by Matthew Castleman
in Issue 157, February 2025
Evening sun flashes orange darts into my eyes, and my boot toe strikes a stone so solidly moored in the ground it could be the tip of Lucifer’s horn. That sends me, on the run from Flemish mercenaries, already bleeding from a pike graze to the hip, pinwheeling ass over teakettle over ass again and landing with the clank of armor and sword and pistols and stolen saintly relic on the hard, scrubby turf.
The sun dips and the world goes the color of iron and lavender. I slink my way from bush to knoll to copse, spending as much distance as I can in their feeble cover. My horse is safely in the stables of a friend who runs an inn near Copenhagen, recovering from a wolf bite. He’ll have to be warm and comfy for both of us tonight. I sit for a moment and take a deep breath. My battered body sees my moment and raises me hours.
Cold ground leeches life from me as the ink blue sky warns I won’t be in cover of darkness much longer. I unwind my cloak from around me and spend a grimacing minute working blood into my limbs. There’s just enough light to unwrap and re-dress my wound. Back on my feet, I spot the not-too-distant edge of a forest. Losing myself in the woods is my best hope, and I press on.
The scout is on me long after I should’ve heard him coming. A poor night’s shivering sleep and an empty belly will knock you farther down than you think. He tilts his lance and spurs straight at me. My backsword scrapes clumsily out, gripped in not quite awake fingers. The dark grey steel’s inlaid with a line of black stone I suspect is an ore refined from digested human souls. In any case, it keeps the blade from breaking. My sword flicks right as I step left, pushing his lance off target and clearing out for him to overshoot.
The energy of his charge expended, he drops his lance and draws a long saber, beautiful with a hefty curve, something he probably stole off a Polish casualty. I see the scowl on him – he doesn’t want to give up his mount, but his horse is tired and won’t be able to keep wheeling and charging. He dismounts, giving her a pat.
Wise choice. Without momentum, a horse mostly makes you a bigger, slow-turning target. A horse fighting a man at a standstill is like a man fighting a cat in a coffin – your size still matters, but it’s as much a hindrance as an advantage.
He feints low and cuts high with a twist reversing the cut’s direction. I’d been cautious with my guard, and a simple lift is enough to catch his cut. He has the momentum and knows to use it, whirling a second strike around his head before I can throw an attack of my own. I rely on my sense of distance and step back, and his blade cuts the air a handspan from my head. I rock on my back leg and step hard into an answering thrust.
He has to dedicate real power to parrying my heavier sword, stepping a little unsurely and backing out of distance. I let my sword hang, saving my arm. My point drags along the ground in my weariness.
The Flemish man says something in his people’s dialect of Dutch, which I think I catch some of. It’s like German hammered flat and rolled in pepper. I’m sure a Berliner would say similar things about the German I spoke growing up in Bern.
He’s trying to goad me into hasty attacks, but as he speaks he takes one more step back, and gives me an opening.
“Thanks,” I say, pulling one of my pistols. His grimy face bends as he realizes the mistake he made in backing out of sword range, and he rushes in. He almost gets me before my ebony wheellock with inlaid archaic Greek enchantments sparks, flashes and spits fire and smoke. The ball catches him in his sword shoulder, spinning him as he crashes to the ground at my feet.
He says something through pained teeth about my father’s profession and my mother’s lineage and my face. I smile and kick him in the head. Better a wounded man for his friends to stop and tend than a dead one they can worry about burying later.
His horse is having none of me. I reload my pistol with a sigh and set off for the forest on foot. Now, I can hear the others coming.
The sun seems not to want to rise, leaving us caught in the clinging dregs of night. A thin line of lighter blue glazed in yellow struggles to wrestle the indigo sky off its perch, but the gloom goes on. An eerie feeling’s in the air, like a hum of faint voices.
A shout punches the air and a shot cuts it apart. Dust bursts from the soil near me. I bolt, glancing over my shoulder. At least seven black shadows against the dim background, most mounted.
A wrong step sends me plummeting into a ditch, and it’s dark as midnight again. I lift my head and spit out bitter dirt. It’s not just a ditch, it’s a cave or maybe a sinkhole. I can barely see the gap I fell through. To my pursuers, it must’ve looked like I took a step and vanished.
I’ve lost too much time for climbing back out to be a safe idea. Luckily there’s a semicircular opening in the side of the cave. The faint light seeping in from the surface guides me a few steps, and then I’m scuffling across the floor, toes leading the way like scenting hounds.
There’s a sensation of quiet, old resonance here. It’s like someone struck the place with a giant mallet a thousand years ago and it never quite stopped ringing.
My reaching hands find a rough stone wall and follow it to an opening. I have a moment of stomach lurch when my foot drops, but it finds new purchase. I step down, send my left foot scouting again, find new lower ground, and repeat. Stairs.
I alight in a lower chamber and go on swimming in blackness until a patch of dull lavender appears. The glow’s coming through a small doorway, which is rounded at the top and starting to narrow again at the floor, like a cut-off oval.
The lavender room is tall and narrow, and smells like a garden. Great jars and amphorae line the walls. I still can’t see where the purplish light is coming from. It hangs in the room like it was exhaled by a ghost. There’s another doorway at the far side of the room. More stairs down, small and well cut.
The flowery scent is even more present here than above. The broad circular chamber is low-ceilinged, and cut into its walls are what look like seats and shelves. Rotting traces of wooden furniture, most too far gone to identify, are strewn throughout. It’s just light enough that I can make out a circle of shapes in the center of the room.
There are nine of them, sitting in a circle on the cold stone floor. Bodies, husks of centuries or more, clothing melted into filmy wisps that hang from dessicated skin and parched bone. I see no means of violence around them. No bowls or cups where poison might have been. For all the world it looks like they just sat here until they died.
And so we did.
It’s not a voice. The phrase assembles itself like a thought is having me instead of the other way around.
That is – we didn’t die, exactly. But as you can see, we’re not alive, exactly, either.
“You don’t say,” I whisper into the room, unsure of whom I should address. “Who are you?”
Quiet Sisters. This is our temple and our refuge, a place of contemplation. A place to sit.
I look from face to dried, skeletal face. There are strands of something suggesting that long ago the Sisters wore veils or masks. Now, the skin of their faces has hardened so much with time it’s hard to tell where there’s still skin and where there’s only skull.
Instead of more words, there’s a rush of imagery like nimble hands are hastily brushing picture after picture onto my eyes. Time moves backward. I watch the spark of this war snuff itself out as the delegates fly up off the cobblestones into the window of Prague Castle, and then the images get broader and quicker. Cities shrink and change, villages move, burn, starve, regrow. Charlemagne’s armies roll back, leaving patchworks of small kingdoms and tribes. The Romans gnaw at the edge of the Black Forest, advancing and retreating across the Rhine and grabbing and biting what they can before vanishing south.
It doesn’t stop there. Trees grow wilder, fields get smaller, wolves roam freer. Back before anyone had ever heard of Rome, tribes live off harsh land, trade with each other, raid when they feel bold. I can tell that time continues to recede, but it no longer means anything to me. Focus settles on a simple but impressive stone building, almost like a funeral mound, but all of solid stone blocks. I’m not in a cave at all. I’m in an edifice that time has buried.
And so we have sat.
“Why?”
Because it needed doing. Some needed to work the fields, some to hunt, some to fight, and some to sit. Over time, distinctions erode. Between nine and one, between body and earth, between life and death.
A sound echoes from back the way I came and I press myself up against a wall, trying to shrink from the purple glow. “While that’s all lovely for you, I haven’t been contemplating everything for ten thousand years. Life and death are still pretty different for me, and there’s a bunch of people coming to illustrate the distinction.”
This place has always been one of protection and aid. You may find it serves you in that way, Bastian Stahl. I don’t know why I feel a pang of surprise that they know my name, given… everything else.
I draw my sword. The stone inlay hums softly, like it’s found its way to a familiar place. I tip the brim of my landsknecht hat to the Sisters and retreat through a small door on the far side of the room. The dim purple illumination remains, helping me down a cramped narrow stair that winds until it hits a long corridor with doorways on both sides, its end out of sight.
Voices carry down the stairs from above, harsh and arrogant but with a spooked hush. I hasten down the corridor and take the first doorway on the right.
Another stone passage with eons-worn doorways diminishes into the distance until it melts into a twilit blur of shadows and stone. I walk an arbitrary distance, looking into doorways with my sword probing ahead. Every way goes on into more of the same.
I hear them moving behind me, muttering to each other in their cousin tongue. I pause, trying to assess if I’ve gone in circles or if this place really is as vast as the maze wants me to believe. Hearing closer steps, I set off again, pick a doorway and step through. Straight into a Flemish mercenary.
The fight has none of the propriety and elegance of my prior skirmish. We stumble into each other with a shocking suddenness that shouldn’t have been possible. I should’ve heard him around the corner or seen his leading foot – something. His bark of confused aggression makes my ears ring as he pulls a long knife. My sword’s past him, hanging uselessly in the air behind his back, and he locks a heavy grip on my right wrist to keep it there.
His knife comes up to plunge into my neck above my armor. I get his wrist in my left hand and we’re locked up, blade arms pinned in, snarling in each other’s faces like panicking dogs. I twist to get my right leg past his left and lever him over my hip, and he falls. As his back hits the floor I drop my knee straight onto his nose. The snap echoes down the hall and his hand lets go of my sword arm.
His head lolls woozily and he makes no attempt to get up. I disarm him, toss his weapons through a random doorway and toss myself down the next one.
Now I hear them calling for each other. They’ve gotten themselves separated. The purple glow has taken on a smoky texture, though that may be my brain struggling to find details or landmarks. The maddening thing is, the walls and floor aren’t perfect and uniform; there are chips, scratches, and other small differences. But they aren’t helping me find my way. I’ll memorize all the minute hairline cracks in the stone around a doorway, step through and explore the next passage, then come back and they’ll be different.
The shouting sounds like it’s coming from every direction now. Pulling a pistol, I sit down and lean against a wall. I take the last sips of stale, souring water from my waterskin and close my eyes to think.
Where are you going?
The Sisters’ words float up from the darkness under my mind like old bones peeking up from a bog.
“I don’t know, do I?” I whisper.
That is why you’re lost.
“I know the definition of ‘lost,’ thanks.” The wound in my hip starts pulsing again. “You haven’t got a map you could run down here, do you?”
We each had our turn in the labyrinth. You will make your way.
I lean my head against the stone. I regard the pocked ceiling and swish around the things I’ve just been told. Then I realize that the pulse I feel isn’t my wound. It’s coming from the pouch on my belt with my stolen goods.
All of this fuss is over a very small box.
I fetch out the reliquary, a box of ebony and mother-of-pearl with gold furnishings. Sliding open the top reveals index fingerbones, supposedly of a recently canonized minor saint. A girl, it’s said, who was executed by Protestant troops for leading hidden Catholic practices for her community.
The bones are twitching. I’m struck with the powerful sense that they want to be taken somewhere. Or I’m wounded, exhausted and dehydrated and absolutely losing my mind. Can’t say it makes any functional difference now.
A mercenary springs through a doorway like a horse kicked him, and his scarred, bearded face breaks into sneering at the sight of me. He raises his pistol. Slumped against the wall, I can only do the same. We take hasty aim. I gasp in a quick breath and grit my teeth.
Two black powder charges crack, two blazing white flashes overlap, two plumes of biting smoke burst into already stifling air. An intense concussive pain hammers my chest. My vision swims with the afterimage of the flash, and it feels like someone’s chiseling a bas-relief into both eardrums.
My eyes stop swimming in starlight as the smoke thins out, and I see the man’s form crumpled against the doorway he came from, shot through the heart. I pat the floor around my legs and find the flattened pistol ball that struck me just as dead-on, if not nearly as dead. I brush my steel cuirass’s deep green enameling, in which the ball hasn’t even left a mark.
Maybe it’s my deductive power or maybe I’m just intensely focused by being shot, but a few things have come together and clicked. The Sisters’ saying that I will make my way, not find it. The little bones, stirring like they’ve got an appointment to meet. The fact that twice now, someone who’s looking for me has blundered directly into me in spite of being as lost as I am.
I take doorways without regard for their position or appearance, but with the strong intention that I need to move deeper into the temple to keep a step ahead of my pursuers. After crossing some dozen or so thresholds, I step heavily at an unexpected drop in the floor, and arrive in a low-ceilinged catacomb. Hundreds of niches are carved into the walls, and an ancient skull stares back from each one of them.
There’s a sourceless light in here also, a weak grey glow like a guttering candle hidden in fog. Even with no clear source, it still seems to cast shadows, elongating the skulls’ eye sockets and the gaps where their grim smiles have lost teeth.
I walk on, the skulls stare, and every minute or so the relic gives me another little twitch. It takes a while for me to notice that the ceiling is creeping lower and the walls narrower. Faint steps echo behind me; at least some of them have made it through. I try to pick up the pace, but the cold death of the catacomb pulls at me. I feel a deep ache like my own bones have had enough of carrying me around and wouldn’t mind a repose in a stony nook themselves.
My head’s ducking low, even with my knees bent. There are niches in the floor now, rows and rows of arm bones, leg bones, spines. Another few dozen yards and I’m crawling. Each time I put down my hand it sends up a flurry of dry yellow-white dust. With every breath I inhale a talcy mist that used to be people.
The space narrows and the bones claw at me, hooking on my belt and sleeves, skittering off my armor, threatening my eyes. A low, long shushing sound sweeps through the room, like the last breaths of all the dead are trapped down here.
Somewhere behind me, one of the mercenaries snaps. The charnel trawl and suffocating tightness overwhelm his resolve, and he starts to make sounds like a blacksmith’s bellows being kicked. Scuffles and shouts from the others respond, and the sounds dissolve together into a mess.
It’s only when I hear that music of failing nerves that I realize how close I am to the same state. Even as I think about it I feel that thread start to unwind, until a gentle rhythm shakes me. I put my hand on the reliquary. The finger bone’s moving again. It taps out a soft but persistent drumbeat, steady and easy. I tie my breathing to it, in, two, out, four, in, two, out, four. The fog of horror recedes a little.
Eyes closed, I push my way through centuries of the dead, thinking back to what the Sisters said about breaking down divisions. If the way out of the maze was conscious intention, maybe the way out of this catacomb is the stubborn, dumb refusal to stop moving forward.
I don’t know how much longer I’m in that stifling space, but the transition out of it is as abrupt as a foal’s birth. My arms and legs splay into sudden emptiness and I spill to a much lower floor. My hat’s steel undercap saves me as my head clangs against the floor like a bell cut from its ropes.
I think this part really was deep underground originally, a cave barely hewn into a slightly more regular shape. In spite of its depth, it feels like standing in a high mountain pass. Wind rushes through, a strong and steady enough wind that I have trouble just getting to my feet.
I struggle to make sense of the apparent fact that here, in the deepest part of the temple, I can see a hint of what looks like new-risen sunlight. I walk forward, straining against the wind.
A sharp burst of almost-familiar words pushes through the air. I plant a foot and put my back to the cavern gale. The man’s easily fifty, built like a walnut tree, scars with stories to tell. The leader, at a glance. He draws a massive old wheellock pistol and I realize I never reloaded the one I fired in the maze. Its mate is the only shot I’m going to get. I draw it, feeling my arm muscles quake.
Our shots are muffled into hoarse whumps by the wind. My shot hits his steel cuirass square in the chest, but leaves only a wide dent. His shot either missed or went straight through me and the shock hasn’t set in yet. I’ll just keep going and see if I suddenly fall down dead.
The smoke from both shots streams across his oncoming form, giving him the look of an apparition conjured from the mist, death’s face in battlefield haze. He draws a long Turkish saber and drops his spent pistol, advancing on me faster than I can retreat.
Our swords throw blue sparks into the wind. His mass lets him put punishing power behind even quick cuts. I parry with imperfect form and it sends a shock through my wrist that feels nearly bonebreaking. He’s using me as a windbreak, moving nimbly in my slipstream. Every block and cut I throw saps me more than his attacks do him.
I launch a quick cut from the elbow at his head. He whips up a hanging guard, and the clash throws up more sparks and a wisp of smoke. The wind blows the sparks straight at his eyes. His flinch throws him off tempo just enough that I can make a lunge that ends with our places exchanged; it’s his back taking the relentless gale now, serving as a precious shelter for me.
I press the attack even though my arm feels ready to detach itself and go find a corner to pass out in. The fury of the fight is leaving chips in his blade as mine, augmented with the weird stone, remains even-edged. He stumbles as his back heel strikes a low ledge, but recovers quickly and steps up onto a raised stone dais. I follow and our blades bind and twist, each struggling to gain the lee. We end up side-on to the wind, seemingly even at first. But it’s blowing into my left side – my right arm is downwind, being constantly pushed off target, while his is being helped straight into me.
My strength is almost gone. His saber lashes around and around, each strike carving bits from what I can put into the next defense. At last my guard falters under a heavy strike and his blade slashes my left arm. I stagger back and he lets me, happy to rest for a moment while the ability to fight literally flows out of me. I collapse to one knee and press a bloody palm into the dais.
The stone beneath my hand glows amber. He doesn’t seem to notice, and advances on me to deliver his coup de grace. As his saber arcs down, the wind dies. His body, braced against something no longer there, is thrown off balance and his cut strikes the floor next to me. I hardly have to lift my weapon to put it through the base of his throat.
He lets go of his sword and sinks to an oddly serene sitting position, giving me a nod of respect. With a last burst of iron strength he grabs my hand, opens it, and puts something from his belt into it. It’s a sealed letter, probably one he wrote home to his family for exactly this eventuality. He looks into my eyes. I nod, he nods, he dies.
The dull glow at my feet somehow brings me to understand that the dais we found ourselves on is an altar. I gave it my blood, and my sacrifice stopped the gale.
It’s bright enough for me to see the statues around the edge of the chamber. Some look human, others less so, all are carved in a flowing, abstract style that makes them seem alive. They’re deeply beautiful.
The finger twitches again, leading me to a long shelf of skeletons and partial skeletons with pottery, jewelry and other grave goods arrayed around them. A spot for the honored dead.
This is where it will be at peace. I don’t know how it’s telling me these things, but I find a vacant spot, and I lay the finger bones to rest. I have a strong feeling it wasn’t really Catholicism that this girl was executed for practicing.
A long tunnel slopes up and up until it deposits me out of a cave entrance I can barely squeeze through, into the forest. Sunlight filters through the trees. I collapse under one and tend to my arm with my last clean bandage.
You passed the ordeals, Bastian Stahl. Rightfully, you may claim a place in our order.
“I’ll consider it,” I say to the air, attracting the curious attention of a scavenging sparrow. “Is there something you need? Something I can bring you?
All we need is to sit. You should try it.
“Maybe I will, another time. Fare you well – or I guess I’m the one doing the faring. Sit well.”
Be seeing you.
I catch food in the woods. I nurse my wounds. I find a more agreeable horse from those they tied up and return to the world I know. Can’t escape the feeling I’ll be back here someday. But that day can tend to itself.
© February 2025, Matthew Castleman
Matthew Castleman has had stories published in Old Moon Quarterly, Andromeda Spaceways, Daily Science Fiction, and elsewhere. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.
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