The Screaming Skull

by Rick Ferguson

  “Who wants to know?” I asked.

  “Answer, earthbound, or you’ll taste my spear,” said the Rider.

  “Okay, then. Yeah, I’m him.”

  The woman gestured back to the horses, their wings now folded across their flanks. “This woman bade us bring her to you.”

  Inside the litter, a figure slumped against a pillow. I stepped forward, exposed to the invisible pressure of several hundred pairs of eyes now turned toward me. I pulled back the curtain, and there she was.

  Her eyes were closed. Her ringleted auburn hair, strewn across the pillow, was now run through with a streak of white. A lump leaped into my throat. Relief—pure, blessed relief, ambrosia straight from the goblet of Frigg—flooded my heart. Alive, I thought. Ten months of crushing guilt vanished in an instant.

  She had been through some shit since I had seen her last, when I cried out her name as the mighty obsidian doors of the Hellmouth slammed shut, trapping her in Hell. Talk about getting the dirty end of the stick.

  “Come back!” I cried that night. The Screaming Skull, which I had worn in place of my own head long enough to vanquish Malacoda, was now gone—tossed by me into a lake of Hellfire with the blessing of King Minos of Limbo. Above my head, the Blue Falcon shook in its final death throes; soon the deep dungeons themselves would collapse, entombing me within. The fleshy walls of the Hellmouth writhed and twisted, the tortured souls within crying out in psychic agony. Separating Melinda and I were the doors of the Hellmouth itself, the runes carved into the brimstone glowing crimson as they began to swing shut again on their monstrous hinges.

  “I have to save them!” Melinda called.

  “You can’t save them! They’re dead!”

  “Maybe I can still save their souls. I have to try!”

  Then I understood: Melinda never quit. The fires of Hell itself held no power over her will. If she had to brave them to save the souls of the children we failed to save in life, then through the black bones of Tartarus, into the bottomless pits of Malebolge, and across the frozen plain of Cocytus itself would she journey to save them. In her own way, she was ten times the hero that I ever was. Her balls were ten times bigger than mine.

  “Then I’m coming with you!” I called, racing toward her. A geyser of flaming Hellfire and brimstone erupted before me, the force flinging me backward. The Hellmouth shuddered. Then, I heard a voice both familiar and terrifying.

  “I think not,” came the figure’s voice, filling my head like a tumor. “You have a date, I’m afraid.”

  I didn’t turn to face that voice—not yet. My gaze was fixed on Melinda, standing within the Hellmouth, prepared to sacrifice everything for the sake of seven doomed children.

  “Melinda!” I cried. The Hellmouth doors slammed shut, their massive hinges groaning so loudly that I could only read her lips as she uttered what I would come to think of her final words—I love you. Then came the high, keening screams of the souls trapped in the doors as they were pulled into the Void.

  Some men wait their entire lives in vain for a woman to utter those words. I should have run after her that day. I should have beat on the doors of Hell with my head until they opened again.

  Before I could make a move, I saw him—the assassin Garrin Grimmreaper, my dark counterpart, my negation. Suddenly he was there, the black cowl masking his face, his black scythe drawn. It was our first encounter. At the time, I knew shit about the Quest, or Koschei, or the Grimmreaper, or any of it. I knew only that I was terrified of him. Even so, I might have mistaken him for some garden-variety tool of Saggon—until I heard his voice again, caroming around inside my head.

  “Too late for the Skull,” came the dark figure’s voice. “But I’ll have that girdle off your stinking corpse, shitstain.”

  “Come and get it, assclown,” I said.

  That was ten months earlier. Until I saw Melinda asleep in that litter, I thought she was dead. So, you may forgive me if I mistook relief for love. When I scooped her into my arms, soaking in her reality, and when her eyes opened to find mine, and she smiled, it sure as fuck felt like love. Chemically, what’s the difference?

  “Hey, stranger,” Melinda said. Her face was pale. There was a new scar near her left ear. “Buy me a drink?”

  “Sister, I’ll buy you the whole bar,” I said.

  7

  Back when I first met Melinda, I didn’t know from women. They were alien creatures, as exotic as the rarest of dryads. My mother Lisandra died from lung-fever barely six months after my birth, and the nurses, nannies and au pairs who raised me are nothing to me now but a blur of sagging breasts, sour breath, silent farts, and cold porridge. So, I didn’t exactly grow up comfortable around women. You’d think that being a prince would give you an edge with the ladies, and you’d be right—about my older brother Elderon, who was banging chambermaids in junior high. It wasn’t just that he was the oldest, that his jaw jutted a little more than mine, that he stood a hair taller, or that his dimples were placed just so. He also seemed to intuitively get women in a way that I never could. I was a gangly dorkwad of a kid, underweight and struggling with personal hygiene; once old enough to crave the attention of girls, I had as much success as a mouse at a cat party. So, I wallowed in self-pity and spent long, stolen moments staring into the mirror. It never occurred to me that if I simply cleaned up my act, dressed a little better, and stopped acting like such a fucking dipshit, then maybe my luck would change. No dice. As I stumbled into manhood, I focused on my swordplay in the hope that a steel phallus would grant me the confidence I so sorely lacked.

  When the woman on the cart planted her fist in my eye, she therefore struck a hornet’s nest. I couldn’t get that chick out of my head. As I sat swilling beer in the Suds ‘n Shade, sparring with Amabored outside Saggon’s armory, or writhing on my cot at Lady Hagg’s Boarding House on Lamplight Street, I pored over the fleeting image of her flat, pug-nosed face burned into my brain. In a city of 100,000 souls, I had to find her again.

  “It was an inside job,” Amabored whispered as he, Lithaine and I cooled our heels outside Saggon’s office the next day. The Thieves Guild headquarters, a lavish, legendary, decaying freak show of a hotel and inn named the Blue Falcon, stood brazenly in the Thieves Quarter at the corner of Halberd and Chainmail Streets. The Blue Falcon was built, so the legend told, by Storm Stonegorm as a gift to Arturus after the end of the Dread Wars. The Falcon was legendary because, to put it simply, the manor’s interior did not match its exterior. Without, the Falcon was a fantastically ornate inn and manor house, the sprawl of which covered two full city blocks and included copious entrances, tall spires, myriad carved beasties, stables, courtyards, gardens and outbuildings, all towering behind a ten-foot-tall stone wall topped with wrought-iron spikes. Within, the Falcon seemed far larger and more sprawling than its exterior footprint could possibly allow. Corridors ran for scores of yards before angling into tangled mazes of narrow passages. The inn’s Great Room, renowned for hosting what most wags believed to be the longest continuous party in existence, seemed about three sizes too large for the building. It was not uncommon for guests to wander into a room and, when they wandered back out, find themselves in another part of the building altogether. Some doorways, rumors told, led to different universes entirely.

  The approach to Saggon’s office, lurking at the top of his personal tower, was straightforward enough. Squirm through the Great Room past the ever-evolving horde of cutpurses, scallywags, rapscallions, button-men, grifters, gypsies, tramps, and thieves gathered to swill the cheapest beer and rye whiskey in the Free Kingdoms; speak the password to the one-eyed ogre who guarded the tower with spiked club at the ready; ascend the dank staircase into the tight stone labyrinth that squatted near the top of the tower, being careful to flip the hidden levers that prevented poison-tipped darts from sending you into a mouth-foaming death rattle; skirt the hidden pit of sentient Black Sand that lay in wait to squeeze your internal organs out through your orifices; offer a hello to
Saggon’s hot Shadow Elf secretary—who kept a hand-crossbow cocked and loaded beneath her desk—and you were in.

  In the reception area sat the dark elf, her sublimely long teal legs driving us to distraction as she studied her carved black nails. That yesterday we were mere hired cogs in a vast thrumming engine of vice and crime, and today were moments away from an audience with the Man himself, was not lost on us. Amabored saw it as an opportunity, Lithaine as a threat. I saw it as a reason to piss my pants.

  “Inside job? Get the fuck out,” Lithaine whispered back. “The bats down there work for Saggon, for fuck’s sake. Who would cross him?”

  “Maybe it’s one of the old families trying to muscle their way back in,” I offered.

  “All I know is it stinks like a dwarf’s sweat socks,” said Amabored. “Yours wasn’t the only shipment hijacked last night. I heard five shipments went down, and each one lightly guarded. Somebody sang. If he thinks it’s you two, then the gibbet will be the least of your problems.”

  “Let him try,” Lithaine said absently, as his gaze traversed the blue-green curves of the shadow-elf.

  “Good luck with that,” Amabored said. “I’ll bet she prefers an elf with hair between his legs. Or is it spun silk you lot grow?”

  With a metallic snirk, Lithaine’s knife swung against Amabored’s throat. The barbarian’s grin widened, and then it vanished as the receptionist loosed a crossbow bolt that buried itself in the wall a quarter-inch from Lithaine’s skull.

  At that moment the door to Saggon’s office swung open, and a blast of frigid air hit us in the face. The Over-Boss hailed from the Fordal Wastes, some of the most inhospitable country on Woerth and a thousand leagues north of Redhauke, and thus kept his quarters as cold as a witch’s tit—or so we had heard. Had we known what he really was, we’d have fled his office and not stopped running until we reached the Pustiu Waste.

  The receptionist motioned us into an alcove, where two bodyguards relieved us of our weapons. Then we were shoved into Saggon’s office.

  We found the Over-Boss waiting behind a desk in a simple, well-appointed office hung with bearskins. The desk was laden with food and drink. From two carved stone bear heads snarling on the wall opposite the desk blew twin streams of chilled air, while on the wall behind his desk a great stone fireplace stood unused. Along the curved tower wall hung the stuffed and mounted heads of what we took to be the bosses of the seven crime families who once ran the Redhauke underworld. On the fireplace mantle rested on a pedestal the scimitar-shaped, petrified red dragon phallus that we would later use to send Redulfo the Black to his reward. Had we the foresight to sneak it out of Saggon’s office that day, we would have saved ourselves a passel of trouble.

  As for Saggon the Large himself, the man did not disappoint. Like my father, he bore the aura of a man who had learned to bend other men to his will. His head was bald, his nose Roman, and what had once been a lantern jaw now struggled to support the weight of multiple chins. Saggon had once been a powerful man, in the physical sense of muscle, bone, and sinew—a fierce warrior possessed of boundless ambition and ruthless cunning. Now, his sobriquet referred solely to his disgusting Jabba-like girth. Sure, he could still squash our skulls like peanut shells, but he’d have to catch us first.

  “Boys,” Saggon said, motioning us inside with a wave of a sausage-fingered hand. “Come on in, have a seat. Have some mulled wine. From a little gnome tavern I know. They make the best. And here, some crab cakes from the wharf. And the little cheeses there. Try that one there, the Camembert. I get a shipment in from Arrendell. They age it in gryphon skulls.”

  We sat. We partook. I tried to keep my hands from shaking. For minutes, there was no conversation as Saggon attacked his own plate and poured two goblets of spiced wine down his gullet. With a belch that set the candles to swooning, he wiped the wine from his greasy lips and gave us the once-over.

  “So, Manny. Moe. Jack,” he began. “Here’s the thing. On any other day a shipment gets pinched on your watch, then I’m afraid you leave our employ by the swiftest means available. No offense, that’s just the way I do business. But today, I’m feeling magnanimous. Frankly, I need your help.”

  “At your service, my lord,” said Amabored, bowing from the waist.

  Saggon seemed surprised that one of us had dared to speak. He let it pass. “Yes, you are. It’s the woman, you see. One of you saw her last night?”

  “I—I did, my lord,” I stammered.

  The Over-Boss leaned forward in his chair, his fur-shrouded fat sliding forward. “Did you speak to her? How many men were with her?”

  Lithaine and I told the story. From Saggon’s reaction, we learned that he knew her—and that he was afraid of her. The moment passed, and the Over-Boss creaked backward in his chair.

  “So, here’s how it is,” he said, taking a hand-rolled cigar from a case and lighting it. “You two swells are bait. She got the drop on you once, so she’ll be back. You let her snag another shipment, one week from tonight. When she does, our barbarian friend here will be waiting inside the false bottom. She gets to where she’s going, and you find out where she’s holed up. Whatever you do, don’t you dare take her out. Leave that part to me.”

  “Could be a suicide mission,” Lithaine said.

  “Life is a suicide mission, my pointed-eared friend,” Saggon said. “My man downstairs will arrange the details. Be at the Falcon at midnight on the twenty-third. Any questions?”

  We had no questions. The Over-Boss dismissed us with a wave. Once back in the lobby, I took Amabored aside.

  “Let me have the spot in the wagon,” I said. “I have a score to settle with this broad.”

  “Sure, you do,” Amabored said. “Be my guest.”

  8

  That there was more to this story, we had no doubt. Saggon had dozens of thugs on his payroll smarter and more talented than us. Why send us to get close to a woman who seemed to have his number? He had to be playing an angle—one that would most likely result in us being dead.

  “Saggon’s not that smart,” said Jaspin Spellbinder—yes, still the same Jaspin Spellbinder who fucked us as hard as it’s possible to get fucked—proprietor of the Suds ‘n Shade tavern, tucked on the corner of Specter Lane in the Guild Quarter of Redhauke. Suds was the premier watering hole for Redhauke adventurers, the place to see and be seen, to pick up rumors about deserted towers filled to the brim with booty and doubloons, about forgotten catacombs strewn with emeralds and rubies, about a certain necropolis outside the village of Hightower in which every other crypt held enough jewelry to buy the finest mansion in the city. On any given night, the place was packed to the rafters, knee deep in body odor and bullshit as swordsmen, sorcerers, rogues, and priests of every race, stripe, and denomination traded war stories, scars, women, and blows. A former adventurer himself, Jaspin kept the drinks cheap and a bottomless supply of anecdotes, insults, and quips at hand. He asked only that you not fuck with him or his livelihood. Cross him, and he’d unleash some mind-melting spectral illusionist shit on you that would leave you gouging out your own eyeballs or swallowing your tongue.

  Jaspin liked us because we only showed up when we had cash on the barrelhead. During the frequent slow afternoons when we had naught to do but nurse our beers and watch the flotsam and jetsam of the street drift past the front door, he’d regale us with tales of his old adventuring days—like the time he was captured by the Negali tribesmen on the Serpent Islands, who lashed him to a tree, tortured him, and forced him to drink hallucinogenic Beholder blood before sending him into to the Pit of Dagal, from whence no man returns. I don’t know who the hell Dagal was, but then again, neither does Jaspin. When the tribesmen bound his hands, they failed to gag him, which allowed him to cast the one spell in all the Nine Books of Thaumaturgy that doesn’t require a hand gesture or a material component: the First-Level illusionist spell Blind Enemy. Suddenly every tribesman within a hundred-foot radius saw the lights go out. While they fluttered about like
headless chickens, Jaspin worked his way out of his bindings and walked away. Any other adventurer would have braved the Pit of Dagal and its dozens of chambers, ten-foot-wide corridors, secret doors, clever traps, and hordes of killable monsters, all for the chance to rack up treasure and Guild experience points. Not Jaspin. Above all else, he treasured his own hide—which was why he retired from adventuring to tend bar. That he was up to far more than bartending, we had no clue.

  “Seriously, the guy has more earwax than brains,” Jaspin was telling us as our asses were once again wearing out his bar stools. “I have hemorrhoids smarter than him.”

  “How do you run a criminal empire with no brains?” Redulfo asked.

  “By surrounding yourself with smart people who have an interest in seeing you do well,” Jaspin said. “The Over-Boss is always a target. Better to be the guy whispering in the Man’s ear than be the Man yourself. This woman—she’s highly placed, or she possesses skills that Saggon has found useful. For some reason, she’s turned on him.”

  “Enough shop talk,” Amabored said. “Come on, Jaspin, batter up.”

  “You’d better warm up with a couple of beers. It’s going to be a while.”

  Saggon had given us a bonus to arm up for the work ahead. We were supposed to spend it to repair our patchy quilted armor, sharpen our blades, and fill our quivers. Instead, the three of us—Redulfo liked to keep a clear head—pooled our argentae to purchase three Flaming Telepaths, Jaspin’s specialty cocktail. We had been itching to try one for weeks, but it was too pricey for those of us living in abject poverty. That day, the argentae burning holes in our breeches found us racing straight for Jaspin’s place to have our minds blown.

  The drink had to be ordered two hours in advance. Jaspin needed two assistants to help him mix it. While much of the process took place in the tavern’s cellar and had never been witnessed by patrons, I did later learn that, besides containing equal parts Shōchū, triple-sec, and Everclear, the drink also contained wyvern milk, dryad nectar, and green fairy sweat—three of the more powerful hallucinogens on Woerth. There was a blowtorch involved. Jaspin also cast an enchantment of some sort on it, which was possibly the real source of its power. He served it flambé in an imp skull. The coup de grâce required the would-be imbiber to chant, in High Elvish, Nothing good can possibly come of this.