Read The Lore Anthology: Lore of the Underlings: Episodes 1 - 5 Online
Authors: John Klobucher
The vell
Arrowborne tried to rise. The boys struggled but held him down.
Then
another fall began… one of fine needles… thousands of them… shed like a shower of silver tears… teardrops from the pining Liar’s Tree for the leaves it lost a season too soon…
Lacking
any shelter or shield, Morio bent as best he could to let his rucks’ padded back take the bulk. It worked… in a way… except that he now stood pinned and poked from shoulder to shoe in a topcoat of quills.
“Looks like a prickupine,” someone smirked, “Plump and ripe for plucking.”
“Or a porkling peppered with prickly cloves and skewered for the spit.”
“But no. S
ee how the needles crown him? He’s more Lord of the Lard than pig in a poke.”
“Yes
, swillbag,” hissed Finder Hamyx, suddenly sprung to life again and recovering from his long silence of shame. “All hail the Semperor of Swine!”
“The Liar King!”
roared elderwoman Pum, who too had awoken as if from a spell.
Boxbo and Ixit joined in together with a girlish giggle:
Truth lies in a royal pain
So don’t mind if we pick your brain
“That sounds offal, Boxbo.”
“Exactly, Ixit.”
At last Morio’s knee buckled under the heartless barrage and he seemed almost certain to succumb, bough-beaten and buried by the unforgiving fall. A moment more and it would all be over. The battle lost. The man gone.
But just then the rains abruptly stopped and the winds turned a new direction, gusting strong and warm from the south. Morio filled his lungs with a new breath, a puff of life, and a wonder befell him — a small wonder well aimed, as if by an unseen hand. From high atop the Liar’s Tree a heavy seedcone tumbled down, down at a dead drop like a hard truth cast from heaven. The cone had the shape of a wildeboar’s heart, with four full pods and every edge tipped in an irony fang, so it met no match in the snaky vine that tethered
him to his hell-bound berth. It cut the cord and the man ran for his life, given again.
The folk were confounded.
“He lives!”
“Huh?!”
“It can’t be. How?”
“Who cares how? You owe me. Now — pay up, pay up, the lot of you!”
“Not so fast, Lunxy. Look where he goes.”
“Back to the Black and Blue?!”
“No…”
Out from under the ironwood’s reach, Morio stopped for a moment and shed his mortally wounded ruckskin. “Pity,” he blurted, out of breath. “You were a fine old friend.” He made to tuck his tattered shirt but suddenly stiffened, looking legward, with a boyish blush. “Whoopsie! There we go. Hooo…” After a solid minute or so, he shook one leg and then the other, his face flush but serene. “Some business just won’t wait!” he proclaimed, pouring forth with a frothy laugh.
Three of the onfoot outer Gu
ard moved in and quickly surrounded him. They pressed their pikes to his back and sides. “Go now!” ordered one.
“
I’d love to sir,” said Morio. “That’s oh so kind of you, but… ‘Mission accomplished’ and ‘Anchors aweigh’ already, I am relieved to say!”
The Guard put a boot to Morio’s
buttocks and kicked him into gear. That launched a long march toward the thicket of troops with a poke or prod for every step forward.
“Who knew that a pant could be so absorbent
?” marveled the prisoner as they went. “And then treat the nose to such a scent… of heaven-sent mersy petals to boot?!”
The Guard, less
enamored of Morio’s pants, gave him another whack in the back.
A column of pikesmen
, more armor than flesh, lined the last of their course. As Morio passed they thrust weapons aloft and chanted low the verses of a wordless dirge ominous and old. Ahead at the heart of the hold they marked, a glow of soft gold awaited… cast by a bale of light, sweet crude… spun oil just now laid down and lit.
Here
Morio’s keeper sent him sprawling, headlong into the haloed ground with one final blow from behind. “Down, clown prince.” The hammering nailed him — bound to be whiplashed and cross-eyed as well — while from his hair fell a pound and a peck of the ironwood’s precious nettles. Oddly, those had done no harm, for the deep heap of curls he wore atop had made a cushion to catch them in style and spare his skull a certain riddling. But he was on his knees now blinking back a haze… a man adaze and confused.
In
more or less the bat of a lash Syar-ull stood over his kneeling prey, this sack of skin awallow in the stinking mud and soiled black blades all once sweet and green. The master Guard looked to call for his mount but the bull chevox needed no command. Sovereign charged hard from the rear, eyes ablaze and snorting foul fire. With the right of his two great goring horns, he hooked the marked man by the brace of his britches to hang him high and helpless.
“Well whoa is me,” noted Morio
, fighting back a wince. He looked glassy-eyed and a little woozy. “Regards, everyone! Hello down there. Glad to see you and you again… albeit in duplicate and spinning… I didn’t know that you all had twins… Anyway, where were we my friends? Where did we leave off earlier?”
The black Guard pressed the point of the strangers’ sword
of pearly white to Morio’s throat. This time he spoke his sentence songless in words both clear and hoarse. “Now shall you die like dogswine to slaughter. Prepare your eyes for darkness and your pitiful soul for the fires below.”
Arm and blade drew back to strike
when a sound of horror stood all still. A poisonous noise. It was the vell.
Arrowborne howled a baleful howl with a soul-filling cold to chill even the bloodless.
As if his grave wound had been healed, he bounded from the bittersweet seedbed that the brothers made for him and at the death about to be. It mattered not that Syar-ull was the finest soldier of Syland. No man alive had the power to change a vell’s mind once in motion. Arrowborne met him high ahoof and kicked the broad boneblade from his grasp.
The weapon went spinning skyward
, high then higher than a bird, then floated to land in phantom flight right to the hand of the man of red, the brother Treasuror, Fyryx Hurx. In that same instant the vell fell hard, aslump on the ground in a motionless heap.
Fyryx raised the sword for silence.
Eerie quiet gripped the Keep.
“This is the devil’s night… as if
grim Prince Vysitor himself reaches from hell to play us for puppets. He offers us a devil’s deal, to let his demons win the light or lose ourselves to this dance in the dark. No good can come of either.”
A weariness weighed on his voice.
“Bring the taller two. Let me look on all three at once.”
“Treasuror, sir!” answered Faal-syr eagerly.
As he waited, Fyryx dropped the arm to his side without the slightest glance at the foreign hilt his fingers held. For a moment his eyes seemed absent, lost.
The young woman was first to come, let to walk alone untouched. She strode
in steady and sure. Behind her followed two pair of the pikesmen herding the larger John Cap like a bull. He seemed to like making them labor some, though that caper came at a heady cost — his hat was lost along the way.
Syar-ull marshaled them all arow, aside the dangling Morio. He barked and growled and gnashed his teeth, both hungry and angry to bite.
Carefully, John Cap cocked his head and whispered up to their high-borne friend. “Hanging in there, ‘O?”
“In high spirits,” answered Morio.
“Keep it up.”
“Oh, yes I can, all for Miss Vaam’s plan!”
“Shhh!”
Fyryx paced the stra
ngers’ row yet this time eyed them not. It was downcast that he kept.
“Odd invaders are
these three… but how did we go so weak?…
“And why did a part of our heart turn their way as ally to turn on us? A vell of the ull, from the Semperor’s
stable… Arrowborne, what have you done? Are you fevered from your wound? Is that the reason you protect them… at the price of your very life? Perhaps you’ll wake and shun their souls…
“But the beast rules tonight. It cannot be denied. The die is cast till dawn.”
Fyryx raised his gaze from the ground and found the black mask of the master Guard. “Syar-ull!” he ordered with speech again strong. “Take these to the Letting Pen. Hold them there alive for now but surely locked away, deep down, bound in devil’s moss if you must… feet to the flames as you see fit.”
“With pleasure, sir
my sir.”
“Then pitch my battle tent
, out beyond the wall by the wood and make camp.”
“Sir. As Treasuror says, Guard does.”
“Boys! Ayron, Ayr, Pyr! Go gather the Guard of the southern shores. Fetch pike poles and good, thick limberwood sheets from their packs and fashion a litter to bear poor Arrowborne away. When you reach camp, lay a bed of soft straw in the fore chamber of my tent, near the door. Then set him there to rest. He must not pass this night alone.”
“Yes Uncle.”
And off they ran.
Fyryx suddenly noticed the folk.
“Now what are you waiting for?! Someone, clear this forsaken field and shepherd what’s left of our herd back to town. It’s time to send the Treasured home.”
Fyryx slowly shed his wet coat and hat then laid them carefully at the foot of the thick mat of bristlebush on the floor before him. Though soft sleep seemed to beckon, he showed no sign of napping abed this night. Instead the restless man straightened and turned about, brushing aside a flap stitched of old sector flags to emerge from the battle tent’s aft chamber and into its dim, high-domed meeting hall.
With measured steps he reached a pike-mounted torchure wheel of molded malaphant bone at center of the circular room and took from one of its seven spokes a short handtorch, soot upon the handle but flame aglow of gold. Its soft light seemed to soothe his reddened eyes. It smelled of sweet fat and comfort.
He let the glow lead him to a slumbering lamp that hung by the tent’s yawning fore door, a dark way of passage made stable this night. Fyryx lit it by slipping the torch through a collar just below and the warm flame flared and licked at the air. Then he crossed the threshold, the line where light cast shadow aside, and without a sound slid gingerly in. His red hair and beard, turned briefly ablaze by the aura of burning oil, faded into embers.
As his eyes grew full to the half-light, Fyryx found the vell’s still but beautiful form curled like a babe in a cradle of straw. The three boys, his treasured nephews, sons of his brother Ayryx, had labored hard and done just as he had asked of them.
Never before had they been more like men. But, the mission met, he sent them home to night the moon’s last hours in their own beds. Boys or men, they would stand stronger by the Keep well slept.
They had not gone willingly.
Fyryx knelt on the edge of the fragrant straw but the hilt of the strangers’ sword pressed into his ribs beneath the web-woven umbershirt he always wore. He unlet the lash of spring vine that bound it to his blood-snake belt and set it down on the floor. Then he placed his right hand gently on the vell’s smooth, tan coat, not far from the heart, and closed his eyes.
Cold.
So cold. Beyond the cold of death. It ran up his arm, standing each hair on end.
He sought the signs of life. The heart beat still though only an echo. The chest yet rose yet further it fell.
Breath, yes, but shallow, grave. The chill wisp of a passing ghost.
Then he could hold the touch no more. He took back his hand but barely felt fingers. He shook them alive, slumping back on his heels. His eyes opened wide and wet.
“Heavens help me,” he whispered aloud. The vell quivered but it could not hear him.
Fyryx looked on Arrowborne’s hind left leg, all curled up, too hideous to wash, and gnashed his ground-down teeth. “I shall slay every oddcat that prowls this sacred land, I vow by my blood, I swear.” The wound grew still with an ooze of its own… a sinister stew of sinew, skin, and bone abubble in colors unknown…
The chamber’s air went heavy and damp, beading into summer sweat on what warm flesh it found. Fyryx wiped his brow and noticed the feeling returned to his fingertips. Now he turned onto his hands and knees and crawled like a child through the golden straw to rest close to the face of the angel-made beast. And there at last he sat.
“Do you remember the day, Arrowboy? The day we came to make this Keep, so, so long ago?”
The vell kept quiet and stiff as stone, its lidless eyes icy, disturbingly blank.
“We knew it was coming. For months of moons we knew, all since the Guard of the ull returned with word of a far new home, the
promised land at last and hope. The Treasured talked of nothing else.
“We watched our parents ready and plan, and helped our families pack. The trip would be long and hard they said. And it was. But our lives had been hard already, ever lost in this savage Wilderness, so it was that many survived.
“Those left made a grand caravan nonetheless, winding our way from the northern wastes, climbing slowly the slopes of the Hail of Shales to the shadeless sweep of the high, flat plain. Scores of tired traveler’s carts. Teams of the strongest chevox, yoked or free, but all bearing our burdens. A small herd of boven bulls and cows. And the teeming folk, thick afoot.
“I remember Ayrie and me, riding in a creaky cart that tilted to one side. We lay in a bed of bush hay to cushion the bumps. You trotted alongside, with a smile that only a vell can smile. The warm morning sun washed our faces.
So pure and bright. I’d never felt the likes of it. Even the dust in our mouths tasted good. If I close my eyes I can taste it still and see that sweet new light, shining on the boys we were…
“It was on the faces of others too.
The peace of a people being reborn, free to tell folklore anew. And who could deny us childish dreams? We were not prophets or ages-old sages, but nomads who’d never planted a seed. Who could foretaste the fruit of this day?
“No… I was all of seven, my brother just turned ten that spring. You, Arrowboy, you were already ancient yet acted a pup. So we played. As our columns crossed the empty plain to a distant dot, a speck in the hazy far where prey birds flew to flock, we played without a care.
A game of names or ‘mock the folk’. Racing carts. A gumpod ball you chased and caught. We played as the white sun of noon sailed the sky’s wide blue, a prow of hot to plow the cool… A duel of spit. A wrestling match that always followed it (which Ayrie won each time). A round of your favorite hop-a-vell to entertain the Guard.
“Midday passed yet we ate as we rode, unwrapping cold flyrat from leaves of swamp palm, breaking off chunks of dark brickbread, downing gulps of knownot juice. Between bites, Ayrie leaned over the side of the cart and pulled up clumps of tough, musky scrubgrass, all but falling out each time. He fed them to me then
I to you from the palm of my outstretched hand.
“With the end of lunch we were sleepy and bored, so Ayrie and I both napped. Not you of course. And you had a joke — to poke our backs and bellies with the cold of your nose just as our eyes closed, every time we nodded off. But that only worked a while…
“When we woke the crossing was well past half and the distant dot had blossomed into a deep and misty wood, a forest that rose on the horizon with a halo of prey birds high overhead. Still long away, hours thought Ayrie. With all else exhausted, but one game remained. It was Ayrie’s idea. Though we’d have to be quiet…”
Fyryx leaned forward, his lips near to Arrowborne’s ear. “Keep it secret…” he whispered. Then back he sat again, noting not a flinch on the vell’s frozen face.
“So we came to counting the folk. No one knew the number then. No one ever asked. They dared not find it different from the Semperor’s Rule of Threes, set when he chose the first Treasured ones, fathers and fathers before Ayrie and me. But you were there boy, you knew them all. And when the young Semperess herself, the beautiful Amyly, gave them the gift of a farewell song, you heard each note from her fabled lips. I know but the naked words:
Three thousand, three hundred, thirty-three
Heroes every one
Cast to dwell in this hellish place
To keep the blood of their people safe
Left alone to wander lost
In wastes no foe would know or brave
Hidden for some fearsome day
Foreseen…
Three thousand, three hundred, thirty-three
Jewels in the Semperor’s vault of souls
Treasured in our hearts to hold
Forever
“It is said she sang as an angel… from childhood raised a Voyce of the Court, but enchanted in time the Semperor so… he fell in desperate love… and banished his first to take her as bride… What does an angel sound like, boy
?…”
Fyryx snapped back with a start, having nearly slipped into dreamy sleep. “Oh, I’m sorry
Ary… Arrowboy… I must have… So, the counting…
“First, the Guard. That was easy. For thirty-three there were and thirty-three there would always be.
Fiercest fighters of all the known. Bravest of brave, true to the bone. One for each sector of Syland. Twenty-two bore the bounty of our oceanlands’ twin tides, sibling shores of brothers in arms never breached, whence rivers rose as blood aflow from the rim of the rugged east, running red by the stormy Syar Sea and westward down to drown in the thirsty Sea of Mer’n, deep blue but bedeviled — these gave us the outer Guard, proud soldiers of the ‘syr’. Eleven more were nobler still, warriors all of the inner ‘ull’, the sectors of secret, landlocked and walled, which held the Semperors’ city strong and ringed this wild heart, our home. Where you were born, Arrowboy.
“Next were the elders, we knew we’d need to tally those. They tended to die… though age and ill-health were the least of their woes. It seems that’s why the Semperor, so wise and well served by the eyes of spies, ruled their number
so high as three hundred.
“Remember old Cornox, the boven man? Just a day before our departure, as Ayrie and I picked up pricklets in a thornblind down by the tar pool’s edge, we heard him come with another for a sit unseen on the round rocks. The other whispered a bit, but fell silent with a slap. Then the boven man began. In a voice that rattled of death he wheezed a musty tale, but nothing like we knew, all of the elders’ origin, of how they came to be. We couldn’t believe our ears and listened hard with all we had. This story was thick with politics.
A lesson in the leader’s art, some of it dark.”
Fyryx coughed up something in his throat to make it go raspy and rough. “It went like this…”
So you believe the rhymes of children, do you?
Songs of the elders’ election? O, how they were handpicked, selected from the wisest and most steadfast of all the land! Each by the touch of the Semperor himself, Poxum LVIII, the Foreknowing, Marshal of the Guarding Armies, Pilot Admiral of the Two-Seas Fleet, Keeper of the City at Syar-ull. Ooo, yes indeed. Then celebration! Their affirmation, solemn and warm, in the great cathydra’s Heroes Hall at Thynes, and the adoration of thousands strong, a throng awaiting them that night, beyond the storied rosewood doors…
Now surely that’s what some saw. But another side of the stone there was, the side in the soil with crawling things. Do you catch my meaning? It wasn’t just the good and pretty
that the Semperor picked. No, he was too clever not to toss some gutworms and bloodgrubs into the mix and be rid of them easy and quick.
So for every two of merit anointed he chose as third a foe, a voice of dissent appointed for the Wilderness to swallow up silent. From popular prayerman Xole of Mer’n-syr who preached of the Semperors’ power grown too strong, to the ancient Sons of the Shadow Guard forever claiming a bloodline fraud from crimes in Sempyre times gone by, to an angler named Wyll Kyll and crew who, in the royal port of Pyth-syr, made a stink of keeping their fishy catch for just themselves to sell — five score such were called to appear at the Semperor’s court without delay for the honor of joining the Treasured there by the eve of Mourner’s Day.
A few dared decline as unwell or deceased, but most of those soon were “encouraged” to come, suddenly looking less sick and less dead. Only an alliance of eight remained, five men and three women (one surprisingly young) from the southern-most shores, as a thwart to the Semperor’s will. They fled to the foothills of snow-capped Mount Taan and there held fort with a small force of men, simple sectormen, with loyalty deep as a bag of gold, if you know what I mean. They watched and waited for the Guard to come but day upon day all was quiet. And then one morn from the mountain itself a lone messenger, encloaked in cloud, descended. The Semperor would meet them for talks, he announced, seven days hence at Floramore, in the Taan-syr Gardens by the sea. Suspicious though some were to accept, even they could not cast away such an unheard of concession as this.
The Eight arrived on a glorious day and were greeted with gifts and spiced sweets. A line of young maidens beckoned them on, onto a path of petals pink,
and sprayed them with fragrant perfume as they passed. So here they left their protectors behind. They came to a field of wild plume in bloom and a table set beyond their dreams. Platters replete with succulent meats, rare delicacies and decadent treats, dish after tempting dish, each more sumptuous than the next, and mugglets of pure silver pom wine to drink. At the head, the white-bearded Semperor himself, who stood with welcoming warmth and wide arms. “My children, precious people, how good you would come. Please…” He motioned for them to be seated.
But before they could sit there appeared in their midst a sight that beguiled the eye of each.
A creature bejeweled of colors bright, a flying flower in flittering flight. And then another. And suddenly more. “Enchanting, aren’t they,” said the Semperor. “But, be careful friends, don’t let one choose you. For it shall follow you forever, whispering worries of death in your ear till you’re mad, mad enough to hasten the end by your own hand. Oh, and did I mention that they are particularly drawn to the delightful scent of lillylorn that you wear? Of course, if you’d rather join my fine Guard under cover of yonder carriage…” The Semperor waved his steady hand toward a gleaming, gilded wagon — a team of combed and ribboned chevox yoked before it.
All of the alliance but one fled for their lives from the beautiful beasts. The lone holdout, a powerful merchant named Doolox Slyne, was defiant.
“No, dear Lord of Lies, Poxum the Pretender! I shall not trade the treasure of my lifetime for your feast of fools and garden games.”