by Rab Foster
in Issue 138, July 2023
The man carried the stench of magic.
Had it been a real stench, Shathsprey wouldn’t have smelt it. That was the one benefit of the polar temperatures and the freezing wind and snow assailing the city. They neutralised its rancid odours. Even the reek of the underground river that flowed through these catacombs had disappeared, while ice formed and thickened along its sides, leaving just a thread of sewage oozing at its centre.
But this metaphorical stench came from the man’s movements. The catacombs had the reputation of being one of the most dangerous places in the city, yet the man looked both unarmed and unafraid. The only thing he possessed that might have acted as a weapon was the strange, metal staff he walked with – and from how it announced his presence with its clinking noises against the flagstones, it was probably more a liability than an asset. Nonetheless, he moved insouciantly within the bubble of light from the lantern he held in his other hand. He was confident his magic protected him.
As he approached, Shathsprey observed too his breeches and frockcoat, and his lack of an overcoat or cloak. No ordinary man could be out in tonight’s elements and move comfortably dressed only in those.
Shathsprey rested his head against the wall behind him and sighed. During his travels, he’d met many practitioners of magic. A few had been good people. Most had been rotten.
His two companions huddled beside him, under the blankets they’d bought with the money obtained from pawning their swords. They paid the approaching figure no attention. Keeshan was busy tending to Holmeer, who’d been injured in battle three weeks earlier. He was worst-affected by the cold and too weak to notice anything. Now Keeshan announced, “We can’t stay here another night, Shathsprey. He won’t survive until morning.”
Shathsprey hoped the man would walk past. But hearing Keeshan’s voice, he paused, then came to their section of wall and shone the lantern on them. “Soldiers?” he inquired. “Mercenaries? Perhaps from the battle that happened recently across the border? Perhaps from the losing side of it?”
In the lantern-light, Shathsprey noted how, for some reason, the man’s staff was really two thin, iron poles, tied together at the middle and at their ends. He retorted, “We might have lost that battle, but we inflicted enough damage on the Soorian Fourth Army for them to lie low and lick their wounds for a while. If we’d surrendered sooner, they might have been emboldened. Emboldened enough to cross the border into this neutral kingdom of yours and make a prize of this fine city here.”
The man sneered. He swung around with his arms outstretched, so that his lantern briefly illuminated the sewer and the walls on either side of it, where dozens more vagrants crouched and shivered. “Well, on behalf of this fine city… I thank you.”
Keeshan spoke up. “Our friend here’s in trouble. He can’t take these conditions much longer. Will you help? A couple of coins would suffice, so we can get him into an inn. He doesn’t need a room, just a space beside a fire for a few hours so he gets some warmth into him.”
The man drew a cloth bag out of his frockcoat. From within it came a scrape of silver. “I can help you with more than a couple of coins,” he replied. “But first…”
Shathsprey anticipated him. “First, you want us to do something for you.”
“Precisely. I need two people to carry out a task tonight.”
Keeshan said, “We’re not leaving our friend.”
The man freed three coins from the bag and dropped them into Keeshan’s hands. “That’s enough to secure somewhere warm for him. You have an hour. Meet me in the Hog-Market at the end of the night’s second quarter.” He shook the bag, jangling the many coins remaining in it. “Get this task done and the rest is yours too.”
He started to walk away, but Shathsprey shouted, “Wait! What do we call you?”
The man turned and glowered back. It pleased Shathsprey that he’d lost some of his composure.
“I said, what do we call you?” He knew such people were reluctant to divulge their names. They feared that rivals might use their names in spells directed against them.
The man spat it at him: “Cystos.”
On that note of ill-humour, Cystos departed. The clinking of the iron poles faded. His circle of lantern-light dwindled to a dot and then, as he ascended some steps to the street, winked out altogether. Behind in the darkness, Shathsprey and Keeshan clambered up, then wrestled Holmeer onto his feet too.
“Well,” she said, “this is a sudden turn in our fortunes.”
Shathsprey wondered… A turn which way? From bad to good, or from bad to worse?
Keeshan emerged from the West Gate Inn and joined Shathsprey, who sheltered in the alleyway by its side wall. “I got Holmeer a place by the hearth in the main room and put the blankets over him.” She held up a bottle. “Seeing as the price was slightly less than Cystos’s coins were worth, I persuaded the landlord to throw in this.”
“I heard an army surgeon say liquor doesn’t help against the cold. It warms the throat, but not the body.”
“Then you won’t object to me drinking all of it.” She uncorked the bottle and took a swig.
“Well…” Shathsprey took the bottle and enjoyed a swig himself. “Better a warm throat than nothing warm at all.”
They made their way towards the city-square known as the Hog-Market. Around them, the wind flung shards of ice out of the night-sky and birled the already-fallen snow, making long, white tendrils of it rise and lash across the streets.
Purged by the wintry storm, the Hog-Market no longer reeked of pigs. The only trace of the creatures was the frozen, white-crusted pig-dung crackling under their boots while they passed through a maze of empty pens. Cystos was waiting at its far end. He’d brought a handcart with him and parked it by the entrance to a vennel, which was filled with steep, stone steps. From what they’d learnt of the city’s geography, they guessed the vennel rose towards the High Street.
Cystos scrutinised them. “No swords?”
“Only small weapons,” said Keeshan. “Our swords are with a pawnbroker.”
“Yet tonight I found you hunkered among the vagrants in the catacombs.”
“We pawned them a week ago. During weather like this, in a city like this, such money doesn’t last long.”
As well as Cystos’s lantern and the tied-together pair of iron poles, the handcart contained two packs. He instructed them to carry the packs. Then he took the lantern and the poles, which he again used like a staff, and led them up the vennel. Ascending behind him, listening to the poles’ bottom ends clinking against each step, Shathsprey noticed how he left no footprints in the snow.
The stench of magic indeed…
At the uppermost steps, Cystos gestured for them to hold back and press against one of the walls. Still unperturbed by the cold, he removed his frockcoat and wrapped the lantern in it to smother its light. A minute passed. Then, on the High Street, the glow of another lantern appeared and a member of the city’s guard trudged by.
Once the guard had gone, Cystos unwrapped the lantern and said, “I’ve watched their patrols at this time of night. I calculate we have twelve minutes before the next one appears.”
They emerged from the vennel into the giant corridor of the High Street – its floor a band of cobbles and flagstones carpeted with snow, its walls two towering rows of facades and edifices, spires and turrets, five and six-storeyed townhouses. Shathsprey wanted to ask about ordinary citizens who might also be on the street at this late hour, but then he realised which part of it they were on. Folk avoided this part after dark for superstitious reasons. Here, the street widened into a square. On the opposite side of it stood a tall, windowless wall, dotted with sculptures that protruded through a fleece of white-glazed ivy. Three large braces were mounted near the wall’s top, and from the end of each brace hung a human-shaped cage.
All three were occupied.
Cystos produced a key. “I stole this from the official responsible for gibbeting the city’s executed criminals. I need one of you to climb up to that middle brace, crawl along it, unlock the cage-door, and tip out what’s inside. You won’t have time to do all that before the next guard appears, but make sure you’ve climbed high enough to be out of sight.”
The wind rampaged along the street, spitting ice. “Amid this?” Shathsprey demanded.
“I never promised an easy assignment. Incidentally, don’t think about robbing me. I no longer have the coins on me. You’ll receive them when the job’s done.”
Keeshan turned to Shathsprey and handed him the liquor-bottle from the inn. “I’m lighter than you. I can get up there faster. Stay here and do whatever he needs you to do.” Then she took Cystos’s key, ran to the base of the wall, found fingerholds and toeholds among the frozen ivy and the old, rutted stonework behind it, and started climbing.
Cystos set down the lantern directly under the middle cage and, from one of the packs, removed a half-dozen candleholders. Each bore a stub of wax and had a thick, heavy base to stop it blowing over in the wind. These he arranged in a wide circle around the lantern. Watching him, Shathsprey laughed. “This doesn’t surprise me. What do you require the corpse for? To divine the future in some grisly way? To act as an emissary with the Land of the Dead? To have its rotted flesh fuel some infernal lamp that lets you, but nobody else, see in the dark?”
Cystos indicated the second pack. “You’ll find bags of salt in that. Open them and use the salt to draw two equilateral triangles across the ground.” He pointed to three of the candles. “The first triangle should touch those three with its corners. The second triangle, the other three.”
Then he untied the two iron poles and held them aloft, one in each hand. He began to utter a chant that consisted of low, guttural sounds, the words of some arcane, possibly non-human language.
But Shathsprey interrupted him. “Why not use your powers to fly up there and set the fellow free?”
Cystos glowered at him again. “Don’t be stupid.”
He resumed his chant.
Keeshan scrabbled up the ivy until she reached a sculpture just below the middle brace. In a ghoulish representation of justice, the sculpture depicted a skeleton holding a noose and an executioner’s axe. Frosted onto its surfaces were feathers left by the crows that assembled there during more temperate weather and picked at the gibbeted corpses. She rested by it for a minute, using it as shelter against the wind. Her body was numb, which made her wish she’d brought the liquor with her
“Right,” she said finally. “It’s time to find out if it supports my weight.”
She wrestled herself up onto the brace and began to inch along it towards the grotesque thing dangling at its end. The brace seemed to stay firm beneath her. If it groaned in protest, the noise was drowned by the storm.
Despite being scourged by the wind and its hurtling pieces of ice, Keeshan reached the brace’s end. The cage was right under her but thanks to the cold she smelt nothing of its occupant. Then, from the distant ground, she heard the voices of her companions in an urgent exchange. Immediately afterwards, something smothered their lantern-light. She lay as still as she could on the brace and waited. Soon she spotted a new light floating along the street – presumably one belonging to the next guard whose rounds took him across the square with the gibbets.
That guard was almost below her when a voice whispered up at her: “Cystos plans to kill you.”
The shock made her fall off the brace.
Shielding the bags with his body and holding them low so the wind didn’t snatch away their contents, Shathsprey had etched out the shape of one triangle. The salt was camouflaged amid the snow’s whiteness but Cystos continued to chant, seemingly satisfied with the invisible lines it’d drawn. Shathsprey reached into the pack for another bag – and shuddered. His fingers had touched something hairy and cold at the pack’s bottom.
Whatever else was in the pack wasn’t his business, he thought. He tried to focus only on Cystos’s payment, the bag of coins, at the end of the job. He removed his fingers from the hairy thing and wrestled out a new bag of salt.
He drew a second triangle, on top of but inverse to the first. As he completed that, he noticed a light on the street, far off but drawing closer. “Guard!” he shouted at Cystos.
The chant ceased. “Gather up the candles,” was the terse reply, “and return them to the pack.” Cystos bundled up the lantern in the frockcoat again and lifted the other pack, and they toted the baggage back into the vennel.
From there, they watched the guard cross the square. He was halfway across it when one of the cages overhead suddenly clanked and creaked. The guard halted and raised his lantern, hoping the upper fringes of its light would show him what was happening. Evidently, he saw something in the wintry storm above, for he instinctively grasped at the sword-hilt by his waist.
A moment later, Shathsprey charged out of the vennel, crashed into the guard from behind, and knocked him over. Shathsprey went down too and, tangled together, they rolled across the snow.
As she fell, Keeshan had struck the top of the cage and managed to catch hold of it, which sent it swinging madly on its brace. She lost her grip and fell further, but with a desperate lunge grabbed one of the long bars running down the cage’s side. The bar seemed to loosen and shift. She clawed at the neighbouring bars and her hands found two firmer ones. She got her feet onto the edge of the cage’s floor. Clinging there, straddling the outside of the cage, she waited for it to become still.
On the other side of the bars, a few inches from her face, a head lolled from side to side with the cage’s pendulum-like movements. She was thankful that the darkness concealed most of it. She merely discerned a profile with a sunken face and domed top, out of which things protruded – remaining scrags of hair and peeling scraps of skin and flesh.
From inside the cage, the whispering voice explained: “My name is Azmyre. Have you heard of me?”
Keeshan forced herself to speak. “I haven’t.”
“You’re unacquainted with magic, then. A half-year ago, Cystos summoned me from the Sixth Level and tricked me into entering this vessel. He left me stranded inside it while its original soul still lived. That soul didn’t react well to my arrival. It went insane, murderously so. It butchered several of its fellows before the city guard captured it and the authorities condemned and executed it.
“Being in this vessel during the moment of its death was agony for me. The experience almost annihilated me. For a long time after the execution, I remember nothing. But later, when I regained my senses, I discovered the vessel’s remains had been displayed up here, with me still trapped inside. I’ve weakened further while the flesh imprisoning me has corrupted and crumbled. All part of Cystos’s plan, of course. Tonight, he reckons I’m feeble enough for the next part of his project.”
“What’s that?”
“Transferring me to a second vessel, one even more primitive than this. One in which I’ll be forced to obey his commands, so I become his familiar, his slave. Undoubtedly, his first command will be that I destroy the witnesses to the project – you and your partner.” By now the cage had stopped swinging. “So, you have to help me thwart him.”
“Why should I trust a demon?”
The voice sneered. “In your situation now, you don’t have the luxury of trust. Listen. First, do as Cystos instructed. Unlock this cage’s door and deliver me to him. Then, find me a piece of iron. Cystos uses iron as the medium for channelling his power. But if I can divert that power…”
Keeshan remembered how at least one of the cage’s bars was loose.
Shathsprey scrambled on top of the guard and subdued him by pressing a dagger-blade against his throat. Then he heard a yell: “Kill him!” He looked sideways. Cystos had followed him out of the vennel, had uncovered the lantern, and was putting the candles back in their positions. The heavy candleholders had left clear marks in the snow.
Again, he urged Shathsprey, “Kill him!”
Shathsprey had no intention of killing the guard, since he was an innocent party. But just then the guard took advantage of his distraction, managed to knock the dagger from his hand, lurched up and clamped his own hands around Shathsprey’s throat. They rolled again and this time the guard arrived on top. His hands still gripped Shathsprey’s windpipe.
The end of an iron pole was thrust against the guard’s head, and he screamed and pitched over. Shathsprey struggled free of him, for the first time tonight smelling something – the burning of hair, skin, bone. Like the petals of a grotesque flower, thin, blue flames issued out of a hole in the back of the guard’s head and fluttered in the wind.
Shathsprey raged, “That was unnecessary!”
Cystos poked the pole into Shathsprey’s left shoulder. A hideous, fiery pain convulsed him. He twisted over onto his belly and retched into the snow, though he’d eaten little during the past few days and correspondingly little came out of him. When he regained control of himself, he realised the pole’s end hovered an inch from his face. However, it retreated and Cystos snarled, “You’ll pay for your insolence later. At this moment I need my strength for something else.” He hurried back to the candles.
Still wracked with pain, Shathsprey started crawling towards where his dagger lay in the snow. He watched Cystos at the same time. The man lit a taper in the lantern-flame and used it to ignite the wicks of the six candles. The wind made the new flames slant, but failed to blow them out. After that, Cystos pulled from a pack a small, furry carcass – a monkey’s – which he dumped between the candles, inside the triangles of salt. He stood back, raised the poles, and started chanting again.
A metal door scraped open above him. Something plummeted down and struck the ground beside the monkey, the snow muffling the sound of its impact. Having retrieved the dagger, Shathsprey dragged himself towards the site of the ritual. The fallen thing, he saw, was the gibbeted corpse. Cystos touched it and the dead monkey with the poles and his chant grew louder. A blue, crackling light seemed to envelop both bodies, and flow up the poles, and encase his body too.
Something else dropped from the cage. It too made no sound as it landed in the snow, but Shathsprey was close enough to identify the new object as a length of metal, surely a bar from the cage.
At the corpse’s side, a black, shrivelled hand twitched, then groped towards the bar. It clutched an end of it and lifted it off the ground. Then the hand turned, so that the bar swung through the air until its upper end collided with Cystos’s neck.
The moment the bar touched Cystos, his face contorted within the blue light and his chant gave way to a scream. His body juddered while the bar remained at his neck. His hand that held the pole against the corpse snapped open and dropped it. That left him holding just one pole, which touched the monkey. The blue light intensified until Cystos was no longer discernible inside it…
With a roar, the light surged up out of the square and vanished. Cystos staggered and dropped the other pole. The cage-bar also fell, its end still clasped in the now-inanimate hand of the corpse.
Shathsprey became aware of Keeshan shouting above them: “Damn it! I can’t… I can’t hold on!” Her words turned into a cry and she plunged out of the darkness too.
Shathsprey echoed her cry. He wailed wretchedly on the ground: “Keeshan!”
Cystos pointed and for a moment, a crucial moment, Keeshan’s body froze in the air. Then she fell the rest of the way, which was only a few feet, and thumped into the snow.
In a new voice, Cystos spoke. This voice was deep, penetrating, and unhuman. “I understand you not trusting me. However, since you aided me, I decided not to let you die.”
Keeshan clambered up. For a minute she swayed unsteadily. When most of her balance had returned, she stumbled across to Shathsprey and helped him up too. He moaned as she put a hand on his injured shoulder and she couldn’t help muttering, “You sound like an old man.”
With his new voice, Cystos continued: “Nonetheless, the pair of you had better leave this city tomorrow. I don’t like the idea of people walking its streets who know my true identity.”
They stared at the man’s face. It resembled the face that’d been there before. Yet because of a strange new gleam in its eyes, and an adjustment of its features that formed a strange new expression, it seemed to belong to a different being.
Keeshan demanded, “What about tonight’s payment?”
“A good point.” He stared down at the monkey lying beside the corpse. “You! What about it? What of your associates’ payment?”
Though Shathsprey had believed the monkey was dead, it stirred now. Cystos, or whatever was wearing Cystos’s body, scooped the monkey off the ground and held it close. He did this without gentleness or affection. He had the air of a sadistic child, one who’d enjoy breaking a toy as much as playing with it. “Answer the question,” he said, half-mockingly, half-threateningly. “My servant, my familiar… Cystos!”
The monkey looked towards them. Shathsprey suddenly felt he needed fortification, fumbled the liquor-bottle out of a pocket and swigged from it. He passed the liquor to Keeshan, who gratefully partook of it too.
“The bag of coins is down in the Hog-Market, strapped to the underside of the handcart,” said the animal in a weak but recognisable voice. Though its face was a monkey’s one, it reminded them of a human face they’d known recently.
It also gave off a stench that was perceptible despite the cold – a stench of terror.
©July 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.