by Teel James Glenn
in Issue 115, August 2021
A Story of Altiva
The children in the cages no longer cried or yelled, their tears long dried, but with the stoic endurance and strength of frontier dwellers, they watched the ceremony and the deaths of the adults with only faint whimpers of resignation at their own fate to come.
The first two of the adults that had been taken in the raid had already been given to the dark abominations that the cult priestess had summoned with her conjurations. They had died screaming as the horrid creatures had consumed their very souls.
Besides the imprisoned children there were only three adults and Ada the Umbrian left alive. And the Umbrian was not so stoic about her fate.
“Get closer to me you spawn of the lowest tvek,” Ada yelled at the dancing figures at the foot of the wooden frame she was bound to. “I’ll send you to the bosom of your cursed dark god.”
The naked figures that danced in the twin moons’ light around the clearing howled in glee at the bound barbarian’s challenge. They were two dozen of the cult members, a mix of male and female both human and Victish–the reptile race who called themselves the First People–whose grey skin and wide spaces eyes gave them an eerie appearance. All the dancers were hairless head to foot and painted all over with ancient sigils of power.
“Scream, filthy upland barbarian,” the priestess of the cult called down from the stone pedestal where she stood. Like her followers she was denuded of hair and covered with glyphs , those hers were tattoos and she also wore a headdress of elaborate Kota feathers. “Your angry cries will please Mazdor the Dark Lord when he returns to take dominion over all of Altiva.”
The priestess waved at the stone arch behind her where the warp portal had opened before to accept the screaming captives.
“I piss on you and your god,” the captive woman spat. “Zondra will deliver me from your vile abomination and then I will dance on your grave.”
This made the priestess laugh and her followers joined her in howling enjoyment. Their strange, twisted laughter caused the children to whimper anew in terror.
The captive barbarian pulled at the bonds that pinioned her arms and legs till her wrists and ankles bled but could not pull free of the svorhide bindings.
The cult turned their attention then to the chanting of the priestess who knelt before the stone arch. The edifice was carved with age-old symbols of power that began to glow as she summoned the thing that lived on the other side of the warp portal.
Ada of Umbria sagged with exhaustion in the ropes but refused to give in to the inevitability of her coming death. Instead, she thought, *At least you got away, bard; you’ll sing a good song about my death*. And the thought brought a grim smile to the rugged features of the woman.
She was amazed that it had only been that afternoon that she and her traveling companion had come to the borders of the Thorangian lands.
*****
“What does the sign say, Dunal?” Ada asked from the lead vorn of a string of five. She was a muscular Umbrian woman, tall and broad-shouldered with black hair that framed a face with a square, but still feminine jaw. She wore a mail shirt over a leather jerkin, loose leather pants, soft boots and had a hatchet in her belt and a broadsword strapped across her back.
“You can see it,” the bard said from the last of the antlered vorns as he shifted uncomfortably on the saddle. The four-legged beast was skittish and he had to work to keep it from stopping to nip at the hind of the beast ahead of it with its razor-sharp beak.
“I can not read it,” the woman said with annoyance in her voice. “I never learned reading, only some numbers for herding my father’s svor on our stead.” The two riders were on a rutted road they had come across several miles back in the Lutecian wilderness.
“It says we are safely over the border now.” He said, “So those vorn we ‘liberated’ from your former employers can not be legally claimed here, Thorangian law will not recognize extradition.”
“Others might not think so,” she said. “There are a fair number like me who can not read legal papers nor care to obey such fine points of the law.”
“Then I will make a bargain that you shall at least learn to be able to debate such fine points with them. I shall teach you to read,” he said. The bard was a slight but not skinny man who wore a tattered tunic and loose pants that were clearly city finery that was not meant for travel. In fact, nothing about the man seemed to be suited to the rough country the two were riding through.
“I have nothing to trade in such a bargain.”
“I should think last night’s activity is trade enough,” he said.
Her expression darkened. “That is not something to be traded nor bartered, bard.”
“No offense, madam warrior,” he said, chastened. “Particularly after you saved me from those competing clansmen who wanted my head I would do nothing to offend or anger you. I would gladly make such a skill as reading a gift.”
“No, I would bargain, it is only fair. Perhaps I shall teach you to fight,” she said, ignoring his apology then smiled at her decision. “It seems to be a skill you lack based on how I found you with those clansmen.”
“While it is true my circumstance there was no good, I used to get along fine in the palaces of the rich women I played for,” he said. His eyes got a faraway look before he focused back on her and returned her smile. “But I would be honored to learn from you. And so we have a bargain, then? Words for wounds?”
“Yes.” She kicked her mount forward. They rode for a short while after and then she asked, attempting to sound as if she had not been thinking about the subject for half a day, “Do those palace dwelling Mephan women really pluck their leg hairs?”
He cocked his head and grinned. “That and they use hot wax on them,” Dunal said.
“Hot wax?”
“Yes,” the bard said, “they use it to pull the leg hairs out in groups to save time.”
“What?”
“Many of the women back home in Cozen also use crystal blades to shave the hairs.”
“Like you men do on your faces?” the barbarian asked.
“Some men, dear, Ada,” the bard laughed running a hand along his smooth, soft cheek. “I am afraid this field is fallow for any growth of hair.”
“Beards are scratchy things anyway,” she said with a serious tone. She looked back over her right shoulder at the trailing bard and frowned. “Did all those noble ladies you sang for have hairless legs?”
“I seldom got to see the legs of the ladies I sang for,” he said with a return of his wistful smile flashing across his handsome face. “And when I was in circumstances where I might have had a chance to it was … uh … dark and I had other things to look at.”
The barbarian knitted her brow and looked as if she were going to say something cross but he picked up a vorn-antler flute he had on a lanyard around his neck, blew a few notes, then sang, “*Her thighs were strong, her morals weak but in the dark, I couldn’t peek!*”
The Umbrian woman’s expression went from grim to amused.
“Dunal, you make me laugh!”
“Then I have served a useful purpose.” He feigned a mini-bow in the saddle. “Always at your service, fine warrior.”
“It was almost worth the trouble of having saved you from those tvekbrained clansmen,” she said.
“Almost?”
“Well, you showed some other qualities last night that also made it worth it.”
He grinned. “Oh yes?”
She held up the cloak she had across her saddlebow. “Yes, your needlework on mending this was very good; I can barely see the point of repair.” When she saw his grin flatten she gave a solid belly laugh loud enough to cause her mount to shy in reaction.
“You are a cruel person, Umbrian,” he said with a shake of his head as he worked to control his own mount. Then he blew a two-tone toot on his flute. “A very cruel person, the warrior she, though her cloak was mended her tongue cut me!”
The two road along at an easy pace, no particular time or place to be and from time to time the bard would sing a little ditty and the barbarian laughed at the bawdy or clever twist in the song. The trail eventually widened to a well-traveled road.
“There is a settlement at Fort Sikcar just over that far hill,” Ada said when they had dismounted for a late day meal of jerky and wine. “You can see the smoke. It was a trading camp really that grew to a fair-sized frontier settlement as things became more peaceful with the Victish in the area. If we push on, we can be there by second sun-fall.”
The bard was not accustomed to nor happy to be riding so much, so he dismounted to walk stiff-legged around the area to stretch, strumming a battered mandolin and muttering a bawdy tavern tune.
“Don’t you ever get tired of playing and singing?” Ada asked, as she crouched to study the wagon ruts in the road.
“No,” he said. “ It is how I see the world, how I make my living and, some might say how I justify myself existing to the gods; I am not much else, have never done much and probably will not amount to much. I shall send no armies to battle, summon no storms nor, it seems, father any empires. Except through song.” He stood by her, his eyes admiring her shape made clear by the tightening of her leather pants over her haunches as she bent over. She noticed his gaze and arched an eyebrow.
When she made to mount again, he added, “Can we just walk a bit at least until my dignity has recovered? I am sure the beast will appreciate not having me on its back for a while.”
She reached over, placed her hands under the bard’s armpits and lifted him till she held him straight-armed above her, showing no strain at all “I can’t see why it would bother the beast,” she said. “You are not heavy at all!”
“Then perhaps you could carry me and give the vorn a break?”
Just as she put him down she froze, her expression suddenly intense.
He started to speak but she ignored him and drew the sword from her back sheath. “Down, Dunal!” she yelled just as the bushes on either side of the road exploded with armed attackers who raced out at the two travelers swinging clubs.
The bard ducked under a vorn to avoid a cudgel from the first man while Ada parried two more clubs aimed at her head.
There were a dozen attackers wearing long scarlet robes and wielding only clubs who swarmed at the two companions. Ada spun to take the first pair of brigands with a horizontal slash that all but cut them in half, but as they doubled over; instead of this instilling caution in the ones that followed, the others of the attackers kept coming with suicidal fury.
Dunal swung his mandolin like a club to smash it directly into the face of one of the charging figures.
“They’re Victish!” the bard yelled as he saw the reptilian countenance of the attacker. The grey skin, wide-set eyes and slash mouths of the reptile creatures were frightening as were the sharp, fanged teeth.
“And humans,” Ada said as she spitted another attacker with her blade. There were more racing from the undergrowth with mad cries and no apparent regard for their own safety. She cut an attacker down with each deft sword stroke, maneuvering to try and keep the vorns to her back.
“There are too many of them,” Dunal yelled as he avoided yet another cudgel strike. He again ran through the legs of the mounts and pack animals to avoid an attacker, dodging wild swings of the clubs that seemed to come from the very air. There were two-dozen in the horde that had descended on the pair now with red robes and stone headed clubs everywhere. “We have to flee, Ada!”
“Go, bard,” she yelled as she shouldered into the chest of one Victish and hacked behind her at the throat of a human bandit. All the humans in the horde were smeared with mud that gave them the same dull grey color as their reptile cohorts. It seemed that the world was entirely grey flesh and scarlet robes as the attackers swarmed the Umbrian.
“No!” he yelled and headed toward the barbarian. Two robed bodies blocked him, a human female grabbed him by the arm as her companion, a Victish male, raised a grey, scaled arm with a stone-headed club in it.
“Run!” Ada called and sent her hatchet flying straight to slam into the Victish holding Dunal between his eyes.
The bard kicked hard into the knee of his woman captor to pull free from her. He only hesitated a moment with a glance back at Ada then raced off with two more of the screaming, robed attackers on his heels.
“Go, little man!” Ada yelled as the number of the attackers overwhelmed her and bore her down to the ground, holding her down by sheer weight of numbers. Then one of the attackers slammed a rock-headed club against her head and all went black.
****
“Are you awake, warrior?” The voice had a Thorangian accent and was hoarse. Ada opened her eyes to see a rough, bearded face staring at her from her right side.
“Yes,” she growled. Her head hurt. She was suddenly aware she was naked and, worse, bound, her arms splayed out to her sides. She pulled at the hide bindings that held her but they would not give.
“Be at ease, warrior,” the bearded face said. “These tvekdung cultists know knotwork.” The man was naked like Ada was, and also bound to a wooden frame. Beyond him, she could see others in the same conditions also bound to crude frames.
It was night but before the two moons had risen and the Umbrian and the others were in a clearing on a hilltop. She heard the sounds of whimpering and she turned her head to see a group of cages with dozens of small bodies crammed in them, children crying softly.
“Where are we?” Ada asked. “What happened?”
“The Cult of Mazdor,” the bearded man said. “I am Uvan, we were settlers heading to Fort Sikcar because they said the area had been pacified, that the Victish had moved off west. Then they attacked us–we had no weapons, we are farmers. We could not fight them off.”
Ada could see how battered the man was now, bruised and bloodied in a way that proclaimed he had not given up his freedom cheaply. She was aware then of her own aches and wounds but ignored them and pulled at her bonds again.
“Struggle all you will, high-country beast,” a female voice called from behind Ada. “Mazdor will not be cheated of its offerings.”
The Umbrian turned her head to see a woman also fully nude, but with a shaven head and hairless everywhere on her body. Her skin was stained grey and she was covered in the colorful tattoos of ancient sigils. The most arresting feature of the woman, however, were her eyes. They had gold-flecked pupils that seemed to swirl in wide white iris as she focused them on the Umbrian.
“Release me,” Ada hissed. “Now!”
“Your suffering will please the Great Mazdor as you are fed to it,” the bald woman said. “And I, as his priestess will revel in that suffering for the greater glory of the Dark Lord! He who is the original and first source of the First People.”
Ada spit at the woman who just laughed, then moved off to a group of similarly shaven followers.
“There is no reasoning with that ilk,” the bearded Uvan said with resignation. “They have given themselves to the madness of this a rift-craft cult.”
“Even I have heard of such things in Stoliza,” Ada said. “The one-sheets have warned of a rise of such madness that none of us believed such stupidity could exist; that continentals and Victish would join is such and be side by side–”
“I know,” Uvan said. “Beyond all keene.” He moaned involuntarily from his wounds then pushed on. “Even we on the frontier did not believe it or else we would not have brought the families out to this close to the treaty lands. We were fools to believe the government that it was safe.”
Ada looked beyond the other prisoners now and could see the dark shapes of stone monoliths at the crown of the hill, crudely carved ancient monuments of the First People, the Victish natives that once roamed the area. Each stone was incised with deeply cut and well-worn symbols from the first times of creation.
Around the stones, the hairless grey reptiles congregating in prayer groups which did not shock the Umbrian woman, but the fact that there were continentals–humans like her–with the Victish was almost too stunning to believe. There had always been enmity between the First People and the humans though some areas had been able to find a fragile truce between reptiles and warmbloods
.
In this group, all the humans had their skins smeared with pigment to give it the same grey tone as the reptiles and had shaved their whole bodies to mimic the reptilian pallor.
“They worship an old Victish deity,” Uvan said when he saw Ada’s expression of disgust looking at the scarlet-robed throng. “The damn scum want to drive all of us out of these lands and think their Mazdor will do it for them.”
“I’ll jam their god up her–” Ada said.
“How were you alone out here?” Uvan asked. “Even in normal times, this frontier is too wild to travel by one’s self.”
“You think an Umbrian needs a bodyguard?” Ada shot back with more anger than the question warranted, then she reined in fury to add, “But … but I wasn’t alone. Not really.”
“I am sorry you lost someone,” Uvan said. “They made a point of taking us all alive to feed still squirming to their damn deity. I guess your–”
“He didn’t die,” she said with some pain in her voice. “I hope he did not. I think he did not, anyway.”
Uvan began to speak again but a sudden yell drew their attention to the monuments.
“Mazdor,” the priestess screamed in invocation, “I call thee forth to stand before your followers.” The priestess now danced before the open space of an arch between the massive stones.
The twin moons were up now and in their dual light the priestess was a savage icon, swaying to the drums and chants of the two dozen naked figures who danced around her.
“Yulin protect us,” Uvan said.
“Zondra, the Dual One, will not abandon me,” Ada whispered. To herself she whispered, “Not like some have.” With more bitterness than she thought she should have. She shook her head to chase the thought and pulled at her bonds again.
“Hear our invocations and accept the gifts of life we bring you!” The priestess waved her hands and four of the cultists moved to the last of the adult prisoners on the frame.
“No!” the woman prisoner screamed, her country-bred reserve shattered by the coming fate.
The children began to cry and one yelled, “Mother!” which started all of them crying.
“You scum,” one of the other prisoners yelled, “leave her; take me!”
The cultists seemed to derive entertainment from the prisoners’ misery and laughed as they carried the frame-bound victim to set the uprights of the frame into holes in the stone platform before the archway.
The drumbeats increased in tempo and the priestess lapsed into the growling hisses of the Victish tongue.
Ada and the prisoners all began to frantically pull against their bindings as a strange thing began to happen in the archway. The stars, visible only moments before in the night sky behind the arch began to blur, then fade from view, as something darker than the night began to fill the void between the stone columns.
It was a swirling darkness that was so black it hurt Ada’s eyes to look at it yet she could not look away. There was something in that dark as well, something that was even darker than the blackness yet undulating and moving, as if from a long distance away. It was a mad shape that was not a shape, an impossibility yet real and a form of life that came from a place where nothing could live.
The priestess chanted old arcane words in the Victish First Language, so old that even the linguarings of the Warp Wizards could not translate it. Her body began to glow with ethereal energies that sent spears of luminous filaments into the dark maw before her. The cultists took up their priestess’s chant and the sound of the strange words were a physical thing, enveloping all who heard them in a miasma of fear.
The prisoner on the frame before the stone archway began to scream with a terror that bordered on madness and was so shrill and forced that it seemed to tear her throat. This set the cultists to cackling laughter and they danced with joy as the darkness reached from the arch, flowing around the swaying priestess like a rancid tentacle to wrap itself around the frame where the victim was displayed.
The piercing shriek of the victim reached a soul-chilling pitch and then stopped abruptly with a sucking noise and a sound like the snapping of a hundred branches. The tendril of darkness surrounding the frame and body of the prisoner withdrew, leaving a drained, blackened husk hanging from the bindings–a boneless, lifeless shell that looked like so much boiled leather.
The cultists cheered.
The process was repeated with another prisoner, the darkness crawling around the chanting priestess with vile intent and another prisoner drained of life and form.
The surviving prisoners cursed.
The children cried.
“Not them, take me,” Uvan yelled, but the priestess smiled with glee as she pointed past him.
“Next,” the priestess called, pointing to the next of the frame-trapped prisoners, Ada.
The Umbrian laughed. “Come close enough for me to whisper my epitaph to you, bitch, or is your ‘god’ so weak it cannot face a real woman?”
“Mock if you will, barbarian,” the priestess said. “I will pray for Our Lord Mazdor to drain you slowly so you feel the agony for an eternity.”
The cultists grabbed the frame that Ada was on and lifted it, carrying it to set in the post holes in front of the portal.
The priestess stepped before the Umbrian and looked up at her with an intense expression. “Now you will see the power of Our Dark Lord and how we will reclaim this land for the First People.”
“You are going to bore me to death then?” Ada laughed and then added, “I will make a special trip back from hell to feast on your heart!”
The priestess backed away with a sneer on her face and turned to begin her chanting again to summon the otherworldly being. Once more the dark shape manifest in the space beyond the portal, the temperature in the clearing lowered and the air pressure pressed against Ada’s body. The deathly cold of the other reaches began to ooze through the portal and come for her.
As the darkness began to reach for her it drew Ada’s thoughts back from her memories with a shiver. *I could wish for one more song, bard, but hope you can compose an epic for me to sing to your next doxie.*
She felt the frost within her soul and had the certain knowledge that she would meet Zondra in the next world and the Dark God was going to take her. The sounds of the chanting of the cultists suddenly faltered as a new sound filled the clearing.
A familiar yet strange and unexpected sound, a high-pitched flute’s whistle.
“Dunal?” she gasped and then was about to scream, “Run fool!” when she heard his voice, strong and clear, filling the clearing with rich tones that stopped the chanting completely.
The bard strode into the center of the clearing, singing. His arrival caused the priestess to spin aghast. Dunal stopped to point at her with the gesture of both hands up. “You can’t even chant in tune!”
When she started to speak he stopped her.
“The Dark awakes and stares at me,” he sang. “The soundless terror speaks, The elder beings scream my name, And from the shadows creep. In nightmares and in dreams they crawl, Entwining in my soul, And yet I will not bend to them, To them I will not fall!”
So stunned were the cultists by the sudden appearance of the slight man that they allowed him to walk between their ranks unmolested until he stood before the frame on which Ada was secured, between her and the priestess at the foot of the stone arch.
“You look a little underdressed, Umbrian,” he said with a smile.
“You are an idiot,” Ada said with real pain in her voice. “You will make my death mean nothing because you came back.”
His smile waned and he shook his head. “Did you think so little of me, Ada, to think I value my hide so much? You still have to teach me to fight; we made a bargain.”
The amazed priestess observed the exchange while the bubbling darkness behind her pulsed with growing, impatient need to enter the world and consume. She waved to her followers and said, “I command you to capture this–”
When the headdress-wearing woman started to speak again he cut her off and sang, “When darkness enfolds, To these hopes I hold, That the cycle completes in a story. Of daring and doing, Of loving and wooing, And battles that all end in Glory.” Then he blew a loud, shrill note with the flute and all at once many things happened simultaneously.
The tone on the flute propelled a needle that Dunal had secreted in it into the priestess’s right eye.
The tone also was the signal for the troop of Border Militia, which had slipped into position by the children’s cages, to spring into the clearing and attack the cultists while protecting the prisoners.
The priestess screamed in agony and fell backward so that the enveloping tendrils of darkness enwrapped her, retreating into the other world with the cracking, sucking sound of consumption.
The bard leapt to the frame and used a knife to slash the bonds holding Ada’s hands.
A Victish jumped onto Dunal’s back but before it could sink its fangs into his neck the Umbrian reached over him to grab the smooth grey skull of the reptile in her powerful hands. Ada yanked hard so that the Victish’s neck snapped.
Dunal cut the woman’s ankles free and handed her the knife. “Here,” he said. “You can use this better than I can.”
She jumped past him as he spoke and killed another cultist, then cut Uvan and the other two survivors from the frames. By then the Militia had slaughtered all the cult members they could catch.
Uvan ran to the cages to release the children.
“What did you do?” the Umbrian asked Dunal as she moved to kick the leathery husk of the priestess that was left on the stone platform. She did a small dance step then squatted over it to urinate on the corpse. “Umbrians keep our promises, bitch!”
When she saw him looking askance at her she said, “See, hairless wenches are not to be trusted.” Then she added, “Why did you come back?”
The stars were visible again through the archway, the thing which had manifested there gone to wherever it had been called from–either because its avatars were dead or its hunger was sated.
“I realized I couldn’t help you with that crowd when I saw them brain you,” Dunal said, a bit appalled by her actions on the body. “But when I saw they were clearly going to take you away alive I realized I had time to get help; I ran to Fort Sikcar and then we came.”
She stepped up to him and took his chin in her hand to tilt his head up to look into his eyes. “Yes, you did. You came. And I was going to teach you to fight; what am I to do with you?”
He put a delicate hand on her rough one and sang, “The horizon still calls, And I answer its hail; And my steps are still purposed and free, So this wanderer has miles to, Travel yet, And a myriad of wonders to see!” He blew a two-tone note as punctuation to his song.
She laughed. “That’s it, bard, enough song for now. We should discuss a new bargain and it is time I showed you how an Umbrian plays a flute.”
©August 2021, Teel James Glenn
Teel James Glenn’s award winningwork has been seen in Weird Tales, Mad, Sherlock Holmes Mystery, Scifan, Fantasy Tales, and Mystery Weekly and previously in Swords & Sorcery. Visit him at theurbanswashbuckler.com.