by T C Shelley
Sam jerked his head back and stared at the ogre. ‘Anything?’
‘You pick up that sword for us, get rid of it, then yes, anything.’ Thunderguts spread his arms. ‘So, do you want to get the revolution started?’
Sam looked at Beatrice. His goal was to get her out of here. He’d go along with anything until then. He stooped and gently picked her up, then stepped towards the exit.
‘That’s the spirit,’ Thunderguts said, and chuckled at his own joke.
Sam followed the ogre back out into the cavern.
CHAPTER 20
A delighted bellow lifted the dust. Sam hadn’t expected that and couldn’t help smiling in response to eager faces. They were grinning at him. They were cheering for him. Maybe he could ask for anything. He wondered if Thunderguts would keep his promise. Maggie had said they were pack. And pack looked after pack, right?
Anything you want, Thunderguts had said. Anything? A home. Somewhere for Bladder, Wheedle and Spigot to live with him safely. Perhaps he could be with the Kavanaghs too. He looked down at his dirty, bare feet. Shoes. He’d like shoes. Shoes would be great.
Except to get them, he had to do what Thunderguts had requested.
The ogre king stepped forward. ‘Monsters all, our time has come! Too long we have endured this misery!’ Thunderguts waved his arms around the dais as if the misery somehow surrounded him at the podium.
The crowd cheered.
‘For centuries, the sword has held us back. For centuries, we’ve been kept from our castles, our keeps, our dungeons, our torture chambers and forced to take to farms and forests for food. This sword stole our simple pleasures. Humans walk fearless in the dark, and we no longer enjoy their terror. After Jabberwock died, the sword trapped us down here. Its power compels us. And if we hunt upstairs it makes us pay, and pay dearly, with ash and dust.’ Thunderguts whispered the last sentence but his voice carried. ‘We want to hunt again, don’t we?’
The beasts salivated. And bayed. Thunderguts let the mob roar out its frustration.
When the howl died, the beasts griped and stared at the dais, shuddering.
‘But at last there is a way forward,’ Thunderguts said. ‘We remove our destroyer. Our liberation is here.’ He pointed at Sam. The monsters raised their claws, celebrating them both. ‘He can break the curse on us, free us from this shackle.’
Thunderguts walked to the black rock, he reached and pinched his fingers together in mid-air.
‘Don’t touch it!’ a goblin yelled. Something screamed, high-pitched and terrified.
Thunderguts exhaled, and took a tiny piece of the rock. Sam watched it bend and pull and then he realised, it wasn’t rock, but a rough, black fabric. With a quick twist of his huge wrist, Thunderguts pulled off the black cover to reveal a chiselled white shard sticking into the luminous stone beneath.
The crowd moaned. Sam watched as monster after monster held its head and cradled it as if the rock had brought on a crowd-wide migraine.
It was beautiful, that’s all Sam could see, a glowing rock the same colour as the one inside Bladder. It didn’t move.
‘It won’t do anything to us if we bide by its rules. Friends, you have no reason to fear it. No soulless monster’s going to eat a human just yet.’
Nervous laughs shook the cavern walls. Dirt fell, and ogres threw out punches as if startled. Sam watched a battle break out between two ochre ogres. Thunderguts roared and a reverent silence fell. Huge monsters blinked and stared at their king and gaped as he circled the white rock. It sparkled and shone. It sang. Thunderguts pulled Sam towards it.
‘Look at him. He doesn’t even flinch at it.’
Claws waved at Sam, giving him the thumbs up. They whistled; they stamped their feet. The monsters’ confidence built seeing how close Sam stood to the sparkling stone.
‘Anyone seen the crone?’ Thunderguts yelled. ‘She should be here for our triumph.’
Sam stared at the chaos and dirt, and the lamps. The light of each had grown stronger since the removal of the cover, shining golden, a little burst of sunlight. He noticed the monsters moving away from the lamp posts.
‘Here I am.’ The banshee hobbled forward.
‘You’re late,’ Thunderguts complained.
‘Had a nasty accident with a rock, and I can’t heal the way I did once.’ Maggie grinned, her ancient face creasing into a smile. ‘But, darlin’ Samuel, you came to us. I knew you would. You were smart to run. When I woke Yama was still holding the frying pan, an’ you’ll be happy to know, I took three of her toes for threatening to eat you.’ Maggie peered around Sam. ‘No gargoyle?’ She smiled. ‘Of course you didn’t leave your Maggie for a mouldy pebble. Did you smash him the way he smashed me?’ She leaned forward and traced a calloused fingertip over Beatrice’s face. ‘And you’ve finally got your plaything back. They look so delicious when I’m like this.’ Maggie gave Sam a withered frown. Her sagging eyelids lifted. She reached into her dress and pulled out her silver tin and sniffed the powder. The age faded away, and young Maggie stood before him. The crowd made disgusted noises. ‘You prefer me like this, just the way I prefer them when I’m glamoured. Come to my arms, my Samuel.’ She said and reached for him.
Despite everything, Sam felt something of the weight of his journey fall from him as Maggie pulled him into her chest and held him. Beatrice slept on between them and the noise of the cavern died away. He closed his eyes. She stroked his face and kissed him just above his eyebrow.
‘Oh, sweet Sam, so this is what it’s like.’ She cooed. ‘We could be a family, perhaps. After this.’
‘Family?’ Thunderguts scoffed. ‘Whatever makes the princeling happy.’
Sam rested on Maggie’s shoulder and closed his eyes as she sang him a lullaby. It sounded ancient and lovely. ‘Is it magic?’ he whispered. ‘Are you magicking me?’
‘No, Sam, this is us,’ Maggie said. ‘You’re my own boy. It’s the soul that makes us like this.’
Sam wanted to sleep in Maggie’s warm arms, but the word drifted from him. ‘Soul?’
‘I carried it in me for twelve years. It took twice as much fairy dust to contain it, such a powerful little thing, and to keep the sword from knowing I’d stolen it. Without the dust it would have pulled me apart.’
Maggie rubbed her soft, young cheek against Sam’s.
Sam looked up at her. She cradled him against her shoulder and it did feel right, smell right.
‘Which soul?’
‘The soul inside you, of course. The baby laugh makes you look human, sure enough, but you feel human thanks to your soul. I breathed it in you when you’d scarcely opened your eyes.’
‘When you kissed me?’
‘That wasn’t a kiss, Samuel. It was a gift.’ Maggie pulled her shawl about him. ‘I gave you a soul, my dear. You’re the only monster ever to possess one.’ Sam drifted. The Kavanaghs would be OK without him, the gargoyles too, maybe. He could stay forever with Maggie. She wanted him. Someone actually wanted him.
Thunderguts‘s rumbly voice drifted in. ‘Yeah, you’re the first one it worked on. We tried making other half-breeds before you, but all of them exploded.’
Sam was dreamily aware of Maggie glaring at Thunderguts. Her voice continued soft and smooth.
‘But something happened when the old man sighed his last, something peculiar: the baby laughed,’ she said. ‘Then when the nugget didn’t want to leave an’ looked fierce different, I knew it was special. It would work. Had to really, otherwise your little soul woulda kill’d me.’
Sam gazed sleepily around the cavern. Maggie trailed her fingers over his forehead and he smelt her misty scent. He snuggled closer to her chest. She was so warm. He’d longed to be held like this since his first day. He yawned.
‘We’re bonded, you and I.’ Maggie chuckled. ‘You’re as good a thief as I, you even stole that name back. Those Kavanaghs named the baby I took the soul from “Samuel Kavanagh”.’ Sam opened his eyes and stared at Maggie’s face. She ki
ssed him on the nose. ‘See, you are my own Samuel.’
‘Samuel Kavanagh?’ Sam had a vague memory of the baby Michelle said she’d lost: the other ‘other Samuel’.
‘Mmmm,’ she said, and pulled him in again, he didn’t want to move.
He put his head on her chest. Maggie had no heartbeat.
‘Any time now would be good.’ Thunderguts’s gruff voice broke through Sam’s sleepiness.
Maggie smiled at Sam. ‘It’s to work, my darlin’.’ She pulled Beatrice from his arms. The baby’s tiny sparkles reached back for him.
Maggie took Sam’s hand and strode forward. No longer stranded in a shuffling and wounded old body. Her dusted figure did not shudder, though a few of the larger ogres winced as she approached the white stone spike.
The ogres and trolls retreated, some violently, pushing those behind them back and back, so the ones at the rear walls let out crushed oofs. Sam wondered what the sword would do to him.
The blade glistened in the mouldy dankness, and Sam stared. It was so like Bladder’s heart, milky white, with a rainbow trapped in its surface. Parts reflected blue and pink as others became whiter.
Thunderguts leaned in. ‘You’ll do right by your pack, won’t you, little monster?’
Sam gazed at Maggie; she brushed fingers across his cheek. ‘Make it a world for our kind.’
‘Our kind?’ Sam stared blearily at Maggie.
‘Pull out the sword, Sam.’
The edges of the sword gleamed.
‘Samuel?’ a tiny voice called from the rock.
‘Quickly, my little prince,’ Thunderguts said. ‘Take it.’
‘Get it away from us,’ a voice called from the crowd.
‘Take it back upstairs, as far as you can with it, where it won’t hurt us any more. Up where it won’t be able to keep tabs on us,’ Thunderguts said.
Sam remembered exploding monsters, crazed humans, the ogre king’s own stone hand. His legs wobbled. ‘What if it kills me? Like it did the others.’
‘You have a soul,’ Thunderguts said. ‘You’ll be fine, little prince.’
‘Give us back our dark spaces,’ Maggie pleaded.
Sam’s mouth dried. He looked to the sword. To Maggie. To the dwindling sparkles around the baby she held. ‘If I die, will you make sure Beatrice gets back to the Kavanaghs?’
Thunderguts glanced at the baby and frowned as he peered at Sam’s face. ‘Why would you care …?’
‘If that’s what you want, my darlin’.’ Maggie rocked the baby. Sam reached for the sword. The air tingled under his fingers.
‘He can hold it, he has to.’ Thunderguts panted. ‘You’ll be the prince of all monsters!’
Sam had no choice. He touched the hilt with one finger. Warmth moved to greet his skin. The mob moaned again.
He pulled it away and wiggled his fingers. He hadn’t turned to stone, nor fallen to ash. Maybe he hadn’t touched it with enough skin, or for long enough. Eager eyes watched him study his fingertips.
Then a single light popped from the blade and hovered in front of him. It grew into a pale human shape a little shorter than he. Close up he could see features.
Thunderguts cowered away from the shape. ‘Take it, take it up, Sam. Don’t let any more souls escape. Get it away from us.’ The ogre king moaned and dropped to his bulbous knees.
Sam studied the transparent shape of a serious little girl inside the white light. Her pale-blonde hair and light blue eyes gleamed. She wore a grey-rag dress and a metal collar.
‘Sam, the room, the light’s getting too strong. You must contain the souls until you’re outside,’ Maggie said. ‘Grab the sword. Control them for us. Have them do your bidding.’ She pushed his arm towards the hilt.
Sam grabbed the sword, and it clung to him as much as he clung to it.
Another light popped from the edge of the blade, and a woman with a blue tattooed face appeared. ‘Leave!’ she said. ‘Your kind doesn’t belong here. Take the baby and go.’
‘Get it outside,’ Thunderguts yelled. ‘The light hurts.’
The sword’s power filled the air around Sam. He felt thousands of souls moving inside it. Their courage, their determination, lifetimes of will and energy.
‘Go. Get Beatrice out and leave us down here,’ the blue-faced woman said. Hearing the baby’s name wakened him. Thunderguts and Maggie called her ‘it’ and ‘this’. The woman floated towards Sam. ‘Above all, do good. If we have learned anything from shepherding these monsters, it is to do good, to protect the weak.’
Sam waved the sword, and the monsters in the crowd pushed back again, crushing even more of the creatures at the rear.
Maggie alone seemed unworried by the blade, a gauze of fairy dust surrounding her. Sam sneezed.
An old man appeared. ‘If the sword is returned to the surface, there will be no one to control the beasts. Put it back. Wherever we are, we are trapped in the sword. At least down here, we can do some good.’
‘Put it back, Samuel,’ a younger woman’s soul said. She stood tall, dark and sun-dyed, with skin the colour of soot. ‘Then run, boy, run far from here.’
Sam looked about him, at the monsters shrinking from the sword in his hand, but ready to murder him if he tried to leave without it. ‘Please, stop talking,’ he said to the souls. ‘I can’t think.’
Maggie smiled. Sam looked at her firebrand hair shining, a blast of colour in the cavern, but despite her bright colouring, she gave off no light. Not like Beatrice, not like the sword.
He turned to put the blade back into its setting.
‘No!’ Thunderguts said. ‘Take the sword now!’ The ogre leaned forward to grab him, his living claw almost on Sam’s shoulder. He stopped. Sam still had hold of the sword. The ogre’s eyes lit on the bundle of rags in Maggie’s arms and he snatched at Beatrice. ‘Take it, or this thing stays here forever.’
‘And after you’ve taken the sword, do you think they’ll have any use for either of you?’ the young woman’s soul asked. ‘She’ll die and you’ll die before you see another day.’
‘… Or you’ll die before you see another day,’ Thunderguts echoed. The prince-maker had gone, he was only an ogre after all.
Sam groaned and stepped away from Maggie and Thunderguts. The crowd groaned with him.
‘Why don’t you just all go now?’ Sam screamed at the souls. ‘Then they don’t need me.’
‘Is he ranting?’ Thunderguts asked Maggie.
Sam stared at Beatrice’s face. His whole purpose had been to save her. If I could complete that task at least, I will have done one thing right.
The blue-tattoo woman leaned over Beatrice and seemed to touch her forehead. Beatrice cooed in her sleep and sparkles exploded into Thunderguts’s face. The ogre king grimaced.
Maggie studied Sam, her face gentle with concern. He knew it was an illusion caused by fairy dust, but even with Thunderguts’s threat and the souls’ refusal, he didn’t want to disappoint her.
He tried to shove the sword at her. ‘Please, just let me take Beatrice home first. I promise I’ll come back.’
‘No,’ Maggie said, and waved a hand at the monsters. ‘They’ll not let you.’
He looked at them all. Thunderguts’s meat-rich breath stank.
‘Samuel, take it and get out of here,’ Maggie said. ‘You can have everything you want. Just do this one little thing for us. For me.’
Sam howled. In this whole time, he had always been able to decide. He had chosen to reassemble Bladder, he had resolved to follow the pixies and brownies, even though it had been a bad idea, and even in the emptiness of Yaga and Yama’s tunnel, he had determined to keep moving. And every single step had been driven by his decision, his ultimate purpose, to save Beatrice.
But no matter what he did, he knew the outcome. There was no right answer. No matter which path he chose, Beatrice would die. They were trapped.
Sam held the sword high above his head. All that power and he couldn’t do the one thing he wanted
most. The mob of monsters cheered.
Sam screamed and smashed the sword down on to the rock. It broke, and sharp pieces flung through the air.
The shards captured the dying glimmers of lamplight as lanterns dimmed, the sallow light thrown across the cavern. The pieces clattered down upon the white and stony ground, and the rock and sword faded, as ashen as a goblin’s face.
A gasp lifted from the crowd of monsters desperately trying to avoid the splintered pieces as they landed. Then everything went quiet.
Thunderguts stepped forward to look at the broken weapon. He leaned down and hit a small piece with his stone fist. When nothing happened, he put Beatrice on the ground and touched a sliver with a living finger. Still nothing. The ogre’s maw opened, his jaw falling to his barrel chest. Then he chuckled. He threw back his huge head, and a laugh rattled out of him into the grey air above.
The crowd roared its approval.
‘He did it, the princeling did it. Who knew it was so simple? Come to my arms, my beamish boy.’
Thunderguts gathered Sam to his cold, damp chest. Sam surrendered to the embrace and smelt the ogre’s carrion breath. When Thunderguts completed his gruff hug, he dropped Sam and turned back to the ogres.
Sam grabbed Beatrice off the ground, before any monster could take it into its head to eat her.
‘You’ve freed us, Sam. You’ve freed us.’ Maggie smiled and opened her arms, but he stepped back towards the cave and watched the brewing crowd. Heads bobbed and stretched to look at the broken sword.
He wondered what creature he’d have to avoid first, but none of them were interested in the baby. They had forgotten Beatrice and pulled confused faces. Sam heard one whisper, ‘But where’d the souls go?’ ‘Gone,’ a stooped troll replied. Others giggled.
And then the monsters rushed the walls.
The crowd around the dais looked up and the excited conversations carried. While Thunderguts’s triumphant laughter filled the cooling cavern, ogres, goblins, pixies, crones, boggarts, brownies and all the rest climbed. The ones on the highest tier reached the exit quickly, those below fought for a place on the wall so they could escape and get upstairs, where they could consume thousands and thousands of human lives.