The Well of Mimir

What Only Gods May Kill

I am Trallo, of lost Capathia, last city of the Lun belt, buried now by the sands for twenty storms. I am a free man, not a slave nor organ donor, nor breeder for mutants or food for monsters, for I survived the death of our false god and the horrors of the savage desert that came for me when our walls fell, where those others of Capathia did not, and so the mighty Mathes, god-king of Xan, saw my worth and made me a hunter upon the trade-roads, giving me concubines and slaves for my little seen home in his undying city.

Today, I hunt.

There is a new beast who prowls the road between Xan and Oph, wandered in from the desert seeking more sustaining prey, or awakened by some cursed foolish sorcerer in the wastelands. It leaves behind it a foul golden ichor that burns the rock itself and turns the sand to red glass. It has slaughtered two godless tribes living in the ruins of Marker Exvivtee, and attacked a caravan, which is what drew the attention of Mathes and the bitch goddess Ir-ut of Oph. The legionnaires protecting the caravan drove it away, but the god-kings wish it dead.

It has been here recently, but I can not find where it has gone, as though it is a ghost. And I pray this is no demon of the wastelands, or some sun-child sent down from the heavens. I stare into the obsidian egg that the high priests of Mathes have given me, a tracking device, they say, that can find the beast, for I can not. Golden beads flicker or pulse deep in the smoky depths. Curved lines form and glow.

It would be arcane and unfathomable had not the priests explained it to me.

But the krelor are howling. I will have to feed them soon before they start ripping each other apart.
Thank the gods they hate the taste of human flesh.

---

Snak is my favorite of the krelor. I have this fascination with patting him upon his thick, leathery head, as though he were some house-pet of a lazy nobleman uplifted by the god-king. Somehow it helps me think, and he will sit and persevere the treatment while the other two would have my hand for the insult.

I touch the blessed stud of copper in my neck and speak, “Cral. Toh. Ready.” My words are sent to the beasts prowling at the edge of camp, snapping bones between their dagger-teeth for the marrow inside. I look down, “You too, Snak.”

“Northwards. Those bluffs. Track. Pathfind.” What my eyes see, their eyes see. The worn bluffs in the desert furlongs away. The krelor are no dumb beasts: smart enough to think, primitively, and to grasp basic language. Smart enough to hunt. Smart enough to know the roads are safe, and the desert beyond them isn’t; smart enough to give one another glances that might pass for concern among men.

“Cral, take point.”

The krelor pauses only a moment, then dashes forward on his six legs, broad nose sniffing the dust, claws striking sparks on the loose flint littering the ground. Through the copper stud I can hear the whine of his simple thoughts and his overpowering senses.

I move off the road until Snak whines–a low, wet, gurgling sound–and I stop. I always forget. “Right. Good boy, Snak.” I whisper a prayer of benediction to Mathes, bowing my head and making those signs the god-king has imparted to me for this rite, and a faint rainbow shimmers above my head. This is my own personal spirit of protection, whose presence will grow stronger the further we go from the road, the further into death and ruin and the domain of the sun’s demons, a rare gift from the mighty Mathes.

The krelor have nothing to fear from the desert air, born to the sand as they are, but even they do not dare the deeper wastelands. It sickens them, and there is nothing edible to satiate them.

Far ahead, Cral snarls, the sound a wet, vibrating hiss.

---

Though we search, we do not find Cral. I can not hear him any longer, sense his thoughts or see through his eyes.

Snak and Toh walk alongside me, heads hung low, sniffing, watchful.

Eventually, I recognize the place where Cral stood when last my mind touched his, before the god-forged link between us was broken by distance and the sun’s sorcerous mischief. An angled ledge leading up a shallow, weathered cliff with a tangle of cracked boulders along its base. There are signs of a fight here, fresh scratches on the rocks, stirred dust, slight furrows in the sand, when altogether followed lead to a spot that still steams with fresh golden ichor eating away the rock and glassing the sand. There is heat yet radiating from it.

Cral found our quarry, and I have no hope for him now.
The other two krelor growl low in their throats and slink around warily.
The beast nor its trail is anywhere to be seen. Vanished again, like a ghost.

If this were a campfire tale of the nomads told after the youngest children were asleep, now would be the perfect time for a chilling wind to blow. But the day is hot and utterly still. The world does not care about monsters or the loss of one krelor.

---

We make camp in the ruins of Marker Exvivtee that night, in a building whose four barren and weathered walls remain more-or-less intact. Others have used it as well, for there are clear signs a fire has been built in a shallow pit here on many occasions. I set a fire myself, soaking the little wood I could find in a long-burning oil made in far-off Phenita, and wrap in a long, thick cloak. Snak and Toh wrap up with one another on the other side of the fire, snarling and biting to decide dominance first. I ignore it.

It is true that a fire attracts attention, and attention is something a lone traveler should never strive to attain, but the nights are too cold to survive without heat. The hate of the sun burns the air during the day, but when it passes beyond the horizon and that great, black eye closes, the temperature plummets and you can feel the chill of the ice-lands in the air. Sometimes, it is cold enough men freeze where they lie, never to rise again.

I push the memories aside. They are as distant as Phenita to me, and it is of no use to travel into them again.

Phos and Demos trail through the night sky above, the little one trying to outrun the swiftly settling darkness. The world is still utterly quiet and it makes me nervous, but the night passes without incident.

---

When I awaken, the ashes are still warm and the bloated sun has begun heaving its black bulk over the horizon. Snak and Toh are yet asleep. And she is there, wrapped in gauzy linen from head-to-toe, only her piercing blue eyes showing clearly, like sparkling crystals. Snak and Toh are yet asleep…

I reach for my blade, and find she has already stripped me of it…that I can not look away from those eyes.

“You are on the lands of the Jes-ti,” the voice is clear, perfect, unmuffled. It reminds me of the purest silver chimes I once heard ringing gently on the unreachable sun-deck of a noblewoman in lost Capatha. Beautiful.

Demonic.

She waits for an answer.

“The lands of Marker Exvivtee are claimed and ruled by the mighty Mathes, god-king of Xan,” I want to inform her, but the false bravado instilled by the priests falls apart in her presence and fades away like lonely clouds hammered by the gaze of the sun, and it goes unmentioned. Then she is kneeling before me, looking up at me, and my heart wants to break.

I do not even ask who the Jes-ti are for fear of offending her.

“You seek a beast, a new monster, something that hunts and kills and disappears. The Jes-ti seek this monster as well.”

I know of only one man who has seen an elf and lived, though I have heard legionnaires’ tales of slaying them by the dozen with the holy fire of the gods.

“You…you want me to leave? To leave your lands? To leave the monster alone?” I ache. I want to reach out and snap her neck, quickly…no, to make love to her. I hate what she is doing to me. I spy a rock, nearby, to crush her skull. I ache with desire to reach out for it, knowing what it is that kneels before me and bewitches me.

“Find it for us.”

I ache to please her.

She stands and presses her fingers against my eyelids. I want to embrace her. I want to recoil in horror. I sit still and feel fire burning into my skull. Then she seems to drift out of the building, those crystal blue eyes watching me, unblinking, demure, feral.

And then I am free. The krelor whine wetly and awaken.

I now know of two men…

---

I have beautiful nightmares about those crystal blue eyes for the next two days.

In the meanwhile, the golden lights within the god’s obsidian egg have led me deep into the deserts beyond the ancient road. Snak and Toh have hunted and found game wanting; they have begun to hunger, and eye one another uneasily through the heat of the afternoon. Through the blessed copper stud I can feel their hunger, taste their growing desire, and try to keep them as far from one another as I can.

If it comes down to it, I will kill Toh and let Snak eat him; but I do not think about this when I press the stud.

The air smells wrong here. Heat bakes the rock and dust and rises from the broken ground in shimmering waves that bend the pale sky and warp the horizon itself. My guardian spirit scintillates above me, its hypnotic dance driving the sun’s demons away. I have been deeper in the wastelands, hunting dangerous predators, but I do not know why this beast would travel so far when its prey traverses the road two days behind us, yet this is where the god’s tracking device tells me the beast has gone, so I have followed his will here.

Perhaps the thing knows it is being hunted.

Perhaps.

A lone roc sails the blazing sky overhead, its sharp hunting cry swallowed by the blasted landscape. I ready the bolt-thrower Mathes’ priests have given me, checking the dry chemical bay that fires its deadly ammunition. I have been told not to use it unless absolutely necessary, for it is irreplaceable and carries only six shots, but this is a weapon that can pierce the hide of a drake; it will make short work of a roc, should it descend.

The roc is gone within minutes, sailing onwards, uninterested in morsels.

In an hour I discover why.

A wide, deep crater holds the stinking, twisted carcass of some snaking, reptilian beast the length of some city streets, cooking unpleasantly in the sun. The smell is overpowering and even the krelor will not go near it. I choke down my bile long enough to identify some of the wounds upon it as the acidic golden pits left by the creature I hunt, vision telescoping forward to sweep along its carcass, then returning to normal–one of the many gifts given me by the god-king’s rebirthing chambers.

The blessed copper stud in my neck aches for a moment.

We move downwind as quickly as possible, a scarf wrapped around my mouth and nose to keep the smell out. The roc spotted earlier seems not to mind the stench and I wish him a good meal as I turn attention to the occult lights whirling and shimmering in the depths of the obsidian egg. Ahead, ruins rise out of the desert rocks, the sparsely scattered and crumbling walls of long-dead buildings far beyond where any man has traveled or lived in any historical time past myth, revealed for this moment by some recent duststorm. Most are clustered on the edge of a cliff; one remains intact, of Weathered stone, pitted but not broken. A doorway beckons, swept clean of sand by the wind, leading into darkness.

I settle on a slight ridgeline nearby and far back, watching that dark entry, the krelor creeping into the rocks nearby, flanking. The black egg winks at me knowingly and I stare into its depths. The beast is here, the arcane signs of the god-king say. Then there is movement in the ebon depths of the doorway, and I raise the bolt-thrower, sighting along the smooth frontal barrel with the clean smell of metal filling my nostrils.

I will my vision to telescope forward again, zooming up into the doorway, and lower the weapon as the shadows draw back to reveal the form of a man huddled in the entry, resting or dead. I do not sling the weapon as I climb down the rocky hillside and make my way towards the ruin and the silhouette of the man spied there. There is no movement as I approach, only when I have leaned slowly, carefully down to check his pulse.

White eyes huge and staring turn to stare up at me, blinding orbs in the dirty shadows of his face, and rough hands caked by dried blood grasp my face and he whispers in a voice desert-dry and starved of water, “Help me! By whatever god you owe allegiance to, hunter, help me!”

It is clear he has crouched here for days, unable to flee without a guardian spirit to protect him from the wasteland demons that would devour his soul when he stepped beneath the hateful sun. A backhanded strike sends knocks him away, but he crawls forward again, pleading, yet careful not to leave the shadow of the doorway, grasping the hem of my clothing in his hands.

“I am not here to flee. I am here to slay the beast you fear so.”

“You do not understand! We must leave, we must go, before it finds us, hunter. Please, help me! We must flee!” He is insistent.

“Then flee, and pray some god takes pity on your cowardly hide should you find a city before the demons devour your insides,” I grab his hands and fling him off me in disgust. This time he does not crawl back, but he does glare up at me, huddling on the ground, still, in the shadow of the ancient doorway.

“I am Ianthes of Ir-ut’s legions, hunter. Commander of the Exvivtee Second Squadron. I am no coward. No coward except in the face of what lairs beyond. Either take me away, take me, please, or kill me!” The terror in his whispering voice concerns me, “By the holy might of Mathes of Xan, kill me if you will not help me!”

His eyes are wild as he leaps at me, and grapples with me using strength no dying man should have, dirty hands wrapping tight around my neck in a choking embrace. Then he stumbles back, crimson spattering the sand and rocks as he grasps the handle of the knife I have buried in his chest, holding it like a lover, his eyes smiling with a fervent, thankful, peace before he topples still to the ground.

I wait a moment, then retrieve the knife from dead fingers that treat the killing blade like a precious idol, wiping it clean on his tattered and bloodstained clothing once I have tugged it from his fanatical death-grip.

Sheathing the blade, I check the egg again. The beast waits nearby. Below, it seems, in whatever subterranean tunnels these ruins mark.

The krelor pad forward and sniff the body of Commander Ianthes, nudging it, then ignoring it in disinterest. I, however, can not shake my grotesque interest in the grin upon the face of the legionnaire and my growing fear at the nature of the creature I face in the name of mighty Mathes. I put the egg away and bring the bolt-thrower back up, double-checking the dry chemical chamber, glancing one last time at the smiling corpse before I step through the doorway and into the waiting maw of stone.

---

The doorway protects a once-sealed chamber, whose seals cracked long ago to let sand and debris slip in, forming small drifts and mounds, but not so much that the stone stairway spiraling down into the earth nor the few carelessly strewn bones scattered freshly here are hidden. There is no decoration to tell me what this place might once have been. Only darkness and smooth walls, and the darker curve of a stair twisting downwards into the rock. Behind me, the krelor pad nervously, nipping at one another in anxiety.

“Toh, go back. Guard the entry. Watch.” The krelor stops and then turns, padding back up the steps and searching for a place to conceal itself and fulfill my commands. The images of its movements bleed through the blessed copper stud, making me twitch. There is sorcery here, now I am sure of it.

I step carefully forward and slowly, cautiously, descend the black stairwell, pausing occasionally to listen. My fingers guide me in the dark, and notice a hum from the walls, strange and nerve-wracking, nothing heard so much as felt. The hairs on the back of my neck rise…sorcery taints the air and stone of this strange place. I descend further, and the hum grows stronger, enough now to be heard, pulsating with a noticeable rhythm like the heartbeat of a demon. Then the curving stairway ends, opening into a broad, low-ceilinged room from whose floor rises a series of menhirs carved with strange, angular runes of incredible complexity.

The stairwell is central to a long, rectangular room. Golden-red sunlight diffuses through the darkness from low openings all along the walls on one side, casting shadows and reflecting from endlessly drifting dust-motes. A half-dozen small doorways are carved through the wall at the far end, half are buried by sand and rock, while the room behind me is all shadow and darkness in which black ropes or cables are strung like vines, and massive, nameless machine-things of metal and ceramic hum and pulsate among the menhirs, forgotten for ages, working without purpose.

I whisper a prayer to Mathes to protect me, but the prayer is short for I can feel the beast is near. My instincts, the same that kept me alive after lost Capathia fell, tell me something is watching. Snak growls, low and deep, feeling the same. But there are too many shadows, too many places to hide in this chamber.

We move between the menhirs, towards the light streaming from the doorways, carefully. The ceiling drops slowly to meet us, sand and dust stir at our footsteps, though I can see ours are not the only feet to have stirred it, nor are those other feet human. I duck through one of the doorways into another part of the ruin where the sun blazes down. I am on a wide patio of stone where shallow, broken steps lead to a broad, circular courtyard strewn thick with sand and rocky debris. A curving, intact wall runs to my left, holding back the desert, though the sand has long ago conquered the wall on the right.

I move to the left, carefully staying in the shadows while crossing the courtyard. A sudden spray of dust and rock is my only warning–behind me!–and I duck and roll, putting a broken section of wall to my back, raising the bolt-thrower and scanning the wide courtyard. It is gone, dying dust devils swirling where it was, the sand steaming with burning gold ichor. I check high and low. Waiting. Snak is nowhere to be seen, nor felt. I touch the blessed copper stud, praying, but a dull ache creeps through my skull. The sorcery is thick here and it fouls the holy gifts of the gods; even my eyes begin to ache.

“Snak!” No response. “SNAK!”

Dead quiet, any echoes swallowed by this silent crevice of the desert as though it were water.

Golden ichor steams and hisses in the sand nearby.

---

Why isn’t it trying to kill me?
Why can I not find it?
How does it appear and disappear so swiftly?
And where does it go, where does it come from?

I stare at the golden motes deep inside the translucent black egg cradled reverently in my palm, wondering what it is mighty Mathes is trying to tell me, praying for the sign or revelation…but all Mathes will give me is one steady golden mote. The beast is still here somewhere, near, but I can not find it.

I do not understand where the creature could be, but I wonder if I could draw it out…

I apologize to the body of Ianthes, brave servant of the bitch-goddess of Ir-ut, as I hoist his bloody carcass over my shoulder. Toh watches me keenly from behind the rocks nearby, and I tell him to go back to his job. It takes a few moments to drag the body down the winding stairwell to the chamber below, and a few more to carry it out to the courtyard and throw it sprawling into the sand.

The reaction is instant, far quicker than I could have anticipated, the creature tearing itself from the ground with the fury of a sun-mad beast, sending dust and rock pluming up and out. I find myself paralyzed in horror at my first glimpse: it is bloody bone and wet muscle without skin, worm-like with a lizard’s head, bristling with an insect’s sycthe-like appendages. A crimson-wet ribcage encloses its writhing torso, like gruesome armor forged by some hellish smith to protect the ropy mass of pulsing veins and clumps of whorled, uneven flesh that form its body, sinew and muscle and scale fused together in some terrible fashion not designed by nature. Before I can force myself to move, it lashes out with two impossibly elongated arms that end in grasping, clawed fingers. I stumble back barely in time, feeling the cold claws graze my stomach and drawing hot, red blood as I fall to the ground.

It releases a warbling cry like no creature I have heard before in the wastelands, and golden ichor flies hissing and burning from dagger-lined jaws made for biting–but not for devouring–the razor teeth haphazard and snaggled, and pulls the rest of its body to the surface, spraying sand and dust everywhere as it lunges down upon me, a half-dozen spider-like legs ooze rotting strings of muscle and flesh and scything blades spring from its body, slashing at the air and I see aged metal bones glinting within the rotten mass beneath.

Scrambling desperately backwards, barely avoiding each strike, never able to bring the bolt-thrower to bear, I realize this is no mutant beast, nor even demon. This is some machine-beast left to sleep in the desert, a thing from the forgotten wars of the gods before time began, which I know of only through story. But I do know it, for I have heard the name whispered in terror: it is a harvester…a thing that takes parts from its living prey to add to itself, a thing which builds itself from the remains of its victims, growing larger and stronger and more terrible. And this one is large, and strong, and terrible…

Sharp, uneven spikes jut like broken obsidian daggers from the long stretch of its eyeless skull, all torn from a half-dozen different creatures and wedded haphazardly to bone; a similar crest of patchwork skin and spiky bone runs down its back, some are varying rods of dull and pitted metal that spark and crackle with strange energies under the horrid sun. It lashes and writhes and twists, grabbing, slashing, whipping about, cutting, lunging, biting, every part of its jagged body a weapon.

I do not know how I survive its assault.

I reach the doorway and throw myself desperately through, seeking cover among the menhir as it slams purposefully against the wall behind me, testing the stone furiously, hungrily, and with horrifying intelligence. It whirls suddenly and retreats, dragging the body of Ianthes down into the sands and disappears. Spatters of golden ichor hiss and burn in the courtyard, burning stone and turning sand to glass, then all is still and quiet.

A moment made too long by terror passes; I wonder why it has not attacked and swallowed me up from below. Bending down, I brush the sand away at my feet and find solid, worn flagstones beneath. Surely these would prove no problem for a creature of this power? For it is a creature of myth, a thing born of and awakened by sorcery, a thing only a god can hope to kill.

I draw out the egg and stare once more into it at the golden motes and lines the priests taught me to read. The beast lurks near, waiting still and patient.

I am already dead. Yet I bandage my wounds, shallow as they are, and prepare myself with the death-rites. I pray to the mighty Mathes of Xan, asking him to forgive my failure. And I find myself no longer disgusted with Ianthes’ seeming cowardice, for now I am doing much as he did. I have heard death by starvation and dehydration is a terrible death, and consider how long I should wait before slitting my own throat…waiting only to see if and what escape the fates might provide for me. And I wonder how far I would make it in the open deserts…

For a long time I am left alone to sit with my thoughts; the tension drains me, then fades. During some unknown moment I drift into dream.

---

“Why do you lie here, hunter-of-Mathes?” the voice is crystal clear, cool, like the refreshing water chilled from a deep well. I know I should not look but I cannot help it; my eyes are open before I can think not to do so. Those blue eyes stare into my soul. I want to kill her…no, to love her. She cradles my blade. Those eyes glow like the rarest blue pigments in the robes of the gods, and I want to weep at their beauty. I hate her. I dare not offend her.

I answer, my tongue a thick and clumsy thing in my mouth, “The beast is an old and powerful thing of the gods, mortal men can only die before it.” And my heart breaks for failing her.

I struggle to raise my arms and crush her skull. To kiss her ripe, pale lips and strangle her before she can further bewitch me. She lifts an arm as if it is stirred by a gentle breeze and touches a delicate finger to my forehead, like the softest silk…burning like a needle hot and deep into my brain. I think I am screaming.

She whispers like a lullaby, “The Jes-ti are not mortal, and I am not a man.”

My heart leaps with hope, mind whirling like the sands in a storm as it sees salvation and survival in those words, and I cry out, “Then slay it!”

But she is gone and I am alone in a dark chamber lit only by a dim blue-green witchlight that seems to flow slowly down the carvings in the the menhir, the darkness echoing with my shout. It is night, and my wounds now sting with the birth pangs of infection…I wonder if she was real or a fever dream, but I have heard it said there is no distinction when it comes to visits by the elves.

I shudder and clasp hands to my knees, burying my face in them; there is too much sorcery in this hunt, bedeviling and soul-damning.

There is quiet in the room for too long, and I am alone again with my thoughts, thoughts that dwell upon lost Capathia, last city of the Lun belt, buried now by the sands for twenty storms.

Perhaps I still dream. I cannot tell.

---

When the sun again peers through the narrow windows that line the chamber, casting dusky reddish beams, I raise myself and slowly search the room, blade drawn, creeping slowly through the dark shadows among the humming machines that crowd the far end of the chamber. I find nothing, but do not yet sheathe my sword. Within the obsidian egg dance shifting golden lines telling me the harvester, at least, hunts elsewhere. I thank the almighty Mathes, then examine my wounds again which bulge red and painful with infection.

The salves and ointments I have with me burn and sting as I apply them, and I hope they will suffice to drive the infection from me before the infection drives my strength from me. Then I crouch and ponder deeply for a long while, sword laid on the floor before me in easy reach, next to the egg I watch carefully.

A voice breaks the silence, startling, “You have fed the beast.”

The announcement comes from the darkness between the menhir, among the sorcery-machines of the old gods. I remain silent and still, searching carefully with my eyes, sword now drawn. A few moments pass, and then the speaker steps forward into the dim light, lazily as if strolling through a marketplace, giving me a few moments to take his measure and all that is alien, foul, and powerful about him: though his right eye is normal, in the place of the left are three small slits in the smooth skin of his face, each a lid over a glittering, black iris like that of some multi-eyed insect. The slight frame and elegantly-bored stance speak of idle nobility, the horde of metal adorning his person more so.

A band of large, irregular squares of metal hang from his shoulders like a necklace, centered against his breast by a long shard of feathery shrapnel from some ancient machine, the pitted surface polished to shine. Numerous sorcerous charms hang from crisscrossing belts of scaly leather at his waist, above those another thick belt is buckled with a large, segmented gear, to which sharp-angled bands of polished copper are fused and curve elegantly around his midsection. A thick red scarf, heavy with pulsating angular golden lines that match those upon the menhir, is pulled down to showcase a polite, if disinterested, frown.

My hand tightens upon the hilt of my blade.

“Sorcerer,” I spit.

He continues to regard me calmly, arms crossed loosely behind his back as if unconcerned with my weapon, and I think better of attacking him, though he does not respond either to affirm or deny the charge. His one human eye blinks while the other three stare coldly, and I shudder.

When I reach for my copper stud, hoping to summon Toh, he lifts a finger and I freeze before flesh meets metal.

“You are wise to fear me, hunter. Even one such as you would not find me a trifle.”

My hand lowers.

“Who and what are you? You are too foul to be one of the Jes-ti.”

He smiles slightly, “You are right, though elves can appear as anything they desire to appear as. Even something as foul as I. But you are right, I am not of the Jes-ti, nor any elven spirit of the deserts.”

“The Jes-ti are the masters of this land,” the words are spun like spider-silk from my lips, unbidden, “You would do well to leave.” My free hand flies to cover my mouth as I try to keep someone else’s voice from spilling forth.

There is silence for a moment as the other searches my face. “The elves have you,” he whispers, “Even as we speak they burrow into your mind, like roots seeking the water in the sand. They wrap themselves around your mind and take your body, shaping you into something more than mortal and less than human.”

In strange disassociation, I realize the voice sounds like my voice, like the voice of a Capathian, using all the words of lost Capathia, the inflections and timbre that the sands strangled and buried twenty long years ago when Mathes came at the head of a howling demon drawn up out of the desert sand, a storm the walls could not break, and devoured my people.

My sword has slipped from nerveless fingers.

“Do you know what the elves are?” he asks, but my confusion and horror prevents any answer, “They’re like a plague carried on the wind. They devour whole settlements, tricking the minds, taking the bodies, and lie in repose among flowers blooming from the sands.”

Slowly my hand slips away from my mouth and I find my voice is again my own, “Capathian…you sound Capathian…” As if that were the more important part of what he has said.

The carefully trimmed brow above his human eye rises, “I hear it buried your speech, another lost child of our city. Tell me, brother, how came you here, elf-ridden and god-enslaved?” His eye take in the copper stud, the golden egg, the bolt-thrower…the three dark slits upon the other half of his face are unreadable, boring into me with the intensity of the sun upon the desert’s anvil.

I find myself speaking, with my own voice this time, telling him all that has happened.

“I wonder what the Jes-ti desire?” the sorcerer murmurs quietly, seated casually cross-legged across from where I kneel stunned, then directly to me, “Why you? A lone man, even armed with ancient sorcery, cannot defeat these machines. They lay waste to whole armies, they destroy godless cities, even the gods must wrestle with them. What do they wish with one such as you?”

I have no answers for him.

“I will tell you this, my Capathian brother,” he draws out a thing from behind him, a circular disc with wings, all of metal, wrapped sporadically with leather cord, the center bulging with a greenish crystal, and hung all across with small, often gruesome charms, “this alone might drive the elves out from you, or at least bind them fast…but such help is not free.”

I whisper, “Your help would damn my soul. You play with demons’ sorcery. All I need do is reach the priests, and–”

“–the elves will have you before you could ever reach Xan.” His tone tells me he is not trying to convince me, he is merely stating a fact.

Yet I cannot grasp what value he can see in helping me. He sees the hesitation in my face and quietly points out whatever it is the elves wish serves neither of us, though I do not know either what his goals are, and he does not offer them up.

“Even now the harvester busies itself in its lair, adding the slain to its mass,” then he seems to talk to himself, “The process is fascinating. Mathes will cower in his city until the beast comes to him. He will not bring a crusade against it, and will hope it travels elsewhere to trouble some other god.”

“You speak blasphemy!”

He notices me again, “Do I? My god was slain long ago. A god we both worshiped as true and as powerful as Mathes, whose bones dry and crack in the dust among shattered walls. No. I do not. Mathes will wait for the harvester to strike another city, then pounce upon it while it lies weakened, bearing it to the ground. Both city and beast, if he can.”

I wonder now about him and his business here in the waste. Sorcerers often flee into the deserts seeking escape from persecution, and ancient machines and lost sorceries they can turn to their will.

“You awoke it. Your damned sorcery.”

He smiles and it is wicked.

“Do you not wish revenge? For your city, your brothers, your sisters, your father and mother, even your god?” he asks.

“No.” I lie, but dare not do otherwise for fear Mathes hears me. I have buried such feelings, such desires, for they do me no good. “You seek to destroy Xan as lost Capathia was destroyed? You think yourself a god to sit in judgement of Mathes?”

“I think not even Mathes a god,” he glowers, his strange eyes narrowing too.

I tense and repeat the words that have been burned into my soul for twenty years, that go against everything I was taught before that, “The god of Capathia was a false–”

But he interrupts with an annoyed snap, as if chiding a slow-witted child mouthing an obvious lie, “I am not interested in the propaganda of the god-kings. You know as well as I our god was not a false one until defeated by Mathes and our city salted and burned. Had Mathes been defeated, he would be declared the false god.”

The blasphemy makes me shake in anger and fear, and yet…

His voice is like a serpent sliding hungrily through the rocks, and I scramble to find a place to hide from what I wish to say, to fight to say what I must if my god is listening. “The god of lost Capathia failed me in the end,” I spit, “Proving he was false! And this is not yet over. We will see if Mathes fails me, sorcerer!”

I grasp up my sword swiftly and move to charge, but the invisible hands of giants swiftly lift and hurl me painfully against the far wall. The sorcerer stands fire-eyed and frowning, arms crossed. I struggle to my feet, my very bones bruised, and shakily point my sword at him with more foolishness than bravado.

“Leave the lands of the Jes-ti,” a voice that is not my own tumbles unrepentant from my lips, “Leave the lands of the Jes-ti. Leave the lands of the Jes-ti. Leave the lands of the Jes-ti. Leave…”

“SILENCE!” the sorcerer motions and my throat constricts, nausea washing through me as the spell eats away at my life-force. Somewhere far distant, through methods unknown to me that bear chilling implications, I can hear screams of terror and pain I know somehow come from elves.

“Before the day has ended, they would have your soul,” he lectures, but I do not hear the end of this speech, for a dark shadow down the stair launches itself in quick leaps, and then Toh has torn the sorcerer’s throat out.

Blood arcs in crimson bursts from arteries opened like wine kegs on festival days, and the the sorcerer shakes upon the ground in his death throes. Through the stud, I can feel Toh’s distaste for the spice of human meat.

“Good boy,” I say.

---

By the time the beams of the sun have crawled down the wall and crept across the floor nearly to my feet, I have made a decision: I am a coward for my despair. I survived the wrath of a god rained down upon Capathia, and I survived the hungry maws of desert beasts while wandering the sun-cursed land. Now I have killed a sorcerer in the wastelands. I will see now if I can survive being hunted by a titan of the ancient days.

But I am no fool, I take the sorcerer’s elf-binder with me. I strip what other metal I can from him, knowing its worth in the city, where it is scarce and worth fortunes.

I am the greatest hunter of Xan, equal to any legion. But battered and injured as I am, possessed by elf, this is beyond me. I will flee and report its presence to Mathes, should I survive the trek, then the legions of Xan will crusade against it.

Toh and I climb the stair and leave the place of the menhir.

---

She comes again that night as I sleep on a high slab of rock I have climbed for (unlikely) safety from the harvester. There is no warning of her arrival, for I see Toh sleeps as if enspelled. Her eyes sparkle as if they are gemstones, yet I am not enthralled.

The elf-demon realizes too late the failure of her glamours as I grasp my sword and prepare to run her through, but she falls before me pleading, her lips spew lies, “Great hunter, spare me! Spare me! I came only to thank you.”

Something–I know not what–stays my hand a moment.

“We knew that if you found the monster, the sorcerer that woke it would not be far. It was he we wished to find, he we wished driven from our lands. His sorcery was foul poison, it brought pain and loss.”

I growl an angry response, “The sorcerer told me you burrow into my mind. That you would take me and I would be no more. I do not think he lied.”

Her full mouth twitches. “Yes,” she finally admits, and accompanies it with a pout, “It is our way. But you have saved us and now we owe you a debt…how may I serve you?” The question is coy, and despite the fading of her glamours, her eyes are wide and her body pale and lithe. I lower my sword and she rises to embrace me.

Some time later as we lay tangled together in the night, the two moons chasing one another above us, she rises up silently, her face splits suddenly into thirds, becoming a red mouth lined with rows of sharp teeth that snap down towards me. I manage to throw one hand around her throat as the thing she has become twists and hisses atop me, her fingernails gouging painful, bloody furrows in my arms.

A fumbling hand finds hilt, and blade finds heart. With a great shove, her body topples from the ledge to the desert floor below…except when I roll over to look down, I see only a cloud of dust roiling in the wind below and drifting away. There is no body to be seen.

Then I find myself wondering if I should have let the sorcerer live.

And I keep the elf-binder close to my skin, sorcery or not.

---

…to be continued…

---

Copyright (c)2008 Raven Daegmorgan

• RSS feed for comments on this post
• TrackBack URI