Swords v. Cthulhu

by Jesse Bullington

  “By what?”

  “By Lalli. On the ice. I saw it from afar. I could not tell you why.”

  “I believe I can,” said Mauno. “No matter. We shall not have reinforcement from his God. Muster your forces. Let Ukko fill our swords with thunder. Blast! How can men battle such a thing as this?”

  It lumbered onward, now cracking the ice where Henrik’s body lay in a pool of frozen red. As the surface crumbled, his body fell into the water, bobbed, then sank out of sight as the lowest reaches of the Great Thing descended deeper toward the lake bottom.

  “Now!” cried Mauno. “While its blades are below the waters! Archers! Send this thing back to the north and over the edge from whence it came!”

  Arrows flew, for all the good they did. The archers may well have fired at the sun or the moon. And still they fired more, wasting shaft after feathered shaft.

  Then, before it had reached the near side of the lake bank, the mountain stopped still before a tiny figure. There stood Lalli with a small bundle of furs in his hands, raised high above his head.

  “This evil from another land I give to thee, vile thing!” bellowed Lalli. He set his parcel in a small skiff and pushed it into a channel of water between broken sheets of ice. He pressed until the water was chest high and gave the skiff a final shove, then turned to race back toward his farmland and his people. He hoped to rid the land of two evils that day.

  By the time he reached Mauno, screams and moans were erupting from the villagers. For the mountain had resumed its dread crawl. Heedless of warning, it roamed onward. More and more ice broke until the causeway that reached the nearby fjord was breached. Bits of ice bobbed and flowed toward the only route of escape; as did the skiff, which cut a sharp path straight to the lake’s outlet, as though guided by invisible oars. Dark clouds bunched causing the afternoon sunlight to fail. Snow began to fall.

  V

  It took hours for the village to fall silent. Tähti and Aili surveyed the wreckage from the far side of the lake, watching the Old Thing’s peak disappear into the eastern horizon. The setting sun bathed the ground in magic hour glory beneath dark grey skies. Every crushed home and smeared body was vivid for that moment, soon fading into dusk. The sun crept further behind earthly mountains that had never thought to sever roots and hunt madly after human flesh. Aili’s herder whimpered.

  “It sees all save us.” The Princess wept hot tears into her cold palms. “Why do we yet live?”

  “For years I’ve dreamed and seen beyond, Aili. Our old ways were stories for children. And the new myths woven at the world’s belt are no better. There is but one truth. We are all doomed if such things as we have seen awaken from endless slumber and march upon us.”

  “The snow shall bury this land,” said Aili. “We must go south toward hope.”

  “Yes. But first, into the fjord and after that book,” said Tähti.

  Aili, wracked with grief, could only nod as she unwrapped the coil of rope that moored their boat to a post on shore. She was a woman of Kvenland and knew well how to row. Her oar strokes cut the blackening water and sent them toward the outlet. The dog turned circles in the boat, not knowing where to look or cower.

  Tähti scanned both banks in case the skiff with the book had been snared before it could escape. Then the current caught them and there was no more need to row. Aili settled next to Tähti with the herder huddled at their feet. They shared a fur cloak once more, hands wandering in search of comfort. The princess reached down and gave Tähti’s member a squeeze.

  “I feared our trysts would have to end when it came time for me to continue our bloodline,” said Aili. “But now I’ve seen that the Queendom can live on. And with a wizard at my side.”

  Their boat entered the chasm of the fjord, destruction in its wake. A quest for knowledge unknown lay ahead. And warm love spread fire within.

  By night, the fjord was moonlight silent and bitter cold. They would never have survived the chill if not for the dog, Tähti’s flame, and their frantic coupling. The waters slowed; even time seemed frozen. As the moon drifted to its apex, illumination flooded down the great chasm, a pupil-less white eye trained on its unseeing self, mirrored in the black water.

  Up the great rock walls on each side were clustered formations of glowing globes. At first they looked like honeycomb refractions of lunar beaming. But with each league they drifted by, the reliefs in the stone seemed more purposely, madly carven. Finally, the frieze was complete, telling a story of time and space beyond measure. Tähti reeled, knew too much. Aili closed her eyes. Then the boat stopped.

  Icewhite craquelure faded into pure ivory ribbon that paved the fjordbottom-rivertop as it snaked around the next curve of crevasse. Fifty yards farther down the ice sat the skiff, the stone bundle within.

  Tähti stood and began to climb out of the boat. Aili grabbed a sleeve and pulled Tähti forcefully back inside. “What is it?” she asked. “Why have we risked all for this one thing? I would like to live and love and build anew. With you.”

  Tähti struggled to put into words how the hideous scrawl of ink had curled like wriggling black maggots into deepest brain recesses. “It is the Kuolledien Kirja, the Book of the Dead. You understand?”

  She nodded. And shuddered. “But what should the dead want with us?”

  “These things were not dead, but forever sleeping. For aeons. With this book, I… my dreams. I didn’t, couldn’t have known… But there is more knowledge still. I will close the gate!” Tähti leapt onto the ice. The dog followed, slipped, found its footing, and padded forward.

  Distraught as she was, Aili was still a queen’s daughter. Her intuition screamed danger of magnitudes unimagined in her scant privileged years in Kvenland. There was only one choice, since she held no fascination for death. She picked up the oars and began to row upstream, away from her love and her horror. The muscles in her arms rippled like rope. She wondered why this course was more difficult than losing her entire village scant weeks after mother’s final crusade. Her tears froze to her face before she was half out of sight.

  Across the ice Tähti moved carefully from floe to floe, eventually choosing the same path the dog had taken. A step away from the skiff, the ice began to crack. Tähti froze in place, barely breathing. The dog gave a garbled bark. Its echo throughout the fjord seemed to chip away at what semblance of reality remained. The bubble surrounding this cosmic evening burst at once, and two things happened:

  Aili saw a smoldering pyre float toward her, remnants of father Mauno’s funeral skiff, which must have been following just out of sight the entire night.

  And far above at chasm mouth slopped the Great Thing. Its immeasurable flank collapsed over the fjord wall, crashing down through the ice to the bottom. Yet still flesh and stone and grass and gross yawning eyes kept coming.

  The resulting wave flipped Aili’s craft, and she dived bodily toward Mauno’s buoyant resting place. As she soared through the air, she saw Bishop Henrik’s corpse floating by just under the surface, a rosary in its frozen grip. Finally, Aili landed hard on her father’s pyre, gasping for the wind knocked from her, culling life-giving warmth from the dying embers.

  Rolling up from the ash, she saw Tahti standing far across the ice, the black book raised skyward. She heard the chant skipping like a stone over the water. “Yog-Sothoth” was all she could decipher as words come from a human throat.

  The rest of the bodies followed Henrik’s downstream. Now the waters were choked with silent gliding corpses.

  The dog howled again. By now its face had elongated into a white cone ending in a stretching tentacle, a strange thing in the moonlight. A wall of Old One crept forward toward it like a waterfall of gnarled sinew and stench. In a lurching tide of catastrophal scale, Tähti went under. An eyeblink later, Aili joined her lover. Unknown to all, she had been queen of a dead race for a matter of seconds.

  Bow Down Before the Snail King!

  Caleb Wilson

  Storks

  Th
ere were only a dozen storks. But on that murky midnight, with the fire burning low and blue from the stink of vanished cities that bubbled up from beneath the plains, there might as well have been a hundred.

  Charops’ drab leather outfit was somewhat beak-resistant. Not enough to make her comfortable; the horror birds were known carriers of pestilence, so filthy that their diseases bore diseases. She jumped over the furrows of fallow civilizations, stabbing wildly with her long Strategist’s knife. It was a versatile blade, but better suited to the considered application of force ten times what was needed, measured stabs in the back, and the trimming of extraneous lines from contracts than to fending off a clacking, hissing, disease-ridden flock.

  Ichneumon the Weird was stumbling along somewhere behind Charops. Certain stork bait, unless the Weird could get her shit together — which made Charops furious, or maybe that feeling was sadness.

  A stork exploded as a slightly larger than life-sized pink stone statue of a stork appeared inside it, displacing feathers, guts, and bone. The bloody statue hit the grass, and Ichneumon stuttered out some quavering mixture of glee and agony. That was one way to do it.

  Kobius, the man-at-arms, bared his teeth and growled. He whirled a spear as he ran, slapping it up and down, the haft bouncing like a branch in a gale, gore arcing from the blade. He was wearing stork plumes on his hat, and Charops wondered, as she gasped for breath, if he had found them already detached from their original owner. Either way, it seemed that the storks had taken offense at Kobius’ choice of attire.

  As for Loron, whose skimpy linen robe seemed so ill-suited for travel outside the courts and couches of Zend... Loron leapt along lightly as a dried leaf.

  May we all age so gracefully as Loron.

  The Municipal Expedition

  Loron, that notorious old poet and flatterer, had found evidence of a treasure hidden in the south. As was the right of every citizen of Zend, Loron petitioned the King’s Vizier to launch an expedition of recovery, with any proceeds to be split evenly between himself and the crown. The Plaster Eminence granted Loron’s petition, though she must not have thought highly of his chances. If she had, she would have authorized a bigger expedition.

  The municipal companions were Charops, a Strategist of low rank but high promise; Ichneumon the Weird, whose unsettling presence meant she was sent away from Zend as often as possible; and the man-at-arms Kobius. Kobius had survived the flock of storks they met two weeks south of Zend, but not the sting from the invisible asp he stepped on five days later. His corpse lay beneath a cairn, unless jackals had found him. Charops wondered how long it would be until she forgot his name.

  Four weeks south of Zend and Havernar, the expedition finally arrived at the dry river valley marked on Loron’s map. According to the map (according to Loron, who refused to show anyone else the map), the “Hall of the King of Snails” was tucked away at the far end.

  Charops felt the weight of the plains behind her as a haunted presence, stretching north many leagues to the mountains that guarded the cradle of civilization.

  Ghastly thought: when they were done here, they’d have to cross the plains again, in the other direction.

  Hieroglyphs

  Loron had disappeared along the tree line to their left. Charops was more interested in two mossy pillars of stone, almost hidden behind the laurels.

  “That’ll put a pause in their parade. Blood under my sandals. Ah, a gate, until... ” said Ichneumon. She was wearing her customary outfit of red brocaded cloak, red smock, red shoes with long, curled toes, and red skullcap. Short yellow braids stuck out from under the cap.

  “A gate until what?” Charops asked. Ichneumon’s conversation tended to suffer when she was distracted. “And where’s Loron?”

  “The statue just splitting. I really didn’t know it would just... the ankle would just crack. And that it would all start to fall. Sorry. I mean, these pillars used to be part of a gate.”

  “Until... ?”

  “Until history. Sorry about the screaming. I think he’s over there.”

  Ichneumon gestured vaguely, and a moment later Loron stuck his head out between the trees.

  “It’s this way. The map is quite clear. Are you coming, or are you coming?”

  “Hey, hieroglyphs!” said Ichneumon, pointing to carvings arranged inside a vertical cartouche on the pillar.

  “Can you read them?”

  Ichneumon scraped back moss with her fingernails. “Sure. Old Lesathi. The name of a plant. I think. The statue had hieroglyphs carved on its face, you know. Impossible to drop that.”

  “What plant is it?”

  “Never heard of it. I don’t know if it has a name in Zendian. It would be something like... shell oak? It might not actually be an oak. Might not be a plant at all.”

  “I’ll be over here,” called Loron, “waiting for you at the hall, which is where you’ve been hired to take me, which is marked on my map — ”

  “Yes. A moment,” said Charops.

  “— waiting, impatiently —”

  Strategist and Weird forged between the pillars into a choked clearing where the sun shone over mounds of greenery, a battlefield where nature had long since triumphed. The air was still, hushed as the dreams of graveyard statues. There had been a town here, or something like a town, but the buildings, all unbuilt by history, weren’t buildings any more, just sunken foundation holes, or corner stones and shed roof tiles hidden under quilts of vines.

  Charops didn’t see much to catch her eye at first. But a lot that’s worth seeing must first be uncovered. Like this: a wooden wagon lay beneath the weeds. The boards were worm-eaten and soft with rot. Charops poked at them with her boot.

  “Look, the wheel has been removed,” said Charops.

  “Interesting,” said Ichneumon. “Not in itself, I mean — wagons are boring — but the decomposition, or lack of it; I mean, this wagon can’t have been here for all that long or it would have rotted away completely. A decade, maybe? He was just flattened, you know, blood came shooting out his sleeves, you know? Ah, damn, I mean to say, considering that the rest of this place is antique, it’s interesting. The wagon. Everything was sliding into the pit. I mean, I’ll bet nobody’s put old Old Lesathi hieroglyphs into stone in five hundred years. Except Weirds in the Folly.”

  Charops saw another shape, longer and lower than the wagon, also hidden under the vines. Ripping back the vines like she was yanking the blankets away from some bedchamber indiscretion, she revealed a fallen obelisk of stone.

  “Ooh!” Ichneumon bent over the obelisk and its more extensive hieroglyphs, while Charops sat on the edge of the wagon and considered the overcast sky.

  Ichneumon was muttering to herself.

  “What do they say?”

  “There was a town here, or perhaps ‘outpost’ is the better word. It was founded... ”

  Ichneumon counted years and dynasties, moving her lips slightly. Ichneumon the Weird was less horrifying than most of her colleagues, at least in Charops’ opinion. Most people who weren’t her great friends and traveling companions didn’t share this opinion. Her eyes had the eerie blankness exhibited by anyone who made a practice of fooling the universe into doing magic. Charops knew it made mundane calculations difficult, when each instance of magic produced over a whole lifetime of chicanery had to be remembered, lest the universe take everything back and the Weird’s soul was set to burning like a rancid candle, as all the magic she’d ever performed was reversed in a split second.

  “Four hundred and eight years ago. Or seven, or nine. Depends on —”

  “Don’t worry, doesn’t matter,” said Charops. “And apart from that?”

  Ichneumon ran her forefinger over the stone. “They were concerned about... the ‘flow of time.’”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Can’t tell. Here’s it says ‘shell oak’ again. The way the pit just opened up beneath them, it was like, like a wound. Like a sword cutting through parchment. Sorry. Ah, it
seems this place was called Shell Oak Landing.”

  “And what do you mean, ‘concerned about’?”

  “They keep mentioning it, is all,” said Ichneumon. “Ah ha. Loron’s map was accurate. Separate from Shell Oak Landing is the Hall of the King. It’s farther along this way. And there; I think that heads down to what used to be the river. Choked on water, the water was like iron, like a chain of iron, a metal eel sliding down his throat. Says here, a ‘sacrificial’ hall.”

  “Sacrificial.”

  “That’s what it says. The Hall of the Snail King. ‘Sacrificial’ might have some other connotation here.”

  “Not really too many things that word can mean,” said Charops.

  “No.”

  “Bearing some connection to this ‘shell oak,’ whatever that is? What exactly are we walking into here?”

  “... Hieroglyphs are pretty ambiguous,” said Ichneumon.

  Epigrams

  Ichneumon smiled suddenly.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I almost forgot,” said the Weird. She pulled a scroll from one of her dozens of pockets. “I found it in Loron’s pack last night. Might be... oh, the statue, it just exploded out of the stork’s lungs, it starts the size of a pea. And in the end, it’s bigger than the stork.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Charops unrolled the scroll. At the top was written “The New Epigrams of Loron,” and below that were further lines of Loron’s flowing script.

  “Ah,” said Ichneumon, “could be better than I thought! It’s not murder, is it? Self-defense, isn’t it? The whole town buried under ash, but I rang the bell first. Fair warning. Uh, let’s hear them.”

  Charops read the first epigram out loud.

  I, Loron, am genius; a genius, I, Loron

  My rivals, wastrel, ninny, fop, moron

  Ichneumon said, “Maybe he’s gotten tired of being a flatterer?”