Grimdark Magazine Issue #3 ePUB
Page 9
He blinked—saw Shinurta convulsing with laughter, his great head roped in meat that should have been hidden.
Eryelk’s grin faltered, for a heartbeat merely.
‘Come, Acclaimed Champion,’ Queen Sumiloam of Ainon purred.
Blood or seed, the saying among his people went. Blood or seed.
‘Hew your Blessed Queen.’
Something had to be spilled.
§
She cried out when it happened... and then they lay, pulse raw upon pulse, their nudity trembling as a gold sheet beneath hammers.
‘What are you?’ she gasped, baring her teeth about his ache.
‘Holca,’ he exhaled.
‘Yes... But what... are Holca.’
‘A boy...’ he began, only to pause at another crazed image of Shinurta. ‘A boy with two hearts was born to our people in ancient days. His name was Wiglic.’
She gingerly squirmed against his pubis. Her eyebrows climbed into a pained crescent as her focus faded.
‘I am his most violent son,’ he concluded on a bull-deep exhalation.
She looked up, made to smile, but swallowed instead, puffed an errant lock from her eyes in a manner that only further inflamed him.
‘And why...’ she gasped. ‘Why have you come my city?’
His first Carythusali lover had been a widow far into her barrenness. Menace, she had told him. Menace was what had made him her most prized narcotic. The fear that such mighty seed might take root within her.
Fear and wonder.
‘Because only it can contain me.’
A cry climbed from her timid exertion.
‘Because only Carythusal is so mad as to make me sane.’
And it seemed almost religious, speaking such words in the strangling thickness of coitus... Making such declarations.
Shinurta cackled in his soul’s eye. Claws combed the ginger haze across his abdomen.
His stomach lurched. His second heart flexed into a brandished fist.
Boma-bom.
‘You mean depraved,’ she whispered.
§
Chitinous limbs rattled.
He rolled upon her so that she might writhe beneath the splendid might of his form, feel manhood in all its stamping glory, brown skin crushed against red, crying out for the girth of him, murmuring, Slow... slow... her thighs pinned open by his hips, as she made sounds of sobbing wonder, and he huffed breath like a dragon, arching as she enveloped the throat of him, wincing for the purity of his bliss–
This! This was what was happening!
Scales slapped skin.
Boma-bom.
She panted, swallowed as if to wrap breath around more than heaving thoughts.
The barbarian blinked, saw Shinurta hunched, a greased grotesquerie toiling over his loins. The world kicked and yanked about chains and manacles–
What did they do to him?
Bom-bom-bom-bom...
No! No! This! This was what happened!
The most violent son of Wiglic roared, indulged her with a spearing thrust, filled the cup of her insatiable appetite, filled it unto overflowing, and so made shy boys of all her previous lovers...
Her painted husband most of all.
Sumiloam wailed in delirium, laughed in wonder.
The Holca barbarian winked at the King of Ainon where he stood in the bower, pretending to be one of the slaves. This! This! This was what happened.
His skin flushed red.
Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom...
§
Chained to a thread above Hell. Choking sulphur. Bolting terror. Something horrid convolving about his hips, climbing, mounting...
Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom...
The Queen grunted, slathered him with her bliss, and Ratakila howled for ardour, cackled for absurdity. His second heart pounded from his very summit.
Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom...
He roared as a dragon, a demon, in release, in terror.
Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom...
And Shinurta wheezed for hatred and fury.
Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom...
‘Strike your foul image upon his very pit!’
Sumiloam sobbed for... for...
Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom...
Screaming. Thrashing. Bestial glimpses of spider eyes and puckered cunnies.
Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom...
‘Ravish him!’ the Grandmaster screeched, keened.
Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom...
‘Sack his flesh! Blast him with shame! Rape! Rape!’
§
Thurror Eryelk awoke on the riverbank, curled about Vampire beneath a rotting dock, clothed only in filth and blood. Carythusal, when he at last dared crawl out to observe it, burned in every quarter, a vast smoking scab beneath shrouded skies. And though he remembered nothing save making love to the Queen in the grotto, he could see the print of what had happened in the gore that robed him...
The shrieking memories would not be long in coming.
Shinurta had no need to curse him, he realized. He need only trust the curse that was his blood. He need only know him to transform him into a knife for yet another hand...
And so Eryelk fled Carythusal, knowing even then that he would return, that he would pluck his vengeance only when it had grown ripe...
As Stitti had taught him.[GdM]
R. Scott Bakker is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including The Prince of Nothing, a trilogy that Publishers Weekly calls “A work of unforgettable power,” as well as the Aspect-Emperor novels and the acclaimed thriller, Neuropath. He lives in London, Ontario, with his wife, Sharron, and his daughter, Ruby.
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