The Screaming Skull Read online

  James and I stared flabbergasted at our friend. If this was simply a scheme to raise an army and win back his kingdom, then it was overkill by a wide margin. Hell, James would front him the money for an army just to get him out of Kenwood. It couldn’t be that simple. Was it a long con of some kind? Amabored has the best poker face I’ve ever seen; he’s so inscrutable that you’re better off taking what he says at face value. If he tells you that he’s attempting to prevent Armageddon by murdering Chaos wizards, then you’re better off believing him. It’s the safe play.

  “You’re out of your mind!” James said. He stood up so abruptly that Amabored’s guards leaped to their feet and grasped their sword hilts. As if.

  “I’ve never been saner,” Amabored said. Rather than answer James’s challenge, he sat back down on his sleeping silks.

  “You call slaughtering wizards to satisfy the whims of some battlefield hallucination sane? Do you have any idea what the Council of Thaumaturgy will do once they get wind of your little jihad? They’ll send down a rain of death on this place that’ll make the Siege of Helene look like a game of touch football!”

  “I caught them up North, so you’re in the clear. But make no mistake: Those motherfuckers deserved death—the Spellbinder most of all. Either of you would have greased him if you’d had the chance, so spare me the sanctimony. We’re doing the Lord’s work.”

  “The Lord’s work?!” I had never seen James so angry. He stood there red-faced, too livid for words. Then he turned on his heel and stormed out of the tent.

  I reached for Amabored’s pipe, which he had placed on a table next to a cheesy ceramic bust of Elvis Presley that made the King look strangely like a Filipino waiter. I lit it and took a long drag, letting the smoke work its magic. When in doubt, self-medicate.

  “He’s right to be angry,” I said. “If you tried this foolishness down in the Lordship, I’d have to flush you out. You’re a brother, Amabored, and we love you. But this is beyond the pale. I hope you’re playing an angle.”

  “Maybe I am playing an angle. Maybe I’m not,” Amabored said. His eyes flashed with wry humor, as if he wondered whether I knew more than I was letting on. “If he’s worried that I’m going to bring ruin to his country, he shouldn’t. He offered his hospitality and I took it. When he wants me to leave, then I’ll leave. While I’m here, I’ll defend myself. Once the Chaos wizards get wind of my plan, they’ll come after me.”

  “When will it end? How many more are you going to string up before one ends up using your skull for a spittoon?”

  “It will end on the last day of next year. That’s when the Millennium Bug is supposed to strike, and we find out if I’m right or not.” Amabored took the pipe from me to pack it full again. After a pause, he looked up from beneath his brows. A grin creased his weathered face.

  “Say, isn’t your birthday on New Years’ day?” he asked.

  18

  And so it is. In nine days, we’ll be celebrating two propitious events: my sixty-fifth birthday, and the end of the world.

  Could Amabored be right about the Millennium Bug? If so, what a colossal fuck-up. Peasants might still work the land with ox and plow and light candles at night, but city-dwellers rely upon sorcery for conveniences upon which they’ve become alarmingly dependent. Your typical Redhauke hipster switches on magical glowing orbs to light his flat, takes magical lifts to get to the upper floors of buildings, goes to bars to swill magically cooled beer, and watches minstrels play magically amplified instruments. The countryside, meanwhile, is pitted with thousands of dungeons, depthless caverns, underground cities, enchanted castles, towers of spider-haunted mystery, elaborate ruins, crashed spaceships, deadly labyrinths, and monstrous lairs, all of which are filled to the brim with magic arms and armor, potions, rings, tomes, cloaks, and wands. Magical tricks and traps guard these treasures. Wizards write and cast these enchantments, and they get rich doing so. Wizards are also lazy, with a pathological aversion to labor of any kind, and this slothfulness extends to their sorcery. When copying time-sensitive spells into their tomes and grimoires, for example, wizards follow the example of Gygax the Great, who commonly omitted the first two digits of any dates encoded into his spells: writing 99 instead of 3999, for example. This little shortcut was dandy until some wise guy asked what would happen when the date rolled over from 3999 to 4000, as it will in just nine days.

  “Don’t ask us,” the wizards replied.

  No one knows what will happen when the date rolls over. Will spells suddenly cease to function? Will the monsters, demons, dragons, and undead sorcerer kings now held at bay by glyphs of warding suddenly find themselves free to terrorize the countryside? Will some spells hold while others fail with tragic consequences? Or will everything just keep humming along? To weather the apocalypse, end-timers have been digging holes in the ground and stocking them full of supplies. The skeptics tell us not to worry, that it’s all horseshit concocted by those selfsame wizards who caused the problem, and who have since been landing fat Y3K contracts to rewrite spells at the behest of the petrified rulers who fear the worst.

  Will any of these charms, spells or enchantments work after the first of the year? According to Amabored, while most wizards are working to solve the problem, Chaos wizards still loyal to the Hand—all disciples of Jaspin Spellbinder—are working to undo the fix to ensure that the Seven arise and destroy the Woerth. Will they succeed? Who knows? The prudent are taking no chances. I’ve had my own wizards working on the problem for six months; I even threw a couple of them into the dungeon to light a fire under the others.

  So, you see my dilemma. The Astral Telescope tells me that I’ll live another sixty-five years. Amabored’s prophecy tells me that, unless he can stop the Seven from waking, in nine days I’ll be dead along with everyone else. They can’t both be right. The thought that keeps me slumped on my throne, too terrified to eat or shit or touch my wife, is that I’d rather Amabored be right—and that I hope he fails.

  You heard me. Rather than face another sixty-five years of decrepitude, I’d prefer to face the end now. It’s better to burn out than to fade away, somebody once said. I pray that I’ll be consumed by dragonfire, thereby avoiding the coward’s death of dying on the fucking toilet. I’m too much of a pussy to kill myself. If the only way I can ensure my timely demise is to take the rest of the Woerth with me, then that’s a deal I’m willing to make.

  After James calmed down, assured by Amabored that he had no intention of bringing down destruction on Kenwood—at least not for another eighteen months—we spent the night in our old friend’s company. We drank excellent Trappist ale, feasted on pheasant and wild berries, and smoked the peace pipe. Xingo made no more appearances. It was a good night, but something was missing; the years apart had made us stiff and wary around each other.

  At the first bell, we prepared to bed down in a pair of nearby tents arranged for us by Amabored’s men. Before we departed his digs, Amabored took me aside. From his belt pouch, he produced a smooth black stone and tossed it to me. It was obsidian or even brimstone, and I knew at once that it was a charmed relic of some kind.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “It’s a Time Stone,” Amabored said. “I’m supposed to give it to you before you leave. I’m told you’ll need it.”

  “Who asked you to give it to me?”

  The wry, fierce humor returned to Amabored’s gaze. “You did,” he said.

  19

  I sure as hell didn’t remember finding a Time Stone, nor asking Amabored to hold it for me. Time Stones are nothing to trifle with. They’re fashioned from pure brimstone, and only the most powerful wizards dare attempt to manufacture them without unleashing proverbial forces beyond their control. As much as I wanted to grill Amabored about it, he would brook no further questions and kicked me out of his tent. I placed the stone in my backpack and promptly forgot about it.

  Not long thereafter, a pair of plush peasant girls, their hair like corn silk and their bo
dies ripe with patchouli oil, crept into my tent and burrowed into my bedroll. They were a gift from Amabored, and I was tempted to let them try. Had I been prepared to forgo my vows, the same curse that has kept me from accepting my wife’s ministrations would have found me here just as cold and unresponsive. So, I sent them away.

  Telling you this gives me no pleasure, especially since my profession is replete with phallic symbols that serve to remind a warrior of whatever he might be packing, however unimpressive. What is a broadsword, after all, but the lethal extension of what swings between a warrior’s legs? I knew many a swordsman who compensated for his shortcomings with an oversized two-handed battle blade. My most prized phallus was a nifty magical battle-axe called—I’m not kidding—the Rod of Lordly Might. The very mention of its name would send my adventuring comrades into spasms of laughter. Countless times, our crew would wander into a strange town, find a welcome tavern, start knocking ‘em back and, sooner or later, Amabored or Lithaine would shout Hey Elberon! Show ‘em your Rod of Lordly Might!

  It was a handy device nonetheless, the Swiss Army knife of enchanted weapons. It was a +4 battle-axe on the Adventurers Guild’s Enchantment Index. It could expand into a fifty-foot telescoping pole, which came in handy whenever we fell into a dungeon pit, which was nearly every day. It could turn into a javelin or disguise itself as a non-descript walking staff. It was also a perfectly balanced weapon that could send imp heads popping from their shoulders like champagne corks. I loved it—and as my wives would once have told you, I wasn’t compensating for anything.

  I found it early in my adventuring career, somewhere in my Fourth Level as a Guild fighter, during one of our endless succession of imp tower sweeps. The lands outside of Redhauke are pimpled with abandoned keeps, castle ruins, and guard towers, all of which are infested with imp squatters who use them as bases from which to launch raids on the surrounding peasantry. Numbers range anywhere from a dozen to a couple of hundred imps. A party of five mixed adventurers, including a couple of fighters, a wizard, a cleric, and a rogue, can perform a clean-and-sweep in an afternoon.

  We’d be sitting around the Suds ‘n Shade, bored out of our skulls, when someone would eventually get hammered enough to suggest a tower sweep. Most of the time, the imps were sitting on a stash of booty—usually, a couple of small chests filled with coin and a few magical weapons, scrolls, or potions. Sometimes we’d give the Guild their cut, sometimes not. Sure, there was always the risk of a bloody death if you ran into an Eighth-Level imp chieftain on the top floor, but we were fucking nuts in those days. We didn’t know from death. Spending a day killing imps was like playing a round of golf.

  On one of those tower sweeps, I found the Rod hidden in a booby-trapped chest that, when opened, fired a poison dart straight at your jugular vein. We found the chest on the top level of the tower, after a pitched battle in which we sent twenty-five imps to their hellish reward. With no rogue in our party that day to check for traps, we took a chance and opened it anyway.

  Sproing! Wilberd took the dart in the throat. We were all hosed with his blood. The monk dropped like a drunken dwarf.

  “Holy shit!” I cried. “Medic!”

  Adventurer’s Rule Number One: Never leave home without a cleric. They’re worth their weight in platinum. It didn’t matter what god the cleric worshipped—Athena, Quetzalcoatl, Osiris, or L. Ron Hubbard—we didn’t give a damn so long as he had a goodly supply of Heal Wounds blessings. Clerics are handy in all sorts of scenarios. Though generally forbidden to use edged weapons, they’ll happily bash in skulls with maces or morning stars. They double as field surgeons. They can detect evil, turn away the undead, and inflict opponents with curses. They also believe in a higher power of some sort, which makes them humbler than wizards, who think their shit smells like lavender potpourri even though they’re usually cowering in the back of the party hoping not to get filleted by an imp scimitar.

  Like cats, clerics tend to die horribly, however, and we went through a lot of them. Our cleric that day, Father Frito of Lay, was still alive, so he could lay hands on poor expiring Wilberd and heal the fatal wound. As a First-Level blessing, the Healing spell is short on theatrics but nonetheless impressive: Bathed in the holy light of whatever deity Frito worshipped, the wound was cauterized, disinfected, and stitched as if by an invisible thread. If ever you wonder whether a faith healer really has the goods, just cut off your arm, wrap it in ice, carry it into the revival tent, and ask him to put it back. If he does, then pony up.

  My unfortunately-named Rod of Lordly Might still hangs above my throne, though long years have passed since its blade last tasted blood. It still works like the day I found it. If only my real phallus worked as well as my metaphorical one, I might still be married in more than name only.

  20

  That’s enough about my dick. The next morning, James and I awoke to find that Amabored had split shortly before dawn, leaving a cryptic message about receiving a hot lead on another Chaos wizard fleeing Kenwood.

  “I’ll have to throw him into my dungeon,” said James as he stewed over the plate of fruit, hummus, and pita bread brought forth by a gaggle of hippie girls.

  “Good luck,” I said, longing forlornly for a slab of bacon. “They haven’t invented the dungeon that can hold him. Do you think you could take him?”

  James mused for a long moment over this question. Finally, he grinned, the first genuine smile I had seen from him since arriving in his lands.

  “Hell no,” he said. “I’ve gotten soft. But if it’s a fight he wants, I can give him one. I’ve the wealth of a kingdom at my disposal. What’s he got? A few cultists and a cockeyed story.”

  There was the difference. After returning in triumph from the Dread Plain, we were treated like rock stars. Amabored was thus afforded the same chance to sell out that we all enjoyed; he had his pick of beautiful princesses, elf maidens willing to sacrifice their immortality for his love, knighthoods, endorsement deals, acting offers, and empty thrones looking for regents. Instead of cashing in, he immediately scraped together the remnants of his army and marched north to win back the lands that Koschei had handed to the Sultan.

  Five years later, he finally won back his kingdom—but at what cost? He spent every dime he’d ever made. Scorched-earth tactics ruined his reputation; people stopped calling him eccentric and started calling him crazy. His reign as Grand Warlord of the Nomad Kingdoms was short-lived and disastrous, with civil war, famine, flood, and the occasional plague decimating his people and depleting his resources. He lost and won back his lands so many times that they put a revolving door on his palace.

  Meanwhile, James and I grew paunchy signing proclamations, entertaining foreign dignitaries, and cutting ribbons at ceremonies dedicating statues of ourselves. I always suspected that Amabored held us in contempt for giving up the fight. James seemed to believe we deserved the good life; perhaps we did. It was the difference between working harder and working smarter. Hadn’t we already done our part? After you’ve saved the world, what do you do for an encore?

  We were beat. It was time to hang up the spikes.

  That Amabored and James nearly came to blows demonstrated how far apart we had all drifted. Once, we were each instrumental to the success of the Quest: James functioned as our eyes and ears; Lithaine our spirit; Malcolm our Faith; Andrigan and I as our brute strength; Lindar our intellect; Amabored our heart; Cassie our conscience. Once the war was over, it was head-spinning how quickly we found ourselves at odds. Nothing fucks up your head like victory.

  I wasn’t sure what our journey had accomplished, but James seemed satisfied to learn that he needn’t act immediately against his old friend. I considered riding back with him to Castle Darien to hang for a while longer, but I sensed that he was ready to see me off. He had his life to attend, and I had mine. We would always be brothers, but that intense bond of comrades in arms, the utter surety of our friendship—that was gone. Perhaps it was never meant to last. Hell, the James I knew
back in the day hardly existed anymore, no more than the Elberon he once knew still existed. Every morning, you look in the mirror and see the same face you saw the day before. You don’t feel or look any different. Nevertheless, in some subtle and yet irreversible way, you’ve changed. Five, ten, or twenty years slip away, and you can’t even recognize yourself anymore.

  So, we bade farewell to Amabored’s Camp Jihad, crossed the river, gathered our horses and retainers, mounted up, and headed west. A half-day’s ride found us at the Long Road, where our paths parted. We watered our horses at a burbling stream and stood together for a final smoke as our men tended the beasts near the road.

  “If Amabored gives you any trouble, send word to me through the aether,” I said. “I’ll send reinforcements. I love the guy, but you just can’t tell with him. He’s either the sanest man I’ve ever met, or he’s out of his fucking mind.”

  “I can handle him,” James said. “If he nails up one more wizard in my kingdom, I swear I’m going to napalm that for—”

  A dart no bigger than a hummingbird beak sprouted out of James’s throat, a hair’s breadth above his jugular vein. His sword hand lurched upward, his fingers grasping at the offending projectile. His gaze locked onto mine.

  “Bloody hell,” James gurgled. He dropped to the ground in a heap.

  “Holy fuck!” I cried, wheeling around, my body flooding from stem to stern with adrenaline and rage. I dove beneath my grazing horse. Three more darts bloomed on the horse’s flank. It bolted, and I had to roll into the brook to avoid getting my skull bashed in. Of course, my battle-axe was still lashed to the saddle.