by Dale Lucas
They were almost home. Hrissif did not relish stepping out into the windy street again, but it would be easy now that—
Something scraped behind them. It was a loud, sudden sound. Metal on stone. A flat clank. Then a crunching sound of some sort—stone on stone this time. Hrissif stopped and turned. Foelker had stopped, but he wasn’t looking behind him. He was staring at Hrissif.
Hrissif peered back into the darkness beyond his brother’s broad shoulders. That sound had come from somewhere behind them, deeper in the alley, or off on one of its tributaries, but he couldn’t place exactly where.
“What is it?” Foelker asked.
“You didn’t hear that?” Hrissif asked. Why didn’t he just turn and go? Who cared what was moving in the alley? Probably just a dog or some cats looking for a place to screw.
But then he heard it again. A scrape and a clank. What could make a sound like that? A heavy iron box picked up off the pavement, dragged a little, then dropped? Some old, discarded stew pot in a rubbish pile knocked over and dragged by a stray sniffing for victuals?
Or maybe one of those metal shields that covered the access shafts to the sewers? He’d seen city engineers working with those blasted things before. They were iron, and heavy (to discourage idle or clandestine explorations). One of those could make a sound like that as it was lifted from its lodgings and slid aside to allow someone into the stinking tunnels beneath the streets.
Or out of them.
Hrissif snorted. Preposterous. What would venture out of the underground? True, he’d heard the stories—the city was rife with them. Whole legions of mutated vermin; diseased, devolved men; ancient, shit-stinking demons—according to legend, they all lived down there, a virtual shadow kingdom, vital day and night, unseen beneath Yenara’s streets. And it was true, people did disappear more often around the open portals where the sewers flushed into the river or canals. But surely if something lived down there, it would hunt where the pickings were easiest, would it not? It wouldn’t possibly be equal to the task of lifting and moving one of those iron lids …
Hrissif took a step toward his brother, still trying to scan the darkness and see what might be making those noises behind him.
“Hrissif,” Foelker said, shifting back and forth on his feet now, impatient, “let’s go. It’s cold.”
“Just wait,” Hrissif said.
Footsteps now, heavy and ponderous. They didn’t sound like regular bootheels, though. It was a short, thumping sort of gait, like someone trying to walk with large stones tied to their feet. He could just make out the rocky scrape of each step, and something that sounded like earth moving or bones being ground in a low, rhythmic sawing.
Hrissif was curious—but he shouldn’t be foolish. They were steps away from the street. Time to carry on and leave whatever was moving through the alley—toward them—to its business, whatever that might be.
“Come on,” he said to his brother. “It’s nothing.”
Hrissif started to turn.
Foelker suddenly cried out—a yelping, surprised sound, as though he’d been seized or yanked by something or someone.
Hrissif spun round. It was too dark to see clearly, but he could still see the impressions of things, and the impression that he saw filled him with instant, disbelieving horror. He saw Foelker squirming and jostling in the air. His booted feet were off the ground. His surprised yelp now became a frightened, beseeching scream, a torrent of almost-words that conveyed no information, only emotion.
Fright. Need. Desperation. Disbelief.
Something tall and wide held Foelker in its hands. Though Hrissif could not see what the thing was, exactly, he could see its starlit outline, and what he saw made no sense. He saw a low head, but no neck. Broad shoulders. Strange, skeletal projections and protrusions that looked like bones. And its eyes—two bright red-gold eyes, like lamplights in the dark, burning from the bottom of deep wells.
“Hrissif!” Foelker screamed. “Brother, help me!”
His cry was swallowed when the thing opened its mouth—what passed for a mouth, anyway—and roared. As it roared, it made a sound like boulders rolling down a mountainside and blew hot, ashen breath before it, like the scorching air wafting from a smith’s forge.
What is it? Hrissif wondered, his mind working hard to understand what he was seeing. Not a man … made of stone … or is it bone … and that smell … like old, damp earth … the earth of a rotten cellar … the earth of a graveyard …
Then the thing jerked Foelker sideways with terrible force. Hrissif heard his brother’s head connect with the immovable stone wall beside him just before the force and weight of the thing’s enormous hands crushed Foelker’s skull against that wall like an eggshell. Hrissif heard the snap of bone, smelled salt and copper, then felt hot curds of brain and ropes of blood splatter his face.
Then the hulking beast turned its firelit gaze toward Hrissif. It took a single step toward him. In that instant Hrissif knew that he would be its next target, that if he did not move, and fast, his brains would be on the wall as well. That terrible realization set Hrissif’s feet pounding the half-frozen mud beneath him, and he fled into the night, screaming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Bjalki woke with a start when he realized a shadow had fallen upon him. For an instant—just an instant—he forgot all that had preceded that moment, and there was only terror; he was alone in the dark with only a single oil lamp to provide any light, while a monster stared down at him with pitiless, firelit eyes.
Bjalki screamed, leapt up from where he lay, and pressed himself against the cold, damp stone wall. The echoes of his cry ricocheted through the catacombs beneath the temple.
His shock fled an instant later. Sense returned. The watcher—the monster—was no stranger, but his servant and charge. He had formed it, empowered it, summoned the spirit to inhabit it, and given it its mission.
This monster was wholly of his own making.
I am Bjalki, he’d said when he first faced the risen beast, the one who called you and commands you. And this—he’d drawn out the scrap of cloak from the sanctuary, the one stiff with the blood of the man Therba had struck down—this will lead you to those who’ve wronged us.
That was hours ago. He’d waited so long in the darkened catacombs that he’d started to wonder if the creature would return before morning at all. Yet here it was, having caught its master napping on his vigil, staring with its dumb, lamp-like eyes as if awaiting a new command. Bjalki slowly edged around it. The Kothrum rotated its body, keeping its eyes always trained upon him as he crossed the empty chamber to where his oil lamp stood burning atop the lip of a long-dry stone cistern.
As though it were tracking prey, Bjalki thought. Gods, make it stop staring at me like that …
Bjalki took up the lamp and studied his creation in the flickering golden gloom. There had been a number of theoretical models in the texts, from primitive, doll-like effigies of clay or mud to intricate, elaborate automatons rife with gears, clockwork, and forged, oiled joints. Bjalki, though, had decided to use materials close at hand that were both easily manipulated and carried with them a useful symbolism: the frightful majesty of incarnate death. That rough beast now stood before him, molded by his own hands of damp grave earth mixed with ashes from Therba’s funeral pyre and encrusted all over with dwarven bones pilfered from the builders’ tombs beneath the temple: animate, obedient, lethal. Though the Kothrum’s eyes were nothing more than a pair of deep wells in its oddly small head, a mysterious, witchy light pulsing in their depths, there was yet a strange, childlike avidity in them, as if the thing awaited something, craved something, from the one who had created it.
Craving … that’s ridiculous, Bjalki told himself. It’s an automaton, pure and simple. It has no feelings—only a purpose.
Bjalki raised the lamp as high as he could, closely examining its malformed symmetries and primitive, charnel plumage of chalky old bone. The creature looked much as it had when he�
�d given it orders and it had left him. All except its hands.
Those hands, large and splayed and ugly and bestial, were covered in sticky, clotted, slowly coagulating blood.
“Oh, merciful Thendril …,” Bjalki breathed, and lowered the lamp so that its weak light better illuminated the beast’s bloodied talons. As if in answer to his close scrutiny, the Kothrum lifted its hands. It displayed them like a child proud of a fresh finger painting. Most of the blood had congealed, turned black and sticky, but there were still thick red rivulets here and there, rolling sluggishly along its upraised fingers or trembling whenever the beast made even the most minute movement. Bjalki also thought he saw something caught in the joints of its bony fingers: milky curds of some bodily tissue, along with a few sharp bits of bone that attested to something’s having been broken—nay, crushed—in the creature’s bare hands.
The Kothrum had killed this night.
I’ve done it, then, Bjalki realized. I’ve raised an avenger. I’ve delivered death.
Based upon what Bjalki had gleaned from the texts, the thing should have sought the man whose blood stained that scrap of cloth first. Once he’d been located and dispatched, the creature would now seek any accomplices magically associated with the murder of Docent Therba. To the Kothrum, Therba’s death tied together every human present at her death, and the blood left behind by that single wounded man created a path that the Kothrum could follow to find them.
Bjalki forced himself to meet the Kothrum’s implacable glowing gaze. The creature stared down at him, unmoving, unmoved.
“I will ask you a question. You will answer in the affirmative by nodding your head, in the negative by shaking your head from side to side. Do you understand these instructions?”
To his great surprise, the Kothrum slowly nodded the comically small head on its broad shoulders.
Bjalki started to speak again, but his voice caught in his throat, which was suddenly dry as baked clay under a summer sun. He wet his tongue, then pressed on.
“Did you kill one of the marked men?” Bjalki asked.
The Kothrum nodded.
“More than one?” Bjalki added.
The creature’s head slid from side to side: no.
“Good,” Bjalki said, feeling a strange sort of relief. “You’ve done well, then. Was it the man whose blood stained the rag I showed you?”
The Kothrum nodded.
Bjalki had thought that knowledge would satisfy him … but, shockingly, it did the opposite. In that instant, what had hitherto been an abstract concept—an exercise of sorts—struck him as damningly irrevocable.
The man whom Therba had thumped headwise with her stave, a man who had been unconscious and uninvolved when Therba was ultimately murdered, had just been executed—ended utterly—by this thing that Bjalki had brought to life.
Who was he? Did he have a name? A family? A wife or children? A father and mother?
Stop it, a voice inside Bjalki hissed. Waste no sympathy for that man, for he wasted none for Therba, or for yourself. Just because she knocked him out cold before he had a chance to take part in her murder doesn’t mean he would not have.
And yet, Bjalki thought, he could have meant her no harm. He could have been angry and misguided, like the others … but perhaps, when Therba was truly in danger, he would have tried to help her, to stop the man who wielded the knife? Just as their leader helped me escape?
Bjalki felt a strange sickness in the pit of his stomach and realized that it was self loathing. He’d taken definitive action, committed a grievously mortal sin, and had done so without knowing, beyond any doubt, that the man—or men—he sought to murder were, in fact, those most directly responsible.
One man held her, he reminded himself. One more plunged the knife in. Two guilty parties, without a doubt. The others were accomplices—but they did not truly kill her, did they? Can I pass fatal judgment on them when they were not, in fact, directly responsible for her death?
And yet, they were all there. All in masks. All intent on desecrating our temple and terrorizing us and humiliating us. Even if Therba’s murder was the result of a single man’s overzealousness, they were still there to spread fear and do harm, were they not?
Should that absolve them? Does that mean they deserve to live when their brother took Therba from us?
Bjalki stared at the Kothrum. The Kothrum stared back. What had he done, summoning this thing he did not understand, to punish guilty men he could not, realistically, name or pass judgment upon? What had ever given him the notion that he, a fortune-telling, omen-reading auspice, was worthy or powerful enough to traffic with these dark powers and try to see justice done?
Because you were there! that angry voice within him countered. You saw her die! You feared for your own imminent death! And now that your people need you and the men who wronged you might escape mortal justice, you would see vengeance—directed vengeance—visited upon them just as they think they’ve escaped it! That is why!
“No,” Bjalki said aloud, the sound of his own voice sounding feeble even to him. “This can’t be allowed to go on.”
The Kothrum stared down at him as if awaiting orders, but made no move to respond to his words.
Of course he hadn’t given a command. But what could he do? What options did he have?
The stone—that was it!
Every Hallirwelk temple in the world held, among its holy relics, a collection of magical stones recovered, in the most ancient of epochs, from the underground mines that were the homelands of Hallir’s Folk. These stones were discovered at intervals through the ages, always by accident, and usually set apart from the other produce of dwarven mining by a latent glow evident within them. From the dawn of time, his people had cherished these stones whenever and wherever they were discovered, and gathered them together in a single holy coffer at the Mother Temple, to be venerated, prayed over, and sometimes employed in the working of communal wonders or the invocation of miracles from the gods. When Hallir’s Folk began to scatter into the world of men and elves, to build temples to their gods away from their subterranean birthplace, the founding clergy of those far-flung temples would be granted a trio of those stones of power for their own reliquaries, as miraculous seeds of a sort—some small measure of the ancient power the gods afforded all their kind, to be kept and venerated in a consecrated house of worship.
To enact his plan, Bjalki had stolen one of those sacred gems from the temple reliquary, an emerald so dark it was almost black, inscribed with dwarven runes and pulsing with a sickly green inner light. He had been keenly aware, when he’d purloined the gem and brought it down into the catacombs for his ritual, that to use such a holy gift for such an unholy purpose was most unseemly, if not blasphemous. But all the texts had been in agreement about one thing: the constructed body that the Kothrum-spirit would inhabit needed an energy source, and those runestones were the most frequently invoked example of such a source.
Thus, in accordance with the rites he’d compiled, Bjalki had dug a hole in what passed for his dirt-beast’s small round head, then forced the glowing gem deep into the hole he’d made and packed in dirt on top of it. As an afterthought he’d placed a half-broken skull over the place where he’d planted the stone, as a grim helmet of sorts.
And so, if he wanted to deactivate his creature, perhaps that was all that was required: lift off that broken skull cap, dig his fingers into the soft soil of the Kothrum’s skull, and yank that gem out.
It couldn’t hurt to try, anyway.
“Kneel down,” Bjalki said, trying to sound as commanding and forceful as he could.
The Kothrum did as commanded, finally lowering its hands and falling to its knees with a crunching of soil and bone. Its head was now more or less at Bjalki’s eye level.
“Lower your head,” Bjalki said.
The Kothrum obeyed, as if awaiting a blessing.
Bjalki reached up and tried to lift off the skull cap. It stuck fast, as though it had somehow been
glued to its perch.
Strange, he thought. I didn’t affix it. I simply placed it there.
He pulled with both hands. Yanked. Tried to get his fingernails beneath the broken edges of the shattered hemisphere of bone.
Suddenly the Kothrum shoved him. The beast seemed to expend no force on the gesture, but Bjalki was nonetheless thrown back violently and rolled across the earthen floor of the chamber. His lamp had fallen from his hands, just a few feet from the where the Kothrum still knelt.
Bjalki stared for a moment, then scurried to his feet again. He studied the beast in the dim lamplight. Its faceless countenance remained blank and impassive even as its eyes still burned, two miniature forge fires in the murky darkness.
And yet it had shoved him away—defended itself from what was, essentially, an attack.
Bjalki stepped forward. He pointed to the skull cap. “Remove that,” he commanded. “Take it off. Let me see the bare earth beneath it.”
The Kothrum did nothing.
“I said remove it!” Bjalki shouted, then lunged forward again, reaching out for the skull cap. Perhaps, if he could just get a purchase on it again—
This time the Kothrum did not shove—it grabbed. Both bloodied hands shot up, took hold of his robes, and tossed him aside. Bjalki hit the damp stone wall of the underground chamber and tumbled to the earthen floor, breath knocked out of him. He lay for a time in the dirt, sputtering and coughing, trying to understand what had gone wrong. When he’d finally regained himself, he tottered upright and sat where he’d fallen.
The Kothrum stood above him, looming, its lamplike eyes burning down upon him.
“I am your master,” Bjalki said, and struggled to his feet again. “How dare you lay hands on me!”
He reached out for it again, not even sure what he intended to do. He struck it in the torso, like a petulant child, just to see how it might respond. To his great surprise, it responded with violence. Once more he was struck and sent sprawling, head over heels. Once more, when he regained his senses and sat upright, the Kothrum stood above him, staring at him, its silence and implacable face a strange sort of taunt.