by J K Ishaya
"I dashed down the alley ways I had always used as a child for short cuts rather than take the primary routs, with at least two pairs of footsteps echoing on the paving stones behind me. I found these passages to be well lit by the spreading flames that were eating their way from one roof to another. Sparks danced around me, and at last I blasted through a thick veil of smoke to come out facing the slope that led up to the tower house.
"To my utter horror, I saw that further down slope, to my left at the western gate, the doors were wide open and Roman legionaries were storming in. Our meager army had come down from the wall after the fires started and were attempting to engage and hold off the intruders, and the women who had been on the wall were firing arrows into the rows, but our weak forces were failing quickly. Legionary feet stamped the ground as they plowed ahead with their shields, their helmets gleaming in moon and fire light.
“In retrospect, I would realize that they had only just begun to get through that gate. It would occur to me later that the Romans had not appeared to launch any attack. Their scorpios had not been shooting flaming bolts, the catapults had not been vaulting pitch pots over the walls. This fire had come from within Sarmizegetusa, and they had been handed a prime situation to take advantage of, though the next question would become how they had gotten through the gate without a battering ram. These events would be analyzed later, but in the turmoil of finding our families, logistics was not our focus.
"I wiped smoke grime from my eyes and found Scorylo and Brassus catching up to me. The others had scattered to look for their own families and I could not begrudge them that. We turned attention back on the tower house and ran up the slope to find the doors wide open. It had clearly been abandoned. None of the house staff or servants were running out or trying to fight the flames. With no water to fight them, the entire town was a tinder box, leaving us no other choice but to relinquish it all. That did not mean that everyone had gotten out. I rushed in, finding most of the lower rooms not quite touched by the flames though smoke crept across the ceilings and a hole began to burn through a ceiling corner in the reception chamber. I went to the stairwell and found two guards making their way down with their arms around Decebal. I only remember the name of one: Rolouzis. All were coughing from the smoke, and Rolouzis had blisters from spark burns on his face. I began to cough, too, as I hurried to them.
"'Father!' I shouted, and the old man raised his face to look at me with reddened eyes.
"'Zyraxes,’ he rasped and reached out to grab my arm. 'Where were you? Where is Bielis?' Both were good questions, and if I had been keen enough, my mind might have at least fleetingly pondered that second one a little more: where was Bielis? I had not seen him since the briefing, but we had no time to rehash anything. I turned to Brassus and ordered him to help evacuate the king, and then I shouldered my way around them all and headed for the stairs.
"'You cannot go up there!' Rolouzis shouted after me. 'It is already too late!'
"Not one to listen in such a situation, I started up the steps and to the second floor where Decebal's chambers had been. The flames had not made it completely to his chambers, but they had eaten down to that second corridor and engulfed the walls around the next stairwell. 'No,’ I uttered and started for the fiery passage. 'No… no… no…' I felt the heat growing around me to an unbearable degree, drying on my skin, the smoke stinging my eyes and saturating my lungs until my coughs became more violent. Sparks landed on my tunic and singed through the fabric to bite my skin.
"Then a hand grabbed my arm and pulled me back. 'No, Zyr!' It was Scorylo, who had followed me as far as the flames allowed. 'You cannot get up there!'
"I pulled against him at first, my wits dulled from emotion. 'Bendis,' I gasped, until he shouted at me that surely she had gotten the children out and we would find her amid the crowds that had been escaping. My frenzied brain had doubts because the order of evacuation made no sense. Bendis had known that Decebal slept in the chamber on the second floor and would not have left without him, and even if she had sent the guards for him, she would have waited outside with Breslin in her arms and Tsinna at her side rather than go lost amidst the chaos of the crowd.
“With a miserable groan, I turned to look at Scorylo, nodded with the tears from smoke and fear in my eyes. We made our way back down the steps just in time as a support beam from the third floor crashed through into the passage and dashed flames upon the boards that began to more ferociously eat through the second floor down to the main level. On the lowest floor going back through the receiving chamber, we dodged drips of burning debris as the ceiling there began to open up, and we emerged from the smoke into open air. Brassus and the guards were waiting several paces out with Decebal. Scorylo and I joined them and with a look down upon the invading army, I wrenched my falx from its cradle on my back and held it tight near the neck.
"People were running everywhere, and I could barely make out how many of our fighters were left. I wanted to engage, but I wanted to find my family as well. I turned to my men, and my father and saw that some semblance of sanity returned to his eyes. 'It has happened,' he said.
"And it had happened. Our defeat finally loomed uglier than ever. Below, bodies were beginning to litter the square, and behind us, the tower house roof caved in completely with a loud crash and a spew of flames. Heat gushed out of the main doors and brushed our backs. Escape being the only option left, rushed decisions were made. I guided everyone back through that series of alleys while the screaming and the roar of flames and crash of timbers grew louder."
Beside me, Howard is so quiet, and even his personal thoughts are calm as he simply listens. In the last fifteen minutes, we have reached the Seekonk and paused before crossing the street along its western shore to the walk that leads to the Narragansett Boat Club. The waters are silent as well, like everything else in my presence, and the mist is thickest with a few fuzzy pin points of light showing through from the other bank.
"We were all sickened with grief and rage, and even as we made our way back to the spiritual district, escorting the king through the crying, screaming masses, I could hear the ring of gladii. Amidst the rush, we reunited with Daizus, equally as anguished for having not been able to find his wife. The other remaining three of my fine elite warriors I was never to see again. We could do little else for those around us except try to guide as many as possible who had wits left to listen. In the spiritual district we encountered Vesina, who worked to herd much of the crowd toward the eastern wall where the slope below was not too steep and would lead out onto the ridge line, but it had plenty of its own hazards.
"Vesina rushed to us, quickly kissed the king's hand, gripped my shoulders. 'Oh, thank Zalmoxis!' he declared. 'I wondered where you were!'
"I could barely utter anything more than, 'Bendis, the children,' and with a miserable groan and look back toward the burning town, exclaimed, 'I cannot find them!'
"Vesina told me he had not seen them but that Bendis, my clever, clever wife, would have surely found a way out. As I said, I had my doubts, and there would prove good reason for them.
"We made hasty rendezvous plans, and Vesina continued to coordinate the evacuation, but as the eastern wall became crowded, slowing the progress of getting the king safely out, my remaining men and I felt it best to take Decebal to the place where we had originally intended to go over the wall, finding our armor and the ropes still there, still ready for our descent. We urged whomever could manage it to come with us, and so we climbed down into the charred darkness below the mountain."
I stop there, not because I'm choked up and cannot relive it any longer, but because I detect an unwelcome presence near by. Its scent creeps toward me with an ancient dankness that imbues the air with a film that sticks to the skin. Confusing my silence for remorse, Howard starts to speak.
"Again, I cannot imagine, Mr. Corvinus, and out of respect, I will not tr—"
"Shhhhhh." I hold up a hand for his silence, which is quickly supplied. Behind
us, still within fifty yards away, Kvasir has also paused, and I reach out to him: Do you sense it?
Yes.
I recognize it now, slipping toward us from the trees to our east across the street and my gaze pins it there: a shape of shoulders, a faint glimpse of an ochre hood, none of it visible to my company in this gloomy light and fog. Without looking away or gesturing, I say lowly through my teeth. “Howard, if you look back down the street at the turn, you will see that Mr. Freysson has been behind us for some time. Go to him now, and do not look back."
"Why, will I turn into a pillar of salt?" he muses, though I've set his nerves completely on end now with such a display of caution.
"Go, boy," I hiss, and it is less my human voice and more the one he never wants to hear in its complete utterance. "Do what I say."
Though I do not look at him, I know any fragment of a smile has dropped away from his face while his figure steps back and out of my periphery. Next, I hear his footfalls retreating until he has reached Kvasir, whose hackles are no doubt bristling as much as mine.
Escort him back to the house. I'll be along.
He doesn't respond with a direct message so much as an agreeing nudge to my mind, and then I feel my eyes tingle, filling with red as I walk toward the trees.
✽✽✽
The thing waiting for me hunches low as I approach, ready and expecting it to spring from its alcove between two bare, gray trees. The sigil on my back and the runic highways coursing my limbs warm under my shirt and hum on the surface of my skin. At my sides, my nail beds ache as I extract inch-long talons. The skin around them blackens into a tougher matter that slides up my forearms under my sleeves, a natural armor. In my mouth, the canines descend to jagged, venomous points that push into my lower gums, the sting so familiar now I barely notice it. Under my shirt and vest, my back slithers with pre-manifestations of my worst form. My vision focuses on the shape, on the edge of its hood and even I cannot see beyond that, but I know already what it looks like and that it wears a yellow silk veil over what it calls a face. If it plans to attack, it has waited too long, for I am ready to dismember its repellence the moment it moves. My senses branch out to seek others in the area but find nothing more, only this odd and lonely one that appears to have tracked me here for whatever wretched reason.
Another second goes by, and I realize that it isn’t hunching to strike but it is, rather, kneeling. A voice, detached and abrasive, lifts on the air. “I am here to serve you, my lord.”
A spear of ice courses down my center. Here is one of those things I fear, and not so much the thing itself as what it represents. “I am not your lord,” I say, my voice on the edge of its most monstrous, presenting an unearthly growl, layered as if two of me are speaking simultaneously.
“But the one within you is,” it gloats with pleasure. “He will rise to power again soon. So very soon the elder sign will crack, and the yellow sign will rise.”
“He does not hear you,” I say, though my confidence in the statement is precarious at best.
The sickly yellow rim of the hood lowers and the shoulders shake before a raucous chuckle jars loose. “You know he hears. He hears, and he grows stronger, and you will fall, Son of Sarnath. You will writhe with your ancestors.”
“Not tonight,” I reply, lacking cleverness or patience now as a black, segmented tendril, gleaming like a centipede’s sleek body, slips from under my collar beside my neck, germinating from within the flesh of my back. It rips the top of my shirt as it spears into the air, and whips forward with a snap, barely visible in the dark, but the thing springs backward, dodging my attack. I thrash the air in the split infinity that it takes for the thing to land, its ragged cloak trailing, and then I thrash at it again. I catch and tear through filmy, yellow fabric to gray skin and open a welt. A screech sounds, hollow and grating, and the thing springs away into the dark. I withdraw the morbid extension, feel it slide around my neck and back into place, and give chase into the trees.
Time slows down as I open up all of my senses to their full potential to hear a pounding heartbeat and clawed feet and hands grabbing at tree bark and then damp earth as it bounds away; I smell its moldering trail, see the flash of that repugnant yellow cloak. I pick up speed for as sure as it does not want to hurt me—nor can it—I wish with absolute hate to obliterate it from existence. Trees move past me and my feet barely touch ground before I leap through the corridor into a clearing and come down in front of the thing and reach out my arm before it can halt. In a blink it impales itself on my outreaching hand which tears past fabric, slips up under the rib cage and silences the heart. It emits another freakish screech and spasms before it goes limp and I hold it up with my arm still lodged within the gushing cavity that I’ve made. Its shape feels human in my arms as it collapses against me, but when I tear away the hood and silk mask, the face staring vacantly at me is indescribable, and this will not be the last time I see one like it. It was human, anyway, a long time ago. Just like me.
When my hand slides out of its chest cavity, bringing the heart with it, my core rumbles hungrily. The body falls to the ground in a heap, and I devour the heart before I can control myself. Crouching there, primordial and vicious, I tear into it and swallow large, wet chunks that are gone in little time, and I am gorged unnecessarily this night. Not long in the past, I would have come to my senses before such a thing happened, but now I have trouble caring one whit.
After my feast, I carry the remains to the river. All the while my mind probes the vicinity to be sure of no witnesses, then I use the cloak as a shroud with several rocks from the bank and deposit it below the docks of the boat club. Further down, on the edge of the icy Seekonk, I squat to wash off my hands and my mouth, but the damage done to my clothes cannot be cleansed in river water.
By the time I return to the house on Angell Street, I’m some semblance of human again. My shirt is filthy, so before I enter the house, I reach ahead for Howard’s mind once more, sending forward an image of what he’ll see when I come through that door. He will not see the stains on my shirt nor the tear in the top of my collar or that several buttons are missing. My eyes are the last to return to normal as I cross the threshold and, taking a deep breath, I calm myself again.
In the parlor I pause to look at Susan Lovecraft, and I feel pity for the woman. Her mind is so fragile, has long been sliding into its own frenetic spiral. The bogus story that her husband succumbed to syphilis has much to do with it, but she is needy. So needy it’s sickening. I can relate to that in my own way. Then I move on silently into the hallway and hear Kvasir ahead, murmuring in the little room.
“He carries a greater burden beyond what he is, Howard.” He is walking a razor’s edge attempting to explain my suddenly dismissing the boy from our walk.
“I don’t understand. Will I hear everything he has to tell me, now?”
“Oh yes, of course. Don’t be discouraged, he’ll return forthwith.” I glimpse Kvasir in the lamp light, and he looks so out of place with his otherworldly eyes, his untamed hair, in that suit and tie. “This is nothing unusual. Trust me. He’s a hunter now more than anything,” he goes on explaining, and then, beautifully botches it with exceptional ease. “Not of people, I mean, I’m not speaking of his diet. You know what I mean? Do you know that Yuri is a Ukrainian form of George? Every name he’s ever used outside of Zyraxes is either George or a translation of it.”
“George? Why George?”
“He will tell you some time. It’s just a thing.”
That, I decide, is enough of that. I clear my throat, to which Howard jumps and turns on his chair and Kvasir’s gaze darts to me.
Kvasir grins, a quiet indication that he already knew I was there. The feral tips of his canines give him a wicked appearance. “Ah, see, there he is now.”
What was it? he sends to me, rising, the smile shifting to a scowl as he sees the mess that is my shirt even though I’ve ensured Howard cannot perceive it.
A yellow cloak, I r
eturn.
They are thick around you this time of year. You stink.
Pardon me.
And you’ve had a snack.
Yes. Yes, I have.
Chapter Seven
“I beg your pardon,” I tell Howard almost immediately. My sudden shift in attitude by the river has left him rattled not knowing what apparently drew my attention and proffered the growling demand that he go back indoors. “I just needed a moment.” I lower a gaze at him designed to discourage further questions. Quickly we are all settled again as if nothing happened, as if under my psychic illusion I do not have blood all over me or my breath is not rank as the river in which I dumped the yellow cloak’s body.
Howard jitters around in his chair, repositions his notebook and pencil stub in his hands. I look down to see that he hasn’t taken very many notes to begin with, just a few names mostly, or the words I’ve pronounced carefully for him here and there.
Kvasir sits back in the chair by the typewriter again. I sense him toying with the idea of typing something just to play with the machine, and then he gives me a nod of encouragement to keep going.
“So we had no choice but to retreat,” I pick up somewhat where I left off.
Howard exhales a little breath of relief to be back on track.
“A small group of citizens joined us at our point of exit. Vesina guided the largest group which continued over the east wall where they could follow the ridge line. I did not have a head count on how many had joined our group. In hindsight, I would say we had definitely picked the most difficult route, but then who makes such considerations when panicked, grieving, and trying to survive at the same time? My utmost instinct was to get my father out and to safety for as long as Dacia had a king under whom to unite, hope still breathed.