The Screaming Skull

by Rick Ferguson

  “You are indeed an honored guest of Hell, Lord Jo,” said Rhadamanthus. “King Asmodai of Sheol has granted you the Right of Passage. And yet you hold no power here. What can you pledge to Beelzebub, should Prince Elberon fall?”

  “My life,” said Jo Ki-Rin. “If the kid loses, my life will become forfeit to Beelzebub. Good enough?”

  More crowd-buzz and another judges’ conference later, and Rhadamanthus bowed to the Ki-Rin. “King Minos has accepted your offer of editorship. Your grace, will you accept the Ki-Rin’s pledge of his life to you?”

  “Oh, indeed I do,” said Beelzebub, his fly-body bowing obscenely to the Ki-Rin.

  “So mote it be,” said Rhadamanthus. The prince turned to my opponent. “Lord Malacoda, as the challenged party, you hold the right to name the form of combat. Do you accept this challenge?”

  “BETCHYER ASS,” Malacoda repeated.

  “Very well. Name your preferred form of combat.”

  For some reason, at that moment, I thought of my father. Two years ago, I had fought for my pride against the old man. Now, I was fighting for my life. In truth, I was in both cases fighting for the same thing: freedom. For without freedom—the true, unfettered power to enact one’s will, free from every constraint, be it a father’s wrath or the clockwork machinations of the Multiverse—there was no life. There was only slavery.

  Unfortunately, the psychic link between the devil and me persisted, and Malacoda divined my thoughts. I heard again the fell echo of his voice in my head.

  “Thanks for giving away the game, pal,” the devil’s voice said. “Nothing like beating you with your own fear.” Malacoda then spoke aloud, and his voice rang like my doom across the great arena. “I HAVE CHOSEN THE MANNER OF OUR CONTEST, OH GREAT JUDGE OF THE DAMNED. I CHOOSE… CRUSH THE KOBOLD. ONE GAME, WINNER TAKE ALL.”

  Anticipating the excitement to follow, the crowd went nuts. The nobles gathered on the gallery hubbubbed together. Holy fucking shit, I thought. Are you kidding me?

  “No, I’m not kidding,” the devil’s voice answered in my mind. “Prepare to be ass-raped, puny mortal.”

  “Prince Elberon,” Rhadamanthus called down to me from the gallery. “Your opponent has chosen the manner of contest: Crush the Kobold, one game, winner take all. Do you accept his choice?”

  I paused—not out of fear, mind you. Perhaps it was for dramatic effect.

  “BETCHYER ASS,” I said.

  30

  “So mote it be,” proclaimed Rhadamanthus, as the winds of Limbo roared. “The battle is to the death, until the first player scores, or until one player yields to the victor. May the Great Satan, Lucifer the Morning Star, have mercy on your souls.”

  Anon, two tall goals appeared at either side of the stadium, along with a spike-studded metal ball—no live kobold this time—that now appeared on the ground at the fifty-yard line. Across the pitch from one another, the devil and I squared off: he wielding his massive battle-mace, me my trusty and yet sadly pathetic +2 longsword. I was a lowly Fourth-Level fighter, about to engage in mortal combat with a devil that could easily murder fighters of twice my experience level. I had the girdle, and bore the Skull—but what would these items avail, given that I had already fallen once to the devil? Malacoda seemed to think that choosing my family’s game would enhance my fear and thus give him an edge—but what sharper edge did he require?

  A gong gonged, signaling the start of the match. Malacoda then revealed his game plan—for there appeared, materializing out of the aether, four-score of the devil’s infernal henchmen, ready to join the fray. There were minor pit devils, armored war trolls, ghastly ghouls, ghoulish ghasts, muscled Ur-imps, skeleton warriors, even a vampire or two. Instead of facing a single opponent, I was facing a small army.

  Devils are liars and cheats—I should have seen it coming. As the vanguard was already racing for the spiked ball, there was nothing else for it. Girding my loins, I ran for the ball with my sword cocked over my shoulder, bellowing the war cries of the Lordship.

  An imp got to the ball first. I arrived in time to shear off the fucker’s head. With no way to both carry the ball and defend myself from the horde, my play was to guard the ball while taking out as many of Malacoda’s minions as I could. As the girdle and Skull provided me with strength and endurance far beyond my scrawny mortal abilities, I could take out a lot of them.

  Malacoda, meanwhile, was content to hang back, waiting for his minions to do his work for him. As I stacked up bodies, the crowd grew rowdier. They hadn’t expected me to last for more than a minute. At the sight of a mortal man giving an army of infernals what-for, they began to rally to my cause, cheering every time I fried a hellspawn with Skull-lightning or rammed my blade through an infernal’s black heart. Chafing at the loss of his home-field advantage, Malacoda grew wroth. Raising his mace high over his horned head, he called down from the roiling sky above Hades a blast of lightning, which exploded like an incendiary grenade in the arena, sending me and every one of Malacoda’s minions flat on our bellies.

  As I stood, acrid vapor filled my lungs. The smoke cleared, and I could see now filling the arena a fresh army of infernals. Hundreds of them—slavering, rattling their bent scimitars and curved hooks, snorting smoke and flame from their nostrils. Now, I realized the truth: Malacoda was smarter than me. He had trapped me after all, and I would die screaming.

  Wait a minute, I thought. Screaming.

  Oh, you’ll be screaming, all right, the devil’s voice taunted in my head. For the next ten thousand years, I reckon.

  And then came another voice in my head—my own. It was the voice of my future self, speaking to me before our mental connection broke during the showdown at the Blue Falcon.

  Go take down that fucking devil, I had told me. And for Odin’s sake, don’t forget to scream.

  Some mental switching station in my brain at last clacked into life, and I understood. I was no longer just Elberon, lowly Fourth-Level fighter. In part, I was also Koschei the Deathless, the most powerful sorcerer ever to walk the Woerth. Koschei had imbued his own skull with the ability to summon allies, I knew, because I had slain scores of them during my possession of that cursed relic. Before, I had no control over it. Now that I wore the Screaming Skull as my own, what allies might it summon? Reaching out to find the devil’s mind, I locked onto it—and realized that I was right. Malacoda had hung back not out of confidence that his minions would best me, but rather out of fear. Fear of the Skull. Fear of its power.

  I’ve got you now, pal, I thought.

  I’m not your pal, buddy.

  I’m not your buddy, asshole.

  I’m not your asshole, fucknut.

  You’re right—I am fucking nuts, and you’re about to get fucked, I thought. Then I opened the Skull’s jaw, and let it scream.

  The sound sent every demon and devil in the arena running for cover. Even the three High Judges of Hell ducked, while King Minos remained as immobile and impassive as the Sphinx. Atop my shoulders, the Skull now burned with a blinding aura of blue flames. Around me, the arena faded from view, and I found myself seemingly floating in utter black emptiness—a void that was yet filled with a foaming sea of glowing bubbles that swelled and collided and formed new bubbles that sometimes popped like a silent surprise. Each bubble, the Koschei in me knew, was a separate universe. I had only to extend my mind into one of those bubbles, and I could see with perfect clarity its connection to the pure blood of Barbēlō, she who is called Tiamat, the Mother of Chaos. To wield her power, I had only to reach out my hand.

  One of the universe-bubbles swelled in size before me. Within its curvature, I saw a small blue-green planet rife with the spawn of Chaos. Extending my thoughts into this world, I found on a vast plain a horde of fur-clad horsemen galloping toward a crowd of panicked villagers screaming for their lives. I reached out—

  —and now the horde of Mongols appeared in the arena in Limbo, twirling scimitars above their heads and charging straight toward the vanguard
of Malacoda’s minions. Their eyes wide with shock and terror, the hellspawn broke and ran. The Mongols rode them down, swinging their swords in tight arcs that sent heads popping from torsos.

  At this turn of events, Malacoda hesitated—but only for a moment. Then he raised his mace again. Another lightning flash, and there appeared in the arena a herd of war-mammoths topped by wooden towers manned with bowmen. The Mongols’ charge broke against the line of these great beasts. From their perches atop the mammoths, Malacoda’s bowmen rained death upon the horde.

  Just the appetizer, I thought, and reached out my mind again. I summoned a line of ballistae manned by armored crews. The war machines hurled massive barbed bolts at the mammoths, which trumpeted their pain and alarm as their line broke, and they stumbled backwards to trample the devil’s minions. Malacoda summoned a dozen trebuchets loaded with flaming brimstone missiles that smashed into my ballistae. To counter, I called forth a double-line of armored triceratops ridden by Atlantean war-maidens; these barreled into the trebuchets and smashed them to bits.

  So the battle raged, with the devil and I in turn summoning creatures of Chaos and machines of war to smite the other’s forces. I threw at Malacoda three brigades of fusiliers. When they died, I countered by pulling the 26th North Carolina regiment from McPherson’s Ridge and throwing them into the fray. Following the Confederates came a line of 7.7cm FK 16 German field guns. Then a division of Panzer IIs supported by a battalion of Waffen SS and a squadron of Stukas. When the Stukas began dive-bombing the arena, the devil got pissed, and I had to bring out the heavier stuff: Bell AH-1 Cobra gunships, complete with “Ride of the Valkyries” accompaniment; Merkava Mark IVs, their 12.7mm swivel-mount machine guns and 60mm grenade launchers laying waste to Malacoda’s lines; MQ-9 Reapers raining appropriately-named Hellfire missiles; a squad of Battle Angel mechs armed with 60 kilowatt las-cannons and pulse grenades; three Deatheater 6000 dreadnoughts complete with nano-fighters to attack the nanobots Malacoda had sent after my troops; more and more advanced war machines, the abilities and construction of which I couldn’t begin to understand, but which nevertheless obeyed my summons to rain death with impunity upon the devil’s minions.

  And I was prevailing. Behind my forces I came, carrying the game ball, waiting for an opening to find Malacoda and rip his fat bull’s head from his shoulders before I marched across the goal line to win this fucking game. Then, a rookie mistake. For the briefest moment, I wondered what my father would think of my impending victory, and I allowed myself a measure of pride.

  Pride, as the Wise know, is the Original Sin—the only sin, the proto-sin, in which we assume that we can achieve a balance that exists apart from El. None see this truth more clearly than the Fallen. Sensing my thoughts through the battlefield carnage, the devil roared with laughter.

  “SO, YOU THINK YOUR FATHER WOULD BE PROUD OF YOU?” The devil asked aloud, and despite the din of combat his voice rang throughout the arena.

  “WHAT BUSINESS IS THAT OF YOURS, IMP?” I roared back. “COME AND TAKE YOUR MEDICINE.”

  “HERE’S WHAT YOUR FATHER THOUGHT OF YOU, SHITBIRD,” said the devil. “YOU THINK HE DIDN’T KNOW YOU WERE PACKING THAT GIRDLE WHEN YOU TOOK HIM OUT? HE’S THE ONE WHO FUCKING PUT IT IN THAT CAVE FOR YOU TO FIND! HE’S THE ONE WHO STARTED YOU ON THIS GODFORSAKEN QUEST. HE LET YOU WIN, DUMBASS! YOU HADN’T FIGURED THAT OUT?”

  Malacoda belched laughter again, and then the devil invaded my mind with knowledge unbidden. As a waking dream, images of the past unspooled before me. Olderon laughing maniacally on the bridge of his flagship as the sea drakes destroyed the Talony’s fleet in the Battle of Hydra Bay. Olderon again standing on the deck over two captive wizards—and one of them, I was flabbergasted to learn, was our old pal Jaspin Spellbinder. The other wizard, I didn’t recognize. My father and Jaspin? What the fucking fuck?

  The movie continued: bound in magic-dampening chains and facing execution, Jaspin and his companion pledging themselves to Olderon’s service, taking the Oath of Binding to seal their bargain and save their lives; Olderon watching my brother and I grow to manhood, secretly doubting that either of us were fit to rule his hard-won kingdom; deciding finally that my brother was too weak to reign, Olderon calling in his marker on the two wizards to help him devise a quest that would test my own fitness to rule the Lordship. Next, I saw the cave under Chasm Falls—the same cave where I had discovered my magic girdle. I watched Jaspin and his companion teleport into the cave and carefully place the Girdle over the corpse. To give me an extra shock when I later found it, Jaspin cast a Fear charm on the corpse. Then they vanished again.

  The images raced by so swiftly that I scarcely had time to process them. Even so, I could perceive the truth: Olderon had himself launched me on the path to what I would later think of as the Quest, and Jaspin had helped him do it. It was Jaspin who had been searching for the Skull all along. Arriving in Redhauke ahead of my exile, he had murdered Saggon, replaced the Over-Boss with an ice-golem under his control, and set to digging for it beneath the Blue Falcon. Malacoda had mucked up the plan by tossing it to Melinda—but it came to me anyway. Thus came to me the second revelation: What the devil had told me earlier was true.

  TWO PHYLAXES, AND YOU THINK YOU CAN TAKE ME, the devil had said.

  The Phylaxes are drawn to each other, like magnets, Redulfo had said. Once the first one is found, the others will be, too.

  Fuck me, I thought. I possessed not one of Koschei’s Phylaxes; I possessed two. The Girdle and the Skull. Olderon knew all along that I wore the Girdle, because he ordered Jaspin to hide it in the cave for me to find. He also knew that I wore it during our match, and he hadn’t done a thing about it. He let me beat him, so he could banish me from his kingdom and send me on my way to undertake a quest of his devising, all so I could prove to him my fitness to rule—and even then, he doubted me enough to let me cheat.

  So stunning was this deluge of knowledge that I fell to my knees. Before I could recover, Malacoda was upon me. Seizing the Screaming Skull by its horns, he yanked upward, lifting me bodily from the ground.

  “YOU SEE IT NOW, DON’T YOU?” the devil bellowed. “YOU’RE NOTHING. YOUR OLD MAN KNEW YOU WERE CHICKENSHIT. HE KNEW YOU WOULD FAIL WITHOUT HIS HELP. SO, HE RIGGED THE GAME. YOU’RE NOT FIT TO WEAR THIS SKULL, AND I’M GOING TO RIP THE FUCKING THING OFF YOUR SHOULDERS. RIGHT. NOW.”

  Around us, the mayhem of battle faded. Like ice water in my veins, fear flowed through me. Not just fear of immediate death, but rather all the fear I had ever felt, or ever would feel: fear of the Quest, fear of failing my friends, fear of women, fear of love, fear of embarrassment and failure and inaction. Ruling over it all, like some cruel despot with an iron grip on the kingdom of fear that had conquered my heart, was fear of my father. Fear of loving him. Fear of hating him. Fear of becoming him. The devil had found my weakness, and he would use it to destroy me.

  Then, there came unbidden to my mind’s eye an image of my brother and me facing each other on the grassy, windswept plateau above Tradewind with swords drawn. Within the nearby tent, a red-hot brand waited in a bed of coals for one of us to scar the other.

  You think this a cruel test, and so it is, Jorren, my father’s master-of-arms, had told us. But now you know fear. One of you will master it, and one of you will be marked by your failure to do so. The winner, therefore, has nothing to fear.

  Yes, I thought. That’s right. I mastered my fear. I beat my brother, and yet I took the brand.

  What did you say? I heard Malacoda say in my head.

  I ignored the devil. The arena, the two armies still laying waste to one another, the assembled crowd, Malacoda himself still attempting to wrench the Skull from my shoulders—it all faded away. I found myself once again in the moat outside of Castle Kraken, my head submerged beneath the filthy water as Olderon drove his thumbs into my throat.

  This was the moment when I had called upon the Girdle to save my ass. It wasn’t a memory. I was there again, and with an epiphany that
perhaps shook the very foundations of Woerth, I realized that this moment—not the battle with Malacoda—was the true inflection point. Even though I had yet no real inkling of the Quest, I understood that the course of my life depended on my actions here, and now. Knowing now how the old man doubted me, I would spend the rest of my life doubting myself—and self-doubt, I knew, was a terminal condition. The match had already happened—and yet here I was again, with the power to change it. All I had to do was beat the old man square.

  As Olderon closed off my windpipe, I saw stars. To my thoughts I summoned the look in his eye as, three days after I had cast the brand at his feet and refused to maim my brother, I took the branding myself. Though I was but eight years old, I had in some unspoken and yet mutually understandable way beaten the old bastard. At that moment, he realized he would one day die. He realized he would need me to carry on his legacy—and he hated me for it.

  That was all I needed to know. With no help from the Girdle at all, I summoned my rage and flipped him over into the drink. I let him flail about for a moment. Then I pulled him sputtering from the moat.

  “Yield, old man!” I cried.

  “I’ll see you in Hell first!” Olderon raged.

  I gave him another taste of the moat. “Yield! You are finished here!”

  “You’ll have to kill me!”

  I flipped him over so I could see his face. “I don’t want to kill you!” I bellowed. “I want my freedom!”

  We locked gazes. The gleam of triumph in his eyes that I remembered was now gone—replaced with fear. For only the second time in his life, Olderon was afraid. He threw up his hands.

  “I yield!” King Olderon cried. “Prince Elberon is the victor!”

  Only it wasn’t King Olderon who had yielded—it was the devil. I was back in the arena in Limbo. Our armies were gone; though warfare had raged for an indeterminate time across the playing field, there was no sign of it. There was only we two. My cartoonishly-muscled arms were wrapped around the devil’s head and neck as he clawed at them in a futile attempt to free himself. He could struggle for eternity for all I cared—I was still going to choke him out, and he knew it.