The Screaming Skull Read online

  “You die sitting down,” he offered.

  “Sitting down? Where?”

  “On the toilet.”

  I lurched upright. Bestial noises clawed my throat. Wilberd took a step back.

  “On the toilet?” I cried.

  “I told you, you wouldn’t want to hear it.”

  “That’s swell! That’s perfect! When I arrive in Valhalla and Odin asks me, ‘How many men did you send to Hell before you came to stand before me?’ I’ll have to say, ‘None, my lord, because I died on the fucking toilet!’ I’ll be laughed out of the afterlife!”

  “I’m just telling you what I saw,” Wilberd said. “I thought you’d be happy about it.”

  “I’m as happy as your mother when I pay her in cash!” I paced like a caged ferret. “What if I pull a sword down from the wall and cut my own throat with it five minutes from now? Where would your Astral-fucking-Telescope be then?”

  “Don’t be dense. The Telescope reveals the end of your current path through the Multiverse, but it doesn’t eradicate free will. You can always step off the path. Every heartbeat creates a new universe.”

  My shears lay on the ground. The azaleas turned to other business. What now? Intimations of mortality hung around my neck like a petrified dragon turd. The urge to flee—out of the castle, through Tradewind City and down to the harbor, commandeer a ship and keep sailing until I had outrun my fate—flooded me with hot desire. No matter how far I ran, my end would still loom before me: rising with the sun, shining with the stars, a bright comet scarring the sky to herald my demise.

  In truth, it isn’t the method or date of my passing that gets to me. It’s the simple certainty of death itself. I’m not immortal, as I had always secretly hoped. Fate is a fisherman, and none escape his net.

  Now, I sit my throne, unmoved since the day Wilberd dropped his bombshell. My wife, my ministers, and my priests ply me with food, with counsel, with ointments and salves. I refuse all ministrations. I crave only solitude and dwell mostly in the past. So, I’ve called in my scribes to take down this dictation in the hopes that you understand why I did what I’m about to do. To know why I do this thing, you need to know my story, as painful as that might be for you. My story is, after all, not some garden-variety bildungsroman. It’s an epic tale of high adventure, with the fate of the Multiverse at stake. I’ve stepped through the Black Mirror and lived to tell the tale. I’ve been to Hell and back. I’ve fought arch-devils, extra-dimensional Chaos queens, dragons, pirate lords, giants, the undead, aliens, hellspawn—you name it, I’ve slain it.

  Saving the world always requires sacrifice. Some of the good guys must die, or there was never really much at stake. It could have been me just as easily as Malcolm, or Redulfo, or Bellasa, or Cassie. Why, when I’ve spent my life seeking Death, do I so despair now that Death has come to call? That I need not answer the door for another six decades is cold comfort indeed.

  My birthday party is nine days hence. There will be parades, a fleet processional, feasts, speeches, and revues. Even now, heads of state from across the Free Kingdoms undertake long and perilous journeys to sit at my table and toast my good health. Those survivors of the Quest who still draw breath will attend as well. Shouldn’t I simply bask in the love of my family and subjects, secure in the knowledge that I’ve lived, against all the empty clockwork of this dangerous and incalculably heartless Multiverse, a good life?

  No. Fucking. Way. I have scores to settle, markers to collect, and debts to pay. My birthday guests are in for a shock—especially Wilberd, that smug bald bastard. They’ll learn that this decrepit hero has a few surprises left in him yet. My oldest and dearest friends will be here: Amabored, James, Andrigan, even Melinda, whom I betrayed. And when I finally get them all together, I’m going to kill every last one of them.

  4

  Before I continue, a point of order. Does the mere mention of elves and dwarfs, of swords and sorcery, mark me as a mere Tolkien rip-off artist? Allow me to point out that, by his own admission, Tolkien was the translator of the Red Book of Westmarch, not its author. How can you rip off history? In the Multiverse, Middle Earth is no more or less real than my Woerth. Even if Tolkien was lying, and he did make up the whole thing, then he cribbed most of his ideas from Celtic and Norse mythology. Hell, I could have done that. Could I hide behind faux conceits by calling the elves Fairies or Eldar, and the dwarfs Squats or Stunties? Sure, but could you be fooled so easily? I assure you that the arrogant, hemp-wearing, lute-playing, rope-smoking, herbal-tea-drinking elves in my tale are quite real, as are the smelly, avaricious, beer-swilling, gas-passing, gluttonous dwarfs. Middle Earth may reside a mere universe or two away from mine, but I’m a lot farther away from it than some other universes I could name. If Woerth is in the same neighborhood as Hobbiton, then the Four Lands can be found on fucking Bagshot Row.

  If I could create my own universe to inhabit, it would be more Star Wars than Middle Earth—modern plumbing, grooming, and medical science aside, it would be a lot easier to slay a dragon with a lightsaber than the heavy metal I had to lug around. You think it’s fun to live in the equivalent of Sixth Century Europe? No sanitation system, slop from the chamber pots falling like rain on the city streets, medical practices that would pass for torture in any civilized society. Try living through a case of the flu. Try getting an abscessed wisdom tooth pulled. Try dating a girl with hairy legs and summer teeth who doesn’t bathe. You didn’t hear about any of that stuff in Tolkien because he cleaned it all up. Hobbit holes don’t exactly smell like freshly shorn rose petals, you know. Mostly, they smell like outhouses.

  Such was the world in which I found myself. When I came into manhood, I dreamed only of journeying to the far city of Redhauke to seek my fortune. As a prince, I was entitled to my own fleet, my own castle and men-at-arms, and my own vineyards and flocks. It would have been a good life, but it wouldn’t have been my life. It was all very well for Elderon, my brother and heir to the throne, to beg at the table for my father’s scraps. One day, he would run the show, and he could toss down the nearest shithole all the wisdom our father had drummed into his thick skull. But me? I faced a lifetime of watching Elderon walk into doors, take credit for my accomplishments, and lay siege to the last crumbling castle of my self-respect. No thanks. I packed my bags the moment I was old enough to understand the reason for my brother’s smug, shit-eating grin.

  When I found the Girdle of Gargantua, the mild unease I felt at the course of my life became a fever. Still, it wasn’t until my nineteenth year that I worked up the courage to tell dad that I wanted to try my luck in Redhauke. He looked like a man who had just had his worst suspicions confirmed.

  “Did you fall out of your tower window again?” He asked.

  “No. I’ve thought this through.”

  “Thought?” Olderon gave what passed on his face for a smile. “Is that your hobby these days—thinking? You think it’s sensible to throw away your birthright to scour dungeons?”

  “I can beat any sailor in your navy. I’m a better fighter than Elderon. Maybe even better than you. There’s a world out there that could use my help. There’s evil to be vanquished. Kingdoms to be won. Maidenheads to take.”

  Olderon rose from his throne. Having married late in life, he was nearing decrepitude by the time I reached manhood, but even now his presence imposed. He had the torso of a rhinoceros, the legs of a mastiff, and the grin of a wolf ready to tear the hindquarters off an unlucky deer. He gave me the full effect, as it were, fixing his heavy brows into a battlement overhanging his gunmetal eyes.

  “Now you listen to me, boy,” he said. “Don’t tell me about winning kingdoms. Who civilized these islands? When we first settlers landed on Hydra Rock, there was naught here but a flourishing Stone Age civilization with an advanced knowledge of astronomy and a fondness for human sacrifice. Do you think it was easy to slaughter their men, enslave their women and children, destroy their culture, and usurp their land? Why, if it weren’t for Manifest De
stiny, you and I would be toiling still in the copper mines of the Talony. I stacked bodies like cordwood while you were flinging shit on the walls of your nursery. I built this Lordship with my own two hands, over the bones of the dead, and for what? To have my own son spit in my face? I’d sooner feed you to the sea drakes!”

  We stood nose to nose. I held my ground, though he terrified me still. His idea of parenting was to lock his sons in a maze with a hired Minotaur.

  “I want what you wanted,” I said. “To forge my own destiny!”

  “If your destiny needs the forge, then I’ll fetch my hammer!”

  “You’d better forge shackles if you expect to keep me here!”

  “I’ll shackle you myself!”

  “You and what army?”

  That did it. Olderon found the haft of his broadsword and swung the blade in a broad arc aimed straight at my skull. Usually, he stopped the blade before it cleaved me in two. Just the same, I grabbed a buckler from the wall to absorb the blow. Better safe than dead.

  For a charged moment, we glared at each other. Fortunately, I had come prepared for this impasse.

  “There’s only one way to settle this,” I said.

  Olderon raised a furry brow. “You don’t mean…”

  “Crush the Kobold,” I said. “One match. If you win, I stay and polish your brass. If I win, I go with your blessing.”

  “No strings?” asked Olderon, his gaze narrowing.

  “Would I ever take advantage of you?”

  This broke his mood. Chuckling, he lowered his sword and thumped my shoulder with the flat of his hand.

  “You are an arrow from your old man’s quiver, my boy,” he said, “however crooked the shaft may be. Very well—you’ll have your game. Three days hence, when the cock crows. My steward will make the arrangements. But I’ll hear no pleas when we fish you from the moat.”

  “I’ll have the alligators removed.”

  My father’s vanity now duly served, I could turn my attention to winning the match. Lucky for me that I had an ace in my codpiece.

  5

  Crush the Kobold is the family game. Our ancestors have played it for generations uncounted, long before my father’s kin were enslaved by the Talony, and it’s a rite of passage for every male child in the Lordship. There are few rules to speak of. There’s a studded iron ball. There are two goals, one at either end of the field. The ball carrier must reach one of the goals before the other players beat him stupid. If he makes it to the goal alive, he chooses the next man to carry the ball, who runs for the opposite goal. There are no teams, and any number can play. Sometimes we played Greek style, with our banners flapping in the breeze, as it were. Sometimes we played in full plate armor, sometimes on horseback. The last man standing won the day. Never mind the property damage, broken bones, and murderous grudges—that was part of the fun. What can I say? We’re a primitive people.

  Now, about that ace. Three years earlier I had been camping out at Chasm Falls, a 1,200-foot torrential wall of water that swept into Hydra Bay. The land was craggy and forested, and you could lose yourself in the wilderness for days, as you traversed old trails or blazed new ones. Whenever I got the urge to murder my father or beat the piss out of my brother, I retreated there. On my third morning in country, I came across a cave tucked away at the base of the falls. Though I had passed that spot a hundred times before, I’d never before seen it—a recent rockslide had revealed the entrance. I struck flint to steel, got a torch going, and crept inside.

  The cave became a tunnel. Waste deep in cold bay water, I waded deeper into the cliff face until I realized how far I had come and froze stiff. The tunnel walls pressed closer. Nothing stirred but my torch flame, shuddering in the breeze from deep within the tunnel. There was another entrance somewhere on the other side of the cliff.

  Thoughts of sunlight spurred me forward. At last, the tunnel ended in a small antechamber. I swung the torch around for a look. There was another tunnel opposite the one I came through, blocked by fallen debris. The walls arched overhead into a rough dome. To my right was a ledge, waist high, upon which grew a plush carpet of phosphorescent moss. Upon the moss lay—

  —a corpse.

  A skeleton, actually; it hadn’t been a corpse for centuries. It was missing a skull. Now, I’ve stumbled upon thousands of stiffs in my day, and I assure you that they always stink. The fresh ones reek like spoiling melons. If they’ve gone over a week or so, they smell like a thousand skunk carcasses rotting in one of the pits of Malebolge. When they’re as dead as this fellow was, which was at least a thousand years, they just smell… like Death. It was a wicked, poisonous stench, like the breath of a crazy witch who welcomes children into her gingerbread house—a visit that begins with sweetcakes and cider and ends in screaming agony inside an oven.

  It was my introduction to death, and I couldn’t have been more excited if I had stumbled upon a pot of gold guarded by a couple of comely elf maidens. I dipped the torch closer, and the sputtering light revealed a leather girdle draped across the skeleton’s ribcage. Not a woman’s girdle, but rather a protective warrior’s girdle: thick, black leather strap and belt, studded with gemstones and girded by a skirt of bronze bands fastened with beaten gold rings. There were runes—elvish or dwarfish, who really cared?—stamped on the broad golden buckle. It was an impressive piece of equipment.

  Rest assured that I wanted it off that rotten pile of bones faster than you can change your mind. It sure wasn’t doing that bloody bugger any good.

  I reached for it—and how surprised was I when the thing thrust out a bony claw to seize my grasping hand?

  6

  My bowels turned to tapioca. I had encountered a few magical creatures in my day—when I was a kid, my father hid actual monsters under my bed to toughen me up—but nothing to prepare me for the pants-pissing shock of an inert pile of bones springing to life just as I was collecting a little treasure. It would one day become old hat; I’ve vanquished enough skeleton warriors to populate Atlantic City. But that first time was something else.

  The thing now towered over me. Its ancient bones were held together by some fell cartilage of molten evil. Perched atop its spine was a skull-shaped black hole of negative space, limned in red light. From that skull-shaped void came the distant, reverb-laden music of pipes and flutes playing the mad songs of idiot gods. Capering pupils of flame gleamed with malice and delight. It pulled me up in its bony grip, and I braced for disembowelment.

  “WHAT ART THOU?” the thing roared, its gibbering voice issuing from that negative skull-space like whispers from a tomb.

  I couldn’t answer. The spine-freezing voice seemed to issue from deep within my own brainstem, flooding my body with lunatic terror. Where it gripped me, my flesh froze and burned simultaneously.

  “THOUS HAST FREED ME,” it said. “THOU MUST NOW BECOME ME.”

  Before my eyes, the skeleton underwent a blizzard of transmogrifications: wrapped in capering black flames, crawling with obscene puss-filled worms, dripping with hideous green demon-snot, the bones swelling and bursting with blood and semen and maggots from the rotting carcass of Beelzebub’s dead dog. I wanted the thing to rip out my heart, just so I would never have to look at it again. Little did I know that this episode was merely the antipasti. I had just ordered the entrée, and I didn’t even know it.

  The skeleton rose to its full height, still clutching my wrist as it swelled with Hellfire. Then, in a booming explosion that shook the cavern to its bones, it vanished. I was flung backward, hit the cavern wall at high speed, landed in a pool of muck, and lay there for a long while.

  Finally, I stirred. What dim light the cavern had afforded was now gone. Only the glow of the phosphorescent moss protected me from utter darkness. Was I dead after all?

  As the young are certain of nothing if not of their own immortality, my fear soon dissipated. The former owner of that skeleton had been slain by a wizard, I supposed, who then booby-trapped the corpse with a Fear spell t
o protect treasure long since stolen. It put me through the fucking ringer, all right, but I was more interested in the girdle that still lay on the mossy shelf. Here was a prize for the shock I had suffered.

  I ran out of that tunnel before my luck could change, broke camp, and rode back to civilization that same night. Once back in Tradewind City, I took my discovery to a pawnbroker of passing acquaintance.

  His name was Ronald. He ran his fingers over the girdle approvingly and smelled the leather.

  “Nice,” he said. “Good workmanship. Probably dwarfish. It has a rude sort of charm.”

  “What do the runes mean?” I asked.

  “I don’t recognize them. Let me check the database.” He hauled up an impressively dusty tome from beneath his desk and dropped it loudly on the table. He thumbed through it for a long while. Then he looked up.

  “So, you looking to sell?” he asked. He tried to act nonchalant, but his gaze was fixed on mine.

  “What’s it worth?”

  “Oh, you know, it’s a nice piece, I can sell it to one of the guards. I’ll give you two hundred and fifty auratae.”

  Big mistake. If he had offered me fifty for it, I might have sold. His immediate leap to 250 told me that it was worth much more.

  “Two hundred and fifty?” I laughed. “You wouldn’t pay that much to bail your mother out of the toll booth. What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Okay, I’ll give you four hundred. Give me until tomorrow to come up with it.”

  “If you don’t level with me, I’ll take it to that one-eyed gnome down the street.”

  “All right,” he said. “Keep your codpiece on.” He went to the rear of his shop and took down a thick iron bar upon which had hung a mess of copper pots. He brought the bar over and tossed it onto the table.

  “Try to bend it,” he said.

  He knew I couldn’t. I tried anyway, to help him make his point.