by Logan Jacobs
“That’s what I thought too,” I said quickly. “I thought Hakmut was just a pretext that this guy was using to exert control over the other villagers, but… what if Hakmut does exist, and he’s just a nasty piece of work?”
“Burn me up again,” Father Norrell said suddenly. “But this time, take the ashes and scatter them, so that even he cannot reassemble them.”
“... How else do you explain a request like that?” I pointed out to Lizzy.
“Ah, his brains is just scrambled is all,” she said, but she sounded like she was trying to convince herself rather than me.
“He’s not supposed to have brains, his brains were incinerated,” I reminded her. “And I sure as hell didn’t put him back together again, did you?”
“Why does all this god shit have to be so fucked-up and complicated?” Lizzy groaned. “Why can’t you be the only god around?”
“Please end me... don’t let Hakmut… don’t let him…. ” Father Norrell whimpered incoherently.
“Why don’t I just end Hakmut instead?” I suggested.
The pathetic priest started sobbing, whether it was out of terror or gratitude I don’t know. “You c-can’t say that…. ”
“Why not?” I asked. Then I shouted, “Will he hear me?”
The question echoed through the caves.
“Please, kill me or at least free me before he comes,” Father Norrell begged.
“Nah, I think you should stay right there, out of the way, and spectate,” I replied. “It’ll be educational for you.”
Hakmut wasn’t Thorvinius, of course. But any god who would inflict a plague on the people who worshipped him, and then resurrect them to eat each other alive after they died of it, was a god that I felt the world could do well enough without. Also, Father Norrell was a pretty lousy choice of representative to saddle your people with.
There were two other openings in the chamber, besides the one that Lizzy and I had come through. I drew my falchion and a long dagger and watched the opening on the left. Lizzy became a giant wolf again and glared furiously at the opening on the right.
From behind us came a hissing and muttering sound like the chorus of a thousand ghostly tongues.
We both whipped around.
My first thought was that Hakmut had probably been resurrected a fair number of times himself. His skin was a papery greenish white. His features were faintly elvish, but instead of appearing preternaturally youthful as I understood that the race of elves tended to do, he appeared shriveled by many unkind centuries. His mouth was collapsing in on itself as if he had lost all of his teeth. His cheeks were sunken, his brow furrowed, the strands of his long white hair as fine as spiderwebs. Beneath the tattered gray robes that shrouded him he seemed to be suffering from some kind of aggressive form of osteoporosis. And his eyes were pure black, like beetles embedded in his dried apple of a face.
“Where did those other ghasts come from?” I asked him. “Who else’s eternal rest have you been disturbing? And more importantly, are you ready to go to yours?”
Hakmut clearly enunciated a response while staring straight into my face from five feet away, but I didn’t understand a word of it because it was in some language that I couldn’t even recognize let alone make heads or tails of.
So I stabbed the fucker in the belly with my falchion.
He was so dried-out that it was like stabbing paper. His lips parted in silent laughter, which revealed that he had no teeth or tongue. The inside of his mouth was dark like soil, and then before he closed it again I saw a worm rear its head inside.
Then I almost dropped my falchion as Hakmut’s face went slack, and his entire body weight, which wasn’t much, suddenly slumped groundward.
Lizzy made a growl that surely had to be intended as the question on both of our minds, “Is he dead?” Neither of us really believed it.
Hakmut’s voice, the voice of foreign ghosts all crowded into one withered host, came hissing into the air again. But it didn’t emerge from the worm-mouthed great-great-grandpa hanging off the end of my blade like a rag doll. It emerged from Father Norrell who was chained in the corner and clutching his spoon, no longer like a futile means of escape, but like some kind of staff of power.
Then I had to pull my blade back out and leap backward real fast, because the body I had originally taken for Hakmut’s suddenly sprang back to life and twin stilettos flashed at me in its hands that must have been hidden up its sleeves before. They were of sharpened ivory and looked a lot like filthy, impossibly sharp, six-inch-long fingernails.
“You can possess any body, and you chose this piece of shit one?” I yelled.
Hakmut levitated above me, his decrepit body plastered to the low ceiling of the cave, and stabbed down at me maniacally. It took all my dexterity to block his blows and quickly I started to get a crick in my neck from looking up. This was definitely a new angle, and I didn’t like it one bit. I also didn’t like the way he continued hissing a stream of sinister-sounding gibberish down at me from his toothless and tongueless mouth, which gave me an unobstructed view of the worms crawling around inside of it and allowed several of those worms to fall down on my head.
“Please make it stop, end it, end it, don’t let him do that again,” blubbered Father Norrell, whose teeth were now chattering uncontrollably. That was actually very helpful. It told me that Hakmut could seemingly only possess one body at a time, or he presumably would’ve stayed in both the pathetic priest and the ancient deformed elf in order to taunt and distract me from both directions. And the body had to be a dead or a somehow changed one. Otherwise, nothing would’ve stopped him from possessing Lizzy’s body or my own. That was an unpleasant thought.
I myself had mixed feelings about the priest. I didn’t have any sympathy for him, after the way he’d treated the villagers like fodder for his deranged master’s fucked-up plague games. But I also realized now that he hadn’t been quite as in control of the situation in Ferndale as I had assumed. He had just been a puppet for this necromancer freak. So, would I have killed him again as readily as I had the first time?
Probably not, but Lizzy had no such qualms.
“Don’t let Hak--” Father Norrell gasped out as he stared up at the stiletto-wielding corpse. The giant she-wolf leapt in front of him with a bound that cleared half the cave and removed his balding head with one swipe of her claws.
Then his robed body collapsed.
The corpse plastered to the ceiling above me paused in its frenzied efforts to stab me to groan out words that I couldn’t understand in the urgent tone of an incantation. Father Norrell’s chained-up corpse picked his head up and placed it on the stump of his neck, slightly askew, where the muscles and tendons nonetheless proceeded to knit themselves back together before my very eyes.
With his head placed slightly crooked, Father Norrell’s blank blue eyes regained the gleam of life. “Please,” he croaked.
I dodged a stiletto stab to the eye and slashed off the arm responsible. I slashed off the other arm. I slashed off both legs. Then I sliced the stumpy package that remained glued to the ceiling straight down the middle so that one half fell on either side of me.
Father Norrell hissed out a series of horrible guttural inhuman sounds, and the pieces reassembled themselves within the space of a second.
“Lizzy!” I yelled. The giant wolf looked over at me from beside the chained-up priest. I hoped she would understand exactly what I meant. “Three… two… one!”
On “one,” I neatly sliced off Hakmut’s straggly-haired dried apple head, at the exact same moment as Lizzy messily chomped off Father Norrell’s.
Lizzy and I stared at the beheaded corpses of our enemies with anticipation. I noticed that her shaggy tail was slightly tucked between her hind legs. I didn’t feel much better about the situation myself.
But then I started counting again, in my head this time. One… two… three. Four. Five. Six, seven, eight, niiiiine… teeeeeen. And in a glorious turn of events, ab
solutely nothing happened.
Lizzy seemed to have come to the same conclusion. She ran up to me as a naked woman and flung her arms around me in a fierce hug.
“Thanks Lizzy,” I said.
“It’s what I’m here for,” she purred. “I definitely deserve a reward of sorts. Hey, wanna fuck?”
“Here?” I chuckled as I glanced at the nasty cave.
She cackled with amusement at the expression on my face. “Just kidding! Well, I mean, kinda. All right, all right, this cave is kinda creepy, let’s skedaddle. Should we take his head as a trophy or something? To prove you actually killed Hakmut this time, not just his whiny little bitch priest?”
“No, I have a better idea,” I said. “But we have to get back to the temple first.”
She shrugged. “All right. Take me home, Vander.”
“Er, actually,” I said. “You’re going to have to take me home. You know. With your nose and all. Sorry. I’m pretty decent at navigating usually, but we were in a rush, and it was dark….”
An impatient wolf nose butted me in the chest. I turned around to exit Hakmut’s tunnel system the same way we’d come in.
It took us less than half an hour to cover the five miles on the way back, now that Lizzy already knew the way by smell. She kept running ahead and having to scamper back when she realized that she’d left me behind. I’m a fast runner for a human, but no human I’ve ever met could keep up with Lizzy in her giant wolf form.
When the she-wolf and I arrived back at the blue temple, a few of our friends woke up when they heard us come in, since Lizzy trying to be quiet makes about the same amount of noise as a normal person not trying to be quiet.
“What have you two been up to?” Elodette asked as she rubbed her sleepy eyes. I remembered that we were both probably still covered in hay from the floor of the first barn, although I didn’t know whether the centaur’s eyesight was keen enough for her to be able to tell that in the dark. Her tone of icy disapproval suggested that it might be, though.
“Fighting ghasts--” I began.
“And slaying gods,” Lizzy finished.
“Well, just the one,” I said quickly.
Elodette seemed shocked into momentary silence, but Florenia murmured in my other self’s arms, “This is barely the beginning, my love. Soon, you shall have another self.”
“What do you mean?” both my bodies asked at the same time.
“Oh, you’ll see,” she said, and then she gave me a mischievous wink.
Chapter Seventeen
The next day was just as busy as the first, with much of the same kind of work, except that we were all more used to our roles by then and able to function more smoothly as a unit. Some of the villagers became even more friendly toward us, and others who had initially been wary slowly began to relax their guard, although there were a few, like the elderly couple Willobee had offended the day before with his premature declaration of Hakmut’s death, that refused to accept our help.
I marked the doors of those three huts with single lines in ash from the ovens so that my team would know not to enter against their wishes. I continued marking huts that contained corpses with X’s so that Ed and Maire would know where their services were needed. And I marked huts that contained sick patients with circles so that Lizzy and Willobee would know where to deliver the centaurs’ medicines.
The mood overall in the village felt distinctly different than it had when we first arrived. I didn’t know whether it was just the fact that Ferndale had a prescribed plan to follow now, besides just slaughtering cats and getting themselves flogged bloody, or the fact that the merciless god they’d been trying in vain to appease was well and truly dead now along with the priest that had tormented them. But either way, “the clinging vapors of inexorable death and pervasive decay” that Willobee had described had dissipated significantly, even if the plague itself hadn’t yet run its course.
While I was helping Florenia at the ovens that afternoon, she urged me that my most important task now was claiming Hakmut’s temple for my own, so while we waited for a batch of loaves to bake, I settled down and whittled a little wooden statue about the size of my two fists put together.
I instinctively carved it in the shape of the winged, faceless and sexless Visitant, since that was the last image of Qaar’endoth that I had seen and the one used at the altar of my home temple. I didn’t have much practice whittling, unlike some of my fellow novices who had been more artistically inclined. But I had certainly learned how to be precise with a blade in other ways, and maybe some of that skill set transferred over, because I didn’t think the finished product looked too shabby. It might not have been worthy of a rendering in onyx, but it was definitely recognizable as Qaar’endoth, and that was what mattered.
But when I showed it to Florenia, she frowned and shook her head. “It isn’t finished,” she said. “And why the wings? Are they metaphorical or something?”
“No, this incarnation has wings,” I explained. “The Visitant has no face, if that’s what you mean by not finished.”
“I don’t know who the Visitant is, but I know that Qaar’endoth has a face,” Florenia insisted stubbornly. “A perfect face. Chiseled and handsome. And, you’ve carved in the abdominal muscles and the hip bones, but no cock? That doesn’t make any sense. Qaar’endoth definitely has a cock. A very large one. This is a terrible prototype.”
“What’s a proto--” I tried to ask, but the duke’s daughter snatched my dagger out of my hands and then walked off purposefully.
I considered following, but if we both left then the bread would burn and all our ingredients and hard work would have been wasted, so I shrugged and went to tend to the loaves instead. Eventually Florenia reappeared, and we were so busy that I eventually forgot about the incident. I didn’t forget about creating another self, but I figured I’d have time to worry about me later after I had saved Ferndale.
That day, fourteen more villagers had died, and Lizzy reported that six more previously healthy ones had begun to smell of the plague. But all six were living with people who were infected, so our quarantine at least seemed to have prevented the plague from spreading to any more healthy huts, and Ed and Maire assured us that these numbers were astonishingly good compared to the numbers of villagers that had been falling ill and dropping dead in the days leading up to our arrival.
The next day, our third full day spent in Ferndale, something even more wonderful happened.
I was at the centaurs’ medicine-brewing and steak-roasting station with them when Lizzy came running up. She looked so flustered and out of breath that for a horrible moment I thought the ghasts must have started rising during the day as well as the night.
Then she exclaimed, “Otis lived!”
“What?” Elodette asked in confusion. “Who’s Otis?”
But I immediately remembered the freckled little boy that Lizzy was referring to. He had already been sick with the plague when my friends and I arrived in Ferndale. To be honest I hadn’t even given him much thought since I had assumed it was too late for him, based on his pustuled, clammy, and barely-conscious condition when I first saw him. My main concern had been for his three healthy siblings, whom I hoped would stay that way. I had managed to convince some families to use the vacated huts to separate healthy members from the sick, but not all parents were willing to leave the care of their children to strangers, and not all spouses were willing to leave each other.
“Otis is fine,” Lizzy panted out. “He doesn’t have the plague anymore. He smells fine. Well, he smells fucking awful actually. But in a sweaty, filthy little boy way, not a plague way.”
“A plague victim… recovered?” Elodette asked uncertainly.
“Yes!” Lizzy cried. “Thanks partly to you, horse, that’s why I reckoned you might want to know.”
Elodette tried to control her expression, but I could tell that the news affected her. Meanwhile Ilandere beside her burst into happy tears.
Lizzy didn�
�t really understand the concept of happy tears. She frowned at Ilandere. “What’s the matter, you wanted him to die, horse?”
“No,” Ilandere blubbered. “I just didn’t think I’d ever be able to help save someone’s life. I’m not a warrior like Vander and Elodette and… and… most of my herd, so I didn’t think I could do that. I’m always the one who needs saving.”
“Oh,” Lizzy said. “Hmm. Seems to me like a pretty stupid reason to cry.”
“You’re special because you care about saving people you don’t even know, Ilandere,” I said. “You never even met Otis but you care so much about him. You have a huge heart.”
“Thank you,” the silvery princess said shyly.
“That’s not a compliment,” Lizzy said in exasperation. Then she grabbed a cauldron of broth in each hand and headed back to the village.
An hour or so later when I went looking for Maire to invite her to share a midday meal with my team, I found her eating brown bread that did not look the same as one of Florenia’s loaves. Normally I would never have noticed the difference, but helping Florenia with her baking several times had familiarized me with the exact shades, shapes, and textures that she aimed to produce.
“Where did you get that?” I asked Maire curiously.
“Oh, it’s one of the baron’s loaves,” she explained. “His riders dropped a sack of food stores off yesterday, as they do every three days, and I figured I’d take this bread because everyone prefers Florenia’s now. Since I’m not in imminent danger of dying, at least from the plague anyway, so I figured I should let my neighbors enjoy the better bread in case it’s their last.”
“Oh, I see,” I replied. “Well, that is very considerate of you. And Florenia will be very pleased to hear that the village likes her baking.”
I regretted that I had apparently missed the riders’ arrival while engaged with other tasks. I was curious about this Lord Kiernan, who did seem interested in helping the village in whatever ways he could, while keeping them at arm’s length so as not to endanger his own household.