by Gaie Sebold
Nukh breathed into his mind, and Selt opened his arms wide to accommodate the coiling spirit of the world-ending snake.
Through the splits and openings in his tent, Selt watched his captors struggling and vomiting in the dust when they thought no one could see. The barbarian queen’s slaves were dying. Serfs went down into the holes; piles of hairless, living corpses came back up.
Their food carts looked empty now; hollow and drained as the faces of the warrior woman’s thugs. Nukh had his corrosive fangs in them now.
‘This is the moment. The benediction comes. My servants rise up, to consume the living tribute. Feed me Selty boy. Feed me them all.’
It was the voice again; thunderous now, rattling the tent with its black tongue.
The canvas walls of his tent were coated in excrement, mixed with his many powders and oils. But also, he gathered the hot grey dust brought up from the mine on boots and cloaks. The salt of god, the doorway for the hosts of Nukh. Night fell once again, leaving only the camp fires as illumination.
Now was his time.
He pressed a wick into his green-flecked fire, and watched the flames reproduce, from the source to the greasy candle in his talon-like clutches. The childish flame flickered and danced upon the wick, blackening the twine wherever it touched.
Selt set out a jar of potion that was as pungent and opaque as septic pond water; its fumes clung to the nostrils and burned the back of his throat. But he was not finished. He scratched bloody runes into his face with his hooked dagger, and mashed holy unguents and paste into the opened wounds. Fever-heat shuddered through his system like ice water, but the hurt was good. Hurt was cleansing.
‘My soul is of the dragon! Come and hear me roar!’ he screamed at the top of his lungs, before imbibing a mouthful of his distilled broth.
The guards, daubed in ochre and wreathed with bones, rushed into the hovel, saw-toothed clubs raised. Selt spoke the words of power, spewing his dragon’s brew. The candle’s flame was kindled by the fluid as it was spat over it.
Hell sprang from his mouth, and his guards shrieked. .
The blossoming fire caught them both in the face, igniting their beards and leather tunics. They dropped their weapons as they pawed at their ruined forms.
Selt’s dagger, the dragon’s claw, coated in the most gloriously venomous of perfumes, pierced the first guard beneath his ribcage. Hot as the fire that scorched the man’s eyes, the blade’s toxin did its work. While one died, the other staggered away, ripping through the hovel with his bare hands. Flame spread, streaming from the warrior’s face and consuming the canvas with hungry alacrity.
Selt watched this carnival with tears in his jaundiced eyes. The world, again, would burn with Nukh’s clear fire. So said the texts, and thus it was manifest.
Sessian awoke with a blade in her hand.
Smoke. It drifted from the open flap of her tent, along with the muffled shouts of her brethren, and the flickering orange of a wayward pyre.
She wasted no time, snatching up her pistol without a thought. Outside, the stench of the smoke was riper, and the sounds clearer. The smell of bodies burning; was like the plague pits of Wall-Streeter Witch pyres. But there was something else, hidden in the scent. Selt’s necromantic powders.
The camp was ablaze, green-tinged smoke embracing the site like a leprous lover. Tents were funeral pyres, and the thorns seemed to press in ever closer. She thought, amidst the madness, she could see bodies impaled upon the lower branches of the slender stone spires; men screaming, howling, and thrashing in their death throes. Sessian rushed forwards, weapons drawn, but to what end? Where was her enemy? Selt’s tent was burning like the rest, and there was no sign of him.
An axe swung for the back of her head, and would have taken it off her shoulders had she not instinctively twisted away; opening her foe’s belly with her basket-hilted blade. Another foe rose up, screeching mad sermons from its toothless mouth. She thrust her pistol, barrel-first, into its jaws, and split its head. The pale, hairless thing slumped backwards, its broken rifle slipping from nerveless fingers.
More pale devils loped from the smoke. Sessian fired again, but the shot went wide. A club sent her pistol spinning from her grasp. Quick as thought, she dragged her twin-barrel from her belt, and cratered the chest of another slavering ravage-born with both barrels. The weapon spent she tossed it aside. Her dagger punched through the heart of the another foe as her left hand shot out to deliver a vicious punch into the slobbering maw of a third. She took the club of the first foe she slew. Weapon in each hand, she waded into combat, each sweep of her arms gifting another monster its mortal wound. A hissing bald woman pummelled her defensive guard with the stock of a shotter. Only a stamp kick to the thigh gave the pallid, degenerate she-beast pause; time enough to stave in her skull with a well-timed overhead strike. Her knife slid into the gut of another pale demon, but there it stuck fast. The thing twisted away from her, dragging the dagger from her grip.
Sessian swayed backwards to avoid another attack, gulping down a lungful of the noxious smoke. Blinking away fresh waves of the narcotic corruption, she took her club in two hands.
Another loose rabble of creatures scuttled towards her, vomiting and clawing at their own eyes, blindly scrambling towards her. She couldn’t circle around them, so instead she backed away towards the stone thicket, giving herself space. Even these mindless monsters were wary of approaching the landscape of thorns.
Had Selt’s demented ghouls worked together, Sessian would have surely perished, but the screaming devils hacked at each other as readily as they assaulted her. Those that fell were set upon by their fellows. Their ribcages were pried open, and black organs of the dead were consumed by the living, who wept as they devoured their misshapen kin.
Sessian retreated through the thorns, drunkenly lurching to avoid getting transfixed upon the lethally-sharp construction. But the spines of Yucca would not be denied. They contracted around her, enfolding her like a fly trap’s treacherous leaves. Stone points stabbed down at her and all she could do was dive aside; no blade would turn these inhuman weapons aside.
Somewhere above her, perching atop the living thorns, she saw the greenish flames coalescing before her bloodshot eyes. Wings of conflagration swept out from a serpent made of living Fire. Whorls of smoke curled from it like an inverted halo. Just as soon as the image appeared, then it was gone.
On hands and knees, Sessian fled the din of battle and the screeching of demonic things that cavorted, exulting in the carnage being wrought. Eventually, through the demented nest of barbs, the sound died away, the smoke becoming a mere wisp on the air; an insidious, greenish phantom.
Sessian crawled towards that, ignoring the barbs as they tore at her hair and tunic. Her hair came away easily, in great chunks each time.
This was the heart of the Yucca monument, and at the centre of this hateful landscape stood a plinth crowned with a simple symbol; three trapezoids, surrounding a central circle
It looked like a winged angel, rendered in its simplest form, or perhaps a dragon’s horn and muzzle; it was Nukh the destroyer.
Sessian only cared about whose blood it was that drenched it. Talf sat in the dirt, back propped against the stone cylinder. He whimpered as he clutched his belly, hopelessly trying to stuff his intestines back into his abdomen, blood trickling between his frantic fingers.
Selt held a curved blade in his right hand, whilst his left gently stroked the dying boy’s hair. He cooed and giggled as his surrogate son died and only when Talf shivered and went still did he turn to Sessian.
‘Nukh is the end of the world. He was the end of the Yuccans; he was the end of Talf’s. So he’ll be the end of the Barbarian devil Cutress, yes! Talf tried to tell me this is no place of honour; he claimed the plinth was warning. Heresy. He was wrong. This is a place of honour, honour to the ravager, to deadness.’
Sessian rose, her club in hand and her teeth clenched. Imbrued with the ichors of a dozen and more sla
in enemies, she looked every inch the red-handed war goddess.
‘This place is mine. I’ve killed your allies, I will kill you, and I will strangle Nukh himself if I get my prize!’ Sessian snarled defiantly.
Selt laughed in her face. Hysterical, he leapt at her, his blade flashing in the gloom. Sessian knew the fiend had poisons, and she treated his blade like a viper’s mouth. Selt swung the blade without finesse, but instead possessed an animalist mania. His blade darted back and forth in a frenzy of motion. It was not enough. His last stroke was clumsy. It left him exposed.
Sessian brought her club down, hard, shattering his wrist. The old man yelped. She smashed the club into his side with a dull thud, driving the air from his lungs. An overhead strike shattered his collarbone with a crunch. A third blow crashed into his knee, forcing the old man to an agonised kneeling position. Finally, she smashed the flat edge of the club into his face. His jaw came away, and he spewed blood across the dusty ground.
Sessian grabbed his head, tilting it back to look her in the eyes. ‘Where is my prize?’ she spat. ‘You came here from far to the west. You knew there was something here. Tell me and I kill you quick. Deny me? Then slow.’
Selt chuckled wetly from his ruined mouth. ‘Prize? Your prize ish thish!’ he gestured with his functional hand towards Talf’s corpse. ‘Nukh ish death. Thish ish his gift. Thish ish his sacrifice. Deadness ish all he knows and you gave it gladly.’
Selt continued to gurgle and cackle, until Sessian snapped his neck, and left him to rot beside his murdered boy.
The sun was rising when she finally made her away out of the thorny entanglement. The last traces of the narcotic fugue had passed, but she still felt a sickness deep inside. It was a dreadful malady, a soul sickness, perhaps? she thought.
In the cold grey light of dawn, the camp was a very different place. Ash and charcoal littered the dead place. Her serfs were all dead. Most of her warriors were dead also. Not merely dead but mutilated; butchered like beasts.
She knew then why the sickness grew inside her. There were none of the pale monsters amongst the fallen. Her own warriors’ bodies now appeared pallid in their turn, but all these corpses were... human.
She found Haast, laying where he fell, with Sessian’s basket-hilted dagger protruding from his belly like a conqueror’s flag.
Her eyes were raw from the smoke, and she was too dehydrated to cry out. Sessian saw one of her warriors raise her own pistol toward her. There was no honour in this death. There had been honour in none of this, she cursed wearily. There was a phrase; a fragment of a psalm of some ancient wise man. His words came to her now, unbidden, as if she was desperate for her end to somehow be profound, and not ignoble and pointless as everything else she’d done here on this lonely, dead mountain.
‘I am become deat-’ she began, before the bullet drove all thoughts from her mind.
THIS BLESSED UNION
Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘Cheer up, brother! Is that long face fit for a man about to meet his intended?’ Duke Malmer of Daine boomed cheerfully.
‘Screw you,’ was Ralpe’s response to that.
Malmer laughed hugely. ‘Really? One wedding and you’ll be rightful lord of Tyrenan! What’s so terrible?’
‘And the reason you’re not marrying her yourself is…?’
‘Because my eventual spouse will be clean and accomplished and housetrained!’
‘Quite.’ Ralpe scanned the forest edge sourly. Malmer, his elder brother, had been his tormentor since they were children. Little had changed.
‘You don’t even like women,’ Malmer pointed out inexorably. ‘Just marry the feral bitch and you can see all the pretty boys you like on the side.’
‘How delicately you put it.’
‘You’re not going to make a scene, are you?’ Malmer asked him. ‘I mean, this is for the family, right? The family and the duchy? You want what’s best for-’
‘Yes, yes, all right. What’s keeping her?’
Malmer shrugged. ‘Probably they had to take her for walkies or something. Probably she’s left her spoor on every tree on the way here from the deep forest.’
Nineteen years before, the widower duke of Tyrenan had died in battle, leaving his kingdom to his newborn daughter and her ambitious uncle. Nature had taken its course, and soon enough the uncle was on the throne, wearing the circlet and conducting the ongoing war with the other seven duchies that had lasted well over a century, and showed no signs of stopping.
The new king had stopped short of direct kin slaying, when it came to disposing of his inconvenient infant niece. Instead, being a man of traditional habits, he had ordered the babe taken into the deeps of the forest that stood at the centre of the eight duchies, and had her left there. Apparently that somehow made it better.
He had proved unpopular with the fractious populace of Tyrenan, that ambitious uncle – both for his usurping and the grand scale of his predatory hedonism. After almost two decades of rebellion and unrest, he had been found hanging in his own chambers, and by that time nobody cared enough to mount much of an investigation. That had left Tyrenan to the ambitions of the other duchies and the unravelling chaos that came with lack of government.
Except… persistent rumour amongst the peasantry said that the girl had not died, but somehow lived and grown to maturity within the forest. For a long time, persistent rumour could stick it in its ear, as far as Malmer and Ralpe were concerned, because everyone knew that the deep, deep forest was deadly. Grown men, experienced hunters, whole platoons of troops had vanished into its venomous darkness, never to be seen again. There were wolves, they said, and bears, and the wolves and bears lived short and terrified lives because there was far, far worse.
And yet the rumours kept coming back, of a girl seen within the trees, a human child where no human ought to be, and, as the years went by, not a child but a woman.
And then there had been contact: the girl had come to a village of loggers and hunters at the forest fringe in Daine, or they had trapped her somehow. Those who saw her said she bore the features of the old Tyrenese royal family. Forest rumour became a duchy-wide obsession. She was the heir that the people of Tyrenan would accept.
Malmer had wasted no time in sending for his studious younger brother. For too long Ralpe had closeted himself with his books and the more muscular members of his personal staff. It was time Malmer’s junior sibling dipped his wick for the greater glory of the family. For generations the eight duchies had struggled against each other, borders shifting back and forth, fire and the sword sweeping the land. If Daine and Tyrenan could be united, then abruptly the world would know a power great enough to crush the others one by one and end the war.
And, Ralpe thought, perhaps it would not be so very terrible being Duke of Tyrenan. At least he could keep a decent library.
Then there was a disturbance from the forest fringe. A handful of the locals, woodcutters and charcoal burners and the like, came skittering out, and for a moment Ralpe thought there must be some monster about to make its appearance. They said the deep woods were full of them. The wretches were forming two shaky lines, though, a bridal path down which he would finally see his intended. The escort of soldiers and advisors the brothers had brought with them shifted and shuffled, ready for trouble.
And then she stepped from the shadows of the trees, and a change passed over all who saw her, like a summer wind.
Hunchbacked, Ralpe had predicted; wall-eyed, disfigured, bow-legged. Filthy, of course, her hair matted and tangled – and probably all over her body. The woman he looked on now was none of these things. She was beautiful. She stood tall, clothed in a gown of gossamer silk that clung to the rich contours of her body. She wore a crown of ivy, and a chain of foxgloves gave imperial splendour to her throat. Her eyes were green like the sun on the leaves, her skin pale as birch bark.
And she was heir to Tyrenan. Ralpe and Malmer had both guessed that the feral foundling of the woods was just some wild bra
t of the right age, a coincidence that Daine could exploit to press its claim to the vacant throne of its neighbour. Ralpe had seen portraits of the late Tyrenese royal family, though. The woman before them was a younger and more radiant version of the last duchess. She was the real thing. He would not have put so much as a bent penny on it.
He stepped forwards, mouth opening to recite the portentous words that his brother had written for him, about unions and destinies and bloodlines and the like. Before the first word could clear his lips, Malmer had virtually shouldered him aside.
‘My lady, last blood of the ancient and noble house of Tyrenan!’ the Duke of Daine declared passionately. ‘I bid you welcome, as your brother in nobility; welcome, as your husband to be!’
The look she turned on Malmer made him stumble, so charged was it with bright mischief.
‘I give you thanks.’ Her voice made the men there swallow with abruptly dry throats, straighten their backs and puff out their chests. If she had any idea that the identity of her bridegroom had just been switched, she gave no sign of it.
Her name was Candide, she said. On her lips, in her voice, it was the most beautiful name in the world.
Ralpe spent the month leading up to the wedding in a state of constant nail-biting anxiety, waiting for things to fall apart.
That he was no longer the groom was, frankly, no great concern to him. The dukedom of Tyrenan was a burden he could live without, and for various reasons – that were the stuff of ribald and mildly insulting songs in most taverns – a nubile young wife was not high on his list of priorities. He was involved, though, even against his will. Now Malmer had dragged him into this, Ralpe found that the success of the union, the possibility of Daine-Tyrenan bringing a much-needed order to the eight duchies, was something he was invested in. Except every day it seemed that the wedding would be off and everything would fall apart.
It was not the Tyrenese. He and Malmer had anticipated meeting a lot of resistance there, despite the clear provenance of their new duchess. After all, they would still have to swallow a Dainish duke.
