“I’m going to stick my thumb in her eye and spoon it out like a gooseberry,” she shrieked, as the ball disappeared into the chasm below.
Her alabaster skin was flushed red and her kohl black eyes bore the menace of a shark in a feeding frenzy. She stomped about the chamber, her stiletto heels carving furrows in the teakwood floor, her black hair trailing behind her like a cloud of squid ink.
Her mother stood by, intangible, her phantom form hovering above the ground like a ghost from the attic. She sighed at the sight of her daughter’s tantrum. Evidently the girl had taken the destruction of her army personally.
Drensila continued to rage. “Let’s see how this Nat—this gnat—suffers another battalion of my trolls. Trolls armed with cannons and explosives and canisters packed with deadly gasses.” Drensila had learned much from Nat’s mislaid smart phone, and was eager to put her new knowledge to use.
Carnella wasn’t the least bit surprised by her daughter’s reaction. The girl was headstrong. Easily antagonised. It had always been her weakness. She coughed politely. “There is another way,” she suggested.
Drensila turned to her mother with a sneer. “Then why don’t you explain it to me?”
Carnella floated across to the chamber wall, which was decorated with a tapestry bearing the Durkon family sigil: an arachnid embroidered in silver onto a background of midnight blue. “Instead of sending more men to the dwarf stronghold and leaving yourself open to an attack,” she said, “why not let the fly come to the spider?”
Drensila felt her hackles go up. All her life she’d bucked instinctively against Carnella’s authority, and the habit had embedded itself in her muscles. The reflex was unwarranted this time though. Her mother’s plan, much as it pained her to say it, was a sound one. “You’re right,” Drensila admitted. “As a matter of fact, you’ve been right about a lot of things lately.”
“Thank you, my dear,” said Carnella, graciously. “It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve served you as best I can under the constraints to which I am bound.”
She swiped her hand through the tapestry, demonstrating the lack of materiality that made it impossible for her to affect the physical world. The materiality that her daughter had denied her when she trapped her soul in the dead womb of The Nether. When she turned her from a human being into a hungry shadow. A devil’s whisper.
Drensila scratched her chin. “Maybe it’s time I rewarded you for your loyalty,” she said. They were family after all, united under the same banner, for better or worse. Besides, Carnella’s behaviour since she’d found her mouthpiece in the physical realm had been nothing short of exemplary. Giving her mother some time to think on her sins had obviously done wonders for her temperament. “I’ll do you a deal,” said Drensila. “Continue to serve as my trusted advisor and I will grant your spirit a physical form… for a probationary period at least.”
“You would do that?”
“Perhaps. But understand this, dear mama, if I catch even the slightest whiff of subversion I will send you back to that hellscape like shit off a shovel. Do we understand each other?”
Carnella smiled from lobe to lobe. “Of course,” she replied. “I promise you, daughter, you will not regret this.”
HAVING EMERGED FROM the swamp, Clive continued his desperate advance on the Citadel of Durkon. Cleaver trailed behind in a wet sack, carving a rut into the earth as he was dragged along in his kidnapper’s wake. Every now and then, Clive would stop to catch his bearings, and when he did, the sword would snatch a look at him through a tear in his burlap prison.
The boy was a mess.
On top of being covered in green slime—which made him look as though he’d crawled from a leprechaun’s guts—his hands were blistered red raw and swollen like mittens. A swarm of flies buzzed about his face, eager to feast on the remains of his punctured eyeball.
“Mate, you look like a right dog’s breakfast,” said Cleaver.
Clive ignored him and stubbornly limped on through the undergrowth.
Watching him plough ahead with the horrible wounds he’d endured, Cleaver could almost feel sorry for the lad. Clive had given in to cowardice and look where it had gotten him: fouled up, cast out and all alone.
“Seriously,” urged Cleaver, “you wanna get that eye looked at before the rot sets in.”
Again, Clive gave him the cold shoulder, pushing through brambles without even registering the thorns snagging at his flesh.
“You don’t really think Drensila’s gonna fix you up, do ya?” asked the sword. “You’re ‘avin’ a larf, mate.”
Clive’s ignorance beggared belief. What was he expecting? A pat on the head and a, “Well done, son”? He’d be lucky if Drensila hung him upside down and cut him in half lengthwise. Still, there was no turning him around. He’d come this far and he wasn’t going to back down now. That poor bastard was going to walk into the arsehole of hell and there was nothing anyone could do to convince him otherwise. Cleaver was stuck. He was about to be delivered into the hands of the enemy. His righteous quest had come to an end. He saw the Citadel of Durkon on the horizon. Saw it gleaming like a jet black beacon.
THE VAULTED CEILING of Drensila’s candlelit undercroft amplified the sound of footsteps as four trolls tromped across its granite flagstones. Upon their shoulders, they carried a pair of wooden poles supporting an elegant casket inlaid with argent filigree. Having reached the centre of the crypt, the trolls carefully set the casket down on a black marble pedestal and departed as ordered.
Carnella, who stood alongside her daughter as the trolls performed their duty, watched entranced. “Is that what I think it is?” she asked.
Drensila didn’t answer. Instead she intoned a cantrip that caused a row of iron clasps along the side of the casket to drop like a chain of falling dominoes. Once the magical locks were unsealed, the lid of the sarcophagus slowly creaked open and Carnella stepped forward to look inside.
There, lying upon a bed of raw silk was a woman’s body, ice cold and stock still. Eerily, the woman’s eyes remained open and fixed on the ceiling. She was dressed in a blood red gown decorated with sparkling jade gemstones.
Carnella smiled. “A touch outdated now, I expect,” she said, admiring the dress, “but the height of fashion in its time.”
“Is that all you have to say for yourself, mother?” asked Drensila. “Standing there, looking down on your own corpse.”
“Of course not,” replied Carnella. “I haven’t even begun to express my gratitude. In all the time I spent suspended in that ink-black nothingness, I never dared imagine my earthly form remained intact.”
And so it did. Drensila had kept her mother’s body on ice for the better part of a decade. She could have burned it to ashes and sent it to the four winds, but instead she’d kept her casket hermetically sealed and her mother’s earthly shell perfectly preserved.
“You really are a sentimental old sop,” joked Carnella, working up a tear.
“Tread lightly, mama,” Drensila warned. “I haven’t returned you to your body just yet.”
Carnella nodded respectfully and drifted away from the casket to allow her daughter to work her magic.
Drensila closed her eyes and tipped back her head. From her sash, she removed the Durkon rod of power. Squeezing a button on its handle, she ejected a slim blade from the rod’s pommel that she used to slice the back of her forearm. She trailed a ring of blood around the casket, and as the red beads hit the dust they flared up, angry and bright. The glow began to coalesce, and soon an unbroken circle of scarlet light was formed.
Drensila took a step inside the glowing circle and slipped into a trance. Her jaw went slack as dark invocations fell from her mouth, guttural and terrifying. She aimed the rod’s crystal at Carnella and a ray of crackling light emerged that struck her mother and began to dissolve her ghostly form. Carnella thrashed and howled, convinced she’d fallen for a cruel trick and was being sent back to purgatory—
—but instead of vanishing
from the material plane, her essence was transferred to a physical form.
Not to her form, but to the form of a tarantula nestled in the shadows of the undercroft’s vaulted ceiling.
The ritual was almost complete.
Drensila uttered one last invocation, and the tarantula descended from its web on a length of silver silk. Down it came, inch by inch, until it reached the casket and set down upon Carnella’s body.
The tarantula alighted on her forehead, then plodded across her left eyeball and crawled inside her mouth. It was a tight fit. The spider was so large that it could be seen walking the length of Carnella’s esophagus like a slow, backwards gulp. Eventually, the spider disappeared completely, lost inside of her belly. For a while, the body simply lay there, then the chamber’s candles began to flicker. Shadows writhed and danced. The body shook and twitched, until finally Carnella sat bolt upright and gasped. A great, wracking cough came next, followed by the regurgitation of a desiccated corpse. The arachnid’s body landed on the ground, spent.
It was done.
Carnella had reclaimed her foothold in the physical realm. Her soul was once again bound to her body. She had returned to her home of flesh and bone.
“Well, mother, aren’t you going to say thank you?” asked Drensila.
Carnella snuffed the air and smiled. “My dear girl,” she said. “I promise I’ll pay you back a hundredfold for what you’ve done.”
Chapter Two: House Rule
THIS WAS THE second time Nat Lawler had been granted audience with His Royal Lowness, the Dwarf King. She wasn’t dressed in shackles this time, nor was she being marched at swordpoint, but she was no less nervous for it. Though she’d been formally invited to meet the king on this occasion, the manner in which she chose her words would prove no less important now than when she were his prisoner. More important even. For though she’d come to kneel before him and ask for his help once more, this time the ask was so much bigger.
Nat and her fellow humans filed into the throne room. Five had crossed the veil to The Broken Lands, and now only three remained. With Clive a defector and Terry kidnapped, all that remained were Nat, Ashley and Neville. One might have considered this an occasion for mourning, but the dwarves hadn’t invited the humans to join them so they could lament their losses. They’d invited them to celebrate their successes.
The chamber’s gallery was stocked with cheering dwarves; well-wishers applauding their honoured guests this time, not soldiers with crossbows pointed at their hearts. Nat and her crew were treated to a rapturous reception. A hero’s welcome. The dwarf with the axe-shaped beard, who they now knew as Rundal, cheered the loudest upon their entrance, clapping his calloused hands and slapping them playfully on the rumps as they passed him by. Galanthre and her brother Eathon were stood among the dwarves too, and though they towered above the under-dwellers, the two races behaved as allies now. Bonded by blood and by sacrifice.
Nat soaked in the applause then took her spot before the king’s cobalt throne. She made a sweeping bow and winced as her tender ribs creaked beneath her breast.
“Welcome,” said the dwarf king, throwing up his hands and setting his great tummy wobbling. “Thou ar ‘ere today t’ receive ahr thanks. Ye fought bravely ‘n’ wit’ cunnin’. Ye banished t’ intruders ‘n’ saved ahr ‘ome. ‘Cause of ye, t’ dwarves ‘n’ t’ elves are united. Livin’ as one in t’ belly o’ t’ earth.”
He clicked his sausage link fingers and a tiny dwarf entered the chamber pushing a large trolley. It was Tidbit, the beardless engineer whose technological know-how had helped turn the tide of their great battle. Upon his trolley lay a suit of fine plate armour, built for a woman. The suit ran from head to toe and was made of overlapping pieces of polished iron fastened by straps of full-grain leather. It was quite unlike anything Nat had seen before. That’s not to say she was a stranger to images of fighting women, having seen plenty on the posters tacked to Terry’s bedroom wall. Those fighting women tended to favour suggestiveness over protection though, preferring to battle in chainmail bikinis and teeny lambskin panties. This was something else. Tidbit had built this armour for combat, not a teenager’s spank bank.
“For me?” Nat asked, approaching the dwarf’s trolley.
“Ye earned it,” replied Tidbit.
Nat ran her hands over the superb set of armour. “How did you know my measurements?” she asked, admiring its contours.
“Ah took ‘em while ye wor asleep in yer ‘ospital bed.”
“Oh,” Nat replied, noting the cups of the perfectly proportioned breastplate. “Oh.”
The king smoothed down his great apron of a beard and leaned forward in his throne. “Well?” he said jubilantly. “Let’s ‘ear yer speech.”
The dwarves in the gallery began to chant; “Speech, speech, speech!” they cried.
Neville and Ashley joined in too. “Speech, speech, speech!”
Even Galanthe and Eathon got in on the act, she clapping her hands and he stamping the metal hooves of his running blade legs.
The occasion had turned into a peculiar sort of retirement party, with a suit of armour standing in for an engraved gold watch. It was the exact opposite of the tone Nat wanted to strike, so she waited for the shouts to die down, cleared her throat and did what she could to get things back on track.
“Thank you for the gift,” she announced. “It’s beautiful. I’ll treasure it, I really will.”
The king nodded in appreciation, as did Tidbit.
“But more than that,” Nat went on, “I want to make use of it.”
The king looked puzzled. The armour was a ceremonial piece. A tribute meant for displaying, not for stopping swords. “‘Ow so?” he asked, raising a shaggy eyebrow.
It was time for Nat to lay out her proposition. “Look, I don’t know about you lot,” she said, casting an eye to the gallery, “but I’m sick of sitting down here and getting attacked. Right now we have Drensila on the back foot, but it won’t last for long. Pretty soon she’ll have grown a fresh batch of trolls and come right back at us.”
“Let ‘er try,” roared the king. “We’re finished wit’ t’ overworld. In a couple o’ days we’ll ‘ave collapsed t’ mineshafts ‘n’ cut ahrselves off from oop top completely.”
Nat shook her head. “Don’t you get it? The longer we stay down here the more powerful Drensila gets. She’s already figured out holograms and flamethrowers; how long before she atom bombs her way in here and finishes what she started?”
The mood in the room turned considerably colder. Ashley and Neville looked to one another as the dwarves muttered and grouched. Eathon and Galanthre stood by silently, curious to know where Nat was headed.
She drew a breath and willed herself to be strong. That was the only way she was going to get these people on her side. Confidence. Assurance. Certainty. Same as an airline pilot has. After all, the guy at the stick doesn’t take the microphone and say “I'm going to try to land the plane now.” No way. He puts on his best grown-up voice and tells you in no uncertain terms where you are and what time you'll be setting down. There’s no question about whether or not he can land the plane. That’s exactly the level of confidence Nat needed to inspire.
She steeled herself and made the announcement. “I say it’s time we stop playing defence and take the fight to Drensila.”
The king scoffed. “We didnay lose all o’ them men jus’ t’ abandon ahr ‘ome.”
“No one’s asking you to abandon your home, just to fight for it. Come with me. Come with me to the citadel and let’s all put an end to this. All of us, together.”
Nat saw Rundal turn to his king expectantly, his axe-shaped beard swinging like a pendulum. “Well, Sire?” the dwarf asked.
The king shook his head. “Nay,” he said. “We’ve grit in ahr ‘earts but we dun’t belong above ground.” He folded his great, drumstick arms and let them settle on his belly. “End o’ conve’sation.”
Nat couldn’t believe what she’s heari
ng. “So that’s it then, is it? You’re going to sit down here in your little bunker while the world goes up in flames?”
“Ye said ye wanted t’ reunite ahr people,” said the monarch of the mines. “Well ‘ere we are, lass, united.”
“Not all of us,” cried Nat. “What about Terry? He might not share your blood but he was ready to spill it to save your home. Doesn’t that deserve something?”
The king turned his head. His frustration was plain to see, but Nat sensed some shame in there too. She looked to her companions for support. “Anyone want to chip in?” she asked. “Seriously, feel free to jump on board at any point.”
Neville was the first to say something. He rolled over in his wheelchair and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know,” he said, “I think the man might have a point.”
Nat’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”
“This is his home,” Nev went on, “and seeing as we’re stuck in this place, it might as well be ours too.”
“What are you talking about?” Nat replied. “Ongar is our home. Terry’s too, in case you’d forgotten about him.”
“You think this is easy for me?” Nev cried. “You’ve been with Terry a year, I’ve known him since we were Cub Scouts! Don’t tell me I don’t care!” He wiped a tear from his eye.
“So that’s that then, is it?” said Nat, casting daggers about the room. “Terry just stays captured, does he? Until Drensila gets bored of having him around I mean.”
Ashley puffed out his chest. “You just point the way, girl. You know I’m ready to rumble.”
Neville called bull. “You’re only saying that to look good in front of your hot elf girlfriend.”
“No way, bruv,” Ash protested, but his blush was plain to see.
Galanthre jumped to her own defence. “You think I’m some winsome strumpet ready to be swept off her feet by the first man who makes eyes at me?”
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