The Screaming Skull

by Rick Ferguson

  So terrifying was the dragon’s piercing shriek that the Hand’s attack stumbled to a halt. Seeking the scream’s source, the insectoids trained their bulbous compound eyes upward. The dragon flipped around again, arresting his screaming descent, and then flew skyward with two great flaps of his ragged bat-wings. The force of the torque flung Lithaine from the beast’s neck to crash into a swarm of assassin bugs and scatter them like bowling pins. Still shrieking, the dragon raced upward, one foreclaw swiping at the arrow shaft protruding from his oozing eyeball.

  “NOW!” bellowed Amabored, waving his arms at young Redulfo. “Cast the spell and hold up the dragon-dick!”

  Malcolm gave a small bow to the wizard. “If you would indulge us, young sieur. Cast your spell, and once you’ve done so, hold the phallus aloft, like so.” The paladin demonstrated with his sword, hoisting it high over his head with both hands.

  Shrugging with exquisite indifference, Redulfo the Younger tucked the dragon-phallus under his arm, took out his flute, and blew a short run of notes. The air around him began to shimmer. Before he could vamoose to a safe distance, Malcolm’s sword and shield were ripped from his hands and captured by the invisible magnetic sphere that had formed around the wizard.

  High above the ground, another magnetic field appeared as a shimmering bubble around the shrieking black dragon. Redulfo the Black stopped suddenly in mid-flight—and for a moment, the dragon hung there resplendent, his dark wings stretched taught like full-bellied outer jibs.

  And so, back to my original point: Why does my swollen prostate make me think of the day we slayed Redulfo the Black? Because my apothecary did the same thing to me that the dragon’s younger incarnation did to him—shove something so far up my ass that it had to come out somewhere else. The first time one of my apothecaries shoved his fist up my bunghole to check my prostate, I kicked his ass right there in his office and threw him into my dungeon for a week. While I never got used to the procedure, I did come to accept it; I wished only that one of my many healers and clerics had bought me dinner first.

  To Redulfo the Black, however, we only had to do it once. The spell did its job, manifesting two opposing magnetic fields that wanted nothing more than to race toward each other at ridonkulous speeds. Holding the phallus aloft per Malcom’s direction, the wizard launched from the ground like a Saturn V, racing at a blistering pace toward the dragon. The dragon, meanwhile, was flung ass-first at the wizard. Below, all of us—men, elves, and insects—watched with stunned wonder.

  When the two opposing objects met, the result was both predictable and wildly astounding: Redulfo the Younger drove the dragon-phallus directly up Redulfo the Black’s black-dragon asshole. There was an explosive gout of black blood and gore as both phallus and wizard disappeared into the dragon’s bowels—and then another geyser of blood as the wizard rocketed out again through the dragon’s upper chest, directly above his heart.

  “Bullseye!” cried Amabored.

  The force of the impact dispelled the magnetic fields. His momentum arrested, the poor gore-drenched wizard now flailed wildly in a ragged parabola back toward the ground, where he crashed into another knot of insectoids and sent them flying. The fatally-wounded dragon, meanwhile, tumbled head-over-tail, plummeting straight down, until he landed with a sickening thud about fifty chains away from our position.

  For a moment, nothing moved. Then the remaining insectoid assassins renewed their attack—but only for a moment. The dragon moved his head briefly, and the bugs froze again. With scimitars poised, they stood utterly still amongst the bodies of their dead comrades littering the field, now a pop-art cacophony of congealed red and black blood, grass blackened by acid, and lonely patches of undisturbed green.

  Meanwhile, a bruised and battered Lithaine climbed to his feet, a bloodied Malcolm retrieved his sword and shield, and a gore-slimed Amabored wrapped bandages around his savaged forearm. Across the field, Redulfo the Younger also rose unsteadily. As the least-wounded amongst us, I took it upon myself to jog over to him.

  “That was surprisingly effective,” I said. Robes matted and slimed with black dragon blood and entrails, the young wizard was searching the ground for his spectacles, only to give up when he realized that he must have lost them when he was rocketing through a black dragon’s guts at Mach Five. He shrugged.

  “I’d say that was the most unpleasant thing that will ever happen to me,” said Redulfo, “but I’m pretty sure I’d be wrong.”

  “Look on the bright side,” I said, hooking a thumb over my shoulder. “You could have been him.”

  I walked the wizard across the field to where the dragon now lay in a jumbled, angular heap. The others gathered also, until we stood together in a rough semicircle around the bloody mess. Redulfo the Black, erstwhile Lord of the Valley and Master of the Workshop of Telescopes, was still alive, if barely. From top to bottom, the würm was a bloody horror. As the dragon’s shallow, ragged breath rose and fell, the gaping hole in his upper chest oozed black magma. Stretched out on the grass, his long neck curled around to the thin, tapered head and snout, also caked with blood. Lithaine’s arrow protruded still from one eye. He looked asleep—until he opened his good eye to regard us with surprising warmth.

  “Well done, fellows,” Redulfo the Black croaked. “Well done indeed, young Redulfo. It appears that my hypothesis was correct, and my experiment a success.”

  “You know we had no choice,” I said to the lizard. “It’s not personal. We just need your brain.”

  “Why the elaborate plot?” asked Amabored. “Why the bugbears, why the spiders, why the time travel, if all you wanted to do was die? You could have made it a hell of a lot easier on us.”

  “In my previous incarnation, I might have told you that none of us ever had a choice in our actions,” said the dragon. “I have, however, proven that notion incorrect. There is a lesson for you here, my friends, should you choose to learn it. For five thousand years, we have been trapped in a universe in which time was immutable, and life preordained. As I have just proven, however, that this proscription is no longer true. You live now in a universe in which anything is possible. You have free will. I suggest you use it.”

  “We will,” I said. “Now, we have to get young Redulfo here back to the Blue Falcon before the whole place implodes.” I glanced around at the frozen assassin bugs. “What about these guys?” I asked the dragon. “Why did you stop them from killing us? Aren’t you on the same side?”

  “While possessing Koschei’s brain makes one necessarily Lawful Evil, I’m pleased to report that imminent death has released me from the stringent requirements of alignment—allowing me to help you,” said the dragon. “You see, here at the end of my life, I find that I want you to succeed, friend Elberon. I want you to complete the Quest.”

  “Now he tells us,” said Lithaine.

  “Once I expire, the spell restraining the Hand will dissipate within an hour,” the dragon continued. “I suggest you retreat to the Workshop, where the castle’s defensive charms will prevent them from following you. There, you’ll find the pathway to resume your Quest.”

  “Then we’d better get moving,” said Amabored. “We’re going to need that brain of yours, you know, pretty soon.”

  “Do you mind if I take a minute?” asked Redulfo the Younger. He glanced back at the dying dragon. “Now that I’ve killed him, I’d like to get to know him a little better.”

  “Sure thing, kid,” Amabored said, clapping the wizard on the back. “Five minutes.” He turned to the dragon. “The less he knows, the better, right?”

  While dragons can’t necessarily smile, this dragon gave a convincing approximation of one. “There’s nothing this young wizard can learn from me that he doesn’t already know,” said Redulfo the Black.

  While we searched for the mirror that would send the wizard back to his own time, Redulfo communed with the dragon. Ostensibly, they were the same person, incarnations separated only by a short span of time. Again, I wondered: J
ust how much of our friend was left in the dragon? Wasn’t Redulfo gone well before we killed him this second time? The thought filled me with inestimable sadness—for the loss of my friend, and for losses yet to come. Even living as I was in the full glory of my youth, I had come to understand one of life’s eternal truths: Live long enough, and life becomes mostly about loss. Live long enough, and everything you love dies, changes irrevocably, or becomes a brutal parody of itself. Like I said before: It’s all a steaming bowl of shit soup.

  I wasn’t alone in my melancholy. Having at last located the blue-framed mirror that led back to the Red Library, we returned to gather up Redulfo the Younger and found that Redulfo the Black had finally died. The wizard had placed a gentle hand on the dragon’s blood-caked snout. When he turned to us, we saw the tears streaming down his face.

  “I would have liked to have known him longer,” said Redulfo. “I think all he really needed was a friend.”

  Malcolm knelt beside the wizard. He placed his own hand alongside Redulfo’s on the dragon’s snout.

  “My good wizard, we were his friends, to the last,” said the paladin. “We gave him that for which he longed the most: We released him from his pain.”

  27

  As I hear Malcolm say those words again, I wonder still if they’re true. Did Redulfo long most for relief from this world? We all bear our measure of pain; I sometimes justify my own often-terrible behavior by convincing myself that the pain I’ve endured is more than most people could handle. And yet, I say this while sitting atop the riches of a kingdom entire. No matter how badly you think you have it, there’s always someone who has it worse than you.

  The conflagration of quantum forces erupting within and beneath the Blue Falcon had sent the famous inn and fortress shuddering through its final death rattle. My battle with Malacoda, my first explosive interaction with Garrin, the detonation of the Holocaust potion, and the kinetic energy released by the clashing timelines had proven too much for the inn, which was now imploding into slow-motion ruin. Outside the Falcon’s high courtyard walls, the Redhauke Guard and the gawping onlookers could only watch in horror as stone, bricks, wood, and debris began to rotate madly around the inn’s expansive courtyard in a strengthening chaotic cyclone.

  It was one thing to observe the destruction from the outside; it was quite another to be trapped within. The young Redulfo, still reeling from his brief sojourn through a dragon’s colon, emerged flying out of the mirror portal to find the Red Library disintegrating around him. Dodging a hailstorm of flying tomes, jars, and sorcerous artifacts, the wizard raced out into the hallway, where he nearly collided with Amabored and Lithaine fleeing from the collapsing remains of Saggon’s tower.

  “Redulfo! Thank the gods you’re alive!” said Amabored, grabbing the wizard’s shoulders. “What happened to your glasses? Have you seen the others?”

  “Those are more complicated question than you might think,” said the wizard, who had mostly cleaned off the dragon’s blood and guts before his older friends sent him back. “If by ‘the others,’ you mean the others we came here with—then no, not recently. I left Malcolm in the Grand Foyer. I haven’t seen Elberon and Melinda since they descended below. I’m pretty sure they’re okay, though. Call it a feeling.”

  “I know what you mean,” Amabored allowed, narrowing his eyes at the wizard. “I know I make it out of here, at least. Can’t say the same for the elf, though.”

  “If we don’t leave now, then we’re all going to die,” said Lithaine.

  “You’re right,” the barbarian allowed. “Best not to chance it.”

  As the wooden floor of the long corridor bucked and split while the plaster walls exploded in successive gouts of dust and debris, the three men bolted for the staircase leading down to the Grand Foyer. They arrived there to find the staircase collapsed into a heap of rubble. Peering down from the mezzanine into the wide hall, they saw amidst the overturned long tables and shards of smashed crockery a wide, tall, bloody and suppurating mound of dead imps—most of them missing limbs, a good many missing heads. Of Malcolm, they saw no sign.

  “Christ, that paladin took care of business,” Amabored shouted over the din of the Falcon’s demise.

  Taking a few steps back, Lithaine jumped from the balcony to land with a sickening thud on the pile of corpses. He slid down them, causing a small avalanche of severed limbs and headless torsos, and then bounced away onto the floor of the hall. He glanced up, waiting for the others to follow suit.

  They did so, sending more corpses sliding and rolling down the corpse-mound. When they arrived at the bottom, the three men turned toward the pile—and saw a hand, now exposed from within and clutching a sword hilt. It was Malcolm’s sword.

  “Holy shit!” Amabored exclaimed. “It’s our paladin!”

  The three men rushed the pile and began pulling out corpses to expose more of Malcolm. Soon they had exposed his head—and their fear of his death vanished when the paladin, be-slimed with blood and gore, sneezed explosively to clear the dripping black goo from his sinuses.

  “Thank the Star Maiden!” Lithaine cried with uncharacteristic alacrity. Together, he and Amabored hauled the paladin from the pile. By the time Malcolm had recovered enough to stand wobbily, Lithaine had restored his façade of insufferable ennui.

  “Hogging all the glory for yourself, I see,” the elf said.

  “Forgive me, my liege,” Malcolm said, smiling through the dried blood caking his face. He retrieved his kite shield from the corpse-pile as he spoke. “‘Twas not my intention. As I had promised your wizard friend that I would guard the staircase, however, I was bound to slay these foul hellspawn until there were no more to slay.”

  “You’ve earned your stripes, paladin, there’s no doubt,” said Amabored. “Enough with the jerking off—we have to find Melinda and Elberon.”

  At that moment, the inn gave a great shuddering groan as the walls and ceiling of the Grand Foyer began to give way. Wooden beams and jagged sheets of plaster and lathe broke free to sail past the heads of the four men. The debris was sucked into a quantum vortex forming around an eye located somewhere near the center of the inn’s footprint. Within a minute, the flying debris field became so intense that it threatened to decapitate or impale them.

  “Run away!” Amabored cried, and they all broke for the exit. Dodging missiles of brick and stone, they serpentined through the foyer and then out through the front entrance, just as the mighty oaken door-halves were ripped from their hinges and sucked into the vortex. Once in the courtyard, they each dived for cover—Amabored into an open zombie-grave, Lithaine and Redulfo under a pile of stone debris, and Malcolm beneath his shield. From their separate vantage points, they watched the Blue Falcon die: the burning remains of the tower now imploding, the walls and ceilings of the great inn breaking apart, the furniture, tapestries, and possessions collected over the long centuries of the inn’s lifespan vanishing into the whirling vortex. The tornado of debris increased in intensity, spinning ever faster, condensing into a neutron star of quantum destruction. Finally, the remains of the vast inn vanished in an orgasmic release of force that flattened bystanders and broke windows from the Thieves Quarter to Shorestone Palace. Out in the harbor, the chop grew so fierce that smaller boats were swamped or capsized. Every bird flying over the city was killed instantly.

  After that, there was silence—until the crowd gathered outside the walls finally overcame their shock and exploded into a raucous hubbub of excitement and disbelief. Within the courtyard, the four men emerged from their cover.

  “That was intense,” said Lithaine, dusting himself off.

  “We sure as hell know how to throw a party,” said Amabored. “We need to scram before the guards grow balls big enough to come in here.”

  “Your friends,” said Malcolm. “The woman, and the fighter. What of them?”

  “Jesus, you’re right,” said Amabored. “They’re trapped below, or they’re dead. FUUUCCK!” the barbarian bellowed.<
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  “I don’t know about Melinda,” said Redulfo, “but Elberon is still alive.”

  “How do you know, good wizard?” asked Malcolm.

  “Trust me.”

  “Okay, he’s alive,” said Amabored, glancing around at the smoking hole where the inn had been. The inn had sat atop a vast warren of dungeons and catacombs which was now entirely exposed—and entirely buried beneath a massive, smoking pile of stone and brick debris. “How the fuck do we find him?”

  “Follow her,” said Lithaine. Amabored spun to find the elf pointing to a figure standing off in the middle distance of the courtyard—the glowing form of a barefoot, raven-haired young girl wearing a white gown. She beckoned to the men to approach her.

  “That’s her?” Amabored whispered, as he perhaps wondered to himself why he was whispering. “The girl from Doomtown?”

  Lithaine sighed. “Yep. That’s her.”

  “An apparition—marvelous!” said Malcolm, clearly enchanted. “She’s no tool of Chaos. In fact, the light of the Star Maiden shines brightly from her. Whatever she is, we may trust her.”

  The paladin’s endorsement was good enough for Amabored, who shoved Lithaine forward with a hand on his back. The elf approached the girl warily as the others followed. The ghost allowed them to close, and then darted into the inn’s carriage house. The slate roof of that building had been sucked into the vortex along with its three sets of tall wooden barn doors. The girl stood at the middle archway of the barn, motioning them again to follow her inside. As the men approached, she slipped into the shadows of the ruined building.

  Once inside, the men found the girl hovering over a stone well long since gone dry. She motioned them to descend into it. Then she quickly faded and was gone.

  “You first, cupcake,” Amabored said to Lithaine.

  The elf tied a rope to the bars of one of the horse stalls, then dropped the other end into the well. Malcolm found a torch, lit it from his tinder pack, and tossed it into the well after the rope. Then Lithaine climbed into the pit, and the others followed.