Black Forest

by Shane Lee

  “Enough.” Mullen slammed his hands on the desk. His face was crawling with fury and twitching muscles. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He stood.

  “Do you think,” Mullen said, “that you are the first idiot villagers to come into my office and tell me that my town is being terrorized by something supernatural?”

  He came around the desk. Monty pulled Terra close, but Mullen simply walked around them, pacing on his short legs.

  “Every time I hear a knock at my door, I am flooded with stupidity!” Mullen roared, the words booming in the space of his office. “Monsters, curses, and spirits. Are all you backwards people having secret meetings where you come up with this nonsense?”

  “Judge,” Monty said, “I’m not lying to you. The Dromm is—”

  “That damned forest, too, I’ve heard enough about that to last me ten lifetimes!” Mullen laughed, a frantic and harried cackle. “Even Tobias brought up those fucking black trees to me. When I thought the man couldn’t get any more annoying. Even in death, he’s managed to dent the brain of my courier.”

  Mullen was circling around them, pounding his feet into the wood. Now he came back around to his desk, moving to the front and forcing Monty and Terra to back up. The short man seemed to stand seven feet tall. The contempt on his face made him ugly and twisted, and when he barked another laugh at them, it rang like a snarl.

  “I am done with the both of you, and with this town. People trying to leave, blaming me for getting sick. Getting in my way. I’ve had enough!”

  Mullen stepped forward, darting his hands out lightning-quick and grabbing two fistfuls of Monty’s shirt.

  The small man was strong, almost eerily strong. Monty stumbled forward, and Mullen held him up, pushing on him with arms like iron bars. Terra grabbed on Mullen’s arm and he shoved her away, hard. She fell and rolled back on the floor, smacking into a bookshelf.

  “Hey!” Monty flared, putting his hands on Judge Mullen’s upper arms. It was like grabbing onto a pair of bricks, and he wasn’t budging. “Let go of me, or I swear—”

  “You’re in no position to make threats, child,” Mullen said, and he pulled Monty closer. He had no fear of retaliation from Monty, or from Terra, or from anyone. Whatever was in his eyes was writhing and wild. Untamed.

  Still, Monty could claw at the Judge’s eyes. Grab his head and wrench it. Close his bigger hands around the man’s neck. But he let him speak.

  “You listen to me,” Mullen said, staring into Monty’s eyes and holding him firm. “You are going to sell me your land. You are going to vacate the house. You are going to take the money and leave this town. And if you don’t, I will kill you both.”

  Mullen released him, and Monty pushed off him and went to Terra. She was sitting up, looking dazed, but she seemed okay. He didn’t see any blood.

  Mullen’s hands were balled into fists, and they slowly unclenched. “You are not going to spread any more rumors around this town, either. I should’ve taken action on this long ago. If I see you talking to someone about spirits or curses, if I hear about it, the both of you are dead, and so is whoever you open your mouth to.”

  “You’re crazy,” Monty said. “Your town is dying around you, and all you care about is buying our land?”

  “No one will know what happened to you,” Mullen said, ignoring Monty’s words. “Trust me when I say that I have done this before, and with people much more important than you. No one will care that you’re gone, and the farm will be mine regardless.” He sat down at his desk again, looking them over with sudden, remarkable calm. “The only reason I won’t just kill you now is because it will complicate the acquisition process.”

  Terra was up now, brushing Monty off when he tried to help her. “I knew you wouldn’t listen,” she said to the Judge. “You remind me of the monsters I read about. It’s no wonder my mom hated you.”

  Mullen’s eyes glinted. “If she were around, maybe she could talk some sense into her spawn. It’s a shame; she had such potential, and it was wasted on that little plot of land.”

  “I’m not your courier anymore,” Monty said, suddenly so angry at himself that he hadn’t seen behind this man’s mask. “You’re going to let this town die, is that it?”

  “I don’t care,” Mullen said, either about Monty quitting, or Irisa, or perhaps both. “I will give you one week to make arrangements for the land. If it’s not signed over by then, I will be taking it.”

  Monty took Terra by the arm, pulling her away from her still-standing glare. Mullen’s fury was down to a simmer. He sat in his chair and watched them go.

  “Children,” he added, before Monty opened the door. “You are free to flee, as well. Abandonment calls for the same paperwork as death, and I have the forms ready.”

  38

  Elrich watched the Bellamy children exit his office, the older boy slamming the door behind him. Monty’s rage filled Elrich with a thin glee, something he hadn’t felt in a while. It was good. Good to take action! Good to do something, instead of sitting here and letting the townspeople come to him over and over!

  And they had been. Each face he saw made it clearer that the town was slipping out of his control. If it wasn’t someone crying over their dead mother or father, it was someone asking him to do something about it. As if he was a doctor. As if he had time for that.

  The Bellamy papers had been stuck to the top of his desk for weeks, and he stared down at them now. It was all he had been focused on, and he’d been lathering the eldest living Bellamy with honey when he knew that vinegar was the most effective. Well, so did the child, now. Both of them. Elrich Mullen was not one for idle threats.

  He resisted the urge to crumple the papers on his desk, closing his fingers into empty fists. If they were his only problem, he might be grateful. And to think, weeks ago, he had been planning on approaching Delila Bellamy with an offer for the farm. A generous offer, more even than what he had offered her distasteful progeny.

  But like the one settled on Monty’s shoulders, it would have had its own undertones. Problems with the farm that could be created, causing much trouble for the woman and her family...and problems that he would be all-too-happy to undo, once the farm was in his hands.

  She would have been overwhelmed with gratitude. She would have seen him as a hero and savior. Now she was ashes and blackened bones.

  But he still had the town, or at least he would soon.

  “Spirits,” he spat, sprinkling the paper. He pulled his hands away. It didn’t matter what came over the town—sickness, rumors, or morbid nicknames like ‘the black’—it inevitably spread from person to person and made it to his desk. He’d heard a fresh dozen tales of monsters and spirits. Entities brought by traveling merchants; wraiths emerging from the Dromm forest; monsters sucking the souls out of people like they were mugs of beer. And that name that Monty had given it, what was it? Nal’Gee.

  It was the fault of the bards and storytellers traveling with the merchants. So much outside trade only lead to poison in the town.

  Nal’Gee. The name rang a bell. Some man—no, it had been a woman, from a troupe that had come through the town recently.

  Some evening past, Elrich had made the mistake of stopping by the Moon tavern for a bottle to take home, and he had seen this crone sitting on a table, feet on a chair, blue shawl wrapped around her head and a bowl for coin resting between her knees. She’d been surrounded by a crowd, telling some tale, and he’d heard that name from her lips. Nal’Gee.

  Her bowl had filled up just fine. The villagers had eaten up whatever she fed them, then probably asked for more when it was done. And it had gone so far as to make its way into his own head, and now too the heads of the Bellamys, the only gods-damned family in the town he needed. Any sane person would take the money for the land and be happy with it.

  But the people, Monty included, were clearly going crazy.

  They were trying to leave his town, to go where they felt it would be safer. He had to put a stop to that,
of course. Owning a town with half its population gone was practically worthless, and would do nothing to further his goals.

  No. No one was going to escape him. The doctor had confirmed that this black was not an illness. Whatever it was, it would run its course and leave the town a few citizens lighter, and that was all.

  And if it does kill everyone?

  The thought crept into his head as it had before, and he ignored it. He’d seen plagues. He’d seen infections wipe out whole square miles of cities. This wasn’t anything like that. He didn’t know what it was, but he’d seen people die a lot faster and a lot more horribly, and more widespread to boot. This was nothing. If someone died every day, it would be years before it would matter to him.

  But villagers fleeing the town would cripple his office much quicker.

  Elrich stood from his desk and moved briskly out of his room, locking the door as he always did. The light was bright out here, and he narrowed his eyes against the biting cold of the breeze. He swept forward through the hall, ignoring the sycophantic greetings called from the offices on either side of him, and pushed through the glass front doors.

  He hated the idea of being forced to talk to another idiot, but he needed to make himself known as the Judge of Irisa, not just some desk-rider who sat behind a door. He had to get his hands wrapped back around the town, tight enough so that nothing and no one would be slipping through his fingers.

  He’d first go to the Moon. It was time to start keeping a bottle of the good stuff in his office, not just his house. He’d prefer not to be seen buying it, but he didn’t have a courier to run such things right now, did he? Like all things, it was better handled by himself.

  He was undisturbed through the streets, and that was because they were empty. Unusual at daytime after lunch, but not as of late. Mullen hardly noticed; his quick gait took him to the Moon tavern, and he pushed in through the door as though he owned the place.

  Technically speaking, he did.

  The bar was empty, too, and he walked up to it and smacked his palm on the wood, summoning the barkeep from the next room.

  “Judge, sir,” the man said, and his name was Barton. Mullen knew it, and ignored it.

  “Bottle of Welshire, barkeep,” Mullen said, and when the man set it on the counter, Mullen laid down coin and said, “I have some questions for you, friend. That vagabond storyteller woman who was in here some nights ago, do you remember her? With the blue wrap on her head?”

  “Aye.” Barton slid the coin beneath the counter. “Kept a lotta drinkers in here. I wish she could stay all the time.”

  “Mm.” Mullen wrapped his fingers around the neck of the liquor bottle. The sight of that wench had been what made him arrange the Keepers, his small crew of enforcers that stopped travel out of the town. Which meant that she should still be here. “I heard she is still in town, and I want to talk with her some. Did she tell you where she was staying?”

  Barton hesitated. He might have seen the dangerous glint in Mullen’s eyes. But when those same eyes bore into him further, he spoke. “She did, sir. The inn down east lane, the nice one. Montgomery.”

  “Wonderful.” Elrich pulled the bottle off the bar and tipped Barton a nod. “Stay well, then. I am sure that I will be back.”

  He left the Moon, tucking the whiskey into his robes, connecting lines in his head. He didn’t want anyone leaving Irisa, but there was always an exception to the rule. That exception was nestled around this raconteur and whatever band of vagrants he had managed to pin down within Irisa’s borders.

  If you wanted to stop a rumor, you killed it at the source.

  39

  Shaking with rage, Monty slammed Mullen’s office door behind him and left the Commons with Terra.

  A few short weeks ago, an altercation like that with the Judge might have left him in fear. But now, with Nal’Gee threatening their lives, Mullen seemed like nothing more than a petulant bully. A dangerous one, but nothing compared to what was really at stake.

  “We’re not selling anything to that pile of horse shit,” Monty swore, moving with long strides toward nothing in particular.

  Terra gasped at the curse—silly, considering all they’d been through—and then she let out a giggle before turning more serious. “He said he’d kill us.”

  “He’ll have to get in line, won’t he?” Monty stopped them where the street turned, nestling them in a shady corner between two buildings. It was cold, but he didn’t notice. He felt so heated that he thought steam might be rising from his hair. “I don’t care what Mullen says or threatens us with. We’re done with him, and we have bigger stuff to worry about.”

  “Yeah.” Terra looked out at the street. “Where is everybody?”

  Monty looked up, too, seeing the streets completely empty in the middle of the day. “Maybe everyone’s too scared to come outside,” he surmised.

  “So he won’t pay for our house anymore,” Terra said, quickly changing tack.

  Monty blinked. “Yeah, I suppose that’s true. That’s okay. I’ve got some money from the courier work.” What he didn’t add was that it wouldn’t matter for anything if Nal’Gee was free to tear through the village.

  “Let’s go home,” he said, stepping back into the sun. “I’ll talk to Patricia, see how much we’d owe her to stay there.”

  The one-week clock Judge Mullen had given them began to tick.

  Monty knew there was a lot to do in that time, but he didn’t know what any of it was. The first thing was to talk to the landlord, Patricia, about the cost of the quarters in town.

  The number she gave to Monty made him balk. One month would clean him out completely, with barely enough left over to buy a sack to carry their things back to the farm. Which it looked like they’d be doing, once the money Judge Mullen had paid had run out. In a useless bit of luck, that wouldn’t be for ten more days. Good news, but not quite enough to make Monty jump for joy.

  One week wasn’t enough time to pore through all the books necessary to find the answers they needed, if they were there at all. Still, they both read everything they could get their hands on. Monty hated to go back to the Commons library, but it had to be done. Certainly he wouldn’t let Terra go alone. To his surprise, Mullen was rarely in the building. Busy with other things, apparently, and ones that brought him out of the office.

  He felt disconnected from town and goings-on since he wasn’t running messages anymore. He decided it was better to be out and about rather than behind closed doors. Maybe someone else could tell them more. Two days of reading until their eyes dragged had yielded nothing.

  That was how they found out that Bella, Dr. Tobias’s housekeeper, had been the next to die. She had succumbed the day after Dr. Tobias, and apparently she’d never left the house again. Judge Mullen and a pair of priests had read both of their rites together. Efficient.

  Monty wondered if they’d be burned together, too, and if anyone else would be lumped in.

  Going out into town and asking around about old legends was difficult to plan out, and even harder to execute. Monty knew plenty of townspeople, but had no idea who to talk to.

  He spoke to Bradley, and he was hopeful there would be something there, but there wasn’t. The baker was far more interested in actual gossip than some legend, especially if it wasn’t something he’d heard about. Though his young assistant, Joelle, did have something to say.

  “I heard about Nal’Gee,” the girl said to them, bouncing up to the counter once Bradley had moved away to serve someone else.

  Terra perked up, standing on tiptoe to see better over the counter. “From who? Your mom and dad?”

  Joelle shook her head. “Nah, they don’t tell ghost stories like that. There was a storyteller from one of the caravans in the Moon the other night. My parents would never let me go there, but I snuck in to get a nip of the beer.”

  She looked rather proud of herself for that.

  “The storyteller talked about Nal’Gee?” Monty said in disbelief
. “Why would someone from out of town know about a local legend?”

  “If they’re a storyteller, they know lots of stories,” Terra said, answering before Joelle could. Her eyes were lighting up. “Didn’t you read about bards and gypsies? The really good ones remember hundreds of stories, even more than a book could fit!”

  Joelle nodded along. “Yeah, she was talking there for hours, I heard. All night! I hung around for a while, and she was still going after I left.”

  Monty turned the idea over in his head. “If that’s true, then it makes sense that she would tell stories from around here...”

  They would have to visit the Moon, talk to someone there, and try to find the storyteller. If she was still here at all. Joelle had seen her three or four nights ago, and caravans didn’t tend to hang around the town very long.

  Unless they got trapped.

  It was a hope, but a slim one. Would the Judge care if outsiders tried to leave, or were his men only stopping villagers?

  Monty thought, for a moment, about running away—if it was even possible. Taking Terra and getting the hell out of here was probably the safest option...but then again, was it? Mullen had a long arm, and Nal’Gee—if she could leave the forest, what was to stop her from leaving the town? From finding them wherever they went?

  Besides all that, he didn’t want to abandon his home. His farm; his friends and villagers. Dromm family or not, there was love there. There were bonds, and they were strained by death and discontent, but they held. Monty couldn’t leave that behind, and he couldn’t ask Terra to do it, either. They would fight this. They would protect their home.

  Their mother would have done the same.

  They would look for this woman from the tavern, and if there was any luck, she would still be in town.

  40

  The Moon tavern was not a big place, but it did enough business to keep uncorking barrels and pouring them into mugs. They made their own beer, and most people would say it was fine, because most people in Irisa had never tasted good beer. The bottles of whiskey and good liquor were shipped in and sold at thrice their value. It was usually only east-side people who walked out with glass.