The Bandalore

by D K Girl

  ‘How can you be such an inept moron?’ Pitch hissed.

  ‘Shut your bloody mouth.’ Pitch’s ceaseless badgering fuelled Silas’s anger, and his own desperation fired through him. He sat back on his heels, jaw tight, and thrust his hands at the mud. ‘Come. Now.’

  The bandalore shot up from the mud, bulleting into his waiting hold.

  ‘I’ve got it!’ Silas cried. The loop of string found his finger, settling over it.

  ‘Move!’ Pitch cried, scrambling to clear the mud.

  The limb of an enormous oak flew at them, arrowing through the air with astonishing speed. Silas had no time to run, so he settled for a violent lurch sideways, mercifully finding firmer ground. The branches whacked the mud mere inches from his face.

  An erupting scream, more raucous than any before it, tore through the clearing. A fearful apparition emerged from the woods. A woman, once perhaps. Taller than Silas by a decent head, although her own was anything but decent. Black Annis was the work of a nightmare. Her skin blue as a late summer sky and as wrinkled as a crone’s, her beakish nose running to a hooked point that dripped with foul blackness, and her huge eyes a dull silver. Her hair, what of it could be called such a thing, ran with the same fluid that came from her nostrils. The strands reached to her feet, their ends clogged with the debris gathered off the forest floor. But it was her nails, no, her claws that captured Silas’s attention. As long as half her arm, and with sharpened tips that a swordsmith would be jealous of. She set her silver eyes upon him. Her wretched body, not much more than skin and bone, held dreadfully still. A predator ready to strike. Despite the assurance of the bandalore in his grasp Silas was paralysed with fear.

  ‘Pitch, help me,’ Silas cried.

  ‘You must—’

  Whatever Silas must do was lost to the moment. The creature standing so statuesque in the shadows now burst to life. Arms spread, slender claws reaching, her dank hair flowing around her like a tattered coat, Black Annis lunged at Silas. Her cry was a far reaching note that sailed ahead of her, splitting the air. Silas’s own scream rose with it, his voice hoarse from wailing, from fear and horror, cracking as the tormented soul flew at him. He sought to find his feet, and at least make a show of defending himself from what surely must be his end, but his muscles spasmed, his arms locking rigid. His fingers bunched into rigid claws around the bandalore and a single, solitary note rang out.

  Silas leapt to his feet, just as Black Annis was upon him. He threw up his arm and swung wildly. His fist struck her middle, where the flesh had no give, as hard as the wood that struck it. She did not fly through the air as Pitch had done when struck, but she did stagger. Black Annis shattered the air with an angry roar, her bladed claws sweeping desperately close to Silas’s shoulder. He ducked, for once finding himself not to be the tallest of company, and managed to huddle beneath her outstretched arm and twist around to position himself behind her. The blood roared in Silas’s ears. This was insanity. What had Mr Ahari thought to happen here? Silas was fighting a battle that he could not win. And Pitch, damn him, did nothing to aid him.

  Silas let out a frustrated roar, and it was met by one of Black Annis’s own. She turned on him, and the stench of her drove ahead of her, pressing at him. Silas ran, choosing a direction blindly. Seeing too late where it had led him. To the bloodied and broken body of the child. He blinked down at the senseless carnage. The hair lifted with the ever-growing strength of the wind, and he found himself staring down at eternally sightless eyes. Barely had the child lived and she was gone.

  Addison had laid blame upon Silas for this. Blamed those who should have seen to this creature long before she killed in such an appalling way. His anger was not misplaced. And Silas’s own now joined it. If the Order saw fit to make the children’s lives a part of their game, as Pitch claimed, then Silas would play for them. The bandalore’s string tightened around his finger. The opening notes of a new melody rose sweet against his ears and Black Annis’s scream reached higher, as though the notes tortured her.

  Silas uttered a silent prayer that they might. He stood utterly still over the child, his coat slapped by the wind against the rock. From somewhere, far away, Pitch shouted at him. Urged him into the fight.

  But Silas waited.

  Until the heat of Black Annis was upon his neck. Until the notes of the bandalore filtered through the chaotic maelstrom that approached at his back. He waited until the scythe’s song pitched with notes of loss and grief so intense the sky might shatter.

  And then, and only then, did death’s servant move. He swung around, releasing the bandalore. The collision of song and scream made the world tremble. Black Annis arched her back, her mouth impossibly wide with her death note. The bandalore sliced across her bony chest, deep enough to enable the hint of shattered bone to show.

  ‘Again.’ Pitch shouted from somewhere closer by. ‘Bring her to her knees.’ His voice rang with bloodlust, and Silas fed on its fervour. Black Annis straightened, her mouth running with the thick black slime, her eyes now laced with fine threads of onyx through the silver.

  Silas struck again, and again she righted. This time with a chunk of her beaked nose missing, the next with a sunken, broken cheek bone.

  He was making his mark. Was it possible he could truly bring her to her knees? Pitch still screeched nearby, his words indecipherable. His assistance not forthcoming.

  Arm aching with the blows, head ringing with the notes of the bandalore Silas staggered backwards. A step from the mouth of the cave. The bandalore’s notes rose frantic and uneven. His foot slipped on loose ground, and Silas found that it was he who fell to his knees.

  Black Annis, a grotesque and bloodied monstrosity, struck her blow. She was upon him, fast as a snake. Her claws struck, piercing through his flesh, their metal sliding into the softness beneath his ribcage.

  A new agony exploded through him, his organs impaled upon such a dastardly, filthy thing. He threw back his head, but the scream would not come. He was shoved back, into Black Annis’s cave. Misery and torment were thick on the air. And Silas’s own joined the fray.

  What a fool he was, to imagine for a moment he might best such a creature. As enraged at himself as any monster that tore him asunder, Silas screamed a silent scream. Black Annis’s claws sunk deeper, all the way to her knuckles. She dripped her foulness on him, rancid breath making his eyes water.

  Silas would die. Again.

  And he did not care for it. He’d barely yet lived.

  The teratism bared her teeth, oversized gums stuck with multitudes of jagged shards.

  No. Silas did not care for dying at all.

  He threw back his arm, the tear of muscle and ligament spreading through his entirety. The bandalore’s notes drew higher, higher evermore. The weight of the wood grew in his hands, threatening to pull itself from his grasp.

  Silas landed his blow, and a flash of white bloomed in the darkness. Black Annis’s cry stopped dead. The claws jerked from his body, their retreat bringing fresh agony. Her wretched head fell from her neck with a dull thud upon the rocky floor. A tremendous shudder rattled stones loose from the arched ceiling, drawing his attention away from the lifeless eyes that stared up at him from the severed head. Silas raised his arm, seeking to deflect the raining debris, but stopping short when he saw what it was in his grasp. A great curving scythe, the blade a shining onyx with a strange, crooked handle of pale white wood dotted with notches and stumps, as though the carver had abandoned his task halfway to finishing. Dark sticky liquid coated parts of the blade, and a droplet swung free, descending to land right upon Black Annis’s snarled, death-struck lips.

  Silas pressed the tip of the scythe’s blade into the earth. The weapon was all that kept him upright. His own blood ran freely, warming his legs. Eyelids heavy, Silas slumped against the wooden handle, only to find himself collapsing painfully forward as the scythe disappeared as quickly as it had come. The bandalore rolled from his hand, no strength in his fingers to keep it.
Lying with his cheek to the ground, his torn middle pressed to the soil bleeding him into it, Silas blinked through clouded eyes. There at the mouth of the cave stood a fine-boned lady of middling age, the church’s veil upon her head, a wooden rosary dangling at her neck. Weeping sores covered her cheeks, one so close to her eye as to force it closed. Silas imagined he saw her lips move but he was falling fast beyond conscious thought. When he blinked again she was gone. A very lost soul at last moving on.

  Black Annis was no more.

  His lids slowly lowered. Silas sank into numbness. As he drifted deeper into the darkness, the faint echo of a voice reached him.

  ‘Fuck. Silas? Are you dead?’

  But he could not answer Pitch’s question, nor make the slightest sign he’d heard it. Silas was utterly done. He faded away with Pitch’s hands rough upon his shoulders, and curses hot against his ear.

  Chapter 21

  Silas came too in the grip of a stoking pain like none he had known. Through the white heat and ceaseless moans that escaped him, Silas discovered that he was no longer prone on the hard ground. Instead, he dangled over Pitch’s shoulder, the slight man managing to carry his considerable load without issue. Silas was very much alive, every inch of his body trumpeted its agony loud and clear. White specks dominated his sight, as though the snows had began too early, but he made out enough of his surrounds to understand that they moved through the woods. He knew this for certain because Pitch seemed to be going out of his way to choose the most vigorous path possible. Stumbled into depressions and pushing bodily through foliage that whipped at Silas’s wounded body. Each time Silas screamed. A sound beyond his control, his body so stimulated by pain he barely felt a part of himself at all.

  Each time the reply to his agonised cry was similar. ‘By gods if you don’t shut up, I’ll dump you here.’

  Silas whimpered at the very thought of remaining another moment in this place.

  ‘Put me down,’ Silas dribbled, for his lips were not as capable as his mind.

  ‘Believe me, I’d enjoy nothing better than to cast your great hide from my shoulders. You are bleeding all over my coat.’ He quickened his pace, jumping to clear an obstacle that Silas could not see. The pressure of Pitch’s shoulder against Silas’s wounds was more than he could endure, and the world vanished in a sea of black.

  When next Silas peered through slitted eyes, he was met with a new discomfort. Pitch had brought him to the carriage and had at last cast Silas’s great hide from his shoulders. Silas lay across the seat, though of course it was not long enough to accommodate all of him. His feet rested on the floor, causing his back to add its twinges to the plethora of aches and terrible pains that gripped him. Granted, they were a small displeasure compared to the hot pincers that seemed embedded in his gut. Silas breathed in short gasps, for it was all he could manage with the damage Black Annis had inflicted upon him.

  He shuddered, the memory of the touch of her claws against him rattling him with horror.

  ‘Will he die?’ A young man’s voice, tight with concern. ‘Such ghastly injuries…’ Silas’s foggy mind registered Clarence’s presence.

  ‘How the blazes would I know?’ Pitch growled. ‘I am no bloody doctor.’

  ‘What did you see in there? Did you…did you see any sign of…’ Clarence could go no further.

  The carriage hit a rough section of road, and Silas groaned, squeezing his eyes tight. Below his belt a dampness clung to his trousers, his own blood soaking him.

  ‘Did we see any sign of the child you lamented over?’ Pitch said, careless and abrupt. Silas’s pain was joined by dread. He knew full well Tobias Astaroth was not an empathetic soul. ‘Aside from the fact I have no idea what she looks like, I would assume it highly likely that the child is dead. I’m fairly certain you’ll find that one of the skins hanging from the boughs belongs to—’

  Clarence’s anguish filled the cabin, a guttural cry that spoke of a heart tearing in two.

  ‘You bastard.’ Silas’s words hit the air as strange grunts, utterly indecipherable.

  Pitch pressed at his shoulder, his fingertips only mildly different to knifepoints. ‘Stop moving. You’re bloodying up the damned carriage enough as it is. By the gods, I am famished, do you think there is any chance of tea when we return to Knighton?’

  Clarence burst into a more hearty round of tears, the kind that were messy and noisy and shook one’s entire body. For some time there was only the clip of the horses’ hooves, and the sobs flowing from Clarence. The carriage once again hit a brutal spot of road, and yet again Silas vanished in a haze of black.

  He woke in a strange though comfortable bed, in a dark unfamiliar room with the scent of gingerbread thick on the air. Beneath it though wafted the hint of something less enticing, horse dung. But he doubted it was either of the scents that had shifted him from his slumber. It was more likely the voices, raised in anger. One of which was all too familiar.

  ‘I’m in servitude to an oaf who has not the remotest idea of how to protect himself, and yet I am to stand in blood, and shed none of it. I cannot tell you how tiresome this is already.’

  ‘Oh do stop being so dramatic, you fop.’ A feminine and firm voice.

  ‘Piss off, Sybilla.’

  ‘I shall not, this is my house.’

  Silas braced, edging his weight so that he might roll onto his back. He moved with ginger trepidation, but his pain had lost its jagged edge.

  ‘Do you enjoy living in the middle of fucking nowhere?’ There was the scrape of a chair upon wood, and a light sprinkle of laughter. The woman’s laughter.

  ‘I rather do. Keeps me safe from the likes of you, to begin with. Very few daemons ever bother me here, especially ones with reputations as sordid as yours. Is there anyone in London you’ve not bedded?’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘Don’t harbour any ideas of a move to the country then.’ Whoever she was, she jested comfortably with him, and with a great degree of amusement. ‘Now, the gingerbread is done, with enough sugar and treacle to make anyone else but you positively ill. Why do you keep pacing by the door? Her ladyship ordered you to wait here and I dare say even one as reckless as you would not defy her, Pitch.’ The emphasis was heavy, and decidedly mocking. ‘I have no clue why you prefer that name, it’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Says the woman named Sybilla. It rather sounds like an affliction.’

  ‘One I’m sure you are most familiar with.’

  ‘Oh, you have no idea, my sweet, frigid angel.’

  As the pair continued sparring in the next room, Silas made a careful investigation of his body. He bit at his lip, lifting a hand to his chest, uncertain what he might find. Clearly, he had survived the encounter but the memory of his fight was a raw imprint upon his mind. The sensation of Black Annis’s claws pushing through skin, through ribs, through his very core, would not be soon forgotten. Her foulness had infiltrated him, even now he imagined he felt its touch upon his blood.

  Silas lay staring at the peaked ceiling. If he squinted he could just make out the yellowness of straw through the gloom. They were in a cottage of some kind, rather crude in its nature. He traced his fingers over his chest, finding the rougher texture of bandages wrapped tight around his midriff. For the first time Silas noted that there was not a trace of mud upon him, nor a scrap of clothing. With a start he lifted the light brown blanket covering his body. Naked, his manhood a limp coil of flesh between his thighs.

  ‘Do you feel any pain?’

  Silas jumped at the voice, clutching the blanket to him for what paltry defence it might offer. ‘Who is there?’

  The voice had come from the corner of the room where a large armchair hulked. Through the checkered curtains hanging across a window to the right of a chair a narrow dart of light penetrated the gloom. Barely bright enough for him to make out the figure who sat there. He thought he spied the gleam of red hair.

  ‘Hello, Silas. I am glad to see you awake.’

  A familiar
voice. ‘Clarence?’

  ‘Not entirely.’

  Silas eyed the door. He could breathe well enough, though not entirely freely, and his joints no longer ached as though fire were among them, but feeling better and getting to his feet were different things entirely. He considered calling out to Pitch.

  ‘I do not believe that Tobias will rush to your rescue, even if you did need it. He is not presently an avid admirer of either you nor me.’

  It was Clarence’s voice, but it held a flat quality that Silas did not recognise. As though the young man were rather bored with speaking at all.

  ‘Clarence, are you all right?’ The loss of the child could well be responsible for his strange demeanour.

  ‘Oh for goodness sake. I am clearly not Clarence,’ non-Clarence harrumphed.

  Wincing, Silas manoeuvred himself into almost a seated position. His belly twinged at the points where Black Annis’s claws had penetrated. ‘Who are you?’ he grunted, managing a rather uncomfortable pose with one shoulder pressed against the bedhead, a flat, solid piece of oak. The very thought of such a tree left him cold. ‘Do not harm Clarence. He is a good man, much tested.’

  ‘You’ve known the man less than a day, how do you know he is good? It is not prudent to assume knowledge of a person so quickly.’

  Silas opened and closed his mouth not once but twice before he found an answer. ‘Perhaps I do not know, but he has not been unkind to me.’ Which was more than Silas could say for his supposed partner. ‘And it has been a taxing time for him.’

  There was a long pause in which the conversation between Pitch and the woman Sybilla rang loud, clear, and most unpleasantly. They had moved on to talk of a party in Oxford, where he relayed talk of what had been done to various parts of his anatomy by a wealthy visiting American business man as an audience watched on. Both parties seemed highly amused by the recall, Pitch’s dainty laugh free of malice and the disconcerting edge he managed so often. Silas shook his head to free himself of the stomach churning images the conversation raised, and returned his attentions to his own situation. Surely a possessed Clarence would not have escaped the notice of the woman and the daemon now gorging himself on gingerbread and tasteless memories in the other room? Which meant that whoever sat in this room had been granted permission to do so.