A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  Blank-eyed and mindless they were, shaped in every deformity imaginable and unimaginable. Faces suffused with an insane, malignant glee, they howled and caterwauled in tones that ranged from far below to far above those audible to the human ear. No two tones harmonized, all was discord and conflict. Glaeken now knew the origin of his dream the night before . . . the Choir of Chaos was assembled and at work.

  His gaze shifted from the howling demons to the ebon sphere that floated in the center of the Amphitheater. It appeared to be a thin-membraned ball of inky fluid, suspended above and before him by no visible means. The eyes of each of the twelve hundred were fixed steadily upon it.

  Glaeken noticed a slight swirling movement within the sphere and recoiled at a fleeting glimpse of a dark, nameless shape and two glowing malevolent eyes.

  The embryo of Rasalom’s new form floated there in its inky amnion, suspended on a placenta of sound from the Choir of Chaos. Rasalom was not mad—he had been telling the truth.

  Suddenly Glaeken gave in to a sudden urge to sing. He had no idea where it came from. Perhaps it was a feeble effort to counteract the effect of the sound that pressed down on him with such ferocity . . . perhaps the glimpse of those eyes in the sac had pushed him to the brink of madness and the song offered a tenuous link to sanity. He didn’t know, he simply began singing.

  He lifted his voice in the hymn of praise to the goddess Eblee, a sweet simple song known the world over. And his effort did not go unnoticed. The demons of the Choir pulled their gaze away from the amniotic sac and glared at him with unrestrained fury. Perhaps the merest trace of coherent melody within the Amphitheater interfered with the gestative process, for Glaeken noticed a slight ripple coursing over the membranous surface of the sac.

  In response, the twelve hundred increased their volume and Glaeken was knocked flat. Vision and awareness blurred as every fiber of his being screamed in anguish. Still he sang, clinging to the melody as a last thread to sanity; but he was fading, losing his grip on consciousness. His hoarse tones grew fainter as the Choir of Chaos attacked him with unwavering vocal fury.

  And then Glaeken heard another sound, as out of place as the sun in a starry sky: the dulcet tones of a harmohorn had joined him in song. Blinking his eyes into focus, he turned his head and there behind him stood Cragjaw. Eyes closed, bathed in sweat, the squat little man was leaning against the wall and blowing a perfect modal harmony to Glaeken’s song. Glaeken found new strength then and redoubled his vocal efforts.

  Something began to happen in the Amphitheater. The flawless acoustics permeated the new sound throughout the huge chamber. If a touch of coherence had proved slightly disruptive before, the harmony of man-made instrument and human voice began to have a shattering effect. The twelve hundred demons became agitated, thrashing in their niches, their voices faltering. And this in turn had its effect on the embryo. The tortured membrane stretched and bulged from the rolling convulsions of the thing within. The glowing eyes pressed against the sac wall, glaring in unearthly rage.

  Then came a weakening, a thinning, a tiny puncture, a rent—the membrane ruptured in an explosion of inky fluid as its contents burst free into the air. The sac and its partially formed occupant fell swiftly and silently into the mists below.

  A howling scream of agony rose from the Choir of Chaos. The idiot demons ceased their song and flew into fits of rage, slamming themselves against the walls of their niches and finally hurtling over the edges and down. One by one, then in groups, and finally in a hellish rain, they followed the embryo back to the hell of their origin. And then . . .

  Silence.

  Glaeken had almost given up hope of ever experiencing it again. He remained prone and reveled in the lack of sound as strength and sanity surged back into his body.

  “Ho, Cragjaw,” he said finally, rising to his feet. “What brought you to this concert?”

  Cragjaw sighed exhaustedly as he slipped the harmohorn back into its case. “I owed you a service so I came after you. Seems a good thing I did.”

  Together they stumbled back down the passage toward the antechamber.

  “We are more than even, my friend,” Glaeken said. “I did but aid you in a street brawl—and enjoyed it, too. You risked your life just by entering this region.”

  They arrived then in the antechamber and found Rasalom stretched out on the floor halfway between the throne chair and the doorway. Dead.

  Glaeken reached into the withered sorcerer’s robe, pulled out the Ring of Chaos, and snapped the chain.

  “That cannot be Rasalom!” Cragjaw exclaimed. “And where did he come from? I didn’t see him when I passed through!”

  “It’s Rasalom, all right. The curse is broken but I suppose Iolon will want to have the ring before he gives me the reward.”

  Cragjaw started to speak as they headed for the surface, hesitated, then started again.

  “Ah, Glaeken, I fear I bring bad news. When I reached the summer palace I learned that Iolon had been overthrown by his army. There will be no reward, I’m afraid.”

  Glaeken took this news in silence and continued walking. Receiving no reply, Cragjaw continued.

  “I too am out of work. The generals have no liking for the harmohorn. Their tastes in music are a bit coarse for my skills, running more to naked girls with tambourines and bells. Knowing they would not honor Iolon’s promise of a reward, I traveled to warn you that you would be imperiling yourself for naught. I found your horse on the way—he is well—and thought you might be in some I danger, so I rode my own horse nearly into the ground and ran the rest of the way on foot in an effort to catch you before you entered the cavern. I was too late. But I heard this awful caterwauling within and followed the sound. You know the rest.”

  Glaeken nodded appreciatively. “But what made you bring the harmohorn?”

  “You don’t think I’d leave it unguarded, do you?” Cragjaw replied indignantly. “It never leaves my side!”

  “I suppose you sleep with it, too?”

  “Of course!”

  Glaeken smiled and tucked the Ring of Chaos into his belt. “Ah, well, the quest has been rewarding in one way if not another. I may not come away a rich man but at least I’ve found a friend among you strange easterners.”

  “Strange easterners, are we?” Cragjaw said with a gleam in his eye as they reached the mouth of the cavern. “Then you must be from the Western Isles after all!”

  With the late morning sun warm on his face, Glaeken offered only a good-natured laugh in reply.

  GREEN WINTER

  The knife made a crisp, rasping sound as it sliced through Veneem’s skin. The area over the left deltoid had been numbed with ice before the procedure and he felt only a sensation of pressure, a mild discomfort

  The dark green of the epidermis parted cleanly to reveal the lighter dermis below. This in turn gave way and exposed the pink of the subcutaneous fat. Blood appeared in a slow, red ooze as the doctor completed the elliptical incision around the growth—a tiny hand and forearm this time, mottled green, with minute, articulated fingers.

  Veneem had put off the excision for as long as he could because the growths so often withered and fell off on their own. But this one had kept on growing, so now he was back at Dr. Baken’s adding another scar to his collection.

  As the segment of skin supporting the growth was removed, blood filled the cavity and overflowed onto the arm. The doctor quickly wiped it away and began suturing. Three deft ties closed the wound. After a compress was applied and a clean cloth wrapped around the area to hold it in place, Veneem rose to his feet.

  “See you in five or six days,” Dr. Baken said, dropping the excised growth and the excess thread on the garbage pile in the corner. “Those sutures ought to be ready to be pulled by then.”

  Veneem nodded. He knew the routine.

  “Tell me something,” he said after a pause. “Don’t I get an awful lot of these things?”

  “No, not particularly. They’re fairly common
in regenerated limbs but the incidence varies between individuals. I’ve got a number of patients who need excisions far more often than you.”

  Veneem nodded with an overt lack of concern. He didn’t want the doctor to think him overly concerned about his health—that would be unseemly for a hunter.

  “How’s Rana?” Baken asked.

  The question surprised Veneem. The doctor had met his daughter, of course—he had been to the house often enough during the early stages of the arm’s regeneration, and during Nola’s final illness—but he didn’t think Rana had made enough of an impression on the man that he’d be asking about her.

  “She’s well. If I can keep her out of trouble she’ll make someone a fine wife someday.”

  Baken smiled. “If she stayed out of trouble, she wouldn’t be Rana.”

  Veneem had to agree, yet he wondered how the doctor could make such a precise observation. He brushed the matter aside—everyone knew Rana. Now to the matter of settling the fee.

  “Get you a rabbit for this—that do?”

  “Nicely. Before the half-moon, if you can. My meat supply is getting low.”

  “You’ll have it tomorrow or the next day.”

  He took his fur jacket from a hook on the wall and gingerly slipped his left arm in first. Veneem was of average height and heavily muscled, more so than most hunters, but moved with a feline grace that was the sine qua non of his profession. With the jacket cinched securely around him, he covered his shiny green scalp with a cloth cap, nodded brusquely to Baken, and stepped out into the cold.

  His eyes immediately scanned the ground for game tracks. Sheer reflex—he knew he’d find nothing. The ground around Baken’s hut was an indecipherable clutter of comings and goings and waitings-around. Pulling his horse out from the shelter, he slid up onto its bare back and trotted eastward along the road. Denuded trees stood stiff and still on either side as an icy gray sky threatened more snow.

  Veneem liked snow. He detested the cold that came with it, but winter was inevitable, and so if it must be cold, let it snow. Let it be a wet snow that stuck to the trees and etched them in white against a darkening sky. Let it snow briefly, frequently, no more than a finger’s breadth at a time—just enough to erase the stale tracks and highlight the fresh. At such times small-game hunting was as easy as picking wild berries.

  He was perhaps halfway home when a movement, a darting shape in the thicket to his right, caused him to pull up his mount up sharply and peer into the gloom. His searching eyes found nothing. He could have sworn he’d seen a shadow moving in the tangle. A big shadow. Almost big enough to be a hairy. He cursed the overcast sky. If the sun was out he’d have a better chance for a second look . . . if there was really anything there to see.

  His eyes weren’t what they used to be; hadn’t been for a few years now. This was no casual admission—it was his most carefully guarded secret. He was a hunter and his eyes were his life, his reputation, his means of support, his protection—

  Protection.

  He snorted a disgusted puff of fog into the air. If his vision had been better, perhaps the bolt he’d loosed at that charging boar would have found its eye instead of glancing off its skull. Perhaps then the enraged beast wouldn’t have butted Nola, half-crushing her chest, nor gored his left arm so badly that Dr. Baken had been forced to remove it at the shoulder. The arm took a full five seasons to regenerate. Nola died of the fever shortly after the accident.

  And life had not been quite the same since.

  No sound, no further movement came from the thicket. He strained to see but the outlines of objects began to blur beyond two man-lengths. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. Couldn’t have been a hairy anyway—they simply weren’t seen around here anymore. Just as well . . . his crossbow was at home.

  Giving the horse’s flanks a jab with his leather-shod heels, he continued on his journey. As he turned off the main road onto the path that led to his home, his gaze roamed the ground in search of wheel tracks. Finding none, he began to curse softly and steadily as he rode and was in a foul mood by the time he reached the house.

  “Rana!” he called after tethering his horse to the nearest low-hanging branch.

  The main structure of the house was a low dome of hardened clay with four small windows—boarded now against the cold—and a single entrance. Pushing aside the double hanging of cured hides that covered the doorway, he entered and called again.

  “Rana!”

  The girl came out of the smaller of the two sleeping rooms at the rear of the house. She had her father’s long face and high cheekbones, but her dark eyes were her mother’s. The fire in the hearth flickered off her face and bare scalp, darker green than usual now due to the increased time she was spending indoors. It was warm inside and she wore only a simple tunic that hid her thin, wiry frame and reduced her small breasts to an almost imperceptible swell.

  “Something wrong?” She was nineteen summers and spoke with a clear, high voice.

  “Yes! The delivery was to have been made at sunrise today. Absolutely no later—the Elders promised!”

  “We still have some cheese left and there’s plenty of meat.”

  “That’s not the point. The supplies were supposed to be here by now and they are not.”

  “I’m sure you have a pretty good idea of why they’re late,” Rana said after a short pause.

  “I don’t have any such thing,” he lied and pulled his jacket off with angry, jerking motions, oblivious to the discomfort he caused in his left arm.

  Of course he knew why the supplies were late: The Elders disapproved of Rana and her overt disrespect for their authority, and this was how they chose to show it. They’d never have dared such a tactic while he was First Hunter, but many things had changed since the accident.

  His home, for instance. Rana had moved easily and naturally into the void left in the household by her mother’s death—preparing his meals, ministering to his arm while it regenerated, doing her best to keep his spirits up. But nothing she could do would fill the void in his spirit or allay his sense of loss or make him feel complete again. Only time would do that.

  Time was a friend in that respect, and an enemy in others. Time, along with lots of sun-soaking, food, and rest, had replaced his left arm. But the time needed for convalescence had also preyed on his mind. The other hunters had seen to it that he was kept well stocked with provisions during the regenerative period; this was a tradition, but he’d chafed at being an invalid, dependent on the beneficence of others. He had always been a producer and the role of passive consumer did not sit well. He had been First Hunter before the accident. During his period of forced inactivity other hunters had vied for the vacant position. This was natural and he felt no resentment. However, by the time he was ready to go into the field again, his reputation had faded and he’d not found an opportunity to reassert his prominence. To date, no one in the enclave was generally recognized as First Hunter.

  In ways he could see and in ways he could not, Rana had changed, too. She was now prone to long absences from home and to loud, pointed questions whenever she attended a plenum. For every point of the Law she had a Why? For every Revealed Truth she had a host of doubts. Rana had become a nettle in the collective breeches of the Elders.

  And that could prove dangerous.

  “They’re goading you,” she said. “They want you to bring me into line and this is their way of telling you.”

  “They’d be falling all over each other trying to supply me with farm goods if I were First Hunter again.”

  She came over and hugged him. “You are First Hunter as far as I’m concerned, and you should be treated as such. You bring more meat into the enclave than any two other hunters combined. It’s only because of me that they’ve held back on restoring your title—they don’t want a First Hunter who can’t control his daughter.”

  Veneem ran the fingertips of his left hand lightly over the glossy green smoothness of Rana’s scalp. He wanted to tel
l her that she was the center of his life right now, that although her flagrant disrespect for the Elders distressed him, he admired her fire. But he said nothing of his feelings. It never had been his way to show affection, and he couldn’t change now.

  “I guess I’m lucky you’re not a farmer,” she said, “or I’d have been taken off a long time ago.”

  His voice was a low growl. “Then there’d have been some dead Elders a long time ago. The Elders are the voice of God in the world—I believe that and I revere them as such. But they’ll never hurt you, Rana. At least not while I breathe.” He pushed her gently to arm’s length and, resting both hands on her shoulders, gazed at her face. “But why do you do it? Why do you provoke them so?”

  “Because everything they tell us is a lie! Everything!” The utter contempt in her voice made him cringe.

  “How can you say that with such certainty? The Elders are older and wiser than either of us. And when they make a pronouncement, it is the Revealed Truth of God.”

  Rana’s white teeth chewed briefly on her lower lip. “Some other time, Father.”

  “Don’t toy with them,” he said with an expression that matched the grimness of his tone. “You can push them only so far. If you should ever be deemed a threat to the order, even I won’t be able to protect you.”

  The squeak of wheels and the clop of hooves from down the path halted further discussion as they both went to the door. The supply wagon had arrived.

  “See?” Rana said, holding the hangings aside. “They’ve sent it late enough to irk you, but not late enough to bring you after them.”

  Orth, who had been driving the wagon since Veneem was a child, pulled the pair of horses to a stop in front of the house, set the brake, and slid from the seat-—not as smoothly nor as quickly as he had of old, but still with an unmistakable sureness to his movements. He was swathed in furs and blankets to such an extent that he no longer looked quite human. Only his eyes showed through the wraps—quick, dark, darting pupils under heavy green lids ringed with the white lines of age.