Swords v. Cthulhu

by Jesse Bullington

  Elspeth drank until her thoughts and stomach calmed. She pushed the horror out of her mind, focusing on chewing her paltry share of the rabbit Ghostsign had warmed for them. Nanrin, who could summon the strangest things from the earth, gathered the last of their campfire into a conjured jar of rippled glass. Elspeth thought it should have smothered out in the jar, but it burned bright and warm, guiding them as they crossed the ice shelf, heading for the tundra just beyond.

  The ice shelf was a place Elspeth would not soon forget, and not only for the beasts they had encountered and the god they had slain. She loved to journey, and the barren land was breathtaking, no trees to spoil the even line of the white horizon, only deeply blue and plunging cracks to show any change in the ground ahead of them. The crossing was slow, and when they reached the shelf’s jagged edge it became slower still. Their descent took the better part of a day, twilight coating the sky and fresh snow spitting down from meager clouds, deepening the chill that clung to the ice shelf. It loomed behind them yet, strange and pale as the moon rose in the sky. The moon was as pale as ice itself, its light throwing all into harsh lines. Elspeth wanted to make camp, but saw in the near distance the first tangle of trees that gave away the River Tayl. It was said to be the longest river in all the world, and the foulest.

  In the moonlight the trees resembled men hunched to the ground; they called to mind the misshapen form of the dark man, scrabbling for things he could never hold, even as riches spilled from his fingers. He had too many hands and so did the trees. Elspeth allowed herself a shudder as she looked at them, the other women striding past when she paused. She could not say yet where the shattered temple lay; only when an inky arm slithered past her and pointed — illuminating the part of the river cloaked in deepest shadow — did she know. She said nothing to her companions, only angled her steps where the dark man had indicated; one by one, the women altered their course to align with hers. The objections began.

  “We are in no condition to face — ”

  “ — should camp here and plan a way for — ”

  “The fire begins to sputt — ”

  “We face what comes,” Elspeth said. Only Basher had not complained, and Elspeth looked at the dwarf. The smaller woman’s face was split by a fierce grin.

  “Tonight then, you shall give in? Whatever it may be, Keelan, I am here.” The dwarf’s smile deepened, and Elspeth nodded. “We shall not lose another tonight. We need all who remain.” She could not believe they might assault Lowenhold Prison with fewer than five; perhaps there would be a way, perhaps the prison would not be so daunting… she laughed softly at her own foolish hope.

  “She begins to lose her nerve,” Ghostsign said.

  “It is not that,” Elspeth said. “Only — ”

  She stopped, eyes upon the wooded riverbank. She came to see they were not trees at all, but living, breathing creatures. They were black and rough, twisted as live oaks would be, and perhaps the mud did anchor them, but there the resemblance ended. Each struggled to free itself from the swamp’s mud, but their limbs were new and weak. As wolf pups might, they snapped ugly mouths when their fellows swayed too close.

  The wreck of the temple became visible as the horde of newborns parted. The old stone was coated in mud, looking as though it had been pushed from its foundations by the creatures’ struggle. Within the temple they would find it — her? Elspeth did not know, did not care. If slaying this thing brought them one step closer to the prison —

  The thing, such as it was, emerged unbidden, uncalled. A thousand-thousand shrieking tentacles pushed out from the temple’s ruin, stones cracking like shells as the beast clawed its way out. It would have made even the ice shelf seem small, more and more body unfolding itself from the temple and spreading into the sky.

  As the great creature reached into the silver moonlight, the young screeched their welcome. Their own tentacled limbs writhed like a field of grass in the wind; under the moon’s light the effect was dizzying, and Elspeth drew Feymal. She met the thousand-eyed gaze and called the beast by the name the dark man had woven into her dream.

  “Shub-Niggurath!”

  With a sound of thunder, Shub-Niggurath forced itself wholly free of the temple, stone avalanching down as the beast thrashed into the sky. The shrieking globe of it blocked out the moon, and where its tentacles didn’t end in mouths, they were barbed and dripping with rot from its long nesting beneath the river temple.

  Elspeth raised Feymal and Shub-Niggurath laughed, a repulsive sound that poured its way into her ears as boiling oil. Elspeth believed her brain would be eaten from her skull, and dropped to her knees, even as Nanrin also fell. The jar of fire shattered and in the wet of the swamp the flames hissed out, leaving them in moonlight’s chill. Winseris let fly with arrows, and though the barbed and poisoned missiles plunged into countless fanged mouths, Shub-Niggurath’s laugh only deepened, as though these wounds did not carry pain or death.

  Elspeth had no way to reach the floating beast, so high had it risen above the temple ruin, and so began where she could: on the ground, with its young. Feymal cut hungrily through the tender boughs. Everywhere a limb fell, blood coursed to deepen the ebon foulness of the river. The shrieking deaths of its young brought Shub-Niggurath from the sky.

  It swept over the temple’s scattered stones and Elspeth charged to meet its hideous mass. She leaped sideways, from fallen stone to fallen stone, dodging the drooling, fanged mouths of Shub-Niggurath. When the first mouth caught her shoulder, hot and fetid, Elspeth reeled backward, slicing up and out with Feymal. The sword’s bright edge severed the tentacle, though the mouth clung yet to her flesh. A bright trail of sour blood arced upward against the night sky.

  It was then that Elspeth saw Basher, charging the furious Shub-Niggurath, screaming “Iä! Iä! Iä!”

  Basher launched herself into the insect-laced air as if born to the sky — not a dwarf at all, but a sleek, flying animal of the clouds, and so it became, as Elspeth watched the way the compact dwarf body changed, the way the body released what it had held. One form folded aside so the second, a glorious shadow dragon, could emerge. The ink-cloud dragon clawed itself into the sky with silver talons, obsidian wings unfurling behind. Basher’s tail whipped foul and forked into Shub-Niggurath.

  But Shub-Niggurath would not go quietly; even spiraling down to earth, it lunged screaming for Basher, enveloping the dragon with its endless tentacles. Basher was swallowed, wings collapsing as if broken at the root, tail lashing the air, while Shub-Niggurath folded and consumed her. Elspeth’s wonder turned to horror, even as Winseris and Nanrin advanced, arrows and bright ropes of flame directed at the boundless creature. Ghostsign, too, leaped across fallen stones and severed tentacles, slashing any limbs within reach. It was the pattering rain of warm slop from the onslaught that got Elspeth moving. Feymal screamed its death song between Elspeth’s sanguine palms, ravenous for the tender curve of Shub-Niggurath’s belly. The blade cut and pulled, until the fiend was split down its center, surrendering itself and the bloodied wreck it had made of Basher.

  Elspeth coiled a shaking arm under the dragon’s jaw, but could not haul her free, even as the others told her no, stop. She sank sobbing into the steaming viscera and prayed that Basher might yet breathe, but the dragon, the dwarf, hung dead in Elspeth’s arms, the ruin of the monstrosity streaming from Basher’s shadowed scales.

  In the wake of Shub-Niggurath’s death, its young fell silent. Elspeth pushed away from the dead and stood dripping blood over the field of young; they were not dead.

  “Burn them,” Elspeth told Nanrin. The witch conjured a fire from the depths of their fourfold grief, enough flame to enshroud the thousand young and burn them from the face of the world. The fire sparked on the greasy surface of the wretched river, sending a ribbon of flame north and south.

  The scent of death still hung in the air as they marched south in a single, gore-drenched line along the still burning River Tayl. The dark man appeared beside Elspeth, an
d though she kept her eyes forward, she felt him, as oily and hot in her ear as Shub-Niggurath had been. She watched as he opened a portal in the world, cutting one place into another. Following the River Tayl, it would be a long walk to Khyber Bay, and an even longer walk to find a ship that might carry them — where? She thought the question, and he only laughed, barbarous and cold.

  The portal — a gate? — shone like a collection of iridescent, globular coins, and none save Elspeth took note of it. One moment the party followed the burning river, with the cries of the dying young in their ears. The next, it was Holy Wood they approached, the ground cracked and desert-dry beneath their boots. Still dripping blood, Feymal trembled in Elspeth’s hand, as if it knew the land that had birthed it, and the sword sang to unleash horrors anew. Holy Wood — so named, though no tree marred the horizon as far as one could see — was said to be as distant from all things as the stars were distant from the world. Unreachable by any but the most faithful, the desert was home to a black pit where it was said the one true god did live.

  Elspeth knew Holy Wood put them closer to the Dunegall Sea, from whose tossed blue-gray waves the dismay of Lowenhold Prison rose, ebon shards thrown from heavens that had never known starlight. In the dark of her mind, Elspeth felt the slither of waterlogged tentacles and saw the ratcheting open of an ancient eye, amber and upon her. She did not look away, only kept advancing until the atrocity bowed its head.

  Before her Holy Wood yawned, black and vile, countless horrors crawling from its darkness. The star that fragmented itself into Lowenhold had landed here first, a fist in the dry earth, an immeasurable breach from which none had returned. The beasts had made the desert their plaything, shitting the dust to mud, lobbing handfuls of wet at one another. They were goblins and sprites, mischief and mayhem.

  “There,” Ghostsign said, and leveled a finger at the largest of the creatures rampaging in the dirt.

  A winged serpent slithered its way through the chaos toward her. Elspeth supposed she should have been in awe that these creatures existed, that they drew the same air she did, but she saw these beasts as she saw the dark man: only as a means to an end. The dark man cared for none of them; saw in them only the means to his ascendancy.

  “Yig.” She growled the name. In its great arching wings, Elspeth saw only the wreck that had been made of Basher, and she charged with a fiendish scream. To her he was but a lock that, once removed, would see them closer to opening the prison gates. He was a thing to be cut open and bypassed, nothing more.

  In her rage, Elspeth had no clear notion of where the other women were; they were vague impressions, arrows whispering past, flame and other spells brightening the dusty air, but her focus was the serpent. She danced in close, a sword’s length away from the beast.

  Instead of taking to the air, the god-serpent used its wings to buffet Elspeth before she could strike. She was swept from her feet into the foul wet of the ground, where the snake fell upon her, lunging with his poison-fanged maw.

  Elspeth drew the beast closer — wrapped her legs around its writhing length and plunged Feymal through its scaled, quivering belly. With one hard upward pull, she cut Yig from belly to jaw, coating herself in a warm shower of blood. The two halves of the serpent flailed in death’s final confusion, then collapsed on either side of her drenched body.

  It should not have been so easy, Elspeth thought, and her heart hammered. She looked for the next assault, but heard only the distant shriek of that imprisoned aquatic monstrosity — as if it knew the locks were being undone. This cry echoed in her own bones so thoroughly, it was a surprise to feel a new blade against her throat, to look into the eyes of the archer Winseris and discover murderous intent.

  Winseris had not changed so much as she had finally become herself — much as Basher before her. The regal costuming was discarded, Winseris’s black mouth overflowing with glassy, needled teeth running with blood. Elspeth pushed herself backward and away, nicking her throat on the blade, and scrabbling upon the hard, cracked ground as Winseris advanced.

  Elspeth kicked a foot into Winseris’s chest, into her jaw, but the creature transformed under every assault. Winseris was as water, rushing past stones in its path, and if not around, then over. Elspeth could see nothing but crimson waves of changing flesh through which Winseris sank. Feymal struck, but did not strike true; everywhere Elspeth tried to counter, Winseris flowed in another direction. If she split around Feymal’s sharp bite, it was only to reassemble herself on the other side.

  Gradually Elspeth became aware of the stark light of Holy Wood’s dust-clouded sky, visible through Winseris’s bloodied body. The sky was unveiled entirely, Nanrin standing at what had been Winseris’s feet, drawing her off Elspeth with hands cloaked in fresh blood. She fed their former ally into a conjured jar, the sides of which did not allow Winseris passage. Winseris pooled in the bottom as fanged and gnawing ichors, unable to escape. Nanrin sealed the jar with a spoken spell, Ghostsign lunging for the conjurer’s injured hands once she had finished. But it was another spell that eventually stopped the bleeding; Nanrin appeared to suck the blood back into her body, so quickly did her hands run clean.

  Elspeth eyed Ghostsign and Nanrin, and they returned her stare. All was quiet, and Elspeth waited for them to turn on her, the way they no doubt waited for her to turn on them. Around them the dust swirled, the beasts having crawled back into the hole that was Holy Wood, and for long breaths none of the women moved. When Elspeth picked up Feymal from the dust, Ghostsign rocked forward on her knees, and Nanrin lifted her hands, though they shook with exhaustion.

  Elspeth reached into the neck of her leather bodice to withdraw a sweat-soaked cloth. She wiped the sheen of blood from Feymal as she said, “You realize we have been betrayed?”

  The breath seemed to go out of Ghostsign entirely, while Nanrin lowered her shaking hands. Elspeth let this idea sit with them as she cleaned her blade. The wind moaned low, lifting more dust, settling it, only to lift it once more.

  “The dark man?” Nanrin asked. In her lap, within the jar, Winseris spun in furious circles, unable to escape. Nanrin slapped the glass side and Winseris sank into resigned stillness.

  “Who else?” Ghostsign snapped, her expression as hard as Elspeth’s must be.

  “Why would he place such a creature within our own party?” Nanrin objected. “He needs us to do his killing —”

  “Does he.”

  It was question and statement both, Elspeth confident she had the way of it now. “Who cut S’tya-Yg’Nalle from stem to stern?” she asked them. “Who rendered Shub-Niggurath into debris? Who decimated that vile serpent?” She pointed at the wreck of Yig only steps away from their present huddle.

  “You?” Ghostsign spat the word, no question as to who she thought was the better fighter. “You think this is about y —”

  Elspeth offered Feymal to Ghostsign, the other fighter sneering at the weapon balanced on Elspeth’s flat palm. “Take the blade.”

  Ghostsign closed her hand around the grip, but rather than pluck it from Elspeth’s palm, found herself only able to knock the blade to the ground. It lay between them, a compass needle pointing toward the distant, churning sea. Elspeth looked at Nanrin.

  “And you.”

  Nanrin tried, but could not lift the blade. Magic made her hands glow, by turns hot and cold, but nothing she did would bring the weapon into her hands. It moved in the dirt, but little else.

  “The riddle resolves within its name,” Elspeth said, wrapping her hand around Feymal’s hilt, lifting the blade as easily as she ever had since she had first found it in a heap of discarded weapons. “At the point of a bad death. It is about Feymal, said to have come from the very star that broke the world in this very place. And Lowenhold?”

  “A prison made of those same star shards,” Ghostsign whispered. The hostility drained from her, but in its place rose despair. “Then we are of no consequence. Our abilities, in the end, are nothing.”

  “And this
dark man — he wants Feymal?” Nanrin asked.

  Elspeth shook her head, a slight motion that sent dust swirling. “He cannot hold the blade. He wants what every man wants — power — and would wrest it from those who possess it.”

  “And the treasure?” Ghostsign came to her feet, staring down at Elspeth and Nanrin, hands on her hips. “A lie?”

  “How many have perished in this quest?” Elspeth stood alongside Ghostsign, studying the woman’s face. Her features were worn by sun and wind alike, by knife and fist and whip. The understanding was clear within Ghostsign’s eyes, Nanrin less quick to comprehend.

  “What are you saying?” Nanrin clutched the jar to her chest, fanged and bloody Winseris rousing to flail at the glass once more.

  “Treasure is of no consequence to the dead,” Elspeth said. Nor would a sister be, she knew, and ached for the loss of something she couldn’t fully explain. Was it truth or lie, that sister?

  She turned, sliding Feymal into its scabbard. They had no choice but to follow her — they could die in this desolate place, or travel beside her to the underwater prison where the great slumbering god slept, where the dark man would ask that she kill it with the blade made of the stars.

  The jar shattered on the ground.

  Winseris flowed free and died in vicious flame.

  One woman fell into step behind Elspeth, and then the other, and they walked away from Holy Wood as they had walked away from every other place the dark man had brought them to — in a single, bloodstained line, through a portal that swallowed them, that tasted and carried — and knew.

  Elspeth felt the portal between this place and that as a living thing, a creature that knew what they were, what they meant, what they planned. The gate was old, older than even the stars that had birthed Feymal, and it reached without hands for the sheathed weapon — thinking to slip it from Elspeth’s side when it was not in her hand — thinking it could take, could... conquer? No, the gate knew it could not.