“What the fu—”
“Assassin!” shouted Tsaeb to the fleers in the hall. “Bring water! Hurry you idiots!”
I watched from the broken wall, but that was as far as I could bring myself to go. I stood with my mouth open, eyes popping out of their sockets. No one in the hallway cared to stop and help, or to leave and help by bringing back the water that Tsaeb seemed in dire need of. He sat straddling Charla’s chest, his bulging demon legs—hooves on the ends like a goat—tight against her shoulders. Her hands pressed firmly to the floor by his own.
“Find some water, Norman, now!”
The growl in Tsaeb’s voice was more intimidating than the demand.
I took off running out the door and to wherever my legs would take me, wherever I might find water first. When I came back seconds later carrying a small mug, Charla stood with her tail wrapped tightly around Tsaeb’s throat, dangling him feet from the floor.
“My ssscared virgin cussstomer,” said Charla with a victorious grin. “I want my golden thimble.” Her tongue slithered out, licked my face from afar and then slid back inside so fast that I could barely see it. I touched my face with my free hand in a delayed reaction.
Tsaeb held on tight to the tail around his neck, grunting and choking, unable to speak. He tried to kick his way free but his legs were too short to reach anything but air. He coughed a few words up that I could not understand.
“Sp...sashit nyer...ace!”
I looked bemused at the tall, red naked creature in front of me. “But you didn’t even get me off,” I finally said to the succubus. “I started thinking about baseball...baseball!”
Tsaeb growled and groaned and choked some more.
“Well, what am I supposed to do with it?” I said to him, holding out the mug of water.
Tsaeb was still incapable of speaking intelligible words.
“Sp...sashit nyer...ace!” he repeated, more annoyed than before.
I looked down at the mug of water, back up at Tsaeb, at the water again and then the succubus. I slung out my hand, throwing the water on her.
It did nothing.
Charla laughed and jerked her tail, hitting Tsaeb’s head against the ceiling.
“Sssomehow,” she began, “I knew he’d do that.”
“It didn’t work!”
Tsaeb managed to roll his marble-like eyes. ‘Well no shit!’ is what his expression read.
Strange gray moonlight shone through the window. Shadows were huge against the walls, Charla’s towering seven feet to the end of her tail where Tsaeb dangled like a rag doll. The boisterous crowd in the tavern below had fallen to utter silence. No one roamed the halls. There were no voices in the distance, or beds knocking against the surrounding walls. Water dripped through the cracked floorboards below.
I absently dropped the empty mug.
“Came to screw the witch did you?” said Charla.
“No,” I paused, searching for the perfect lie, “I was going to screw you, I thought.”
The succubus laughed.
“Honey,” she smirked, “I’m afraid you jussst don’t do it for me.”
An unexpected splash of water hit me in the face. My skin went from freezing to warm and then to cool. A tingling sensation took over. The old bearded man from the tavern, Morris McAlister, stood near me holding an empty bucket. The dark room began to light up brilliantly. It seemed to be coming from me, yet I could not see it. I tried looking behind me, but Morris grabbed my head and held it still.
“Duncha move,” said Morris. “Darkness faces the Light.”
The succubus suddenly dropped Tsaeb. He rolled out of the way and toward the window where he pressed his back to the wall and tried to catch his breath.
“Dumbass,” Tsaeb grumbled, “I said splash it in your face, not on her!”
The light grew brighter around my face. Morris held fast to my chin. Charla opened her mouth and drew back her head. Her banshee-like scream shook the room and sent Tsaeb scrambling under a broken table. Morris stood firm, eyes clenched tight, one ear covered by his free hand. I was unaffected by the piercing scream this time.
The succubus fell to her knees. Her red skin began to smoke and char until finally her body went rigid and still as if rigor mortis had already set in. Morris fell to his knees next and then so did I. I tied to shake off the stun.
“You almost got me killed!” said Tsaeb, finally making his way out from under the wreckage.
He appeared shorter in his demon form, though with longer arms.
“I didn’t know what the hell to do!”
“Listen next time,” Tsaeb barked, stepping up and dusting off his khaki trousers. “And next time you get horny, let me check them out for you first. I can smell a succubus from blocks away.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me before, in the tavern?”
I was getting angry. I looked around in search of my pants, forgetting I was in the room next door to ours where Charla had taken them off.
“You don’t just go around saying it,” Tsaeb answered. “Besides, I didn’t think you’d try to hook up with one of those women anyway. I couldn’t even get you to eat the food!”
Tsaeb moved to stand next to the body of the succubus where she lay twisted on the floor. His bloody horns sank back into his skull, hooves shifted into feet—he was the boy again so casually as though he had never been anything else. He stood over the body, inspecting it, nudging it once carefully with his bare foot. With no sign of movement, Tsaeb kicked her hard in the ribs. Thunk!
“Dead,” he announced, “and it didn’t take as much as I thought it would.”
Morris went over as a second opinion.
“Yep, Morris would say she’s dead alright.”
“But how?”
Morris grabbed hold of the succubus’ ankles and tugged the heavy body until her skin ripped loose from a stray nail sticking up from a floorboard. The sound of her flesh ripping was menacing and horrific. I winced.
“Put water on the face,” said Morris, “and it washes away the evil that shrouds the goodness behind it.”
Morris began pulling the body toward the door, her long, red tail knocking over the last remaining pieces of intact furniture.
“Just a bunch of goody-light bullshit, really,” said Tsaeb.
“Well, looks like the ‘bullshit’ worked to me,” I said. “How does it work?”
Tsaeb tossed my pants to me after walking through the wall.
“A succubus can’t withstand facing Light in its true form,” Tsaeb began, “and water on the face—or, technically in the eyes—somehow releases a person’s Light, or something stupid like that.” He moved about the room, gathering his riches from the floor and tossing them carelessly back into the bag. I struggled with my slacks, finding it difficult to stand on one foot even for a second with all the debris. Morris stopped in the hallway near the stairwell and left the body there.
“You two should head out soon,” said Morris. “There’ll be more; count on it.”
“More because Norman can’t keep his mouth shut.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Tsaeb shook his head and went back to tying the top of his bag into a tight knot. The items he had to take out of the bag to get it to close, he wore proud and ridiculously.
“Put this on,” he said, thrusting a golden crown into my stomach. “It’s too big for the bag.”
“I’m not walking around this place wearing something like that.” I looked down upon Tsaeb irritably, and then snatched the crown from him anyway. “Morris, you deserve this for your help.” I held the crown out for Morris to take, but Tsaeb stepped in-between us to object.
I snatched it back.
“You have a problem with that? I say Morris gets it, and if you disagree then you can get yourself out of your dilemma with the Devil.”
Tsaeb stood there for a long, infuriated moment until finally giving up. “Humph!”
A small group of men in dirty cloaks scrambled up the sta
irs. Each grabbed a limb and carried the body down and presumably out of the tavern. I could hear the back of Charla’s head thumping against every step on the way down.
I went to find my backpack. Quietly I wondered what might have happened if Tsaeb had never intervened.
~~~
Morris agreed to escort us to Big Creek to find the imp.
“Thought you went home earlier,” I said to Morris as the three of us left the town center together.
“Morris did, but then remembered the wife,” he began. “She fell out o’ the Ugly Tree ‘bout twenty years ago and hit every damn branch on her way down—Morris would rather be at Tiny’s Inn knockin’ headboards against the wall with prostitutes.”
I couldn’t help but laugh a little.
“Was in the room across the hall when I heard Tsaeb screamin’ for water—I hate them succubi, daughters of Lilith, assassins of the queen’s. Any chance to kill one and Morris is gonna take it. Damn sure will!”
According to Morris McAlister, the people of Fiedel City and most of Creation protected the queens and others who were important to, what Morris referred to as ‘The End of the Beginning’.
“But why do you protect the queens?” I said. “Why are they such a target?”
I realized how many times I had asked that question and how many times it had been avoided. Finally, Morris gave me an answer, though it was not exactly an entirely comprehendible one:
“Outsiders sometimes come, outsiders like you—lucky bastards! Do y’know what Morris would give to be chosen to bed up with the Queen of Creation?”
Morris looked dreamy for a moment.
“Queen of Creation?” I interrupted. “I thought she just owned the city and the field?”
“Oh, no, no! She rules all of Creation—Watch out for that pile of horse shit there—her spirit was here long before Man.” He went on, “Anyway, she’s a’posed to have a child, or sumthin’—there’s lots of different stories—that’ll bring to Creation a world without suffering.”
The dreamy look Morris had before was brighter and even more dreamy now, euphoric even.
“She must be beautiful,” I said, now having more reason to believe she was not a hideous witch that I would have to force myself to sleep with.
“Oh, Morris wouldn’t know,” Morris replied, looking over once. “More horse shit! Boy, you should watch where you’re goin’.”
“Norman isn’t the brightest crayon in the box,” said Tsaeb who walked a few feet ahead of us. “That’s why he almost got me killed.” Tsaeb swatted mosquitoes above his head, cursing them under his breath.
I ignored the insults entirely.
“Morris ain’t never seen Queen Illian, or any of the others, but really they all the same spirit.”
“I don’t understand.”
Tsaeb stopped in front of us and gave us no choice but to stop as well. Crickets and toads and the stench of swampy water polluted the forest. Mosquitoes were relentless, swarming like a miniature plague of locusts, but thankfully, they didn’t seem to like my blood as much as Tsaeb’s. The great, dark moon was not as bright here, leaving the land black, laced by a faint blue hue. The Cypress trees with their great protruding roots grabbed deep underneath the swamp.
“They believe when she dies she just comes back in another form,” Tsaeb said. “Then the people of Creation name her all over again. Been Livvy, Aislinn, Agrippine, Maryn...you get the picture.”
“There ain’t never been no Maryn.”
“Yes there has,” Tsaeb argued, “A long time ago—you were too young; no I doubt you were born then.”
“Morris would know; he keeps up with the histories. Ain’t been no Maryn.”
“Queen Maryn,” said Tsaeb, “was the one who bit the dust in just a week’s time.”
“Assassinated?” I said.
I watched my footing religiously now.
“Yep,” Tsaeb answered, stepping over a branch in the road, “I heard she was burned alive in her room on the top floor of the fortress.”
“Does anyone have any stories with evidence to back them up?” I said. “Seriously. Is anything about any of these queens, witches, or whatever you want to call them, anything more than just hearsay?”
It was evident that Fiedel City seemed a place of unfounded information, plagued by greed and filth and rumormongers.
“Sure,” Tsaeb began, looking over with a smile. “Everyone believes everything they hear about them.”
I grumbled quietly.
“There’s Big Creek,” said Morris, pointing. “Jus’ up ahead.”
I thought it all sounded odd, but then nothing was exactly normal in this place, either. And when we made it to Big Creek, I knew that nothing in Creation was ever going to be normal. Ever.
What in the hell is that?
Big Creek wasn’t a creek at all. We stood on a cliff overlooking a vast valley of rocks and dead trees, withered brush and a small cave in the distance. The landscape was of cracked earth like the bed of a lake that had not seen rain in years. Ravens and vultures flew over the corpses of dead animals and perhaps even people. Carcasses, enormous and amazing lay out upon the ground; the skeletons of long ago mammoths, their great ivory tusks jutting up from generations of earth and weather. On the other side of the valley, a wreckage of two ancient ships buried half inside the mountain. They proudly told their story of a long ago storm or great sea battle, which sent them on their last daring sail. But there was life on these ships. Firelight moved past the ships rotted windows. Clothes hung on lines stretching from one broken mast to another. Children ran across the decks and men stood in watch high in the topmasts.
The smaller ship had two masts. A colossal sail tattered and almost entirely rendered useless dangled by its last threads. Enormous oars, still intact, were thrust into the ground, keeping the ship from crashing onto its side.
The larger ship was massive at more than three stories; a scale so grand it seemed unfeasible for the hands of man to build. Its body was made like a galleon, pregnant in size and far too enormous for a thousand men to row across the sea. I had only seen one ship up close in my life: the Carnival Conquest during a seven-day cruise of the Western Caribbean on my honeymoon.
This was no Carnival ship.
From the mountaintop on the east side, a thin waterfall slithered into an opening. A pity the mountain was so stingy with its water; the valley could have used some before it died utterly.
We stepped onto the platform of the most frightening suspension bridge ever constructed. I thought there had to be another way around. I would gladly walk ten hours out of my way through steep, rough terrain, but knew that Tsaeb would never let me live it down, either.
The first step onto the swaying bridge and I felt my heart press against my rectum. I froze, unable to lift my three-ton feet any further.
“Come on, Norman!” shouted Tsaeb who was well ahead of Morris.
The bridge extended more than two hundred feet across, and the drop even further. The rotted, weathered wood creaked and groaned under my footing. The thick ropes that kept my balance felt strong in my death grip, but it gave me no comfort. I knew in my heart that the bridge was going to break underneath me, that one foot was destined to push through a weak spot, or the ropes were going to snap in half and send me crashing into the mountainside. I knew, as I continued to walk, that it was my fault alone that my marriage with Amanda ended so badly. I began to ask forgiveness for all my ‘sins’: for taking the extra ten bucks the gas station attendant gave me last year. For ordering CD’s through a mail order club under a fake name—four times—and having the free merchandise sent to the empty duplex next door. For shoplifting a Hershey’s bar at age nine and a box of condoms at age sixteen, which I never actually used. I prayed, with my eyes shut tight, that I would be forgiven for every stupid decision in my life.
I swear I’ll never sin again...I swear.
The wind whipped through my hair. The bridge swayed side to side and with ever
y movement, my arms and legs felt more like jelly. I felt one heavy jolt and then another as Tsaeb and Morris stepped off the bridge and onto safe ground.
“This bridge is as sturdy as Old Ronan’s wooden legs,” said Morris.
I felt a hand on my arm. The awareness came back once my feet touched the earth and air found my lungs again.
“And he’s got some damn sturdy wooden legs! Sure does!”
Tsaeb didn’t taunt me out loud; the smirk pretty much covered everything.
“Lost his legs fightin’ a gator, he did!”
Tsaeb and I followed Morris who talked away as if someone had been actually listening. “...got trapped in...,” and two minutes later, “...a friend of Morris since...,” and his words faded into several more minutes, “...and just snapped his neck like that, like a s’getti noodle over a boilin’ pot of chicken broth!”
The walk to Ronan’s place somewhere on one of the wrecked ships was a long and tiring one. It took nearly an hour to travel down the winding rock and limb-littered path. It was lined with markers made of speared raven skulls. Ravens. They were everywhere, I realized. Ravens circled high above the valley methodically. Ravens took rest on the ships, on the mountain ledges, even on the bridge, all lined along the rope like pigeons on a clothesline. Ravens squawked and cawed and dropped white gifts for the passersby, in generous amounts.
And there were ravens that spoke.
“Pay the toll! Caw!” said one raven next to two others atop a sign that read: Big cReeK.
“Fifty pence, a finger or a toe! Caw!” said the raven in the middle.
Myself, Tsaeb and Morris halted, but only I thought there was something incredibly wrong with this picture.
“Caw! That you, Morris McAlister? Hawareya?”
“Yep, Morris is grand, grand,” answered Morris, dipping deep into his pockets. “Morris came with visitors for Old Ronan.” He pulled out fifty pence in the form of six pence, but apparently, the ravens didn’t know the difference.
The raven on the right caught one coin in its beak and the rest fell in a small pile of coins and bird shit.
“Caw!” the ravens thank you’d.
“What’s the wuther like in Big Creek today?” said Morris to the ravens.
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