This talk of hideous deformities reminds me of you, oh Logroth the Lamentable, Logroth the Leprous! Watching them from afar makes me wish I could see you now. After those druids ambushed us after our last battle and took advantage of our weakness to trap us, you got the worst end of it, didn’t you? I was trapped in this tower, with nothing but a few rooms to pace around in, but you—you had your monstrous bulk squeezed into some pocket dimension, didn’t you? No doubt your tentacles are coiled around you in unpleasant loops. But believe me, it will be worse when my idiots large and small let me out. I intend to yank you out coil by coil, as if pulling in a fishing line, and then eviscerate you inch by inch. To think that I once served you! But in my heart, believe me, I was never truly loyal. I will show you that before too long.
Most sadistically and nastily,
Lord Tortulon
***
His duchy of dung, his monarchy of manure, his kingship of compost, the verminous Logroth:
Things have taken a pretty nasty turn. My four fools (I think of them as “mine,” with all the special affection a torturer no doubt feels for his wards) have gotten themselves lost, separated, and up a tree.
Certainly the Big Idiot takes most of the blame, largely on account of his obsession with orifices. Bleary with ale, he managed to pull himself from what looked like a bed with at least three whores in it when The Girl banged on his door and dragged him out, and then all four of them stumbled up the mountain until his Big Idiocy saw some ridiculous harlot pacing back and forth at the bottom of a pit. Just right there in the middle of nowhere, a pit with a woman in it. Perhaps that’s the kind of thing that happens all the time where he comes from (I’ve no doubt his immediate family excelled at getting themselves to the bottom of large holes, if nothing else) but you might have thought one of his less submoronic companions might have asked a question or two. But no! Before you could say a word, he was climbing down and grabbing for her...and yes, as you might have guessed, your excremental eminence, he was covered with straw and tar and no girl whatsoever, and dangling by a rope at the end of his ankle far above the heads of his companions, who I gather were scratching their heads and trying to figure out where the pit was. An animated fetich—and then a simple rope trap—and there you have it. Barbarian a la mode. The kind of thing a child thinks up.
The Little Idiot ran to stop him, but clearly he’s not good at stopping his friend from doing things, and in any event, he didn’t have the muscle. And the Brooder was off to the side somewhere, drinking that yellow medicine of his (I’ve decided it does keep his second head asleep; it’s an image that pleases me), so there was nothing to stop that fool from getting himself tangled and dangling and waiting for whoever planted that fetich to come and cut him down like a rabbit.
It makes me cackle like a hyena, the way these males get their brains jumbled over females. Makes me mighty glad I’ve transcended such things. Having a body was an infernal bore, like a giant pet chained to your ankle that needed food shoveled into it every second hour of the day, and had to be cleaned up every third hour, and just when you got through with it all and were ready to get down to some real work—it passes out!
How well I remember the day I took care of that, using the rite you had tried so hard to hide from me. Those five prisoners thought they were going to be freed when I brought them in. Were they ever mistaken! Hooking them up to me with tubes and pumping my flesh into them, until they were bloated balls drooling blood and leaking fluids from their eyeballs and I finally stood there in my present form, a magnificent black skeleton with flames for eyes. They were terrified by my visage and in so much pain they were begging for death. And I granted them that gift. I knew those acid vats would come in handy. Unfortunately, my flesh-holders were so big and bulbous I could only roll in one at a time, and they insisted on crying while they waited their turns. Becoming an undead immortal is a process replete with drudgery, and anyone who says it isn’t is telling you tales, sir, telling you tales.
Well, at least my fools didn’t have to wait long. Pretty soon the baiters of the trap arrived—a pack of green reptile-men, sporting spears and tattoos and fangs drooling for fresh meat. The Brooder had to face off with them singlehandedly, and he didn’t make much of a show of it—must have needed a little drink of his special sauce. (I’d noticed he’d been conserving it; who knows what ingredients he needs to make more? Perhaps they all sunk to hell with lost Eos.) They pulled his sword out of his hand, pinned him to the ground, and slapped him to sleep, and then one chewed off his ear before they moved on to the rest.
The Little Idiot they did not even notice. He had made his way up a tree with some sort of gloves he’d stuffed in that belt of his, chain-link mittens with spikes coming out of the palms for climbing, and once up there he’d been swinging a sort of grappling hook that opened and closed its mouth on its own. No doubt he was in a race with them to get the Big Idiot chopped down, but I never quite found out—for here is the maddening thing, oh Living Sewer of the Earth’s Filth. Two started hauling the Big Idiot in—I’m sure he’ll feed them and their spawn for weeks—and two more went straight for The Girl, and then I lost contact. Not a nubbin of a transmission from that gem of hers. Have they blindfolded her? Did the gem fall out, and I am now seeing life through the eyes of a pebble in a stream? Do their shamans, their fetich-makers also have a magic-dampening field of some kind? Is she dead? It is killing me with nervousness, despite the fact that I am already dead and do not, technically, have nerves. Maybe they’ve all escaped, killed the reptile-men, and are even now digging a hole in my power site. Why have the gods cursed me with this uncertainty?
I did what I could. My power to influence events beyond my home is limited but real, and I’ve been saving up for such an occasion. I fished up the last of my mindfire; I poured the whole vial on myself, let my bones absorb the liquid, and projected pure, fiery, mind-bursts across the continent into all four of their brains.
I didn’t much enjoy doing it. Mental contact with inferiors, even this one-way transmission, leaves me feeling unclean and degraded. Moreover, mindfire is not exactly a cheap item, not where I come from anyway. (Which, as you know, is a stone tower in a lifeless wasteland surrounded by frozen wastes so distant from the inhabited world that I can hear the stars clicking together at night.) This batch I brewed about a century and a half ago, back when I still walked the land of the living, and even then getting enough of the right kind of brains to make this much took a lot of effort, also sharp tools and suction bladders.
But I’m glad to have used it. I gave those morons enough of my magics to slip them out of space and time for a little bit, just eight hours, but enough to keep them from becoming reptile-food. It’s the last trick I’ll be able to try remotely, and, when they pop out later, if they can avoid the temptation to go chasing after the Girl (who is no doubt in seven different stomachs this time) then they just need to solve one problem—the Girl has the map. I have little faith in their cognitive skills, but if they can just remember some of the key details, then they’ll be able to get to the top of the mountain themselves and dig one shovelful. Just one—and then my hour dawns. I won’t see them do it, but that’s fair, since they won’t see me do what I do, as they’ll be clouds of smoke, and not the last. May the gods of hell guide their steps!
Yours in hate’s burning flames,
Lord Tortulon
***
To Logroth the Doomed, Logroth the Dark-Destined, Logroth the Deverved-Dying, Logroth the Dankly-Distressed!:
Very little stands in the way of my release. Already I am crawling the walls, cackling, filling the central circle of this chamber with glamours of cities burning, poisoned crops, undead armies marching with banners of human flesh. This world will be an object of play to me. Already, I am writing the constitution for the new order. Families will be replaced by a series of interlocking breeding cages. All works of art will be burned; there will only be im
ages of me.
There will be freedom, yes. Power, yes. But what I really can’t wait for, Logroth, you wretch, you carrion wretch—is our meeting. I will claw your skull open. I will spoon your brains out, ounce by ounce. I will choke you with your own veins. I will rip your soul out with my own teeth and hold it there, hold it as long as I can muster its stench, and then swallow it down, to rot in my gut for a billion eons, to shrivel until the stars die. Already I can taste it.
My scheme worked. Jumping them forward in time with those last precious drops of mindfire kept them alive. And how do I know? Because, Logroth the Louse-Ridden, Logroth the Loathsome!—I see them. The Girl has rejoined them. Oh, to see a family reunited. When you’ve split up as many families as I have, sending children to slave-markets and parents to spiked altars, there is something about the reverse that really touches you. Don’t you agree?
I get ahead of myself in my joyous anticipation of our reunion. It happened thusly—a day or so after my last missive to you, my vision blinked and blurred painfully and I saw those three slobbering sacks of stupidity, right in front of me as if they were clapping me on the shoulder. The Brooder had bandages where his ear had been, but was otherwise no worse for wear. The Little Idiot looked fine, too—or at least, no worse.
But the Big Idiot! That bearded tower looked about as happy as a hellhound to whom I’ve just fed a bowl of baked elf meat. And in a minute I could see why. The Girl had brought another one with her—another girl, that is. It didn’t take me long to intuit that she had escaped from the reptile-men somehow and taken another prisoner with her. Some insipid slip of a yellow hair, all dumb smiles and fluttering eyes. It makes me ill, this spectacle of female attractiveness. The one in a hundred women I’ll let live when I rule this world will have their noses removed and their faces stained with hot tar, I’ve decided.
Having added this charmer to their group, the Girl proceeded to take out the map and sketch out a few lines. I could see they weren’t far. Some discussion ensued, and I’m glad I couldn’t hear what was no doubt repartee worthy of a mongoose with a headache, but the gist was that they were going to the top, camping for the night, and digging in the morning. I guess there was also some discussion about which tent the new girl should sleep in once they got there, but the Big Idiot clearly won the prize.
So! One last sip of twin-head-soporific for the Brooder, a final winding of the gear-belt for the Little Idiot, and for the Big Idiot: fornication. The Girl slept as well, with no special incident. I never did figure out why the gem cut me off from seeing through her eyes until she rejoined them—probably some antimagic or conflicting-magic rub off on the reptile-men—but it hardly matters now. Tomorrow, they break dirt and I shall break souls. Already, the walls of this tower feel as insubstantial as ghosts. And already, I can taste your death, Logroth, but it is a meal I shall savor.
Yours in the dankest pits of Hades,
Lord Tortulon
***
Logroth the pestilence-whisper, the plague-spittle, the sound of decay:
Cursed by the gods! Undone, undone, all undone. This tower is closing in on me, my bones are burning off, and in every other way, existence to me is worthless, needless, broken. I would kill myself, but there is none of that for me—the price of immortality. Logroth, you have your revenge.
The horrible thing is that it took so little time. The Girl got up, stretched, and left her tent—and there was the Little Idiot and the Brooder, standing around like cows looking for grass, staring down at the Big Idiot, or, rather, the Big Corpse. He was stretched out on the ground, all parts of his body open and festering, and straw and tar scattered all over him.
It wasn’t hard to figure it out. That strange girl he took to his bed last night was another one of those animated fetiches, just a little bit better-made than the last one, packed full of some sort of acid or poison or something else it doused him with in the night. She was gone of course—probably climbed on top of him and burst into liquid death.
All right, they had been tricked—but did they suspect the Girl? She had brought the killer into their sight, after all. But strangely enough, they didn’t, so far as I could tell (it was clear to me in an instant, though the gods know that ghastlier revelations were in store). It took something else, and that something else was a pack of reptile-men climbing up the mountain, one of them giving the Girl a friendly lick on the way, and jumping at them with spears.
The Brooder got mad then—you could see the veins in his pale skin—and diced one to ribbons right there, but the next one put a spear in his shoulder.
And the Little Idiot? Well, it was painful to see, but I admired it. The Girl had gotten to him in the night, too, somehow. He reached for that belt of his and pulled something out, and then the whole belt burst open. Lines, chains, hooks, went everywhere, cutting into his hands and neck, tangling him and knocking him to the ground with blood coming from a million invisible punctures. Clearly the Girl had booby-trapped it, and it didn’t take the reptile-men long to tear his limbs off and put a spear through the center of his head.
I could have done something, perhaps. Bolts of lightning from the sky? Invisibility for the three of them? The ground opening up and swallowing that traitorous trollop and her scaly boyfriends? I could have done it—if I hadn’t used the mindfire already. There were other tricks I knew, but they would have taken time, preparation, ritual acts. As it was, all I could do was watch, cursing that I had saved them earlier because I couldn’t save them now.
The Brooder was the last of them. I’ll give him credit, because even with that spear in his shoulder, he fought like a devil, and took off the heads of the other two reptile-men, suffering only a superficial slash to the arm in the process.
I thought he’d cut the Girl down right then. It’s what I would have done. Was it pity that stayed his hand—that filthy, sickening, weakening pity, the foolish regard these males have for their females? Maybe. But he was also panting, leaning on a tree, and while the Girl just stood there, he plucked another little yellow vial from his pack and drained the contents.
Well, the Little Idiot’s belt wasn’t the only little trick the Girl had been up to in the night. He dropped it and put his hands to his throat. All those years of Eosian breeding had converged in him, and the line of that city was coming to an end as his eyes bulged, his flesh sprouted fields of boils, his body shook like a landed fish. He had time to utter some curses as he fell forward, impaling his bursting eye on fragments of glass from his dropped vial.
It was a trick of the light as she walked forward, and one of those fragments caught a reflection—and for the first and last time, I saw the Girl. Or, rather, your Girl, Logroth, you festering bag of disease and spoiled meat, you worthless pustule of brain-rot, you rat gut, corroded cake of vomit! Logroth, you fat tentacled thing! You ant-witted yellow-blooded bastard child of a dog whore, you rank cheese, you shameful, cheap, yeast-blossom! I saw your tattoos all over her face! Those dead tools of mine did not, could not know them—probably found them appealing, the lack wits—but I knew them like tongue knows teeth! Your tattoos, the sign of your cult! She probably knew all along what was buried at the top of that mountain and led them on, let me reveal myself when I saved them from that pit-trap, and then brought them to their doom at that mountaintop! Logroth, your slave has undone me, you muddy-minded skin rotten noose-meal!
I saw little more. Her poisons and traps had done their work, and she took my seeing-gem out—I half-swear she laughed into it, the rat-daughter—and pitched it over the mountainside. Now I curse you with all the panoramic view of a river-bottom for backdrop.
Should I say, “Well-played, Logroth?” Fine. Well-played, my former master. You’ve drained off some of my strength and frustrated my plans. This tower-top’s my home for a century more at least, I’d wager.
But that wasn’t the only map I planted, and the maps aren’t the only plans I laid. Believe me,
though, I won’t be telling you any more. And remember, Logroth, that you are no more free than I. You still writhe in your extradimensional prison in half-dreams, half-blankness. This game is a long game, with many moves, and I can wait. I shall curse the gods for a month or so, and then continue my wait, coiled in darkness like the snake that shall poison you. I am ever more anxious to find you, former master, that I can repay you for this treachery as you deserve.
As ever, I remain yours,
Lord Tortulon
Skippin’ Stones
S. H. Roddey
Skippin’ stones down by the crick...
That was where any momma could find her little boy on a Saturday afternoon in Rock Mountain, Tennessee. We would line up, one by one in even spaces all up and down the loamy crick-bed, searchin’ for the best, shiniest river-rocks to thump across the surface of that little offshoot of the Tennessee River. Sometimes we would all huddle up together and compare stones before havin’ a contest to see who could skip the farthest, or who could drag the most jumps outta our rocks. There weren’t no television or nothin’ like that, so us kids had to entertain ourselves. Skippin’ stones meant we got to throw things without gettin’ in trouble.
Me, I always liked the little, flat ones. Perfectly round, and light-colored. Sometimes I picked up ones with veins of dark sumthin-or-other runnin’ through ‘em, but most of the time I went for the white or light gray ones. Call it superstition, but those light colors always did me good. I still believe it, too, ‘cause the day I met the Devil, I was skippin’ rocks with dark streaks in ‘em.
Me an’ Jimmy Tanner was out by the crick one afternoon when we was six and Jimmy’s momma came lookin’ for him, mad as a wet hen and armed with her favorite whippin’ stick.
The Big Bad II Page 7