eyes then, and screamed, and tried to scrabble backwards across the bed, through her mother.

  “There, there, little one, it won’t hurt. Much.” The creature grinned.

  Outside, screams had started to echo up and down the streets of Zanne, reverberating through dark alleys, bouncing from slick iced cobbles and dark patchy flagstones. There came the sounds of battle. Sword against sword. The slap of iron biting flesh. The crash of bodies hitting the ground. Running boots. The splatter of blood. Cackles. Snarls. Whimpers.

  Chalandra leapt suddenly from the bed, scooping up a wicked shard of glass from the broken window. It cut into the palm of her hand, drawing blood which seeped, bubbled, then dripped to the bare stained wood.

  “Stay back!” she snarled. She risked a glance behind her. “Go, Torney! Flee! Seek help! Seek the City Elders! Tell them you are Kanda’s daughter! Tell them what you saw here!”

  Torney turned and fled, stopping at the door to turn and watch her mother. Chalandra advanced on the creature which held up its hands. Long, thin strings or wires or, or… or roots seemed to surge from the flesh and wrap around Chalandra and enter her through nose and mouth and ears and anus… and she was picked up and spun around like a spider spinning a victim in its web… and then ripped suddenly apart into a hundred segments of bloody, quivering flesh that hit the bare floorboards in crimson cubes and chunks and lumps.

  “Mummy!” hissed Torney, an almost silent exhalation of air.

  Then she fled, and behind her heard the sounds of cracking bones, chewed flesh, and the slurp of consumed blood.

  “Guards stand firm!” bellowed Sergeant Tilla, and everybody obeyed instantly, for no soldier crossed the wrath of Sergeant Tilla without ending up with broken cheekbones, a broken back, or both.

  The hundred and fifty guards locked their shields, fifteen wide on the main thoroughfare that ran through the cultural quarter of Vagan, and ten deep to a man. A formidable fighting company, many of the men having fought either the constantly attacking forces of Zakora to the south, or even having fought the bastard mud-orcs. These were not raw recruits. They were seasoned men, hard men, carrying scars of battle, experience and a cynical eye.

  And as the elf rats approached up the street in a hobbling, crawling swarm, and Sergeant Tilla bellowed, “Stand steady! Present long spears!”, there were more than a few veterans who went weak at the knees, dry in the mouth, with full bladders and a desperate urge to piss.

  These were not some enemy army.

  Not even mud-orcs.

  The rumour had gone round faster than a beautiful whore with syphilis. These were elf rats. Fucking elf rats. Returned to claim the land as their own; as had their ancestors; as the Dark Legends foretold, despite the words and pictures being banned from schools and libraries and museums. What was the song? “With rewritten histories and a fictional past.” The history books belonged to the successors. Victorious kings and their creeping, crawling politician slime, sticking tongues up back crevices for a taste of the spoils.

  Elf rats!

  “Stand steady, lads!” growled Tilla, giving them strength and backbone. As the great sergeant said in his own words: he hadn’t been killed yet after thirty-five years of battle, and he wasn’t about to fucking start dying now.

  As the elf rat charge increased, so long spears lowered. Tilla gave a bleak smile to himself. He’d seen it a hundred times before. The weight of the charge forcing onwards, then suddenly presenting spears from behind a shield wall; the front of the charge would want to falter, to stop, realising they would be inevitably impaled – but the weight of their comrades, eager for battle, and unable to see the low-held gleaming points of iron, pushed them on and on and on...

  But the elf rats did not slow.

  They came on, accelerating, snarling and screaming and drooling and brandishing short black iron swords…

  “Hold steady!” screamed Tilla, sensing a growing panic in his lads as his own adrenaline burst through him and he revelled in the exhilaration. Damn. This is better than sex, he thought, and grinned. His old buddy, Jakko, would have slapped him on the back. That’s because you’re not doing it right, sunshine!

  The two lines smashed together and the elf rats threw themselves on spears, impaling themselves and grasping shafts in bloodied, bark-covered claws, holding the spears locked inside their dying bodies to form… ramps… which the rest of the charging force climbed and leapt from into the ranks of the City Guards. Swords slashed left and right, iron clashing with iron, as men and elf rat fought in sudden, harsh, closed battle for the first time in centuries. Heads were cut from shoulders, blades skewered torsos and hearts, livers and kidneys, limbs were cut free, men went down screaming, elf rats went down silent and squir
ming. Elf rat claws and fangs slashed out, bit and drew blood, and many of the City Guards crawled away from the battle scene, bitten and bleeding and infected.

  It was over in a short time.

  Sergeant Tilla was the last to die, finding himself in a swiftly decreasing circle of steel and trusted armour. Old Kav went down, sword-cut and bitten to fuck. Llandana, the jammiest bastard in the whole of Vagandrak at cards, bone-dice and Fish Wife Rune Poker, had his throat ripped out and staggered around, unable to scream. Unja lost his eyes, and was stabbed by two elf rats simultaneously through the belly. All these things Tilla saw, and fought on grimly, hacking away hands and ducking low, cutting through legs at the knee. The point of his sword skewered lungs and heart and groin arteries. He kept low, moved fast, seemed hardly to touch the enemy but left a devastating bloody massacre in his wake. Until a spear jabbed out, cutting into his side, lifting him a little. He cut backwards, but a sword blade smashed into his clavicle, breaking the bone, cutting flesh. Tilla gritted his teeth, refusing to scream as he went down under another half-dozen hacking swords.

  Sergeant Tilla lay on his back, looking up at the sky brightening with a pretty winter dawn. Everything was suddenly quiet. Snow started to fall, big fuzzy flakes that turned the world hazy. To his left he could see the Old Opera House, ramshackle and quaint, kept alive by enthusiasts and run by obsessives. To his right, was Old Ma’s Bakery, which in his opinion baked the finest meat and potato pies in the whole of Vagandrak.

  He grinned, and there was blood on his teeth.

  A figure appeared. He was obviously old and moved with great agony, joints crippled, arthritic – if these creatures could suffer arthritis. He wore a cloak of deep brown, interwoven with thin branches of black wood. He moved to stand before Sergeant Tilla, and he stooped, and stared into Tilla’s bright, feverish eyes.

  “How many guards do you have, my son?” he asked.

  “Who… who are you?”

  “I am Bazaroth aea Quazaquiel, Sorcerer to the Elf Rat King, Daranganoth,” spoke the creature, and pulled a long, silver dagger from beneath his brown robes. “Now answer my question, boy, and your end shall be swift.”

  Sergeant Tilla cackled, eyes bright, brow narrowing into a frown. “Go on, fuck you, elf rat.”

  “I can make your ending swift and painless!”

  “Fuck off! I want it hard and painful; only that way will I get to hunt your kind in the afterlife. So do your worst, you toxic piece of shit. I welcome every fucking second of it. Welcome it, you hear?!” he screamed.

  Bazaroth looked up at the elf rats. “Move on. Progress. Kill and conquer. Take the city,” he said, and the elf rats moved on over the corpses of the slain city guards. Then he looked down at Sergeant Tilla, with something akin to pity in his ancient, bark-woven face.

  His black bark lips seemed to writhe for a moment. Then Bazaroth aea Quazaquiel gave a modest smile.

  “Our final moments will be intimate,” he said, and seated himself cross-legged beside the wounded body of Sergeant Tilla. “I will give you what you ask for.”

  It took Drakerath, the capital city of Vagandrak, two days to fall. The fighting was vicious, bloody, and relentless. Finally, the city gates were closed and the city itself descended into silence. Nobody entered. Nobody left.

  It took Vagan a little while longer, mainly because of the garrisons of King’s Guard stationed in the Keep. But even that, after hours of bloody, relentless fighting, was overrun. Many soldiers were hung by the neck from the city walls, eyes bulging, bowels hanging down beneath their boots like some obscene painting from The Abattoir Monologues. Finally, the city gates slammed shut. Huge bolts, wider than a man, were slid into place with grating squeals. And the country’s war capital, to all intents and purposes, became a silent, mourning, motionless graveyard.

  And Zanne. Zanne was the last to fall. The high black gates – the northern Corpsefield Gate, the eastern Winter Gate, and the southern Royal Gate – all were shut with resounding thuds, like the heavy stone lids slammed on a massive, desolate, sealed stone tomb.

  MOLA

  Mola sat in a rough wooden chair at a rough wooden table outside his villa, listening to the sway of the trees, his legs warming in the weak sunshine, and thought about the pain. It nagged him worse than any fish woman at the market whom he’d bedded and cast aside. It throbbed inside him, worse than any physical invasion of a blade he’d ever had to deal with – and that number measured quite a few. From bottom to top, his left knee was barely weight-supporting, and was raised with angry purple bruises. His left thigh, from knee to hip, was one huge bruise like a lightning filled sky during a summer storm. His hip, surprisingly, had survived the impact, but under his left tit two ribs were broken and constantly clicking, forcing Mola to adopt a slightly effete posture where he cupped his left wrist under his breast, pressing his ribs to offer some modest external support. Above that, his breast bone also clicked when he moved in any way whatsoever, bringing a curse to his lips from the gentlest of manoeuvres. The back of his shoulder and neck was a mass of throbbing, rigid, humming tendons, a cauldron of intense agonies, a platter of pain that made him grin like an idiot and curse like a sailor. But the final reigning glory was his left shoulder – or more precisely, the tip of his shoulder where one major part of the impact had occurred. His physician had called it a possible “rotator cuff injury”, and he was glad to have had that told to him, but to Mola it was simply the place that, when pressed even gently, made him squeal like a virgin pig having the sacrificial spit-roast spear thrust up its nethermost. He continually attempted to press that area of his shoulder, searching for some improvement. It made him scream every time. And yet, every single damn day, as if in some perverse search for personal masochism and redemption, he’d probe gently at the shoulder, dancing around the fiery hot area until morbid curiosity finally championed and he dug in a finger. “Aiiieee,” was normally the retort, and further curses, which highlighted why he should be doing exactly what his physician advised and bloody resting.

  The problem was, Mola wasn’t the sort of man to rest easy. That’s what happened when you not only trained the fighting dogs for the Red Thumb Gangs, but ran the most lucrative illegal dog-fighting pit in the whole of Vagandrak. Called The Dogs, it was a class pit. Only the best for Mola’s fighting dogs. And if you didn’t like it? If you were an awkward motherfucker? Well, you got fed to the dogs.

  His right hand came over and pressed tentatively at his ribs. Something went click. “Son of a bastard’s bitch’s bastard,” he muttered, face scowling, dark shaggy brows meeting in the centre, lank ragged hair tossing about his broad round head. “Fucking horses. Fucking stallions. Fucking wagers!”

  “You still sore, boss?”

  “Yes, Carrion. I am still fucking sore.”

  Carrion scrunched up his face. “Well, it’s been a whole week, boss.”

  Mola gave Carrion a look that would have had the little man cut into pieces and fed to the meat-eating fishes of the harbour. Or the eels. Yes. Definitely the eels. They consumed bones more readily than a pen full of hungry pigs.

  “I’m just saying,” muttered the little man, backing away and exiting the villa’s easy room carrying a tray with empty glasses, each stained with a residue of whiskey sweat.

  Mola sat, enjoying the rays of the dying sun, for what little enjoyment he could feel. The problem was, and this was a common problem, he’d been drunk. Not drunk as a lord, but certainly drunk as a whore. Drunk was something Mola did well. Hell. Drunk was something Mola fucking loved. Not so drunk he couldn’t function; oh no. What would be the point of that? But drunk enough to furnish him with… a unique perspective in any given situation. Drunk enough to be brave about any situation. Drunk enough to face a blade, or shove a blade into another man’s guts. Drunk enough to care – fuck it. To Care with a big C.

  Mola felt sour, and bad, and cold. His head felt dark and bad and maudlin. He thought back over long bitter years and remembered better times, t
he good people he’d known, the good times he’d enjoyed. And he thought about those good times turned sour. He thought about those good people he’d known stabbing him in the back and fucking him over. And he thought about the bad times. Shit. There had been a lot.

  “Damn you,” he cursed, and wriggled, trying to get comfy.

  Carrion entered, and moved slowly to Mola. He handed the man some small white tablets. “Time you took these,” he said.

  “I don’t like to. They addle a man’s brain.”

  “You need the relief,” said Carrion, with some sympathy, his compact, dark features contorting.

  “Thank you. What would I do without you?”

  “Die under the blades of the Red Thumb Gangs?”

  “Yes. Thanks for reminding me of that one.”

  “Do I also need to remind you of the fight?”

  “No.”

  “So the dogs are ready?”

  “My dogs are always ready,” growled Mola, his own voice more reminiscent of the hounds he trained than any human sound a man should utter. His brows formed into a savage scowl and Carrion closed his mouth with a clack of teeth. He’d worked for Mola for ten years, but knew even that was not enough. Never enough. The Red Thumb Gangs believed they controlled Mola and the dog fighting pit he ran on their behalf; but in reality, Mola was a man apart; the sort of man who nobody truly ran, or owned, or controlled – despite appearances. Mola did not feel fear. He felt pain, yes; every fucker felt pain. But fear? Fear was something that happened to other people.

  Mola rocked several times, then managed to gain his feet with only a minimum of rich and inventive swearing. His head snapped round and his small dark eyes pierced Carrion. “What the fuck are you looking at?”

  “I was merely contemplating your recently increased elegance.”

  Mola processed this. “You cheeky little bastard. You want to spend five minutes with Thrasher?”