by Mario Caric
in Issue 108, January 2021
The blizzard waned. The howls of the winds toned down to undulating whistles. Massive snowflakes kept hitting at a sharp angle, further fattening the tall pine trees. Although night reigned for the past three months, the brightness of the snow still refused to give the last word to the dark.
A black figure trudged through the endless white. The thick plumage of the terror bird he wore provided excellent protection; the feathers had a unique quality of maintaining warmth during the cold and creating a cooling effect in warm periods. The feather mantle gave him a constant hunch, like a vulture of sorts. And while most of his body remained unfazed by the dreadful conditions, the same could not be said about his face. The sharp wind cut through his skin. Icicles formed on his long, raven-black hair and matching beard.
For two days Glain had braved the treacherous Winterwood forest and the never-ending series of snowstorms. He slept an hour for every five or six hours of walk. He wanted to get away as far as possible. But not because of the weather.
The image of Syvanna wrapped in a frosted shroud came often. Each time his haunting eyes tried to blink the memory away served only to sharpen the picture. He had done her hair the way she had liked; straight with an even number of cascading locks on the sides. He had chosen her favorite deerskin dress. Folded her hands before laying her in the frozen pit behind the cabin. She looked serene. Free.
Glain grunted. Forced the thoughts away. He knew they would come back, stronger than before, but he so longed a respite.
The thin white dress fluttered along with the ashen blonde hair a hundred yards ahead. The blizzard, although weak, masked most of her features. She gazed at him between two trees.
Glain blinked again. The woman remained still for a moment, as though making sure he registered her presence, then twirled and disappeared deeper into the woods.
He sprinted after her. Fell through the snow. Clawed his way out. Kept going.
When he reached the place where she had been standing, Glain saw no tracks on the ground. The dress swooshed fifty yards ahead. He rushed on, negotiating the thick tree trunks. No matter how much he tried to catch up to her, the woman seemed to maintain the same distance; she glided through the forest with a staggering familiarity of the terrain. Glain thought he glimpsed her bare feet before she made a sharp turn at a gargantuan snag and was lost anew. He pushed himself as fast as he could toward the dead tree hulk.
The shrills Glain heard spilled across the narrow clearing. He first assumed they belonged to the woman, but there were too many at once. The shy moonlight that somehow squeezed between the looming clouds soon gave a clearer—and more dreadful—sight.
A dozen small, apish creatures screamed in terrible unison as they swarmed their prey—a man dressed in a scarlet uniform overlaid with light armor and a heavy bearskin cloak. A helmet obstructed the view of his face. He fought back with uncoordinated zeal, waving the two-handed sword with little strategy or effect. Glain could discern a crumple of bones strewn about the man’s feet.
The shrunken gray things moved on all fours, even though their front extremities were arms. After getting a better look, Glain realized their shape did not, in truth, correspond to any ape. If anything, they looked closer to human children of assorted ages, with large bulbous heads set upon fragile frames. The protruding ridges of their spines coiled left and right as they snapped at the victim. Their shrieks were those of scared or starving younglings. They jumped and scratched and bit the soldier. Two clutched onto his shoulder and the small of his back. One sank its teeth in his neck. The man’s own growls drowned in the sea of incessant wails.
Glain recollected the crooked fingers of the shaman pressing hard against his cheekbones. The acrid breath on his young face, beady eyes beneath a crown of crow feathers and twigs surveying his own spectral ones. “He stares into the other side,” the old man had said to the Council of Elders, but kept his concentration on Glain. “He will summon the horrors to us.”
The soldier’s cry stirred him from his reverie. Without losing another moment, Glain slid down the gentle slope, drew his own sword, and raced toward the center of the glade. The pristine surface of the lean, somewhat curved, single-edged blade glistened in the pale moonlight and the sparkling crystals of the snow.
Alerted by the vibrations Glain’s stomps through the crisp blanket covering the ground, one monster turned its wobbling skull around. Empty eye sockets stood amid the shriveled, long dead skin and gaped at the stranger. The creature let out a bellow of surprise between rows of deciduous and permanent teeth. There was no more doubt about it; it was a living corpse of a child.
“He’s a child!” came the father’s begging from the memory. “Please, don’t do this!” he continued to plead with the shaman and the Elders who stood before Glain. It was the last time Glain had seen the settlement.
The blade’s first blow cut a skeleton in two. A puff of smoke gushed out instead of blood. The next sent the round head of another flying. Glain spun on the ball of his heel, slashed three more with a single swift action. The dismembered bodies twitched and came to a halt.
The rest of the ghouls backed off from the death-dealing newcomer who used the opening to get to the man in scarlet. He drove the blade into the imp that grasped on the victim’s neck. The sword slid inside the creature’s mouth and split the skull in two. Glain punched the thing that still hung onto the man’s back. It flew away and landed in a snowdrift. Invigorated by the unexpected but welcomed aid, the soldier finally gripped his weapon the proper way.
The ground was a mess of red stains and shattered bone, juxtaposed to abstract crumples of white.
The six surviving skeletons created a tight circle around the men. So light were they that the layer of snow beneath them remained almost untouched. Baring their deformed jaws, they snarled their protests, yet dared not make the first move. They seemed to weigh their options.
Glain had no intention to wait. He inched his foot forward. The ghouls screeched in frustration. He did it again. The soldier followed suit. The monsters jerked, yowled, and spread out, jumping over the slope and scuttling away.
The shrills faded out.
The men’s stares met.
“Thank you,” uttered the soldier with effort. He spoke in a dialect Glain recognized to be close to Standard Aladrian. Syvanna had taught him that, among other things.
“I thought I was done for.”
Glain nodded. They sheathed their blades. It was time to practice his own Aladrian.
“You hurt?”
The man took notice of the tatter on his neckline. The scarlet of his blood was indistinguishable from that of the robes. He withdrew his hand, showed it. “A graze, thankfully.” His eyes seemed peaceful, with no hint of fear. Surprising, given the ordeal he had just been through. Thick, kempt mustache—a touch of a twirl on their tips—rose and fell in rhythm with his breaths.
The Aladrian took off the helmet, released a shoulder-long hair. He couldn’t have been over forty and was in good shape. He studied his savior with dedication. Inspected the lankiness of Glain’s frame; the signature weapon of a specific group of people, the feathered mantle; the hard facial lines obscured by the mane and the beard that fused with the dark garments; the aquiline nose that split the unavoidable phantom eyes.
“You’re of the Crow People,” decided the soldier, surprised by his own revelation.
Memories of the cabin came back. The haphazard way Glain had cobbled up the first part of the dwelling, alone, in the early days of the Day Months, when the cold sun rose from its long slumber and spared some of its bleak rays to the vast tundra.
The strong hand of his father resting on his own in stoic comfort. The swings of his hammer as he finished the second part of the house for Glain. His screams when the tribesmen had found him and dragged him away. The loneliness that had stretched for years afterward.
Before Syvanna.
“But the Frozen Lakes are way up—”
“No, I’m not,” rasped Glain and turned away. The soldier got the message.
“I’m Kiorim.”
“Glain.”
The ghostlike eyes searched the area. There was no fluttering of the white dress, nor the hobbling of gray shapes in the vicinity.
“What were those creatures?”
“Ghouls,” spoke Glain as he scanned the miniature bodies about them. “Child ones.”
“It’s the war,” Kiorim shook his head in honest regret. “Keeps sucking up resources and starving people to death on all sides.” He contemplated his armor. Apart from being smeared by spots of his blood here and there, the cuirass was full of dents. “Draws everyone in. And never ends.” Kiorim looked back at Glain, tried to start a conversation. “I fell three of them, but if you hadn’t shown up—”
“Have you seen a woman with them?” Glain cut him off.
“A woman?”
“Or before you encountered them,” he added.
The man’s face furrowed. “No, no woman. They ambushed me as I was passing through. Less than five minutes before you arrived.” He paused. “You saw a woman?”
“I don’t know,” said Glain. Weariness began to weigh down on him. “Where’re you headed?”
Kiorim pointed to his left. “East. About two days’ walk from here.” He looked up at the patches of the Night Months’ sky. “Not that it matters in this time of year. I’m going home to my wife. I’m on leave.”
Glain recalled Syvanna in front of the cabin. It had been amid another season of Day Months. She had had her arms wrapped around herself. Her lips had shriveled into a thin slit, yet the chatter of teeth was still audible. Frost had turned her skin pale. The fireplace had helped it regain its dark, southern tan. The warmth of the animal furs he had been gathering during the years of solitude had beckoned them. The softness of her touch had turned him into a man.
Kiorim said something as if from a distance. Glain’s stare was blank. The Aladrian figured the man in black didn’t hear him and so repeated the question. “I said, and what about you? Where are you going?”
Glain’s reluctance to answer was obvious, but he couldn’t find a way around it. Regardless of the constant struggles with the stream of painful thoughts he had to fight off, he wanted—needed—to be alone.
“Southeast,” his voice was almost a whisper.
Kiorim’s face brightened. “Then my village is on your way. Maybe we can travel together if you’re fine with that.”
Glain grunted, set off slow enough for the soldier to catch up. Kiorim replaced his helmet and went after him.
As soon as they left the clearing behind, Glain caught himself gawking around the silent forest.
The woman was nowhere to be found.
The trip proceeded at a steady pace. The barest instances of the conversation between the two companions made its uneventfulness even duller. Kiorim kept up with Glain, who maintained the lead. They rested whenever Glain determined they needed to, which was not often. Kiorim obeyed without protest. Not once had he asked for a respite. He moved with silent determination, eyes sparkling with anticipation, so much so he did not want or need to eat. When Glain would offer him strips of jerky, Kiorim would thank him for the gesture and just sit and gaze at the campfire. The bottomless strength he harbored came from an intangible but apparent source.
It made Glain’s heart wrench.
On one such occasion of respite, Kiorim, carried away by the excitement of the increasing proximity to home, lost his restraint.
“You never told me your destination,” he said to Glain who sat on a log across from him.
The slithering shadows of the weak flames combined with the hunch caused by the terror bird cape made a nightmarish shape out of Glain. His strange eyes pierced through the thick hair.
“Cortos,” he mumbled.
“You plan on becoming a soldier of fortune?” said the Aladrian, interested. The free port-city of Cortos was an oasis for people of all walks of life who sought a fresh beginning for themselves, especially if it implied the work in either the mercenary or trading milieu.
“I heard they’re always in need of those.” Glain looked into the fire.
“By whom?” asked Kiorim.
Glain’s stare was chilling.
“I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you don’t strike me as ever having left the High North,” said Kiorim and then rushed to avoid a potential misunderstanding. “I meant I’d hate to see you get swindled by the city folk in any way.”
The rugged faces of the slavers from a week ago flashed back. Their savage grins, rotten teeth, and the conflagration that had consumed the cabin in their mad glares. The pounding in his chest as he saw Syvanna’s mangled arm buried in the snow at their feet. The wreath-like tattoo of the Slave Ring painted on it could not have been erased even by the years of treating the dark southern ink with the clear waters of the Frozen Lakes.
“But then again, with your skills, they’d be fools to try.”
Their gaping maws as he had rushed out at them from the woods and struck down all seven in a blind fury.
Kiorim sighed. “My point is, the civilization ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
The utter helplessness that had brought him to his knees afterward. The first tears he had spilled since he had last seen his father, dragged away and then killed for his transgression of helping him.
“Glain?”
He snapped up at Kiorim. The soldier saw past the haunting eyes, said, “If you want, I can be on guard duty. Can’t sleep, anyway.”
Glain allowed himself a quiet groan. He took the sword, slid to the side of the log, faced the other way, and wrapped himself in the mantle’s plumage.
He peered through and beyond the trees. Everything was still. It seemed even the ghosts were asleep.
Glain let the soft crackle of the fire send him into the forgetfulness of sleep, however brief it would be.
The remainder of the trek passed in the same rhythm. Kiorim curbed his need for companionship to the best of his abilities. What is more, he made sure to keep a distance of ten feet or so between himself and the brooding man. Glain appreciated the gesture in silence.
It was on what would have been the second day—if such a measurement held any meaning during the half-a-year-interminable stretch of constant darkness that made up the Night Months—that the travelers reached their destination.
The dense forest of Winterwood gave way to a wide, flat terrain that appeared to unfold and continue wherever they looked. The squeak of the snow beneath the boots was more discernable than one would have guessed. In the distance, Glain noted the beginnings of a rolling range of hills which, as Syvanna had once told him during an intermission between their savage bouts of love-making, stopped right off the southernmost peak of the continent. It also marked the beginning—and the end—of the North.
Bathed by an aura of shimmering polar lights, the Sky-Piercing Mountains greeted Glain for the first time. His lips moved of their own volition underneath the thick beard, speaking their name in silence. For an ephemeral moment, it made Svyanna spring back to life.
“This way,” Kiorim invaded his meditation with a hand wave. He grinned from ear to ear and took charge for the first time. The exhilaration propelled him into a trot. Glain squinted up ahead but could see nothing. The clouds had once again closed off the stars.
The Aladrian broke into a run.
“Kiorim!” called Glain, confused. The man ignored him, kept sprinting.
A sudden gale surged from behind Glain—pushed him forward—and was gone. Up ahead, the soldier had turned into a dot.
“Kiorim!” growled Glain anew. The dot paused, waved, pressed on without hesitation.
A whisper came to him. He snapped around, drawing the sword. The squeal exploded in his face as the blade sliced the ghoul in half. The body dove into the virgin white blanket.
Glain faced the thicket of trees three hundred yards away. From the beyond, and although padded by the snow, the scurrying noise rose. Multiplied to a soft hum. The hum turned to a drone.
A black shadow swelled between the conifers. Deafening shrills reverberated against the trunks.
Glain clutched the blade. Stepped back.
A swarm of ghouls burst forth.
“Fuck,” he grumbled in his own tongue. It was the first time he used it since his last talk with Syvanna. The word itself seemed fitting, all things considered.
Glain jolted around and darted after Kiorim. Keeping the lean blade low and to the back so as to not invade on his pace, he rushed across the blank terrain. The dampened beats of an untold number of hands and feet thundered from behind, accompanied by an unbroken throng of screeches. The creatures were light and fast.
He could not outrun them.
His predictions proved true a mere moment later.
Propelled by that same gale that had summoned them, two clusters of living corpses flanked Glain. But instead of closing in on him, the creatures overshot him, lithe frames contracting and stretching in an unstoppable stampede. More followed, and Glain was lost in the horde. He swerved past the child skeletons, now led by their sense of direction rather than his own.
Vague as they were, pieces started falling into place.
He was never the actual target.
A new tone of shrieks and a shift in the stream of the undead bodies signaled a change of some sort. Glain fought to match the flow, arms raised in defense. Flocks of ghouls darted before his wincing eyes. He pushed through, trying to be as unobtrusive as he could as to not draw the monsters’ attention—and ire—onto himself. Ere long, the flurry of the ghouls somewhat settled, and Glain found himself in front of an abandoned cemetery.
Hundreds of stunted wooden posts atop miniature heaps of snow-covered rocks dotted the vista. Most were half-torn by the freezing winds of Winterwood or had fallen off from years of neglect.
A short distance away, Kiorim rested his hand on one post that endured.
The woman in white stood beside him.
The ghouls scampered around in line. They gritted their snagged teeth at the two motionless people in front. Glain noted a gap of some ten yards between the creatures and the first grave. He also noted his lingering reluctance to take a better look at the woman. It was fear, he knew, of what he might—or might not—see.
But time for fear had long passed.
The cascading blonde hair was identical to Syvanna’s, except it framed a triangular face, as opposed to the oval one he had come to know so well. It was mesmerizing, but with clear northern traits. She also had fairer skin and lighter eyes. Her dress, Glain now saw, was diaphanous, and showed the tender features underneath with no hindrance. It was a northern burial gown in the same vein his people—or, rather, the Crow People—had their frosted shrouds. The woman’s feet, bare as he had thought them to be the first time, were buried ankle-deep in snow.
Glain let out an exasperated sigh, tried to keep the raging storm of despondence at bay. He locked onto Kiorim.
“They can’t enter here,” spoke the Aladrian with unusual calmness. His voice stirred the ghouls. “You just have to hurry over before they turn their attention to you.”
Whether or not the skeletons understood Kiorim, their eyeless stares shot at Glain. He skimmed over them, sword-hand clenching, then back at Kiorim. The soldier cheered him on with a hopeful nod.
A delicate smile lingered on the woman’s lips.
The ghouls inched closer. Sneers intensified. Fists thumped onto the ground in a warning. They knew what he planned to do, and they were ready to stop him.
Glain bolted. The monsters leaped.
The lean blade flashed, reaping through the bodies like a scythe and raising snow-dust and leaving limbs and torsos in its wake. The creatures’ screams of rage overpowered Glain’s own thoughts. He kept his focus onto the first, half-broken gravepost ahead. Head hung low, he swung the weapon from side-to-side in wide strokes, the other arm close to the chest.
Upon nearing the last stretch of the run, Glain threw himself up in the air, twisted, and struck. The backslash hooked three ghouls that flew behind him. He landed on his side among the graves with a resounding thud, skidded deeper into the cemetery proper. The body parts rained down, but what fell onto the burial heaps was a spatter of tar-like substance.
Furious, the ghouls paced back and forth a yard or two before the first grave. They jumped up and down like the apes Glain had first thought them to be. A few feigned assaults, only to wheel the next instant. Their screeches appeared more potent than ever; their impotent frustration almost tangible. The disproportionate skulls wobbled, threatened to burst from the sheer exertion of howls.
With a drawled outcry, the last rows of the gray skeletons began to thin out. Reluctant as they were, the creatures seemed to realize the futility of a prolonged stay. More headstrong ones stalled, refusing to give even an inch. They kept baring their jaws and snarling at the three untouchable figures. But soon the dwindling numbers of their group forced them to comply. They took to the trees faster than the others, as if to escape some dim sense of shame or hurt pride.
Glain waited for the last of the ghouls to disappear before he faced the soldier and the woman.
Kiorim removed his hand from the post. “The dead can’t walk over each other,” he waved his head at the empty terrain.
“Yet here you are,” said Glain. While the secret behind his companion’s inexhaustible energy reserves had become clear, a plethora of other mysteries still hung in the air. He sheathed the sword, walked over to them.
The Aladrian exhaled. “I’m sorry, but you were my only hope of getting here.”
“It is I who should apologize,” spoke the woman for the first time. Her voice was nothing like Syvanna’s. She regarded Glain with sincerity, but he nevertheless had trouble meeting her gaze for more than a few seconds. “It was I who drew you into this. When I sensed your tether to the other side,” she said, and Glain knew she did not mean his inhuman eyes, “you were a godsend. You were the only one who could help my husband get home.”
“You’re wights,” stated Glain. “Shades of a past life.”
“I lost mine in the battle at Ilven Pass,” spoke Kiorim. “I suspected Unah had met the same fate because when I was last here the famine had already taken its toll upon us.” He considered his wife’s gravepost. “As I said before, the war is starving people to death, no matter which side is winning.”
“Why were those child ghouls after you?” asked Glain, although he suspected the answer.
Now it was Unah whose head fell. “I was expecting,” she managed, reaching for her flat stomach. Kiorim’s hand, in turn, caressed her cold cheek.
Glain had traced his fingers across a faded scar on Syvanna’s belly. “They took him from me,” she had whispered in an almost apologetic manner. Glain had taken her in his arms. He remembered her deep sobs.
“It was our bond to each other,” said Unah. If she was alive, her words would have been drowned in tears. “It is what helped sustain us in this world. Those poor souls saw it as a reminder of their own lives. They latched onto it.”
“There is nothing I can do to make any of this better,” said Kiorim, defeated.
Unah took his hand from her cheek. “There is nothing any of us can do anymore,” she assured him, focused on Glain. “We cannot repay you in any way. You have saved us even in death.”
Bitterness grasped Glain. “Yeah,” he fought the word out, “wish I could’ve done it for someone else as well.” He spun about and ambled away.
The blizzard picked up again.
©January 2021, Mario Caric
Mario Caric’s love for the Sword and Sorcery genre and the tales of ancient civilizations featured therein drove him to a career as an archaeologist and, later on, osteologist. Apart from academic papers, he also co-wrote the mystery/puzzle games Twin Moons, and Mystery of the Opera: The Phantom’s Secret. He was the main writer of the visual novels Patent9—The Goddess of Trust, and its upcoming follow up. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.