by Rab Foster
in Issue 133, February 2023
The road started to descend. By the time it reached Ketaxos, the town overlooking the escarpment, its incline was considerable.
Indeed, the base of the town’s eastern wall, through which the road entered, was higher than the top of its western wall, through which the road left again. Between them sloped an open area that temporarily replaced the road and formed a square with townhouses positioned along its sides. The rainwater that coursed down it towards the escarpment had gouged out ruts and trenches and exposed rocks and boulders. No one had tried to surface this chaotic square with flagstones or cobbles.
Drayak Shathsprey passed through the entrance in the eastern wall, a palisade of lichened spruce trunks. Ahead, the square was shrouded in morning fog – common in these parts, he’d heard, due to collisions of cold and warm air rising and falling past the escarpment-face – and the western wall was invisible. He coaxed his horse down the slanting square, its hooves picking their way between rocks and runnels. One either side, through tendrils of fog, he glimpsed houses whose condition was little better than that of the ground below him. Their stone slabs were flecked with some last crumbs of lime-and-tallow whitewash. Seams of moss had replaced the grids of mortar between the slabs. Their windows were glassless and covered by cracked timber shutters.
Drayak thought it appropriate that this was the last part of Rothyrdun he’d ever see. A shithole little town at the edge of a shithole little kingdom.
When he arrived at the gateway in the western wall, another palisade, he discovered its gates were closed. He dismounted. A pump stood to one side of the gates, beside a trough of murky water, and to this he tethered his horse.
He approached the gates. The bolt holding them together was padlocked in place. But it’s daylight, he told himself. Why aren’t they open?
He imagined the road beyond them, passing the lip of the escarpment and starting the precarious, zigzagging descent down its face… Down to civilisation. He’d thought a lot about civilisation recently. Where there were flat, verdant landscapes rather than jagged, windswept ones. And soil producing grain and fruit rather than gnarled root-vegetables and scraggy grass for half-starved goats. And houses bright, dry and clean rather than dark, damp and smoky. And people who looked you in the eye and smiled rather than skulked and scowled under filthy woollen cloaks.
He pushed futilely against the bolted gates, then turned and surveyed his foggy surroundings. He saw no sign of a gatekeeper. Indeed, it unnerved him that since entering Ketaxos he hadn’t seen anyone… But then he picked up a sound of voices. Listening more intently, he discerned how the owners of those voices were wailing and sobbing.
He moved in the direction of the voices, which brought him both up from and along from the gates. After a minute, the bubble of visibility that accompanied him through the fog encroached on the back of a crowd. Its members were on their knees amid the square’s dirt and rocks and their heads were directed away from him. He threaded between the people until, ahead, the fog cleared and he saw what they were facing. Their lamentations were loud now.
They knelt before a wall at the square’s edge. The wall was in an immeasurably better state than the town-houses and it bore a large mural whose colours had been retouched regularly, so that it looked as bright as the day it’d been painted. The mural showed a young warrior, clad in armour, brandishing a sword and mounted on a white horse. His body was perfectly proportioned. He wore no helmet, so nothing hid his handsome face and flowing tresses of hair.
When Drayak understood who the figure in the mural was meant to be, he started laughing. As his laughter continued, and loudened, and was noticed, the townspeople gradually fell silent. In the end, the only sound was that of him roaring in hilarity.
A small, elderly man clambered up at the front of the crowd and hobbled towards him. He didn’t wear a cloak but a tunic of fur, with variegated colours of brown, russet, cream and gold. Flitters of long grey skin trailed from its sleeves.
Drayak stopped laughing. He recognised the man as a priest in the Church of Empyrean Shadows, the religion followed by Rothyrdun’s inhabitants. He also recognised the costume as the pelt and wings of a type of giant bat found in the kingdom’s remoter gorges. Bats were sacred to the Church. Its clergy claimed to use the animals as messengers. Bats, supposedly, carried communications between the priests and also to the mysterious Shadow Dwellers in the Upper Air who observed and manipulated the world’s affairs.
The priest halted before him. His costume gave off an unpleasantly musky odour. “You,” he raged, “dare laugh on this tragic day?”
“Why’s today tragic?”
The priest stuttered apoplectically. “Our king… Our beloved king… is dead!”
The warrior painted in the mural bore only the slightest facial resemblance to the man Drayak had spent three years serving. Bodily, there was no resemblance at all. “He can’t be. He was alive when I left the capital a week ago. I passed through the town of Korstus yesterday and nobody said he was dead then. How can you, in the back-end of nowhere, suddenly know he’s dead?”
The priest gestured upwards. “The winged ones brought us news. The high priests sent them out across the kingdom last night.”
The hilarity that’d possessed Drayak a minute earlier had vanished. Now he felt only bitterness. “Suppose he is dead. Why prostrate yourselves and yowl and lament like this?”
“Because he was our king. We’re in mourning. The whole kingdom’s in mourning!”
“Listen, Larros employed me. I knew him.” He pointed at the mural. “For one thing, thanks to the inbreeding his forefathers indulged in, he looked nothing like that. He was a bloated monster. So heavy he needed half-a-dozen of his guard to hoist him out of bed in the mornings. Secondly…” Drayak’s voice grew angrier. “…the monstrosity of his soul eclipsed his physical monstrosity. He was vile. I’ve seen him cut a mother’s throat, so that he could get his hands on her nine-year-old daughter, whom he lusted after – ”
The priest cried, “Lies!”
“No, truth! I’m glad that foul bastard’s dead. For three years I’ve endured his perversions and cruelties. If you’d seen what I’d seen of him, you wouldn’t be wallowing here, sobbing over his passing. You’d be rejoicing. The Slug-King Larros is no more. Hurrah!”
By now, the face of every person present had turned towards Drayak. Every face glowered with hatred and rage. Suddenly he realised he’d been foolish to reveal the scorn he felt for their king. This was ironic, considering that for the past three years he’d been extremely careful in keeping his feelings hidden. Showing those feelings in close proximity to Larros would have been fatal.
The people were rising off the ground now. Drayak backed away from the priest, then spun round and started striding in the opposite direction, towards where he’d left his horse. At the same time, he began easing his blade from the sheath at his side. A half-risen man lunged against his waist, trying to tackle him, and he smashed a knee up into the man’s face. Another lunged from the other side and the hilt of his blade, now in his hand, cracked down on that man’s head. Deciding that walking wasn’t going to get him clear of the crowd in time, he broke into a run. More people tried to intercept him. He shouldered one out of the way and slammed a fist into the face of another.
Then there were no more people ahead of him, only fog, and his run became a sprint. Behind him, a chorus of shouts, shrieks and curses indicated that the population of Ketaxos were on their feet and chasing after him. He realised he was running the wrong way. He needed to go down as well as across the square. He swerved and nearly skidded and fell on the muddy, rock-snarled slope. In the fog behind him, he glimpsed the townspeople’s figures, indistinct but furiously animate, like an army of characters in a shadow-puppet show. He hurtled downwards and the western palisade came into view again, with the gates in its middle.
His horse watched him nonchalantly from the pump and trough. Then, just before he reached the horse, a figure stepped out of concealment behind it. This was a tall, dark-skinned woman with a nearly-shaven head, wearing a shabby but not wholly decrepit uniform that denoted a captain in one of Rothyrdun’s town guards.
He grabbed at the tether, eager to untie it from the pump. Rather than greet the woman, he came out with a question: “Have you seen the gatekeeper?”
The woman took note of the loudening hubbub that was following Drayak down the square. Then she swung a wooden cudgel against his head. The blow sent him reeling back against the trough, where he tripped over its side and crashed down into its water.
Probably the blow would have left him unconscious, but the cold cloudy water sloshing around him, over his face, penetrating his mouth and nostrils, prevented him from passing out. He gripped the stone rim on either side and levered himself up, then managed to swing his legs out and sat with his backside on the trough’s edge, coughing out water he’d swallowed. Pain blazed in his forehead where the cudgel had struck it, although that pain didn’t blind him to the sight of the many figures emerging from the fog above. Leading them, moving with surprising sprightliness, was the old priest clad in the bat-pelt and bat-wings.
The woman loomed over him. “You could…” he said, between his coughs. “You could just let me get on my horse… I’ll ride out the way I came in… You won’t see me again.”
The cudgel smashed into his head again. He toppled off the trough and onto the ground beside it. Lying face down, a moment before he passed out, he tasted the earth of Rothyrdun – the kingdom he despised.
Drayak was sprawled over some straw that mouldered on the cell’s floor. Because he wasn’t yet able to move again, he spent the time thinking.
I considered him a monster, but for three years I served him. I did his bidding. I assisted him in his schemes. Surely that makes me monstrous too?
Desperately, he searched for evidence that he wasn’t the moral equivalent of King Larros.
When I could, I disobeyed orders. People are alive because of that. The family my men were supposed to execute outside the capital’s northern wall… None of us had the stomach to do it. We knew the parents were innocent of any crimes and the eldest of their children was only about eight years old. So, we looked the other way and let them flee into the forest. That forest was full of wild beasts, and freezingly cold, but perhaps they survived…
Or that courtier who’d antagonised him for no reason that anyone could understand, that courtier I was told to torture to death in the catacombs. I released him and had him swap clothes with the body of another prisoner who’d just died there. Then I stamped on the corpse’s face, caved it in, made it unrecognisable, so that when I passed it off as the courtier’s nobody knew the truth…
Who else? That girl… Fourteen or fifteen years of age, the object of his lusts even though she was quite old by his normal tastes. She’d displeased him somehow and he’d wanted her dead. I got her to the western gate and gave her a dagger. If I’d been able to provide a horse, or food, or money, I would have, but at the time the dagger was all I could manage… “Take this,” I whispered, “and go!” Her eyes… They’d shown gratitude. She wouldn’t have looked at me that way if I’d been a monster –
The scrape of the cell-door interrupted his reverie. To his surprise, he managed to sit up. As his physical body started functioning again, so too did his sense of smell and he was assailed by the cell’s stenches, of shit, piss, vomit, and rotted straw.
He recognised the figure in the doorway, dark-skinned, with cropped hair and wearing a captain’s uniform. “Well,” she said, “that was a stupid thing you did.”
Drayak raised a hand. His forehead had a bump where she’d landed the first cudgel-blow. Where she’d hit his head a second time, his hair was crusted with dried blood. “They were being ignorant. They angered me.”
“We searched your belongings and found this discharge letter.” She held up a scroll of paper. “Three years’ service, eh? All you had to do was keep your mouth shut and wait until the hullaballoo over Larros’s death died down. Until people recovered their wits. Then you could’ve found me or one or my men and shown us the letter. We’d have got the gatekeeper to open the western wall and you’d have been on your way.”
The captain’s voice had none of Rothyrdun’s harsh accent. Like Drayak, she was a mercenary from beyond its borders. She could only be a mercenary, since the people of Rothyrdun were contemptuous of anyone whose skin-pigmentation differed from their own, and since the kingdom’s men regarded a woman’s worth as being only in the kitchen or bedroom. However, when it came to hiring mercenaries to bestow organisation, discipline and fighting prowess upon his shambolic army, militias and town and city guards, Larros had been happy to employ people from outside, irrespective of their race or gender.
“And that’s not possible now?”
“Judging how you enraged the entire town by insulting their late, beloved king, I should say not.”
Drayak sighed. Then he asked, “What are you doing here? How much do they pay you?”
“Pay? Not a great deal. However, there’s nothing in Ketaxos to spend my wages on, so I suppose I’m accruing a little wealth. Also, with this town perched right on the escarpment, and on the border, when I get bored of it I should have little difficulty packing my bags and slipping away.”
“That’s all I wanted to do. Slip away…”
Then other voices, ones that had the Rothyrdun accent, became audible in the passageway outside the cell. The captain’s voice immediately changed. She shed any trace of sympathy or fellowship. Instead, she announced coldly, “There’s been a decree. Pyugar the Priest has received a new emissary from the capital, carrying another message – ”
Drayak groaned. “Bats! You don’t believe these charlatans’ nonsense about being able to talk to bats?”
The captain ignored him. “This evening King Larros’s funeral pyre will be lit in the centre of the capital. His soul will rise into the Upper Air. He’ll take his place alongside his ancestors – ”
“What? Those inbred bastards?”
“ – who reside there as Shadow Dwellers. Every town in the kingdom will light its own pyre, and place on that pyre one member of the town’s population. That person’s soul will join a retinue of souls from across the kingdom. Accompanying King Larros in his ascent. Destined to serve him for eternity in the Upper Air.”
Now Drayak saw several guards standing in the doorway behind the captain. They were local men, wearing uniforms barely recognisable as uniforms because of their decrepitude. He said, “I expect nobody in Ketaxos is eager to end up on the pyre. Even if it bestows the honour of being able to serve their beloved king in the hereafter.”
“No. But your arrival, and your treasonous outburst, means they no longer have to worry. According to Pyugar, the message doesn’t actually specify that the person burned on the pyre should be a local.” She turned towards the other guards. “Pyugar says the pyre is ready. Take him!”
As they dragged him from the cell, Drayak had an appalling thought.
Maybe the mumbo-jumbo of the Church of Empyrean Shadows is true. Maybe I will find myself in the retinue of Larros the Slug-King and have to serve him for eternity.
Three years were bad enough.
It was impossible to build a pyre that didn’t topple over on the rutted slope of the square, so a site had been chosen outside the town’s palisaded walls. Drayak was taken to the eastern gate, where a cart hitched to a pair of horses was waiting, and made to sit in the cart between two guards. Other guards, including the captain, arrived on horseback to provide an escort.
They made their way along a track that branched off the main road and climbed a mountainside above the town. The fog had long since lifted and the evening light had only begun to dull. As Ketaxos receded below him, huddling against the escarpment, he made out distant plains, forests, lakes and rivers beyond it.
The world that isn’t Rothyrdun, he thought despairingly. The world that’s civilised.
They stopped partway up the mountainside, at a shelf of flat ground. Above this shelf, the slope became steeper and rockier, then almost vertical, and Drayak could see several huge, long clefts cut into the higher surfaces of rock. Meanwhile, the flat ground was home to a building with a round, crumbling wall and a conical, moss-slathered roof. Visible on the wall were carved hieroglyphs and geometrical shapes that identified the building as a temple of the Church of Empyrean Shadows. A crowd of townspeople in their hooded, woollen cloaks was waiting there and they started screaming abuse the moment he appeared with his escort.
But Drayak was more perturbed by the structure of planks, beams, old furniture, logs, branches and sticks that’d been hurriedly assembled in the middle of the area. Precariously, it tapered up to a point higher than the summit of the temple.
The priest, Pyugar, stood in the temple’s entrance, at the top of a half-dozen stone steps. For some reason a ladder had been placed by his feet, one end resting on a higher step, its other end resting on the ground in the direction of the pyre, so that it slanted at a shallow angle.
Drayak was led to the temple. When he arrived, Pyugar pointed down and ordered, “Lie against the ladder.”
Puzzled, Drayak made no movement, until one guard administered another blow to the back of his head and he dropped to the ground. This time he didn’t lose consciousness. He heard the priest instruct the guards, “Tie him to it.” Then he was lifted and laid along the ladder-end at the steps, a few feet off the ground, and he felt his wrists get bound to the joints where the last rung was attached to the ladder’s shafts.
His head had just cleared after the blow when he realised that the insults and curses coming from the crowd were growing even louder – growing closer – and suddenly there was a commotion around him. He heard the mercenary guard-captain yell, “Get back, you idiots!”, and the old priest squawk, “Leave him alone! He needs to be alive on the pyre!” Then a dozen figures in cloaks swarmed about the steps, the ladder, him. Several fists bashed down on him. Someone had brought a stick and whacked it across his chest. Another had eggs and smashed these over him. Globs of spit showered him. Voices screamed, “Traitor!”, “Scumbag!”, “Bastard!”
While the guards tried to wrestle away those townspeople and restore order, somebody got onto the top step beside Pyugar and then fell down, or was knocked down, on top of Drayak. This person shrieked into his face, “You slandered our king, you monster!” Briefly, his eyes met the eyes under the person’s hood. At the same time, he felt movement behind, then within his bound right hand. He heard a whisper too… Then the person, a young woman, was seized and dragged off him. The captain, who had her in her arms, roared, “Get away from him, you mad bitch!”
“Monster!” shrieked the woman again. “Slandering monster!”
Yet the hate in her words then was at odds with the look she’d given him, and the message she’d whispered to him, a moment earlier.
The captain glanced down at him and seemed to notice something, for her expression hardened. But rather than say or do anything, she turned and bundled the woman away.
Once those townspeople had been propelled back into the crowd, the priest knelt by him and explained helpfully, “It’s believed that for a soul to successfully migrate to the Upper Air – a soul that’s being migrated, deliberately – there should be awareness at the moment of death. So… No point in just putting you on the pyre and lighting it. The smoke might render you unconscious before the flames reach you. It’s wiser to wait until the whole pyre’s ablaze and drop you into it.”
Then guards gathered along the sides of the ladder and started to raise it up from the steps, into a vertical position, with Drayak at the top. After a long struggle, they got the ladder erect. Now, while Drayak dangled from its end, the pyre was directly in front of him. Burning torches were placed against the base of the structure. He supposed it would take some time for it to be fully alight. When that happened, the ladder would be tipped forward, delivering him into the heart of the conflagration.
Until it began to be clouded by smoke, billowing from the flames that were climbing the pyre’s sides, his view of the world below Ketaxos and the escarpment seemed more magnificent than ever. He heard the voice of the old priest, histrionically chanting something from one of the Church of Empyrean Shadows’ sacred texts, but this was gradually drowned out as the crackling, rasping and sparking of the flames became louder.
Drayak noticed how the air around him was full of flitting shapes and shards of high-pitched sound. He realised bats were swarming above the pyre and wondered if the Church’s claims were true, if its priests really could summon, command and communicate with the creatures… He turned his head towards the mountainside that rose over the flat ground. The bats were issuing out of the clefts high in its rock. Then he glimpsed something leave a cleft that looked much bigger than its normal-sized companions. After another moment, he felt air waft against his face as a pair of huge wings displaced it, carrying their owner past him.
He’d been told those giant bats lived only in the remotest parts of Rothyrdun… But this, he remembered, was a remote part of the kingdom. Evidently, Pyugar didn’t have to travel far when he needed a new bat-fur to wear.
Then the pyre-smoke swirled around the ladder’s top and he no longer saw anything below him – which meant the people down there couldn’t see him. He knew this was the time to act. The young woman who’d fallen on top of him had swiftly cut through the cords fastening his right wrist and placed the dagger in his hand. Then, her eyes still showing gratitude, she’d whispered, “Take it and go.”
Since then, he’d managed with his right hand to keep the dagger – his old dagger – pressed against the inside of the shaft. Nobody but the captain had seen it and she, on a sympathetic impulse, had chosen to ignore it. What could he do with it, except kill himself quickly and avoid a slow, agonising death amid the flames? Despite clutching the dagger, his hand had managed to maintain a tenuous grip on the shaft, so that it looked like both his hands were still tied.
All he had to do now was sink the dagger into his heart…
But he decided not to. His feet scrabbled under him until they found a lower rung they could perch themselves on. Then he reached across and cut the cord binding his left wrist, so that suddenly there was nothing holding him against the ladder. He sprang forward and crashed down against the pyre’s summit, not yet on fire. He clawed his way upwards. Branches and sticks, pieces of timber, wooden furniture, all cascaded away beneath him. Flames suddenly belched up the pyre’s side, past him, and flung storms of sparks high into the sky. This agitated the bats. Their sounds became shriller and they swooped down, deflected from their paths.
By now the whole mass of wood was shifting, perhaps in the process of toppling over. Parts of it broke away and fell. Momentarily, some of the smoke cleared below and through it he saw Pyugar. The priest had perceived that something was amiss, stopped chanting, and run across to the pyre’s side. He stared upwards, mouth agape, and then a section of burning timber tumbled down on him.
Still Drayak scrambled. He wondered why was doing this. Why all this effort, just the sake of surviving a few moments longer – ?
Something landed on the pyre above him, on the points of two clawed feet and two hooked thumbs that protruded from the midpoints of its wings. The wings were drawn in and for a moment the creature resembled a table draped in an overlarge tablecloth – though a table that had, jutting from its end, a head that looked as big and fearsome as a wolf’s. A few sparks gleamed amid the variegated colours of its fur.
Just before the giant bat recovered from its disorientation, hopped off the pyre and took flight again, Drayak lunged and grabbed hold of its feet. The bat flapped upwards while the pyre keeled sideways and disintegrated in a furore of flames, sparks, smoke and cacophonous noise. Then the energy the creature had expended in taking flight was overcome by the weight of Drayak hanging beneath it. It pirouetted and started to descend.
While the bat spun, Drayak caught a glimpse of everything to the east of the escarpment – jagged peaks, barren tracts of moorland, and dark, dense clumps of forestry, which formed the landscapes of Rothyrdun. From a dozen points across the terrain, thick, black twists of smoke ascended into the sky. Presumably, they carried the souls of those unfortunate enough to have been assigned the job of serving King Larros in the Upper Air.
The bat flapped madly but the battle it was fighting was a losing one. Drayak’s weight was remorselessly dragging it down. They descended from the mountainside, past Ketaxos and across the edge of the escarpment, and then down the escarpment’s vertiginous face. The air slewed around them and the world below the escarpment rushed up towards them – much too quickly, Drayak decided.
He dismissed all self-congratulatory thoughts about finally escaping the service of Larros the Slug-King and concentrated on his next task…
Remaining alive.
© February 2023, 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, Swords and Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3. and previously in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.