Inferno volume 5, p.19
Inferno! Volume 5, page 19
‘I don’t need their stinking pity.’
Glancing over her shoulder, she said, ‘Wouldn’t pity suggest that they like you, at least a little?’
‘That’s unlikely.’
‘At the very least it means they care.’
‘They like having someone to look down on.’
Grabbing the foetid cloth he used for cleaning, she dipped it in his water cup and set to scrubbing his dishes.
‘Oi, you little wretch,’ he barked. ‘I was drinking that!’
She ignored him as she worked. ‘Gallowglas said he’ll give you a mug of ale if you come by the Dripping Bucket tonight.’
Fell had been once, back when he first came to Hollow’s Dell. Many times he considered returning, just to hear Terese sing again.
‘I hate the tavern. Too many people.’
‘Terese is going to sing,’ Rita said, as if she’d read his mind.
That stopped him. Terese sang like the very gods spoke through her. ‘I do love the sound of someone skinning a rutting tomcat.’
‘See?’ she said. ‘A reason to go!’
Rita babbled on as she cleaned, telling him about how Maz killed a deer on her first time out with Lawrence, the huntmaster. She talked of how beautiful Sarah looked in her new dress, how old lady Kalindy died the night before in her sleep, and was to be buried this afternoon in the town plot. She told him about how distant wars were going to affect the price of grain, and how the vile forces of Chaos were being driven from the Realm of Shyish. A thousand conversations between ignorant farmers overheard and filtered through the understanding of a ten-year-old girl. Half the time he hadn’t a clue what she was on about.
‘How old are you?’ she asked over a shoulder.
‘Why?’ he demanded, suspicious.
‘Terese asked me how old I thought you were.’
He swallowed a sigh of relief. ‘And?’ he asked, curious in spite of himself.
‘I said sixty.’
Not too bad, considering the truth.
‘Terese said she thought you were closer to fifty-five.’
Fell smothered a grin of pleasure. Not only had Terese asked after him, but she was also wondering if he was of a suitable age; whether they might spend time together without it being unseemly. Even though his back and knees were hell, he looked nothing like his true age.
Finishing, Rita wiped her hands on her trousers. ‘Will I see you at the Bucket?’
‘No.’
‘All right. I’ll swing by tomorrow.’
‘You set foot in my house uninvited one more time,’ he hefted the cane, threatening, ‘and I’ll crack your skull!’
‘I’ll probably be late,’ she explained. ‘I agreed to help Hellen collect eggs. I’ll bring you a few.’
‘I hate eggs.’
‘I can make scrambled eggs, you know. Momma showed me. Maybe I’ll try and find some cheese.’
‘Get out.’
‘I’ll make you scrambled eggs and cheese,’ she decided, collecting her basket and wandering out the front door, red braids swinging behind her.
‘You’re not right in the head!’ he called after her.
By all the gods dark and bright she reminded him of Leona, his daughter.
Collapsing into the now vacated chair, he sat in silence. His knees hurt. His back ached. One of the fingers on his left hand felt like it was going to lock up.
An eternity of slow decay.
Time devours us all.
Someday, he’d be a broken ruin, utterly helpless. His joints would seize, and his ancient bones crack. It might be a decade, or maybe another century, if he was careful, but that was his inevitable fate.
Rot and decay. Eternal life trapped in an undying body.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Break the oath he swore over the dust of his daughter, and he could repair himself.
Never.
He’d lie where he fell, mind as sharp as ever, awaiting an end that would never come. Carrion creatures would feed on what little meat he had. Insects would worm into his eyes, feast on his brain. Even that could not end him. Tied to these bones, his soul would remain forever trapped. He couldn’t die, not ever. No escape.
‘Grief,’ said the woman who did this to Fell. ‘I curse you with an eternity of grief.’
Fell and Ruhinn knelt over their daughter’s bed. They’d cried themselves hoarse and now had nothing left.
Wrung out.
Emptied of all emotion except soul-staining misery. The one bright spark in the world, snuffed.
Leona lay still and pale, red hair brushed out and tied in plaits neater than she’d ever achieved when alive.
My girl. My beautiful girl.
Why go on? What was the point? How could anything ever matter again?
Ruhinn placed a hand on Leona’s forehead. ‘She’s cold,’ his wife said. ‘So cold.’
He watched her glance about, as if in search of a blanket to warm their daughter.
She’s not cold. She’s gone.
But he couldn’t say it, couldn’t speak the word.
Gone.
Teeth clenched tight, his skull ached from the pressure.
‘Daddy, am I going to die?’ Leona asked on her last day.
And he lied. ‘No, my love. Daddy will protect you. Daddy would never let anything hurt you.’
He was, he discovered, wrong. He could still feel. Something deep inside cracked then, never to heal. The kind of soul-deep wound that either breaks a man or twists him into something different.
This can’t be real. This can’t be.
Having a child changes you. You don’t know who you are until you’re a father. For the first time in his life, Fell had liked who he was. The selfishness of youth fell away, and he became a man. Tasks once daunting were nothing. Work hard to support your family, to give your beloved little girl everything she could need? Yes! Happily! Having a reason made all the difference in the world. His thankless job as a scribe for the Collegiate Arcane became bearable. That they couldn’t have another, that Rue had barely survived giving birth to Leona, made their daughter all the more precious.
The Collegiate. Gods, he’d spent countless thousands of hours copying tome after tome for the masters. Much of the time he understood little of what he wrote. His eidetic memory and knack for penmanship and precise copying, even when he didn’t know the language, earned him a place among the most prized scribes. Funny, as the work bored him to tears.
What a waste! Every hour there he could have been with Leona!
The Collegiate.
Something poked at his memory, demanded attention.
Copying books. Forbidden books, sometimes.
‘Rue,’ he said.
She looked lost, red-rimmed eyes unseeing.
‘I copied a book once.’
Ruhinn stared at him with dull emptiness.
‘It was a language book. A dictionary… for translating from the ancient tongue.’
She blinked. ‘So?’
‘I also copied another book. A book written in that old tongue.’
She waited. Not with patience, but with dejected disinterest. Nothing meant anything any more.
Fell pictured the worn leather cover, soft in spite of its age. Each sheet, warm to the touch. He remembered leaning close to inspect a page and seeing the whorls of flesh, the ink a strange, rusty brown with the scent of old salt. Blood. A thick tome; many hundreds must have died to make that one book.
One of nine.
Maybe.
‘A forbidden book,’ he said. ‘A private commission, though I do not know for whom.’ The idea built as he spoke. ‘I didn’t understand it at the time.’ He’d always had a perfect memory, could clearly see the pages of every book he’d ever copied. ‘I can apply one to the other. With some work, I can read that other book.’
Rue shook her head, lost. ‘So?’
‘I think I know what the book was.’
Closing his eyes, he remembered the text on the cover, flipping through the pages of his mind to find the translation. His breath caught.
‘If I’m right,’ he said, ‘it was a book of spells. Necromancy spells.’
‘Death,’ said Ruhinn, perhaps beginning to understand.
Eyes still closed, Fell skimmed through several more pages of the ancient tome. ‘A spell book.’ He turned to Rue. ‘Necromancy, my love. Powerful necromancy.’
‘Necromancy,’ she repeated, looking to where Leona lay.
‘Maybe…’ He hesitated, afraid to give voice to his thoughts.
Rue turned on him, curled her fingers in the collar of his shirt. She glared into his eyes, alive again, bright with desperate hunger. ‘Bring her back to me. Whatever it takes. No matter the cost. Bring her back.’
Fell swallowed. Whatever it takes. No matter the cost.
He knew little of necromancy, but something of history. These were fiercely guarded secrets, and necromancy devoured its practitioners, twisted them, body and soul.
‘Whatever it takes,’ he said. ‘No matter the cost.’ He held his wife. ‘I swear it.’
Purpose. Without it, we are nothing.
He had purpose now.
The next day Fell left his job at the Collegiate Arcane. He and Ruhinn sold their family estate in Glymmsforge and used the funds to pay a Scáthborn aelf to cease their daughter’s rot. Fell would learn necromancy, but could not do so overnight. It would take years. They rented a single room over a cockroach-infested tavern, and Rue took a job cleaning dishes and scrubbing floors to support them while he studied.
Day by day the horror grew in him as he came to understand the task he had undertaken. But there could be no turning back. He would not fail Ruhinn. He would not fail Leona.
No matter the cost.
It became his mantra, repeated when he woke screaming from the nightmares, tangled in the sheets, face flushed and soaked in sweat.
He felt himself crumble beneath the onslaught of this terrible knowledge. The man he was died, hour by hour, day by day.
Year by year.
No matter the cost.
Fell crushed the potato with a fork, making sure there was nothing hard hidden within. In the past, he’d broken teeth on unexpected foods. Once, an incisor cracked in half when he tried to eat an apple Rita brought him, a treat from Terese. Pulling out the remains was unpleasant. When confident the potato was safe, he spooned it into the stale bread, making a hefty, if somewhat bland, sandwich. He ate slowly, chewing with care. It was, he was loath to admit, the most delicious thing he’d eaten in months. Maybe longer. After, he released a long belch and sat happy and sated.
He spent the day rooting about in his vegetable patch, pulling weeds, ever cautious not to injure himself, before returning inside to collapse onto his one chair with a groan. His back hurt. His knees hurt. His arms–
It all bloody well hurts!
He eyed the dirty plate still sitting where he’d left it on the table. Reaching out, he collected a few crumbs with a dirty finger and ate them.
He considered the Dripping Bucket. There’d be people. Few if any would talk to him, but they’d note his attendance. The town was small, everyone knew everyone and everyone knew everyone’s business. Except for Fell. Though he’d lived here for years, no one knew him. To the people of Hollow’s Dell, he was a grumpy old man probably named for his tendency to trip on things. Little Rita aside, people rarely talked to him. And that was fine. What could he possibly say to those with such brief mayfly lives? They’d age and die, and he’d still be here, rotting, falling apart one bone – one joint – at a time. In another decade he’d move on, find another town. It didn’t do to stay anywhere too long. Better not to catch the attention of the townsfolk.
Still, it had been a long time since he’d immersed himself in the hubbub of humanity. It would be nice to see people, even if he didn’t talk to them. There might even be news from beyond the Dell. Rumours of war had been trickling in for years. The forces of Order and Chaos would never rest until they’d subjugated or freed – the difference seemed non-existent to Fell – all the known world.
Gallowglas’ offer of a mug sweetened the deal even further. It had been years since Fell had allowed himself alcohol. A man who doesn’t heal can’t afford the careless clumsiness of drink. But just one? It’d be nice to feel a little distance.
Admit it, you’d go just to hear Terese sing.
In a town like Hollow’s Dell, there wasn’t much for entertainment. Not like in Glymmsforge. He recalled how, years before Leona was born, he and Ruhinn used to attend concerts, visit galleries and see plays. They once saw a lavish production of The End of Despair, Fall of a Mortarch. The magisters shut the play down the next week, hanging the actors in the city square, displaying their tortured corpses in iron cages. But out here, out on the ragged edge of civilisation, a voice like Terese’s was a wonder.
She’s not hard on the eyes, either.
Fell laughed, a flat, humourless chuckle.
Nearing fifty, Terese was less than a tenth his age.
Funny how, as a youth, he’d never noticed older women. These days, anyone under forty looked like a child. There was something about women in the later half of life, a confidence, an understanding of what actually mattered, that was attractive beyond pert body parts.
Also, twenty-year-old girls don’t know you exist.
Terese, on the other hand… Sometimes she watched him when she thought he wouldn’t notice. And she often sent food along with Rita. He licked his lips at the memory of the potato.
It didn’t matter. There could be nothing between them. She’d age and die, and he’d have to watch.
We all fall apart, just at different rates.
Having already lost one family, he was unwilling to lose anyone else.
Excuses, excuses, old man.
It wasn’t like Terese was going to bear him children. Why could they not spend a little time together, make the passing years a little less brutally lonely?
No!
Rue might be centuries gone, but he would never betray the memory of her. And Terese deserved better.
How old do you have to be before you stop thinking about women?
He didn’t know. Certainly, he had yet to reach that age. Would he ever? Would he miss it if he did?
‘One drink,’ he said. ‘One quick drink, and then I’ll return home.’
Home, a stinking hovel. Two rooms, one where he slept, another where he ate. A bucket to crap and piss in. Gods he missed the estate back in Glymmsforge. They hadn’t been wealthy, not compared to some, but sometimes he dreamed of sitting rooms, soft divans, leather reading chairs and a small library of much-loved books.
Late that evening, cane in hand, Fell made the short walk to the Bucket. He moved at a careful limp he once jokingly told Rita was ‘stately’. She’d pretended to understand, bouncing off the walls with the careless and enviable energy of youth.
Each time a foot slipped in the mud, darts of hot pain shot through his knees. The slight decline made the trip into town easier, but treacherous after a rainfall. The journey home would hurt, though he wouldn’t truly appreciate how much until he woke the next morning.
He laughed, a mirthless cough. Nothing ever gets better. The axiom of the elderly.
Movement caught his attention, and he shuffled to a stop. There, to the west, up on what the locals called Hollow’s Hill, stood a massive black beast of a destrier. Cloaked in white, the rider sat watching Fell. The wind gusted, whipped at pale wisps of cloth, teasing Fell with hints of a shapely body hidden beneath. The horse stood motionless, its eyes two shards of obsidian.
She found me.
A terrible sadness – a soul-crushing grief – overcame Fell, and he stumbled to his knees. Tears came, and he sobbed into his hands for a lifetime of loss. The pain of the fall was nothing. Flesh and bone and muscle mattered not when everything worth living for had been torn from your life, turned to dust before your very eyes, crushed in a skeletal fist.
When the misery had passed and his eyes were once again dry, Fell found his cane in the dirt and pushed himself back to his feet with a groan. He stood, staring at the blood on his hands where he’d scraped them on a rock catching his fall.
‘I have to leave.’
He’d stayed in Hollow’s Dell too long.
He felt it deep in his bones.
Turning, he saw the rider was gone.
She wanted to be seen.
It was a message: I found you.
Fell turned, looked back up the hill towards the wretched hovel of his home.
You can’t leave tonight, not in the dark.
The only easily travelled path out of town was the single road cutting through Hollow’s Dell, and that was the one place someone would definitely think to intercept his escape. On the other hand, creeping through the forest in the dead of night was a sure recipe for broken bones.
Doubt and fear.
They won’t come tonight. She would want him to suffer. I’ll sneak out in the morning.
He tried to shake off the lingering grief, but it clung like spiderwebs.
One last night. One more taste of Gallowglas’ ale.
One last chance to see Terese, to listen to her sing.
Would Rita be at the Bucket? Sometimes her mother let her stay up late to hear a few of Terese’s songs before bed.
I’ll miss the brat.
The thought hurt more than expected. The precocious child was a constant annoyance, always letting herself into his home and prattling on with that incessant babble. A thousand small gifts littered his hovel, crude drawings sketched in charcoal on thin slabs of wood. She often brought sweets, treats saved from her own meals. Her constant thoughtless kindness was a pain.
So like Leona.
Fell sighed, and turned back towards the Dripping Bucket. One last night. He’d say goodbye to these people who had, if not welcomed him, still been kind. He’d say goodbye to Rita too, if she was there. And he’d thank her. She’d more than earned that.
