The Screaming Skull Read online

  I lay in a pool of warm, copper-scented goo. My breath was shallow in my lungs. A bald head blotted out the sun. Then, a feminine voice: “Step aside, monk, or he’ll die.”

  An angel hovered over me. Her hair was spun gold, her skin Italian alabaster, her lips the ripest of plump red strawberries glistening in the dew. Her eyes sparkled with blue faerie fire. Her gaze met mine, and I was lost.

  “Mommy,” I said, and passed out.

  19

  Sometime later I awoke to find myself surrounded by gleaming marble. My nostrils were filled with the scent of fermented grapes. There was a down pillow under my head. A hand held a goblet before me.

  “Drink this,” said a woman’s voice.

  She helped me to a few swallows of wine. My vision clearing, I discerned marble columns, wooden pews, and an altar laden with olive branches. The marble likeness of a warrior woman with spear and helm towered over me. I lay on a soft divan, naked but for a silk sheet draped over my midsection. Beside me sat the angel who had appeared in the street—an angel now disguised as a mortal, golden-haired woman with a laughing gaze. I loved her instantly.

  “You have me at a disadvantage,” I burbled.

  “Don’t flatter yourself. The monk disrobed you, not I,” the woman said. “I merely saved you from death. By the grace of noble Athena, you are healed. Your wounds were grave.”

  “Athena, eh? You’re a shield-maiden, then?”

  “I am her servant, Cassiopeia. You are…?”

  “Elberon of the Isles,” I said. I took the goblet from her hand and drained it. My strength was returning quickly. “Cassiopeia—I’ve heard that story. You’ve a sister chained to a rock somewhere, right?”

  “I was named after the constellation, not the queen,” said Cassiopeia. “My father didn’t read much. But he loved the stars.”

  “Obviously,” I said, “since he sired one himself.”

  20

  That was smooth, wasn’t it? Show me the woman who wouldn’t fall for that line.

  The reappearance of the Screaming Skull marked the onset of several imminent crises. The most obvious problem—that whoever delivered the Skull to me knew I had once possessed it—wasn’t even the worst one. The worse problem was that, although I had been living with one woman for five years—and married to her for four months—I was now in love with another one. Or at least in lust. What’s the difference? Either way, I was obsessed.

  After Melinda clocked me upside the head with that fucking skull five years earlier, she became my first obsession. What I had only glimpsed when she drove her fist into my eye on that first night, I had now seen in full flower: her bravado, her strength, her skill with a blade. She was like me, but with tits.

  I awoke hours later, prostrate on the Stonesong Bridge and suffering from a hangover the size of Mt. Meru. A thin layer of snow covered me. Dawn was breaking over the mist-shrouded hills. I was alive, intact, and still possessed of both sword and purse. Melinda the Blade, as I now knew her to be, was gone, as was the jeweled skull with which she had cold-cocked me. The bodies on the bridge were gone. The frozen pools of blood remained. But for the distant cawing of crows somewhere in the valley below, I was alone.

  The journey from on-my-back to on-my-feet was long and arduous, and still I faced the bone-freezing trek back to the city. Two hours by wagon became six hours on foot: over hill and dale, past farmhouses farting chimney smoke into the blue sky, skirting the occasional bundled-up travelers to whom I gave curt nods even as my hand found my sword pommel. A league outside the city, I finally scored a ride with a pot-maker who sat a mule wagon rattling with cookware. The pot-maker’s merchant pass got him through the Dragon Gate, saving me from another stint in Doomtown.

  Once inside the city, I stopped off at Lady Hagg’s for a hot bath administered by her ancient gnome manservant. After a good tongue-lashing from the old woman for leaving the privy a mess, I headed for the Suds ‘n Shade to rendezvous with my mates. I found them breaking fast, the barbarian hunched over a slab of bacon and a side of grits, while the elf worked over a bowl of spiced oatmeal.

  “There he is!” said Amabored as I took a seat while Trilecia, one of Jaspin’s barmaids, brought me coffee and bread. “So, you fucked her, right? How’d she like it? Could she find your cock without a magnifying glass?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Maybe he wants to take her on a date first,” said Lithaine. “Just because you’ll screw anything with a hole doesn’t mean the rest of us will.”

  “Damn straight. Bend over this table and I’ll fuck you too.”

  “You couldn’t handle a prime cut of elf meat. I’d make you my bitch.”

  It felt good to hear such civilized discourse. While we ate, I recounted the night’s events. We were in a thorny thicket. I hadn’t located Melinda’s hideout, but I knew her name. What else did I know? That some badass dwarfs, apparently wanting that wagon full of pipeweed for themselves, had attacked her. That she had some sort of jeweled skull of potential value to Saggon. Was this information worth enough to save our asses? Or was it so worthless that Saggon would throw us from his tower window?

  “Let him try,” said Lithaine, when I mentioned this possibility. “I say we march into the Falcon, cut off his fucking head, and blow this shithole.”

  “We don’t want that fat bastard on our asses yet,” Amabored said. “Let’s tell him what we know, and then we’ll decide our next move.”

  Heading for the Blue Falcon, we wound our way along the crooked byways of the Guild Quarter, pushing our way through the afternoon throngs as the high, moss-draped towers of Saggon’s lair loomed ever closer. Fingers of ice gripped our spines as if the Falcon itself was filled with malevolence and brooding upon our approach.

  At the entrance to the inn’s main courtyard, we found two centaur guards, their dark skin stretched taught over rippling muscles. Alerted to our arrival, they lowered their fencepost-sized crossbows to allow us inside. The Falcon’s courtyard itself sprawled as large as a rugby field and crawled with all manner of cutpurses, pickpockets, ruffians, second-story men, grifters, gamblers, and hedge-fund managers gathered in various clots to strike deals and manufacture plots. Once inside the inn’s massive granite-columned Great Hall, we penguin-walked through the crowd to the bar, where we were promptly set upon by a murder of tiny wood-elf hookers who pushed their tits into our bellies and angled for drinks. Before we could shoo them away, a gargantuan eight-foot-tall hill troll stomped over and did it for us. He hooked a meaty thumb over his shoulder.

  “This way,” the troll grumbled.

  We followed. The troll led us out a pair of barred and chained double doors, down a long stone corridor ramping downward, through another pair of doors, and into a lavishly wide hall lined with ten-by-ten-foot pits. The pits were presided over by masked and leather-bound men wielding whips and chains: lictors from the Torturers Guild, under contract to Saggon. Dangling over several of the pits were screaming men, their limbs splayed wide by ropes lashing them to posts anchored at the corners of the pits.

  We had heard of this place. Saggon called it the Confessional, for it was in this room that his prisoners confessed their sins. At the bottom of each pit grew a colony of piranha fungus, its hundreds of savage fanged mouths snapping and snarling amongst the purplish moss, waiting for the torturers to cut the lashes and send down fresh meat. We exchanged glances—and in that fleeting moment, each of us understood that none of us was going into one of those pits. We would die instead, fighting back-to-back.

  The troll motioned for us to sit at a table near the stoves, which suited us fine, as Saggon kept the Confessional as frigid as his office atop the high tower. After a moment, we saw the Over-Boss himself turn away from a table upon which lay the gory remains of a prisoner. He trundled over to us, wiping his bloody hands on his bloody smock, and dropped into a chair opposite ours. Something grotesque passed over his face that might have been a smile.

  “You boys hungry?” he a
sked. “Some quail eggs maybe? Some sandwiches?” He called over to his shadow-elf secretary, who lounged nearby, cloaked in wolf furs and filing her nails into sharp points. “Get a tray of sausages in here for the boys, would you? There’s a girl.” He gave us another once-over. “So—Mo. Larry. Curly. About the woman. What do you have for me? Something good?”

  I got through the story as quickly as I could without telling him that I hadn’t learned the one thing he had asked me to learn. As I spoke, the torturers continued their dark work on the men dangling over the pits. Soon the food arrived; Saggon dug in while we tried to keep our breakfasts down. It took everything we had not to cut and run.

  “Interesting,” Saggon said. He licked the sausage grease from his fingers. “Dwarfs. Crazy octopus-dogs. Melinda. A skull on a chain.” The Over-Boss leaned forward, his swollen forehead hovering inches from my own. “Tell me about that skull, my young friend. Tell me everything.”

  There wasn’t much to tell, but I told him. He listened with feigned insouciance.

  “You did good, kid,” Saggon said, motioning for me to stand up. He did so as well, hauling his prodigious girth around the table. He gave me a fatherly embrace—one that soon became a headlock.

  “Here’s the thing,” said the Over-Boss, his muscled arm wrapped around my neck like a python. “You left out one very important detail, the detail that I just happened to send you out there to find out for me, the very small detail of where this woman is holed up. You didn’t find that out for me, did you, Shemp?”

  It felt as Saggon was trying to squeeze my brains out through my asshole. Outside of his lair, I would have used the girdle to do as much to him, but trying it now would only invite his henchmen to kill all three of us. So, I could only surrender as Saggon dragged me over to one of the pits. He hoisted me up by a leg and dangled me over the edge. Later, I would have cause to wonder at his strength, which seemed far too great for such a fat tub of goo. For now, the snapping fangs of the piranha fungus swaying beneath my inverted gaze left me too terrified to think.

  Lithaine and Amabored didn’t dare move—any attempt to save me would find them drawn and quartered. I could pray only for a quick death.

  “What if I just dropped you into this pit, my son?” Saggon snarled. “And then maybe drop your friends in after you, just for knowing you? You think I should do that, Gomer?”

  “No, my lord!”

  “Then tell me what that bitch wants! What’s she hiding from me? Where’s the skull? Did you make a deal with her? Spit it out!”

  “I’ve told you everything, my lord! I swear it!”

  Screwing my eyes shut, I waited for the end. Instead, Saggon hauled me back, dropped me onto the sawdust-strewn floor, and then helped me to my feet. He clapped me on the back and bellowed laughter.

  “I was just fuckin’ witcha!” He cried. “I had ya, didn’t I? I had him, boys, didn’t I?” He said to my companions. “Naw, you did all right, Frankie. You did what you could.”

  Saggon motioned me back to the table. My legs felt al dente, but I managed to collapse into a chair. Thank the gods I hadn’t pissed myself.

  “This is what I want, Elvis,” Saggon said, leveling his gaze at me. “You get me the location of that gal’s hideout within twenty-four hours, or I sell pieces of you around town like Girl Scout cookies. You got me?”

  A frozen sheath of doom formed around my heart. Motherfucking bad luck. I would have to bug out of town after all.

  “Consider it done, my lord,” I said, with no conviction whatsoever.

  To our blessed relief, Saggon motioned us out the door. The troll led us back through the Great Hall and Grand Foyer, and then out to the courtyard.

  “That was fun,” Lithaine said. “What now?”

  “I’ll be out of town by nightfall,” I said. “No reason why you boys can’t stay. I’m the one who’s fucked.”

  “If you split without giving him what he wants, then we’re all fucked,” Amabored said. “Time to ply our trade on the Were Coast. We’ll meet at Jaspin’s place at dusk.”

  It appeared that our lives in Redhauke were over—but fate was destined to yank us by the balls in a different direction. A watch later found me back at Lady Hagg’s to pack up my meager possessions. When I stepped into my third-floor room, the skull with which Melinda had clobbered me on the Stonesong Bridge sat leering on my nightstand between a fat red candlestick and an oil lamp. It looked utterly benign—and I might have considered it so, had I any inkling of who put it in my room, or why.

  I considered the skull less benign still when suddenly—and, may I say, unexpectedly—it started to scream.

  21

  I hadn’t even time to wrap my brain around the horned skull shrieking in my room before Melinda and two masked henchmen burst through the door behind me. The woman spun me around and thrust her dagger at my throat.

  “Do what I say or die!” she shouted. So loud was the skull’s keening wail that I could only read her lips. I nodded. Grabbing the still-wailing skull from the nightstand, she wrapped it in the thin bedsheet from my sleeping mat and dropped it into a shoulder bag. Then she flung open the door and yanked me into the hall.

  At once, we saw the leaches. Dozens of them, each the size of a bull terrier and as black and slimy as a devil’s tongue, slithered on the walls, hung from the ceiling, or writhed on the floor. At the business end of each one lurked a puckered maw lined with a double row of needled fangs.

  “What the holy fuck—?” I cried.

  “We’re too late,” Melinda said. “Swords!”

  A scream behind us, from one of Melinda’s men. A leach had dropped from the ceiling and sank its fangs into the poor bastard’s head. The henchman screamed and caromed off the walls. Throbbing obscenely, the leach sucked pinkish-gray goo from his skull through the hollow straws of its fangs. A scarlet flood poured from the man’s eyes, nose, and ears. In five seconds he lay twitching on the floor, a bloody horror.

  “Crom’s beard!” I said.

  The leaches launched themselves at us. They were blind and slow; by timing our swings, we could bisect them in mid-flight—which didn’t kill them but did slow them down.

  Soon, the other henchman had his face pulled from his skull, and Melinda and I found ourselves back-to-back near a window at the end of the hall. Still the glistening, black abominations came. Behind closed doors, the other boarders cowered beneath their beds; I envied them. I also felt the old familiar rush of adrenalin at once again doing the death-tango, with the crone’s fingers around my throat and her cold breath on me like the horror of an open tomb. My nuts felt like cannonballs.

  Catching Melinda’s gaze, I saw the same hunger in her eyes—she felt it too.

  “Out the window, then,” she said, her gaze locking on mine.

  “You read my mind.”

  Still clutching the bag holding the screaming skull, Melinda launched into a headfirst dive out the third-floor window. I followed, and a push from the girdle sent the window frame exploding ahead of me over Lamplight Street.

  A three-story fall rarely ends well. Fortunately, even in midwinter Lamplight Street is lined with thatch-covered vendor stalls selling wormy fruit, knockoff roc-feathers, worthless aphrodisiacs, and the like. We crashed into a pair of them, sending the stall proprietors running for cover.

  Then we heard the sirens: Sklaar’s ornithopters, piloted by gnomes and drawn by whatever powerful magic had summoned those leaches. Swooping towards us, they darkened the streets like the shadows of owls hunting field mice. They were zeroing in on the skull’s muffled wails. Unless we could quiet the thing and then vanish, in moments they would cordon off the block with Force Shields and clamp us in irons for unauthorized use of sorcery.

  A pair of ornithopters dropped low to hover over the street before us. “Follow me!” Melinda cried. She bolted for the nearest alley.

  I followed. Crossing over Fountain Avenue, we were soon lost in the maze of the Guild Quarter, leapfrogging over piles of ref
use and pools of sewage, losing ourselves in the bowels of the city. The skull had stopped screaming, opting instead to concoct new deviltry from its hiding spot in Melinda’s purse.

  We stopped short in a cramped courtyard lined with barrels. Melinda crouched before one barrel and depressed a hidden latch. The barrel sprang back to reveal the maw of a well and a ladder descending to the catacombs below. Without a look back, she started down the ladder. I dove in after her just before the spring-loaded barrel snapped back into place. Wherever Melinda the Blade was leading me, I was at her mercy.

  22

  Dropping from the ladder into a narrow rock-hewn tunnel, I raced after Melinda. Despite my shock and terror, I fixated on her ass bobbing before me in the feeble torchlight. My thoughts lingered upon that mystical nexus where her ass, thighs, and abdomen all merged into a fantastical, goddess-touched landscape. If ever I found myself sniffing around that landscape, then I’d have to fake not needing a map.

  For a good while, we jogged through the slime-coated tunnel as it twisted and branched, coming at last to a rusted sluice gate anchoring the end of a narrow tributary. Melinda gestured over it, and hidden runes carved in the metal awoke into a dim ruby glow. She touched the runes with her finger. The gate dissolved into the aether, replaced by a portal that led into a chamber plump with warm firelight. Melinda looked back at me.

  “Saggon will pay dearly for the location of this place,” Melinda said. “But you’d better spend the money quickly.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  “Then come in,” she said. No sooner did I slip into her silk-draped apartment than I found myself slammed against a stone wall with her dagger once again at my throat.