by Logan Jacobs
“It doesn’t feel right,” I said. “It feels too easy. Every material has its own grade of resistance to being shrunk or enlarged. And gold is several grades more resistant than this stuff, whatever it is.”
“This whole palace is probably an illusion,” Theo said.
“I don’t think that creature we saw was an illusion,” I said. “I could feel its… aura. And I think it felt us too.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Theo said.
I concluded that he had the right idea about that. I wondered which door to take. The door we’d come through at first was the same one that the nightmare creature had exited through. I didn’t want to open it, only to run smack into it. The other door, on the other hand, would lead us deeper into Gorander’s palace. Which was beginning to seem less and less like a place we wanted to be. Especially if the gold in it wasn’t real gold.
But I didn’t know if I could just turn my back on this place and walk away from it, either. The Savajun sorceress Walks with Spirits had seen the conviction and determination in me. That was probably what had led her to conclude that I was “true of heart.” How true-hearted would I be if I tucked my tail between my legs and left five minutes after I got into the palace just because I’d seen one ugly face there?
I walked over to the opposite door, the one that the red-hooded thing had come through. I heard the clatter of hooves striking gold coins as Theo followed me. We left behind the treasury of fake gold for another hallway. This one was wide and drafty and lined with stone pillars.
I glimpsed a figure walking toward us, and my heart leapt for an instant but then I saw that it was just a human. A woman, dressed in a housemaid’s black dress beneath a white apron. She came closer, and her face looked just as sunken and lifeless as those of the miners outside, although it wasn’t smudged black. I didn’t bother trying to talk to her. I just let her pass us by.
At the end of the hallway, we reached another feasting room. Inside, there were two humans, presumably more former townsfolk of Fairhollow, busily draping the tables with cloths and setting out plates, cups, and silverware. They didn’t even blink at the sight of a huge black horse strolling by in the middle of the palace. Whether they had been suffocating in the filthy pits of the mine outside, or folding napkins here in this pristine room, I didn’t think they would have known a difference.
I thought of how terrifying the situation must have been for that one man who had fled to Bluegarden, when he was still trapped here in Gorander’s palace. When he was the only one who didn’t fall under the spell, and who must have tried desperately to rouse his neighbors, his friends, his family, to action, but they were all calmly oblivious to their own plight. They might have even reported him to the sorcerer if he caused too much of a disturbance. They wouldn’t have remembered who he was, or who they were. The only person who mattered to them now was Gorander. And their only desire was to serve Gorander’s wishes. To be surrounded by these walking dead was worse than to be alone.
Theo and I moved on from the feast hall into another checkered hallway. Instead of being lined with topiaries and lit by chandeliers, though, this one was lined with massive pillars with torches set in sconces.
At first the hallway seemed to be empty. I kept my hand resting on Theo’s shoulder as we walked as a source of reassurance to both of us.
Then, someone turned out into the hallway ahead of us. It was another townsperson, this one was carrying a silver tray piled precariously with goblets and vials of colorful substances. I thought they must be materials for working magics and wondered if we should follow the man to wherever he was delivering them.
But then disaster struck. I guess that becoming mindless and losing their personalities didn’t absolve these people’s bodies of their human clumsiness. I heard a faint, crystalline tinkle as one of the vessels on the tray must have slid and bumped into another. Then the tray tilted wildly as the man apparently tried to save one of the vessels from falling, and a glass bowl fell to the floor and shattered. A brilliant blue liquid puddled on the checkerboard tiles. The man lunged too late to try to catch the bowl, and the whole tray went flying from his hands as he went sprawling. Colored powders sprinkled him. Spilled liquid soaked into some of the spilled powders, and a silvery mist rose into the air. I thought I could hear a chorus of ominously whispering voices, but the sound was so soft that I wasn’t sure if I was just imagining it.
The man rose stiffly to his feet. He didn’t try to clean up the mess. He didn’t try to walk away from it either. He just stood there, waiting.
I didn’t like the look of that at all. I pulled Theo behind the nearest pillar, and he pressed himself to the wall as close as he could.
A moment after we had concealed ourselves, three red-cloaked figures like the one we had encountered in the room full of gold swept down silently upon the servant in the middle of the hall.
They threw their hoods back to reveal bald white heads and shriveled ears. Their wide mouths crowded full of needle teeth opened, and then they pounced on the hapless servant and started tearing off mouthfuls of his flesh and swallowing it. They exposed his rib cage, and then his innards started to pour out of his stomach, and the creatures slurped them up. All the while the man didn’t make a sound. His expression didn’t change. He just stood there as he was eaten alive by the red-cloaked demons, and his blood streamed down and created a widening pool across the black-and-white tiles, and flooded the colorful mess he had made a minute ago. The devouring demons seemed most interested in the vital organs inside his chest cavity. His head and limbs they didn’t touch. When you could see through the gaping holes in his middle from front to back, they pulled their hoods back down over their horrible grub faces and glided away again. The ravaged corpse with its eyes still open finally collapsed, as if it were no longer required by its masters to stand upright.
I could feel Theo trembling beneath my hand. I had to admit my hand itself wasn’t as steady as usual.
Well, I guess that creature we’d seen before hadn’t been Gorander after all then. There were more of them. They must have been some kind of demon familiars that oversaw the townspeople he had enslaved.
“Maybe those powders and liquids have something to do with how Gorander is maintaining this palace, and how he’s keeping all those people from Fairhollow under his spell,” I said. “Maybe there’s a way we could use them against him.”
“First of all, you’re not a sorcerer and you don’t know how,” Theo whispered. “Second of all, they’re all mixed together and submerged in corpse juices now. Wouldn’t that make them ineffectual?”
“It depends on the substance,” I said. It was true that I wasn’t a sorcerer, and didn’t have the ability to cast spells myself, but I did know a tiny bit about how it worked from Vera. And Theo and I needed to find out as much as we could about the enemy in whose deadly palace of illusions we were currently trapped. “Stay here.”
I left the cover of the pillar and crept up to where the half-eaten corpse laid. Then I knelt down to look at the clumps of colored powders, some of which were dissolving in his blood, and the liquids that swirled through it in strangely beautiful patterns, especially the brilliant blue, which was combining with his blood to create violet. The coppery scent of blood overwhelmed everything else, but if I sniffed and concentrated hard, I could catch faint whiffs of various herbal scents and what might have been kerosene. I was pretty sure my sense of smell, just like all my other senses, had been sharpened by Walks with Spirits’ brew.
Then, my sixth sense told me something was wrong. Before I actually heard the rustle of robes or smelled their distinctive musty scent, which was a little like that of very old books, and certainly before I laid eyes on their deformed visages, I felt that the demons were coming.
I drew my sword as I stood up and whirled around and found myself facing three of them.
They stood in a row and surveyed me silently. They looked just distinct enough from each other that I could tell them ap
art when comparing them side by side, although any one of them encountered individually would have looked more or less the same to me, with their black insect eyes embedded in soggy-looking masses of disintegrating white flesh and those nightmare grins of needle teeth.
I didn’t know if they had only pretended to leave the scene of their feast in order to lure me out, after having sensed a living presence nearby, or if they really had left, but then returned after a few minutes to dispose of the mess. It was also entirely possible that these were three different demons altogether than the ones that had gnawed the poor man’s innards out, and they just happened to come down this hallway by coincidence. I hadn’t gotten a close enough look at their faces to know. The extreme horror of their faces forcibly repelled the gaze.
My first instinct was to blurt out, “I am a servant of Lord Gorander,” which had seemed to work as a sort of pass phrase with the seemingly hypnotized former townspeople of Fairhollow to convince them to accept and henceforth ignore me. But something about the hooded demons’ air of intense focus on me stifled the words in my throat. It wouldn’t matter what I said. They already knew from my sword that I didn’t belong there.
I didn’t know whether their response to that knowledge would be to try to kill me, or try to apply whatever magic had been used to enslave the townspeople in mind as well as body, I just knew that I was going to give them a hard time of accomplishing either.
They swooped toward me. I realized that the way they seemed to glide weightlessly along the floor wasn’t just an illusion. They could levitate.
I just hoped they could die.
I ran the first one through with my sword, but there was a strange lack of resistance. The demon was made of flesh, but it was less dense than human flesh, and felt like stabbing into scrambled eggs instead of actual flesh, so my sword easily slid through all the way to the hilt. But then the blade caught on his ribcage. Even his ribs weren’t quite in the same place that I would expect a human’s to be, I couldn’t see the creatures’ bodies well due to their voluminous robes, but I suspected that their skeletal anatomy was warped.
I shrank my sword in order to draw it free, then expanded it again in time to swing it at the next demon to reach me. He had his arms outstretched and reached for me with his long, pale, grub-like fingers, which reminded me for an instant of how Theo always said that human hands looked like they had worms attached to them. My sword swept under his arms and due to the insubstantiality of his body, was able to cleave clear through his torso and send him tumbling to the floor in two pieces. I glanced down out of anatomical curiosity and wished I hadn’t. The inside of him was filled with a mass of wriggling black maggots.
I didn’t know what these creatures were, what animated them, in what sense exactly they were alive. But the one that I’d cut in half didn’t move anymore, at least not as an entire unit, although the maggots that had filled him up like grains of rice inside a sack certainly seemed alive and well. The one that I’d stabbed from front to back, however, seemed unaffected by the wound, although I could see a handful of maggots trickling out of it.
The third demon, the only one that I hadn’t injured yet, flew at my leg with his jaws spread wide and I booted him in the head as hard as I could. His head exploded like a ripe melon, which had the disgusting side effect of raining maggots everywhere, including onto my clothes and skin. I’d been spattered in human brain matter before and wasn’t entirely sure that I didn’t prefer it to this bizarre alternative. At least expelled brain matter wasn’t alive, and you didn’t have to worry that it was going to try to burrow inside of you.
Then the demon that I had stabbed was on me. I swung my sword at him and he flew out of the way, then sank his teeth into my left arm before I could stop him. I didn’t just feel the standard sensation of pain that you would expect from being stabbed by a mouthful of dozens of three-foot-long rusty needles, there was a high pitched ringing in my ears, almost like a human shriek but at a higher frequency. It felt like my body was protesting at the wrongness of the substance that had just invaded it. For a few seconds of shock I couldn’t form any conscious thoughts, but my body reacted instinctively anyway.
I shrank my sword down to the size of a dagger, plunged it into the demon’s neck, and expanded it again so that the steel ripped through his tendons and spinal cord and caused his clenched jaw to release its grip from my arm. Then I yanked my sword free and severed the last few sinews of his neck as I did so, which caused his body to crumple to the floor. His decapitated head, however, remained attached to my arm, like a tick’s or a wasp’s might, and the stump of his neck poured out wriggling black maggots. I clawed the head off frantically and plucked out the handful of sharp and skinny teeth that remained planted in my arm like splinters. My left arm burned with pain, and it felt weakened, but I could still move the fingers of that hand, which I figured was a good sign for an eventual recovery.
I was now standing over three demon corpses in the midst of a dark spreading mass of wriggling maggots. I stomped some of them, but there were so many that the effort was hopeless.
I looked over to the post twenty feet away where I’d left Theo. He poked out his head cautiously and asked,
“Can we go now?”
I wanted to say yes. I really did. But before I could reply to my horse at all, there were more of the demons emerging. They weren’t even approaching from down the hallway. This time, they were floating directly through the walls, one after another, until there were about twenty of them silently surrounding me in a circle while the maggots that had spilled from their brethren slowly spread across the floor beneath them.
I held my sword high in my right hand, stood at a slight crouch, and prepared to go down fighting.
“Surrender now,” one of the demons rasped out through its jagged nightmare of a mouth.
I was shocked, not least because I hadn’t realized the drowned grub-looking creatures could talk.
“I don’t think I will,” I said. I’d much rather die on my feet with a bloody sword than allow them to keep my body alive as a slave, while my mind was possessed by the sorcerer.
“Lord Gorander wishes to speak with you,” the demon continued, as if I hadn’t spoken.
That changed things. If he wanted to speak with me, then presumably he wanted to do it with my mind intact, at least initially, probably out of curiosity to figure out who I was and why I had infiltrated his palace. That meant the demons didn’t immediately intend to subject me to whatever mind-altering spell they had used on the townspeople of Fairhollow. And they would bring me to their master, which was exactly the person I had come to see.
“What a happy coincidence,” I said. “I too wish to speak with Lord Gorander. I command you to escort me to him at once.”
“Drop your sword,” the demon said.
I chuckled. “No.”
“Lord Gorander’s orders,” the demon intoned, as if I gave half a shit about that.
“You don’t know me very well, so I’ll pardon your ignorance, but be informed from now on that giving up my sword is simply not how I operate,” I said. “Your lord commanded you to bring me to him, yes? Hard to fulfill that command if either all of you, or I, are dead. Which would be the inevitable consequence of your continuing to insist upon taking my sword. And my bet’s on the former outcome.”
The demons paused. They didn’t exactly silently glance around at each other to confer as a band of humans probably would have in that situation, but maybe they had some sort of telepathic equivalent. At any rate, after a few moments of hesitation and expressions that I interpreted as scowls, although the extreme disfigurement of their faces made it difficult to say for sure, they all turned in unison and started gliding along the hallway, still forming a ring around me, with the evident expectation that I would accompany.
“The horse too,” one of the demons rasped out after a few steps without looking back.
I looked back to see Theo’s enormous round black rump and cascading
black tail peeking out from behind the marble pillar where I’d left him. So, the demons had known he was there all along. When he heard those words, his head peered out cautiously too. I gave him a nod, and he emerged and trotted after us.
So, it looked like Theo and I wouldn’t have to wander every inch of this damnably gigantic palace on our own, just to ferret out one measly sorcerer. His servants would save us the bother.
Chapter 14
The demons surrounding me more closely than I would have liked had a distinct smell, similar to old and moldering books. I thought about how they had all passed through the wall like ghosts, yet they seemed to be substantial, since they could be torn open by steel. So maybe it wasn’t them, but the wall that was insubstantial in certain sections. I was pretty sure that at least parts of the palace were just an illusion. Even if you had the resources, you couldn’t build something like this within six months. It would have taken closer to a century.
My theory was almost immediately confirmed when they led Theo and me over to a section of the hallway that we were walking down and started to drift through the wall. Several demons went ahead of me. When it was my turn, I felt like I was just going to walk smack into a solid wall, but then I walked forward anyway, and hit nothing but air.
On the other side, I found myself in a damp, dark tunnel built of mossy stones, lit by torches, with a low ceiling that I practically hit my head on. I tried to memorize the section of seemingly solid stone wall that we had just passed through, in case I needed that information for later, but it looked so exactly like the rest of the wall which stretched on for as far as I could see until it rounded a bend, that I didn’t think there was much chance I’d recognize it. If I needed to escape this way, I guessed I’d just have to run my hand along the wall as I went, until I came to a section where it passed through.