Lost Lore: A Fantasy Anthology

by Ben Galley

  The stranger stared at Benska for a few moments longer, exhaled a long, weary breath, and looked back down at the fire. His sword descended a fraction of an inch, which Hesk took for encouragement.

  “Have you been injured, sir? In a fight?” he asked.

  The agent looked at Hesk for the first time, and Hesk regretted drawing those eyes to him. Whatever they had seen, Hesk thanked sweet Belu he hadn’t seen it as well. The stranger’s lips moved, formed the word injured a few times. He nodded his head, then closed his eyes and denied the affirmation, shaking his head from side to side.

  “Well, whose blood is that then?” asked Benska, his question for Hesk and Iorgen rather than the stranger.

  “What you got there, old man?” Iorgen asked, still brandishing his sword, but looking now at the thing underneath the agent’s left arm.

  “Shit,” spat Benska. The ugly man took two steps back and let his mace-wielding arm fall to his side.

  The hairs stood up on the back of Hesk’s neck. It was a human head. The hair on it was matted with dried blood, making a mystery of whatever color it might have been. The skin was pale, but spattered with the same filth covering the Syraeic agent. The stranger followed the shaken gazes of the three mercenaries, looked down at the head, and turned its face toward him, the broken blade still held in his hand. The first sounds escaped his lips.

  “Leh…leh…leh…” Hesk thought the man might weep, but instead he looked back up at the three of them, frowning with brow furrowed. Finally, in a hoarse voice he said, “F-friend,” and turned it to face them, as though introducing it.

  It was a woman’s face, at least three or four days dead, blood-painted flesh of the neck ragged, as though it had been torn away rather than severed from her body. The hair was cropped short, in a fashion popular with Syraeic swordswomen Hesk had known, and her eyes had clouded over, masking their color. One protruded gruesomely from a socket, threatening to dangle on a muddied cheek.

  “Another agent?” asked Hesk in a gentle voice, moving toward the man with one hand stretched out, as though he approached a skittish mount. An idea was forming in his mind, a solution to his dilemma. He forced himself to speak with a calm he didn’t feel. “I’m sorry for your loss, brother. You look exhausted. Why not sit by the fire and share our breakfast?”

  The stranger stared at Hesk with an unsettling intensity, but didn’t recoil from his touch. He allowed the youthful mercenary to coax him to the log Iorgen had tripped over. Hesk motioned for Iorgen to bring over some bread, then he reached for the severed head.

  “Let me take this burden from you, friend.”

  With astonishing speed, the stranger had the lethal edge of his broken blade against Hesk’s throat, spitting and stuttering words like venom: “Leave her b-b-be!”

  Hesk felt the sting of the steel on his skin, held up both hands. “I don’t mean to steal her, brother. We could bury her, give her a proper burial.”

  The man’s eyes drilled into Hesk. With the blade still pressed to the youth’s throat, the man hissed out his emphatic response: “Not…here.”

  “Of course,” Hesk responded, signaling for Benska to bring one of their empty satchels. “Perhaps in Serekirk, at the League cemetery, or maybe you want to return her to the Citadel, bring her home to Boudun? Proper and honorable to care for your Syraeic sister so. I mean only to…shelter her remains, shield her from the elements. I meant no disrespect.”

  The stranger gave him an almost imperceptible nod and removed the blade’s edge from his throat. A wary Benska stood near now with the satchel, a leather bag meant to hold the imagined treasure hoard they would gather here in the Barrowlands. Hesk reached again for the ghastly head and this time the stranger relented, allowing him to take it from him. Hesk placed the head in the bag with gentle care, then closed the flap. He started to secure the metal buckle, but the agent’s now-free hand, covered in dried gore, shot out and grasped his wrist like a vice.

  “G-got to breathe,” he croaked, disconcerting eyes wild.

  “Breathe?” exclaimed Benska. “It’s just a bleedin’ head!”

  Hesk stared at the stranger for a moment, at a loss for words. He drew in a deep breath and forced a kind smile. “Of course,” he answered, as though this madness was reasonable. “I won’t close the latch. We’ll keep her safe and warm for you, sir.” He set the leather bag down next to the man, propping it against the log. Iorgen handed him a hunk of bread and Hesk gave it to the stranger. He chewed at the bread mechanically and stared into the fire as the trio of mercenaries backed away.

  “The man’s an asylum candidate,” whispered Iorgen. “Kindest thing we could do for him is give him a great knock on the head and end his grief.”

  “He thinks the goddamned head is breathin’,” offered Benska.

  “He’s in shock, confused,” said Hesk, looking over at the agent who absently consumed the dry bread. “Maybe he’s lost his wits, but he’s a godsend.”

  “How by Lalu’s undergarments is he a godsend?” sneered Iorgen. “He’s lost his mind and dangerous, even with that broken blade. He near slit your silly throat a minute ago!” Iorgen poked at the red line on Hesk’s neck. Hesk swatted the hand away.

  “Yes, we’ll have to be careful, but he’s our ticket back into Serekirk. I admit it: my scheme is a failure. We’ve been wandering three weeks with almost nothing to show for our trouble. Our food’s near gone. I say we head for Serekirk with the agent. They pay mercenaries a reward for returning injured Syraeics to the Counting House. They’ll probably even give less scrutiny to our lame ‘washed overboard’ story.”

  “I thought we should say it was pirates that sunk our ship,” said Benska, scratching again at his earhole. His companions ignored him.

  “How much?” asked Iorgen, piggy eyes gleaming with avarice. “A reward for him even with his mind broken?”

  “Returning him alive should net us a couple thousand sovereigns. We could even get a reward for the head.”

  Iorgen glanced at the man by the fire, and Hesk followed his gaze. The stranger had finished the bread and sat transfixed by the flames. He still brandished the broken sword, but now he patted the leather bag by his side, speaking words Hesk couldn’t make out. Iorgen looked back at Hesk.

  “He’s talking to the cursed thing. Having a conversation. Look, it was your plan we followed into the Barrowlands, so you can get us out. You hold his leash. You’re responsible for him. He waves that steel at me, or makes like he wants to add to his head collection, and I’m slitting his fucking throat.” Iorgen punctuated the last word with another poke at the reddened skin on Hesk’s neck.

  “But we were gonna find a tomb,” whined Benska.

  “Content yourself with your brass bracelet,” taunted Iorgen. “We can divide the reward for the lunatic and his surplus head. Two thousand and change split three ways is a pretty haul. And we won’t need to risk our necks crawling around in the ground. Would you rather dance with a hungry hollow man? Or get skewered like a Revival chicken on the rusty blade of some old Djao trap?”

  Benska emitted a grunt, followed by a gob of phlegm spat onto the ground. “OK. We take him back to Serekirk. Freckles is his keeper.”

  Hesk grimaced, held his tongue, and nodded.

  They walked south and east, their pace slow and methodical. That was wisdom in the Barrowlands. The ground was uneven, covered by coarse, ankle-high grass hiding holes and rocks that made faster travel unsafe. Iorgen and Benska trailed behind Hesk and the stranger, bickering with each other the way they had for the past three miserable weeks. Hesk was glad the wind blew northwest. It carried their inane chatter away from his own ears. The Syraeic trudged beside him, silent, his eyes locked on the terrain immediately before him, or on nothing at all. Hesk spared him an occasional glance, seeking any change in his distant demeanor. For the first five miles, there was nothing. He was like a wind-up toy,
dutifully ambulating in the direction he was set in motion. Hesk at last broke the silence.

  “My name is Hesk Atterley, brother. I was born in a little village outside Leatham. Came to the Citadel when I was seventeen, to join the Syraeic League. Afraid I washed out, though. Been mercking for several years, mostly in Busker ruins. I came to the Barrowlands ‘bout six months ago. Heard the pay was better. No one would hire me, though.”

  Hesk couldn’t be sure the man heard him at first. But his conversational grin vanished when he realized that he had just blown their cover story with the truth. As he contemplated the possible consequences of his foolish indiscretion, the stranger spoke. “Pescham, off the Woolly Coast.” His eyes never moved from the sickly green grass before them.

  “Pescham?” Hesk repeated, hopeful. “You come from Pescham? What’s your name, then?”

  The stranger said nothing, placing one foot before the other.

  “I’m not sure I’ve heard of Pescham, but if it’s near the Woolly Coast that makes you a true Hanifaxer,” he continued. “My own village is called Bedderben. No one’s ever heard of it, so now I say Leatham, or outside Leatham. We like to think ourselves ‘Faxers, too, though many from the main island like yourself dispute it.”

  The Syraeic walked like an automaton, but mouthed Leatham.

  “You still haven’t told me your name, sir,” Hesk asked, smiling and looking sideways at the man. The agent didn’t answer, didn’t seem to hear his query.

  The man had to be at least fifty, Hesk thought. The graying hair, the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, the wrinkles—they spoke of experience. He had a nose like the beak of a hawk, thin lips and a strong, angular chin with a slight cleft. He had the look of a serious man, a soldier, someone worthy of respect. Hesk scanned the damage to the man’s leather armor. Gouges and tears screamed of claws and teeth, not the kind of marks left by manmade weapons. This man had fought in some Djao ruin, with beasts, perhaps even demons or the dead. He remembered the head now concealed in the leather satchel: the flesh of the neck was torn. It hadn’t been cut from the body with a blade. Hesk suppressed a shudder.

  “What’s that up ahead?” shouted Benska from behind them.

  Benska was pointing forward, waving his finger. Hesk scanned the foot of the hill they were approaching. What at first looked like a long rock peeking out from beneath the Barrowlands grass turned out to be four gray stones set close together. Say what you would about the man, Benska had a good set of peepers.

  “Not sure,” Hesk answered. “Maybe a marker of sorts. Maybe nothing.”

  Benska began trotting toward the stones, then cried out in pain moments after he passed Hesk and the stranger, spilling to the ground and holding his ankle. Iorgen let out a sophomoric guffaw. “Only a bloody fool runs in the Barrowlands, you stupid turd!” Benska replied with a string of unimaginative profanity, rocking back and forth, nursing his ankle. Hesk sighed and marched towards his fallen companion, kneeling by his side to check the man’s foot. It wasn’t broken.

  “Can you walk?” Hesk asked after turning it this way and that. He helped the ugly man up, who tested the ankle with exaggerated caution.

  “Yeah, I suppose,” Benska mumbled, sheepish. Iorgen snickered.

  As they approached the stones, their Djao pedigree became obvious. Each was a different height, the tallest three feet tall, the shortest half that, each two-foot square around its base. Dark gray and worn, they were shaped like tapering pyramids with the greater portion of their pointed tops lopped off. Hesk thought of the blunt molars of some lumbering herbivore. Three had a single pictogram carved on their faces that he recognized as indecipherable Higher Djao. The other, third from the left and two feet tall, had a series of words inscribed in it. He touched the surface of this stone when he finally reached it, kneeling as he felt the letters carved there.

  “What’s it say?” asked Benska, who couldn’t read regular Hanifaxan script, let alone this ancient writing.

  “Agat-eshi, agat-uril…szi-da-reddeh mi-ahl ghesou-laa,” Hesk answered, sounding the strange words aloud.

  “Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba!” mocked Iorgen. “What’s that nonsense mean?”

  “First risen, first fallen, let no god bar our passage.”

  The three mercenaries turned to the stranger, who had spoken the translation in a distant, hollow voice. Hesk looked back at the stone, then to the Syraeic again. Though he seemed to regard the stones before them, his expression still said he was a thousand miles away, lost in some nameless gloom.

  Benska screwed up his face, making himself even more repugnant. “Crazy Djao rambling! It don’t make no sense.”

  “Well,” Hesk started, managing to recall something from his abruptly ended education, “Uril, ‘fallen,’ can also mean ‘slain,’ killed in a fight. I think.”

  “So, it’s a tomb marker?” said Iorgen, piggy, avaricious eyes alight.

  “Or a monument to a battle,” Hesk answered.

  “Is there a tomb down there?” sputtered Benska, banging on one of the stones bearing a single pictogram with his mace. “How do we get in? Do we dig? Press a button? Are there magic words to speak?”

  Hesk thought back to his time at the Citadel, an eager adolescent sitting in a classroom of eager adolescents, his natural enthusiasm for descending into old ruins in search of hidden treasure gradually smothered by the droning lecturer, a Syraeic septuagenarian with spittle at the corners of his mouth. The man had had a life-sized rendering of Djao capstones on the wall behind him, sketched in charcoal on parchment by some agent who had once stood before just such a monument. He could remember a sense of longing and wonder, but nothing else. No words about detecting seams or latches or pressure points on carved rock, weathered by a dozen millennia. The preceptor’s words had been wasted on him. That lad had lacked the patient intellect and focus one needed to absorb the sometimes esoteric and dry knowledge every successful Syraeic agent required. He cursed that eager adolescent now, as he had many times since then. That young mind, consumed by daydreams of fighting demons or corpses fueled by necromancy, or swimming in piles of ancient gold coins, while the lecturer’s priceless wisdom was paraded before him in vain.

  Hesk’s reverie of regret was broken by the scrape of metal on stone. The stranger dragged his blade across the sickly gray lichen that covered the top of the stone whose Djao script he had translated moments before. This released a disgusting stench from the growth, greenish moisture peeking out from the disturbed vegetation.

  “Eeeh!” cried Benska. “Gods of the Netherworlds! What a stink!”

  Hesk looked to the muck created by the Syraeic agent’s scraping, watching a bead of moisture slide forward and then suddenly sink back into the stone. He set the leather satchel containing the head beside the stone and drew his own sword, carefully employing its edge to peel away more of the lichen. At last, he swept the scrapings to the ground.

  “Lalu’s tits!” exclaimed Iorgen with a laugh.

  Revealed was a trio of rectangular indentations at seemingly random places atop the stone, each bearing a single word in Lesser Djao script. Hesk spoke them aloud in a reverent whisper, tracing the words with a trembling finger. “Ghao, aem, szaa.” It almost felt as though he was in a dream: a monolith of true Djao manufacture, ancient clues, hints and mysteries dancing in the air around him. His pulse quickened.

  “More gibberish,” said Benska, scowling.

  “What does it mean?” Iorgen asked, squinting his eyes, nostrils flaring at the lichen’s pungent stink.

  “Ghao means ‘man,’ or ‘human,’ I think,” answered Hesk, eyes focused on the word, thrilled with his recall. “And aem…uh, ‘place?’”

  “Like a man placed that stone there?” offered Iorgen, a rare attempt at helpfulness devoid of his trademark sneer.

  “No,” responded Hesk. “More like this place…location.”

 
“Szaaaaa,” said Benska in an ignorant drone, drawing the word out as though contemplating the sound. “What’s that about?” There were a few moments of silence, but for a gust of wind along the grassy hillside. Then the Syraeic agent, whom the trio of mercenaries had almost forgotten, croaked a single word.

  “Lend—.”

  Hesk tore his attention from the recessed Djao words to look up at the weary stranger. He was pointing with his broken blade to the leather bag lying on the ground. Hesk took hold of the satchel by its strap and held it up to the agent with an uneasy feeling in his gut. The man hesitated a few seconds, then took the bag from him, using his other hand to push back the flap and look within. He spoke to the head inside the bag in a confidential whisper. After a pause, he nodded, as though acknowledging the head’s response.

  “Curse,” the stranger said, sounding out the word, like the hiss of a serpent.

  “She told you that?” scoffed Iorgen, poking at the leather satchel with a finger. “Ask her if she’ll give my manhood a kiss while you’re…”

  The glare from the Syraeic, wild-eyed and lethal, shut Iorgen’s mouth mid-sentence. Benska grabbed a corner of the bag to look inside, as if to see if the head truly spoke to the madman. The agent drew back his sword arm and drove his elbow into Benska’s face with sudden, precise violence that sent the squat mercenary reeling backward. Benska dropped his mace as he fell howling to the ground, cradling his broken and bloody nose with both filthy hands. In a flash, the cutting edge of the Syraeic’s blade rested under Iorgen’s chin, tilting the black-haired man’s head up, as though he was a barber readying for the first stroke of a shave.

  “Hold, friend, please,” begged Hesk, rising slowly from the Djao markers, leaving his sword resting flat atop the freshly cleared stone. “My companions meant no harm, brother. Please, lower your blade. They will apologize.”

  The Syraeic’s expression was alive with fury, every ounce of it trained on Iorgen, who seemed incapable of softening his sneering countenance, even in these dire circumstances.