by Ben Galley
Benska’s mutilated corpse disappeared into the hole along with the appendage that had murdered him, and soon came horrid sounds of chewing and crunching and smacking of monstrous lips. Hesk brought his blade down on the wounded tentacle again, but rather than pull back for another blow, he began sawing at the devilish flesh, cutting through a tangle of muscle and meat. The severed end went limp along with Iorgen’s brutalized arm when he cut through. The convulsing stump, spewing more of its stinking, viscous juices, vanished into the hole.
Hesk turned to the limb wrapped about the black-haired mercenary’s head. He brought the sword’s edge down on the appendage, wishing he had an axe for the purpose, and began sawing again, his strokes manic. But when he was halfway through the limb, he saw the light go out of Iorgen’s bulging eyes. Another tentacle emerged from the hole and wrapped itself around the corpse’s midsection, yanking it into the darkness. More sounds of savage feasting followed.
Hesk went down to one knee, an abrupt wave of fatigue washing over him. He stared into the dark opening, the hidden beast’s black blood coating the floor before it, the limb he had severed lifeless and curled about itself, a dozen plump gemstones scattered here and there. Hesk heard the devil-thing breathing, could smell its hulking, malodorous bulk, feel it, ancient and evil. But he couldn’t bring himself to retreat. He felt a weird paralysis, his two selves at war with one another. Should he gather the priceless jewels spilled on the floor and live in luxury, like he was the King of Hanifax? Should he charge into the hole, confront the demon and slay it, like the heroes his grandpa told him of as a young boy in Bedderben? Or should he flee, flee now from this profane place with mind and body intact?
He felt a lascivious tickle at his ankle. The sight of a cluster of tendrils, like swollen earthworms snaking themselves around his ankle filled him with horror. He lurched backward, spilling himself on his backside. He tried to propel himself away by kicking his legs, but his heels could gain no purchase on the stone floor, now slick with the beast’s dark blood. He swung his sword in a panicky arc at a second fluttering cluster of tendrils that reached out from the darkness, severing a half dozen of the grasping things. He cried out for help, from the gods, from the stranger, from his mother, he knew not whom. His terror seemed to summon another meaty appendage, like those that had killed his two miserable companions. It sprang forth from the black hole, waving in the air, like an accusatory, demonic finger. It wrapped itself around his right wrist and squeezed so hard it made him cry out and drop his blade. The weapon fell to the floor with a metallic clang, and the tentacle snaked its way up and around his arm. In concert with the worms encircling his ankle, it began pulling him toward the ominous hole.
Hesk’s heart threatened to burst through his chest as he looked upon the yawning maw of darkness, drawn by an inexorable, ancient strength. He felt the beast’s hateful exhalations in his face, could sense its insatiable, bottomless hunger. In seconds, it would consume him: his flesh, his bones, his memories and regrets, his mistakes and promises, his foolish hopes and dreams, everything. Nothing of Hesk Atterley would remain, not even ashes for an urn to join the others in the Syraeic vaults.
It was when he saw a glint of light within the blackness—perhaps it was his guttering torch reflected off an eyeball of the beast—that a desperate fury welled up from within him. He began kicking, crying out, investing every ounce of his being to resist his extinction. Weaponless, he reached over with his left hand and grabbed hold of the fat tentacle that imprisoned his sword arm, a gesture almost comically feeble against the creature’s beastly strength. A wink of light reflected off the silver Djao ring on his pinky as he clawed at the scaled appendage. When the metal of the ring touched the tentacle, there came a hiss of burning flesh, like meat thrown in a heated pan, and a pale feather of smoke peeled off the abomination’s rubbery skin. The tentacle convulsed, brutalizing his trapped limb, but at last it released his arm and retreated into the darkness.
A terrible keening came from that black place, filled with a hatred and anger so deep and alien that Hesk felt his mind teeter on a precipice. He tried to flee, but the tendrils still wrapped around his ankle held him, like a child refusing to surrender a plaything. Hesk’s right arm was throbbing with pain and useless, while his left clawed hopelessly for the tenacious feelers, just out of his reach. Was the beast waiting, conserving its strength to finally drag him to its gluttonous mouth?
A flash of steel fell across the tendrils that held him, a broken blade slicing through the waggling things, like a fisherman’s knife cutting bait. And then Hesk was being dragged back along the stony floor, away from the hungry blackness, between the rows of bones, and out of this bleak charnel house that had so nearly been his tomb.
The stranger guided him from the ruins without words. They emerged at last into the sepulchral light of late afternoon in the Barrowlands. The agent fashioned a sling for Hesk’s injured right arm and did the best he could to wipe the gore from his flesh and armor. Hesk rested for a time, sure the stranger was indulging him, but finally the man spurred him into motion, and they started the trek southeast to Serekirk.
They walked without speaking for the first mile or two, the Syraeic agent’s broken sword at last sheathed. The man still held the leather satchel containing his colleague’s severed head close to his chest. Hesk was the one to disturb the silence, speaking without looking at the stranger.
“Thank you. Thank you for my life.”
The man said nothing, patted Hesk on the shoulder, and swept his graying hair back with his free hand. Then he reached into a seam in his armor between armpit and pectoral and withdrew an object that he handed to Hesk. Hesk looked down at the palm of his hand. Resting there was a gleaming topaz the size of a peach pit.
That night, Hesk and the Syraeic agent, whose name he never learned, camped under the oppressive Barrowlands sky. The stranger fell asleep long before Hesk did. Serekirk was still a day or two distant, but he felt certain that whatever lay ahead would pale in comparison to what they had just survived. Every muscle in his body ached, and he was more exhausted than he had ever been in his life. But still, he felt a kind of nervous, electric animation. He reflected on each moment since the mad agent had stumbled upon them. This was the life he had sought out as a youth, wasn’t it? He felt simultaneously repelled and elated. Part of him wanted to go back to that awful place, explore the halls they hadn’t explored, now, in the middle of this starless night. And another part of him wanted to run screaming all the way back to Serekirk.
Hesk looked over at the sleeping stranger, whose eyes jerked back and forth beneath their lids, his limbs twitching, an occasional whimper escaping the man’s lips. His broken blade was out of its sheath again, clutched to his breast.
Filled with pity and gratitude, Hesk wondered what dreams the mad dream. He looked down at his left hand, at the Djao ring on his pinky. The stranger and this not-so-simple ring had saved his life. In the morning, he would ask the Syraeic what the engraving on the ring meant. He attempted to remove it, to look again at the words etched inside the band, but the touch of the beast’s tentacle had somehow deformed the metal so that it wouldn’t budge. A smith or jeweler would have to aid his removal of the ring when they reached civilization. But it didn’t matter now. He could not forget those words: Ish-el-a-eld. Regardless of their meaning, they held a special kind of magic for him now.
Hesk’s eyes were drawn to the leather satchel, lying next to the sleeping stranger. That part of him longing to return to the tomb goaded him over to the bag now, urged him to pick it up from the ground, and put a hand to the closing flap. Why? What was this morbid impulse? He had already seen the head; he himself had placed it in the satchel. What reason did he have to look upon its gruesome visage again? For a stupid thrill? A reminder that he was no longer that daydreaming lad, but a real adventurer facing horrors and wonders tavern rubes would hear tell of with awe?
“Put the b
ag down,” said the part of him that wanted to race for Serekirk.
“Just a quick peek,” said the intrepid part of him that hungered for more of these dreadful delights.
Hesk moved aside the flap of the leather bag, releasing the stink of rot. The severed head stared back up at him. The woman’s cheeks and forehead were still smeared with dried gore, her hair a gummy tangle of carnage. But her sightless, milky eyes were somehow aware, penetrating. Grinning broadly, ivory teeth stained red with blood, she spoke to him in a hoarse, yet lilting alto.
“Ish-el-a-eld,” she said. “‘Hold tight, my beloved.’”
Head to www.mikeshel.com to discover more stories by Mike Shel.
5
Into the Woods
Timandra Whitecastle
Nora sighed. “Come on. You don’t really believe all that mumbo jumbo about twins having a double soul? We may look alike. But we’re not the same person.”
- Touch of Iron
The morning I started to bleed, my mother rolled her eyes to the heavens, huffed a sigh, packed a basket with bread and cheese, and told me to go to my grandmother’s.
The walk would help loosen the cramps.
I hadn’t even reached the door when she called me back and insisted on the head scarf.
“You’re not a child anymore, Jelena,” she said, straightening my hair, tucking it under one of her old scarves, the red one with the birds embroidered along the edges in neat stitches. It wrapped around me like a shawl, filled with her scent. “In the world outside, you carry the red roof of your father’s house as shelter upon you, until you live under the roof of your husband.”
“But it’s not raining,” I whined. Whatever I said, she seemed determined not to listen. So it was all the time.
“Your father and brothers will be working all day.” She looked me in the eyes shortly, muttering a list of all the things she had to get done under her breath and quickly ran me through my chores. “Have you started the dough? Good. Have you swept the ashes? Good. Can you feed the chickens before you go? Very good. What’s the rule for going to your grandmother on your own?”
“Don’t walk among the ruins.”
“They’re dangerous. You could hurt yourself.” She straightened, her rough hands on my shoulders and looked me over one more time. It seemed that she wanted to say more, but she pressed her lips together tightly before planting a wet kiss on my forehead just underneath the scarf. “I’ll make you your favorite stew tonight. Promise. Be safe!”
So I crossed over the threshold of my mother’s house, pale and shaky, my clogs still re-painted in bright colors underneath the spatter of mud ﹘ the child I had been only yesterday ﹘ and my hair covered as befitted the newly born woman.
I walked slowly across the autumn earth, wet and squelching from the days and days of rain, minding the deepest puddles. Our village ﹘ the first log cabin had been built here by my father’s father, stone had yet to be quarried for our houses, and we still didn’t have cobbled streets or even roads other than the mudtracks of the heavy carts. It was defined by the absent things, though the men worked tirelessly to secure the shingled roofs, racing to beat the winter storms. The scent of resin announced our settled presence on the shores of the Great Lake, the sacred sea. Our village had been cleared from the surrounding forest, and stood high, overlooking a crooked arm of sandy beach. In summer my brothers and I had run into those calm, clear waters, screeching and splashing; Andro had dunked me under, again and again, laughing, and in the evening, we children had sat bareskinned before a fire, sand everywhere, lips blue but smiling.
But now the lake was empty, and in the early morning, ice laced its rim. It stretched in deep blue, north and south, for as far as my eyes could see. The glorious sea. The sacred sea, blessed of the goddess Indis, scattered with small islands like pearls.
I followed the beach for a while, tossing pebbles into the lake, cracking the frost. The months of thick ice, and hole fishing, and skating were still ahead of us, yet the wind blew chill from the water already, wailing in the haunted ruins looming on the cliffs above. Tugging at the knot of the scarf, as though the wind knew that I wanted to feel its fingers run wild through my hair.
I clutched at the tight knot under my chin. “My mother bound it,” I scolded the wind, and laughed. “You cannot take it off.”
I wandered up the coastal path. Winds coming down from the mountains had met the winds on the water, and together they had danced their storm dances, whipping the trees into curious shapes.
The path beneath the trees was steep and narrow, leading high up the cliff on which the ruins stood - the ruins I was forbidden to enter.
But we children had all entered anyway, daring each other on summer nights, when the sunlight never quite left the sky. Marisa told me that if you pick flowers from among the ruins on midsummer and sleep with them under your pillow, the Lords and Ladies will let you see your future husband in your dreams. But I had dreamed nothing, though I didn’t tell Marisa that. We decided: she would marry Andro, and I would marry her brother Oles, and we would be sisters forever. But her inner clockwork ran faster than mine, hidden in the folds of her flesh, deep inside us all, and Marisa had a headstart of two months. Her fair hair was always covered now as she moved through the village; her breasts had just begun to swell ﹘ my Marisa was a woman already, and only now was I ready to join her.
On the top of the cliff, on the pinnacle of the journey, only the slope downwards before me now, I rested. My feet dangled from the remains of a large toppled statue, the heels of my clogs rapping a slow beat against the body of a god or a wight as I ate a bite of bread against the gnawing pain in my belly. I didn’t feel hungry, though, more sick, and the cold crept from the white stone bench through my skirts, numbing my skin.
The wind always returned with force among the ruins, moaning in the holes, rattling against the rotten wooden beams, making them creak. Grand structures and houses high as cliffs stood there, crumbling slowly, gracefully, like rich widows. The wight lords had left overnight, the old ones said. They had left their temples, their wonders, and their terrors, and we trembled alone in their wake as the forest and its twisted, turned creatures reclaimed the formerly inhabited space, twig by twig, claw and paw, with shuddering thin saplings, and a hot stream of water rushing underfoot, carving its own path, and spilling into the Great Lake in an angry white froth.
“Why don’t you just build our house with the stones from the ruins?,” I had asked Father last winter when he lamented that the wooden beams of our house were warped and let in the draft.
“That is a good question, Lena,” he answered with a sigh, looking at Mother. “Many of our neighbors ask themselves the same thing. But it would be wrong to take old stones to build new houses.”
“Besides, the stonework is crumbling,” my mother said, lips pressed tight as she ladled stew into Father’s bowl. “It’s dangerous up there in the wight ruins, and I don’t want you to go!”
“The place is cursed,” Andro hissed into my ear. “The ghosts of the Lords and Ladies haunt their lost realm, and if you’re not careful, Lena, they’ll devour you.”
“Shut up!”
He grinned. “They snatch human children and take them to their netherworld realm to string their musical instruments with fine human hair, make the daughters of men dance and give them treats when they perform well, just like dogs. And when they release them from their entertainment, the world outside has gone on, for two hundred years, and all their family is no more.”
“I said shut up!” I squealed in delighted terror, hitting him with my spoon, and he laughed while my mother scolded me.
But now, I wasn’t a child any longer. I was a woman.
So, I rose from the statue, and remained true to the path, skirting the wight ruins, until I finally reached the ancient wight harbor on the other side of the cliff, and there three st
randed longboats stood leaning against each other on the empty, flagstone pier. My grandmother lived in the boat closest to the rotting docks. From her back door ﹘ in what used to be the stern ﹘ you could walk onto the stone steps leading down to the water, down to where other boats were still tied to their posts, but had sunken, half-submerged in the clear water, their leaning masts doubled in reflection, mirroring the crooked trees on the cliff.
Nanna saw me coming. She was on deck, in her rooftop garden, smoking her pipe, and pottering away among the plants, the green leaves of her herbs and shrubs spilling over the railings, trailing down in abundance and splendor as though trying to reach the ground and spread from there across the whole world.
“What’s that on your head, lyubasha?” She called down. “Did a harpy do it’s business on your hair while you were dancing through the wight ruins? Is that why you must cover it so?”
“It’s my mother’s headscarf, Nanna. She insisted.”
Her eyebrows shot up and she grumbled around the pipe as she moved carefully down into her longboat. I could still hear her muttering as she came to open the door.
“It’s not even raining,” she informed me. “My daughter is a very silly woman sometimes to insist that you wear a headscarf on such a fine day as this. And what is this?” She started digging around in the little basket. “Cheese and bread ﹘ does your mother think that I’m witless or that you are? I’ve got cheese and bread enough. Have you said hello to Masha?” The last she said in a low voice, nodding nearly imperceptibly towards her neighbour, who bobbed her head at me through her open boat door, her wobbling toothless grin making her seem more than a little senile.
