by Jake Ozga
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Cover
Skull Throne – Jake Ozga
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Castle of Blood’
A Black Library Publication Imprint
eBook license
Skull Throne
By Jake Ozga
I walk barefoot beneath the silent, predatory sky. I step carefully among brittle indigo flowers and leave no trace of my passing. I watch – unblinking – the line of trees as they tremble and fade away. The sky sighs and the flowers blur in the wind, their petals becoming indistinct smears of colour.
Time passes; it flows around me like a river. I settle back into its currents and drift. I close my eyes and when I open them again I am elsewhere. Day has turned to night and in the weak light of the moon the grass is blue and ethereal. I crouch among it and become invisible. I whisper to myself, ‘To live peacefully, we must live unseen.’ I whisper it over and over like a prayer. My mother taught me this when I was a little girl, when I was still a thing of flesh and blood. There is no sound in this Realm of Death, the place I once called home. There are no birds, no insects, just the barest breath of the wind. I listen. Any moment now. Here they come.
Dark shapes separate from the deep blue shadows of the treeline and walk into the field, down where the grass is shorter. I am as still as a mouse and if I breathe it is not so anyone would notice. There is a new sound, the sound of something scraping. It does not belong here, it is so vulgar in this place. Three men walk under the light of a burning timber, most likely taken from a homestead nearby; they make no secret of their presence. The first of the three drags along a girl by her hair. A second is lost in the shadows at the edge of the field, a darker shade. Moonlight picks out the edges of his form; it reflects on sharp corners and cutting angles. The third pulls behind him a great axe with hooks and barbs that furrow the earth as he walks.
I watch as they make the girl kneel in the gently swaying grass. She is like a bird, so skinny and delicate. Her bare arms and legs are almost translucent in the light of the waning moon. Her face is hidden by long, lank black hair. She doesn’t cry out; she knows better. I bite my lip and draw a bead of blood – a test to see if I am dreaming. They pull her head back and I see her face. Her wide, dark eyes seek out my hiding place, and just for a heartbeat her gaze meets mine. I see that she is me and I am her. I am her and I am there in the field, and they hold me by the hair as I kneel and I am scared but not for myself and then the axe swings just once and my head comes away from my body, which topples lifelessly, like a broken doll, to lie discarded in the grass.
I gasp, and the three men turn to look towards where I lie hidden, but they do not see me. The second man takes my head and ties it to his belt. I watch them do it. I watch them do it over and over and over. She is me and I am her. I lie down and curl into a ball. The scraping sound is changing and getting louder. From here, I know, things only get worse. I close my eyes.
Behind my eyelids the edifice looms from the pulsing, rusty haze. It is cyclopean, limitless, the colour of dried blood. There is a thunderous noise that I feel in the base of my skull, that I hear in the bone behind my eyes. It sounds like a boulder dragged across gravel or broken glass but repeated ten thousand times. I squeeze my eyes tight but the shape of the monolith is revealed to me: a monumental throne, built from skulls in numbers beyond my ability to comprehend. They grind against each other like teeth under the weight of the throne’s occupant, a form I cannot make out, lost in the haze. And in dark heavens at the limits of my perception, a burning eye holds me in silent regard.
We are no strangers to death, we who live in his realm. I am no stranger to death; it has always surrounded me. But this is not a vision of death, this is…
Violence. Always the same visions of violence. Even now, when I’m awake, I see the throne. I see the cutting edge of a jagged blade across a fragile, delicate neck. I see a burning, hate-filled eye. I see these things with my eyes open or closed. I see them interwoven with the mundanity of my hidden existence: they are there as I gather my herbs, as I walk under the blanched and sallow sun, as I whisper through the floorboards to the bodies down in the darkness, as I watch from the shattered windows of my ruined home in the realm of silent ghosts, and as I sleep alone under cold and lifeless stars.
Days and nights pass without distinction. Their edges blur as if viewed through a raindrop, remembered only as a dream upon waking – real in one moment and nothing but fragments in the next. I too am blurred. I am a figure without definition, a form without edges. This numbed existence – this fugue, this dream – I float through it like a ghost. Live unseen, but how do you live a life without hope? In truth I do not live, but I exist still, I remain. A heavy blade scrapes a furrow through freshly tilled soil and the skulls grind together under a crushing weight. I remain in incoherence. I linger in madness. I do not know how long it has been this way and I wonder if it will ever end. I am missing a part of my soul.
I open my eyes. Daylight. I am in the charred remains of my crumbling home. I am standing at my favourite broken window that looks down onto a field where nothing grows and no animals graze. The glass panes are long since gone but there is no wind in this place to speak of and I no longer feel the cold. I am rarely hungry and eat sparingly; instead I make tea in a heavy iron cauldron that hangs from a chain over a modest firepit that I do not remember replenishing. The fire burns white, the pale smoke drifts away towards the stars through the ruin of the roof. The water takes time to boil. I add more of the herb than last time: a pinch of mhurghast root adds a bitter taste but too much can cause paralysis or even death. Brewed to the correct strength the tea removes my dreams, replaces them with this confusion of non-existence, though every day it takes more and more to grant me peace, and every day the dreams return like an invasive weed with roots grown deep inside my head. The herb is found everywhere in this quiet corner of Shyish and I have harvested enough to kill myself a hundred times over.
I do not know if I will kill myself. It is not that I want to be alive, it is that I am unable to decide. It is too much to decide a thing like that; I need guidance. I used to have help, but I have lost a part of my soul and so I am as a ship adrift, alternately becalmed or borne on indiscriminate tides. Decide to die, decide to live.
I see three shapes emerge from the shadows at the edge of the field. I quickly drink the tea and feel its effects immediately. The figures blur into nothing. The world loses its hard edges. I deliquesce, I slip away.
Wait. Wait. I wade back towards the shore from some impossible, dreamless depth. Something has disturbed me from my sleep; some primal instinct sets my heart fluttering as if a predator’s shadow has fallen upon me. I lie awake on my cot and listen. There is something… Far away I hear a man’s voice, raised in rough song. It echoes across this silent, dead land. This is new. My dreams have never sung before.
I walk to the broken window. I move carefully, barefoot on the fragile, fire-blackened floorboards that creak and splinter at my passing, tiptoeing so as not to disturb the bodies as they rest beneath me. I do not know if it is morning or evening. There is pale light as the sun swims weakly across a liquid sky that is always the same ashen grey, faintly diffused with smudged silver stars. The fields are smothered in a funeral shroud of mist and I see nothing and no one, but still I hear the song. It is a chant, vulgar and brutal; it does not belong in this place. I stand in the doorway and watch the shadows as they coalesce and pool together, and from the mist there comes a man.
There comes a man: tall, swaggering, alone. He sings his barbaric song with words I do not understand. He wears the piecemeal red armour of the invaders, so deep in colour that it first appears black.
‘To live peacefully,’ I whisper. ‘To live peacefully…’ My voice trails away. This is something new. I try to think what I should do. I should hide, I should remain unseen, but instead I sit in the doorway and watch as he turns to walk towards the house. I should fetch my mother’s spear, but it is too much to contemplate and instead I close my eyes, and when I open them he is approaching me. He is a new vision. So things do change after all – a part of me is relieved. I bite my lip and taste the metallic tang of blood, but I do not wake up. ‘Open your eyes,’ I say to myself. ‘Open your eyes.’ But they are open. I should run, but instead I sit and I think: it would be the easiest thing in the world to die now.
He does not stop his song as he takes a handful of my hair and drags me back into the charred bones of my house. With his free hand he beats the heavy iron armour on his chest, a percussive crash to accompany his chanting. I watch the stars as they blink out in the heavens. I watch the tea as it boils in the heavy iron pot on the last embers of the fire. Am I to be forever a spectator at my own death? Decide to fight, decide to die – even in these final moments it is too hard to consider.
He throws me ahead of him and I fall awkwardly beside my bed, scraping my bare knees. He draws the sword he wears across his back: an ugly pockmarked blade with a single, well-notched edge. He removes his helmet and I see he is a young man, not much older than me. He has stopped singing. His jaw is ruined from some old injury that has healed badly, and the wound is only partially disguised by a tangled black beard. He says something in a tongue I struggle to understand – the guttural, snarling accent of the invaders is so different from my own – but I know what he intends: I see myself on my knees. This has happened before, different but the same. Time repeats itself. Existence is a loop of chain, the links pass endlessly through my hands. He means to take my head, over and over again. The thought stirs something in me, an unfamiliar anger. Just the tiniest drip, drip, drip of this new feeling into a pool at the bottom of a deep, dark well. Maybe I can use it.
And then he steps towards me; he steps on brittle boards damaged by the fire. He does not tread lightly, as one should, as one must. I hear cracking. I see it coming, I almost smile. And so of course, the floorboards break, and he falls into the darkness, into the darkness with the corpses.
I touch my neck cautiously, but I am intact. I cock my head and listen, waiting for the grinding that heralds the vision of the skull throne, but it does not come. This is something new. The man is hurt – a bone broken in the fall perhaps. There is cursing and moaning: ugly words and sounds that have no place here and which make me want to retreat somewhere hidden and silent. But instead I sit at the edge of the hole, legs dangling into the darkness below, and watch him. He is struggling to get his arm free of some splintered wood that has him pinned in place. His leg is bent the wrong way.
‘Please be quiet,’ I whisper. But he does not hear me and he continues his awful noise. I consider the situation for a while, then I stand and stoke the fire that has cooled in the firepit. I add new bundles of kindling, taken from the thickets near the house, and then cuttings of the grey wood that I keep in a basket near the door, and I wait for the fire to catch and get hot and the water in the cauldron to boil, and then I push the whole thing over so that the cauldron falls and spills down into the hole. There is more screaming – louder now – and then finally there is silence. I watch the last of the water trickle over the broken floor for a moment. Drip, drip, drip. Then I go back to my cot and fall asleep.
Later, as I lie in my bed, I talk to him. I ask him what happened to his jaw, but he does not reply. I lie and watch the stars and imagine him injured in a duel with some brutish rival. I try to remember the song that he sang but when I attempt to whistle it, it does not sound right at all. It has been some time since I checked on him – some days perhaps – it is so easy to lose track. In the hole the moaning sometimes resumes but not for so long that I need to boil any more water. I leave the cauldron where it lies, I do not numb myself with tea. I feel different. I am feeling more and more different all the time.
One night I hear him talking. His voice is small now. I lie in bed, wide-eyed in the darkness, and I listen.
‘I do not want to die here. I do not want to die like this.’ He slurs his words. I have to concentrate to understand him.
‘We came here before. A year ago or more. We killed you,’ he says. ‘We killed you, my brothers and I.’
‘Yes,’ I whisper.
‘What are you? Are you a ghost? A spirit? We have met such things in this strange land.’
‘Am I a ghost,’ I whisper. ‘Am I a spirit.’
‘We killed you – we cut off your head!’
‘You cut off my head,’ I whisper. ‘You cut off my head and I want it back.’
The next day I make a decision. I rise from my bed and I retrieve my mother’s spear and I step down into the cellar, barefoot among the debris and the bodies. He is still trapped by a beam of splintered wood that tears into the meat and muscle of his arm when he tries to move. His leg is twisted. He has stripped off most of his armour until he is naked and his skin is pink and cross-hatched with raw and bloody fingernail marks where he has scratched at his blisters. His face is pale and his tangled beard is foul with vomit. He snarls at me and so I push the broad bronze point of the spear into the sole of his bare foot and he screams. ‘We killed you, we killed you,’ he groans. The bodies in the darkness watch us in silence and I try not to think about them. ‘You will tell me where you have taken my head,’ I say, and twist the spear. And so, in time, he tells me.
Later, we are sat quietly together. He says that he doesn’t want to die this way but I am not listening, my thoughts are elsewhere. His breathing becomes strange and uneven and eventually he goes still. I contemplate the information that he has shared and finally I decide what to do; I decide all on my own. ‘I know,’ I say to the bodies in the darkness, ‘I am feeling different. I am sorry that I have to leave you.’
I pack a few things from around my home and I carry my mother’s spear. I take a bag with some little provisions and my herbs, although I have not drunk any of the tea in some time. In the grey of the evening of that same day I set out to walk towards the setting sun, in the direction from which the man came some few days past.
I pass from the lands where my mother chose to hide into the land that once belonged to my father and his people. I walk through fields I knew as a child and then yet others that I have never seen before. All is still, all is dead. As it should be. At the edge of a copse of skeletal, ash-white trees I walk into a cloud of mist, until I come to a beach of colourless sand that stretches away into the distance. Each step I take along the beach is swallowed by the mist that spills out from a vast lake or sea, and it is only by following the edge of the water that I do not become disoriented. Behind me my footprints are erased by the milk-white water as it laps soundlessly at the shore. Ahead of me, my path is not yet written.
I walk along the shore until I reach the stone marker that I am looking for: an upright column of obsidian, almost twice as tall as me. I trace the razor-sharp edges of the stone with my fingers. Etched on the glassy surface is an eight-pointed star and another shape – a crude skull perhaps, repeated over and over. This object too does not belong here; I know somehow that it was once not of this realm, that it was carried here by the invaders.
I turn and step into the tepid water, the light of Azyr at my back and the spectre of the waning moon ahead of me. The shallow sea vanishes towards an invisible horizon, where it merges in silence with the mist. The water is thick and opaque and the air is redolent with the smell of brine. I taste salt on my lips. After a short while I am up to my knees in the milky water and it seems to get no deeper, the coast now long lost somewhere in the mist behind me, and all around is beautiful, bloodless serenity. I stop and I think that I could fade away here, that I could forget about the edges of myself and dissolve into thi
s nothingness. I close my eyes. And then I hear the drip of the blood from the head I carry by its tangled beard, the drip of blood into the lifeless water, and I am reminded of why I am here and what I now seek. In the distance, muffled by the mist, I hear the familiar sound of bone grinding on bone, and I wade through the water towards it.
They are camped in the skeleton of some great sea creature. The bones of a giant ribcage rise from the water, black and ragged. A fire illuminates an area of land at the heart of the creature’s remains, the light diffused by the mist. Around it I see figures moving. I lower myself into the water until only my eyes would be visible if they were to look in my direction. I remain unseen. It is too shallow to swim but I pull myself along on the seabed, my hands sinking through the spongy silt to find purchase on the rock beneath.
I observe the scene for a while, drawing slowly closer to the camp. The water around the island is full of froth and movement, and I realise that it is surrounded by a frenzy of fish of some sort. No, not fish but eels. They gather at the island of bones, thrashing in the water, writhing and knotting around each other like coils of oiled rope as they fight to feed. They tear scraps from the carcass of the great sea creature, ripping black meat away from the bones and bringing it back into the froth. As I watch, I see an eel uncoil from the swarm to snatch something from the shore in its jaws: a severed human arm. There are many more body parts that lie discarded near a great iron cooking pot in the camp. Even as I observe, one of the men walks to the pile of body parts, takes part of a carcass upon a curved butcher’s hook and hefts the torso up and into the cooking pot.
Is this where they brought me when they took my head? I wonder. Is this where they would have tossed my body? My skinny little arms and skinny little legs and my poor little stump of a neck where my head should be?
Wait. I think. Wait, how could it be me? I am here. I am alive. I am more alive than I have been for some time.
