“Yeah, well, mindless obedience can be a double-edged sword. Be careful he doesn’t slice off anything important.”
“You needn’t trouble yourself.
My
life shall not be at risk.” The subtle emphasis Gabrian placed on the word “my” gave Aurelius cause to send a narrow-eyed look over his shoulder. Still glaring at the wizard, he absently waved a hand across the door scanner. A heavy
clunk
sounded and then came a grinding of gears and a hissing of pneumatics. The large double doors rolled slowly open and after a few seconds they clanked into place inside the jambs. Not bothering to extend the cargo ramp, Aurelius jumped the half a dozen feet to the ground and yelled, “Gral! Over here!”
They heard the snow crunching loudly with his approach, and then the giant troll loomed into view. “What want from Gral?”
Gabrian pointed inside the ship. “Climb aboard.”
Gral walked up to open doors. The deck stood only at knee height for him, even though it easily cleared Aurelius’s head. Gral stepped up onto the deck and began thudding around the cargo bay like a little kid.
“What this cave made of?”
Aurelius hauled himself up after the troll with considerably more difficulty. “Welcome to your new home, Gral.”
“Home? This not home. Gral not even have furry feather bed to sleep on.”
“We’ll get you a furry feather bed, but for now just make yourself as comfortable as you can. Oh . . .” Aurelius trailed off in a frown and cast about the cargo bay.
“What?” Gabrian asked, his brow dropping a dark shadow over his eyes.
“Artificial gravity is malfunctioning, which means inertial compensators are, too.”
“And?”
“And, unless we want troll pudding, I’d better think of something to keep him from flying around.”
Gral was looking back and forth between Gabrian and Aurelius, slowly blinking his large yellow eyes. He might have looked fearsome with his bloodstained hands, his giant frame, and his demonic features, but for the dumb look on his face. “Why talk about Gral like he not here? Tell Gral what to do, and he do it.”
Aurelius sent the troll a quick, placating smile, the kind a parent might offer to a child. “Sure . . .” He cast about a moment longer, then walked up to one of the crates and typed a code into the panel on the side. The top of the crate slid open and Aurelius peered over the rim. “Good, it’s empty. Come here, Gral.”
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. . . .
“Get inside.”
Gral obediently climbed in.
“Now sit down.”
The giant monster sat with his knees tucked up to his chest and a third of his body still poking out of the crate. Aurelius stood back with a frown.
“Well?” Gabrian demanded.
“It’ll do.”
“Then let’s be on our way.”
Aurelius nodded and they turned to leave.
“Wait! Gral not comfy!”
Aurelius cast a quick look over his shoulder. “You have to stay there, Gral, or you’ll fly around the cargo bay like a giant pinball.”
“What is pinball?”
Aurelius sighed. “What happens to an egg if you drop it?”
“It crack and leak.”
“Yeah, that’s what will happen to you if you don’t stay in the crate.”
The troll’s eyes narrowed. “Gral stronger than egg.”
“Just trust me. You don’t want to leave that crate until I say you can.”
“Fine.” Gral screwed up his face in a fearsome pout. For just a second Aurelius felt sorry for him, a simple creature thrust into a complicated environment and forced to adapt.
Gral squandered that sympathy in the next instant by sticking out his fat green tongue and flicking it like a snake. Aurelius left the cargo bay with a snort of amusement. Gral was like a giant four-year-old—a four-year-old with a tendency for murderous rages and a penchant for raw meat.
* * *
They reached the cockpit and Aurelius and Gabrian took their prior places in the pilot and copilot’s chairs respectively. Reven was left to take one of the remaining two passenger’s seats. Aurelius cast a quick look over his shoulder to see how a
wolf
might do that and found the beast stuck on the other side of the cockpit doors, its shoulders too broad to even fit through the doorway.
“Ahh . . .” Aurelius’s mind was already racing to solve the problem. He was about to suggest that the wolf go join Gral in the cargo bay when the wolf’s lustrous black fur rippled and shimmered. Suddenly the fur seemed to peel back from Reven’s face; his snout grew shorter; and his ears became less pointed. His skin took on a pinkish hue and his whiskers disappeared. The monster stood up on its hind legs and suddenly, standing there before them was a giant, hairy, naked man. Aurelius grimaced at Reven’s nakedness and shrugged out of his coat.
“Here, put this on,” he said, tossing the furry brown coat at the wolf man.
Reven caught it with a snarl, revealing unnaturally pointy white teeth and prominent canines. Guessing at the reason for Reven’s sudden fury, Aurelius said, “Who better to wear such a coat than another wolf?”
“Would you wear a coat made from human skin?”
A disgusted look crawled onto Aurelius’s face. “I suppose not.”
Reven tossed the coat back and then turned sideways to squeeze through the door. He sat with his bare backside on one of the leather passenger seats. Aurelius grimaced and made a mental note to replace that seat when—
if
—he ever got back to his time.
“So where to, Wrinkles?” Aurelius turned to the old man and frowned. Gabrian had his eyes tightly shut and they were roving around rapidly beneath his eyelids. The old man was mumbling to himself, his lips moving, but only whispers coming out. “Hey! Would you quit that? You’re creeping me out.”
Gabrian’s eyes snapped open and he shot Aurelius an icy glare. “Start the ship.”
“Where are we going?”
“I will guide you.”
Aurelius shrugged and began flicking overhead switches. The engines came to life with a rising roar that began thrumming through the deck. After a shortened version of his usual preflight check, he lifted off at 5% thrust, and his ship rose quickly into the sky. He felt a giant hand of acceleration squashing him into his seat as he continued nudging the throttle up. The trees rose endlessly to one side, and to the other, the ancient ruins of Forgrim City. He peripherally noted Gabrian releasing his white-knuckled grip on the armrests long enough to strap himself in, and heard Reven fumbling around to do the same.
“Hey, Wrinkles, would you help the Hairball with his seat restraints?”
Gabrian waved his staff and whispered something unintelligible, to which there came a double
click
of buckles.
The treetops rose into view and soon they were looking out over an endless sea of snowy evergreens lying close beneath a layer of puffy white clouds and a dark, star-dappled sky. Aurelius redirected thrust from vertical to horizontal, and the roaring engines seemed to hold their breath for an indecisive second. Suddenly, the roaring returned, but twice as loud, and they were plastered violently to their seats. Gabrian’s face was frozen in a tight grimace, and Aurelius felt his hands being torn from the flight stick. He couldn’t breathe, and every beat of his frightened heart felt labored and slow. He held on to the controls with all his might until the pressure eased.
“Whoo! I’d forgotten how great that feels!” Aurelius said with a grin.
Gabrian turned to glare at him. “Do that again, elder, and I will kill you.”
“Oh lighten up, Wrinkles. We’re perfectly safe. I’m not about to kill myself just to get rid of you—tempting as that might be. So, which way?” Aurelius began banking in a languid circle.
Gabrian pointed toward a distant range of mountains which appeared to rise only slightly higher than the trees. “Into the Skull Mountains.”
Aurelius stopped banking and set course for the mountains. “That’s a cheerful name.”
“They were named thus for the thousands of skulls found cracked and shattered inside the caves.”
“Skulls?” Aurelius asked.
“Human skulls.”
“Ah . . . dare I ask how those skulls came to be there?”
“The skull is the only bone wolves won’t eat. Some superstition they have about it being bad luck.”
“The spirit dwells in the head,” said Reven with a growl. “Were we to eat it, that spirit would be forever trapped inside us. Who would want to share company with a human spirit?”
“As I said,” Gabrian finished.
“Wait, so we’re headed to where those giant wolves live?”
“Yes.”
“Is that where Malgore went?”
“I don’t know.”
“What? Then why are we—”
“Because for now, it’s as good a place as any for us to rest the remainder of the night, and for me to meditate on Malgore’s destination. And because I said so.”
Aurelius sighed. “If I didn’t need your help, you desiccated bag of bones . . .”
“If you didn’t need my help, then I wouldn’t need yours either and we could be happily rid of one another, but for the moment we are not so fortunate because we are both looking for the same thing.”
Aurelius snorted. “And you, Hairball? How come you decided to come along for the ride?”
“Honor demands it. You saved my life; now I must save yours.”
“You do realize that I couldn’t have stopped Gral from killing you.”
“Yet you tried.”
“And only succeeded because Wrinkles did something to that dumb brute to make him his slave. If anything, you owe Gabrian, not me.”
Reven bared his teeth at the old wizard. “The old one intervened on your behalf, not mine, and only because you put yourself in danger for my sake. Therefore, my honor still demands that I serve you, not him.”
Gabrian snorted. “Trust a wolf to find the most obscure trail to follow.”
Reven snarled again.
“Don’t worry,” Gabrian intoned. “You will see how mistaken you are before the end.”
Aurelius frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just fly, elder.”
“There,” Gabrian pointed. “Set us down by Ossein Lake; we’ll pass the rest of the night there.”
“Ossein Lake?” Reven growled. “You mean for us to spend the night by
Ossein
Lake?”
“Keep your snout out of it, wolf,” Gabrian replied.
“Hold on a minute, Wrinkles. Is there something I should know about?” Aurelius caught the old man and wolf trading glances over his shoulder. “Well?”
“Not a thing,” Gabrian replied.
“Reven?”
The wolf’s only reply was a snarl.
Aurelius heaved a deep sigh as he triggered the braking thrusters and gradually shifted to vertical thrust.
They set down upon the sandy shores of Ossein Lake with a gentle
thump
. “Well,” Aurelius began while unbuckling his seat restraints. “I’ve had just about enough of this. I’m going to bed. You two want to see your rooms, or are you two just going to cuddle up here in the cockpit?”
Reven and Gabrian wordlessly unbuckled and followed him back through the ship. Aurelius tried his best to avoid seeing Reven’s hairy nakedness, but short of stumbling around with both eyes shut there was no avoiding it. To make matters worse, Reven had a way of constantly blocking the way with his enormous frame.
They passed through the galley cum lounge and came to the rightmost of two corridors. Reven stood blocking the corridor and Aurelius had to look away to avoid going blind.
“Ah, Reven? Would you mind moving a little to the right?” Aurelius heard heavy footsteps and risked a glance to check if the way was clear. Thankfully he only caught a peripheral eyeful of hairy backside. Aurelius hurried down the corridor. The first door to the right was a narrow portal leading to the port gun turret. The second was one of the guest cabins. Aurelius passed a hand over the door controls and typed something into the keypad. “There,” he said, “now it’s set for general access. Who wants this room?”
Gabrian stepped inside before Reven could twitch. He waved his hand over the inner door controls in an awkward replica of the gesture he’d seen Aurelius make, and the door swished shut. The door swished open an instant later, and Gabrian asked, “How do I lock it?”
Aurelius smiled thinly. “Why, you have something to hide? Don’t worry, Wrinkles, I’ll knock. Thanks to Hairball here, I’ve seen enough of ugly naked guys that I have absolutely no desire to see whatever lurks beneath those moth-eaten robes.”
Gabrian returned Aurelius’s smile with equal frostiness and the door swished shut once more.
“Well . . .” Aurelius trailed off, turning to Reven and instantly regretting it. “We need to get you some clothes.”
“I don’t like clothes. They make me itch.”
“Yeah, well you’re making my eyes itch.”
After twenty minutes of searching his wardrobe and passing articles to the wolf to try on, Aurelius was left with a pile of stretched and torn clothes, none of which had properly fit Reven. At last Aurelius threw up his hands and said, “You know what, just be naked!” Aurelius turned to the pile of clothes with a look of dismay, wondering if he should bother packing them back into his wardrobe.
Not without washing them, that’s for sure.
. . .
Maybe I should just burn them.
There came a swish and rustle of fabric, and then, “Is this better?”
Aurelius turned to look and saw that Reven had whipped the sheets off his bed and tucked them around his body in a crude kind of toga. The silver thermal blanket in combination with the white sheet gave a stylish but anachronistic look to the clothes. Given Reven’s enormous size the sheets only came down to his knees, and there was a suspicious bulge lurking below his waist, but overall it was a reasonable attempt to cover up.
“It’ll do,” Aurelius said with a nod.
“Good. Where should I sleep?”
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
A few minutes later, Aurelius stood before the open door to the second of four guest rooms aboard the
Halcyon
. “Well, goodnight Hairball.”
Reven stepped inside the room and was about to wave his hand across the door to close it, when it occurred to Aurelius to ask, “Hold on wolfy. When you heard we were setting down beside Ossein Lake you seemed concerned about something. Care to enlighten me?” Reven hesitated, and Aurelius added, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell his wrinkledness.”
“It is a forbidden place. No one comes here.”
“Why?”
“It is haunted.”
“You’re joking right?”
“What is joking?”
“Ahh, in this case, saying something that isn’t true to make someone laugh.”
Reven’s green eyes narrowed. “I will never understand humans.” With that, he waved his giant hand across the controls, and the door swished shut in Aurelius’s face.
Aurelius frowned.
Great, another moody monster.
He was tempted to lock the wolf inside, and then do the same to Gabrian, but he suspected that the wolf could break the door without too much trouble, and Gabrian would just use magic to do the same. He’d have to trust them not to meddle with his ship while he slept.
With a sigh Aurelius turned and shuffled down the corridor to the captain’s quarters. He stepped inside his room, closed and locked the door behind him, and then flopped down on his bare mattress.
“Lights off.” The room fell into blackness, and he recalled with a smirk that he hadn’t told either Gabrian or Reven how to turn off the lights in their rooms. He hoped they wouldn’t break the fixtures to solve that problem.
Suddenly, the full measure of his fatigue came crashing down on him and it felt as though the room were spinning. In minutes his eyelids drifted closed and his consciousness descended into a world of cozy pre-dream nonsense, his mind rambling as it struggled to give order to the events of the previous day. Colors and shapes flashed and danced before his eyelids, spinning through his mind’s eye in a dizzying swirl. The transition to sleep was almost imperceptible, such that he couldn’t be sure whether he was awake or dreaming when he felt the cool brush of air against his face.
A chill crept through his body. He tried to move, but found he couldn’t. Panic hammered in his chest. A heavy weight pressed down on his sternum as though trying to silence his frantic heart, and nonsensical whispers began echoing close beside his ears. He tried desperately to sit up, to open his eyes, to do something! But he couldn’t so much as twitch. Shivery fear crept down his spine until he felt an overwhelming desire to run. Something was very, very,
wrong
.
Suddenly, he found himself in a dark forest, starkly lit by glowing green moss and crusty, pulsating red lichen. Monolithic icicles hung from branches overhead. Aurelius felt a vague sense of déjà vu, but again he felt that strange sense of wrongness. He felt naked and vulnerable. Watched. It was as though someone were standing right behind him, breathing in his ear. Malice was a palpable force reaching out for him from every side, but as he looked about, he could see nothing but trees and the jagged shadows cast by hanging curtains of ice. Then he heard familiar voices. He picked Gabrian’s voice out of the mix, then Gral the troll’s, and finally his own voice. Aurelius spun around in a dizzy circle to see first Gabrian, then Reven in wolf form, and then himself and finally Gral. They were picking a path through the trees. The feeling of déjà vu intensified and suddenly Aurelius realized that this was more a memory than a dream, except somehow he was remembering it all as though he’d been a hidden observer to the scene. He could see himself as though it weren’t him at all he was watching. It might have been his twin but that he knew for certain he’d actually been walking through this very stretch of forest only a few hours ago. Everything was exactly as it had been then, except that now, in his dream, he felt another presence a host of presences. Like a thousand eyes watching him from the shadows. As Aurelius watched himself and the others walk by, his dream self was peering into the dark shadows between the roots and trees and fallen branches for any sign of what might be watching them, but there was nothing.
Then came the unintelligible whispers he’d heard upon falling asleep, but this time he understood them perfectly. They sounded with repetitive echoes inside his head as though a whole army was speaking in unison.
What are you doing here, elder? You don’t belong here! Leave us!
Overcome by terror, Aurelius ran as fast as he could, rushing through the forest in a blur of red and green lights shimmering upon the glittering curtains of ice. Yet no matter how fast he ran, the feeling of being watched remained, and the whispers dogged his every step.
You are not welcome here, elder. We will not warn you again.
He continued running until he ran straight into a hanging grotto of ice which completely blocked his way. He skidded to a stop in the crunchy brown needles and turned to run back the way he’d come. That was when he saw the shadows—thousands of dark, black shadows seeping out of the forest and walking toward him with hands reaching for his throat.
Aurelius woke with a gasp and shot out of bed.
“Lights!”
The lights snapped on just in time for Aurelius to see an inky black pool seeping under his door. He blinked furiously, unable to believe his eyes, and then the pool was gone, leaving the shiny deck spotless. Aurelius’s mind raced to come up with an explanation. The door was airtight; nothing could have fit under it.
Maybe he had imagined the shadow.
But then a terrifying image flashed through Aurelius’s sleep-clouded mind: shadows seeping out of a dark forest with hands reaching for him with malevolent intent. . . .
And he knew that somehow they had been real.
* * *
Aurelius ran his hand over the door controls and rushed out into the corridor. The lights snapped on. He looked both ways quickly before he spotted a dark black shape oozing along the deck. Aurelius hurried after it, trying to keep his footsteps as quiet as possible. His hand automatically dipped to his holster only to find it empty, and he swore under his breath. He should have replaced his sidearm from the weapons he’d been delivering for Freedom. The cargo hold was a veritable armory and here he was without a gun.
Aurelius followed the shadow past Reven’s room, and he thought about stopping to wake the wolf for backup, but he didn’t have time to explain. When Aurelius reached the door to Gabrian’s room, he watched the inky blackness flow into a puddle and ooze under it. Aurelius stopped just outside the door with his heart hammering in his chest. He was about to pass his hand over the door controls and barge inside when he heard a booming voice rattle through the door.
“What is an elder doing in our time?”
Aurelius pressed his ear to the door.
“He came here by accident,” came Gabrian’s reply.
“Send him back! His presence in our time is unwelcome; he is like a grain of sand beneath one’s eyelid, scratching, scratching, scratching! Tempting us to waken. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
“You wouldn’t dare to waken without the necromancers to give you form. You would be in torment every waking moment.”
“I am in torment already!”
“I cannot send him back—not yet—I need the relic first.”
“Then find it!”
“I am trying.”
“Leave us now. . . .”
“Wait! I need your help.”
“You shall not have it.”