by Rab Foster
in Issue 116, September 2021
The shaft Bump was crawling down became so steep that he lost his hold on its stonework and slid forward, unable to stop himself. Worse, the faster he slid, the narrower the shaft became. But just when he feared he’d get irreversibly stuck in it, he shot out of its far end, dropped through darkness and landed on a hard floor.
Lying on the floor, Bump recalled again the bedtime stories his grandmother had told him long ago. Those stories had convinced him that a hideous monster now lurked in the darkness with him.
Finally, trying to ignore both his fears and the pain from his newly acquired bruises, he got up. He realised his surroundings weren’t wholly dark. He could see that the shaft had discharged him onto the bottom of a round alcove and this opened into an area that was round too, but much larger. As he entered the large area, he looked up and saw how the structure’s interior tapered above him. High up, it became like the inside of a chimney, and at the very top it was open, which allowed in the radiance of tonight’s full moon.
As Bump’s eyes adjusted further to the moonlight, he saw that the rim of the area he was in was lined with circular openings that, presumably, led to alcoves like the one he’d just emerged from. Further up the wall, on top of those, was a similar but slightly smaller ring of openings. A third ring was positioned on top of that ring, and a fourth on top of it, and then a fifth… He wheeled around, peering upwards, trying to decide what it like. Being inside a giant honeycomb, he decided, but a honeycomb in the shape of a cone.
Then he lowered his gaze and inspected the area’s floor, which was covered with flagstones and had a central part cluttered with pedestals. Shapes were propped against or rested on top of those pedestals and he ventured towards them to find out what they were.
He discovered they were musical instruments, fashioned on a grand scale. All were at least twice his height and many were wider than his arm-span.
The instruments included drums, cymbals, tambourines and frames with hanging gongs and bells; dulcimers, zithers and glockenspiels; guitars, lutes, banjos and similar instruments ranging from thin ones with a single string to obese ones with multiple strings; and horns, trumpets, sacbuts, flutes, bagpipes and twisting, serpentine zinks. Particularly big was a harp with a towering column and swooping neck; a hurdy-gurdy whose crank alone would have needed one musician, using both arms, to turn it; and an organ with a rank of pipes ascending from the height of a sapling to the height of a full-grown tree…
He panicked as he saw something resembling a long, thick tail lying under the organ. But then he realised it was a tube from the organ connected to a massive set of bellows, not a tail connected to Syrak.
Bump assumed Syrak had a tail, though his grandmother’s stories had actually said little about his appearance. Supposedly, he was a giant monster dwelling in this range of hills, to the north of their home city. He devoured livestock and humans indiscriminately and greedily and had a roar so dreadful that just hearing it would send a person insane.
Unlike Bump, his companions didn’t come from these parts originally and weren’t familiar with Syrak’s legend. Therefore, he’d been the only member of the party who felt alarmed the previous evening when they had their conference with the elders of the local village.
Seated in a hut that was hazy with peat-smoke, pungent with goat-stew and reeking of greasy sheep-fleeces, they’d discussed the proposed mission. “We’re nomads,” one elder explained. “We only arrived, erected our huts and started grazing our flocks here last summer. We know nothing of the history or purpose of the ancient structure standing on the highest of these hilltops. We went up and inspected it, of course, but we couldn’t open its entrance door, so we left it again and forgot about it. However, during the time since, at night, sounds have come out of it occasionally. And anyone who’s too close to it when the sounds begin has lost their sanity.”
Another elder continued. “We’d happily pack up and move our flocks away from this cursed place, but with the winter almost upon us, we can’t do that yet. Many more of us could have gone insane by the time the spring arrives. Meanwhile, nobody here has the courage to approach the structure now. That’s why we’ve summoned you to investigate it.”
While his companions haggled with the elders about the fee for their services, Bump felt his heart sink. He formed a theory about what’d happened. Someone, a powerful magician probably, had built the structure as a prison and put Syrak inside it. The monster was as unknown to these nomadic shepherds as he was to Bump’s companions but, evidently, they sometimes heard him bellowing within. And as Bump’s grandmother had said, the price of hearing him was madness.
The next day, trekking up to the structure, his companions had shown no interest in his theory. Instead, after arriving at the structure and confirming that its door was sealed, they’d forced Bump to climb up the outside wall. Some way above the ground, they’d noticed, the wall was peppered with large round holes. Bump was given instructions and threatened with violence if he didn’t follow those instructions, to climb into one of the holes and find a way of opening the door from the inside.
Now he threaded between the musical instruments and crossed the other side of the floor. The loudness of his footsteps disturbed him. Each step he took on the flagstones sounded like somebody cracking one of the giant drums behind him. He found an arched vestibule at the floor’s far edge, interrupting the bottom ring of alcoves, and when he entered that, he came to the back of the entrance door.
The ends of a timber beam had been placed inside brackets on either side of the door. Bump put his hands against the beam’s underside and strained for several minutes, trying to lever it up. At last, the beam rose free of the brackets and thudded down on the floor, and he managed to swing the door open.
His three companions had been waiting outside. They entered, carrying flambeaus. First came Barshtok, who said: “Good work, Bump. We’ll make a thief of you yet.” Much time had passed since Barshtok had stopped being a working thief himself and instead had become a leader of other thieves. These days he had an un-thief-like stoutness.
In contrast, behind him, Asmalia was tall and slender. She showed Bump less courtesy. “I preferred our last apprentice. He didn’t complain as much as this one. We shouldn’t have abandoned him when he got stuck in that drain.”
Frandal was at the rear. He’d used a pointed stick to force Bump up the outside wall, prodding him on the backside with it while he scrabbled for handholds on the stone. He jabbed this stick at Bump again as he passed. “Yes, this one’s nimbler but he doesn’t half like to whine.”
The trio passed from the vestibule into the main area. Barshtok held his fiery torch towards the gargantuan instruments arranged on and against the pedestals and asked, “Could these have produced the sounds that our clients are so frightened of?”
His voice boomed. For a moment, stunned by the structure’s weird acoustics, nobody else spoke. When the conversation resumed, they talked much more quietly.
“Clearly,” said Asmalia, “this place was built for the performing of music. Look at its strange internal architecture. All those curved indentations in the wall. It was designed to amplify the sounds coming from those instruments for the benefit of an audience.”
“And how,” Frandal sneered back, “are you such an expert on this?”
“I’ve told you before. I was once a singer in the grand concert hall in the capital.”
“Ha! I’ll bet the only singing you ever did was from the bed of a brothel in the capital’s slums!”
Ignoring the insult, Asmalia turned towards Bump. “You, apprentice, what happened when you went in through that hole in the outer wall?”
Bump always felt tongue-tied when Asmalia addressed him. Even now, barely more than whispering, she sounded imperious. He managed to stammer, “There was a shaft, sloping down, getting narrower… It was like being inside a giant trumpet… I fell out of its end…” He pointed. “Into one of those alcove-things over there.”
“So that’s something else this structure was designed to do. Presumably, all the indentations around us are connected to the holes in the wall outside. Funneling open as they go. As the apprentice said with a rare flash of imagination, like giant trumpets.”
“Then this place,” Barshtok reasoned, “wasn’t just constructed for an audience inside. It was meant to channel the music outside too so that people in the surrounding countryside could hear it.”
“Precisely. Which explains how those hill-nomads can so easily hear its sounds now.”
“But what do they hear? Music from these instruments? Who’s here to play those instruments? Moreover, how does music cause insanity?” Barshtok sighed. “This is very mysterious.”
Unable to hypothesize any more, the thieves moved forward among the pedestals and started examining the instruments. They soon parted company and explored on their own. However, even with yards between them, they needed only to speak at a normal volume. They had no trouble hearing each other thanks to the structure’s amplifying qualities.
Frandal paused by something as long as he was tall. Its conical shape wasn’t crafted but naturally formed because it was made of a giant animal horn. His torch’s flames gleamed on its varnished surface. “The thing this belonged to must have been huge!”
Elsewhere, Asmalia examined a mandolin that was the length of a coffin. She ran a hand along its bridge. “This part, at least, is made of bone.” She plucked the strings arrayed against the bridge and their notes were as loud as clashing sword-blades. “As for its strings…”
Barshtok had stopped by the organ. He was just tall enough to reach up and touch the bases of the pipes. He asked her, “Aren’t musical strings made from animal guts?”
“Yes. But I wonder which animal contributed these…”
“The organ-pipes,” said Barshtok, “are bone too. Whole, hollowed-out bones. The tallest are far longer than any bones I’ve seen.”
In the glow of his companions’ flambeaus, Bump could see that though other materials had been used too, like brass, clay, and pinewood, much of the instruments had been fashioned from parts of something’s body. The skin of a drum truly looked like skin – scaly, warty skin. The blowpipe, chanter, and three long drones of a bagpipe protruded from a fleshy sack that resembled a giant kidney. He wondered if everything came from one animal’s body. One monstrously big animal?
A hideous sound suddenly wheezed through the chamber and for a moment Bump believed that Syrak was emerging from hiding at last. But then there was a rumble of laughter. Frandal had clambered onto the pedestal against which the giant horn rested, put his flambeau down on it, and then lain down himself so that he could place his lips against the horn’s mouthpiece.
Asmalia snorted, “You demean that instrument by trying to play it. When you’re so pathetically unmusical.”
Ignoring her, Frandal blew into the horn a second time. Again, he didn’t produce anything resembling a musical note but, again, Bump found the wheezing sound disturbing. He couldn’t help but think of a beast reviving painfully from hibernation, struggling back into its normal pattern of breathing…
Then the wheezing turned into gurgling. On the pedestal, the torch-flames showed Frandal’s eyes wide with alarm. His arms and legs flailed against the surface around him. His lips still enclosed the horn’s mouthpiece but, obviously, he no longer wanted to blow into it.
Asmalia approached the pedestal. “Is something wrong, Frandal?” She stopped near the wide, flared end of the horn and gasped when she saw blood leaking out of it.
Though Frandal was the one who bullied him most, Bump hurried to the pedestal too and scrambled up on top. Frandal had stopped flailing and lay flat and still. His chin rested on the pedestal’s edge, lips still touching the horn’s mouthpiece. Bump grabbed him so that he could drag him back from the horn but immediately snatched his hands away again. It wasn’t just Frandal’s position that was flat, he realized. His whole body was. The contours of his limbs, torso, and head were sinking downwards, leaving only a flaccid, empty bag of skin. The horn had somehow drained him of his insides.
On the floor below, Asmalia stood surrounded by a pool that’d issued from the horn. Illuminated by her flambeau, her reflection stared up from at her from its red sheen.
Music began to play across the floor. Sticks began to crash against drumskins, bows to scrape across strings, gusts of noise to issue from pipes and horns. Things twanged, wailed, blared, clanged, and blasted. The music deafened Bump and he clamped his hands over his ears. Yet the acoustics of the structure seemed to magnify it to the point where he didn’t just hear it from outside his head. It played inside his head too.
Asmalia dropped her torch, turned, and fled. Somehow the huge harp had materialized behind her, its strings quivering of their own accord. She collided with it and struggled among the line of harp strings. As they moved, they sliced into her. Bizarrely, Bump saw how the blood flowing from her wounds rolled up, not down, the twitching strings and disappeared into the pins and levers holding them against its neck. Then she became limp and hung amid the strings like a dangling marionette.
Bump had to exercise all his willpower to stop the music from overwhelming him. He removed his hands from his ears so he could grab Frandal’s flambeau off the pedestal, then he jumped to the floor. Asmalia’s body had sunk down beside the harp’s foot and pedals. Its strings not only glistened with blood but were clotted with shreds of flesh and furred with wisps of hair. Bump ran the other way. He felt things strike him. The edge of a cymbal slashed along his left arm. The rim of a bell gashed his forehead and blood squirted from it.
Then he heard peals of organ music beside him and saw Barshtok lying on the flagstones nearby. The tube that extended from under the organ had coiled itself around him like a python. For a moment, Barshtok screamed in pain and terror, then fell silent. His face seemed to shrink. So too did the tube’s coils, as if the plump body inside them was deflating. At one end of the tube, the handles of the giant bellows opened wide and the bag between them expanded. Then the handles slammed together, the bag flattened and the notes clattering out of the organ became a shrieking cacophony. Above, Barshtok’s blood gushed from the tops of the organ pipes.
Injured, stricken with fear, Bump stopped moving and cowered by the bottom of a pedestal. Suddenly he heard a new sound competing with the din from the instruments, that of voices chanting: “Sy-rak! Sy-rak! Sy-rak!”
Also, the structure’s interior was brightening. He looked to the vestibule and saw figures filing through it from the entrance door. The figures were both tall and short, but all held torches and wore robes with pulled-forward hoods hiding their faces. Once in the main area, one figure immediately turned to the right, the next to the left, the next to the right again, and so forth. This created two lines, moving in opposite directions around the edge of the floor. At the same instant that the last figure entered from the vestibule, the lines met at the point on the floor’s edge directly opposite it.
Bump started moving again. Keeping himself concealed from the figures, he scurried from one pedestal to another in the direction of the door. Meanwhile, the torch-flames held by the chanting figures showed him that the instruments, still producing music, were also somehow rising off the flagstones and pedestals. They ascended to different heights inside the structure and hovered there. They changed too. He saw a bagpipes become a bloody, pulsing sac, the reeds protruding from it turning into arteries that snaked off to join other instruments like trumpets, horns and flutes, which themselves transformed into organs, or knotted blood vessels, or tangles of intestines. The bars of a xylophone became a succession of ribs. The harp became a plexus of long nerve-fibres. A pounding drum metamorphosized into a heart.
Around those levitating, transforming instruments, a mountainous outline became visible. And the air within that outline darkened and congealed as flesh began to reconstitute itself –
Bump realized he was still among the instruments and thus inside the outline too, which meant in another minute he’d be embedded within the reformed body of Syrak. He took a deep breath and bolted from the pedestals’ cover, across the section of floor to the vestibule, along it, and through the doorway into the night.
He careered down the slopes until he arrived back at the nomads’ village. There, he discovered it was empty.
*
A few days later, a village girl of Bump’s age found him hiding in a clump of ferns, thistles, and gorse bushes on one of the hillsides. She didn’t report him to the village elders. Instead, taking pity on him, she smuggled scraps of food to him, as well as some balm to apply to his wounds and some rags to bind them with.
At one point, he said accusingly: “You lied! About being nomads, about knowing nothing of the structure!”
“It’s not our fault,” she retorted, “that your friends were so stupid, so blinded by greed. That they didn’t wonder why we weren’t speaking a nomadic dialect. That they didn’t check our huts and realize they were permanent, not temporary ones. That they didn’t think it strange that, if the structure really caused madness, there weren’t any mad villagers wandering around.”
Another time, she explained about the structure. “Centuries ago, our ancestors built it as a temple to Syrak, whom they worshipped as a god. They appeased him with sacrifices there so that he wouldn’t devastate their city.” She noticed him staring skeptically at the dirty sheep-fleece she wore and added, “I know we’re a primitive people now, but back then we had a great civilisation. Its ruins have sunk into the bogs and been buried under landslides. Only Syrak’s temple survives of it.
“Then Syrak died. I suppose that showed he wasn’t really a god. He was a huge, powerful but natural creature who grew old, as natural creatures do.”
“And your ancestors made those musical instruments out of his carcass?”
“Yes. They believed that Syrak’s spirit would live on in the instruments’ music.”
Bump shuddered. “It certainly did. His malevolence animated those instruments. They fed on my companions!”
“Of course,” mused the girl, “there is something god-like about Syrak. He’s transcended death. Anyway, our ancestors modified the structure so that it became Syrak’s concert hall as well as his temple. But still a temple for offering sacrifices.”
“And a temple where he comes back.”
“Yes, when the moon is full and he receives the blood of a sacrifice, he still grants us glimpses of his majesty.”
Finally, Bump felt recovered enough to travel. The girl warned him that she’d only permit this, and not inform the villagers of his presence if he took her with him and married her when they got to the city. She was fed up with living as an impoverished, primitive, monster-worshipping hill-peasant.
Bump agreed to her terms. On his part, he was sick of being a thieves’ apprentice, of being mistreated and patronized, of having to do the dangerous work that the thieves themselves were too cowardly to do, of having to answer to a stupid nickname like ‘Bump’. An honest life as a married man back in the city seemed much more palatable.
As they made their way out of the range of hills, they met a party journeying in the opposite direction. These were a group of thieves whom some nomadic shepherds had summoned to investigate a mysterious structure on the highest hilltop.
©September 2021, Rab Foster
Rab Foster was brought up on a hill farm in the Borders region of Scotland but he now works as an educational consultant. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion, Blood Moon Rising, Legend, Schlock! Webzine and Sorcerous Signals. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.