The Collected Short Fiction, page 166
Woe to us who discovered it for him.
We marched. North and north through the tilled and green lands around Great Port. North and north over the Tumwater and though the Wolverine Mountains a day’s ride from the sea. North and north again until we passed through Sterling and entered the Black Forest in the region known as Cottonwood Vale for the cottonwood trees that line the River Fetch.
Our troop was led by Captain Vanger – well known throughout the army as a genuine hard ass. Vanger the Incorruptible, Vanger the Whip. Captain brooked no nonsense among the ranks, squaddie or civilian. Carried a blacksnake whip at his belt – as the men all do in Carlsbad, which is where he’d been brought bloody and screaming into this evil world. Loved that whip, Vanger did. Could snap a fly off a man’s cheek at seven paces. Nobody was safe from it, either. That’s how Manfred Hurt lost a chunk of his earlobe – old Incorruptible popped it like a cherry over some trifling infraction or because he didn’t care for the look on the lad’s face. No, it didn’t teach Hurt much except to use a bit more stealth when fucking about. Only a bit.
North and north. Five days along the Left Hand Path where the canopy closes like an iron trap and sunbeams are wan. That way cannot be found anymore; it has overgrown and some sprats argue it only exists in the addled minds of old men. Sprats with fewer teeth than before they say it to me, I aver.
Our scouts, a squad of Peloki warriors who wore topknots and red ochre war paint, had their chores cut out for them. You think our homely shack lies in the wilds, now, do you? Back then, the Left Hand was the only trail except what the animals made. Before the grand massacres that exterminated them once and for all, Malets and Hillmen skulked from the moors and hunted the forest. Not for game, mind you. Plenty of that in the highlands. The savages collected scalps from unwary southerners they caught with their breeches at half-mast.
None of us snot-noses had seen a genuine blue-belly, and despite the grim mutters among the veterans, we eagerly hoped to catch a glimpse. Some shit-eating fairy always lurks in the wings, waiting to grant an errant wish. Horses and donkeys went missing. Patrols spotted malevolent shadows flitting among the wagons and drove them away with torches and shouts. Finally, the Malets captured two lads on graveyard watch – snatched those unlucky boys smooth and quiet as weasels in the coop. Captain Vanger forbade any rescue mission into the deep undergrowth. He’d fought in the Battle of Thornwood and a dozen more on the Ynde subcontinent where tigers and their cults of worship roam the jungles. He knew the score. We marched onward and dusk came in a rich crimson blush through the foliage.
Deter Johansen and Marvin of Saltlick, those were their names. Healthy lads with good strong lungs. The boys’ screams echoed for two nights. Still echo in my mind sometimes.
Three more days northwest and we forded the River Hunt and soon came upon a marsh of pale moss. Across this bog spanned a rough path of rotted planks. Here lay the beginning of The Fells. The savages harried us no more. Even they were wise enough to stay clear of that cursed land with its toads, spiders, and poison clouds from the Fifty Years Fires.
The trails crisscrossed the Fells like veins in the back of a crone’s hand. Some called those paths The Gray Fingers, others, the Long Trail Winding. They branched every which way and as far as I know, wound on forever. Nobody can say who slapped them down in the first place. Perhaps it was the ancient kings or surveyors from the time of Argead of Enathia or his usurper son. What I do know is the horses and donkeys hated them. The soldiers hated them, too, but to step off the planks was sure death. The mud had no bottom and would suck a man straight down to hell.
More days of stumble and slog. Mosquitoes blacked the nets at night. Bloodsuckers droned so loud, you couldn’t hear the comrade snoring at you shoulder. Everybody had the shits. Lost four men and an entire string of horses to the bog water.
Autumn north of the Wolverine Mountains is dreary. Rain, muck, and leeches are what you’re in for. Our camps became restless as the priests argued with the officers on the matter of performing rites sacred to the season. The men were not particularly thrilled that the Feast of the Dead fell upon us as we journeyed across a land laid low by sorcery. We feared to off end the Powers, yet we dreaded to commence ceremonies that by necessity draw the attention of the Dark. Captain Vanger compromised by doubling wine rations and permitting the chaplain to affright us with gruesome tales of how the inhabitants of the region had all gotten themselves exterminated. The chaplain painted with broad strokes; the men were bumpkins and nitty-gritty details would have been wasted.
On the next to last evening of autumn, the army camped atop a butte that heaved from the quagmire. West lay the ruins of Castle Warrant. Warrant’s towers had crumbled and pieces of carved granite were embedded in the slope of the ridge it occupied. The vision of that night remains: a half dozen campfires in an encircling ring around the crown of our bluff, smoke rising into the grin of the skull moon; shattered battlements of the castle silhouetted against stars smashed so densely close together they formed bands of white and pink and smearing red. Gelid cold of the dark between the stars seeped across the void and stole my breath. I slept little.
At dawn, the soldiers dug earthworks. Captain Vanger hadn’t lived to earn silver in his whiskers by playing the fool. No guarantee the blue-bellies wouldn’t return in force or that the giant troglodytes of the deep swamp wouldn’t boil forth to ravish the men and slaughter the animals. We civvies were divided into small parties overseen by squads of light infantry and dispatched along vectors of approach.
Manfred Hurt and me were sent to a breach in the southern curtain wall. Dandy and Lutz got sent elsewhere with other laborers. I never saw Lutz again. He fell into a crevice. Plop.
With picks, axes, and pry bars we spent the hours until dusk chopping through thickets and rolling aside boulders to reach the outer courtyard. Mossy walls loomed overhead. Hurt asked me if I knew of the Warrants and why their castle was so damnably massive. It went against my grain to admit any sort of book learning to the oafs of my acquaintance, thus I broke wind and shrugged. Da had taught me to play it close to the chest. On the other hand, Ma had taught me to read, semi-educated lady that she’d been before her logger-love swept her away from civilization. I could’ve instructed my chum that this fortress had once held the Northwest Marches against the Noord, those fathers of Malets and Grethungs and the Peloki, indeed, a hundred other tribes that fell to barbarism when the great Empire Across the Sea receded into itself. They called her Castle Warrant, yet she’d served as the steading of many a noble family until the Belfours lost her during the Interregnum.
I could’ve also mentioned the rumors of madness and depravity that possessed the Balfour family decades before the wars. My grandmother waited on the famed historian Grote of Lygos, and she read over his shoulder when he recorded the Red Treatise of Diebold and the North. She’d muttered of bloody orgies and foul sacraments that occurred in many of the north holds of a certain era. A vile cult infiltrated the ranks of the noble families, corrupting those fair knights to the ways of evil, and ultimately destroying them from within. Traffickers with the Dark, Gram said of the cultists. Were she yet living, she would not have approved of our traipsing about the ruined estates of those who’d perished in the thrall of wormy perversions.
No way could I speak any of this to loutish Hurt. He cursed the Crown in one breath and praised it with the next. Over a supper of boiled oats and salted pork, a strapping blacksmith’s son named Henry Bane gripped my shoulder in his ham hock fist. “Don’ go back in the morn,” he says to me. I ask why not and he says he beheld a crow peck the eye from a dying mule. The crow winged through the mist toward the western tower. Henry Bane took it for an ill omen. “Somethin’ right terrible will happen tomorrow,” he warned.
Fuck me running if that clod wasn’t dead right. The horror acted on a delay. It fastened upon me, aye. I finally understood, in the fullness of time and all that. More and more every night when I lie awake and listen to branches scratch the roof.
The courtyard sod had grown brittle. A royal engineer marked a spot and we yoked a team of mules to an auger and bored until we’d punched a hole into a vault. Me and a score of other lads descended on a series of lines knotted together. Down and down into the bowels of the earth with our picks and our lamps, hearts pitter-patting in our throats. We knew what to search for – coffers of jewelry and objects of art and ancient precious coins tarnished or bright, ceremonial blades begrimed by rust and verdigris, and panoplies of ancestral armor.
A grand cavern spread beneath the foundations of Castle Warrant. Stalactites oozed primordial slime. Shelves of granite and quartz blazed in the torchlight and fell away into utter blackness. A river clashed over distant rocks. Colonies of bats shrilled as they funneled into the abyss. Echoes traveled for leagues. Our party unhooked from the belays and clung to the damp spine of bedrock, followed its curve around to a landing and came to a flight of steps carved from the very stone itself. One case spiraled downward into the heart of the earth. The second case corkscrewed upward into the ruins of the castle proper. Our party split. I ventured up with nine comrades. A lonely feeling to watch the torches of our other fellows sink and dwindle to specks floating in oil, then snuffed.
In case you’re wondering, we never saw them again either.
Hurt and I took point. We climbed. Three hundred steps. Cracks every which way. Deep cracks stuffed with millipedes and pill bugs and wet, cancerous moss that smelled worse than the stuff in the swamp. Clung to our boots and squelched like mud as did the pale mushrooms in their beds of hollowed step and splintered masonry. Earthquakes had tumbled stones from the vaulted roof. We scrambled over them, or went around, climbing, climbing, until at last we traveled through an archway into the basement.
Mind you, Castle Warrant stood for a millennium before the Interregnum. Emperor Innocent II himself ordered it built. As one of the great keeps of the North, Warrant contained smithies and barracks and stables to house lancers of diluted Xet stock who rode warhorses imported from the west. And dungeons. Many, many cells, many chambers of interrogation and woe. The rock was a honeycomb full of bones. An ossuary of damned souls. None of the prisoners of war were released during the final days before the Fires. Men, packed into cubbyholes, were left to gnaw one another like starved rats. Their skeletons moldered, locked in the eternal struggle.
Oh, how we tiptoed past the bones. Our shadows, tall and cruelly sharp, capered and spilled across the walls, mocking us. Grown men, with daggers and swords, we huddled together and held hands like children passing through that crypt. Halls crissed and crossed and doubled upon themselves. Sergeant Bakker broke out the chalk so we wouldn’t become lost forever in the warren.
The stairwell to the main floor had collapsed, confining our search for riches to those lower levels. I filled a burlap bag with coins. Brass, bronze, copper, reliefs worn smooth and shined to a glow I could see in the near dark. I swept all kinds of bullshit into that sack on the chance it would fetch a kind word from the Captain or at least spare me from the lash. Pewter cups and pewter plates, mostly cracked, but who gave a rip? Metal tongs and shattered candlesticks. Hurt rejoiced to find a trunk he thought would be jammed with valuables. Alas, mostly dirt and moldering cloth. He saved a moth-eaten tapestry that had grayed with antiquity.
Smoke hung in the fumy haze of our torch. More slimy lichen covered the walls. More slimy white mushrooms puffed beneath our tread. My breath huffed forth, and I sucked it and the torch smoke and the pall of the mushrooms in again and my thoughts revolved around themselves and my mood lightened even as a tear of desperation leaked from my eye. Intoxicated, dear daughter – no matter the source – is one way to pass the time in hell, should you ever need to know.
Hurt and I struck it rich in a dead end passage. I leaned against the wall to rest my sore backside. The stone crumbled and sloughed away and there in a queerly shaped cell, were two-dozen obsidian eggs stacked within the remnants of rotted crates. I’d seen their like once at a jeweler’s shop in Victory City: hollow for the placing of a gem or prayer scroll while other others contained several smaller versions, each nested within its kin. Richies collected them in sets of fanciful design and jewelers crafted them in a drover’s dozen lands.
I lifted one and turned it over. Different from the fabricated pieces I’d encountered, yet similar enough to give me hope of high value. Hard and edgy as the obsidian it resembled and seamless as any true egg. Something inside rattled the way a musician’s gourd rattles.
“Why’n hell they got no latches?” Hurt said the way a child will of a Solfest upon discovering there’s no gifts on the breakfast platter.
Surely the exotic nature of the eggs would fetch a fair coin. We’d get double rations at camp and that pleased me well enough to clear my foggy brain. I admit to a larcenous nature – knowing well that Hurt was too dumb to count, I socked away three of the eggs with the intention of smuggling them back to civilization and brokering a fortune of my own.
Hurt gathered our comrades while I set about fashioning a travois to transport the other goods we’d gathered. Soon the others arrived bearing their own dubious treasures. We stowed our spoils and proceeded for the surface. A train of scout ants dutifully transporting crumbs back to the colony.
Somehow, and maybe the brain-fog returned to beleaguer me, I lost the way. I’d taken the hind teat of our column as I dragged a carpet-load of junk treasure and no one wanted to trip over it in the gloom. One moment, Hurt trudged a couple paces ahead, and then I stubbed my toe on a loose stone and the men went around the corner, gone. Grunts and laughter and curses quit upon an instant as did the glare of their lamps and torches. The sudden stillness sobered me right smartly.
I shouted to them. My voice echoed through the labyrinth. It didn’t rebound; it kept on going without answer. Then I felt in my pockets for flint and in moments ignited a brand from a sconce. A feeble reddish hue flickered from that ancient pitch. Nowhere did I spy Sergeant Bakker’s chalk marks. I thought of all those skeletons in their cells and the weight of the rock overhead, and of the mold and slime oozing in the cracks. Somewhere, wind moaned through a crevice. Dread coiled around me, sure as the noxious smoke.
Hold still, young Ruark. Someone whispered from the shadows. Hold still, child. I’m almost with you. My father’s gruff voice, though he’d died several winters before, crushed beneath the felled trunk of an oak. Later, I became convinced it was my imagination, but in the moment, that coldly eager whisper was enough to get me moving. I abandoned the load and set forth with alacrity.
The hall wound this way and that and tightened until rudely carved rock dug into my shoulders. I squeezed through and stumbled into a cavern. Saints know how big – couldn’t see far as the brand smoldered to a nub. Earth crumbled away from the toes of my boots into a pit. A foul breeze moaned up from that abyss and snuffed the dying flame.
Sapped of fight, I curled into a ball and fell asleep right there on the lip of oblivion. Chill and damp woke me. Didn’t know what else to do, so I crawled. Crawled because I dared not risk tripping into sudden doom. I rested often; so thirsty I sucked at water seeping through rock, so hungry I licked the salty blood from my scabs, so weary I’d slip into dreams of the home cottage and Mother’s honey porridge before the miserable cold roused me and I crept onward without direction or hope. The hunger became terrible. I sorted through my pockets, mad for the smallest crumb, and came across three of the obsidian eggs I’d stuffed in there and forgotten. I nearly pitched them away, until something stayed my hand.
Strangely, the jagged edges had smoothed and softened as unfired clay does over time. The shell curved, pliable as leather as I caressed it. In a daze, I obeyed a mindless command and cracked the egg and took its clabbered bounty in a gulp. The darkness was complete, thus I couldn’t discern what yolky, blood-warm mass sludged down my throat, nor what fine bones and bits crunched between my teeth. The taste of it, horrible and delightful, a rancid ambrosia, smoldered in my guts. The next two went down the hatch with more ease. I heard my own grunts and gulps echoing from the rocks around me. Horrible. And I licked my fingers and the ground for any drooling trace, and when I’d done, crawled onward.
The Dark looks after its own.
I found a chimney vent and wriggled my way until I popped out on the surface. I wept and rolled in that bog mud. You’ve seen the scars upon my back. You know how Captain Vanger greeted me upon my return to camp. After twenty lashes at the whipping post, they clapped me in the stocks for a night and chalked it off as a lesson learned. The Captain said I reminded him of one of his stupider nephews.
I wasn’t the only sod who disappeared. Only one who vanished and then came back, though. Vanger ordered the company to withdraw. Apparently he took a gander at the obsidian eggs Hurt and the other lads hauled out of the depths and made the call right there. Loose talk spread through the ranks – Jon Foot wanted the eggs, had sent us into the wilderness for the very purposes of securing them, gold and gems be damned.
Damned.
The company made good time on its return journey. The weather stiffened and that sent the blue-bellies into their warrens for the cold season. On the eleventh sunset when we camped near the Thrush Meadows, I went forth to fetch wood for the bonfires. Dreadful pains stabbed through my innards. A foul, sickly sweat oozed from my entire body and made my clothes sodden. Phantasms of delirium cascaded through my mind. I bolted from the work part and squatted behind a log and voided my bowels.
