by Rab Foster
in Issue 159, April 2025
Two old men were in the room. One was a barber-surgeon. About to perform surgery, not barbery, he bent over the other man, who was in a chair. He inserted into his patient’s mouth an instrument with a claw that clamped onto rotten teeth and a fulcrum that rested against gums while the teeth were prized free.
The door swung open. Before it was forced shut again, the desert wind screeched through its frame and rampaged about the room.
The barber-surgeon snatched the instrument from the mouth, jerked upright, and flattened his tousled white hair against his scalp. He and his patient stared at the figure who’d entered. It was tall, broad, and clad from shoulders to ankles in a woolen robe that was belted against its waist. The belt supported a small armory – a dirk, dagger, cudgel, brass knuckles, throwing stars. Visible over the figure’s shoulders were the top of a pack, the hilt of a holstered sword, and the blade of a holstered axe. A hood was drawn over its head, hiding the face save for a squarish jaw.
The figure yanked back the hood and tresses of hair tumbled to its waist. The tresses were crusted with sand and dust, though parts were faintly red.
A husky voice said, “I need cleaning up.”
Only then did the barber-surgeon realize. “A woman?”
She approached their end of the room, weapons jingling on her belt, sand leaking from the folds in her robe. Her eyes flitted from side to side, observing the equipment of the man’s two professions on shelves along either wall. To her left were sets of shears, razors, brushes, combs, tweezers and ear-spoons, jars of tonics, oils and creams, bowls of clips and pins, a couple of wooden mannequin-heads with wigs draped over them. To her right were racks of scalpels, forceps, syringes, speculums, saws and catheters, jars of balms, ointments and medicinal syrups, cups used for bloodletting, a tank of water containing leeches that made black, undulating lines while they swam. A layer of dust begrimed everything, almost as thick as that coating her hair-tresses. She hoped the tools were scrubbed before being used.
She stopped before them. “Yes, some have remarked on the fact. I’m a woman. Now, I’ve spent three weeks trudging across that wasteland behind me and would like its filth washed off. Can your establishment do that? Or do its services not extend to ladies?”
The barber-surgeon turned towards a curtain that concealed part of the wall behind him and shouted, “Karzia?”
Someone dragged aside the curtain. A crooked, white-haired woman was revealed, standing in a doorless opening. “What the matter?” she rasped.
“We have a visitor from the Outworld. A lady.”
“Makes a change.”
“She needs maintenance, Karzia. See to it.”
Twitching a gnarled hand, the old woman beckoned the newcomer through the opening and into a second room. “What’s your name, dearie?” she demanded as the curtain fell back behind them.
The second room contained no surgical instruments. Its shelves displayed daintier-looking shears, brushes and combs, as well as clasps, ribbons, caps and hairnets. Below them, by the bottoms of the walls, were things used in the making of hair-dyes – buckets of ash, ochre, berries and flower-heads, bottles of olive oil, vinegar and honey, stacks of lye soap, and mortars and pestles smeared with dried juice and mashed petals.
“Cranna,” said the newcomer. From between two buckets, her gaze was momentarily returned by a black cat with gleaming yellow eyes. Then the cat crept off into the room’s darkest corner, where its blackness became a camouflage.
The woman grasped one of Cranna’s tresses and rubbed off the dirt, so that its redness was more apparent. “Cranna,” she cackled. “Cranna the Crimson!”
She got a growling reply: “Don’t call me that.”
Ignoring her, the woman said, “I’ll heat up water. Remove your garments. Your weapons too. You’ve no need of them here. We’re all friends.” A chair was positioned in the room’s center. “Then sit and rest.”
Once the woman had hobbled off, Cranna inspected herself in a mirror hanging in a gap among the shelves. As with the things in the other room, there seemed nearly as much grime on the mirror’s surface as there was on her. Then a shriek pierced the curtain. The patient had emitted it as he surrendered a tooth to the barber-surgeon and his fulcrumed claw.
She heard the barber-surgeon complain, “Why come to me now?”
His patient moaned, “I couldn’t bear that hideous pain anymore.”
“You’d only a few more hours to wait. Then you’d be perfectly well again.”
Cranna turned away from the mirror, pondering the barber-surgeon’s words. Whatever he’d meant, she didn’t like the sound of it.
Later, more noises came from the front room. Cranna was bowed forward while the woman used a pitcher to pour warm water, thickened with egg-whites and herbal extractions, down her dangling hair and into a basin on the floor. They heard the door open. The wind raged inside again and the curtain flapped back into their room. This startled the black cat – no, cats, for it’d been joined by a ginger one. The felines scooted past the basin and into a deeper part of the building.
The door was closed and the wind ceased. Men cursed with exertion and a weight thudded against the floor. Sensing trouble, Cranna rose from the chair and took her weapons-belt off the pile formed by her pack and clothes. She wore only her leggings now, so she also took the largest towel the woman had brought and wrapped it around her.
When she passed the curtain into the first room, she discovered that two more old men had dragged something onto the premises. They crouched on the floor, over their delivery, as did the barber-surgeon. The patient with the bad tooth had left.
The newcomers gawped at Cranna – not lustfully, though the top of the towel barely concealed her breasts. With her hair a dripping red hydra and her hand now holding a dagger, they seemed afraid of her.
That suited her. She preferred men to look at her that way.
Realizing the two men were staring at something behind him, the barber-surgeon turned, saw her, and got to his feet. “Madam,” he said pompously. “Please return to my wife. What they’ve brought tonight is unpleasant. Not for female eyes.”
The thing on the floor was a corpse. Surely a corpse – the damage it’d suffered meant it couldn’t possibly be alive. Huge gashes ran from its collarbones to crotch, carving indiscriminately through armor, cloth, skin, flesh, and bone. Torn entrails oozed from the ruins of its belly and made a mess on the floor beside it. Its head had encountered similar trauma and much of the face had been cut away, hanging to the side like a partly-removed mask. Plastered over those gory injuries was the desert sand that Cranna had recently been cleansed of.
She noticed the hair spilling back from the head, discernibly blond despite the blood and grit befouling it, and couldn’t help gasping. The barber-surgeon misinterpreted this. “Told you it was no sight for a woman,” he grumbled. “Now will you go back?”
Cranna shoved him aside. “Out of my way, fool. I know him.”
As she knelt, she corrected herself. “I knew him.” She lifted the bloody, hanging-away face and set it on the front of the skull, so that some semblance to Shadlar returned. For a moment, she tried to remember him positively, as a comrade, a friend, finally a lover, and not as the rogue who’d betrayed her three weeks earlier.
Then, to the men who’d conveyed him here, she demanded, “Where did you find him?”
There was a short, flustered silence so that, when one of them did speak, she knew the answer was a lie. “Beyond the town’s edge.”
The barber-surgeon intervened. “From his wounds, he was attacked by the nomadic savages who prowl this desert. They carry scimitars capable of slashing a man to ribbons like this.”
“Strangely,” said Cranna, “while I journeyed through the desert, I came across an encampment of those nomads. They weren’t savage to me. We bartered a few things, then they gave me food and water and let me rest in the shade of their tents. They behaved very civilly.” She fumbled with the corpse’s torso, as if trying to close its wounds and stop its insides from seeping out. Then, evidently deciding it was a lost cause, she stood up. “Indeed, they were much more civil than your ancestors.”
“My ancestors?”
“I know what your town is, or was. It was founded two centuries ago by the Robber-Lord, Maigway the Scourge. Him and his minions and hordes. After the Thirteen Kingdoms got sick of their predations, joined forces, and drove them into this desert.”
“I wouldn’t know,” the barber-surgeon said blandly. “I’m not a scholar of local history.”
“You’re not? Well, let me enlighten you on where your equipment comes from.” She lifted something off the nearest shelf. “This bronze speculum, for instance. Engraved on its tongs are whorled patterns that suggest it was made in – and stolen from – the Kingdom of Kreelenda. Or…” She lifted another item. “This pewter syringe. It has a lozenge-shaped stamp identifying it as merchandise from the Kingdom of Vonos. More plunder, no doubt. I’ll wager all your tools here are one speck of the booty Maigway the Scourge and his forces took from the Thirteen Kingdoms 200 years ago.”
Then she rounded on the other men. “Why bring him here? There wasn’t anything a surgeon could do for him.” When they didn’t reply, she answered for them. “He still has a fine head of hair. When it’s washed, it’ll make someone a good wig. And his teeth… I suppose they can be used as replacements, for ones patients have lost.” She sighed. “Poor Shadlar. He was a scoundrel, but he deserved better than to end up as spare parts for a barber-surgeon in a filthy little town like this.”
Just then a voice called, “Do you want cleaned up or not, dearie?” The barber-surgeon’s wife, Karzia, had emerged from the second room. She noticed the dead man’s blood, covering Cranna’s hands like red gloves. “Looks like I’ve more cleaning up to do now.”
Before leaving the men, Cranna snapped at them, “Loot the corpse if you want. But make sure it’s buried decently afterwards.”
Back in the second room, she noticed, in the darkness of a further entrance, four pairs of yellow eyes watching her. “How many cats do you keep?”
“Too many to count, dearie. Not that we really keep them.” The woman cackled again. “It’s more like, they keep us.”
Cranna returned her weapons-belt to the top of the pile of clothes. Concealed beneath the belt was a folded piece of paper – the map she’d managed to secretly take from a tunic-pocket on Shadlar’s corpse.
To Cranna’s surprise, the barber-surgeon and his wife offered her a room for the night. This was despite her calling the old man a fool, describing their town as filthy, and alleging that 200 years ago their ancestors had been murderous robbers. She had a few items she’d bartered off the desert nomads, more out of politeness than necessity, which she gave the barber-surgeon as payment. He was delighted by them. “Gel from the horned cactus,” he exclaimed, holding up a bottle. “Excellent for treating cuts and sunburns.” A sachet containing dried brown flakes prompted similar enthusiasm. “Desert sage… You can make a tea from this that soothes sore throats.”
Cranna remembered the man saying previously the nomads were savages who delighted in cutting their victims to flitters. She thought him oddly respectful of their medicinal culture. But tactfully, she didn’t comment on this.
With equal tact, she made no more references to Shadlar and the barber-surgeon’s underhanded use of his corpse for spare parts.
Despite the arduous journey she’d made, Cranna didn’t fall asleep when she lay down on the furs and blankets her hosts had provided as bedding. Their hospitality made her suspicious. Also, her scalp hurt. The old woman had been zealous whilst washing her hair. Several times, Cranna had shouted at her to work more gently because she seemed intent on pulling out clumps of it.
Lying there, not sleeping, she thought about Shadlar. She tried putting herself in his boots when he’d arrived in this town. What had he done? Where had he gone? She decided a vain young peacock like Shadlar, after three weeks in the desert, would surely have done what she had – gone straight to the local barber-surgeon and had himself made tidy and presentable. Anyone who’d endured that desert, conceited or not, would get cleaned up soon after coming here. So why hadn’t the old couple told her they’d met Shadlar while he was alive? The barber-surgeon’s devious scheme to recycle the hair and teeth from the corpse might explain that. But…
There was definitely more they were hiding. They knew something about the nature of his death. Cranna shuddered. It was conceivable they’d offered him a room for the night too. That she was lying exactly where he’d lain sometime prior to his demise.
Later, Cranna heard movement outside her room – stairs creaking, old, slow feet shuffling along a floor, hinges rasping as a door opened and shut. She scrambled up, donned her robe, and lifted a blade. She eased back her door and emerged into the corridor. She heard snores, sawing away somewhere in the house – male snores, those of the barber-surgeon. Then another door opened and closed, a bigger door, which she guessed was the building’s entrance one. They were in the early hours of the morning now, a strange time for an old woman to go walking in the streets.
Cranna headed for the entrance door too. When she stepped outside, she found that the storm had blown itself out. Not only was the air still, but the sky was cloudless – it formed a star-flecked band above the street, the moon planted in the middle of it like a gleaming white buckle. In the moonlight and starlight, she discerned the form of Karzia, hobbling a little way ahead. She followed her, maintaining a distance whereby she didn’t lose sight of the old woman while the old woman didn’t become aware of her.
Karzia led her through several streets. Cranna logged each turning in her memory, knowing she might have to get back to the barber-surgeon’s house by herself. Finally, they came to a building with an imposing outline. Karzia entered it through a gap between two sizeable front doors. Cranna made out pillars flanking those doors, rising to a stone arch, within which the moonlight was smeared over some glass. None of the building’s smaller details were visible.
Cranna debated going into the building too, but concluded it was a bad idea. She might be entering a trap. And whatever had ripped Shadlar open was something she didn’t want to be stuck in a trap with, especially since she carried just one blade.
She also wondered about the old woman’s mission. What could she be delivering to this place so late at night? Information? Something else? She raised her hand to her scalp, where she’d lost multiple hairs to Karzia’s rough hands. Curiously, her scalp no longer hurt. Indeed, it seemed to tingle with good health. Perhaps Karzia’s ungentle methods did bring positive results.
Meanwhile, Cranna realized she heard something – a faint sound, a soft humming, a purr. She looked around, but didn’t spot any of the formerly-ubiquitous cats prowling in the shadows.
She returned to the house. While she walked, she reached up to her neck, where a locket hung on a thin leather string. She decided there was one more thing she needed to do tonight.
The knocking began shortly after Cranna had got up and readied herself to go out.
This morning she’d dressed lightly, left her travelling robe and belt of small weapons in the old couple’s room, and equipped herself with only her sword, axe, and pack. As she crossed the room where the old woman had tended her last night, she paused before the mirror. She had to admit Karzia had done a good job of revitalizing her. If it wasn’t for her size, and her muscle, and her pugnacious jaw, and her belligerent gaze, and her sword and axe, she’d even look lady-like.
She noticed her image was crystal-clear. The mirror had shed all its grime.
Then knuckles started drumming on the far side of the entrance door. She entered the front room. There, she discovered that the dust that’d previously coated everything had disappeared too. Sunlight penetrated a slot of glass above the door and the things on the shelves glittered. Even the floor shone, including the part of it where Shadlar’s corpse had bled and leaked its innards.
The knocking was too urgent for her to spend time wondering why the old couple had cleaned their house so thoroughly during the night – and why there hadn’t been any sound of them cleaning it, when she’d had no difficulty hearing Karzia leave on her mysterious errand. She unbolted and opened the door and found half-a-dozen women crowded onto the doorstep. Young women, the first young people she’d seen since arriving in the town.
“You’re not Karzia,” one of them exclaimed.
“Well observed,” she replied. “The lady of the house is still enjoying her beauty sleep. She was busy last night.”
She forced her way through the women and onto the street. Above, she heard the scrape of window-shutters opening and then Karzia shouting down, “What do you lot want?”
One of the women cried back, “Come on, Karzia, get up. You know how it is on a morning like this. We need our hair prettified, after so long.”
Cranna turned and peered up, in time to glimpse Karzia’s head before it retreated behind the shutters. “Hold on,” she marveled, “she’s got brown hair. Chestnut brown. Last night it was white.”
The women decided to enter the building whether Karzia was ready for them or not. Before she went in, the last one remarked to Cranna: “Well, dearie, she makes hair-dye. She must have used some on herself.”
Cranna set off towards the center of town. It’d been stormy or dark when she’d seen the settlement before. This was her first time seeing it in calmness and daylight. It looked immaculate – despite yesterday’s storm and despite it being in the middle of a desert. Its window-glass sparkled. No sand clogged the cracks between the bricks in its walls. And though she presumed the town had been founded on the site of an oasis, its vegetation surprised her with its greenness and vitality. The palm trees lining the streets, which last night had seemed dwarfish and bedraggled, rose tall and resplendent, their fronds cloaking the walkways in shade. She saw gardens, vegetable-plots, and vine-coated walls whose luxuriant leaves seemed to mock the parched wasteland all around them.
Once she’d got used to the town’s cleanness and verdancy, she noticed the randomness of its architecture. She went through an arch of silvery-grey gneiss whose surfaces were inscribed with hieroglyphics. She saw granite obelisks flecked with pieces of crystal. She passed a wall patterned with quartzite tiles, then a basalt fountain that squeezed a plume of water high in the air. Everywhere stood statues and sculptures depicting different deities, historical figures, and real and imaginary creatures.
This was to be expected. The town’s ornamentation had been stolen from elsewhere, from north, south, east, and west. After the Thirteen Kingdoms resolved to destroy Maigway the Scourge, his flight into the desert must have been a spectacle. Refusing to abandon any of his plunder, he’d had his people transport it all, even blocks of stone that weighed tons.
Cranna passed more townspeople, uniformly young. She wondered where the old ones had vanished to. A young man greeted her as he went by, and she spun round and demanded, “Do I know you?” The man suddenly looked alarmed, as if by greeting her he’d forgotten himself and committed a social blunder. He gave a panicked smile and hurried off.
Cranna continued walking, perplexed by the man’s smile.
A statue carved from marble loomed in the town’s center. She halted before it and consulted the map. Even if the map hadn’t identified the statue, she’d have guessed from its twisted mouth, glaring eyes, and wrathful brow that it represented Maigway the Scourge.
Fortunately, she’d prepared for the journey through the desert before Shadlar stole the map. One side of it was covered in instructions for finding the town – directions, distances, times, sun-and-star positions, locations of watering holes and geographical features that provided shade during the hottest hours of the day – which she’d memorized or made notes about on separate pieces of paper. Its other side contained instructions on what to do after arriving in the town. These she hadn’t memorized or recorded. If the map hadn’t turned up last night, she’d be lost now.
In fact, that other side was barely a map. It showed no streets or buildings, just the central statue and a trail of arrows and numbers zigzagging off from it. Cranna turned in a certain direction, took a certain number of paces, found herself in a street leading from the square, and arrived at a junction. Another arrow directed her into another street, another number told her how many paces to take along it.
She trod with an unexpected jauntiness. For some reason she was enjoying this quest. Something in the air made her buoyant. She realized it was what she’d heard during the night – the soft, soothing murmur, the purr… Then she looked down and discovered several cats, black, white, ginger, grey and fawn, scurrying at ankle-level alongside her.
The map brought her to the entrance of a building. “Not a great surprise,” she muttered, for it was the same one Karzia had entered last night. Now she could see it was a jumble like the rest of the town’s architecture. The doors, pillars and arch were of different styles and had been grafted on from other buildings. Also, she made out the arch’s contents – a half-circle of stained glass that depicted a bearded figure writing on a scroll in the light of a crescent moon. This implied the place was one of learning.
It didn’t appear on the map either, but the arrows and numbers seemed to continue inside, behind its doors. By now an army of cats had assembled around her. One of the doors hung slightly out of its frame and through the crack the cats darted inside, one by one. She waited until all the cats had gone in before swinging open the door and entering too.
She came into a dimly-lit hall. Its floor was crowded with rows of shelves that formed a labyrinth of passageways between them. She saw the last of the cats disappear between the shelves and, straining to read the map in the meagre light, went in the same direction and into the same passageway. The shelves around her were packed with books of varying languages, sizes, ages, designs. Like the barber-surgeon’s instruments, the contents of the library had been looted from countless places across the Thirteen Kingdoms.
The map made her turn several corners and traverse several passageways until, finally, she emerged from the shelves into an almost-empty area of floor. Its lone feature was a sandstone column, also transplanted from elsewhere, which rose to the ceiling and had grooves spiraling up its surface.
At the column’s base, a tiny figure sat on a stool. It held a long handle with a line, resembling a fishing rod, and used this to play with the mob of cats that’d gathered on the floor before it. The line had a piece of wood at its end. The figure flicked the handle forward so that the piece swooped towards the cats. They surged up and clawed at it, but the figure twitched the handle back and whisked it away. Then the action was repeated.
The map had no more directions. The last arrow seemed to point at the figure by the column. Cranna announced, “You’re a strange treasure.”
Ignoring her, the figure stopped flicking the line and inspected the thing at its end. “Worn out,” it said in a dry, scratchy voice. Worm-like fingers removed and cast the wood aside. “Time I attached a new one.”
The discarded piece clattered onto the floor close to Cranna and she lifted it. Though the cats’ talons had scored it deeply, its human shape was still discernible. Unsettlingly, this effigy had real hair. Fixed onto the head were wisps of it that, somehow, the cats hadn’t managed to tear off.
Blond hair, Cranna noted.
She mused: “There never was any treasure. The legend of the Robber-Lord’s secret hoard, of a spot where he’d hidden the most precious jewelry and gems from his raids… That was a lie. Bait in a trap. Meanwhile, this map was a way of delivering victims to the trap. Yes?”
While the figure fastened a new wooden effigy to the line, it acknowledged her for the first time. “Why,” it asked, “would such a trap exist?”
Cranna approached the column. When she couldn’t come any further, because the throng of cats was in her way, she replied, “This town needs sacrifices. Thanks to some foul sorcery, its inhabitants are vampires. The town itself is like an insentient vampire, made of stone. Everything was old and decrepit when I arrived last night, the people, the trees, the buildings’ exteriors and interiors… Yet this morning things are different. The white-haired hag who tended me last night is now a buxom, brown-haired wench. The old man I saw last night having a rotten tooth extracted was, on the street, a smiling young man with all his teeth in place again. The town is unbelievably pristine. What gave everything this infusion of life? I assume it was the lifeforce of the treasure-seeker who came yesterday, drained at the moment of his death.”
Peering forward, she saw how shrunken the figure was. It wore a purple robe but filled as much, or as little, of the robe as an infant would have. The sleeves were rucked around short, stick-thin arms. Its legs terminated between the stool’s edge and the floor, leaving the hem to hang emptily below. Its head and hands were white and hairless.
It corrected her. “What feeds on the lifeforce of those interlopers is not in this town. They live adjacent to it, in another reality. When we arrived here two centuries ago, we found an oasis with the ruins of a temple-complex around it. We used the bricks of the ancient complex to build our town. And this library stands on the site of the temple’s innermost vault. The vault, we learned, contained the entrance to another realm – one whose inhabitants take great joy in feeding on the inhabitants of our realm. They eat souls, not flesh. So now, when we send them specimens to devour, they’re most pleased. It doesn’t take much to satisfy them. What constitutes one puny life in our world is a feast in theirs, enough to satiate their hunger for years.
“And when they’re satiated… Their happiness flows through that gateway and across our town in great psychic waves. It fades with time, as they get hungry again, but while it lasts it’s a miraculous thing. It rejuvenates all who experience it. It takes decades off them mentally and physically. Even the buildings and gardens lose their dust for a while. You’re too young to gain much from it, but you’ll have felt it. A lightness of mood, a spring in your step… Thanks to the hum in the air. That’s them, purring in pleasure, because they’ve been fed.”
Cranna observed the mesh of wrinkles on the figure’s face. “Yet the elixir that hums out of the other realm hasn’t done much for you. You look 200 years old.”
The figure sighed. “I admit that was a surprise. When I conducted the magic rituals needed to facilitate our arrangement with the other realm, I didn’t expect to be stuck here like this for eternity. Acting as a conduit. Enabling them to get access to their prey but not enjoying the benefits of the deal. Not like my followers, who stay young while I grow older. I’m as much of a sacrifice as the treasure-hunting fools who come here.”
Then the figure raised the handle and gave a rustling laugh. The new effigy hung on the line. “Still, I enjoy it when they arrive from the Outworld and I get to perform my sorcery. First, the surprise on their faces. Then, as they see what’s coming, the horror.”
The library’s shadows were darkening. Cranna no longer saw the bookshelves at the edges of the floor. She was alone with the sandstone column, the grotesque thing on the stool, the cats waiting to play with the new toy. But simultaneously, she shifted away from them. The floor between her and them was stretching, becoming yards, then tens of yards long. She found herself standing in her own space, surrounded by darkness. The column, figure, and cats remained visible but were small and distant, like a scene framed by a faraway window. She could see and hear what the figure was doing, however. It launched the line forward and up sprang the cats, desperate to get their claws into the prize at the end.
“They’ll be delighted,” it said. “Usually, years pass between meals. That’s why the town and its folk were so rundown when you arrived yesterday. But two sacrifices in two days – what luck. Incidentally, girl, what’s your name?”
She released her pack from her shoulders, then unholstered the sword and axe. “Cranna.”
A sneer. “Cranna the Crimson!”
“Don’t call me that.”
She saw creatures slouching towards her, out of the darkness. They were twice her height and hirsute with fur. Drool glistened below their fanged mouths, yellow light filled their eyes around the black, vertical slits of their pupils, pairs of sharp, membranous ears jagged up from their heads. Their arms ended in huge, shaggy paws, out of which jutted talons the size of sickle-blades. They brought with them an onslaught of stenches – of musk-glands, bile, and piss – and the air grew suffocating.
When half-a-dozen of them had emerged, the closest one lunged. Though unwieldy-looking, its arm swung with shocking speed and she scarcely managed to spring back and avoid its talons. She retaliated, striking at the arm with her axe. In the normal world, the axe-head would have sheared the arm off. Instead, it caused no damage, passing through fur, flesh and bone as if they weren’t there. Cranna lost her balance and stumbled after the axe. By the time she equilibrized herself, she’d blundered in among them. She stuck her sword-blade into one of their flanks, but the thrust had no effect either. She might have been hacking and stabbing at mirages. Then more claws slashed down and she ducked and dodged away from them.
A talon-tip caught her left shoulder and penetrated its flesh – shallowly, but enough to cause a searing pain. She reeled, blood flecking down the left side of her tunic. As she got over the pain, something else assailed her – a mental numbness. It subsided after a moment, but left her with feelings of gloom and despondency. She wondered if part of her soul, a tiny scrap of it, had been torn away.
She saw the jaw of the nearest creature moving, as if champing on a morsel. And again, she heard the humming sound, the purring. It didn’t invigorate her this time.
She must be in an overlap of the two realms. Physically, Shadlar had been eviscerated in the human realm, but his death was even worse in the other one, where his soul got rent to pieces and devoured. Meanwhile, her weapons seemed useless in the overlap, whereas her opponents could lethally deploy their claws and fangs against her.
She seethed, “That’s not fair!”
She heard a cackle. Daring to take her eyes off the creatures for an instant, she saw the figure raise the handle, preparing to flick the effigy back among the cats.
She managed to stagger free of the creatures and headed for where her pack lay on the floor. They advanced. One of them moved between her and the pack, but Cranna ran forward, juked, and escaped another swipe from its talons. As her adversary pivoted, she reached the pack, tore it open, and yanked out a cloth bundle. The creature’s arms sprang up, ready to strike. Cranna flung the bundle at its face, the cloth unraveled, its contents burst over its snout and eyes. That provoked a screech of pain. It lurched back, smoke seeping from its face, the yellowness in its eyes turning a bloody red.
The pack contained more bundles, which she wasted no time in hurling at the other creatures. They spilled as they hit limbs, bodies, faces. There were further screeches, gouts of smoke, burnings of fur and flesh. While her foes retreated, Cranna looked again at the figure.
The cats were dispersing in front of it, yowling and spitting, the effigy dangling forgotten in the air above. Remembering the figure describe itself as a ‘conduit’, she cast the empty pack aside and charged towards it.
The floor between where she’d done battle and where the figure sat by the column seemed impossibly long. Behind her, despite their injuries, she heard the creatures come after her. Their snarls and hisses grew louder. She kept running. The vengeful noises loudened, and she smelt the reek of their burning wounds and felt the heat of their fetid breath on her back…
She barreled into the area by the column. Most of the cats were gone. Not hesitating, she rushed to the figure on the stool and drove her sword-blade through its chest.
The sounds and smells of her pursuers vanished. She looked back and saw the library restored to its former state, dim and shadowy but no longer unnaturally dark. The only creatures in sight were a few remaining cats, wandering in disorientation. She turned towards the figure. Transfixed on her blade, it spluttered blood from a tiny mouth. Then it keeled onto the floor. It unbalanced the stool as it fell and that keeled too. The top of its seat broke away and revealed a secret compartment, and things stashed inside the stool spilled out.
Cranna felt a flicker of hope that the stool was full of gems and jewelry. Instead, it contained multiple sheets of paper. She lifted a sheet and found herself contemplating a map identical to the one that’d guided Shadlar and her to this library.
The figure, enveloped in its oversized robe, was still alive on the floor. It bubbled through a blood-filled mouth, “What… did… you… do?”
Cranna picked up the cat-toy. The new effigy on the line resembled the previous one, though it bore fewer claw-marks. Also, rather than blond strands of hair fixed to its head, there were red ones. “As you no doubt know, I spent last night in the house of two prominent members of your community, the barber-surgeon and his wife. Late on, I heard the wife, the elderly but sprightly Karzia, leave the house and surreptitiously I followed her. I tracked her through the streets to this library. All the time I felt puzzled. What was her late-night errand?”
She held up the effigy with the plumes of red hair attached. “I guessed she was delivering some things that belonged to me – the strands of hair she’d torn from my scalp while washing me. Strands very much like these. And that suggested skullduggery involving sorcery. I know sorcerers like to obtain people’s hair and fingernail-clippings to cast spells and inflict mischief on them.”
She paused, directed the cat-toy towards the last cat in the vicinity, and dangled the effigy at it. But the cat reacted by fleeing in among the bookshelves.
“While crossing the desert, I encountered some nomads and bartered with them. One thing they gave me was a locket, which I supposed was a charm for warding off evil. When I opened the locket, it was packed with salt. Thus, if I faced sorcery here, it seemed wise to follow the nomads’ example and use salt as a defense. And since salt cleanses wounds, and is a treatment for skin and digestive maladies, it wasn’t hard to find in the home of a barber-surgeon. After returning to the house last night, I raided the storeroom and loaded my pack with as many bundles of salt as it’d carry. A useful precaution.” Cranna looked at the figure. “Do you have any questions?”
The figure didn’t reply. The shriveled thing that’d been Maigway the Scourge was dead.
Alone in the library, Cranna noticed how the pleasing hum that’d pervaded the air all morning was gone. Also gone was her sense of jubilation at outwitting Maigway and the creatures of the other realm. She felt weary and dispirited now. She became conscious of the pain in her shoulder and realized its wound needed attention.
Then she heard screams from outside the building, screams of agony and terror.
“What have I done?” she asked.
Cranna returned to the barber-surgeon’s house through streets that were mired in sand. On either side, the desert wind had pocked and furrowed the walls and a last few vines clung to them in desiccated shreds. Stunted palm trees with tattered fronds rose crookedly, looking like ragged scarecrows.
She sometimes came across half-buried corpses. Thanks to the dry desert air, these were mummified. Their skeletons were garlanded with strands of leathery grey flesh and sealed in parcels of tight, transparent skin.
At the house, Cranna applied some of the barber-surgeon’s balms and bandages to her shoulder-injury. Then she entered the room where Karzia had worked. Half-a-dozen mummies sat there on a circle of chairs. A few scraggy tresses clung to their wrinkled scalps, the remnants of the hair they’d wanted ‘prettified’ earlier that morning. Lying huddled in a corner was a little cadaver that was probably Karzia herself.
Briefly, Cranna felt guilty. By slaying Maigway the Scourge and blocking the gateway to the other realm, she hadn’t meant to doom the town’s inhabitants. Still, she reminded herself, those men and women had been Maigway’s minions. They’d had 200 years to become refined, to acquire the airs and graces of civilized townspeople. But before that, they’d killed countless people during their rampages across the Thirteen Kingdoms. And despite their crimes, they’d enjoyed two centuries of life, much more life than they’d allowed their victims. They deserved no sympathy.
Cranna tipped one of the mummies off a chair. It disintegrated as it struck the floor. The cloud of dust that rose from it was scentless. She sat down and wondered what to do next.
The barber-surgeon and his wife had owned a sturdy and capacious house. Once it was cleaned out – she looked at her seated, mummified neighbors apologetically – it might be an agreeable place to live, temporarily at least. Indeed, the town now had a quietness that, removed from the hurly-burly of the Outworld, she found appealing. And… She looked under the shelves at Karzia’s materials for dyeing hair.
“I’m sick of being Cranna the Crimson,” she declared. “I should stay a while and find out what it’s like being Cranna the Blond. Or Cranna the Brown. Or…”
She noticed several pairs of yellow eyes, watching her from the darkness of a nearby doorway.
“Besides, someone has to look after the cats.”
© April 2025, Rab Foster
Rab Foster was brought up on a farm among the hills of southern Scotland, but now he works in education and lives far away from Scotland. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion, Blood Moon Rising, Fall Into Fantasy 2023, Legend, Schlock! Webzine, Sorcerous Signals, Swords & Sorceries Volume 3, Whetstone, and previously in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.
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