by Phil Tucker
Acharsis darted forward, picked up the dagger, and slammed it up under Yesu’s chin. The man screamed, a hoarse, whistling sound, then something deep in his throat clicked and he fell over to collapse bonelessly at Acharsis’ feet.
Gasping, Acharsis stepped back, leaving the dagger stuck in the leech’s throat. Tears sprang to his eyes as he stared at the fallen man, horror and fury and revulsion leading him to cry out and kick Yesu in the stomach, once, twice, three times - only to stop when the twelve dead soldiers turned their heads as one to stare at him.
Still heaving for breath, Acharsis froze and stared back. None of the soldiers moved any further. They simply stared at him, their eyes sunken and milky white.
“Nothing to see here,” whispered Acharsis, wiping his bloody hand down the front of his tunic. “Nothing to… see.”
An itch on the nape of his neck made him turn around.
Something had come around the corner. Acharsis couldn’t make out what it was. Six or seven feet tall, it looked to be made of desiccated flesh or plant fiber, dark brown in hue and mottled all over with purple patches shot through with ropes of crimson. It wasn’t humanoid, but rather a large mass that flowed forward on a dozen or more legs that rippled beneath it like the fronds of a jellyfish. No eyes. No heads. Nothing he could identify, but rather a hundred or so layers pressed into a dense central… corpus of some kind.
Acharsis took a hesitant step back.
The… thing… flowed down the hall toward him and stopped a dozen feet away. It stank of cinnamon and cloves, rotting flesh and damp.
Should he run? He took a second step away, and the dozen dead behind him bristled, their armor clanking, each of them taking a sharp step forward toward him.
Acharsis froze.
The monstrosity before him shivered, and an arm peeled itself away from its side, a composite limb made of six or seven human arms, jointed eerily down its length so that it unfolded with unnatural fluidity as it extended toward him.
Its movement was slow, however, exploratory; Acharsis stood frozen, heart pounding as the great hook at the arm’s end came toward him, seeming to probe at the air like a blind man searching for his beer.
The monster’s body shivered again, parting along a dozen vertical seams like the gills of a shark; within, Acharsis saw a dark void, a hollowed-out space within the core of the creation, and a name came to him, whispered from the recesses of his mind: huggie daddy.
“Oh, shit,” said Acharsis.
The claw hesitated before him. It was made of serrated bone, curved like a scythe and wickedly sharp. What it didn’t cut in twain it would surely catch hold of on its manifold spikes and hooks.
“This… this isn’t what it looks like,” said Acharsis, voice shaking as he fought for calm. “You see, Yesu tripped on his own knife while - while trying to clean his teeth - and—”
The hook inched forward and brushed against Acharsis’ shoulder, and it was all he could do to not let out a bellow of fear.
Then, faster than he could follow, the claw lashed out and down, spearing straight into Yesu’s back, snapping ribs and tearing flesh as it did.
Acharsis watched, wide-eyed, as the arm folded back, dragging Yesu across the floor with terrifying speed and strength and into one of those gill-like slits which yawned open to reveal its fleshy, soft interior.
Yesu was sucked within. The slit closed after him. The daddy rippled, and Acharsis heard the faint, muted report of hundreds of bones breaking.
The daddy didn’t turn, but simply retreated back down the hallway, hundreds of feet rippling beneath it, and then turned the corner and was gone, leaving only a faint, smeared trail of Yesu’s blood in its wake.
Acharsis let out a shuddering sigh of relief and nearly collapsed. With his shaking hand he drew forth Sisu’s amulet and pressed it fervently to his lips. “Never will I tease you again,” he vowed. “Never, ever, ever. Until at the very least you say something stupid or reprehensible, Sisu, or leave yourself wide open for a mocking comment. Until then, never.”
Voices came from around the corner. Leeches from the library? Turning, Acharsis tucked the amulet away and slipped through the ranks of the dead, hurrying past them to take the next left, heart still pounding within his chest, mouth as dry as the Desert of Bones, desperate to get out of these hallways before some other misfortune befell him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Kish took a deep breath as she stepped into the private hallway that led to the royal kitchen. Her heart was racing, her palms prickling with sweat which was also starting to run down the slope of her back under her crisp new uniform.
Hand settling on the satchel that hung over her hip and which contained the rotten apple, she raised her chin and stared at the archway beyond which lay her trial. She was one of the world’s finest chefs. A cook without parallel. She lived for sauces, glazes, finely roasted animals placed inside other finely roasted animals. Spices were worth more than gold, and - damn. How had Acharsis thought this was a good plan?
Too late now. Shoulders back, taking comfort from her professional appearance, she marched down the short hallway and into the kitchen.
After the cavernous dimensions of the general kitchens, this space was intimate. Two large tables dominated the center of the space, while the walls were covered with gleaming pots and pans, endless shelves holding clay jars, while sheaves of drying herbs and vegetables hung from a hundred hooks embedded in the ceiling. A whole wall was nothing but two great ovens, their depths infernal, and the other wall was a series of neatly built fires under grates upon which pots bubbled and flesh cooked.
It was actually a really lovely kitchen.
An impossibly tall man was frowning down with supreme disgust at a spring of something green that he held with distaste between two pinched fingers. Taller even than Jarek, he stood hunched so as to not bang his head on the pots, his expressive face radiating dismay and hatred, his fingers so long as to appear unnatural.
“You.” His voice was as cold as an executioner’s. “Who are you, and what are you doing in my kitchen?”
“Kishtar reporting for service, Master Chef.” Kish wondered if she should salute, bow, or gaze at him brazenly. “What seems to be the matter?”
“The matter? What seems to be the matter? Here! Here! You tell me!” And he thrust the sprig in her face.
Kish took the offending little branch and examined it. Rosemary, perhaps? A little dusty? She took a sniff. Smelt perfectly fine to her, but she wrinkled up her nose and turned away as if he’d offered her a rotten mouse’s corpse. “Argh!”
“Exactly! What is this filth? Do they expect me to create marvels with such dross ingredients? Are they trying to ruin my career? They are! All of them! I can’t work in these conditions - and now my assistants are gone, missing, sick, they say, and I am left with - you. Whomever you are. Kishtar? Kishtar what? Kishtar whom? Of which kitchen do you come, who taught you, and by the gleam in Nekuul’s eye, who deemed you worthy of stepping in my kitchen?”
The man loomed over her, and suddenly Kish was supremely aware of the cleaver lying close by his left hand. His eyes burned through his fringe of dark hair with a manic gleam, and his lower jaw jutted out as if prepared to rebut her every claim to expertise.
“You are correct, Master Keshun. I am unworthy of working in this temple to gourmet cuisine. I shall recuse myself.” And she bowed and began to back away.
“No, wait, stop! What on earth do you think you’re doing? Do you think to abandon me as well? Is your loyalty so easily broken, your devotion to the culinary arts so frail?” He clutched at his head and wheeled away as if dealt a blow. “Simpletons and cowards! That is whom I must march into battle with! I am doomed!”
Kish stopped in the doorway. “I am not worthy, Master Keshun. Nobody is. But if I can render some small assistance…”
“Yes, yes, shut up, quit your prattling! How you drone on and on! We’re so late, we’ll never catch up. There is so much to be done
! Get a simmering sauce going, use the drippings from that pan, garlic, some truffle vinegar, the requisite spices - come on! And then I need the pie crust made, oh, my soul for a tub of quality butter! Sebaceous and smooth, clarified and with dulcet hues… well? Get on with it!”
Kish moved over to the drippings pan that was set beneath a spitted piglet. Keshun turned away and began to thrash at the contents in the bottom of a huge copper tub, practically weeping as he did so.
Taking down a pot in which to get a sauce going, Kish’s mind raced. How long till she was kicked out? Worse, once that happened, Keshun would throw away whatever she’d worked on, assuming it inedible. Thus she needed to drop the apple into something with which she had no association.
Scraping the drippings into the pan, she eyed what else was going on in the kitchen - and only then began to appreciate the incredible juggling act that Keshun had going. Without looking, he’d reach out to add a branch beneath a pot to increase the heat, stir another, sweep a pile of cut vegetables into his apron only to dump them into another pot without even looking as he moved past it. He wasn’t working on one dish, or even three: he was working on them all, simultaneously, chopping, basting, soaking, kneading, stirring, adjusting. One long arm would reach across both tables for an ingredient high up on a shelf even as the other stirred a pot. It was… incredible.
“Quit your gawping, you insufferable dolt! Have you even begun the task which I set you? Oh, where are my assistants, only they know what need be done, my head shall be severed, I might as well serve it to Irella myself upon a platter of sliced scrotums picked in sparrow shit…”
Kish set to work, doing her best to at least appear busy, adding water and flour to the sauce, stirring in a mélange of spices into the drippings, and setting the pot over a small flame. She’d no idea if she’d done a good job, but as long as Keshun didn’t look too closely, she was fine. What was the next task? Ah. The pastry.
Moving to an empty corner of the second table, she dusted the wooden surface with flour even as she sought a likely target for the apple. The vegetable stew before him? Into the piglet which he was glazing with some kind of thickened plum wine? Into the filling he was preparing for her pie?
How did you make crust, anyway? Kish slowly drew a bag of flour over, fetched a bowl of water, a small vat of butter, a little salt. What else? Did it have to rise? Or…?
Keshun let out a scream, causing her to jolt her bowl of water right off the edge of the table to crash on the floor.
“Paprika! Where’s the paprika!” He clutched at his head as he gazed at the shelf before him, then ran out of the room.
This was it. Kish dug out the apple and hurried over to the simmering pot of vegetables. Her best bet. Should she slice up the apple first, or…? No time! She dumped it in, stirred it down, then raced back to her table just as Keshun charged back in, a small pot in hand.
“Is it smoked? Does it have a delectable flavor? How aged, how aged, by the gods?” He let out a sob and bent over double to rest his brow on the table’s edge. “I’m undone. I can’t do this. A farce. I strut upon the cutting block like a peacock, all unawares that I am the main dish -”
He stiffened. “What’s that?”
“I - what’s what?” asked Kish, halfway toward refilling her bowl from the water barrel.
“A scent. Putrid. Can’t you smell it?”
“I…” Kish sniffed. “No?”
Keshun straightened and sniffed audibly. “Rancid. Foul. As if someone had scooped up a fistful of putrescent innards from the corpse of a dead dog and thumbed the rotten paste into my sinuses.”
Kish watched, frozen, as he rocked his head from side to side, sniffing at the piglet, her simmering pot of sauce, across the table, pausing inches from her face to sniff at her deliberately before moving on.
Damn! Should she kill him? He couldn’t smell one apple shoved deep into the stew, could he? Impossible. And yet -
He moved over to the bubbling pot and inhaled deeply, wafting the steam toward his face with both gigantic hands.
“Something… here. Something’s gone wrong.” His whole body shuddered with such violence that he seemed to ripple. “What could have… not the… a sweet, sickly cast to the odor…”
He took up the wooden spoon and speared it into the stew, slowly stirring it and bringing things to the surface. “No… potatoes are fine… a, lovely giblets, look at that purple sheen… no, what else, what else…”
A blow to the back of the head. Would they still serve the food? Irella had to be served something, didn’t she? Even if her head cook were knocked out? They’d scramble, finish his dishes…
“Ah,” said Keshun with evident satisfaction, lowering his head till it was almost inside the great pot. “Here it is. What rank morsel… an apple? But… how…?”
Then, with horrible slowness, he twisted his head about to glare over his angular shoulder at her, eyes narrowed to slits. “A poisonous wretch seeking to poison my stew. A villainous little sous chef sticking her sticky digits in my dish.”
His hand crept out of its own accord and took up the cleaver.
Kish squared her shoulders. “There’s no need for violence.”
“Ah, but violence most foul has already been committed.” He turned, cleaver giving a metallic ring as he dragged it off the table and rose to his full height. “Did you think to adulterate my own dish beneath my very nose? Did you think to poison our queen? To -” His eyes widened. “To frame me? Is that it? You thought to replace me once I had my cock and nostrils cut off with a sharpened spoon? Oh, I admire your boldness, but no, my pretty filly, you picked the wrong head chef to fuck with.”
Kish stared up at him, mesmerized by the richness of his voice, the depths of his insanity, the way he loomed like a monstrous thundercloud. “You’re mad.”
“I feel inspired,” he whispered lasciviously. “A new dish! A variation on the classic bone broth, garnished with pickled eyeballs and broiled tongue in which delicate lacerations have been made, and into which hummingbird tongues shall be laid down…”
Kish snatched up a large knife and flung it at him. Keshun swatted away the blade with his cleaver, and then surged over the table, striking at her with the speed of a cobra, one hand clamping completely around her neck while the cleaver came rushing down at her temple.
Kish dropped, falling to her ass so that the cleaver swished over her head and the table’s edge cracked into his elbow, forcing him to release her. Then with a roar she leaped back up, thrusting the table up and back at him.
Keshun took the table and flung the entirety of it aside with an insane display of strength, then kicked her in the stomach and backhanded her across the face.
Seeing stars, Kish took up the pot of simmering sauce and flung it at him, eliciting a howl of outrage. Desperately, she took up the spitted pig by the handle and thrust it into his chest, driving the point all the way home so that the spit - piglet and all - remained pinioned in his body.
Keshun let out a howl of outrage. “Not the piglet! Three days I’ve - how dare - my blood may yet serve as a seasoning -”
While he busied himself carefully pulling the piglet out and setting it aside, she snatched up a massive bone chopper and brought it down with both hands upon Keshun’s back. He screamed, scrabbled at the embedded weapon with both hands, then whipped around and head butted her with the force of a falling boulder.
Kish toppled to the ground, pulling a tray of small pots filled with glazed custard down upon herself. Rolled aside just as something heavy was dropped upon her head, and fetched up against a cabinet containing a number of wide, deep pots. She snatched one out and held it up as a shield just as something crashed down upon it, then flung it with all her force at the cook’s head.
Keshun’s head snapped back as the pot hit him straight upon the brow, staggered, and took up a chopping block which he flung at her. Kish turned, took the blow on her shoulder, let out a cry of pain, then pulled a cleaver free of the bloc
k and rose up to slam it into Keshun’s arm.
Only to take a punch straight in the throat. Choking, she staggered back, and on impulse slammed a fist into the spice rack, causing a hundred small clay jars to cascade and shatter down upon the floor.
Keshun shrieked and fell to his knees before them, reaching out as if to cradle them all to his chest.
Still unable to breath, Kish grasped the back of his head and rammed her knee into his face. She felt bone crunch. He rose, swaying. Black motes swimming in her eyes, she tore the cleaver out of his arm and slammed it into his throat.
Keshun’s eyes bulged. Blood burst down his front, and he fell back against the table, reaching up as he did so to tear a rafter free, drawing down an avalanche of clay bricks upon himself and the fire range.
People were clustering in the doorway. Shouts. Kish couldn’t make any of it out. She stared instead in horror as Keshun rose once more, his uniform aflame, half his head pulverized by the falling bricks. Was he going to attack her again?
No.
With supreme effort he reached for the pot of stew.
“Stop!” she screamed and hurled herself over the table at him.
She was too late. He clasped the pot’s searingly hot edge and yanked, causing its contents to flood out upon him as he fell before it and out of sight.
Halfway over the remaining table, Kish stared, aghast, at the upended pot. The apple. Where was it in that mess? Hands seized her, pulled her arm behind her back. Too late she tried to struggle, to break free, but she lacked the strength, the will.
As they hauled her out of the ruined kitchen, she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the great pot that lay on its side.
She’d failed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jarek pulled the dark robes closer about his figure, wishing he’d accosted a larger man, and hurried down the hallways of the ziggurat, doing his best not to limp. The cloth was already tearing across his shoulders, and it felt like one deep breath would cause a seam to split open down the length of his back. Damn, but leeches were small fellows.