The Collected Short Fiction, page 170
Mantooth had dutifully tracked Hand to a village dump site and dragged him out of a pile of refuse by the scruff. Lochinvar introduced herself and Bowie. Once Lochinvar explained her intentions, Hand ceased struggling and sobered in a hurry.
You intend to confront Need? he’d asked. Why do you want me? Why the scout? She’d shrugged. I need the scout because muscle is handy and he’s cheap. I want you because you defeated the sonofabitch once and I’m superstitious like that. They say he fears dogs, and Mantooth owes him a reckoning. Flint? I can’t be expected to walk, can I?
The curse Rabbit Abbot laid upon the Baron is not indefinite. The passing seasons bring evil ever nearer to a renewal of its unquenchable blood lust. Each of you loved my mother in her youth. Her gaze fell upon the hound and charger as well. Each of you owe her memory a debt and so I’ve assembled this company of vengeance. Baron Need is said to be one of the Undying. Assuming this to be the case, it is questionable whether we can permanently destroy him. That we shall try is enough for the moment. My blade cuts through a spectrum of resistance. My ... music box ... will apprehend his vital essence. The sight of old nemeses such as yourselves might freeze the Baron for a crucial moment. Whether or not any of you can provide material assistance is beside the point—this is a dire task and your comradery would make it easier to bear.
A nice speech. Coupled with an impressive armament and genuine facility for violence, it secured the loyalty of her ragtag band. Their journey had led them into the Headsman Mountains and to this overgrown plot. The men shuffled their feet and watched the young woman in the ancient armor press her forehead against the hearth stones in the attitude of prayer.
Bowie said to Hand, “The scribes say you and Rabbit Abbot brought low Baron Need and burned his castle in the winter of ’09. Royal decree proclaims it a no-man’s land for one hundred years and a day. I must ask: How did you defeat him?”
“Defeat isn’t the word that best describes that cluster of fucks. ‘Escaped while making a hell of a mess is closer’ to the truth. Apparently our foe yet lives—to wit, his pet vampire bat you whacked the other night.”
“The lingering presence of the Baron’s cronies and servitors does not necessarily indicate his survival.”
“Somebody’s got to pay the wages.”
“There’s that. Tell me anyway, how it happened.”
Hand looked toward the sun as it drifted behind the peaks. The trees were already lumping together into a charcoal blot. “Yeah, we went at the baron hard. Rabbit Abbot was convinced he’d discovered your mother’s identity and murdered your entire family. He didn’t have any evidence, but got a royal writ due to his connections. I went along for the ride. I lived to fight and was a bit sweet on your mom anyway. Fools, the both of us.
“In the end, Rabbit understood what we faced.” He considered his wineskin. His deep-set eyes were red around the rims. His formerly aquiline nose (once featured by portrait painters throughout the realm) hooked. He had three teeth in his mouth and wattles on his still thick neck. His former bulk had otherwise melted away to cords and bones. “We went to his castle thinking Baron Need a common murderer, a petty tyrant who’d gotten too big for his pantaloons. I expected debauchery, defiled maidens, a few bodies. Instead ...”
The knight shuddered and took another drink from the skin. That steadied him. “The action commenced and everyone in the feast hall began dying. The Baron ... changed. No longer sickly or gaunt as a leper. Satan inhabited him. The chandeliers blazed hellfire, but the hall became darker and darker. The Baron’s face caved under his bulging eyes and became a light-sucking hole. Blood flowed to him from every corner. He didn’t simply inhale blood. He gulped in the very light and sound around us, the heat from our bones. Never moved from his spot at the head of the table. His ropelike arms unwound and from every corner of the room that demon snatched men and rammed them into the seething ruin of his visage. His claws stabbed through my soldiers, chainmail and flesh, two or three at a clutch, and lifted them as if they were paper dolls. Their shrieks and oaths went down his throat, twisted in reverse.”
“Yet you prevailed,” Bowie said. “Rabbit Abbot saved the day.”
“The Ur beast died so that the rest of us might live.” Hand regarded his ragged boots in shame.
“How, dragoon? By what miracle?”
“It’s in the scrolls.”
“The scrolls leave much to the imagination, friend.”
“My mother fabricated a device,” Lochinvar said. “She entrusted it to the safekeeping of Rabbit Abbot and the Ministry of Vigilance when she retired from Imperial service. That’s what undid the enemy.”
Bowie raised his gray brows. “Wouldn’t look anything like an out-of-tune music box, would it?”
“She carried a talisman. Break-in-case-of-cosmic-evil sort of a deal. Exceedingly lethal to things that go bump in the night. Pity she did not foresee her own necessity. One doesn’t expect to draw evil incarnate as a landlord when one retires into the country, I suppose.”
“Yes, yes, a talisman.” Hand nodded at the memory. “Rabbit brandished it as the Baron dragged him to his doom. The talisman flared with a pure white radiance. There came a sound ... All the devils in hell keened as one. Those of us who remained were stricken with blindness that lasted many hours. Fortunately, reserves I’d stationed in the bailey rushed to drag us from the castle as it burned.”
“This raises some interesting questions,” Bowie said to Lochinvar. “Since your mother’s death, I have heard certain rumors regarding her provenance. Some whisper she was not mortal, that she was Seelie from Under the Hill in Oberon’s court sent forth to mix blood with mortals for reasons privy only to that ilk—”
“Hmm. It’s my mother this, my mother that, with you, Jonathan. There you were in the middle of a war; a pair of spies, danger at every turn. Allow me to do the math. Romances have sparked over less ...”
“—and a sage in the far west claims in that winter of ’09 you were taken by the fey and lived several winters among them. That you’ve been sent forth to do their bidding with mystical armor and a dread blade cast from star metal. They say you, like Jon Foot and others of that ilk, command the Voice of the Dark.”
“Little people are a myth,” Lochinvar said.
“What about little green men?” Hand gestured as if to brush aside the emerging stars.
“Little green men are taller than you’d assume.” Lochinvar balanced the music box upon her palm. “My friends under the hill taught me to carve such trinkets, and Mother before me. Five winters and too many tears for me to ever forge another.”
“Secret weapons are to the good. Your soul-trapper may do in a pinch.”
“Add souls to the manifest of things that don’t exist. Sentient beings possess consciousness. Consciousness can be bottled.”
“I’m not a philosopher, Ms. Lochinvar. I’m a drunk. Why disguise your weapon as a music box?”
“Because I can’t play a harmonica.”
An Ever-Sharp Knife
Beans and weak tea for supper. Lochinvar laid her head against Mantooth’s side and drifted away to sleep. Flint cropped the tough grass that grew in the mountains. The men sat in the dark near the dying fire, drinking the last of Hand’s wine.
“Smirking Jaye—alive or dead?” Bowie asked.
“An excellent question.”
“No guesses?”
“I didn’t see him die if that’s what you’re wondering,” Hand said. “Frankly, I don’t care either way. He took his orders from the man. The Baron is the architect of our various miseries, not his footmen.”
“Lochinvar differs on that score. She dreams of mounting his head on a pike.”
“We’ve each got our fantasies. What do you dream?”
Bowie had been regarded as the greatest barbarian-fighter in a dozen generations. During the peak of the Westward Expansion handbills bore his likeness and pennants flew in his honor. Even then, wags at the Capital called him Peloki-Killer behind their sleeves. He’d separated hundreds of blue-painted devils from their heads. Men, women, and children without discrimination. The title followed him even now, long after the wars were highly embellished anecdotes inked on a scroll. His eldest brother had sung for kings and his youngest brother invented outlandish knives, fought duels, and finally got himself killed in one (for the record, a mutual destruction). Both men were enshrined and beloved by a grateful populace. Jonathan Bowie had saved an empire. His reward? Obscurity except to grudging scholars, most of whom were eager to whitewash the seamy details of the expansion. Starting with the many, many massacres Bowie had orchestrated.
“We’re up north, in a field after a battle. Me and some comrades from the regiment. Of course, those guys are dead. The air is heavy with blood. I’m taking scalps. Hundreds of them from faceless men.” He held a Green River knife so it glinted in the firelight. His famous brother had forged the fighting knife for him and engraved Number One Peloki-Killer on the hilt. “You?”
“Nothing so exotic. I’m in my favorite alley in the Capital, drinking. Dog shit and mud up to my shins. Buzzing flies cover the sound of the market shouts and that damned infidel pipe-music the Easterners play.” Hand sighed and cast the empty skin aside. At the end of the day he sat straight and his hands were steady. “Are these visions of the hell that awaits us?”
“A strange idea of hell. Ain’t so awful. I never run short of scalps and my blade is ever sharp. Scalping in the quiet that follows the screams and war cries is soothing. Meditative, like weeding a garden for eternity.”
“Perhaps you’re on to something. My flask is bottomless. The drone of the flies is sort of comforting.”
“There you go.”
“Huh,” Hand said.
Meanwhile, Lochinvar dreamed of a pure, boundless void and her mother’s toneless, metallic voice calling from the distance, counting down.
Culling Song
Rabbit Abbot detonates his holy hand grenade.
A star bursts in the feast hall and a vast, invisible pattern that conjoins the Great Dark and mundane reality is obliterated with a thunderclap. Closed circuit; your connection to the Void is instantly severed and you come unraveled. Flesh melts from your bones. Blood escapes your deliquescing corpse like steam from a whistling kettle. Your skeleton puffs to ash and makes an arabesque upon a pillar. As the material projection of eternal darkness, you cannot die in the traditional sense, so you simply cease to exist as a collection of coherent particles.
You are a mask of flesh; torn away and discarded. Essence diminished, you assume the existence of a drowsing haunt, reliving your greatest defeat again and again by way of muddled and disjointed dreams. The worst of these dreams have nearly awakened you. These are the days when unseasonal storms wrack the Headsman Mountains, when streams flow crimson, and earthquakes shake loose landslides, only to subside as you relapse into deepest slumber.
Today, though, a sacrifice ...
Fleetwood, last of the red-hot sycophants, flutters over the parapet, through a hole in the wall, and dies at your feet with an expulsion of bodily fluids. His warmth rouses you from a torpor that has persisted for years. Your physical form has congealed to a mold stain on a pillar. The configuration of this stain frightens away wildlife and gives the occasional ambitious tomb robbers night terrors before one of your dwindling supply of henchmen does them in as they sleep in furtive camps at the edge of the property.
Fleetwood’s melodramatic expiration sends a trickle charge into your heart (that beats once a fortnight) and gets it thumping faster. The connection to your greater self is still lost. You sense the Void and its hunger the way you might scent smoke and discern a fire. Since that fateful supper, your greater existence is reduced to abstraction in a manner similar to how matters of existentialism are for any mortal philosopher. Unlike the monks and the scribes, you possess proof that incomprehensibly awesome cosmic forces are in motion. You are the proof. Perhaps after eons of enslavement you are also free.
Dawn is brisk. Wisps of vapor rise from Fleetwood’s corpse. The wisps twist into phantom shapes of the Ur bat’s recent memories. You behold the ghostly visages of enemies on the approach. Two men, gray and infirm, yet formidable in their hatred and self-righteousness. The girl resembles her mother. The horse limps slightly; he hates the drunken knight. Only the dog frightens you. However, given his decrepitude, surely he presents little danger.
The column cracks with the sharpness of your grin. Bits of plaster tumble.
Full manifestation requires nourishment. Though your body is temporarily disbanded, an immense reservoir of willpower endures. You project it in a psychic melody. A culling song. Softly, sweetly until the roaches come. Stronger, stridently, and then the rodents emerge. You drain them in their hosts. Scraps of fur and desiccated shells form a carpet of death spiraling outward.
Yes, a heap of rats, bats, and cockroaches give their all before you are restored to a shadow of your former glory. Undead again is close enough, and you are ready for the night.
Castle Blood II
The ruins of Baron Need’s castle were embedded in the flank of Mowat Mountain. A central tower, a section of the inner bailey, and the main house stood intact—the rest had collapsed and become overgrown with a thicket of sickly hawthorn and copses of twisted cedar and birch. Human skulls decorated the brush like popcorn strung through the branches of a diseased Yule tree.
“Powerful cheery,” Bowie said.
“Tomb robbers and brigands are in short supply in these hills, and now we see why,” Hand said.
“The People shun this place. Smack dab in the heart of their tribal lands before the Empire annexed the mountains. Yet the First Kingdoms declined to reclaim it.”
“The Empire taints everything, eh?” Hand said without irony.
“Can’t argue against.”
Mantooth snuffled some bones. He growled and his hackles rose.
Lochinvar glanced at him as she dismounted Flint. “What’s the matter, pup?”
“A bad thing lives in the house,” Mantooth said.
“Bad dangerous bad,” Flint said. The charger’s nostrils flared and his eyes showed much of their white.
“Can’t bite it.”
“Can’t trample it.”
“Nonsense,” Lochinvar said. “It can be trampled and bitten and cleaved, or blown to smithereens.”
“I am afraid,” the dog said.
The horse whinnied.
“Me three.” Lochinvar put on her helmet. She became a pitiless, inhuman creature once the winged helm settled upon her brow. “Don’t see me pissing my breeches, though.” She said to Mantooth, “Orlando was your pup. You have business to attend.”
Mantooth lowered his snout and whimpered in shame.
“Hold fast while I reconnoiter.” Bowie vanished into the underbrush with nary a rustle. A few minutes later he uttered the call of a raven, the prearranged signal. Lochinvar, Hand, and Mantooth climbed the slope to the ruins. Flint stayed back. The big horse cropped grass and kept watch. He muttered, “Good luck, dog.”
The sun shone hot.
“I’m with the critters on this,” Hand said. Pale and shaky from a dearth of booze, he lagged a few paces to the rear. “It returns to me now. The full effect of horror.”
“Courage, Sir Hand,” Lochinvar said.
“Believe it or not, I was a brave man.” Hand carried a bokken stained with blood and grime. He’d pawned his broadsword long ago. “Bravest in the land.”
“Bravery and stupidity are the Ouroboros of youth,” Lochinvar said. “Follow me, knight. I want to speak with the monster before nightfall. There’s much to discuss. We are alike, he and I.”
“Alike? Wait, doesn’t the villain usually say that to the hero, and laugh?”
Lochinvar laughed. “Happy?”
“Uh, truthfully?”
“I didn’t live under a hill with fairies those lonely years. I incubated in the black glow of a terror star and learned what Rabbit Abbot discovered at mortal cost and Mother already knew—the secret of Baron Need. He is merely an appendage. After absorbing the genetic memory of a civilization older than the dust of the first mountains, I hatched to walk the earth once more. Vengeance is an honorable cause. This, however, is a mission of mercy. In truth, I’m not here for the Baron. Not entirely.”
“Lady Lochinvar, I don’t take your meaning.”
“Which part?”
“The whole thing.”
She laughed again. Rebuke glowed in her left gauntlet, its metal awash with bloody clouds.
Showdown
Bowie emerged from a clump of bushes and led the company under the shadows of the gate arch. He hacked aside brambles with a siege axe. Ravens warbled from the battlements as the foolish humans and their dog walked through the gaping entrance of the main house. The birds had seen this routine before. One way or another, soon there’d be fresh carcasses to feast upon.
Lochinvar and her companions breached the inner courtyard and entered the castle. Holes gashed the soot-caked ceiling. Marble floors were buckled and cracked. Withered saplings clawed toward the sun. Brown vines clung to pillars carved with grotesques of beasts. Bones of rats crunched underfoot. Carapaces of beetles and roaches layered the ground in concentric rings. Everything in this place was dead—all thorns, detritus, and ash.
“Saints protect us.” Hand adjusted his hat as he took in the vista of slaughter. “There are many ghosts here. I can almost hear them.”
“Hold that thought,” Lochinvar said. Under different circumstances, protocol demanded protective circles, chants, and onerous rituals. Tarrying near the pit whence Baron Need had sprung to plague the world presented too great a risk. She opened the music box and made an adjustment to its setting. The device emitted the groans of a man or woman getting his or her throat slit. The horrid death cries echoed among the pillars and dust.
