“But it is warm, though,” Uster meekly offered.
Mirrim mimed the act of strangling herself.
* * *
Children laughed when he ran, it was true, but no one else. Dogs slunk away, never barked. Nothing wild would come near him, in fact. Warring for the Aspect-Emperor across the Secharib cane fields, he once found himself face-to-face with an elephant cobra possessing a hood the size of a Tydonni shield. The whole company had watched him stare the thing down, not so much with fury as with vacant curiosity. ‘Ermû’kipillal,’ they began calling him, the Iron Mongoose. The rumour spread so wide that the Lord Palatine of Eshganax summoned him to dine at his palace the following week—exactly as Uster’s sister (the Other one, not Yild) had prophesied the previous winter.
Uster did not like rehearsing the details of what followed. All he would tell those who dared ask about the rumours was that he had loved the Palatine dearly, as a son might love a father, and that this had made his other son jealous.
* * *
The Lady Bayal laughed in the fey manner of matrons who pretend to be pestered into sharing what their heart has been shouting all along.
“Your grandmother, of course, was kind enough to explain it to me, you see, the way it works in the gloomy wilds of Bayal. She told how she had been snatched from Oswenta the same as me, and how she, like every other wife of Samp, had given birth to a girl and then, seven years later, to a boy—the first to be fed to the forest on the first day of her fifteenth year, so the second might grow old and rich and fat!
“I remember I laughed when she said it—I thought she was mad, you see, but she was my new mother, so I thought it better to pretend she was joking... She flew into a rage, of course, screaming about her first born daughter, her Mirrim. ‘You must hate them!’ she raged. ‘Hate your daughters! Or be lost, doomed to hear them crying out on the wind... ‘Mummy-mummy! I’m cold! Please, mummy...’”
The Lady Bayal hung breathless upon the memory. Mirrim looked upward, as if balancing eyes like overfull bowls.
“I asked your father about it,” the Lady continued. “I can still remember how I shook, bodily, like a sack of piglets! listening to him confirm everything his wretched mother had said. The Carathayan, he called it, a demon from some faraway desert waste, come here to bless and to hate!”
“Yes, Mother, I know,” Mirrim said, pupils beneath fluttering lids.
“And then you know that we are doomed!”
There had been real terror in her screech, that gurgle that speaks of bodily panic. The ensuing silence fell upon them as a muzzle.
“Well...” Uster ventured. The hearth popped and crackled. “You two, maybe...”
Mother and daughter stared dumbfounded.
“Unless the Carathayan is a Bashrag,” the mercenary said on an inexplicable lurch. Mother and daughter exchanged a glance.
“You know,” Uster continued, “those big, misbegotten brutes, soulless, with hands flapping from hands, little eyes gazing out from their cheeks?”
Mirrim slapped her forehead with both palms simultaneously. “Uster? A Bashrag? Really?”
“Because that’s the only thing that can kill me. I gotta watch out for them...”
“And ho—?”
“Bashrags. I got to avoid them as best I can.”
Mirrim closed her eyes in prayer. “And how do you know that, Uster?”
The scales of his hauberk rattled for his shrug. “My sister says...”
“Yild?”
Uster scowled at the stupidity of her mistake. “No... How could you even think that?”
“How about,” Mirrim replied, “because I don’t even know your lunatic sisters?” Scarce a fortnight had passed and yet her exasperation had the overtaxed twang of one who could pretend no longer. Uster was forever mistaking the boundaries of things, assuming that everything obvious to him had to be equally obvious to the entire Race of Men. “What is the name of your other sister anyway?”
The mercenary swung on a stoop, acting as if amused at a silly question. “Oh, no-no-no-no,” he laughed, his eyes rounded more in fear than hilarity. “We-we don’t...ah...do that.”
“What? Call her by name?”
“Ha-ha-ha...” Uster said, shuffling in anxious imitation of dancing in laughter, or something of the sort.
Lady Bayal had been peering at the blood-soaked thug the entire time, leaning with what seemed ever more avid attention. “My husband hir—?”
Wood cracked like gravel. The front door did not so much explode open as yield before some brisk entrance—only one lacking a traveller. Uster, Mirrim, and the Lady whirled to the vacant threshold, peered more at than into the blackness blotting the once shining outdoors.
“Behold!” Lady Bayal cried, finding confirmation in her own demise. “The Carathayan has come!”
“If we’re lucky,” Uster muttered.
Terrified as she was, Mirrim spared her protector a witless glance. “We should have fled!” she cried under her breath.
“You two, maybe,” Uster rasped.
Both women spared him a witless glance this time.
“Unless, a Bashrag comes through that door.”
The hearth burned behind them, the heavier hardwood logs now crumbled into glowing heaps, so that the whole pulsed between glow and shining flame. Its light dimmed the further it reached across the common room, until it merely limned the joints between shadow and absolute black about the door.
“That,” Uster observed, “would be scary.”
Cold winter air rushed across their booted feet, bearing with it the scent of frozen evergreen.
Something boiled in the blackness.
Not one of them possessed the words to describe what entered that portal and approached them—if it could be said that anything ‘entered’ let alone ‘approached,’ for all three could feel the presence hanging about their neck, inhaling heat, watching as they did, watching its own approach, first a wraith walking there, then a wraith walking here, countless horrid glimpses advancing on all angles simultaneously, a thousand spectres, all closing upon themselves, at once singular and divided.
Lady Bayal began screaming.
Tut-tut...reality groaned. No noise...
The buxom caste-noble bit back her terror as best she could, choked her curdling scream into a pathetic keen.
The oath has been broken...
Mirrim fled to Uster, embraced him about the waist, only to find herself unceremoniously dumped on the floor below the great hearth.
Now the wheel must be reset.
The voice sucked all breath from them. The hostel’s great timbers shuddered and creaked, the sound of deep joints pestled. A girl Mirrim’s age did not so much appear as shimmer like a reflection upon tar, a point where the eyes refused to fasten, no more than three paces from any of them.
Uster turned to the Lady Bayal, scowling, baffled. “Is this the Carathayan?”
The woman glared at him from the corner of her eyes—the way a horse in a burning barn might. “You’re mad! Can’t you see we’re dead?”
Uster shook his head, dismayed by her coarse manner. He turned to the small maelstrom of glimpses boiling in ink and cold between them.
“Are you the one they call the Carathayan?”
That names, a dozen cadaverous lips replied, only my terror.
“Yes!” Uster cried, nodding amiably. “Your true name is Cacollub...”
Not one of them possessed the words to describe what ensued.
* * *
“Uster... You do remember the spiders?”
His nostrils flared. “Yes-yes. But not as me. As someone else.”
“Well, you used to be fascinated by spiders, drawn to them like a robin to meadows. See how he aims, our Sister would say, and I would turn, look, and there you would be, skinny as a rag-daughter, bent over some spider.”
It tickled his bones, hearing Yild laugh. Plucked his marrow.
“The most common ones you killed outright, and others you drafted into your mad little boy games, and some of them, the rare ones, you befriended, Uster, or at least attended with a reverence far, far too grave for a boy your age. Then there was this one, a sinister bluedevil—as shiny as an opal, I swear!—that had taken up in the witch-orchids on the back gantry. That had been nothing short a love affair, that one! And then do you remember what happened?”
“Yes. But not as me.”
“So it wasn’t you who came bounding into the manse weeping?”
My, how his neck was itchy! “No. I’m pretty sure I’ve never wept, Yild.”
“You have wept. Do you remember why?”
“The wasp?”
“Yes! A blackjacket had come and paralyzed your beloved bluedevil, carried it away for her baby worms. And do you remember what it was our dread sister said?”
His bottom lip bulged. “Wasps don’t weep for spiders.”
“And who was it she said that to?”
“Me.”
“Yes! And all this time you were fascinated by spiders because...”
His brows knitted into a scowl.
“Because I eat them.”
* * *
A flesh and blood girl stood shivering before them clothed in nothing but forest filth, convulsions tearing down each incredulous glimpse. A sound like a cat coughing escaped her, but somehow they all knew it was a shriek, one too great for such a slender throat.
Mirrim drew her Seleukaran rapier, leapt forward and skewered the wretched girl mid-furball. She yanked the blade clear the girl’s folding collapse, ran her through again as she flopped across the corduroy floor.
“Noo!” Uster cried out, wagging two giant palms as if waving down an approaching horse team.
“What just happened there?” Mirrim gasped.
“You murdered that girl!”
“Seju and Angeshrael!” Mirrim cursed in disbelief. “What happened with you, you idiot? How is it you can just speak its name and turn it into something so easy to kill? How did you know the Carathayan’s name?”
Uster squinted at the raven-haired beauty, shook his head in amazement. “So you didn’t know?”
“His sisters,” the Lady Bayal said, approaching her daughter from behind. “Your sisters sent you, didn’t they, Uster?”
A single stride took the gaunt mercenary to the dead girl. He dropped to one knee, grunting the Galeoth equivalent of, “Yawp.”
“Sisters?” Mirrim cried, tearing her shoulders from her mother’s clasp.
“Leave it be, darling,” the Lady said, her eyes imploring Uster as he laboured to decapitate the girl. “So does this mean the curse is...is broken... That Mirrim and I are saved?”
The mercenary stood, slinging the girl’s head over his shoulder by the hair. The grisly trophy slapped on his back sideways, regarded mother and daughter with an eerie, almost philosophical detachment before he turned.
“Are we?” Lady Bayal pressed. “Are we saved?”
Uster paused for a moment, his bottom lip furrowed. “No...” he finally said. “If I were God I would have damned you a long tim—”
“Sweet Seju, Uster!” Mirrim cried. “Is the Carathayan dead?”
Nodding, the awkward giant held the severed head out by the hair, let it swing about like a carpenter’s string circling plumb. “You have to live with this, Mirrim. Do yo—?”
“Uster, I will tear your eyes out I swe—!”
“But I like them even more than your ears!”
All three souls stood staring one to another, the girl’s severed head swelling, draining blood like melted butter. The fire fairly whooshed behind them, pulsing with blessed heat.
Mirrim’s eyes bulged for the grisly madness of the head, then managed to focus on the mercenary. “Are we...safe...safe from the curse?”
Uster Scraul shrugged. “You? Sure.”
“B-but n-n-n-not me?” the Lady Bayal cried, backing away, starting at the bump of a table corner, fairly undone for this one last dignity.
Uster deposited the severed head into a sack he had pulled from the back of his war-girdle. He looked like something truly savage then, cruelly armoured, spattered in gore, lacquered in boiling firelight, a soul too elemental to leave its vessel uncracked.
“Nope.”
“Sweet Seju, why?”
“No one ever tells me anything,” he groused, taking a great stomping step toward her.
At long last, Mirrim began screaming.
Acknowledgements
Adrian Collins
None of this could have happened without 938 amazing grimdark fantasy fans pillaging their bank accounts, giving the project a shout out to their mates, and joining the Grimdark Magazine horde. I’d thank them, but dark lords don’t thank their minions.
Copyright 2017 Grimdark Magazine
Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists Page 47