by Thomas Head
“All the ‘whats’ a man could imagine”
Cullfor looked up. “Funny thing, gazing at stars. A man might come to know the world, to know the very nature of the stars themselves, but it does not matter to their turning.”
“No,” the ancient man conceded. “It certainly does not. This world and the ones next will not work the way they ought. But the stars will.”
Cullfor was reaching for the door when a deep and metallic clang erupted under the inn. It was not an uncommon sound. Inns and pubs are often built over the deeper stone wells. But this was loud. Like a door.
They paused.
The ancient man laughed.
Bunn pulled her robes tighter, and in time, together, they stepped onto the porch. Cullfor looked back at him. He looked at the overgrown starweed crop, planted insanely in the forest’s black. For a breath too long, they waited before stepping in.
__________
Inside, a smell like old milk, or a brothel, assaulted their face. Their other senses were attacked more subtly; all over, things were never quite straight or crooked. The beams and joists seemed warped by something other than water. It was no surprise to discover a thin film of mold muting the once-lively cedar walls.
Further in, the inn was dark. No one else was in here.
Cullfor rubbed his chest.
The ancient man rose from the window outside and walked in, waving them further in yet, against a far wall. While he went, waddling askance from them toward the bar, Cullfor watched him, the dust stirring in the bleak air around him.
Cullfor sat and spoke across the deserted room, “Some of your stew, old master.”
The old man turned slowly to him and nodded. He kept nodding, even as he climbed down some stairs behind the bar.
After a pleasantly short time, he reemerged. There was a lantern in one hand and in the other he carried a new shirt and new trousers atop a new cloak. There was also a long black cape that looked as rugged as it did comfortable. He walked with the bundle, then spread it across their table to reveal a new riding cloak for Bunn as well.
Cullfor glanced up.
The man said, “Hold it, feel it.”
“Old boy, I—”
The man put his finger to his lips, shaking his head. “Traveler, I do not think you understand. Now be patient, thank you, the both, while I gather the rest.”
His eyebrows raised, Cullfor watched him leave again.
The man went in the same direction, leaving the gentle light of the lantern to glow under a ceiling mural. It was a portrait of howling woodtroll. The creature had breasts, but in its paw-like hands it held a long and spiky erection.
Bunn glanced up at the image, squinting in confusion. Then she looked conspicuously to anything but.
Cullfor was averting his eyes too. He felt embarrassed to view it front of her. But if it hovered like a boulder tied by twine to the larger question in his head: How an inn could think to hang such a thing.
“What the frozen hell is this?” he whispered.
There isss a curiosity in you that could only belong to the very wise. Ooor the very foolish.
Cullfor’s head spun briefly. He took Bunn’s hand across the table.
Returning with two pair of walking boots, thick-soled and black as the cape, the man halted before them. “You’ll forgive me my honesty, travelers. But I would rather you, the pair of you, be dressed properly—for a proper supper.”
Cullfor looked at him, sneering, unsure what to think or say.
The ancient man looked up at the painting, and the sight of it seemed as though it summoned a peculiar recollection. “I believe, if you please, you’ll find them handsome and comfortable enough.”
It seemed Bunn was about to stand and examine the clothes more closely, but she stopped as Cullfor reached out his hand.
“How much money for the clothes?
The ancient man managed something that resembled a smile.
“The clothes? Master, they would rot if you chose not to have them. Stay for a meal, and you can spare them my fate.”
__________
When Cullfor returned, he felt afresh in the well-waxed, brilliantly-threaded feeling of the clothes. They and the boots could have been the work of a tailor with a day’s worth of measurements. The shirt fit in a way that both broadened and thinned him perfectly. The gray britches did not need shin bindings, and the cape flowed behind his ankles as he approached the table.
When Bunn looked up, he almost gasped.
She was radiant. He had never seen anyone so luminous and yet so sultry in his life: in the red light and new clothing she seemed a frilly as a young girl, but yet again utterly … womanly, like an impish being, a creature of myth to lure sailors to untimely deaths.
The man motioned for him to sit, gesturing to a simple, hearty meal. There was a pot of stew, three clay bowls, and a half a loaf. A leg of rare meat steamed beside it, along with cheeses and two bottles of wine. While Cullfor ladled the soup for them, draining half the pot, the old man crumbled some of the bread and placed equal amounts in the bowls. A draft of cold accentuated the warm feeling of the bowl as the old man sat.
In a quiet as thick as the soup, they dined.
_________
The meal was as quick as it was delicious. Savoring the last bite of what turned out to be lamb stew, another clang erupted from under the inn again, this time like the tolling of a bell.
Cullfor looked around, something inflating in his sternum.
He looked around again. The room was empty and silent except for them. The high thin windows along the back were shuttered. A wintry spring air turned the lantern in soft circles. The air was charging the room. Growing thick.
Now he stood up.
Then the feeling of being watched hit them all at once. Each in turn looked up at the mural above the table.
Something was different. Something in the eyes. Cullfor moved toward the front door, looking back at the mural. A blunt ache was filling his head. He suddenly found it difficult to move very fast. His vision dimmed.
A metallic moan issued under their feet. Cullfor sensed exactly what was about to happen. He fisted the door and turned it.
It was impossible to open.
He jumped for an antique sword that lay atop the door jam. It was covered in grit and uncomfortable to the palm for all the ancient gnarls that even the handle had gained in combat. He banged the dust from it then stepped in front of the other two.
“This thing,” he said to Bunn, “has haunted my trails for weeks.”
“No,” the old man said, standing. He drew a sword from under the table. “I have haunted your trails for years, boy.”
Bunn stood, scampering to him.
“Well, my sweetness. Now it has come.”
“Stay behind me.”
He stood very still, feeling almost naked somehow, knowing he could not leave even if the doors had opened.
Across the vast, cold interior of the inn, the man approached, changing before his eyes. He was an ancient cold, an evil that quickened from a thousand miles away.
Cullfor briefly stared up at God and hoped to Him he could do something in this that would please Him enough to spare Bunn. This woman at his side. His woman. Cullfor gritted his teeth as he waited in a strange nightmare-smoke of memories, sudden visions that he could not dam. Dozens of dead men were marching into the parlors of his mind. He palmed his forehead.
“What the?…,” he said.
The ghosts in his head paused. They stared at him with tattered raiment dripping from their gaunt frames, their chain mail now just a mockery of armor. He felt too aware of his grip and his sweat. Too aware of Bunn and her want to help. His heart thudded. Then they came. The old man was coming, his mind somehow making him more and more aware of the demons buried here. The men he killed too, they came slowly, wrecking his mind with grief. He pitied them as they came to his sight, their hideous bodies masticated by time. They held scabbards with no swords. Moving throug
h his thoughts, they were not in control of themselves. They showed no expression. He had never considered the fact that his demons might be unarmed.
Cullfor dropped the tip of his blade.
For the briefest of moments, he thought to place the tip of the blade under his sternum and fall on it.
Then he thought of flowers. Of clear skies. Anything. The nearest demon began whispering some sort of incomprehensible dirge, urging him to take his own life, as it reached at Cullfor’s neck. His mouth was a gaunt snarl, the wilting grimace of a damned thing. Cullfor stepped backwards, gripping the sword lightly now. Still there were ghost hands reached for him on all sides. And still, through their bodies, Cullfor could see the old man approach. He grunted, surrounded by a mess of clutching arms and hand. Ghost-fingers were swarming toward his face, begging at him, crowning him and knighting him with their hands, pulling his clothes, though it felt like his skin. Anger flooded him, and it was an anger like he had never know—anger at himself. He was growling as he stepped through a rake of muted flesh. And the demons left, popping and ripping as he tore free of their clutches. Hands fell to the floor like giant, scabrous spiders.
Closer now, the man said, “Know the name of the man will end you, boy. I am known by many names. But in death you will recall me as the Ivorlas Finn.”
Here he was, the man who killed the founder of his homeland. The antihero of every Arwegian boy’s youth, Ivorlas was the immortal founder of the Ivornon Empire who had killed his own father. But physically, he was hardly less frail than the demons that had just crowded him.
But pity will kill you, his mind spoke.
Suddenly his breath was gone. He stood awkwardly. Everything went soot-colored and he felt himself choking on the blood in his sinuses. And Finn grew, now hardly a man at all, but a thing, wardrobed in a likeness of a man. It wore his skin like sinewy and terrible armor now. It was like the dead flesh-plating of an ancient hell-thing, gray and thorny and dangling. The eyes were windows into thick black galaxies. It bore animal teeth. Wolf teeth. No. They were longer. They were more like the teeth of a dragon.
The old man was more than a cruithne lord. He was the King of the Dark Cruithne. It smiled, and licking the elongated, bone-like teeth made the world vibrate with the noise of hellish harps.
“Then know me as well, beast. I am Cullfor. And when I end you, they will call me a mandragon. But when you are gone from this world, know you were sent from it by little more than a feisty little goat from Gintypool.”
The old dragon sneered. “End me? Your fear, boy, reeks the metallic scent of men who had been felled in dung heaps. I sniff the air, but pull from it no strength. No power. I pull from it naught but the menstruation of the false whore you brought to defile my inn!”
Cullfor raised his blade, growling now. He motioned for it to come and the ancient fiend looked at him. It growled something like a word, the near-feminine noise of it as hideous as a wounded child.
And the beast shivered in a reptilian explosion of screaming laughter.
Cullfor felt his life draining to his shins, and as Bunn collapsed, he charged the fiend. Madness latched onto his thrusting sword, tearing into the dragon’s gut. The long blade sank deep and his knuckles raked across its bristly teats.
Cullfor roared, wrenching the steel back and forth inside it.
Finn howled savagely. But no guts spilled. No blood. Just dripping globules of living fat rolling down the hilt as the old being licked the air in ecstasy.
Cullfor felt his flesh prickle. He began to tremble. The fat plopping onto the floor undulated in living liquid, like worms. He leapt backwards for Bunn, but stumbled. He yelped and crawled with the hustle of a wounded animal, pulling her through the inn. The ramshackle work of crabbing away was halted when he found Bunn wide awake, halting them by clinging to the bar.
“We can’t run from this!”
“Good,” he muttered.
Cullfor turned. He raised his blade and strode to the mandragon.
Hunkering under the beamed doors, Ivorlas Finn hissed and emerged into the red light under the mural likeness.
As he chopped downward at it, the fiend swung with a single, terrifying chop. The unnatural strength of the blow sent him sprawling. Finn was howling now, a noise like storm winds. It reached down at him with an open hand, growling as Cullfor chopped at it—the grind of claw and steel rang as it caught the blade, clasping it. Then it wrenched it with terrible force from his hand.
Cullfor knew his hand was broken from the force, and the beast’s sickening lack of effort was almost too much for his mind to accept.
It squeezed the blade, and dropped the ruined steel beside him.
He shuddered as it stomped on his chest, pinning him. He reached for the only weapon he could, the only hard thing on him, the dirk in his boot. Even as he closed his eyes, he could still see the creature that called itself Ivorlas, Founder of Ivorthot. He brought the dirk up in his broken, balled fist and cuffed the knee. The creature roared in pain, its grip squeezing his skull, wrecking his mind with a deep gouge of demonic madness across his thoughts. As it fell, two more swift strikes from his balled fist sent it rolling on the floor. Thin strings of his blood splattered beside it like offensive, living gristle or moist red insects. It had dropped its sword, and its voice again rolled across his brain, a laugh that bit into his mind in shivering, reptilian bursts.
He bent. Pain rushed over his body like hot burns. There was the click of its teeth. As he lifted the fiend’s sword, it was merely staring at him, seeming to consider something.
The taste of fear spread in Cullfor’s mouth as a viscous silence filled the air. He closed his eyes again, and the blade went slowly, downward like the hands of clock, vibrating like a song as it tore apart the creature’s skull in a sizzling burst.
And half of Ivorlas’ head fell away.
Cullfor roared, baring his teeth, and while the ground under the partial head began erupting in a great ripping noise, Bunn rushed to him, pulling at him till they knocked into each other stumbling and crawling madly to get away from a sudden gnawing gape in the earth.
The great maw stretched. Teeth of stone erupted from the great black roll of mud, swallowing the inn.
Just as the earth ripped under their feet they fell and leapt from their knees to tumble and crawl some more.
Chapter 88
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Cullfor slunk away from the hole that was the inn, so weak he was nearly lifeless. Bunn crawling beside him. Neither was unable to get to their feet. From deep, deep in the earth came a stench and a black, devilish clicking. It was a noise to seize the heart and lock him solid. Then a paused silence shivered through them, and a sudden deep cold rocked his mind. It was more than an absence of heat. It was a living chill with roots that spread through his blood. He slumped over, covering his ears as he began to convulse.
He began to vomit and he crawled further and stumbled further, only to roll over lifelessly again.
Bunn leaned over and whispered in his ear: You did it, my sweetness.
He felt the heat of her words on his lobe. And he smiled.
A knowing smile.
The smile of a dragon.
A mandragon.
Chapter 89
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Dhal sat naked and utterly alone in the world, crying, her head dropped, morbid thoughts singing through her head like a death march. For mining silver and harvesting bog iron, she thought, a child is worth five men. But the young are usually dead in a year. How can a life mean so little? Why is wisdom always wasted on the aged? What was this new feeling of doom in her bones? A hellishly long time passed and so too did a myriad of hellish thoughts as she stared down into the water of her bath, and even as the water grew frigid, she just stared into the scummy surface, her tears no longer dropping before her, her life seeming to dissipate with the heat of the water. And then, something… odd.
Something truly bizarre happened.
She stared dow
n into the water and saw a vision beginning to unfold. Jorigaer, Lord of Delmark, rode with an army in search of… her nephew.
“Cullfor…” she whispered. “Be careful my boy. So much rides with you…”
He stared into a tree and seemed to form a response on hi lips. Before the answer came, Talent’s helper’s, the girls in the room next to her, shocked her with the volume of their barks, “Get her! Seize her! She has seen him!”
As Bhiers’ girls folded around her, she instantly, and for reasons she could not name, understood she was going to die, and yet she wondered an odd thing. Do the things we learn in life die with us?
While they pulled a rope down over her wet body, she became more and more aware that some things in life, simply, just did not end well—her own death would be told with the odd curiosity of hunting tales about deer who had wondered into camp. She was bound again, just as she had been before. Only it was worse. One of the girls brought into the room a large wooden pole. They bound her arms behind her back to the timber with thin but strong rope. They bound her at the waist as well. Then she felt the warm clarity of her shock, of knowing this was it. Biting her lip as she was hoisted over the shoulders of the women, she turned to Talent, who had just entered the room, and began pleading with her eyes.
“Help me, please.”
“Take her to the roof.”
“Please.”
“Give her only enough time to say what she has seen.”
“No…”
The fat woman just laughed. “Throw her off if she does not speak.”
“You know I will not.”
“Then take her outside. Give her to the men. Then burn her on a wolf tree and give her ashes to the devil.”
Somehow, something in Dhal was further broken by those words. No worry grew. Instead she grinned, glimpsing for a moment the grand cosmic joke of it all. She shrugged sardonically at the inescapability of her situation.