by Gaie Sebold
She knew that they wore their markings grudgingly the further she led them from the fertile lowland plains, the greater the risk of them turning. One false step and they would depose her. She could probably kill any one of them in trial-combat, but not all together. She suspected Olif the rifle bearer, lean and hungry for advancement, was plotting something amongst his fellows, but what form his malcontentment would take, she didn’t know. Her only hope was to find what she was looking for up here.
Yucca, the cursed mountain. Ever since she was a girl, people spoke of the dark magic which lingered around this grim ascent;
‘Invisible demons. They cut a man’s thread without him ever feeling it. You sicken and die, and never see them coming.’
‘In ancient days, a necromancer cursed the mountain, when the king of Yucca slew his beloved. ‘As you deny me a family, so I rob you of all your children, now and in the ever-after,’ the necromancer said, and so the Yuccamen fell; for their mothers and daughters became barren and childless.’
‘The bear and the eagle had a war when the mount was Edin. But so loud was their ruckus, they woke the dragon Nukh from his slumber ‘neath the hills. He rose up and breathed his poison across the mount. Eagle and bear together died when the forest shrivelled and Edin was destroyed.’
‘When God was killed by the dragon Nukh, his crown of thorns fell from his head and crashed to Yucca, and killed everything there forever after.’
‘The King of the World died, and his tomb was set into the mountain Yucca, and his infinite treasure were buried with him, marked by the stone thorns and guarded by the ravager plague.’
There were endless tales, each one sworn to be gospel by some shaman or holy whisperer. Sessian did not believe most of them; yet they couldn’t all be wrong. The tales told of ancient weapons and bountiful treasures. If her war band managed to capture these weapons, they could rule the valley and the lands stretching out beyond it. They would be safe forever from predation by the City-Kings and their Patriot-Crawlers.
Two days, and the acrid fog descended. Directions meant little. Five riders fell from the cliff where the fog clung close.
Three days in, and dead birds strewed the path before them like fallen leaves, whose sodden corpses squelched beneath the horses’ hooves. The pass was too narrow to camp on so that they ate from the food slung across the cattle’s backs. Their slaves ate the fallen birds.
Five days in, the prisoners began to sicken. Too weak to walk, they were dragged, mewling and defecating, behind the cow sleds.
Belhiem had called these events an omen, and had tried to leave with half the war band. Sessian had shot him where he stood. The man looked perversely comical as he pawed helpless at the neat hole in his forehead, before he collapsed; face first, into the insipid Yuccan soil. No one else challenged her. Olif and Freda stared at her with eyes alight with disgust, but they knew better than to speak out when Sessian’s blood was up.
On the sixth day, Haast returned with word of a wide plateau in the foothills, where the fog was less thick and cloying, and the air less rancid. But that was not all he brought with him. There were two men bound by their hands, tied to his saddle.
One was a young man, no more than nineteen years. The pale-skinned lad was clad only in a pair of loose canvas hose tied with cord. His chest was hairless and smooth, his tussled blond hair fell pleasingly across his handsome features. The boy looked terrified as he caught Sessian’s fiery gaze. She supposed the sight of a six foot warrior woman with a headdress of horns, and eyes painted a gleaming red must have made him think a demoness had come to devour him.
The second figure was old. His thin limbs were twisted and knotted as Yucca’s trees. His flesh was as pale as the boy’s, but with the unpleasant pallor of the sickly and wrong. He was covered in markings and tattoos, coiling script etched into his flesh in dozens of old tongues and dialects. His long nails were black like eagle talons, his eyes grey and hard. The revenant wore a mangy hide cloak, from which dangled dozens of fetishes, tied there by sinews and twine. He had little hair, save for a few stray strands of grey clinging to his mottled eggshell skull, and an unkempt beard. When the ancient appraised her fearsome countenance, his expression seemed quietly amused
‘Crossing the plateau, I came across these two, making spells, messing in entrails and chanting. The boy drew steel against me. Brave but stupid,’ Haast said, gesturing to the new dirk sheathed in his belt. ‘The elder came with no tumult.’
Sessian hopped down from her saddle and approached the diminutive old alchemist. Even dismounted she loomed over him. He held her gaze with a friendly smile, showing brown teeth set into oozing gums.
‘Who are you? What are you on the mountain for?’ she growled.
‘The magick is strong here. The Capitali thought this place most valuable. Selt is myself, and this one is Talf, acolyte of mine six years,’ he replied, his voice a low croak, like a desiccated toad.
Gently, she placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘You come for the magick? Then you know the Yucca Thorns,’ she replied.
Selt nodded slowly, his horrid grin widening. ‘I know it, though it is hidden. No maps show it, for no maps want to know it. The knowledge of it flees from the truth because the Nukh, that old wyrm, is so terrible it coils and whispers and kills. It robs the future to slay the present. So my old master said, so it was so in his day,’ Selt giggled, spitting a blob of brown phlegm into the grass as he spoke, before taking a bite from some slimy fungus in a pouch at his belt.
Sessian grabbed him by the throat. It felt weak beneath her fingers, she could break it easily; even clenching her fingers slightly was enough to drive the air from the sorcerer’s windpipe. ‘No games with me, ravaged man. You will show us where.’
‘I don’t know where... Not yet. I can divine it for you, with my materials. I need my materials, from my tent,’ he croaked weakly.
Sessian sneered before she released him. ‘We head to the plateau. Your hut is there then so will we be.’
They made camp beneath the looming mountain fastness.
As night fell, camp fires bathed the place in flickering orange light. Two warriors guarded the alchemist’s mud-caked tent. Smoke and steam of different colours rose from the hole in its roof and door flaps like the breath of a sleeping dragon.
Sessian had Talf brought to her once her tent had been set. Fortunately, the boy was more than willing to accommodate her desires, and press himself against her firm flesh. It was much better when there was consensus. Congress at knifepoint held no pleasure for her.
As they languished on her bed of animal skins, by the heat of the hearth fire, she turned to the boy. ‘Do you speak Capitali?’
He nodded. ‘I speak a little. Selt taught it me. What do y... sorry...’ he began, before remembering his place.
‘No no, say it clear,’ she replied, stroking his cheek tenderly. Smooth, unscarred; this boy had led a sheltered life, which was surprising.
‘What do you want... in the Yucca Thorns?’
She chuckled, reaching out to take a gulp from her flagon. ‘Same as most I reckon; power, to protect ourselves in this dark time.’
Talf nodded quietly.
‘And why is Selt here?’
‘He tells me little; just chatter about Nukh and the magick. I mix the potions and fetch the water. He talks to himself more than me most days,’ Talf sighed. ‘We came here from far Kel-Fornia. This place is important. Dark majestik he says.’
‘Why are you his? You don’t sound like you want the dark majestik, do you?’ she asked, placing her other hand upon his thigh.
‘He saved me, as a child. Raised me up and cured my ailments. He protected me from the bad ones.’
‘And who are the bad ones?’ she whispered in his ear.
He smiled as he turned his face to hers. ‘You are, of course.’
She laughed uproariously. ‘That I am.’
Talf walked beside Sessian’s horse as they continued their march the next day.
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Selt led them, seated upon a mule, alongside a great weight of scrolls, tomes, jars and pouches filled with all manner of chemicals. Samples of birds, frogs, bats and various bugs were collected in tubs and bottles. Sticks of smoking incense and otherwise drifted from him as he trotted ahead of the band.
They travelled up and down the mountainside for many hours. Selt held a two-pronged divining branch before him, etched with runes of power. Bells were rung, and many wordless chants spilled from his filthy, bearded mouth. He would periodically call a halt to the formation, fill a basin with brackish water, and place a needle on its surface, watching eagerly as it turned upon the dark fluid.
Finally, toward the end of a full day’s trekking, silhouetted against the blazing orange sunset, Sessian saw the object of her journey; the Thorns of Yucca.
They were horrible, uneven things, even at this distance; clusters of barbs jutted from them as they coiled in upon themselves like the enclosing folds of a Kraken’s grasp. The narrow pass ahead of them zigzagged between the forbidding stone blocks barring the way. They were forced to travel in single file. Selt’s mule first, followed by Sessian and Talf, then Haast and the rest. The blocks were too regular to be natural. This was a tomb, or a city or a maze. Something built by other humans in other times.
No one spoke. Beyond the stones, a ring of desolation a hundred yards deep encircled the thorny mound. There no grass grew, no bird sang, nor even the casual chirp of bugs. The silence here was oppression and despair.
This close, the thorns were revealed to be thirty foot stone spires, covered in spines as long as a man was tall, arranged as if they were clambering over one another to reach the darkening sky.
Sessian’s horse whinnied and flinched away from the thorns; its sound deafening in the silence, as it echoed around the valley. She dismounted carefully, patting her mare to reassure her. But Sessian’s soothing words sounded hollow in her ears; inwardly, she felt a profound dread, a feeling she had never believed she was capable of. Her men and women peered around the blocks and the towers, holding their axes and swords close.
Selt slid down from his mule and sank to his knees, arms raised in exultation. He whispered and mumbled in a foreign tongue.
‘He is thanking Nukh for his guidance,’ Talf explained, by Sessian’s side. She nodded and shoved him aside with a dismissive grunt. She felt protective of the young man; it would be a shame if he died here. But she hid her concern in front of her riders.
As she approached Selt, something crunched underfoot.
Bones. Scattered about the base of the thorns; all manner of bones, animal and human. There were skulls too. She looked to the sky, and watched as the sun was speared by a thousand black barbs and dragged beneath the horizon, leaving only the clawing talons of Yucca to pollute the sky with their presence.
Whoever had built Yucca, Capitali or Quarantian, they wanted no one to enter here; ever.
To Sessian that said something was worth guarding long after the extinction of their culture. Though it chilled her blood, she knew she could not leave.
‘We make camp. Tomorrow is digging. The Capitali tomb is here,’ she called out.
‘This is a cursed place. Only death lives here,’ one of her men, Olif replied.
‘Olif is on the right knowledge. I can feel the wyrd. Evil places shouldn’t be defiled,’ Freda added, her sisters nodding darkly at her words. There was a murmur of agreement amongst some of the riders. Haast snarled.
‘You are oathbound, you scum! If your warlord demands this place is dug, it is dug!’
Further muttered threats and curses rippled through the ranks. Haast made to draw his machete, before Sessian raised her hand.
‘If you have loyalty to this tribe, to this band, you will stay. I will not hold you here. This is a dark place. Those who wish to may go. Freedom is yours. Take it. But you take no slaves with you. And when we come down this mountain, you and yours will be our enemies. And you will suffer. ’
Olif rode up, slinging his rifle over his shoulder as he spat at her feet. ‘Your threat is nothing. You won’t come down the hill again, usurper red-bitch!’
And with that, Olif, Freda and two dozen others turned their horses around and left, through the winding entrance they had entered from.
The camp that night was as near silent as the hills that surrounded them. The thorns seemed to writhe in the flickering firelight, casting strange, elongated shadows.
Selt’s fire had a green flame, which flickered as he added more of his mystic spice and powders, decades in the procuring. But it was worth it, for in their crystalline particles lurked the word of Nukh. Smoke coiled about him, dense and serpentine. He blinked and saw faces, roiling in the tumult, silent as everything else. He breathed in the fumes as he bit down on more of his foraged mushrooms, and supped Nukh’s nectar from his drinking skin.
‘This is a revelation space. Manifestly Assured Destruction; madness. Divine profanity; I bring offerings to your altar, Nukh, the spirit of the new, clear winter,’ Selt giggled.
‘Talf is a traitor,’ another voice said, deeper than the wellspring of the ocean, deeper than sound; impossible yet real. ‘His sentence will be the same as the sacrifices.’
The new voice came from the smoke that billowed from Selt’s own maw, circling back around to face him. It was a dragon with a human face and a lamprey’s jaws, circular and grasping. Nukh, manifested. The voice echoed in only his head, like a whisper and roar at once.
‘No, Talf knows his role. He’s a strong one. Nukh will touch him last, and before then, he will return,’ Selt argued.
‘Selt is a hopeful one,’ a second voice hissed, oozing from the blood-filled mushroom crushed between his long claws for hands. The ooze congealed into a mouth, which wetly continued. ‘This is a holy place. Talf knows this is your realm. You found it; the magick belongs with Selt. The red marauder is a thief.’
The walls of his tent were becoming stone, and the thorns pushed through slowly, each wound causing the canvas to bleed and drool.
Selt leaned back, letting the blood pool in his mouth and mat upon his beard. He grinned, breathing green smoke from his flared nostrils.
The clamour of picks breaking rocks robbed the thorns of their morbid silence, but the sense of dread refused to leave Sessian’s mind as time wore on. She’d ordered six or seven test holes in and around the thorns. If there was a tomb there, she would find it. With fewer men, the work took longer. The serfs were still ill from eating the birds, and they only seemed to get sicker the more they worked with their flat wooden paddles. The guards she posted had to watch closely to ensure the same number of serfs went in as came out.
Sessian had the bedraggled warlock Selt confined to his vile little hovel, two guards outside at all times. She trusted Selt not at all. His vile glee was wrong. Yet, wasn’t that what she should be feeling? She had her prize, and she was sure, if she could just dig deep enough, the power of the Yuccamen would be hers.
On the fifth day of digging Talf had found a stone podium at the centre of the thorn structure. There was a message carved into the black stone several times over that took him quite a while to decipher. Yet eventually, he succeeded and took it to Sessian, his sparkling eyes full of pride in his own cleverness.
‘The old-culture talks through the stone. They are talking at you,’ he breathed. ‘They are warning tomb-breakers.’
Sessian raised an eyebrow. ‘What are they saying?’
Talf shook his head. ‘Some of their words I do not know because... But I’ve got close to what they said.’
‘Then tell me.’
And so he drew the hide he had scrawled the message on from his belt, and he read it all at once;
‘This place is a message... one of many messages... heed us! Sending this message to you was important to us. We were once a powerful culture.
This is no place of honour. No site of a great victory or triumph. Nothing of value lies here. What lies here is dangerous and repul
sive to us. This message is a warning, an omen.
There is danger in this place, which increases towards a centre. The centre is here. A thing of dread, beneath us.
The danger remains, in your time as in ours.
The danger scourges flesh, and it will kill.
The danger is a form of fire, energy, spreading out.
If you disturb this place, the danger will be unleashed. You must shun this place, and leave nothing living here. Nothing.’
Sessian listened quietly, before she took the parchment from Talf’s hand.
‘We must leave my majesty. The Yuccamen-’
‘... Are dead; why should I heed their words?’
‘But Sessian, what will we tell the others? We must do something!’
Talf gasped as Sessian’s hand shot out, grasping his throat. ‘The Yuccas lie to protect their treasures. Tomb-builders always lie. No curse will keep me out. One word and I will take your manhood, and then your eyes. We understand, yes?’ she hissed in his face, her sharpened teeth and blazing eyes turning the boy even paler than normal.
All he could do was weakly nod, before she cast him to the floor.
She pressed a shovel into his hand and set him to work the very next day.
The passage into the depths was arduous and slow. Underground was threaded with tough black firestone, which the picks could not break. They had to burrow between the blocks, creating a crude labyrinth beneath the hateful thorns. It was hot work that became hotter as they descended.
Sessian worked in the pits beside her war band, wielding her pick like a battle club, cracking rocks as she would crack skulls; ripping the rubble out with her hands; frantic and furious.
The Yuccamen had to be lying. She could not consider the alternative, for that path led only to an ignominious demise at the end of her tribe’s vengeful spears.
So she kept on digging.