Shadows & Sorcery #166
I’m feeling it—so we’re diving back into the world spoken of the Codex Barbarion for a triple feature! A savage age where all the world must battle for the favour of the gods! This one’s been getting some development behind the scenes, and I thought I’d share.
Now, very important news, the most important: next week there will be no new Shadows & Sorcery, for it is the triumphant return of The Path of Poison! What have Sepp and the gang been up? Literally anything could happen.
But for now, why not check out, or re-check out last week’s birthday special? It was pretty cool, or so the legends say.
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This week, we head into the hills to encounter Dark Sorcery, we seek the secrets of the Wind of Dream, and we listen out for the Call of the Abyss…
Dark Sorcery
Prince Aldo, of the province of Virkam, in the eastern fringes of Regnum Regis, son of the widely considered ineffectual King Aldu, sought, so talk among the Aristocrates of the capital said, to prove his and his nation's worth by, it was also said, stirring up unrest. So the Emperor roused an army of provincial mercenaries—not the Regic Legions, not the Royal Auxiliaries, but mercenaries, as a simple yet devastating show of the people's loyalty to him, and a show of the depths of his coffers.
The march to the border was something of an event in the region, with mercenary bands, loose coalitions, small roving parties, and lone warriors all passing to the south-east through the valleys and hilltops in a month-long dribbling stream, creating as much local business as they did trouble. Soldiers rarely passed through any place without at least one body in their wake, and these sellswords had no superiors to hold them accountable. But not all among this vast caravan of clinking armour and gleaming weapons were hungry killers, some, such as Kyrla and Sammaes, were simple opportunists. They had come from the far west, and they were late. In the time it had taken them to travel by boat, by wagon, by foot, and by stowing away in any hold or undercarriage they could slip themselves into, the mercenary army had grown into a horde.
They arrived at the outer edges of the huge camp on the cliff road looking over the thick, verdant Virkaman brush when it seemed everyone and everything was at a fever pitch—the sun was searing hot, the chants and bells and drums of restless liturgies echoed through the warm, breathless air heavy with the stench of piles of incense and the smoke of sacrifices, puddles of wine and grease slop from aleman's tents simmered with bitter stink in the heat, entire ossuaries of yellowed bones from cast away meals lay in low, spreading mounds, the ringing of bronzesmiths hammers were incessant, and the roars, laughs, jests, and less savoury exclamations had about them a tinge of the kind of exhaustion that was ready to snap any second.
Kyrla and Sammaes had made their way through the throngs of scar-faced old killers and sly-eyed professionals to someone who seemed to be in charge, or at least knew someone who was in charge, and found out they had arrived pretty much just as sign ups were being told to go elsewhere—or stay, but they weren't being paid, and anything they sacked was on their head. The two had no reputation, but their gear was a slight grade above the rest of the battered arms that had shown up already. So, under the light of a baleful, testing sun, their names were added to some kind of list, and told to find somewhere to rest up. Word was going to spread soon—come sunrise, they attacked.
The two, clad in green padded linen garments, carrying their diamond-shaped shields slung over their shoulders, passed about a dozen camps and firepits surrounded by surly, furtive figures with glints in their eyes neither of them liked. A quiet place, but not too quiet, not too away from other eyes, was theirs, on the north-western edge of the force. They must have, they figured between them, left a month's wages with the little altars and priests infesting the camp. But it would be worth it, they said to each other, over and over, the gods would be on their side against this upstart prince. That month's wages would come back to them five times over—seven times, even. Every sliver of a coin spent here was worth it. Had to be, the eve before a siege. There wasn't much else to occupy the mind with, they inspected their weapons thrice-fold—her leaf-shaped blade and his lightly flaring axe, and gambler's dens and brothels were as likely to steal your purse as cutthroats in the night. A few more offerings set their mind at ease on that, at least.
The sun had finally left for wherever it went at night, and something of a chill had crept upon the cliffs. They were higher, bearing the greater brunt of the sun, but also feeling its absence the most. One hundred thousand stars stared down from the heavens. The gods were watching from their thrones, through the veil, from within alien suns—or whatever else one believed. Neither Kyrla nor Sammaes doubted the gods would see the right thing done, but at the same time, idle concerns raised their heads over whether this gaggle of sadists they sat with were in the right, if the Emperor was being tested, or whether Prince Aldo the Bold, as some had taken to calling him, had the gods' favour.
As the night deepened and fires went out across the great sprawl of the camp, they decided it was probably best to do something about it.
They climbed then, in the growing darkness, into the lush and rugged ascent where the land rose and fell dramatically, and suddenly. In the last dregs of sunlight, a cool breeze blew a fragrance from somewhere beyond. Out here, they'd been told by a goodly priest rather pleased with their donations, that some kind of hermit dwelt nearby in the upper country, who, word which has passed around said, had the ear of the gods in some fashion. Most folk, of course, are wary of hermits living in out of the way places, but Kyrla and Sammaes were opportunists, and a little extra insurance from a wilderness holy man would do them the world of good. They had no friends in the camp, and hadn't bothered to make sure that at least a handful of other mercenaries wouldn't eye them for their loot.
But instead of the aged and wise ascetic they'd hoped to meet, what met them in the shifting murk was a withered old wretch in rags who asked upfront if they could pay for his services. Oh, he knew why they were here, he wasn't stupid, he could hear and see the marching soldiers and the hunters and other unsavoury characters creeping about. But they were the only ones smart enough to seek him out. They had better come look, then. Kyrla and Sammaes shared a glance.
Lurid light from sputtering braziers illumined the dingy chamber they stood in, where, hanging from numerous chains and cords in the low, thick-beamed ceiling, and sitting upon dusty shelves, were some dozen weapons, bits of armour, and curious trinkets and idols. The light somehow made the bronze of the various Regic swords and axes burn, while it made the iron of the vargeld axes and northern horseman spears seem darker. But it wasn't merely human arms which hung there, wicked khanalfar scimitars, slender asalfar swords, and even two hefty obsidian axes that Sammaes muttered must have belonged to the Great Beast were on display. Of the armour, the various bits and pieces of greaves and bracers, the horned or crested helmets, and hammered breastplates all seemed to be of human, yet quite ancient, make.
Sammaes knew them instantly, even the alfar and orc or goblin ones, to be relics of the gods. Nothing else quite looked like them. Only this place didn't exactly have the feel of a shrine.
"You know, then," said the withered old fellow, noticing Sammaes' expression as he turned to Kyrla, "the value of what you see?"
"Divine relics," Sammaes said, the humility clear in his tone.
"Tools to be used," returned the old man with a glare. "But you are warriors both," he continued as he trailed his fingers over the hanging armaments, "are you looking, perhaps, for strength? To make the killing easier?" He stopped, hand resting on a heavy blade that curved and tapered forward. "Cleave through ringmail and corslet as though they were soft, pliable flesh..." he finished those three words by running his finger along the side of the falx. "Or maybe you find battle distasteful? Many fighters do, but to spill blood is often necessary, no?" He made a sound in his throat that might have been a chuckle. He moved to something else, then, and grasped the empty sockets of the grotesque face plate of a black iron helm. "Strike them with a terror so cold it stops their limbs, and simply...cut down the chaff."
"How..." Kyrla began to ask, her eyes passing quickly over the clouded red glass vials and vessels which seemed to be sitting just about everywhere.
"Does it all work?" the old man finished, a glint in his eye. She nodded.
"You pray to the god of the relic," said Sammaes with confidence.
"Oh yes," he said with wide eyes of mocking incredulity. "But only I know the right words for each one."
The strange old hermit moved elsewhere then and took down from a shelf a heavy, translucent green amulet in the shape of a winged monster—a treasure worth a year's pay, no doubt.
"Is that a-" asked Sammaes.
"Exactly what you think, yes. Could it be you desire a different power, hmm? To make the servants and messengers of the gods...your own?"
"Odd thing for a holy man to say," Kyrla all but growled.
The old man laughed, inward and ugly, but he wasn't looking at either of them. He brought the strange amulet close to his mouth, and began to mumble something. As he did do, his head and his eyes turned to the two mercenaries, and a grin spread across his rapidly whispering lips. Suddenly, then, there was a sound. A dry scrabbling and clacking on the roof of the grim little hut. The old man's eyes darted up as he heard, as did both Kyrla and Sammaes. A second later something landed on the ground. Into the open doorway lumbered a thin-bodied thing with beak-like head and stalk-legs, two great fan wings fluttering at its sides. It stood, every so often shifting its on feet, more like points that dug into the ground.
"How did you call..." Sammaes trailed off with a tremble, but Kyrla's hand fell to her sword hilt.
"Do you really think the gods will just send to me daemons on command? You poor fools," he leaned closer to them, and hissed: "the power is in the artifacts!" He rushed over to a hanging sword, held by the hilt and spoke a mantra of a war god, and a flash of fire shivered along the wavering blade. He laughed, let it go, and held out his hand, speaking another prayer, and a spear fell off its chain and into his hand. "You think the gods are at the beck and call of every mortal with an enchanted sword or magic amulet? No! And we need them NOT!" He spun about to do something else, only he turned into the point of Kyrla's leaf-shaped sword, who swore loud and frightened as she wrenched it free, blood and viscera slopping to the bare earthen floor. Sammaes bolted over, sending his flared axe into the wizard's neck with another shaken curse. Two strokes later and he was dead. The two warriors stood there swearing. The daemon had left.
"You heard the things he was saying! The things he was doing!"
"Aye, weren't right..."
"I'm not having that blasphemy on us the night before a battle. I'm not!"
"Knew this wasn't no hermit shrine," Sammaes was looking around, feeling eyes that judged upon him from all angles.
"The gods'll favour us for this, Samm, saving these holy relics from dark sorcery."
"We'd better liberate these Regic weapons, then...don't you think?"
Kyrla agreed wholeheartedly. They weren't killers, they were faithful, and they were opportunists.
Wind of Dream
Áéa was popularly considered, throughout Regnum Regis, a land touched by the gods. Its golden vales, white sands, azure waters, verdant plains, twilit woodlands, and cool perfumed winds from great expanses of orchids and lotuses, all suffused with a sun that seemed to shine brighter than anywhere else in the world, and gentle rainfall from the passage of thin clouds were vision after vision of a bucolic paradise. The people were an old race, but simple, they were farmers and fishers, poets and actors, their priests were the leaders of the broad open towns and villages of ancient, toppling columns and arches reared centuries ago, and longer.
But deep in the Áéan heartland, where Regic influence began to wane, where imperial soldiers ceased to tread and border fortresses suddenly vanished, rites unheard of by even the most inquisitive imperial rite-stealers and explorers took place away from prying eyes, gone unchanged for millennia. Some were to propitiate the countless wandering demigods and their insatiable lusts and hungers—would that the empire knew of the sheer extent of them, they would steal them away for their blood sports or kill them, was what many an Áéan peasant lamented. But some rites gave credence to the Regic stereotype of the god-touched countryside, for there was known to many a heartlander and southerner the existence of a lonely stretch of grassland that no path or track crossed, where there gathered those who still dared to perform the rites of the oracles.
Old stories say lights could be seen on that gentle rise far off on certain nights, when chill breezes came in from the sea, or when the wind made certain sounds through certain trees, when every door and shutter was fastened tight, and the baying of bestial demigods filled the night air. At these times, seers and soothsayers of all kinds gathered in the wilds en masse upon that particular low hill or mound, and there enacted ecstatic and hallucinogenic orgies and feasts upon the bare earth long into the night. It was, so the stories went, so they may become more receptive to the voices of the gods that would haunt their dreams upon that hilltop.
Those who survived the night would then return to Áéan civilization with newfound secrets and lore, much of which never fell into the hands of those from Regnum Regis.
It was Kavasta's very own sister who had told her of them, for she had the sight, of the intimate knowledge granted, and of veiled references to grim offerings. Well, one day she never came back. Kavasta did not have the sight, but all the same, knew just enough to follow others who did out to the secret place where the gods whispered on the wind.
She watched from a distance throughout the whole evening, and into the growing night, the primordial rites of old committed once again. Flashes of coloured lights sometimes spilled from the leaping bonfires, and sometimes they were in response to a particular sound from the cacophony of human sounds, sometimes they came and were answered by howls and ululations, and by dancing and creeping silhouettes. A sickly sweet stench pervaded the air for hours until finally it seemed as if the entire gathering suddenly collapsed, nearly all at once, a collective energy utterly spent.
When the final dregs of light had vanished, and all that lit the landscape were the stars, Kavasta crept up the undulant slope. She kept low as she climbed, every shift and rustle making her jump. She didn't quite know what it was that had set her so badly on edge, but when the wind came, she guessed her flesh had caught the horror before aught else. She could tell it was different. They must be speaking within it, from on high, from beyond. It also brought down the hillside the stink of stale incense, spices, and burning—the stench of intense ritual. As she gained the summit, the wind seemed to cavort atop the broad expanse, for in the silver-tinged dark the grasses and weeds were pulled and pushed this way and that, as were the clothes and rags of those who lay sprawled unconscious on the grassy peak, and the long hair and coarse fur of the demigods which which roamed about, picking over the sleeping bodies.
Kavasta fell to the ground, hands over her mouth. Gods help her, she thought, this was the offering. This is why her sister never came home.
She watched a hunched, horned, and snouted thing covered in shaggy black fur, that lumbered on strange legs, pick up a person by their neck and legs, and force its maw into their stomach, stifling any sound with long black fingers. She watched tall, pale, naked things very much like people, though not completely, pull off the heads and limbs of sleepers. A thing with a head somewhere between a serpent and a person surmounting a grossly bloated body forced an entire human down its gullet. A spider with a man's arms dropped a corpse and a long, dripping proboscis slid out from the chest. She screamed prayers in her head that they wouldn't come over here. She repeated benedictions that they wouldn't follow if she ran. There was nothing behind her. She was nearly sure of that. She supposed she would know. She looked to one side slowly, and saw a collection of decently high and rather wide braziers, smouldering low and still sending trails of smoke. She could hide between them, cover herself with the rags and sheets nearby.
She made sure the demigods had turned away for a moment in their hungry search, like birds pecking at the soil on a warm morning. That wind was still blowing about, from no one direction. Between three braziers, arranged so a taller one was behind two shorter ones, one being shorter than the rest, and wrapped in some long, loose, discarded garment, she knelt, and watched. And then, she listened. Above the wet sounds of breaking bone, tearing muscle, and eerie hush of wind, was something else. Were those voices? Around her. Below her. The sleepers were whispering and muttering. Speaking the things from their dreams. What the gods were saying to them.
For some several hours, Kavasta sat in a rigid daze, shadowed by the braziers and tattered shroud about her, by the dimness of the stars, and at some point the demigods left, having had their fill. But she had listened, all night she had listened. When some semblance of awareness returned to her, she got up when the sun was merely a pallid line on the horizon, cast off the garment, and silently left before anyone else woke up, looking at the world around her now with strange new eyes. Things, she now knew, that must be kept a secret for all time to come.
Call of the Abyss
By decree of a past Emperor and upheld by successors, one of the kindest acts ever wrought, slaves may "buy their freedom". A master may tally, at their discretion of course, the revenue brought in by a sole slave's work, and should it amount to a goodly sum—enough to replace them—by pre-arranged agreement, the slave may become freed.
Michas had no such prospects, not back in the bastard master's fields, and now, not in any others. But he prayed now to any god that would listen to save him, to let him wake up in his quarters back east, where the things which skittered and slithered through the festering back alleys would become nothing but the shadows of bad dreams under the sun. He'd be damned, he'd thought, if he was going to spend another night sleeping near the midden pits outside the city. The warmth was not worth the smell which stuck to him for a day after. So he had snuck past the walls before sundown, and sought some alcove or overhang out of the the way of guard patrols.
As the city had gone silent, or as silent as a city in the capital lands of Regnum Regis ever got, he had begun to hear things not quite shuffling feet, not quite revellers in the distance, nor chants, nor bells, nor drums. But they were steps, and they were voices. The worst he'd ever heard in his life. Not the deliberate pad or ragged huff of a thief or cutthroat, not the shuffle or wheeze of some disease-wracked wanderer, not the loping or chittering of some goblin. Irregular gasps and gulps through foam and phlegm. Wet sounds, dragging sounds, slopping sounds, and then, worst of all, furious skitterings and scrabblings. He knew he was being watched—being followed, but gods help him, what were those things with the stalk arms and bulging bent backs and faces that were neither the faces of men nor daemons?
Each time it was something new. A head like a spider's body surmounting rags peered from around a corner. A face on a neck that stretched and stretched like a centipede looked from some overhang before darting back in. Soft, flabby limbs that seemed bereft of bones pulled a maggoty bulk out of the shadows, and with shocking swiftness, into some unseen culvert. They were talking to each other, he knew it. What did they want with him? Michas was just a beggar. A poor beggar and run away slave.
No one who'd be missed.
He prayed for favour, and muttered under his breath how he'd given coins to the temples even when it had meant going without a room for the night, he'd burnt half his meagre meals as offerings, he'd prayed every day, please oh gods, he whimpered as he ran and ducked, afeared just as much of the guard's torches as he was the things in the shadows.
"You," slurred a voice like ripping fabric through a mouth not meant for speech, "are favoured!"
Michas tripped and skidded around—it was close—where?—how?
"Why," came another voice that clicked, "are you running?"
A hand emerged from a shadowed porch—thin flesh on thin bones whose fingers tapered off into ragged talons. Gods of the world, he thought, I can't let it touch me.
"We," came that first voice, "are in every street."
"In every city," came a third voice like bubbling fluid.
"Under every step you take!" yet another hissed.
Something dropped down just ahead of him. Oh gods, he was lost. He'd just ran. He was cornered. It began to stand up, its hunched form held up on wiry, stick-thin legs. A hand emerged from within the shadow, filthy, pallid flesh, held out...in offering.
"No more fear. No more pain." Its voice was soft and hoarse.
"Join us," said every voice in perfect unison.
"We...are promised..." came the soft, hoarse voice, "a dark destiny by a god in secret."
"Under the world, in the deep, in the abyss, no more slaves," said the ripping fabric voice.
"No more masters!" the clicking voice came.
"Eat, and breed, and kill, with your brothers and your sisters," gurgled the voice of fluid.
"All are one in the Vermen!" exclaimed the clicking voice.
Michas hadn't even really noticed when the thing had put its hand on his shoulder, or when the others had came closer, and embraced him. A swift and rushing darkness took him then, but it seemed more like a dream than anything. Or, just perhaps, a prayer answered.