The Devil's Judgment

by Chris Pisano

  “Tired of obstinate women this week, ain’t ya?” the one guard whispered to him.

  “Trouble with the ladies?” the other guard asked.

  “Heard he got his ass kicked by one last week. A blondie thing right outside of Orsrun. Handled him and his two riding companions with ease.”

  “Yeah? She make off with his balls, then?”

  Methel turned and cuffed the one guard’s head hard enough to draw blood. In a growl so deep Bale swore he felt it from where he sat, Methel said, “Not that I need to explain myself to the likes of you, but she was massive. Large as a young giantess. Now, if you ever want a test of skills you must simply name the time, the place, and say your farewells to all your loved ones.”

  Methel punctuated his statement by shouldering past both men to leave the room hard enough to make them stumble. Heads low, neither guard dared to look at each other or the prisoners and simply followed.

  After a few loud heartbeats, Dearborn spoke. “Bale.”

  “Yes, Dearborn?”

  “We’re going to plan our escape now.”

  four

  It was Dearborn Day. Methel hated Dearborn Day. He always had to clean up the mess.

  He wondered if the girl would be rendered comatose or maddened. He preferred comatose. Much easier to deal with. Sling her over his shoulder and take her to the nurses in the abbey. The maddened ones were so much worse. Violent fits of fear were often taken out upon him. One time a girl scratched him deep enough to warrant a bandage. He did not like that at all.

  He rounded one final corner to get to the ceremony room—the “snake pit” as he referred to it in the sanctuary of his own mind—and stopped in his tracks. Speekore, the scientist waited in front of the closed door of the ceremony room.

  A hobgoblin, like any, in some respects, Speekore was taller than most and lanky. His limbs were long and seemed to move slowly to the casual observer, but certainly fast enough anytime he needed to be somewhere to perform a torturous experiment. To Methel, he looked like a giant green spider, the way he skittered along the castle hallways. Yet, much creepier. He had no way to gauge how old a hobgoblin was, but Methel assumed the scientist to be old for his species. Misshapen discolorations of darker green looked like islands upon his bald pate. What hair he did have grew in varying lengths from the back of his head and rested like cobwebs upon his shoulders. To add to the monstrous image, his eyes were hidden behind thick glass cups embedded into his skull, and his chin was metal, a forged approximation of a jawbone. It did not move, affixed to his head, and his upper lips rippled in unnatural ways when he spoke, allowing for glimpses of tiny teeth and the flicker of a fetid tongue. No, Methel did not like Speekore the scientist, not one bit.

  “Hobgoblin.” Methel’s standard greeting to the scientist, the most courteous one he could muster.

  “Human.” Speekore’s upper lip peaked just enough to expose rotted little pebbles of teeth.

  That was the extent of their conversation as they waited outside the door together in silence. For Speekore, interaction was a way to ferret out weakness. With anyone else, he would talk until he got a reaction, a way to dig into a person’s mind and soul, excavating any tidbit that might be useful in the future. Not with Methel, though. Methel had learned that the best way to silence Speekore was to remain silent himself. He was curious as to why the scientist was here, but with patience, all would be explained. Spending a few minutes in awkward silence gazing into the nearest sconce while the scientist stared at him was nothing compared to the experiments that happened in another part of the castle. The door to the ceremony room finally opened and Daedalus strode out.

  The prince was naked, every wiry muscle exposed to the world, his taut skin glistening from sweat and ceremonial oils. His black hair was plastered to his head, neck, and shoulders in clumps from the same liquids. Judging from his deflating erection, the ceremony had just ended.

  Moist air flowed from the ceremony room in waves. The flames of the massive braziers in the four corners of the room burned thick, heating the buckets of water suspended over them. The room needed to be hot and humid for the snakes.

  Hundreds of snakes wriggled around the room, the vast majority squirmed together along the far wall to form the bed of the Dearborn Day ceremony. Atop the bed was the girl Methel had to fetch. Naked and curled into a ball, she shivered and twitched, her unblinking eyes staring at something far, far away. Methel assumed it was hope, something in the distance that would never get closer, a mirage that would never become real.

  “Your Highness,” Methel nodded to the prince as he started to go into the room but stopped when Daedalus placed his skeletal hand on his shoulder.

  “A word, please, General.” Methel was at an age where the list of things that concerned him was short and waning. An unscheduled conversation with Daedalus was close to the top of that list.

  The prince then addressed Speekore. “Take the girl to the abbey nurses. Do not deviate.”

  The hobgoblin’s upper lip curled into a smile as he gazed longingly into the room. “I will try.”

  “You will succeed. She will make it there in a timely manner, unmarred. I have other scientists, many of them curious about the inner workings of hobgoblins.”

  Speekore’s enthusiasm deflated like an emptying waterskin. “Yes, Sire.”

  After a moment to observe that the hobgoblin was following orders, Daedalus walked down the hallway, the dripping fluids adding a bit of a splash to his bare feet slapping against the stone. Methel kept pace. “I’m off to meet with the other generals regarding the war effort and find that I have no other time but now to meet with you.”

  “I understand.”

  “Have you checked on my prisoner?”

  “I have.”

  “And?”

  “She is well. Healthy. I believe she may have not only forgotten that she is in any form of prison but forgotten that it was you who put her there.”

  “Perfect. Soon it will be time to finally reveal to her my revenge, what I have been planning all these years.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “I’ve been so busy lately I’ve almost lost sight of that. With the war. Hunting down whatever wizards are left. Finding Perciless. Cleaning up whatever messes my brother makes. My brother . . . I need to meet with him as well. His ability to govern is certainly lacking. How has he been of late? Any recent . . . incidents?”

  “The king has not razed any towns due to paranoid delusions for months now.”

  “Good, good. This has been the longest stretch. Do you think he’s getting better?”

  “Do you want me to say yes, or do you want me to speak the truth?”

  Daedalus sighed and ran his fleshed hand through his hair, sweeping the clumped locks from his face, and scratched at his head. Methel believed that to be more from frustration than any form of itch. “Speak the truth.”

  “I believe he might be getting worse. With the wizards in his personal guild, King Oremethus still seeks ways to hunt and kill “demons.” He’s commanding the wizards to develop new spells or teach him the languages found in arcane and unholy books.”

  “Demons,” Daedalus muttered to himself. “My brother is the real demon with this obsession and wasting the wizards’ time and skill like this. They should be on the battlefield, not locked away in laboratories and libraries.”

  “He is the king after all. They are his wizards to waste.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. I’m well aware of that. Has your Elite Troop found any more to add to his guild with your latest mission?”

  His Elite Troop. It had been his Elite Troop for nine years now and he still wasn’t comfortable with his role in it. It had become his the day that Daedalus formed it, and that was only because he was the closest guard when the idea came to fruition. Angered to the point of spitting whi
le he yelled, Daedalus conceived of the Elite Troop hours after Dearborn Stillheart verbally emasculated him. That week, the prince assembled a dozen of the most ghoulish monstrosities for Methel to command. Over the nine years, a few had died, but Methel made more than adequate decisions, a fine General indeed. But he wasn’t perfect. “We did. We found four in the remote town of Rothrol. However, one sacrificed himself which allowed the other three to escape to Tsinel.”

  Daedalus balled his skeletal hand into a fist and backhanded the nearest wall. Small chunks of stone scattered across the floor and the prince looked down at them, almost surprised. His gaze shifted to his own genitals as if he had forgotten that he was naked. A shake of his head to put this information out of his mind, he looked back to Methel. “That is unfortunate. Clearly the doing of my other brother. Ten years of rousing my towns, my villages, my cities, turning them against me and we are no closer to capturing him than we were when he first escaped. I knew I should never have let that lecherous creature live. His connections to the criminal underground have done precious little good. Information leading to the capture of a traitor here and there hardly warrants his current standing with the king. Perciless has been recruiting for a secret army and if my estimates are correct, it must vast in number by now. Large enough to strike any day, so it’s time to reallocate resources. You and the Elite Troop will find Perciless and bring him to me. Anything you need will be made available to you, even if you’d like to increase your ranks. Just go tell the lecherous creature and garner from him all of the information he has about the last known sighting of Perciless. Now, I’m off to meet with the generals to see why we haven’t won the war with Tsinel yet.”

  Without so much as a nod, Daedalus turned and went about his business. Methel chuckled to himself while picturing Daedalus naked with his cock swinging about yelling at a room full of generals. His mirth was fleeting, though, replaced by duty. He had to see “the lecherous creature.”

  Haddaman Crede.

  Methel groused inwardly the whole way to Haddaman’s room, behind a lonely wooden door at the end of a dead-end hallway. He assumed there were secret passages and fake walls throughout this area because he rarely saw Haddaman move about the castle, yet the lecherous creature continued to run a successful criminal organization under the name of Vogothe. Methel never once looked past the worn bricks and chipped mortar for any kind of switch or lever. He simply did not care. Every time he ventured this far, he just wanted to say his piece and flee.

  Knuckles hovered close to the door, yet he could not bring himself to knock. Not just yet. He needed to weigh the options of leaving this life behind first. He had plenty of gold stashed away to give him comfort during his fading years. No more horrors of this castle, no more killing in the name of king and country. As he did every time these thoughts crossed his mind, he dashed them, knowing very well that his life would end at the blade tips of the very Elite Troop he commanded. Fate was but a noose that slipped tighter the more he struggled. But before he could rap on the door, a voice from behind it said, “Enter, Sergeant.”

  Methel hated the lecherous creature.

  The door opened upon a whisper even though all others in the castle creaked and squeaked. Minimal light made its way through the thin gaps between the curtains. Methel’s old eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness, too quick to glance from one amorphous shadow to the next, desperate to make out what moved and lurked about. And the heat was intolerable. He refused to step any further into the room than past the threshold, but the torrid air caressed him, coaxing forth a few beads of sweat. The smell of rot, earthen musk, and fungus soon followed.

  Methel knew the layout of the room, and what crept around in it, so that helped his eyes adjust. Against the entire right wall, mounds of large capped fungus grew. Bulbs the size of small men grew from the decaying trunks of trees. The slimy film that covered everything glistened in the faint light. Hundreds of slugs half the size of his hand crawled among the folds of the mushrooms and burrowed into the wood of the dead trees. They were the source of the flowing, dripping mucus. Haddaman harvested it, needed it. Deeper inside the room, the slugs fed on other things; things Methel would rather not think about.

  A bulk shuffled across the floor from the left side of the room, slowly making its way out of the darkness. The bull head was first, its eyes long since dead, marble white and glossy. A tongue lolled out of its mouth, gray with one of the slugs crawling around on it, its mucus trail flowing to the floor in long strings. The horns looked dry and paper-like, but Methel knew very well that the bones were hard, the tips sharp. The rest of the minotaur stepped into the faint light, an abomination against nature. Deader than anything moving had the right to be, it could stand to well over fifteen feet tall. Necromancy and dark sciences kept it animated for the sole purpose of transporting Haddaman Crede.

  When on its hind legs, the minotaur looked as if it were carrying a child swaddled to its belly. It took but a mere heartbeat longer than a glance to realize it was no child and there was no swaddling. It was Haddaman.

  The minotaur lumbered closer to Methel, then dropped forward, propping itself sturdy with its knuckles to the floor. Haddaman now dangled from the thing’s belly. Limbless, charred and melted nubs protruded from his shoulders and hips, long strips of deep crimson muscles attached Haddaman to the moving corpse of the minotaur, making him look like an aborted fetus refusing to relinquish dominion of the womb. Wide membranes, the viscera of pulling an undercooked steak from the bone, ran from underneath flaps of Haddaman’s skin to the various parts of the minotaur’s underside. The corpse moved as Haddaman wished it; a puppeteer pulling the strings from under the puppet, as part of the puppet.

  Dozens of slugs made their way across the carcass, their secretions needed to keep the corpse from rotting. One slug crept too far along the bull cheek and fell to the floor. The minotaur lifted its right hand and gestured to it. Haddaman asked, “Would you be so kind . . . ?”

  Methel picked up the slug and the phlegm colored creature squirmed between his thumb and index finger, ooze dripping over his knuckles. He wanted to crush it, drop it to the floor and stomp on it. The last time he did something like that, though, Haddaman exaggerated the story to Daedalus. Methel’s punishment was a month of sewer duty. However, that did not stop him from reaching up and shoving the slug into the left nostril of the bull head.

  “Aah, yes. Thank you, dear Methel.” As the minotaur put its hand back on the floor and returned to its original stance, Haddaman swayed. A slug crawled across his forehead, the skin wrinkled from deep burn scars. “It is very fortuitous that you came to see me.”

  “Why do you think that?” Methel was unable to muster more than a flat tone. He hated interacting with Haddaman, and hated conversing with him more so.

  “I’ve been hearing a very interesting rumor this morn, one involving you.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Indeed, it is. This rumor is about a run in between you and a girl near the town of Orsrun.”

  “I have heard this rumor, too.”

  The minotaur lifted its right hand and ponderously stroked the bottom of its slacked chin, a simple move for the living made blasphemous by the dead. “I am made to wonder, is there any truth to this rumor?”

  “Some rumors are true, others are not. Surely one as wizened as you is aware of this.”

  “Indeed I am. I am also aware enough to discern truth from tale, and there is certainly truth to this tale.”

  Methel shrugged. “So say you.”

  Haddaman chuckled, a tiny and innocent noise reserved for children. “The General of the King’s Elite Troop should not be thwarted by a mere woman, don’t you agree?”

  “Go ahead and make your jokes. I’ve heard them all.”

  “Oh, you misunderstand, dear Methel. No jokes about this woman handling you so deftly. To do what she did might be more of a
testament to her abilities rather than your advancing age or diminishing prowess.”

  Methel chuckled. “Ability and size. Could be a bastard product of a human and giant.”

  “Large, you say?”

  “Very. Blonde. A young thing, too, from what I could see under her hood.”

  “I wish to see this young, blonde giantess. Take me to her.”

  Conversations with Haddaman offered few moments of smugness from Methel, so he savored them whenever they made themselves available. Intertwining his fingers behind his back, he rocked back on his heels and smiled. “No.”

  The minotaur’s fingers curled to knuckles as it lurched forward. The act would have been intimidating had it not caused Haddaman to start swinging. “What did you say? Remember to choose your words wisely, lest you wish me to repeat them to Daedalus.”

  This had been the moment Methel had been waiting for. He took a step forward to enjoy this, no matter that he was now close enough that slug secretion oozed from the bull’s head to his shoulder. “You have my blessing to do so, for all you would be doing is repeating his own words to him.”

  Haddaman’s lips pulled back into a sneer. “How do you mean?”

  “The only reason I ventured to this part of the castle was to tell you of the prince’s new assignment for the King’s Elite Troop. As you have failed repeatedly, he now wishes us to have a more hands-on approach in questing for his brother, Perciless, since you have been so inadequate at it, and instructed me to get whatever pertinent information you might have on the matter.”

  The dead muscles of the minotaur flexed as Haddaman’s words filtered through clenched teeth. “You lying, treacherous—”

  “Remember to choose your words wisely, lest you wish me to repeat them to Daedalus.”