by Mike Allen
His first wife refused with increasing hysterics to set foot in the place. Within that week, she vanished. Leonind’s voice tightened like an oud string as he told me this.
The wedding took place in the grand ballroom the day the robber-merchant’s servants brought his son to the manse. The priestess who presided over the wedding was like no other, a woman shrouded in red gauze whose voice cracked like brittle bones. The son never saw the girl with snow-white hair again. He heard his father’s howls of terror all through the wedding night.
This story didn’t scare me, but it certainly scared Leonind. His huge eyes focused somewhere other than the table and its tomes. An intuition told me he described the screams from memory, that he’d meant to tell this tale as if it had happened to someone else but lacked the composure for the task.
The robber-merchant’s servants tended to the son, though fear bent their spines and whited their eyes. Even by day they lived by candlelight. His father turned quiet and pale as ash, and at night his screams echoed through the manse’s maze of halls.
Then came the day his father regained color, the flush of fury, and ranted without pause. “The old witch tricked me, but I’ve taken care of that now, oh, yes... I’m so sorry, my boy, my boy. We can never leave this dark place, these cursed grounds, never. But we are free of her, and that knowledge will be our sun.”
Yet that night his screams began anew, louder than ever before, and in between he yammered and wept, “No! No, no....”
Leonind sat there beside the bed, mouth moving without uttering, until I demanded, “Well?”
And he snapped “Insolent!” and blew out the lamp.
But I refused sleep. I waited long, breathless minutes. Then, braved the dark.
I prowled to the entrance, pressed my ear against the door. And again heard distant voices.
My fingers found the latch, and slowly, so slowly I turned it, pushed the door open. Outside, the gloom only lightened by a shade.
I stayed in the opening a long time, barely breathing, until the dark haze coalesced into outlines and I realized I’d seen this setting before, in dreams. The doorway let out onto a long balcony, with an abyss yawning beyond the filigreed rail. I walked toward the rail in a crouch, and when I reached it I had to stifle a gasp. Above the cavernous pit hung a chandelier larger than a merchant ship, an intricate mass of webs and dust that hadn’t shone with light in uncounted years, and yet it sparked in its depths with the dimmest of reflections from a light source deep below. The balcony I stood on was part of a mezzanine that completely encircled the entire vast ballroom. On the farther side I witnessed ghostly stairs.
I didn’t dare to breathe as I peered over the railing.
The illumination came from a pair of torches, each held by a wide-eyed armsman. Two more gripped a shivering figure between them, a child, a slender youth or even a woman, I couldn’t tell. The figure occasionally struggled, which revealed feet bound at the ankles.
A fat man in robes stood before them all, bent on one knee in submission before a towering basalt throne. Whatever sat there glistened in the torchlight. It said, “You have prepared to pay the price?”
And when it spoke, I wanted to shield my ears and cover my nose. It sounded like screams bubbling from quicksand. Its mere words poisoned the air with a stench like corpses piled at the bottom of a well, so powerful it even reached me on my perch eight floors above.
The kneeling man swayed and stuttered. “My Lord Audrind, I would have the House of Ayfel trouble me no more.” And then stammered, “Is it truly necessary to....”
“You are welcome to change your mind,” the thing said. “But you will never leave.”
The supplicant sobbed, “Yes, Lord,” and the captive whimpered.
“Let it be known then, Earl of Syburgh,” said Lord Audrind, “On your behalf I will send my children out into the world where I cannot go, and each night they will seek anew and never tire of the search until every sire and babe and servant and soldier of House Ayfel breathes no more.”
His voice so sickened me as I cringed behind the rail that I hardly understood his words. I heard the Earl say, “Yes, Lord.”
Audrind’s chuckle made his voice seem mild. “Now then,” he said, “the overture.”
A hiss, a scrape, and the Earl cried out. I had seen no one approach him, but he clutched a spurting stump where his left hand had been. One of the armsmen passed his torch to the other and rushed to his employer’s side, applied a tourniquet. The Earl’s mutilation had been expected and planned for.
“You will leave me to enjoy the aria alone,” the thing on the throne said.
The captive must have had a gag in all along, because it slipped loose. “No, father, no, no!”
But the armsmen and the light retreated, leaving the captive to plead in darkness. And then, the shrieks.... I am no stranger to death, Eyan, but at no time in my life have I heard such terror and pain expressed in a single sound. And they went on, and on, and on.
Oh, Eyan, so often I’ve reflected on this moment and been so ashamed, that instead of trying to do something, anything, to help, I cowered and crawled away, groping blindly in the dark for the room Leonind kept me in, which in that moment of dumb-struck terror actually seemed a place of safety.
I found the door, slightly ajar, and fled inside with an awkward thump. I didn’t recognize until I’d scurried well into the room what a terrible mistake I’d made.
A flare of illumination washed the chamber in flickering shadow and gleam. I’d gone through another door, into a different room, longer and wider than the one I knew. Runes were scratched on every visible inch of walls, ceiling and floor, some of which I could read. Repeated phrases: Death feeds life. Life breeds death. Death breathes.
Tall and heavy armoire s slithering with gold filigree lined both sides of this horrid space, most with their doors open, spilling out once-beautiful gowns now molded and rotting. Other rags, hung within their cobwebbed interiors, reminded me of molted skins.
The glow came from behind the drawn curtains of a canopy bed larger than a house in the Rosepike slums. As I started to backpedal, the curtain parted. The woman in the veil stood there, silhouetted by wavering light, its source hidden behind her.
She wasn’t as I’d seen her in dreams. Her filthy veil hung in shreds. Her feet, her legs, weren’t of veined gray flesh but spun of bone and shadow and wet gristle. I saw hair through the veil, white as milk. Her eyes—I couldn’t look at them.
The same voice that had spoken to me in sleep rasped in my ear. “You arrive too soon,” it said. “Hide, or you will stay forever.”
Behind me the door from the mezzanine creaked. I threw myself into the nearest open armoire as Lord Audrind slouched into the room. Eyan, I’ll never know how he didn’t spot me or hear me. Pressed against the back of the wardrobe amongst those chill leathery hangings, I couldn’t see all of him, couldn’t bear to look at what I did see. Only a massive, man-shaped thing, wet with decay, that paused, chest heaving, his stench threatening to turn my stomach inside-out. The monster started to thrash, and the light in the room thickened and contracted and pulled as if it were the lure and net and Audrind the fish. The air clotted and I struggled not to gag.
“Your petty games of torture and murder make you no braver, husband,” the witch said. “Oh, my lovely children, afore your father turns you out for the hunt, bring him hither.”
And the skins fluttered around me in a bat-wing storm and flowed into the room, gaining mass as they did so, faceless gray shapes that swarmed Audrind as he flailed against them.
Fear blazed through me in a white fire. I gave up on hiding, sprinted for the exit.
Arms wrapped around me the moment I sprang into the hall.
To my credit, I didn’t scream but fought for all I was worth, and though my attacker was strong he was also small. I punched him several times before I recognized the voice hissing at me. Leonind. “What are you doing? Stop. Stop. He’ll hear you.”
/> I fell still and he let me go.
“We have to get you back,” he said. And I knew he meant back into the dark.
I backed away from him until I pressed against the rail.
“Please,” he said, and for the first time I heard genuine sorrow in his voice. “If my father finds out you’re here he’ll tell my stepbrothers and stepsisters to kill you, and then they won’t listen to me anymore.”
And at that moment, Eyan, I began to connect all the strangeness together—the shapes in the dark that were his siblings, the story of the treacherous witch wedding and a father’s evil ambitions, the woman in the veil and the monster that feared her. A husband and wife who walked though their flesh rotted, whose unnatural children lurked in darkness.
I finally voiced what I’d wanted to say for so long. “I want to leave.”
He clenched his fists, closed his eyes. Grimaced. Opened them again. Of what he muttered in response, I heard only, “...someone to talk to....”
I thought of all the brave heroes in the stories he’d forced me to decipher. My sorrow alarmed me, stoked my anger even hotter. “In another place, Leonind. Not here.”
He moaned. “I can’t. He told me I can’t leave. He says the witch’s spell binds my flesh as fast as it binds his.”
I guessed at a piece of this puzzle he had not shared with me. “Will the curse end if you kill him?” And when he didn’t answer I spat. “Coward! One way or the other I’ll leave this place.”
He stepped closer. “You’ll never find the way out. My brothers and sisters will bring you back.”
I climbed onto the rail, one leg dangling over eternity. “I will not live here.” I couldn’t stop my voice from trembling.
“No,” he said, with no hint as to in what sense he meant it.
I’d called him a coward, but perhaps I was no better. I knew there’d be no nursing back to health after this fall to hard marble. So I said the thing that either might be the greatest mistake I’ve ever made or else the thing that might save us all. I told him, “Let me go, Leonind, and I’ll come back for you.”
I can’t swear I meant it as a lie. Eyan, please don’t hate me. It was long ago.
From behind the witch’s chamber door, a deafening scream muffled Leonind’s reply. He repeated it softly. “You swear on your poisoned parents’ graves.”
As I said “Yes,” a gust disturbed the air.
We returned to the room where I’d lain so long in the dark. He asked me to drink the elixir one more time and told me his brothers would bear me out. I closed my eyes, certain they’d never open again, but they did when sunlight seared them. I lay in horse-barn straw in the Steermast Quarter, as far from the Manse Lohmar as Calcharra’s battlements allow. Leonind had kept his promise.
But I didn’t keep mine.
Many things happened, Eyan, between then and the first time I met you. Most of them you know.
I already despised Lord Urnath for the same reasons you do. Yet Lady Garthand won my heart long before Urnath drove her into exile, when she exposed the Earl of Syburgh’s depravities without a single sword drawn, and even Urnath couldn’t spare him from the guillotine. That was the day I learned that the cruel cannot always trump the fair, and you, Eyan, couldn’t know till now how my heart sang.
As you hear this account you may have recognized the House Ayfel, once enemies of Syburgh, snuffed out overnight after the Earl’s son vanished. Everyone believed the one was retaliation for the other. I know differently. The son was the price.
And I’m sure you’ve heard the word “muershadows” whispered when talk turns to the deaths of House Ayfel. Or to other horrors. The slaughter of the Candlemakers’ Guild. The sudden deaths of the entire Oceanside Prelate.
I lived with the knowledge of who the muershadows really are, and tried to forget that I knew it, that I had ever learned it.
I believe Ariste’s son Worulz has become so frightened of Lady Garthand and her forces underground that he’s made this dark bargain. I wonder which heir has gone missing. Or perhaps even more than one?
Eyan, it’s only because we’re so scattered and so well hidden that we’re not all dead already.
I can hear you now: “What makes you so sure?”
Last night as the camp slept, as I slept, a hand cold and unyielding as a gravestone clamped over my mouth.
I opened my eyes in complete darkness and for a second believed I’d undergone the worst wakening of all, that I was still in the manse, lying in that pitch-black room.
But my vision adjusted until I could see the crumbling plaster frescoes of this buried cathedral, the old tapestries hanging from ropes that partition our pallets from the rest of the revolutionaries. The thing gripping my mouth crouched beside me, not moving, not breathing, no pulse in its fingers. I knew instantly what manner of being it must be.
An edge pressed against my throat. I flinched, but the object flexed and failed to cut. Then the hand was gone, and the creature with it. A folded letter lay across my throat. I recognized the script, though I didn’t need to guess who had written it.
I’ve enclosed the letter, though Bryn will not be able to decipher its runes. It reads, “You are in grave danger if you stay. You must leave that cell of thieves and never return. You know why. And you know the only place where safety lies.”
You told me, Eyan, you thought sorcery must have had a role in the slaughter at the camp within the Pauper Catacombs. But I tell you sorcery has been behind every attack on Garthand’s fighters, at Toothgate, at Speaking Cavern, even in the massacre of our people as they prepared to storm the Urnath vault.
Every sire. Every child. Every servant. Every soldier. Lady Garthand herself when she returns. Audrind’s brood will come for all of us. There will be no warning, no time even for screams. And if you go to the Manse Lohmar yourself to bring the battle to them, you’ll meet the same end.
Only I can go, because Leonind has allowed, and because his father still knows nothing of me.
I don’t want to go back. And yet, Eyan, the dream that troubled me before that hand touched my face—it could not have been coincidence.
In it, I was climbing down the outside of the ivy-smothered palisade. I looked up to see Leonind following, anxiously seeking purchase. He looked no older than he did when he cared for me in the Manse all that time ago, and I imagine for an enchanted creature such as him this could be so.
Hurry, I said, though I heard no rustle of pursuit.
He descended gingerly, and I knew the heavy sack tied at his hip held something terrible inside. Hurry, I hissed again, and kept urging him on until I let go and dropped into the thornflowers.
A wind sighed as he struggled the last few yards. Thin as he was, his clothes billowed on his frame. He either chose to leap or lost his grip, I’m not sure which.
When he landed his legs snapped beneath him. He collapsed as if kneeling.
His elfin face withered tight to his skull and blackened as if licked by fire. His eyes rolled and bulged between shriveling eyelids. His mouth stretched open as his teeth dropped out. He touched my arm with fingers like old twigs, papery and long-dried.
I can’t tell you if revulsion, rage, or pity drove me to strike. I kicked him.
He burst in a gout of dust.
Then I knelt and sifted through that dust, searching for the bag and what it contained—his father Audrind’s head. Yet I found nothing.
The wind rose again, shrill cackles carried on its breath. I looked up and saw the witch standing with me in the brambles, her veil stretching around her skeletal form like demon wings. She rose into the sky until my gaze could no longer track her.
And then I awoke, that cold hand over my mouth.
So, Eyan, if I’ve been granted a vision of what’s to come, of what will save us, it can only happen if I do as Leonind demands.
May the goddess who guides our Lady bless my steps and grant me luck, that your ears are never cursed to hear this story.
The dus
k is thickening. I go.
Copyright © 2012 Mike Allen
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Mike Allen’s first short story collection, The Button Bin and Other Horrors, is scheduled for an early fall release from Apex Publications. He’s been a finalist for the Nebula Award for short fiction and won the Rhysling Award for poetry three times. He’s written two novels, both of which are house-hunting. He’s also editor of the poetry journal Mythic Delirium and the acclaimed anthology series Clockwork Phoenix. He records a monthly column, “Tour of the Abattoir,” for the Tales to Terrify podcast site. He lives in Roanoke, Va., with his wife Anita, a goofy dog, and two cats with varying degrees of psychosis.
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PRIDECRAFT
by Christian K. Martinez
“When man governed, there was food and peace. There were clockworks to hold the sun and twist the moon, and magic teeming in the crafts....”
The children huddled around Weaver’s crusty slippers, like they always did, listening to our myths. Humanity fell so long ago we’ve started calling the years “countless.” We’ve only been kept around because of our usefulness. People like the trains.
The children “oohed” as Weaver began the tale of Son the Carpenter and his thousand willow flies. Beneath the lure of the old man’s voice and the mudra of his hands, they forgot their empty bellies and the haphazard patches holding rags around their ribs. They were in the past.
The braces restricting the movement of my hands didn’t release me from the present, and so I envied them. I could not indulge in the mything voice, couldn’t lose myself to its words or pleasure.
“Honor, Twin,” Weaver said, prompting the children to mimic him in a caucus of falsetto warbles.
I returned their bows precisely, trying not to appear rushed. “Service, Weaver.”
He returned smoothly to Son’s story, reclaiming their attention and letting me walk on.