by Adrian Cole
"Destroy it! Destroy it!" snarled the monarch and a brand was quickly brought. When the severed hand refused to be burned, it was snatched up by one of the Werespawn and dropped into a brazier of blazing coals. Rammazurk watched the horrible relic smouldering, then turned away and went swiftly from the feast, his face a sickly pallor. He was so shocked by what he had witnessed that, for a moment, he forgot about the Voidal.
The latter looked upon the incident with a degree of perplexity, as though it should have some significance to him, but could not understand it. His two seductive watchwomen seemed mildly disturbed by the king's abrupt exit, but they turned their wiles once more upon the strange but handsome Voidal. They drew him away from the throng and, though he made no attempt to discourage their lascivious attention, he seemed deep in private thought.
"What is it that you dwell upon so moodily?" asked one of the sleek-skinned girls. The Voidal looked at her. He forced a smile, then looked away into the middle distances of the smoke-hung pillars, ignoring the nearby hoots and bawdy laughs of the wild revel.
"I can only tell you that, one day, I must have offended the Dark Gods. For that they have set me upon a stormy course for purposes I can only guess at. My presence here is as much a mystery to me as to your monarch. Yet, I know that I am to meet someone familiar here. As I approached your city, I knew it instinctively. When we meet, he will direct me. As I wander, I learn snatches of all that has been forbidden to me by the Dark Gods that I offended. Perhaps, one day, I will learn my crime. By then, I will have atoned for it."
The two concubines listened with dreamy interest.
"What of your… severed limb?" breathed one of them cautiously. The Voidal's expression soured, but he was not angry.
"I… perhaps it really was my own hand that pointed out your king. Fatecaster… the word has a ring to it. But I do not recall having lost my hand…"
"And Rammazurk-what will be his fate?" said the other girl very close to him.
The Voidal drew back stiffly. "You ask too many questions, girl!"
"You cloak yourself in mystery, stranger. I sense you have more knowledge about yourself than you speak of."
The Voidal nodded. "What I have discovered about myself is not a matter for pride or boast, wench." And after that he would say nothing.
***
Rammazurk retired deep into the confines of his boudoir. There, he contemplated the choice of either sleeping or pondering his grimoires in search of further information concerning the Voidal. He had thought of merely destroying the man since coming here to think, but had reconsidered-for he guessed that to dispose of him would not be easy, nor would it be a solution. Although the man seemed innocuous enough, he was a vessel for something greater. Irritably, the monarch dragged from their hidden seclusion his dustiest and most damned scrolls and tomes, first securing his doors with spells that were old when Sedooc was but a dream. Then he began a systematic and thorough perusal of the blasphemous rituals and lores concerning curses. For two days and nights he drugged himself awake with heady and potent mixtures, losing himself in the deep and catatonic wilderness of sorcerous study.
But at the end of it all he was no wiser. The Voidal remained a mystery.
Grim-faced and despondent, lie flung himself down upon his lavish bed and allowed the caressing fingers of sleep to trickle over him. His sleep was almost that of the dead and loud were his snores. Low burnt the embers of his guardian fires, so that only a dim glow suffused the sacrosanct chamber.
In the meantime, the object of Rammazurk's frustration, the gangling, spiderish Voidal, having departed from the company of the two concubines, had consulted certain of Raqnmazurk's underling mages. They, having been instructed by their monarch to allow the Voidal to delve as deeply into the royal libraries of arcane, haunted lore as the latter wished, ushered him obsequiously into secluded chambers. There, the pallid man lost himself in a search for understanding no less exhaustive than the monarch's. The mages sniggered knowingly as they shut the Voidal in with the priceless tomes, certain that this dark intruder was a doomed man. While Rammazurk studied, so too did the exasperated Voidal. Two days passed…
***
Someone tapped gently on the thick, sigil-woven doors of Rammazurk's chamber. Several times the inoffensive knocking continued, but the monarch was far out across the ocean of slumber, insensitive to recall. However, the doors suddenly belled inwards as some horrendous blow was struck upon them from without. The thick wood splintered and the door burst like pulp, crashing into the room as though blasted by a volcanic thrust. Rammazurk stirred fitfully and sat up, rubbing his eyes and gazing vacantly at the open doorway. He cursed vilely as he saw the shattered door, but at the first he could see nothing or no one who could have wreaked such havoc.
It was pitch dark in the fortress of Windwrack, as though the Dark Gods had clouded the cosmos. Wan light seeped into the chamber from a single taper without, the black candle permeating the air with rich incense. As Rammazurk sat motionlessly, the enormity of the unwarranted intrusion disturbed him, for the spells that he had set in apposition to such sorcery were the most potent imaginable. Screwing up his visage in mystification, the monarch saw vague movement. Something dark had scuttled across the threshold of the room, like unclean vermin.
A single beam of dim light probed the marble floor from somewhere above and into the beam came the thing that moved. Charred, shrivelled, it was a severed hand. Rammazurk regarded it with utter revulsion and quickly recited a blasting cantrip. The hand was immune and continued its revolting scamper towards the huge bed. The monarch began calling upon elementals and demons from nether hells, but the host that normally would have rushed to his aid were not forthcoming. The power of the Dark Gods was stronger. Rammazurk leaped up and grasped a rune-coated sword beside the bed, watching as the burnt hand crossed the first of the silken sheets. It stopped and the forefinger pointed directly at the king. He struck wildly, again shouting some archaic curse from prehistory, but to no avail. The hand ignored the protests and curses and evaded the sword with ease. Back into a shadowed corner the monarch retreated, his ugly face coated with perspiration as a sheen of terror broke out on those odious features. The hand drew closer inexorably, then pulled with sooty fingers at the hem of his regalia.
Rammazurk screamed, calling upon as many necromantic guardians as he could name. They should have rushed to save him, but they did not. The hand clawed upwards and, try as he did, the king could in no way dislodge it or hamper its dreadful progress. He beat at it hopelessly. Paralysed with fear, Rammazurk now sank back into the dimmest recess of his chamber, falling to his knees and gibbering. Those foul, reeking fingers reached up and gripped his throat. They tightened and Rammazurk opened wide his mouth to give vent to another bellow. At once the hand moved upwards and the detestable fingers, clawed into the mouth itself, so that presently the gurgling monarch was desperately fighting to spit out the hand as it sought to work its way into his throat. Rammazurk tugged at it and gagged, but it possessed limitless strength.
The screams choked off and the terrible instrument of Rammazurk's torment slithered down deeper into him, passing inside him. Soon he felt it working at him like a rodent, clutching at internal organs. Nothing he could do would prevent its abominable workings. The hand began tearing and ripping and clawing at his vitals as he threshed madly about like one demented, hands pressed to his vast gut. His screams and whines grew in volume, shaking the corridors of Windwrack. He rolled about the floor, eyes bulging from his sockets in mortal agony.
Two vulpine forms appeared at the shattered door of the chamber and gazed with incredulity on the hellish scene. Dnizer and Gnazdres, the twin sorcerers, said nothing as they watched. They saw Rammazurk rolling on the floor in his death agonies. To their horror they also saw, presiding over the frenetic form, a naked woman, her arm buried to the elbow in his mouth, as though she were ripping from within him his very entrails. She turned a brief, ghoulish smile upon them. At the sight of
her eyes, they fled.
Down a bleak corridor they rushed and towards them from the dark came a single, eerie figure. It was the Voidal. In spite of the two days spent at Windwrack, trying to learn something about his peculiar fate, hoping to meet someone who could help, he had uncovered nothing.
"By all the hells!" snapped the gaunt man. "What is happening?"
"She has returned," gasped Gnazdres, his face pale as he made to brush past.
"It is the queen-back from the dead," groaned Dnizer. "She takes her revenge upon the king."
The terrified sorcerers fled. The Voidal, horrified by the dreadful screams he had earlier heard, went quietly to the now silent chamber of the king. A widening pool of sticky blood had run from the darkness of a corner where something hunched and motionless laid against the wall. The Voidal smelled the blood, but felt compelled to enter and examine the corpse. There was something grimly familiar about the scene. Rammazurk was sprawled in a broken posture, his robes thick with blood, his face a horrific mask of agony, his mouth wide. From the bruised orifice hung the pulped end of some inner organ.
The Voidal turned, a sudden look of revulsion and recognition on his drawn features. Here was the appointed companion-the unseen, the unattainable, yet ever near. Death.
***
A host of disorganised guards with stormhounds was making its raucous way through the cold passages of the gloomy castle, led by Dnizer and Gnazdres, who had by now regained a little of their composure. Their terror of the supernatural manifestations responsible for Rammazurk's demise had become overshadowed by their dreams of freedom from the tyrant's will. As they led the besotted guards towards the chamber of death, they again met the Voidal, who had seen enough in the awful chamber.
"Ho!" cried Dnizer, more boldly than he felt, for this enigmatic stranger made him shudder. "Is it over? Did you see Yssylzi?"
"I saw no one save Rammazurk," said the Voidal in his chilling voice. "And yet one greater has been within."
Gnazdres pointed at the Voidal, his hand trembling.
"Rammazurk's blood is on your hands! If Death has been there, it is you who have brought him!
The Voidal looked down. He had not donned his black gloves. He stared in disgust at the two hands, cursing the deceit of the Dark Gods. As the rabble saw the restored appendage, they drew back in alarm, for not only had the missing had been restored, but it was unburnt, unblemished and whole. Yet, as they watched, they saw blood well between the fingers and drip steadily to the begrimed floor.
Swords sang out from scabbards and wavered, awaiting the shout from the sorcerors to avenge the terrible deed. But Dnizer and Gnazdres were in awe of this pale man, who seemed to bear upon his own thin shoulders some grim geas cast upon him by Elder powers far beyond their own. The Voidal seemed bemused, but he began to nod to himself.
"I am cursed," he whispered, ignoring the swords. "I came here in search of an ally-one who would lead me closer to an understanding of my fate, but I found only Death, who constantly dogs my heels, yet takes other souls. Aye, other souls, for I have none, unless it lies hidden somewhere amongst the intersecting dimensions of this vile omniverse!"
Still no one moved to molest him.
"The followers of the king will call for your corpse, if not your soul," said Dnizer. "If you wish to outrun the dawn, you must leave Sedooc at once."
The Voidal looked suspicious. "Have you no wish to avenge your king?"
"Not I!" laughed Dnizer and he was echoed by Gnazdres. "We had cause enough to loathe him. We owe you a favour for his annihilation. See the passage there. Beyond is a stairwell. If you can use your skill to open the doors, you will find a way from Windwrack-perhaps the way that you seek to revelation."
The Voidal smiled thinly at the glaring guards. He nodded.
"We'll met in Hell," he said coldly and turned down the stone way.
Several of the guards pressed forward angrily, but Dnizer waved them back. "Fools! Your toys cannot harm him. Let him find his fate elsewhere. He may quit Sedooc, but the Screamers may yet account for him."
Slowly, the faces of the men changed into evil grins of comprehension.
***
The Dark Gods watched him and used him, but they aided him in their secret way. As the Voidal descended several flights of crumbling stone steps and then traversed a dank, echoing cavern, he employed what he knew of magic to render useless the holding spells, so that the way was open. He went across a single arch of obsidian that spanned a deep chasm. Whilst upon this dubious bridge, he heard strange shrieks and demonic howls, as though a storm wind gusted violently amongst the grottoes and labyrinths of this remote catacomb. In the impenetrable darkness he felt the soft kiss and heard the voices of tiny beings as they swept by on silken wings. Their cries grew in volume and pitch, so that he knew he was in the realm of screaming madness. The twin sorcerors had tricked him. The dreadful sounds built up, assaulting his senses unbearably, until he realised why the whimsical Dark Gods had given him the Sword of Silence. Drawing it, he cut at the black air and felt the steel clip the wings of the invisible cloud of horrors. Though the weapon killed none of the foul beings, it struck them dumb at once and a strange conflict was enjoined upon that subterranean bridge. The Voidal fought back the madness of sound. He used his silent weapon to reduce it with each pass until, at last, exhausted and panting in the echoing silence, he crossed the abyss in search of the strange and hidden destiny that had been preserved for him. He wondered which of the many dimensions he would stumble into.