The Oldvaults Under Deadman’s Pile
“I might swim more often in Leper’s Branch Lake, if it weren’t for the bonefish swimming under its surface. Damned spikers killed my grandpa, when I tossed him in with stones tied around his ankles as a joke.”
“Hands off that cup!”
Wet gurgling sounds.
“Old Murg sells more or less the same garters as always. Too much the same. He buys his stuff too fresh from the grave; the worms haven’t had the chance to clean the last man’s-”
In the town of Little Comfort, within its most frequented chrypt, the voices of the regular patrons repeated themselves in the ears of a hunched old man as he plied a path along the row of columns least-limned in the light of the long fire. “Bonefish… fish… fish…” echoed one. “From the grave… the grave… grave…” trailed another.
The man had heard the voices and their echoes often enough. He passed through the same vault - Little Comfort’s Last Rest - every day of his adult life. His own tohmb, scarcely more than a carved hollow in the chief crag of the town, could only be reached by passing through The Last Rest. The only way for any wayfarer to enter Little Comfort proper; Little Comfort, with its repurposed Tohmbs, its headstone tents, all set under the shadows of high cliffs, with terse brown grass and dead shrub yards; the only passage into this harbor of the living was through that convivial house of marble.
Even so the man took pains to be inconspicuous. As he skulked, wringing his fingers to a dryness so sparky that it endangered his sere clothes, he mumbled clipped fragments of sentences:
“Never saw me go. Won’t see me come. Hid it nice. No one finds. My finest treasure. Dug from one hole. Buried in another. Now, a buyer. Quiet. No one must find. My treasure. Buy a better tohmb. Maybe find a mance. Buy a new body.”
Thusly punctuated did the man’s silent footsteps carry him from the inn, up the tangled cobblestone ways, to his home’s door of barbed iron.
As the man opened this barrier with a squeal of metal and squealed it shut behind him, something shifted in his face. Cold comfort though such a portal might have seemed to any ordinary living man, for the old man it functioned like a word of hypnosis. A peace slackened his muscles. His mutters ceased. He went and lit a taper on a nearby ledge, then stood before a mirror and stared at himself. His hands found the basin. He set his thumbs against the rim and leaned toward the water to wash some grave dirt off his chin.
So relaxed had the man become that he did not see the deformation of shadow in the corner by the bedslab - not until this deformation had stolen up behind his shoulder in the reflection. The old man jerked instinctively. But he stopped short of turning. He held perfectly still, as he felt the cold promise of a deep cut, just under the spot of dirt on his chin. In the mirror the razor gleamed.
“Don’t move,” spoke the hooded man who held the old one. The voice was deep but somehow nasally also. “Don’t blink. Don’t even breathe except by way of reply. One breath shall stand for yes. Two breaths, for no. Do you understand?”
The man breathed once. The moment he completed his respiration the knife - which had relaxed - closed back to his throat. To inhale again now would amount to suicide.
“I saw where you buried the map,” the deep-voiced man went on. “Out of the crevice, up on the crags. Two rows of headstones rising from the parched heath, like the skin of a mummy, topped with tongue-colored heather fronds waving in the wind. But I didn’t see this: which grave did you bury it in? Too dark at night. I don’t want to waste my time digging them all. You resurrectors will have pulled the wares from any stones under the sky already. Oh dearie me, you’re turning purple. I’d better ask a yes-er or a no-er. Now don’t lie! Did you bury the map in the westernmost grave in the northmost row of the headstones on the parched heath?”
The old man took two gasping breaths.
So went the interrogation. The man with the knife asked after each headstone on the parched heath in its turn. Then the knife would come away from the old resurrecter’s throat, giving him a chance to breathe his reply. Each time his gasps came as a pair of twins - no. Then the knife would close once more, that razorous shining edge at his wrinkled neck.
“And what about ‘Onion Darling - 37 years, Little Comfort’,” the hooded man went on. “Three stones from the west on the bottom row?”
The old man drew in one deep rasp, exhaled, then hesitated on the second.
In a flash the knife closed with the throat. In the shadow’s reflection on the mirror, teeth flashed in a grin. The shadow tisked. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Getting snuck by Killing Birds with Rocks. ‘Birdsey’ to my friends. My friend Othelmedir, he’s the linguist. The master mancer. And Fogg - be glad I’m not Fogg. I’m just the little stewboy of the crew. Though I must give myself credit where credit is due: I do throw a mean stone. You’ve been had by lowly fodder, you old gravedigger.”
As he spoke the shadow unconsciously loosened the razor-edge of the knife from the bared throat. A man of action might have thrown his shoulderblades against his soliloquizing antagonist. But the old gravedigger was by nature a poltroon. And a fool. He said, “You’re mushroom food, Birdsey.”
“Hmm?” asked Birdsey.
“Map goes to the Foundation. Place for dead. Not living. You’ll perish.”
Birdsey seemed to ponder. He drew his knife away. The old man shifted forward and to the side to extricate himself, but a flash of shadow and steel came quicker. The old man felt pain on his temple. Then the little taper, and the reflection, and consciousness, vanished.
“Perhaps you’re right, heh, heh,” said Birdsey. “It’d be a shame to cut that old throat now. Firstly, because you were so obedient - up till that last word. Second, because you’ve made a long life on this mountain. Ahhh, but Fogg will pull out my fingernails if I leave you breathing.”
Birdsey cut the old man’s throat.
A man with the mien of a redwood tree commenced an act of kneeling on a tiled corridor floor. So proudly stood this man’s height over the masonry of the corridor that it seemed an aeon passed in the span of time it took his left knee joint to bend, his right to touch the ground. His two iron-colored eyes were set in black skin. They scanned the merely-terrestrial stone. In his hand the man cupped a glowing blue ball of thin strands, like yarn woven from the stuff beneath a fire’s coals, and this shed the only light in the dusty passage. When the tall man’s right knee finally reached terra-firma, he gently pushed the wisp of light forward along the tiles. Shadows danced on the walls from heaps of ossature. Before it reached the end of the darkened passage, the momentum of the ball expired.
“I can’t figure north from south on this map,” said a voice from behind the tall man. Killing Birds with Rocks - Birdsey - stepped into view. Birdsey was a small and wiry man, especially beside the monolith currently occupying the corridor, and he hunched now with his sideburns bristling down over an unfurled scroll of leather. “It’s unlike any catacombs I ever sacked. Good sir Othelmedir, do those bones have any pointers?”
Othelmedir rubbed a hand through the salt and pepper of his short, cropped curls. “Not to strangers,” he said. “And no relations of mine whisper among the present.”
“A waste of my air,” spoke a third voice; a deep voice, and the body to which that voice surely belonged thundered into the light of the glowing trail. Fogg, third man, emerged like a mammoth. Fogg’s skin was alabaster white, and sheathed muscles that looked as if they went beyond the scope of natural man. Fogg’s clothes were woven with tusks and ribs from a variety of animals (human among them) with each rib or tusk filed to a serrated shape. Fogg’s two-handed sword wagged by his hip. Fogg’s enormous quadricep, following his eye as it noticed a skull among a nearby strewage of bone, stamped the skull to powder.
“Not wasted yet,” Birdsey countered. He turned so that the glowing trail limned the map more clearly. “heh, heh. If the scratches on this leather usher us to a genuine trove, a little gravediggery is small fare.”
Othelmedir raised one sharp eyebrow a fraction of a millimeter. The primordial man said, “Waste. Just full-dead and marauded dust. No souls.” He glared up at Othelmedir (though Fogg was tall, Othelmedir was yet taller) as if daring a rebuke.
“Regarding the space above that particular dismantled armature,” said Othelmedir, “you are correct.”
The three men followed the line left by Othelmedir’s orb. Othelmedir bent and retrieved his glowing tangle when they came to the intersection where it had stopped. He repeated the maneuver with the next corridor, and the next. Birdsey carried a lamp, but oil and wood were precious on the mountain. The ball was their chief light. Their path carried them into a low-ceilinged vault, lined with pillars notched in a hundred alcoves, each alcove sporting a skull. The dead-jabber that was common in the Oldvaults of Deadman’s Pile - especially the lower catacombs - hissed within the chamber. Fogg’s two-handed sword was now in his hands; the pale savage eyed the chamber darkly.
“I hear no words with rotten syllables,” said Othelmedir. “No hostile ghost mutters in the throng.”
“What are they saying?” asked Birdsey.
“Nothing worth repeating.”
“Slurs? Insults?”
“Ghosts this deep are cracked, brittle as driftwood.” Othelmedir shrugged. “The speech defies comprehension, but a threat carries its own signature.”
“Nothing shiny,” Fogg grumbled as he tossed a skull from an alcove and squinted in the vacant space. “Not one sparkling disc. It’s all been combed.”
“We’ll be dragging gold out by the sled if the ship’s real,” said Birdsey. He matched Fogg’s displaced head with a stone he threw from his sling - it ricocheted off of the inner wall of a pillar-alcove and knocked the skull loose.
“If.”
“Three separate accounts corroborated the myth of the ship in the frozen tohmb,” said Othelmedir. “The testimony came from both Little Comfort and Lower Trestle; from the living and the un-living. The story holds. Locating the old roads drawn in the leather map presents our difficulty. Locating the road, and circumventing whatever protects the Mailed Flayer’s remains.”
“Mailed Flayer?” Birdsey’s ensuing laugh shifted up an octave. “heh, heh. I never heard about what was interred in this tohmb.”
“Perhaps the title misleads. That was the rumor from the ghost. A Mailed Flayer named Angstlich; holy and unholy servant of Sang, The Scratcher.”
“heh, heh.”
“Stop trembling,” said Fogg to Birdsey. “It’s only bones.”
“But consider, my strapping chum. Bones are deadlier than muscle when they’re moving on their own.”
“Bones can be crushed.” To emphasize his point, Fogg’s two-handed sword returned to its sheath, Fogg’s one-handed morningstar emerged from its loop, and Fogg’s sledgehammer arm pulverized another skull in another hollow.
Othelmedir marched to the exact middle of four pillars, where his glowing orb had stalled. Fogg’s black eyes, Birdsey’s narrow ones, and the empty sockets of a score of skulls all stared at the tall and thin mancer, underlit in the faint glow of sapphire. Othelmedir intoned, the same phrase spoken over and over, deadspeech, the language of the dead and the scholars. “Fehér uj sinonak. Fehér uj sinonak. Fehér uj sinonak.”
With Othelmedir’s understanding and orb lighting their way, the three walked a short time later into a smaller round room. This room was an intersection of five paths. Four large byways opened into cardinal directions, the three men having entered from the east. The fifth way was down. A railless aperture spanned most of the floor. As Othelmedir leaned over the lip - and he could lean far indeed - the mancer descried a narrow stairway. Little more than a foot in width, this stair descended beyond sight.
Othelmedir extended his arm and released his orb. It plummeted, leaving a midair streak of blue. It was still falling as Othelmedir, then Birdsey, then Fogg set their feet on the narrow descending steps.
As the three dropped foot by foot to this lower epoch of the Oldvaults, they sensed a change in atmosphere. The dwellers on Deadman’s Pile had long ago inured themselves to the various odors of the various states of decay, from fresh blood, to the first bloated stages of rot, to desiccation. This new odor was not unfamiliar, but nor was it common. It was a smell like the memory of some primordial species of mildew, mildew that had been the apex of a fungal world in an older Time. The stairs and the walls of the hole transitioned from the cold grey of bland stone, to a fuzzy whitish texture of dead moss; then to coal-black, covered in soot and deeply shelved.
“Othelmedir,” said Birdsey, his echo slowly moving away below and above him. “Your magic ball has been only a fleck in the black for long moments. I think it swells again at last.”
“The descent spans many centuries,” said Othelmedir.
“All the way to the Foundation?”
“So the stone suggests.” The cant of Othelmedir’s words broadened as the three stepped down the last round of the stairs, and plumbed an open space. The floor was flat, unmortared stone. The walls showed some working. Huge iron stakes covered in flaking rust were driven sporadically into the various rock faces, in clusters of eight.
“Not likely we’ll meet other looters,” Birdsey mused as Othelmedir lifted his orb and picked a passage to follow. “These cavities might be a thousand years old; the looting of them, a hundred years.”
The last word of each of Birdsey’s sentences reverberated ahead of them in the silence. “Looters… looters… looters… Years… years… years…”
Fogg said, “Be nice to have a donkey.”
“Donkey… donkey… donkey…”
Birdsey cast the pale giant a puzzled glance. “Why?”
“Why?… why?… why?…”
“To haul out more of this boat treasure. That was the way of old chryptsackers.”
“Treasure… treasure… treasure… Sackers… sackers… sackers…”
“My dear Othelmedir,” said Birdsey, turning back to the mancer, “will there be wards on this mailed flayer’s tohmb?”
“Tohmb… tohmb… tohmb…”
Othelmedir had been walking with eyes closed, murmuring his other language. Now the iron eyes opened, looked back at his comrades, and saw the nerves on Birdsey’s face. “Watch for the mechanical traps,” he warned. “My attention goes to runes and curses.”
“Traps… traps… traps… Curse… curse… curse…”
All of these echoes seemed to spend a very long time in dying, as if the trio could follow them as fast as the echoes could move away. These repetitions seemed to acquire a tone of their own as they went. “Curse” faded like the last gasp of spite from the lips of a dying man.
They traversed several more lengths of corridor. The next moment of intrigue for Birdsey came when they entered a passage where the walls had been more finely chiseled. As Othelmedir’s ball rolled down its length, the blue line revealed ten perfectly spaced alcoves, five on each side. Small holes in the walls were common enough, but these were too diminutive and too low to the ground to serve for interment. Othelmedir held a palm high in warning. They stepped warily to within a few yards of the first set of niches. Othelmedir bent with torturous slowness to the niche on the left. Birdsey did the same on the right. Each hollow contained a simple pewter plate. The plates were brown and undamaged, probably lustrous beneath the layer of dust that precluded reflection.
“I’ll be slit,” Birdsey exclaimed, his last word echoing languidly away. “Unsacked treasure. Heh, heh.”
“Touch nothing,” Othelmedir cautioned.
“Cursed, eh? Do they block our way?”
“The plates refuse our passage, no. But see that ten niches hold ten long-lasting brown plates. In such arrangements, one plate always carries a curse. No method exists to discern which.”
Birdsey’s shoulders sagged. “Guess we’d better keep going.”
Fogg grunted, and fell in line behind the mancer. They hurried past the ten alcoves.
No sooner had they reached Othelmedir’s orb, however, than the mancer held his palm up once more. He knelt, swiftly this time, and Birdsey saw an excited gleam in a corner of the iron eyes. Othelmedir brushed his palm over the floor.
“Bend and look,” he said. “See. No mortar, but the stone bears light carvings; hexagons. At each corner of each hexagon, three scratches. Innumerable scratches across the floor.” He straightened and glanced back the way they had come. “Our passage has taken us across a threshold into some burgh committed to Sang. We proceed quickly.”
Othelmedir continued to push the ball carefully ahead along each corridor, but apprehension now lacquered the whites of both his eyes.
At last they perceived the glow of the rolling ball spread into a wider chamber and reflect off something on the far wall. They hurried under a last arch and entered a hexagonal room. On the face opposite them, a set of huge bronze double-doors gleamed in the blue light. Thousands of scratchmarks raked the surface, marring the brown-yellow sheen like open sores, as if some metal-rending nails had scraped desperately against it. The blue ball had halted against the metal. Stepping closer, they found no handles or locks.
“Is this the guided way?” asked Othelmedir.
Birdsey unfurled the leather scroll they had stolen. He scanned the markings, then raised his eyes to the ceiling as he reflected on the recent turns they had taken. Finally he shrugged. “We’ve followed the map. These two round dots here may have been the plates. How do we open the tohmb?”
Fogg grunted. He stepped up to the door. He did pause, and stared at Othelmedir. The latter raised no objection. Fogg slapped a palm against each scarred bronze door and strained. The striations stood out like an azure spiderweb under the pallid skin of his arms. He strained silently against the door for several moments, shifted, set his back against the bronze and pressed with his mutant legs. The door budged not a mouse’s hair. At last Fogg came away. He caught his breath and shook his head. “It can’t be forced,” he said.
“Search for a mechanism,” said Othelmedir. “I inquire in deadspeech.”
Birdsey immediately cast his eyes over the six walls. Each was covered in icons of giant horseflies, carved directly into the stone. The four walls which did not support the bronze doors or the entrance arch each held a curling symbol of a worm embossed on it. Birdsey went to the nearest and ran his hand over the worm’s loops.
“Fehér uj sinonak,” Othelmedir chanted softly the same phrase from before. “Fehér uj sinonak élérntés.”
Fogg knelt and stirred the dust of the floor with his fingers. It had an altered texture to the dust of the corridors. Thin, and fragile, like dry filo flakes.
“Nothing on the reliefs,” said Birdsey. “The ceiling’s dark, but it looks smooth.”
“Keep looking,” said Othelmedir.
Fogg looked up from the dust to the huge motif of the worm beside Birdsey. He squinted, then drew a sharp breath. “Wormskin,” he hissed.
“What?”
“The dust. Shed skin. A serpent or a worm.”
Othelmedir only nodded and closed his eyes again, resuming the call to the dead. Birdsey said, “Heh, heh. I suppose worms are sacred to all the gods.”
“Something’s wrong in this room,” Fogg went on. He stepped away from the center of the chamber and ran a hand along the surface of another carved worm-panel. “I feel it in the jungle of my bones. I-”
But something else hissed as Fogg set his palm against the worm relief. He sprang back. Othelmedir’s eyes flashed. Birdsey spun. The hiss persisted, and all three stared at the double bronze doors.
A perfect black seam opened between the scratches on the bronze. The crack widened. Othelmedir took a pace back, and Fogg’s two-handed sword swung from its scabbard as the hiss rose to a wail like a wraith. All three put hands to their faces, both as a ward against the sharp wind, and against the texture-stench of the ancient air. Dust, with the smell of an abandoned cabin in a deep covert, and the chill of glacier-smoothed pebbles, blasted their skin.
When the gust of cold air finally subsided, the three lowered their hands.
The bronze doors yawned before them. Othelmedir bent and retrieved his ball. The wine-black walls of a tunnel, curving down and to the left, shone brilliantly in the light of the orb, their surfaces rendered dustless by the breath of the tohmb.
“Fogg,” said Othelmedir, “go to the front.” The pale giant grunted and stepped toward the tunnel.
But just as they were taking their step toward the door which had expelled its hiss, a third hiss sounded. Something behind them thudded.
Fogg reacted the swiftest. He had already spun half-round before the sound reached the ears of his comrades.
One of the reliefs on the wall had been the source. Specifically, the worm within the relief. A living (or not) thing came to enormous animation as it unfurled on the floor. Its underside had been the color of the wall, but the sides and back of the worm were a rust-colored leather, with bony protrusions like lizardskin.
The creature was enormous. Swift as they had reacted, it had already untangled its great mass. Its faceless front was thicker than the trunk of a sturdy pine, and it rose so high that it brushed the ceiling nine feet overhead. Curtains of dust and cobwebs floated down like snow.
Fogg’s coiled muscles launched him like a triggered jawtrap. The worm reeled back from the swing of Fogg’s two-handed sword, but Fogg’s two-handed sword clove with the speed of a moor cat. The blade slammed the worm’s left flank - its upper mass swayed sideways under the weight of the blow, and the chamber shuddered as it struck the wall. But the blade did not cut.
Birdsey meanwhile had knocked and whipped a stone with his sling. A whistle punctured the silent heaving of the spined worm as the stone rent the air. It thudded into the rusty leather with no more effect than Fogg’s strike. The worm lashed out with impossible speed for a creature of its mass. Fogg brought his two-handed sword up to block. The thing slammed against the enormous pale fighter like a collapsing wall, drove him back against the actual stone, and pinned him.
Othelmedir had been stunned by the sudden violence. Now he wagged his head and focused on the worm as it squeezed against Fogg. He recognized the creature. “A leatherwyrm,” he called. “Stab. Never cut.”
Fogg’s two-handed sword was pinned with his arm, however, the worm’s bulk crushing sword and arm against the stone. The savage endeavored to reach his morningstar, but the bulk of the monster covered his waist.
“What’s it want?!” Birdsey yelled. He whipped another stone to no effect.
“Rust and moss, but the worm will devour Fogg. Then lay slime on his corpse.”
Suddenly the worm’s back-end rose and swung. Birdsey screamed, dropped his sling, dove sideways. He was up in a moment beside Othelmedir, tugging the towering mancer toward the newly-opened door.
“Fogg’s dead,” said Birdsey. And indeed, Fogg’s pale face had turned a deep eggplant color as the worm collapsed his lungs. “Inside, and shut the doors.”
“No-” Othelmedir began. Birdsey was beyond terror, however, and only yanked Othelmedir harder toward the door. Othelmedir himself felt no special grief for the loss of Fogg, beyond the latter’s value as a fighter. But he feared entrapment within a single-exit tohmb.
Fogg seemed at that moment to have second thoughts about dying. With a savage cry and a surge of corded arms he pressed the worm’s bulk. A tiny gap opened, small and momentary. But in that brief second Fogg filled his lungs. Fogg’s two-handed sword shifted also. He set the blade at an angle with the wall so that, as the worm pressed in again, its own force drove its bulk along the razor edge. The creature emitted a vibration that might have been pain. It reeled back, a small incision visible in the leather. Fogg neither pressed the attack nor held his place. The instant he was freed he stumbled for the door, gasping. He heard the worm slither against the floor just as he crossed the threshold. He spun, bringing his two-handed sword up to block.
Birdsey tried to slam one of the heavy bronze doors. He abandoned the effort and fell back, however, as the leatherwyrm threw itself against the door’s stone casing. Fogg’s two-handed sword blocked none of the worm’s mass, for the worm came up short of the weapon. Its vastness slammed the bronze doors and stone frame. A mineral snap resounded. The tunnel shivered. “Back!” yelled Othelmedir.
The three chryptsackers fell back as rubble and dust crashed in curtains over the shape of the leatherwyrm. The door arch buckled. Thunder like a sea storm boomed as they stumbled down the curving slope. Othelmedir’s light flickered as great dust plumes blew past and around them. Then there was one final, terrific crash like a gong. A loose piece of ceiling rock blasted Othelmedir in the shoulder. The light winked out in an instant, and all three were plunged into a cold and storming blackness.
The groaning of the stonework faded in starts and stops. Amidst the darkness and dust, men’s voices sputtered.
Finally Birdsey’s voice softly coughed: “Who’s living still?”
Fogg barked just beside Birdsey, “I’m alive.”
“Othelmedir? You hurt?”
Othelmedir said hoarsely, “This shoulder has been smashed.”
“Conjure a globe so-” Fogg began. A fit of coughing dust interrupted him, before he resumed, “So we can take stock.”
“No focus. The pain, agh.”
Another rumble shook the floor. Then the blackness seemed to fall permanently still. Fogg said, “The air feels cool and open ahead. Birdsey, help the mancer. Then grab a hold on my shirt.”
Birdsey stumbled over some loose rocks to where he heard Othelmedir’s pained hissing. He groped blindly until he felt a sharpness that was elbow rather than stone. He helped the tall mancer drape a long arm around his shoulder, then led the way back to Fogg, guided by a clicking sound Fogg was making. Birdsey caught hold of the collar of Fogg’s leather coat. With the savage leading, they descended.
Fogg found the wall soon enough, and after the three had stumbled past the debris of the collapsed door, the terrain smoothed for walking, even blind. Othelmedir’s breath evened. He withdrew his arm from Birdsey and began to walk unsupported, and all three felt the chill settling into their clothes. They shivered, and surely their breath misted, though they could not see it.
As they went blindly on, however, they discovered that they could see the misting breaths. Their eyes adjusted to the dark, but how? How in a sepulcher utterly without light? They gradually understood that a thin vapor shed soft light in the tunnel, which continued to curve steadily but inexorably down. The vapor, which must have been heavier than air, thickened into an even brighter glow as they descended; not so bright as the sun, yet brighter than the yellow light of a full harridan’s moon, and teal.
The tunnel had afforded the three space to walk abreast. Now it widened to five meters from wall-to-wall, then six, then they discerned ahead that it opened out broadly. Othelmedir raised his good arm with a flat palm. They proceeded slowly, noticing a strange glimmering texture of the floor where the tunnel terminated.
They realized, as they stepped out and into the wide space, that this glimmer was the shine of the teal vapor off of a floor of ice. They had entered a huge, frozen cistern, deep in the catacombs. And at the heart of this cistern, there was a frozen ship.
A long vessel of three masts, tarred and tallowed to watertightness, lay locked in the center of the frozen pool. Blue-white powder rimed every board and line of the ship. The double-set of rowlock holes on the side that faced the three were frozen over with draping curtains of icicles. Two more enormous icicles, oddly symmetrical and perfect, dangled over the ship from the roof of the reservoir, nearly even at their tips with the crow’s-nest of the center mast. The ship seemed to the three plunderers more like the idealization of a ship than a concrete one; a vessel in service to one of the seven dead gods, carting souls for the deity’s malign ends, so silently did it lay, crusted and motionless in the teal fog. This was not full silence, but the silence of a frozen lake crackling like a dead thunderstorm. The air tasted antiseptic.
“Guess this is it, heh, heh,” said Birdsey. He glanced at Othelmedir. The mancer’s iron eyes shone like steel as they stared across the frozen expanse.
“Seems solid,” said Fogg, stamping at the ice’s edge.
Othelmedir said, “We cross.”
Birdsey happened to glance down as they stepped carefully over the frozen pool. He squinted, bent and wiped a hand through the light spackle of frost that covered the surface, then jumped back. “There’s dead below.”
Othelmedir used his good arm to unclasp his cape and sweep it about. He uncovered, a foot below the surface, locked in near-perfectly transparent crystal, half-a-dozen frozen men. They were wholly composed, with not a flake of rot scarring their upturned, pale faces; faces frozen in the last moments of terror and death; lifeless eyes wide, and seeming to follow the three.
Othelmedir whispered something. Then he said, “The souls have departed, at least.”
“Let’s get to the ship,” said Fogg.
As they progressed through the mist, Birdsey spotted something else. “Look.” He pointed. “On the far wall I see another opening, heh, heh. Maybe we aren’t trapped.”
As they reached the vessel, its frosted hull presented their first obstacle, for the surface was smooth and outward-facing. Fogg spotted some small pits where the rowholes had not fully frozen over, and began chiseling grooves in the wood and ice with a knife. The pale man started up, and soon slipped over the gunnels. The two below heard a quick intake of breath.
“What lies above?” asked Othelmedir.
“Treasure?” asked Birdsey.
Fogg tossed down a knotted rope. Birdsey climbed easily, and together he and Fogg hauled in the injured mancer.
The three stopped and stared. The deck was barren - covered in the same rime of frost - except for a few pieces of coiled cordage, and except for three thickly-frozen rings around the three masts. The rings were each under a thick but translucent layer of pure ice. And under this ice, hexagonal, golden coins sparkled. Birdsey’s eyes especially seemed to reflect the gold.
Othelmedir, though the sparkle had drawn his initial attention, quickly paid closer mind to the masts. They were not sawn and carved pieces of timber, but birch trees; whole birch trees, with bark, and with thin sere sails hanging from their branches. On the deckboards surrounding the masts and their three rings of treasure, scratches gouged the wood. The scratches were deep enough that the ice patina did not conceal them.
“Sang’s red ribs,” said Birdsey with a whistle. “That’s a fine-ish pile. Who’d have thought a trove like this’d lie untouched, only some rotten worm to guard it? I wonder if there are more below? We might find a barrel to pile these golden hexes in, and roll everything out of this pit. Blast me, but this air’s colder than a harridan’s teats.”
Othelmedir said, “The frost suggests some manner of curse or enchantment.”
“Not a bit. Five of those shiny pieces says it’s some crystal machine.”
Othelmedir had noticed the door to what would have been the captain’s quarters. He walked across to it. He tried the knob, but it was frozen stiff, and the door would not budge. He glanced at Fogg.
The door exploded into fragments when Fogg’s two-handed sword smote its face.
Within, in a high-backed chair at a long table of black wood, with acolytes arranged down either side, they beheld the Mailed Flayer.
The servant of Sang. The Flayer and his acolytes were completely frozen; their faces pale as ghosts and marked with thousands of small, cat-like scratches; their eyes closed as if in prayer. The acolytes wore black robes with red sashes. The Flayer wore a steel cuirass gilt in silver, and had laid on the table before him a three-headed scourge. He appeared to have been about two-hundred years of age, before the magic of this reservoir had arrested his aging in-perpetuity. More gold, fine tableware of silver and bronze, jeweled weapons, other works of art - all was frozen to the surface of the table, or stacked upon the various shelves. Othelmedir’s iron eyes locked on one shelf in particular, where he saw half-a-dozen furled scrolls of leather.
At this scene of the profanely pious, Birdsey stiffened. Othelmedir recognized the suspicions working Birdsey’s brain, and said, “True-dead, every one. The deadspeech of a servant of Sang would have reached me the instant we entered the tohmb, were such a soul present.”
Birdsey relaxed. “Is there necromancy to crack ice?” he asked.
“None within my proficiency.”
“Come on, Fogg.” Birdsey spun back out of the door and walked to the rail where they had left the knotted rope. “I’m going onto the lake. I’ll hunt for this freezing-machine; it’s got to be in the water. You try to crack one of those ice-rings around the masts.”
The pommel of Fogg’s two-handed sword let out a note that echoed over the ice and resounded within the chamber, as he banged the weapon against one of the crusted rings. Birdsey scampered deftly down the ship. He then began wide arcs upon the ice, sweeping the surface frost, shuddering whenever he met the upturned eyes of a body.
Othelmedir had remained in the cabin with the dead. He drifted toward the shelf of leather scrolls. The flimsy teal light from the frost-coated window cast his tall shadow over the scrolls; he unfurled and read each in silence. The tink, tink, tink of Fogg’s two-handed sword sounded faintly from without. Some of the scrolls Othelmedir examined were only instructions for rites sacred to Sang, The Scratcher. Others were perhaps more useful, having grooved upon their surfaces the words of witches, The Words with Rotten Syllables.
While his narrow eyes sifted the cracking leather, however, Othelmedir’s thoughts hung upon the outer chamber. That the frost was not the result of crystalline machinery, he was certain. He had read somewhere of this kind of enchantment, and Othelmedir now cast his mind back into books that had no names for an answer. The cold in this cave was, he thought, perhaps wrought by the captured ghost of a terrible winter. A whole terrible year of weather’s ghost - the idea struck him, for he recalled in a flash the name of The Blizzard that Flayed the Road; and he recalled that the winter of that blizzard, recorded centuries and centuries past, had been a year of a terrible Spring blooming, a baking summer; and of course all autumns were dead on The Road of Graves. Still, Othelmedir believed that the captured ghost of that year now waxed in winter, here in the present, in this Mailed Flayer’s tohmb.
While Othelmedir pondered, Fogg’s TINK, TINK, TINK, continued to resound dully in the back of his mind. Birdsey had by now reached the wall of the reservoir, and was circling toward the second exit with his sweeping pattern.
A trigger was needed, thought Othelmedir. An augur for the coming of spring; a thaw. What could signal a change in season, in such a place of depth and death? Othelmedir shivered in the cold - a grisly action in a man so lean and tall; too swift, like a hummingbird’s flitting wings.
Water. The answer surfaced unbidden. All was crusted and frozen in this chamber, but perhaps a sprinkle of liquid form might trigger the change he desired. Othelmedir considered how to bring this about for some minutes. He nearly laughed when he thought of it, but did not, for he never laughed without purpose. He made as if to spit, but stopped. If the environment of the cistern were as terrible as this, in dead winter, what unpredictable scene would the onset of spring invoke? What tempest would the malicious ghost of that ancient year enact?
The steady TINK, TINK, TINK sounded sharply and more clearly, at that instant, through Othelmedir’s pondering. He turned, strode to the door. He saw Fogg still hammering at the ice with his pommel. The position was awkward, the work arduous, and the man was breathing heavily.
“Fogg, stop,” said Othelmedir.
Fogg stopped. He looked back at the mancer. Before Othelmedir could shout a warning, the pale man raised a pale hand to his long black hair, to a brow heavy with sweat, and after wiping a translucent bead, flicked the moisture to the ship’s deck.
Lightning flashed, thunder cracked a signal gong note. The teal mist disgorged a sharp stinging rain. Within the flash, the ice pool melted.
The water was a roiling sea. The two stalactites unfroze. Two metal conductors. Arcing light; wave crash. Fogg’s arms windmilled.
One bolt searched.
Saw Fogg.
Struck.
Miraculously as Fogg stood in place - swaying, smoking, eyes glossy - the direction of his leaning precisely counteracted the sudden rolling and swaying of the deck. He remained upright. Birdsey meanwhile had been near the second exit when the season shifted. He leaped for a rough-hewn stone pylon girting the tunnel mouth. Now he screamed, and clung desperately to the stone as the rain beat his head and shoulders, and the waves hammered his spine. A howling wind churned the air, flung every atom of the subterranean lake. From a scene of entropic torpor, the reservoir had become a place as violent as the heart of any ocean hurricane. The ship itself was a dancing feather in a smokestack.
Othelmedir had tried to catch himself on the rail, but had grabbed unconsciously with his injured, dominant arm. Now one specially heavy swell smashed into the port side of the ship. The deck rolled. Othelmedir shouted in pain as his grip gave. The tall man fell like a tumbling sequoia toward the gunnel, toward the churning foam.
Fogg had regained his senses. He vaulted across the swaying deck and caught Othelmedir in one arm, just as the latter pitched over the railing. Fogg just managed to encase the wooden lip of the rail in his knuckles. The ship bucked, they slammed against the side. Othelmedir nearly passed out from the impact, but shook the blackening tunnel vision away, and clung to Fogg’s drenched collar.
There they held, while the rain and waves thrashed. The piled gold had scattered in the impact. Yellow sparks flashed over the sides of the ship, twinkling in the air, or sinking in the water like fallen stars. Othelmedir’s own grip slipped. His shoulder throbbed. Fogg gritted his teeth and tightened his grasp around the rail and the mancer, nearly cracking both.
Then, without a sound, the savage warrior heaved with all the sinews of his back and biceps. He pulled first until his chest was level with, then over the rail, then flung Othelmedir one-armed back onto the deck. The judder of the impact sent flashes of fresh pain through the mancer’s shoulder. Fogg hooked an elbow through a baluster, then a foot.
Across the water, by the exit, Birdsey had meanwhile gained a firmer spot on the rock.
All three receded as much as they could into themselves, bunching their necks and tucking their limbs to be as small as possible, while the monsoon thrashed in the too-small enclosure of the Mailed Flayer’s tohmb.
Long were the rain and the waves in their waning. Never did they disperse entirely, for the ghost of that Year of the Seasons Terrible clung to its spiteful condition through Spring as well as Winter. The initial wrath of the weather waned, however, until the rain only streamed instead of stabbed; and until the Wind was only a constant moan, not a mastication of a gaseous jaw; and until the waves were high dunes of whitecapped water that, nevertheless, held a rhythm.
Fogg rose, arms aching from the strain of holding himself and Othelmedir in place. Othelmedir, despite the throbbing in his whole left side, managed to stand, supported by the rail. The deck rocked. In the comparative lull the two heard Birdsey shouting. “Sang’s red ribs. I thought the waves would smash my bones to jelly. You out there - still living?”
“Not slain yet,” said Fogg in reply.
“Looks like this tunnel goes up. Any gold left on that tub?”
Fogg scanned the deck. “Some scattered pieces.”
“Grab them and come across.”
Othelmedir took a deep breath, drawing his mind back from flaring pain in his shoulder. They would need to find a skilled leech when they returned to the surface - or a better mancer than he - to correct the injury. He forced his thoughts to the present. “The cabin warrants inspection,” he said. “More of that wealth has likely remained aboard. Birdsey.”
“Yes?”
“Have you found a boat, or raft, farther up in your tunnel?”
There was a pause. Fogg staggered across the rolling deck to the captain’s quarter, scooping up some scattered hexes of gold as he went. Presently Birdsey was heard to cry, “No boat. But those frozen corpses are floating now. Make a raft of ‘em, maybe? heh, heh.”
“Spare me the foolishness,” Othelmedir rejoined. “Something must be fashioned from the ship’s material. Fogg?”
Fogg grunted. “That captain’s table. I’ll-”
But Fogg fell silent as there resounded a sudden gouging, rending, wailing sound.
Fogg and Othelmedir turned in the direction of the masts, from whence the sound had emanated. Fogg’s eyes screwed into narrowed promises of violence; he swore without sound.
Each of the three birch-tree masts had moved. Not in conjunction with the ship’s rocking, but of their own accord. Their roots, which had been tapped down and nailed between the deckboards, were pulling free, tearing nails loose. The branches, from which hung the ragged sails, stirred the air. One of the trees swept a freed root out across the deck, gathered up two-score loose hexes of gold, and dragged them back into a small arc around its old posthole.
Birchmen. Othelmedir knew the false masts. Once there had been a forest on Deadman’s Pile, before the Road of Graves began to wriggle through it. A birch forest; a forest whose limbs grew with green leaves, and whose trunks grew alabaster with beautiful dark spots; not the skeletal, leafless, leprous trees which now sprouted from the mountain’s soil, fully-grown and crooked and dead. But that ancient forest of many thousand years ago had been sawn down in its Time. And the souls of those trees had never forgiven the offense. They haunted their sawn trunks forever after. Birchmen, trees of hate and locomotion.
Birchmen were nigh-impervious to man’s implements of bloodshed - being made of wood not flesh. But they were sightless… if Othelmedir’s memory recalled rightly. Carefully, slowly, Othelmedir waved to catch Fogg’s attention. He held a finger to his lips.
Fogg tracked the sweeping of the aft mast’s long roots with his black eyes for a moment longer. The masts began to shuffle across the decking, and he saw that he must move or eventually be caught in its path. He began to pick a route to Othelmedir, carefully avoided the scattered spackle of glinting yellow on the deck. The rain poured on still; the ship rocked. Othelmedir held perfectly still at the rail, watching his companion tiptoe toward him. The Birchmen ranged farther. Fogg stopped at a fallen line of rigging, which spanned the deck, and terminated in a coiled pile at the bow side. He picked up the cordage at its end. He continued to sway carefully over the shifting pieces of coin, meanwhile knotting his end of the rope into a loop, by which he meant to tie a harness so that he and Othelmedir could descend the ship’s side in silence. All this time the three Birchmen roved. Though each continued to sweep the scattered gold back into rings, the unabating waves only undid their work.
“What’s taking?” Birdsey’s cry echoed in the hollow room, above the hiss of rain and sliding coins. One of the Birchmen instantly swiveled, the tattered sails on its limbs fluttering with the sudden motion. With alarming speed (any speed was alarming to witness in a tree) the things rushed to the rail upon its writhing tangle of roots, like the tall standard of some dead king carried upright on a tumbleweed. Othelmedir and Fogg stood without breath or motion. Othelmedir went into his mind. He found some words of Deadspeech, and made them soundlessly with his lips and tongue. Though his voice produced no noise, Birdsey - who still stood by the mouth of the tunnel, squinting through the downpour - heard the mancer’s ghastly deadvoice in his mind: “Keep utterly silent!” He did so, and waited.
On the ship, Fogg and Othelmedir watched as the alerted Birchman gradually tumbled back to the rings of gold.
Fogg quickly but quietly crossed the rain-washed deck, reaching Othelmedir by the rail. He pulled the rope in a loop over his head and shoulder, and pulled some slack to wrap about the rail. They leaned out and looked over. The churning water seemed far, far beneath them from the top of the deck. Othelmedir looked at Fogg. Fogg shrugged; there was no sense in waiting. Othelmedir nodded. Fogg went to wrap the rappelling line around a baluster.
Behind them, unnoticed, one of the Birchmen’s roots slithered over the remaining slack in the line. It pulled. Fogg felt the rope move on his chest. He grabbed to pull the loop free - too late. The knot pulled tight. The line pulled taut. Fogg was jerked off his feet. The giant marble warrior slammed to the deck with an enormous boom.
The rain fell steady as static over the boards of the Mailed Flayer’s funereal barque; while the swells of the reservoir pulsed with rhythm against its port. Fogg, lying on his back, and Othelmedir at the rail, squinted through the storm at the quivering birch trees. Their breath stopped in their lungs - their shoulders bunched - in that moment of the storm which seemed to stretch.
The trees punctured the pressure. All three towering Birchmen scuttled at Fogg. Fogg’s two-handed sword was free of its scabbard in a whistle. He cut the slackened rope and leaped to his feet.
The Birchmen came like scarecrows caught in a tornado, tattered sails swaying around them as they hurtled. Another lightning bolt dropped from the metal stalactites - the scene flashed lurid. The nearest tree came up short of where Fogg stood. With its root it lashed.
Fogg chopped single-handed at the tentacle-like appendage. At the same time he used his free arm to bully Othelmedir back along the railing. Othelmedir followed the momentum of the shove, hobbling from the charging trees. He managed another soundless mental whisper of Deadspeech, at Fogg: “Birchmen. Too strong. Keep away.”
From off by the exit, Birdsey called out, “What’s going on out there?”
Even one-handed Fogg’s chop had severed the whipping root. The root struck the deck with a clunk. The tree seemed not to care. It barreled down on him with its trunk. Taking his weapon in both fists, retreating, Fogg began to chop, chop, chop at the trunk and the mass of writhing roots. Splinters flew with the rain.
Then Fogg’s two-handed sword struck too deep. He tried to yank it loose; he found it wedged. The Birchman pressed in. The other two followed close. Fogg released the hilt and stumbled back, the space between himself and the bulkhead of the forecastle shrinking with each step. He drew his morningstar, though he doubted he could inflict much damage to the gnarled skin of the Birchmen.
Othelmedir had managed to escape the notice of the trees. He stood near the cabin door, trying to block out Birdsey’s cries and the drum of the rain. Focus. How could he affect another season change? How could he force the ghost of that terrible year into Summer? What had made that summer baking in The Year of Seasons Terrible? An endless sun - that was what it had been.
A sun…
Othelmedir nearly snapped his finger. He focused, pushed away pain and distraction, and recited carefully a phrase of Deadspeech.
In the mancer’s palm swelled a yellow yarnball of light.
A sharp clap echoed through an abrupt and pervasive stagnation which swept through the massive hollow chamber. Not the clap of thunder, but the crackle of kindling. One moment the atmosphere had seemed more full of water than air, so heavy was the rain. Now the rain ceased suddenly, and every soaked board and beam of the ship shriveled with a communal creak. Steam rose to the ceiling in one connected sheet. The chamber became a sauna. The waves ceased, and the reservoir dropped so low that all heard the thunk of the keel striking the subaquatic stone.
The rising steam cloud unveiled the vessel, now lighted yellow by Othelmedir’s orb. Across the low water Birdsey finally saw the shifting Birchmen. He cursed in surprise and alarm.
Fogg acted first. Beads of sweat now stood out on his forehead as he dropped his morningstar and lunged for the weapon he’d left lodged in the nearest Birchman. All three trees swayed in place, dizzy they seemed, parched and shrunken in the sudden summer. Fogg’s two-handed sword came free as the savage gripped its handle and jerked it loose. He wasted no time, driving the weapon right back. Splinters exploded. The tree reeled and groaned. The monster seemed to awaken - it scuttled backward. Fogg had thrown himself into a fury though, and he swung back and in, back and in, with immense blows. The Birchman released a hideous shriek under the attack - the tearing sound of a falling tree, with some otherworldly human pitch to the tone - before the trunk caved, and the upper half came crashing down. The scarecrow canopy struck the deck with a thud that cracked the withered boards.
“Just bail!” Birdsey cried from the dark opening of the reservoir exit. “Abandon ship.”
“Without spoils?” came Fogg’s near-breathless reply. The two remaining Birchmen had recovered now - they closed in on the warrior. Fogg’s two-handed sword cleaved left and right alternately on the two Birchmen as they came in at both sides. Each blow sent some flakes of birch flying, but each came with less fury than the one before.
Othelmedir heard a low crackle at his back. He glanced behind.
Within the cabin - where the corpses of the Mailed Flayer and his acolytes had tumbled from their chairs, and the bodies and furniture lay in dry disarray about the floor - smoke rose. Somewhere below in the hold, a fire had kindled. The ship was burning.
Othelmedir’s head swam. Concentration on the light orb sapped at his already-taxed will. As if from far away, he heard a sharp creaking sound. He looked lazily sideways. One of the rigging lines, stretched taut as the Birchman it was attached to closed in on Fogg, had caught a bright crowning flame licking its way up the length of rope. Othelmedir angled his head slightly, with an almost bemused expression, as he watched the rigging blacken, fray, and snap.
He watched, for an instant, the line whip out in his direction. He felt the sharp crack as it struck his temple. Othelmedir felt himself stumbling. He wondered if he could harness the fire against the Birchmen.
Othelmedir struck the rail and toppled over the side. At the same instant his vision went black. His orb had gone out, but the ship was aflame now, and shed a yellow glow in the tohmb.
Othelmedir did not remain unconscious for long. He woke to water burning its way out of his mouth from his lungs. Something jerked his arm - he felt a dull ache from his shoulder. He blinked heated water out of his eyes.
The pale dead men who had been frozen in the water floated past Othelmedir’s vision. He felt another sharp tug, and understood that Fogg was in the water with him, a hand hooked under Othelmedir’s shoulder, paddling them through the water.
The two crawled like the first slimy forerunning of prehistoric amphibians, onto the cold tunnel shore. There Birdsey waited. Fogg rose, and Birdsey took Othelmedir’s other shoulder. Together, they brought the towering mancer all the way to his feet. Othelmedir swayed for a moment. He turned and stared back, watching the burning ship of the Mailed Flayer as it sank into the water. The two Birchmen had caught fire too; they heard the unearthly scream of splitting, burning wood.
“Left my morningstar,” said Fogg.
“I could dive for coins after the inferno’s doused,” suggested Birdsey. “Hate to leave with airy pockets.”
Othelmedir reached into a fold of his soaked robe. From a long pocket, he drew a lengthy scroll of leather. He unfurled it, and turned so that the light of the distant flame shone on the surface, where were written Words with Rotten Syllables. And though the mancer’s steel eyes betrayed no emotion, his bones chuckled.