by D. P. Prior
The man’s eyes bulged, pipe stem halfway to his lips.
“Hilda,” he yelled through the open door. “Come quickly! We have guests! Wonderful, wonderful guests.” His voice was thickly accented, and the words sounded forced, unfamiliar. But it was the same common tongue spoken everywhere on Earth.
A plump woman appeared behind him, mousy hair wound in buns beneath a straw bonnet. Her face was broad and plain; an honest face, it seemed to Shadrak. Like Kadee’s, only white; free from care, free from worry.
“Oh,” she cried, rushing toward Galen and embracing him like a long-lost son. “Oh, oh, oh!”
Galen blushed and looked to Ludo for help. When Ludo turned his palms up and shrugged, Galen coughed and said, “Breakfast, madam.” He managed to disengage himself and straighten his jacket. “Is there somewhere in town?”
“Oh, but you must come in.” She began to lead him by the hand. “Come in, all of you. There’s food a plenty for guests. We’d be honored to share our home. Honored!”
“We ain’t got time for this,” Shadrak muttered under his breath.
He glanced up at the forest of spikes beneath the castle. In and out, was how he’d thought it would be. Quick as you like. But once again, no one had bothered to plan, least of all that scut Aristodeus. He shook his head. They’d need time to scout the castle, find a way inside without being seen.
Galen and Ludo were first through the doorway, and Albert was close behind. You’d have thought the poisoner would have learned from his own practice that the surest way to catch a man off guard was through his stomach. Was Shadrak the only one who sensed it? The only one who thought these people were just a bit too shogging happy, a bit too welcoming of strangers.
Nameless waited in the doorway. “I like it even less than you, laddie,” he said. “The sooner we’re back on Aethir, the better. I don’t know what Shader and Rhiannon see in Earth. To be quite honest, I’d sooner take a stroll through Qlippoth than spend another minute in the shadow of that castle.”
“I was expecting worse,” Shadrak said. “Liches, dead-shit that walks, maybe even witches. I should be relieved, but I ain’t.”
“In my experience, that’s a good thing,” Nameless said. “Always keep your guard up, but don’t let anyone know you’re doing it. It’s a philosophy that’s got me a long way.”
“Yeah, well mine’s got me a long way, too: cut a shogger’s throat before they cut yours.”
***
With hot food in front of him, Shadrak felt his suspicions dwindle. Not all the way; just enough to let him wolf down his eggs and bacon without imagining himself choking on it. Not enough to unstrap the rifle from his back, even if it mean he had to stand rather than sit at the table. Course, their hosts assumed it was on account of his short legs not being able to reach the floor from a chair. Scuts.
On the other side of the table, Galen wiped yoke from his chops and stroked breadcrumbs from his mustache.
Ludo sipped water beside him, plate untouched. He tried to deflect their hosts by feigning interest in their pathetic little lives, as if he gave a shit about local culture and the pastimes of market gardeners, or whatever the shog it was these people did.
“May I?” Galen swapped plates with Ludo without waiting for an answer, and tucked in with gusto.
Ekyls stabbed at his food and glared at anyone who might have noticed.
Nameless brooded by the door, palms resting on the haft of his axe.
Their hosts continued to fawn and smile, pouring tea and talking about the weather.
Shadrak pushed his plate aside and nodded his thanks. Hilda handed him a cup and saucer. Her husband, George, hovered over him with a bowl of sugar lumps.
“You are too kind.” Albert slurped the dregs of his tea and held his cup out for a refill. “A splendid repast. Wunderbar, as I believe they used to say before the Templum taught us all how to speak correctly.” He tapped his nose at that and winked.
Hilda and George exchanged glances, then, as if on cue, laughed politely.
“Don’t worry,” Albert said. “They have the same problem in Gallia, only there, when there are no Nousians about, there’s seldom a word of the lingua vulgaris uttered.”
“Thank you for your kindness, sir,” Hilda said, pouring Albert more tea.
“Thank you indeed,” George said. “All of you.” He plopped a sugar lump in the cup, raised an eyebrow, and plopped in another one when Albert held up two fingers.
“What I’d like to know,” Shadrak said, stirring his tea with a silver spoon, “is what those spikes are around the castle.”
Hilda coughed and spluttered then started to wheeze.
George took her by the shoulders and led her to a seat. “Sets her off,” he explained. “Not breakfast table talk, but you weren’t to know, not being from around here.”
Hilda dabbed at her lips with a handkerchief. “Sorry. It’s my heart. Always been weak, hasn’t it, George?”
“Always been weak.” George put his arm around her. “The gentleman didn’t mean anything by it, dear. It is natural to ask, is it not?”
“Natural,” Hilda said.
George ducked his head and put a hand to his cheek. There was a pause, as if he were deliberating what to say, and then he flicked a quick look at Shadrak. “There have been… bad folk in these parts. We are all still a little on edge.”
“Bad folk,” Hilda said.
“Raiders, they say. Troublemakers. Terrorizers. It’s all the same thing. Happens from time to time. All dealt with now, isn’t it Hilda? Safe as houses.”
“Safe as houses, George. Thanks to the Prior.”
George turned to the window, where the brooding bulk of the castle dominated the view. He touched his forehead, chest, and both shoulders. “Praise be.”
“This Prior of yours,”—Ludo leaned across the table, eyebrows dancing atop his spectacles. “That’s a somewhat antiquated title. Do you see much of him?”
Hilda pushed down on her thighs and rolled out of her seat to start collecting cups and plates. “See him? See the Prior? Well, I don’t know!”
“Have you been up to the castle?” Ludo said.
Hilda dropped a saucer. It crashed to the tiles and split clean in half. Both halves wobbled noisily for a moment, all eyes upon them until they clattered to a stop.
“No one goes up to the castle.” George was all grim seriousness. “Not decent folk, anyway. Not without an invitation, and they don’t come often.”
“There’s a lottery,” Hilda said. “Once a year, at Easter. Only others that go that way are sinners.”
Albert leaned back in his seat with a smug look on his face. “So, a faceless watcher, your Prior, keeping an eye on you from his castle on the hill. It’s so—what’s the Ancients’ word for it?—feudal.”
“Oh no.” Hilda crossed herself the same way her husband had done earlier. “Not at all.”
“Nothing wrong with a distant ruler.” Everyone started at the boom of Nameless’s voice. “Keeps up the mystique of power. All part of good government.”
Hilda and George shook their heads, tutting and muttering.
“There are no rulers here,” George said.
“That’s right,” Hilda said. “No rulers. This isn’t Aeterna, you know.” This time, they crossed themselves in unison. “None of that Ipsissimist tyranny here.”
“None in Aeterna nowadays, either.” There was nothing amiable about Galen’s tone. He lay down his utensils, pulled a half-chewed rind of bacon from his mouth, and dropped it on the plate.
“None?” Hilda said. “In Aeterna?”
“You’ve not heard?” Ludo said. “The Sahulian Emperor Hagalle drove the Ipsissimus from the Eternal City. The heart of the Templum has moved to Londinium.”
“Ruddy scandalous,” Galen growled.
“No Templum of ours,” George said. His tone had changed, too. Now, he was all brusqueness, like he couldn’t wait to get rid of them. He pushed past Nameless and held the
door open. “Good day.”
“Thank you so much for your hospitality.” Albert sneered as he pushed his chair back and stood. “A most serviceable breakfast. I hope to return the favor some day.”
They filed out of the house, and George slammed the door behind them. The lock clicked, and bolts were slammed in place.
Shadrak looked over the rooftops, beyond the huge dome at the center of town, and up at the castle and the spikes set beneath it. He had a nasty feeling he knew what they were now.
Ludo must have read his mind. He towered above Shadrak, squinting in the same direction. “Doesn’t bode well,” he said, whipping off his glasses and wiping them on his cassock. “Only sinners going to the castle, for the most part. Poor old sinners, eh? But what if the rules are different from the norm here? What if good is bad and bad is good? What then? I’m assuming this Prior is Blightey, and it’s no secret he has a passion for impalement.”
Shadrak swallowed thickly. The thought of that being done to him was… disturbing. But all the same, he felt compelled to get a closer look; see for himself.
“And Easter,” Galen said like a condemnation. “Did you hear them mention Easter, for goodness’ sake?”
“I did,” Ludo said. “An archaism from the earliest fragments of the Liber that Ipsissimus Silvanus would most assuredly not approve of.”
“Heathens,” Galen muttered, scowling his contempt. “And to think I ate their food. Gurrgh. Two ruddy portions of the muck!”
An owl hooted, and then Shadrak saw it glide down and settle atop the great dome. At least one of them was keeping watch, and not led astray by the grumbling of his stomach.
THE FLAMING SKULL
Verusia, Earth
Even vengeance freezes, if it’s cold enough.
Shader’s fury at Aristodeus no longer held the heat to sustain itself. It would come back, he kept telling himself, if ever the warmth in his limbs returned. Once his frozen hands could grip a sword, it would come back.
He slumped over the frosted pillow of Caledon’s mane in the vain hope of dredging a little body heat. The stallion was tiring, each slowing step sinking deep into the snow.
The endless plains of empty white had finally given way to a sprawling forest of firs and pines. Here and there, glistening silver beeches were bowed in frozen arcs, encased root to branch in ice; entombed in it, like the Father of Lies at the heart of the Abyss.
Overhead, charcoal skies buried the world in perpetual twilight. A brighter smudge told him there was still a sun, but whether it was rising or falling, he could no longer tell. It may even have been the moon. Time itself held no meaning beneath the crepuscular pall.
Shader slapped his hands against the horse’s flanks, felt the pricking of blood trying to flow. He clenched and unclenched fingers that no longer seemed his own.
Caledon bore him along the banks of an iced-over river that split the forest like a gash. The wolf-man, Pete, loped behind, fur stiff and flecked with snow, the crimson remains of his last meal smearing his maw.
That had been two days ago, his last hunt in the thickets on the Gallic border. The further they passed into Verusia, the deeper they cut into the forest, the less wildlife they found. Even the birds were silent here, and such sounds as they heard were muffled by the omnipresent blanket of whiteness.
Shader’s rations had run out the day before, and the flask in his boot was empty. Fasting made you used to the hunger, but it could never prepare you for so much cold. A hot broth, the satiety of warm bread taunted him more acutely than an oasis in a desert.
He sat up in the saddle, face taut and stinging. Dark crags poked above the trees in the distance. Not crags, he realized: the teeth of battlements, the jags of spires and turrets. He blinked and shook the torpor from his head. There had been nothing on the horizon last time he had looked. It was as if the castle had silently burst through from the underworld. Either that, or he’d failed to notice the dreary progress through the forest, the blurring of the hours.
Pete sat on his haunches and howled. Scenting the air, he set his jaundiced eyes on a furrow between the trees and scampered off.
Caledon whinnied and pulled the other way.
Shader patted the horse’s neck, whispered soothingly into his ear. He could smell smoke, and then he saw thin plumes of it above the treetops in the direction Pete had gone. He needed to see this, whatever Caledon might have felt about it.
He dug his heels into the stallion’s flanks and shortened the reins. He couldn’t afford to pass up the chance of a meal in this cursed place.
The furrow turned out to be a snow-covered track that opened onto a swept cobblestone path between white hedges. The wolf-man stood erect, glaring over a gate at a thatched cottage. An orange glow warmed the windows, and smoke swirled from the stub of a chimney.
Pete snarled as Shader drew alongside and slid from the saddle.
The front door was ajar. Pete whimpered and dipped his snout toward it. There was an arm trapped between the door and the frame.
Shader wrapped Caledon’s reins around a gatepost then closed numb fingers around the hilt of the gladius. Frost burned his palm. For a second, he hesitated, recalling how the sword had rejected him that time in New Jerusalem; how it had chastened him for his slaughter. With resolve born of shame, he forced his fingers to take a firm grip. The stinging cold spread to his forearm, but he refused to let go. With a fierce jerk, he freed the gladius from the film of frost holding it like a vise in its scabbard. It came out dull, amid a scatter of ice. He half-expected it to glow, to unleash a golden conflagration to drive back the cold, but if it was the same blade that had served him during the time of the Unweaving, it was now dormant, maybe even dead.
He approached the door warily, moving in a wide semicircle. The wolf-man let out a low growl, eyes flitting from Shader to the arm, as if he were considering which to eat first.
Shader pulled the door wide, stepped over the body of a man.
In the hallway behind the corpse, two more bodies were sprawled atop a shagpile carpet. One was a girl, no more than four or five years old, hair fanned out around her head in an auburn halo. The other was a woman, her pleated skirt riding up milky thighs. The head was twisted at an unnatural angle, and a mass of blonde hair obscured the face.
Shader rolled the man over with his boot. Air rushed from dead lungs, and he leapt back, heart scudding about his ribcage. He berated himself for being foolish. How many corpses had he seen in his time? How many had he been responsible for? They all let out breaths and gases. They all did, and yet this one unnerved him.
The face was sunken and gray. Desiccated. He stooped to close the eyes, but drew back. There were no eyes: just black holes with angry blisters around the sockets.
Shader sucked in a sharp breath, looked over his shoulder at Pete still standing by the gate, watching.
The little girl’s eyes were the same: hollow as the void, scald marks around the cavities. But as he swept the hair out of the woman’s face, an eyelid fluttered, and there was a glint of white beneath. She emitted a soft moan, turned her head toward him.
Shader winced, anticipating the snapping of the neck, but there was none. Maybe he’d been mistaken. Maybe it hadn’t been as bad as it looked.
She gazed blearily at him, and her lips parted a crack. “Eddie?”
Instinctively, Shader knelt by her head. She threw an arm out, grabbed his coat. He helped her half-sit, half-lean against his chest. She nuzzled into him, one limp hand falling on top of his.
“Oh, Eddie, you’re alive.” She began to sob, caught herself with a palpable effort of will, and started to breathe in harsh gulps and sighs. She lifted her hand from his, as if scalded, and sat up by herself.
“Kara? Oh, Eddie, where is…”
Shader stood and backed away as she saw the child; looked past her to the corpse beyond.
“I’m not Eddie,” he said needlessly. “I am… I’m a priest.” He fretted about what reaction that might evoke
out here in Verusia; wondered if they even had priests. He needn’t have worried. She showed no signs of having heard him.
She crawled to the girl, prodded her with the tips of shaking fingers. “No,” she moaned. “No, no.” She reached out a hand to the dead man’s leg, dragged herself along it until she could see his face. “Oh, Eddie.”
Over her head, through the open door, Shader saw the wolf-man shake its fur and pad off back into the woods.
Caledon stood with the patience of a statue, watching him with baleful eyes.
***
The warmth from the hearth fire brought Shader scant comfort, and sent a prickling sensation beneath his skin as the circulation returned. He’d never thought heat could be so painful—except maybe in the Judiciary’s dungeons. Thankfully, Ludo had come for him before things had gone that far. He stretched out his injured knee with a sharp click, rubbing at the joint and kneading the surrounding muscles.
The woman was sleeping soundly on a couch in front of the fire. Her light snoring was interspersed with inchoate mumbles, fragments of speech that seemed disconnected and made no sense.
Shader had done the best he could with the bodies of her husband and daughter: shallow graves out front, already piled high with snow. He’d do better later, once she was ready. If she was. What had happened, she still had not said, but how someone came back from such loss, whether they even could, was beyond him.
Caledon was stabled in a lean-to at the rear of the cottage, with enough hay to restore his strength. Pete, though, had not returned. Shader felt a pang of disappointment. The wolf-man might not have been capable of speech, but he’d been a welcome presence on the long trek across Gallia and into Verusia.
Rising from his armchair, he stooped over the woman and pulled her covers up. Her scent hit him like a blow—he’d not noticed it before: cloying musk that made his head swim. It threw up images of Lallia that time in Sarum. He quickly quashed them.