Swords v. Cthulhu

by Jesse Bullington

  If tracing one’s own path across the Ocean Amorphous was difficult, tracking another’s was even more so.

  Or so I could only hope. I first caught wind of the woman following me — for it was clearly a woman — a week prior. Her boat must have been at least as swift and silent as mine, but her musk was unmistakable. Since then, I had barely slept. Not that sleep has come easy to me over the years since I became the Scabbard of the Blade of Anothqgg. My soul had been thrown countless times across the dimensions untold, strapped to my master’s hip as he waged war with other Great Old Ones, in a war that I had come to understand was an uprising against their masters. The Gods had Gods of their own, and to them Anothqgg was as puny as I was to him. I could gather little of this from my vantage; as my body slumped in a kind of stasis on this stinking world, I was flung elsewhere and otherwhen, my spirit shuddering in ecstatic agony each time Anothqgg sheathed and unsheathed his Blade. Each time, he asked me, “Do you receive this Blade unto your soul? Answer me now, for every time I commit slaughter with it, you must agree to let it return to its Scabbard before it can be so quenched. You may refuse, of course. But then you will remain here, in the void, at my behest, adrift for all eternity.”

  What choice did I have? This wasn’t a window into death, a reprieve from my burden. This was everlasting nothingness, to be endured awake and without hope. Each time Anothqgg posed this conundrum of me, I assented. No torment could have been worse.

  When I did return from his battles, which might have lasted seconds or centuries, sleep eluded me as much as did tranquility or succor. I was alone, more alone than alone, my only reason for existence to serve as a functionary — nay, a function — of a being beyond my perception or comprehension. The irony was not lost on me: I was the Blade’s Scabbard, yet I was a stranger to it, and it to me. When I caught sight of the hilt, I could see the many skulls — some human; some horned; some grotesque, bulbous sculptures of bone that might have only come from the ossuary of the netherworld — that encrusted it. For all I knew, it wasn’t a sword at all, but the tusk or toenail or eyelash of some vast, gargantuan entity that dwarfed even the Gods of the Gods.

  Such thoughts churned through my brain as I set the trap for my pursuer. Exhausted from constant flight, parched from drinking half-filtered mud, subsisting on steamed ferns and the repulsive pulp of the lungfish, I halted for the night and devised an elaborate web of vines in the clearing around me. As I did so, the ground quivered. Nearby, the bottomless mud of the Ocean Amorphous burbled and slurped. Was the Drifting to take hold tonight? I pushed the thought from my mind as I finished tying and concealing my apparatus. I squinted at it from one angle, then another. I wove the trap according to the arcane geometries I had observed, if never fully understood, as my soul had dangled from the belt of Anothqgg on some quasar-strewn battlefield. These geometries were impossible to devise according to the calculus of this flattened plane, but I relied on brute cunning to construct an admittedly paltry facsimile, just enough to render my trap invisible — that is, assuming my pursuer was not able to exist in more than one point in space and time simultaneously. Perhaps I would be so blessed.

  Satisfied with my handiwork, I leaned against a large stone, smoothed by the millennia of the Drifting, and dared to let the tremors lull me into a trance. The opal moon shone down, mottled as if by disease. What lies upon that moon, I wondered, and beyond it? Was it a thing, or a lack of a thing? A globe or a hole? Were moon and sky perhaps made of some similar viscous liquid, like a yolk within the white of an egg? If so, could it somehow be hatched? The cosmos itself, that is? Was Anothqgg himself the hen? Or the fox come to poach? Or the mother of universes who devours her own young? My mind swam as I beheld that orb, that orifice, white within black. Positive space became negative, and negative positive. A profound throe of disgust sickened me to the marrow.

  My loathsome reverie was cut short by the suck of footfalls in mud.

  There was no posturing, no blustery preamble. I leapt to my feet, my hand on the hilt of the Blade. My master slumbered, so it was mine to draw into form, its only intersection in this dimension. As such, it appeared almost common, save for the shimmer it caused in the air around it.

  “I am Ili, the Sheath of the Sword of Pnthai,” the woman intoned. Her voice was hoarse, her hair yellow and wild, her limbs sinewy and thin. Her face was contorted in spasms of barely checked excruciation. For a moment, my heart clenched in harmony with hers. Another Sheath? Here, in this world? The things we might share with each other! The tales we might tell! The pain only the other could understand… Sentiment, all of it. I held my breath until my ribs ached, crushing the softness inside me.

  She stared at me with eyes like flint, then went on with her ritual incantation: “I will take your hair as my trophy, your skin as my tapestry, your innards as chum for the demons I will tame. I will please my master with you, and by doing so become her Squire.”

  A grin curled my lips. “You will take my blade, aye. The length of it. And if you are lucky, you will die before you glimpse it twice.”

  With that, the ground heaved. The stone I had leaned against a moment before flew into the air. A wave of mud broke over the shore and drenched us both in the sour stench of the sea.

  So it began.

  Some swords ring like bells when struck. My blade and that of the challenger Ili clashed like cities being pitched against one another. She brandished hers with the poise of a champion; I held mine like a beast with a bone.

  Mud drenched us. Each time I came close to scoring scalp or severing limb, the quaking earth shuddered, and I lost purchase. The island around us squirmed in the throes of some topological mutation, no longer beholden to the laws of geology. Ili did not taunt me, nor I her. The peals of our blades were proclamation enough.

  Near my feet, a geyser of fetid slime erupted. Boiling and blinding, the rust-red gout of fungoid scum made me drop my guard long enough for Ili to clip my breast with her blade. The pain bit into me like the teeth of a living thing. Twisting out of the way, I saw that it was more than a mere nick. Like the Blade of Anothqgg, her sword intersected the space around us in eldritch ways. The incision widened, as if the strike were still happening, as if the moment had slowed down and refused to move on. I collapsed, a kind of fire coursing across my chest. A river of mud opened just before me, as if mocking my wound.

  The Blade of Anothqgg skittered from my hands and plunged into it, disappearing from sight.

  I raised my arms in feeble defense. Ili stood over me. The point of her blade hovered above my forehead.

  Her eyes bored into mine. There was no triumph in her gaze. Only pain, the anguish that comes from one’s soul being strewn through the cosmos, infected by the violation of a lance so holy as to be unholy.

  But was life not worth living? Even after becoming the Scabbard of the Blade of Anothqgg, I had loved. Hesitantly, true, but not without pleasure. I had even laughed. It was a bitter, blackened laugh, but perhaps more hearty because of that. Death might free me — who knew? The Great Old Ones worked in unfathomable ways — or it might consign me to an even grimmer fate. I was not yet ready to know.

  I grasped her blade. It bit into my flesh. Its vibrations thrummed through my bones. Blood seeped down my forearms, first in rivulets, then in streams.

  Ili’s lust was not sated. I could see it in her eyes. Tortured yet unable to veer from her destiny, she tightened her grip. Slick with sweat, a tendon along the side of her neck fluttered elegantly. It was beautiful. Even here, even now, I could know beauty. It came as a revelation to me, and I gasped at the enormity of it, larger and grander than the pulsars I had seen extinguished in uncounted skirmishes between the Great Old Ones.

  Ili, however, stayed her hand. Her gaze left me. The ground rumbled and palpitated around us. A force whose puissance overrode our petty squabble seized us, and we both turned our heads as the soil blossomed like a flower.

  Out of it came Anothqgg.

  I cannot describe him
. I would not if I could. With a wave of his hand — I call it a hand, but it was the tip of some serpentine appendage I have no words for — he sent Ili’s head whirling off into the wind, a spume of melted skin and skull.

  With the same appendage, he reached into the river of mud that now flowed mightily through the dissolving island. From it he withdrew his Blade. In his hand, it looked nothing like it did in mine. It stretched from his hand to the heavens, in all directions at once, in directions that no coordinates could name.

  He offered it to me.

  Out of instinct I reached for it.

  Then I stopped. I was not in the void, on the battlefield of the Great Old Ones and the Ones Even Older and Greater. I was here. Home. How I loathed it. How it sheltered me now.

  I looked around and laughed. It was not a desperate laugh, nor the cackle of the mad. The Ocean Amorphous seethed. Along the horizon, innumerable islands evaporated into palls of oily haze. The planet could not support the weight of Anothqgg, or even the terrible clangor of his voice. Pandemonium danced above me, a swirling storm of desolation as wide as the sky. It seemed to open into the cosmos, which glared down like an exquisite, crystalline eye.

  The moon cracked and fell into it.

  My home was dying. And in its death, it knew beauty.

  I drew my hand away from the Blade. “I am a daughter of this place, this filthy hell, this abscess of putrefaction. I would fight over and die for it, a hundred times over,” I screamed into the hissing maelstrom with labored breath. The storm swallowed the pitiful chitter of my voice. Yet it echoed, and those echoes grew, spiraling outward, elongated and distorted, crawling across the chaos, until my soul emerged, squinting in the dim light of the violet sun like an internal organ thrust into the cruel air.

  “Then so you shall,” came the voice of Anothqgg.

  He pushed his Blade into me. Not my soul, but my flesh.

  As I bled, so did the world. The bedlam fell to mute silence as the atmosphere dissipated around me, leaving no medium for the roar to traverse. The sea poured skyward, a colossal pillar of mud emptying out into infinity. With it, I began to rise.

  At last, I belonged.

  The Matter of Aude

  Natania Barron

  It did not take long for the thrill of Aude’s grand scheme to wear off. Once she passed through the high gates of Aachen, disguised as Turpin’s clerk — she had taken the name of Milo — relief quickly found itself replaced by a nagging concern that she would be recognized. Or even worse, that Turpin would betray her.

  The bishop had done her a great service in going along with her ruse, but he never would have done so had she not persuaded him with a great and powerful secret. That, and the fact that the Heavenly Mother, the Queen of Heaven, had appeared to her in a dream and told her to keep her brother Olivier from harm. That seemed to carry weight with Turpin.

  Aude had always felt a special kinship to the Mother of God, but now all else felt obliterated. Let the men have their Christ the King. She knew the Queen of Heaven spoke to her in ways none of them would ever understand. And now she had a purpose: to save her brother.

  Roland was not far ahead of them; she could see the black curls at the nape of his neck, just below his golden helmet. Her betrothed. The man she would spend the rest of her life with, should he return from this bitter war with the Saracen king, Balan. The man she was expected to have children with, to raise a brighter generation, once peace was restored.

  But Aude was not concerned that Roland might recognize her. They had spent such a small amount of time together, she was fairly certain he would not know the difference between her and the twenty thousand-odd men in their retinue. He had a habit of finding other things to look at when she was near him, anyway. Theirs was a union of rank and reputation and she was not blind to it, even if she played it so.

  No, Roland would not be the challenge. Olivier was.

  And Olivier was not only her challenge, but also her reason for leaving courtly life. It was all due to their king, Charlemagne, sending Olivier to fight a giant. A creature known as Fierabras, who was rumored to be the deformed son of Balan himself.

  As she brooded over her brother’s doom, the bishop looked sidelong at her, his narrow gaze taking her in once more. If not for those sly, shifting eyes, he might have been a handsome man.

  “You don’t look as nervous as I expected,” said Turpin, leaning over and speaking softly. “Perhaps there’s more of your brother in you than I imagined.”

  “I am not afraid, not of the fighting,” she said, keeping her voice low. “The Queen of Heaven has guided my steps and kept me safe, even when I doubted.”

  “You should consider trying it on, then, fear,” Turpin said, his smile turning the tip of his beard up just slightly.

  “I only want to be close enough to Olivier to help him, when I learn how I may do so.”

  “Yes, so you said. The Queen of Heaven will be fighting on your side — who can be against you? You, an ugly girl in a monk’s habit.”

  She said nothing and continued forward on her unhappy donkey.

  The travel was treacherous and long. Aude had never been in the company of so many men, nor been privy to their strange practices. In the evening they sat together under the stars and sang hymns and drank wine. As the night deepened, the hymns turned to songs of a more lascivious nature. Roland was most often the instigator of such ribaldry, much to Aude’s embarrassment. He also drank more than he should, making a fool of himself in front of the other men. When the sun rose, it appeared that the previous night’s madness was forgotten, and Roland, while puffy in the face and ragged of voice, was back to his stalwart self.

  One such morning, after four days of traveling down through Burgundy, Roland and Olivier’s voices rose without warning outside Turpin’s tent. Aude awoke from a dream where the Queen of Heaven was showing her something in a pool, a kind of scepter or stick, but she could not see it clearly. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she looked for Turpin, but he was nowhere to be seen, having enjoyed himself overmuch the night before. Aude hid her face at the sound of the tent flap opening.

  “Oh, it’s just the clerk,” said Roland, making to leave immediately.

  “Wait. Perhaps he knows where Turpin’s gone off to,” Olivier said.

  Aude had been prepared for such an occasion, and bowed her head so that the monk’s hood she wore obscured her face even further.

  “Why is he flinching like that?” Roland asked Olivier, not quite quietly enough to be polite. “Show us your face, boy.”

  “He’s disfigured, if I recall,” Olivier replied. “Twisted by God and cursed to walk scorned by man. But blessed to have been taken in by Bishop Turpin. No matter. Milo, is it?”

  Aude nodded and muttered, “Yes, lord.”

  “Do you know the whereabouts of your master?” Olivier pressed, poking his head further into the tent.

  Aude shook her head. “No, sir.”

  “Probably face down in some pretty tits —” Roland began.

  Olivier cut him off. “If you see him, Milo, please let us know.”

  Aude nodded her head vigorously and waited for them to leave. Roland owed so much to Olivier, and he never could see it. It made her wonder what it would be like when she was Roland’s wife.

  She let out a long breath and tried to get a better look around the room for clues to the bishop’s whereabouts.

  It was rare that Aude left the tent without Turpin, but when she glanced out the tent flap and noticed the soldiers tearing down and preparing for the next day’s march, she couldn’t help but take a look for herself. Immediately she was taken by just how dirty everything and everyone was. Having spent the majority of her life at court in Vienne, and until recently at Aachen, she was used to an existence that demanded a certain level of cleanliness. Clothing was spotless, faces were clean, manners were polished. Expressions were guarded and conversation was highly regulated.

  But here, the men were not just dirty, but sc
arred and wounded. Their horses were scarred and wounded. They were loud, they spoke in Latin and all dialects of Frankish, and swore in even more tongues.

  It was an exhilarating, terrifying world, especially without the guidance of Turpin.

  “You’ll give yourself away if you gape at them,” came the bishop’s voice from behind Aude. He smelled of stale ale, and something fouler.

  “Roland and my… and Olivier were looking for you,” Aude said under her breath. “They came in on me.”

  “Beyond rude,” Turpin replied. He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his robe, then spat.

  “If Olivier had seen me —”

  “Your ruse would have been up. Smile, princess, and don’t look so dour. We’re due in Hispania in but a week’s time. And then you may enact whatever plan you’ve devised to dissuade your brother from fighting the giant. You do have a plan, do you not?”

  Aude frowned and said nothing.

  Turpin said, “Well, then go prepare the asses. We’ve a long road ahead. Use the time to think well upon your plan, so I can be free of my oath to you, you treacherous little mouse.”

  The smooth green fields and woods of Burgundy grew steeper faster than Aude could believe. With the sea to the west, it had felt like an endless stretch of emerald, with breezy fields and farms. But within a day, mountains appeared to the south, great and jagged and dark against the horizon.

  Turpin indicated that beyond those mountains was Hispania. But before they could reach it, they had to move through the treacherous mountains, not knowing when or where Balan’s forces would meet them.

  Aude had imagined the meeting would be a great clashing of swords. She expected at any moment that out of the hills would pour a host of screaming pagans, eyes wide and faces covered with hideous markings. Such were the stories she had heard at court.