Belial - Episode 1 of the Elder Bornshire Chronicles

by Ben Stivers

  “You are the first to kill one of these, you know,” he said and Blade swished his tail and tromped the mud with his left foot. Before walking away, Arthur said, “Do you want to come in? There is room. Half the cockroaches in there we could throw into the street for these things. No one would miss them.”

  Blade shook his head vigorously and swished his tail to match. He liked Scralz particularly well, but if there were one personality that mirrored Arthur’s feelings of the riffraff in the world, it would be Blade. Less forgiving than Wolf of individual slights, Blade would as soon bash their brains than attempt to talk some sense into them.

  Dragging the dead Snipe up the alley and back through the curtain of the Dead Whore, he brought everyone in the room to their feet with a gasp of disbelief.

  Inside of the tavern, the protests ached Arthur’s ears, but not half so much as Scralz’s bellow for everyone to shut up. They did, but it took several minutes and a thick whack on the head from Scralz to a loud-mouthed northerner who melted onto the floor. Hopefully, she had not killed him, but she had certainly drawn the attention and compliance of everyone else.

  Arthur dragged his package to the largest table in the room and threw the Snipe up on top of it with a squishy thud. He, Scralz and Wolf drew close to the thing to examine it, but the crowd drew in around them, practically suffocating them.

  Wolf turned his head to a man looking over his shoulder.

  “If you want to kiss your mother with that mouth again, get your face away from me,” he growled.

  “My mother’s been dead for half-a-dozen years,” the man said without backing up.

  A swift rearward punch to the groin chopped the man’s further conversation, and the crowd wrestled itself backward a step, those in the front stepping on the ones following until the wave finally settled.

  Arthur took a quick survey of the room, ensuring that a slipped knife did not happen to find its way to his back while he took stock in what Blade had found.

  “You kill it?” Scralz said.

  “Blade did.”

  Another undertone rippled through the room. If people had not known precisely who he was, they certainly did now. Blade’s reputation held the same clout as Arthur’s. Those two things went together much like he and Wolf, or he and Shanay.

  Arthur grabbed the Snipe’s hair, lifted its head slightly and pushed back a lock to examine the eyes. Though blank, the pupils remained large, thin gold irises trimmed the edges and the sclerae were black as pitch.

  “God damned ugly thing,” a man said from over Scralz’s shoulder and Arthur nodded his head, hoping the man was not speaking about her. One split skull might be enough for the night, given what they had on the table.

  “Definitely a night creature,” Arthur said.

  “Those pupils—never seen any so big as that, even on a troll,” Wolf remarked.

  The creature’s mouth was partly open, but the jaw did not immediately give way when Scralz pushed its chin down.

  “Scralz, the skin could be poisonous,” Arthur remarked.

  “I guess we will find out.” With a shove, she unhinged the jaw to expose the finger long teeth, rounded yellow-ivory cylinders with jagged points sharp as a spear. The teeth points themselves, however, were not aligned, but randomly one longer than the other with no apparent pattern.

  “One of these get a hold on you, and you will feel it,” Arthur observed, sticking his gloved finger in and yanking one tooth out of the head. Black ooze ran out of the gap he created in the mouth and down the creature’s throat. The way it flowed, it looked alive.

  “Anthony!” Scralz shouted over to the bar where Anthony had remained. Despite what everyone else did, he still had a bar to oversee and he had not left his station. “Bring me a pot of that boiling water from the back room and a flask of the golden brew.”

  Satisfied that Antony would hurry, she said, “Those are deadly choppers for sure, but they aren’t like us. These teeth are bare bone.”

  However, her interest in the black goo overran the tooth that Arthur held. Anthony ducked behind the curtain for two breaths before he was back shouting, “Get out of the way.”

  Not wanting to be burned by the hot pot, the crowd gave way as much as they could, which managed to be enough for Anthony to wind his way through. He handed the pot and the flask to Wolf, who passed the pot to Scralz.

  “It’s hot,” he warned.

  “Quit teasing me. I thought water boiled when it was cold,” Scralz remarked.

  “Hold that mouth open,” she ordered to Arthur, “and don’t move or I’ll scald you for sure.”

  He allowed her bossiness to rule. Tipping the iron pot, she poured the blistering water into the thing’s mouth directly on top of the black morass that ran from the wound and down the dead creature's throat. The water passed over it as if she had tried to mix oil in a stream.

  “Thought that might be the case,” she remarked. She had done a significant amount of backroom healing in her time and had sewn Arthur and Wolf up more than once. Handing Wolf back the kettle, she took the flask from him.

  Inside the flask, a healing liquid that had been perfected by Rumbar decades before his death, kept court. The golden elixir could heal a wound in a day, and a mortal wound within a week if the patient was treated quickly enough. Only Arthur, Wolf, Shanay and a few others knew such a concoction existed, but they had counted their lives in flasks during their careers and Scralz’s skill at brewing it had kept them on the right side of the earth at times when nothing else might have. Carefully, so as to spill not a single drop, she uncorked the flask.

  “Hand me a cup.”

  Wolf retrieved one from a nearby table, dumped whatever had been in it out. No one bitched about their drink. They were too busy straining their necks to get a view.

  She filled a third of the cup’s depth with the gold liquid, then looked at Arthur.

  “Be ready for anything.”

  “You think it is going to get up and run out of here?” he asked with a smirk.

  Scralz shrugged and poured the liquid into the Snipe’s slack mouth, directly on top of the black mass. Using all of her strength she shoved the mouth closed and put the force of her mother’s heritage behind her grip.

  At that moment, the creature erupted.

  In the Haunted Virgin, Aerilius slouched in a cloth-wrapped chair, brooding, his fingers tracing the scar on the side of his neck. The room smelled like whores and opium, and though he imbibed in both of those things from time-to-time, the particular moment in which he resided rebuked them on behalf of his nostrils. The floorboards or perhaps it was the beds, squeaked repeatedly, endlessly, and loudly with his men whooping and evidently enjoying their stay over.

  Aerilius had been in town for two weeks, moving at night with his men to the Dark Embrace toward dawn, and back to the Haunted Virgin just before the stars shoved the sun from the sky.

  They changed stations with stealth, kept away from conversation with anyone that encountered them. They had started no fights, raised no suspicions. Their names were not mentioned on the streets by the vendors or the meager few tradesmen that littered Pagan’s Way in the daylight hours.

  They had sent a single man on their second night in Hellsgate to investigate the Downs. He had not returned, and Aerilius did not desire to lose another man trying to determine why. They had been told to stay here for a month and keep an eye to the street and an ear to the ground concerning a man named Bornshire. They had done so, but even when sending the girls out to the vendors to buy food, they had found nothing more concerning the man but a years-ago rumor and a litany of stories that, even if they had been partially true, were certainly exaggerated.

  They had a single scrap of information that the owner of the Dead Whore Tavern had once been friends with Bornshire, but a direct approach would not maintain their cover, and if the woman was a friend of the man’s, asking about him might raise the whole town to alert. Thus, they ate their daily meals at the Embrace and spent
most of their nights at the Virgin.

  This night, however, found Aerilius boiling in fermented frustration. He had entered the place already in a foul mood and he had figured a whore or two would settle him down, relax him, set his mind back on his mission, but he had chosen unwisely, picked a fragile unworldly looking slut for his pleasure. She had been limp and cold as a dead fish, no passion, no emotion, not even fear. Like a blank page, her face had been barren. Therefore, he had torn her in half and thrown her out into the street.

  Thinking better of it a few minutes later, he had returned to the porch, expecting to see her still lying there, whimpering, which would have been more pleasure than she had given him. But, when he had gone back to the porch, the girl was nowhere to be seen.

  Mrandor would be incensed if they violated his orders. Nevertheless, either someone had found the girl and sheltered her, or she had staggered away to die in an alley somewhere, but a dead body at this point would cause inquiry. He needed to locate her and anyone who knew anything about her, and put the evidence somewhere it could never be found.

  His men were still upstairs and would be until morning. Other girls lounged around in the adjacent room, but Aerilius had no interest in them. Come the morning, necessity demanded that they venture forth in Hellsgate and openly query the information they needed about Bornshire. Hiding would do no further good despite Mrandor’s firm orders. If someone found the whore in the street, word would spread quickly. If much time passed, any piece of information he might have gleaned about Bornshire would be hidden.

  Returning to the Black Forest, having failed the stealth side, but with the information Mrandor desired would be much more acceptable than returning with nothing. Dawn would come within an hour and when it did, he and his men would venture onto Pagan’s Way, let themselves be known, pound the information out of whomever they needed in order to get to it. If that meant the ugly owner of the Dead Whore Tavern had to have her teeth knocked out, so be it.

  In the tavern, the Snipe went into a fit of convulsions, arms and legs flopping wildly and had it not been for Scralz’s firm grip on its jaw, someone’s leg might have been bitten clean through. As it was, at least a single man ended his day in a fit of unconsciousness from a flailing tail.

  “Hold its legs!” Scralz shouted as gray foam spewed from the Snipe’s mouth, sizzling as though it had been thrown on a hot burner. Arthur grabbed the arm on his side and wrenched it backward, using his arm as a lever, dislocating the shoulder, but still the thing flopped onward as though it endeavored to escape.

  Scralz kept her hands firmly on the horrid thing’s head to ensure the teeth did not manage to start thrashing, and finally Morm and Detur grabbed the Snipe’s other leg while its left arm continued to flail.

  After a short time, the seizures faded until once again, the creature lay limp on the table, missing a tooth, sporting a dislocated arm, and the leg that Wolf had restrained had broken itself. Beneath the eyelids, all color had vanished, leaving only blackness.

  “Well,” Scralz said, removing her hand from the Snipe’s mouth and wiping the goo onto her apron. “That certainly answers that question.”

  Arthur regarded her sternly. “Would you mind never doing that again?”

  “Don’t be captious. You wanted to know as much as I did.”

  “Know what?”

  “That stuff in this thing’s mouth. Doesn’t look familiar?”

  Arthur paused, then said, “It reminds me of troll blood.”

  Scralz shook her head and Wolf also looked at her when she said, “It is similar. Whatever this is, someone with a contorted mind created it. And if I had to hazard my life on the answer, my guess is Lucifer.”

  The room fell silent with hard men holding their breath. Arthur scanned their faces and saw fear clawing inside of their eyes. Before they could launch into an organized panic, he shook his head and said, “No, I killed him. He is dead. Thanatos verified that.”

  Scralz slowly let loose of the Snipe’s chin and signaled half a dozen of the men to haul the carcass out. After a healthy hesitation and a frightful scowl from Scralz, some of the bravest souls assumed the task.

  “So Thanatos says. But sure as I am standing here, either Lucifer is still alive, or he left descendants of his creatures to wander off and they ended up here of all places.”

  Arthur’s eyes narrowed and his cheeks tightened, ruffling his beard. “Thanatos has no reason to lie. If we can find their nest, and kill them, that will be the end of it.”

  Scralz’s face had its own seriousness. “That may be hard to do. I suspect that they infest the Labyrinth. That is the only place we have seen them enter. It is the one place no one goes.”

  After Judas and his Necros had harbored there, no one wanted to go down into that place. No one knew what might have survived there and even less people was curious enough to find out.

  “This thing cannot squeeze down the hole we saw the Alone enter,” Arthur said. “That leaves just one place that I know of.”

  “Judas’ entrance for the Necros? That is buried and covered with rocks and a building sits on top where it used to be.”

  Wolf said to Arthur. “You want me to check it out?”

  “Let’s get a couple hours sleep. Scralz, you ready to run these people off?”

  “Get out! All of you! The rain still pushes off the sky. Maybe that will wash some of the stench from you. Stay together and away from the puddles. Detur and Morm, you know what to do.”

  Arthur waited until the room emptied and said, “What are they to do?”

  “Pass the word around the Downs about our intentions. Those folk don’t mix with us. Still, I would hate to find out a year from now that the whole place is empty because of Alones and Snipes. Who knows? Maybe they will offer to help—whoever ‘they’ are.”

  Arthur nodded to Wolf and together they ascended the stairs to the taverns one-room, second floor for some shuteye, not aware that morning would bring blood.

  Lomast crept through Overlord City’s back streets with only the stars to light his way. Not that he feared being accosted. The army saw that such things did not frequently happen, but still he dashed doorway to doorway because he wished to not be seen.

  He had shown up for work the day after the disastrous court appearance, expecting that the rumors would be running wild and that his fellow workers would question him about how the proceedings went, or perhaps even a back-of-the-hand discussion about what had occurred.

  That did not happen.

  Instead, business continued as usual. If anything, he remained as ignored as ever, shuffling papers, ordering ore, ordering grain. Nothing changed, no one asked questions concerning Griere. Toward the end of the day, his overseer, a man who had once worked for Lomast, called him into an audience.

  “Close the door,” Mur said. He had come to Overlord City around the same time that Sabinus first met with the governor and he had quickly learned Lomast’s job, then surpassed him. He hailed from the north, but not from the sea. Instead, he had traversed the northern lands that followed the Sawtooth Mountains across the land toward the top of the world. He spoke mildly to most people and his blonde hair and blue eyes brought beautiful women to his arm when the city held social gatherings.

  “Is something wrong?” Lomast asked as he sat down on the far side of the desk from Mur. Mur stood by the window, looking out over the balcony, and for a while, he said nothing. He simply stood gazing down the street.

  When at last he turned back to Lomast, he smiled. “Some wine, perhaps?”

  “No thank you,” Lomast said and folded his hands on his lap. “Is something troubling you, Mur?”

  “Me? No. I wanted to talk to you about Griere.”

  Lomast felt squiggles run up his spine, his neck, and into his hairline.

  “The ore has still not arrived,” Lomast replied, praying that was what Mur wanted to know. He felt his world teeter as Mur spoke.

  “The city guard visited today. They told me w
hat happened.”

  Lomast swallowed, but said nothing. After a moment, Mur continued, “You could not have known Griere planned to assassinate the governor. The investigation is closed. Authorities found no fault with you or your family. I know that you and Griere were acquainted. So, if what he did troubles you, I want you to know that you can rest your mind.”

  A myriad of tragedies tinkered with Lomast’s sanity. Griere planned to assassinate the governor? Preposterous.

  “Thank you,” he said simply and resumed sitting quietly, waiting for Mur to get to a cloudy point.

  Mur sat down and stared at him, searched his eyes until Lomast looked away. At that point, Mur said, “Go home. Take tomorrow and rest. Be with your family. Your daughter will be glad to have your arms wrap and warm her after all this rain. Come back to work ready to continue your duty and let us consider this matter settled.”

  Lomast nodded his agreement, thanked Mur once again, and then rose and walked stiffly from the room, shutting the door behind him.

  He had not returned home, however. Instead, he had made his way across the city to Griere’s home. Outside of the building three guards stood sentry and Griere’s wife hung from the top of the outside wall, her neck twisted in a way necks were not made to bend. The rope was tied off, and apparently, the guard intended to leave her there to rot.

  Lomast withdrew into the shadows and crossed three streets over. As he ducked into the final doorway before arriving at the home of Grier's son, the door lurched open and Lomast found himself yanked from his feet into the house.

  His life blurred past. He saw the uniform. He saw the sword. He saw the dagger. The hand over his mouth nearly suffocated him.

  “My name is Ham,” the guard said. “I have already spirited Griere’s son and family from Overlord City. Go home. Go home now. Do your work and keep your nose out of the air. If you do not, they will kill you. Do you understand?”

  Lomast nodded his understanding. Ham removed his hand from Lomast’s mouth and Lomast said, “Griere did not try to assassinate Nerva. That is not what happened.”