by Michael Shea
“You know, since you’ve been my prisoners, I’ve grown rather fond of you all. I cannot help but hope your own cause benefits from the line of development we see before us here. But come, friends! Let us haste to judgement! Make way please!”
The latter was aimed at the townsfolk whom they’d found foregathered near the yard—perhaps two hundred people, none of them seeming very spirited. As the lines moved through them, they produced the by now ritual hail of clods and stones. It was ill-aimed though, felt rather listless, as were their outcries. It was not hard to think, as some of the prisoners did, that few even of the common folk of Slimshur believed Snolp’s myth, or needed to. Enough that the lie was being told on the scale Snolp could afford, and it would become the truth. Still sodden with the shock of the gallows, the chained men marched. Hex marvelled at the leaden compliance of his own legs. The onlookers lingered by the yard, giving the sky vexed, pessimistic looks. Was this their certainty of the sentence? Hex reminded himself the Dapples were said to admit no public to their trials.
Forb plied the knocker of an iron door in the wall of the Deputarium’s forecourt. When both valves swung open, his plume was fluidly doffed, but to no one. Far within, beyond the court and down a dark, porticoed gallery, a small shape waved them forward. Its voice loomed surprisingly large as it rolled out to them:
“Come in, then! Come ahead!”
As the lines crunched across the gravelled court, another rainspatter insisted on the coming shower. They clacked and clinked down the stony gallery. A she-dwarf stood before an inner door, again of iron. Her wild white hair made her half a foot taller, and her tunic looked thick and soiled as a mountain goat’s coat.
“What can you want here?” Her big voice was tense and gloomy. “Tell me you have lost your way! Say anything but that you’ve come for a judgement! Kroppflopp’s in a rotten temper—it must be a century since he was anything else! He’s dying of the mange!”
“Madam, we have come a long way. We have faith in the peerless Kroppflopp. Whatever his mood, he’ll be just. We must insist on his service.”
“Are they charged with a capital offence?”
“Indeed yes! In fact, with the now fam—”
“Then begone! Kill them yourselves instead of getting him into a lather about it! Our gallows are full! Why pester us? We’ve done our share long since! What of your own courts? Is fodder no longer wanted down in town?”
“My dear dwarf,” Forb said, suave but visibly irked by her candour, “your gallows are quite empty. We have only just—”
Profound affront had frozen the little woman’s forehead into icy corrugations. “My name is the Honourable Rem Ibnabib,” she slowly foghorned.
“Abjectest pardons, revered Rem Ibnabib! I recoil from the remotest thought of offending you. We—”
“You have my token then?” she asked, still ice.
“Oh yes!” Forb bowed, offering her a fat stack of coins that he dug from a poke in his belt. “And we’d joyfully pay twice as much should you—”
“Do so, then.” She had raised one shaggy eyebrow, like the first crack in a thaw. Forb faltered, but bowed her the poke with recaptured poise. She scowled at her money a moment, then gave the kind of sigh that prefaces the undertaking of great toil.
“Wait here,” she told them.
The thunder of the door behind her made the chained men blink, as though they had slept while watching her. Hex found his guard’s swordpoint to be now in actual contact with his neck. With unobtrusive firmness, as the truth came out, the steel of coercion had been drawn a little snugger against every man in the lines. From an echoing distance within the iron door they watched came a groan of other hinges. There was a pulse of voice, loud but confused, sustained through several seconds. The answer was a roar from lungs far huger than the human make. One of the prisoners’ legs buckled and he had to be clubbed back to his feet by the guards.
That monstrous growl was also speech, but still indistinguishable for drowning in its own echoes, as though uttered from a well. Its ire billowed and surged a while until the dwarfs vituperative screech grew audible in counterpoint. The big voice rumbled down to simmer while Rem Ibnabib—unmistakably—railed and scolded. Again it thundered when she paused—peremptory now and curt. She counter shrilled and the far door drummed shut. The door they watched flew open—and so surprisingly soon, given the woman’s rate going in, that Forb was knocked off his feet. Rem Ibnabib bowled out, wild and scratchy as a tumbleweed.
“So get up you pipe-legged idiot!” she raged at Forb. “He’s yours and welcome to him! Take them in!” She pointed across a wide and vaulted room, unfurnished save for murky tapestries laid slantingly across the floor by skylights of dark-stained glass. The door in the farther wall had bounced ajar and was framed by the rainy grey light of the day outside.
As the crusaders went rattling and rubber-legged towards that door, they smelled gusts of cold fresh air laced with whiffs of carrion. Forb strode ahead and pulled it fully open. Within, four slender-pillared porticoes rimmed a roofless pit. While they still approached, a hand a man could sit in rose from the pit and gripped its rim. It hauled into view the upper half of a face that looked as big as the rising moon. Its round eyes scowled on Forb. Its unseen mouth growled:
“Dung and Nosewarms! Bring the scum in, then!”
The lines were led cringing inside and arrayed round the pit—their guards at their backs and they amid the pillars, along its brink. The pit was near twenty feet deep and clearly the Dapple had not needed to leap to grasp its rim. Hex’s legs crawled with the sense of their availability to those huge, gnarled bluish hands. The judge’s scowl made them look all the readier to seize and tear things—as did, indeed, his pit’s sale furniture, a big iron trough of raw meat, the broken limbs and ribs of hill plods.
Scanning them, the judge paced his cell’s perimeter. His amber fur, whose black freckling named his race, grew thick on his chest, potbelly and thighs. At his elbows and knees it ended in ragged sleeves. The scabby blue skin it yielded to, and the judge’s restless clawing at these receding frontiers of his coat, told that disease, not time, was denuding him. His dappled beard too hung in rags, his nose was a gnawed remnant round two gaping holes, and his ears were tattered, cheesy stumps. Though massive, his limbs moved with evident pain. His carrion breath came up to the chained men in gusts as he passed in his loathing scrutiny.
“Hail Lofty Kroppflopp, Arch-Juridical Dapple!” Forb said. He was not quite in voice—a bit dismayed to see his judge. “These men, oh most August of Arbiters, are guilty of the now famous mur—”
“Silence!” roared the Dapple. The stone hummed with the voice’s sheer eruptive force, and the prisoners’ very chains seemed to chime with it. Silence, profound and perfect, ensued. Kroppflopp filled it—as mournful, now, as mad:
“You murderous, miserable human scum, do you come here yet? Your ghosts already pack and overflow the execution yard—the foul mix of their stench overwhelms me even here! Numberless filth, as many as the bubbles in the sea’s foam, squeaking their hate and mockery of all the generations of my kind! Damn you, our gallows are glutted with you!”
Another rain-gust crossed the sky. The Dapple broke off and greedily raised his face to it till it passed. “Why can you never be still?” he flared up again. “You must be eternally busy undoing each other. It seems you can only build things out of one another’s bones! Only water your gardens with one another’s blood! No materials but these will do! Such a horde of little busy maggoty unmakers as you a world never swarmed with!”
Bramt Hex’s spirit felt stretched taut between the charnel stench at his feet and the fresh, electric pre-storm sky overhead. A vast, sad resignation counterpointed the horror of his death. Strung dazedly between, his despair plucked his vocal cords, and he heard himself cry out:
“Great Kroppflopp, what of motive? We did not kill for gain, but for—”
“Moronic speck of slime! You killed to be right! The strongest
greed infecting your vermin bowels!”
Lightning split the square of visible sky, and an instant later its thunder smote and skidded against the earth. The rain hit, and immediately doubled. First it clattered on the pit floor, and then embroidered it with the needle-fine spray of impact. The Dapple moved to its centre and raised his face. Rain hung in runlets from his beard’s torn fringes, and darkened his fur to nearly solid black. He cupped his hands against the sky and gently laved his face and ears. Abruptly the rain dwindled, stopped. Kroppflopp’s eyes returned to the accused while his hands still absently scrubbed each other. His hating rictus had relaxed to a bitter grin, and his eyes, from rage, were screwed to the sharper focus of remembrance:
“Alas, my poor forebears! Striving in their blameless, doomed succession to take the fairest measurement of your carnivorous souls! Poor Dapples, prisoners of their stubborn charity! It makes me itch with a rage far worse than this wretched mange! By the powers! Your guilt’s almost no longer guilt! Scum stinks—why punish simple fact? And if only one, just one of you would affirm it! Would call himself in his heart the self-praising tyrant and murderer he is. By the Archipelago! I’d free that man and crown his head with gold! I’d shoe him in the Sandals of Untiring Flight, and gird him with Faffnath’s Unconquerable Blade!”
“Oh Kroppflopp, I am Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” This was Racklin’s impassioned cry. It was so vibrant and impeccably declaimed that Hex, after starting, grew impressed. His chain-mate’s coolness made him ashamed of his own impetuous plea. “I know in my heart,” Racklin shouted, “the killer and the self-justifying despot that I am in my inmost self. I don’t ask justice—that would condemn me—but only mercy; for that alone can the guilty ask!”
“But you don’t believe it!” howled the Dapple. “Not a word!” He surged at Racklin. The judge’s fingers—each Hex’s forearm’s size—seized the pillar near his foot. A blue hand engulfed poor Racklin’s middle, the chain was briefly worried at and snapped. Hex, fallen back against his guard, who had also fallen back, struggled to gain his feet without falling into the pit, where Kroppflopp now bit Racklin’s head off, and stood a moment crunching it, as if in thought. As he took two further bites, Hex looked away, then saw him toss the red-stumped remnant into his trough, and gesture at Forb:
“One more there, ho!”
With the haste of weasels in a coop, Forb and some guards leapt to unchain the nearest man—but with such trembling that shortly the Dapple roared and helped himself, this time swarming up to grab a guard, already unencumbered by chains. The Dapple chewed a while, then threw another remnant in the trough, sighing.
“So. We’ve reviewed—sufficiently—both charges and defence, and now I think we may proceed to judgement. I must tell you beforehand what joy it gives me to render you this verdict. The ghosts of your ilk so haunt this hill, the addition of but one of you, let alone this crowd, must tip the scales and give it them, so that they quite unseat us, if not kill us outright. All this, gentlemen, all this! And even so I dance, I warble, I all but cavort with joy to find you guilty, and send you to the Yard to die. And yea, though you were the guards, and your guards in chains, I would judge the same, and sentence you to die, and so, with godspeed, go you now, into the Yard to die.”
The aforementioned guards showed a laudable promptness and address in marshalling out the prisoners. The guards put armlocks on them and shoved them to a pace that kept them staggering. Hex stumbled with them, managing to hold intact a bizarre boon. It was the masterchain Kroppflopp had broken to take Racklin. The sundered ends were both now hidden and held together by Hex’s hand, for it was common enough for prisoners to grip the masterchain to keep better pace with the line. Yet another futile asset? Or was its futility merely his fear to use it? Stunned, he moved through the skylit chamber, the first door, the colonnade and then the courtyard, its wet gravel flashing underfoot. Ordained death was yards beyond the gate ahead, and the hills were his only slight chance of life. His free hand crept into his tunic, to the sweaty pommel of his shortsword. Just outside, he must draw as he dropped the chain, kill his guard and maybe Sarf’s behind him… draw as he dropped the chain, kill his guard and—the gate, swinging open itself, showed the wains backed right up to its threshold, gangways in place for loading. Neatly, the lines were marched in and the tailgates locked on. In his wain, as it rolled towards the Yard, Hex still crouched with his two secret advantages clutched in either hand, like a mime frozen in a comic moment.
At the Yard’s main gate Forb drew up. His gesture asked attention both of his own train and the townsfolk. The latter, many of whom crouched for shelter in the crooks and corners of the killing machines within, looked damp, disgruntled, and disinclined to oratory.
“My friends, I know that there are different currents of fashion among you. But may I now beg those of you with more rococo leanings to indulge an old campaigner’s taste for the earlier, more classical instruments of justice? Note that I do not disparage the more elaborate aesth—”
“Do you think we care a pinch of flea-dirt?” shrilled a draggled woman. “On with the show before it rains again!”
Indeed, the currents of fashion seemed to run so sluggishly among that crowd as to be undetectable. Forb looked to the wains, and there too beheld apathy.
“I thank you, then!” He bowed. The lynch party moved towards the oldest machines at the saddle’s brink—the wains down a main path, and the townsfolk tricklingly on footways through the wood-and-iron copse. Forb deployed the tumbrels and their guards before a brinkside trio of venerable engines: a Gallows and a Lasher flanking an ancient Drubber’s spiky clubs. From the elevation of the wains the chalky steeps just past that trio were obliquely visible—a rubble of rock and human bones, dropping more than half a mile to the hill-shadowed limit of vision. As the gangways were slammed in place and the tailgates unlocked there was a sudden, convulsive huddling of prisoner to prisoner. Into his friend’s ear Hex said:
“Sarf. I’m holding a break in the chain. Let’s try to run for that slope.”
The black glare of Sarf’s eyes might have been trance. “A break in the chain?”
The gate was hauled down and Forb was calling for four men from each cart. This left one man on the chain ahead of Hex. The guard on the gangway now held the lead end of it, and fitfully pulled it to keep it taut. Hex’s sweating hand knotted and cramped in its grip he did not dare remove his other hand, from his sword. More rain was coming, visible now not many hills away—would he still be alive when it got here?
He scanned the crowd. Its callous ease appalled him. In the surrounding engines they arranged themselves with small, prosaic attentions to their comfort which pierced Hex with an exquisite bitterness. A woman spread her cape across two of a Hammer-tree’s branches to roof herself and her tots; a young couple under a Toothed Coffin’s overhang sat swinging their legs and sharing a cheese; an older couple made a fuss over the wife’s white-haired parents, plumping up their cushions under a Tenderizer’s arms. A man was being installed in the Lasher.
“My friends!” Forb cried from the Gallows’ forestage. Behind him, a bound crusader stood noosed upon the trap, and over on the Drubber a man lay strapped to the bench below the clubs. “This uncertain weather bids us haste, and leaves no time for a proper pause before each taking-off. So, in token for the rest of you, let this unfortunate on the Thrasher here receive it. Fellow, have you a last remark to make?”
The Thrasher was sometimes called the Snapping-Gibbet, that is to say, its four branches dangled chains for the wrists and ankles, and its occupant hung spread-eagle. Thus it was to the platform the unfortunate bellowed his last remark:
“Don’t kill me!”
“Winch away, there!” Forb cried. The gears whirred. The branches snapped erect and plucked the victim skyward—snapped down and whipped him towards the earth, then brought him up again so short it broke him, neck and all, and he vomited a rush of blood upon the boards. The crowd raised only a feeble cheer, having
braved this day for multiple, not single executions. Hex’s bones seemed made of some grey spongy stuff, like so much raincloud, strengthless to save himself even clutching a piece of luck in either hand. Abruptly, painfully, his ears began to buzz—shock made his knees sag. What now? Was this some fit the face of imminent death woke in the irresolute? But hadn’t Forb and his guards winced too, even as he waved on the other executioners? The drop clapped and the rope sang taut over the sudden-sinking felon. The Drubber flailed a meaty drumbeat, spiced with screams, and a rainy noise of blood. Now Hex’s ears reamed his brain with outright torture. He could not think this agony born of real sound, though the coarse vibration drilled him with pain that seemed to include the range of sound. Forb was frankly writhing now, hands to his ears, and those guards and spectators nearest the three engines had fallen to their knees or bellies. Forb was sinking too, his dignity seeming merely slower to erode. Hex twisted, and howled aloud—as much because this wrenched his body free of fear, it seemed, as out of simple pain.
Of that there was enough. It focused to an almost intelligible whispering that flooded—fang sharp—into his brain. A ratswarm seethed through him, whispering with leprous lips a rodent litany of pain and rage. It seemed his skull took on such a cargo of these hissing stowaways that he would topple—weak stemmed—with the load. Woozily, his legs held. His right hand had dropped the broken chain, and joined his left, and both dragged free his sword. As if to mow a swath out through the encompassing agony, he swung wide, his arms in the process knocking flat the man before him, his blade biting, like an afterthought, half through the neck of the guard at his side.
He lurched forward, his waistband slid free of the master chain, and the same stagger dropped him to his knees. Down the gangway a guard that looked as stunned as he felt returned his stare while beyond, the four arms of the Thrasher lifted themselves off their axis, and floated whirling out across the air, their almost invisibly spinning chains, in passing, smiting Forb’s head from his shoulders. He had, in that instant, been gaping at the Gallows’ rope which—detaching itself and snaking laterally—had noosed an executioner’s neck and yanked him, thrashing, off his feet. Before Forb’s acephalic hulk had even settled to the ground, the Drubber’s clubs too left their anchorage and dispersed, acruise for living meat. The whole Yard stirred. Its chains, clamps, collars, fangs, barbs, clubs, and whips—its winches, cudgels, wedges, flensers, saws—its wristlets, anklets, armlets, hooks, screws, knouts, levers, beams, and hammers were all awake, freeing themselves of the frames they were part of and flying abroad to work their art. The audience—snugged into the very arms of the insurrectionary giants—squirmed red and broken in their sudden turmoil. Their mouths made screams Hex couldn’t hear through the pandemonium with which his brain was swarming like a hive, a honeycomb of larval horrors each gibbering its individual woe. On hands and knees Hex crawled towards the gangway, down which the guard was tumbling, his skull struck wide open by a toothed wheel that had just discused past. A flying beam like a swung club spun against the tumbrel and bashed its side panels to a spray of splinters. Staying on all fours Hex scuttled down the ramp.