The Lore Anthology: Lore of the Underlings: Episodes 1 - 5 (13 page)

Vaam drew a line in the air with her hand.
“Carved into a lonely rosewood tree in a forest of iron and rusty leaves. A day away from the Semperor’s city. You were able to read the runes then told us the Treasured fable.”

“My pleasure.
I hope it entertained you.”

“Uncle, your stories always do. But this time we entertained the idea that the fairy tale was true. And upon it rewrote the plot of our mission…

“That night we turned south and traveled by stars up over the mountains and into the wild. There we made a marsh our camp, atop a wide tuffet of swamp grass, then flew out each day our separate ways to search for buried treasure. On the third day nature gave them away — by a circle of birds black and high in the sky spied from afar by Ogdog and me.

“But we had to be sure that this wasn’t a trap. It did seem we’d found them too easily. There in plain sight and just for me, the one the Misleader most wanted. If these were the agents of you-know-who they’d have to work harder than that. So we fashioned a nice little ruse of our own and made phantom menaces of the ogs.”

The round man applauded, pleased as punch. “And the rest, as they say, is history!”

“Is everything clear now ‘O?” asked John Cap. “Do you get what our aim is here?”

“Oh yes, of course… at least I think so. But perhaps I’m still feeling some effects of having been left in limbo so long — tends to make for a wandering mind you know. So if you could put it in one tasty nutshell…”

Vaam stood up. Her voice was clear. “We must gain the trust of this guarded folk so they’ll hear our tales and join our quest.”

Morio had a hand cupped to his ear. Soon he was nodding vigorously.

“Sounds good to me!
Let’s go! Oh — but shouldn’t we round up Ogdog first?”

Vaam spread her palms in a sign of calm. “I welcome your passion but we must stay patient. Let them come to us on their own. The leaves of this book will unfold in time. As for Ogdog, he’s found a job to do, albeit one you helped him happen into. We’ll see him again when it’s done.”

Morio looked a bit deflated. John Cap tried to perk him up.

“Maybe ‘O can be in charge of starting to think about our route back. We’ll need to go a different way seeing that it will be on foot.”

“Yes, I think that’s a fine idea.” Vaam gave her young friend a grateful wink.

“Have you still got that map of yours ‘O?”

In a moment of panic the moored man went pale, blood drained from his moon-like face. “The map?! Oh my! With all the commotion… I wonder if it’s where I…” And he reached for the thick sock around his right ankle.

His fingers went fishing and finally found
the what that they sought and pulled it out. His pallor waxed back to rosy relief. “You know, I favor a heavy stocking and it has once again served me well. Nothing’s better in dark times of crisis like this. You really should try it, John Cap!”

“Sure…” said John Cap quizzically.
“Next time I go shopping.”

Morio hardly heard the young man, so busy he was at working his find. At last it opened up. From a tiny square that fit in the palm unfolded a large sheet of leafy parchment. A long, ragged edge gave it the look of a page torn hastily from a book.

He turned the loose leaf over twice then around and upside down in a squint. “I see that the eyes no longer have it,” he noted to himself. “Nay… it’s still a measure dim in this room to study cartography such as this — a golden example of olden arts too fine to size up in the slightest darkness.”

He lifted the map toward the beam streaming in and pulled it taut between his hands. “Not beyond the shadow of a doubt but at least I can make some things out now. Border lines and legend runes… a title, ‘Sempyre of Syland,’ atop… It’s bound to help us navigate, if just to show the state we’re in.”

Morio rose to rest on his knees and pressed his face against the leaf. Then he muttered a few more words to himself as his nose took a brief tour of the coast.

“But more than that? The jury’s still out. I’m looking for some sign of magic in it.
The ability to let us foresee. A hint of the power of prophecy. Or some kind of spirit locked in its key who can map a path through times to be and chart our future history…”

He lowered the page and sighed. “Perhaps I’ve set my sights too high… with hopes that border on pie in the sky… Or maybe I just need to shed more light. Come at this from another angle…”

Morio cast an impish eye at the hundred vine line hanging over his head. It wagged all along the hand-lit wall as if calling the schoolboy in him to come play.

“Let’s see about pulling some strings around here and letting in more of that light ‘o day. I have a string theory, you know…”

The would-be sage stretched as far as he could and tugged at the vine that hung nearest to him. Nothing happened in the room.
But then…

They heard a distant horn.

“Out there, listen.”

“What was that?”

“No bird of the morn, Uncle M.”

“I guess my theory is not so sound,” said Morio shrugging his soft, round shoulders.
“No matter. Just time to try, try again.”

“Maybe that’s not such a hot idea,” John Cap cautioned, stepping near. “Why go and waste your energy?”

“Then what, sit and take cold comfort instead? Don’t dread, dear watchman. There’s little to fear. Fat chance that hell’s reign will befall us here… Unless by our own idle hands we’re doomed in the relative shelter of this boarded room with such slim pickings for things to do.”

He stood half a-crouch to reach for the next and gave it a hearty heave-ho.

“Oh!”

Torrents of rainwater poured from above and soaked Morio from head to toe. Only the mitt with the map kept dry.

John Cap couldn’t hold back a critique. “That was more ‘Helter Skelter’ than ‘Gimme Shelter.’”

Lacking satisfaction with them, Vaam just let it be.

Belatedly, Morio stuck out his tongue and caught the last drips of some drops from his nose. “Now that was the drink I’ve been dreaming of. How sad that I never got the news.” He wagged his finger at the vine. “Next time, drop me a line.”

A cloud must have passed by the eye in the sky, stray ghost that cast a pall inside. Light fingers made gray fist… then reflexed, sun-kissed.

“And speaking of dropping a line — this fishing hole’s cold, its tales all trolled. We need to be moving on.” He turned. “Time to travel, leave the past, out of the blue and in from the black, back to the future that lies ahead on a road not yet made but driven instead by the lore of eons to come. A way from this wormy hold where we’re stuck.” He reeled and returned to his walleyed look. “Though I think I spy a hotter spot where casting away might bring more luck…”

With that Morio was off, knee-walking awkwardly all along the V-shaped trough beneath the vines, a gutter that caught their drops and joined the tar-specked wall and warped floorboards. He followed its track to the corner near Vaam and stopped at the last bunch of cords, breath gone.

“Whew!” he huffed with a swipe of his brow, “we’re getting somewhere now… I finally have it narrowed down…”

The sweaty man snatched up one more droopy rope, the next to last of the dangling links, and squeezed it tight in his ham-handed right with four sausage-like fingertips. “Okay my dear map, let there be light!”

Crrreak…

Crack!

Thump.

All of a sudden the floor’s tipped end dropped to an even sharper dip. And from the first chamber there came a “Grrr,” then an angry “Ouch!” and a very loud rip.

“Oomph,” was the sound that Morio made, landing in a heap. John Cap, arms out wide for balance, barely kept his feet. Only Vaam stood unaffected — her platform had not moved an inch.

The thrown one wasted little time trying to bounce back up again.
But things were more unstable now, saddled with such a wrong angle as this.

“Sorry friends! That was not quite the plan.”

“Come on ‘O, stop horsing around.”

“Nay, worry not
— I’ll make it right.”

Morio stuck the map in his mouth, clenched in his cornrow teeth. He took the final tail in both hands. He tried with all his might.

Bang! Crash!

“Uh-oh.”

WHOOSH…

Episode
5 ~ Into the Pit

Morio stirred with a sinking feeling that things had just gone south on him.

He had to shake himself awake. He was waist-deep in muck. Totally stuck. Sunk in some new kind of darkness.

Even his voice didn’t seem to work. “Hut huh
hevil hust hahened?” Then he remembered the old rolled-up map and managed to yank it from his mouth. “What the devil just happened?”

It was all the toll of that very last pull. With it the wall had opened up and the floor fell away to dump him out
— out into a sucking wind that pulled him down and in.

“Man!” called John Cap, “what hell hole is this? It stinks to high heaven in here!”

Morio’s head spun this way then that. He searched in vain for the source of the voice. “Yes, much worse than where we were. Especially as we’re swimming in it… But where have you gone to my friend?”

“Over here.”

He found the young man to his back about a dozen spits away. He too was half dipped in this pit but close to the edge of a narrow ledge just under the mouth that spewed them out. He was trying to bury his nose in his sleeve to defend against the evil smell.

Vaam let out a little warm laughter at the mess they were in. “Are you boys done making mud pies down there?” She still stood up in the crooked room on the platform that spared her from their fall. They looked so very small to her now, as if a thousand leagues below.

Morio craned his neck to respond and shouted to cover the distance between them. “This is no time to tempt us with pie, Miss Vaam, whilst we’ve nary a real bite of one in sight. Though I’d give my right arm to meet a fair pieman anywhere but here!” Then he waved his arms wide. “Wherever here is…”

All three took a look around.

One half cavern, the other man-made, this chamber dwarfed both of the first two combined. By all signs its space had been carved from the hillside and dug out deep down to the bowels of hell — or an underground realm near as foul. Sunlight fell though more like a dream, poured through the underside of a stream that ran across the mossy roof high above their heads. That cold water bent the beams to its will and left the warm shine a ghost of itself, a shadow of the sun.

The chamber’s illumination came from another source. Two of its great walls the ages made, sculpted in minerals dripped by time, painted in soils of every brown. Those walls were aglow with oilweed, which cast a gold on everything and bound the lowly ground in fog of smoldering fat and comforting smoke.
A smothering blanket of precious muddle.

Mr. Yoop gazed up from the middle of it and marveled at the sight. Though he spoke his friends seemed not to hear. Vaam was busy descending a ramp made by the fallen floor. John Cap was busy watching her. She stopped to study a mountain of bones piled up on the ledge where she landed. There were more just like it ringing the room along with strange vessels of every description.

Morio, meanwhile, continued to talk wrapping up a lecture on oilweed and its proper harvesting… “It must be picked quite carefully to keep intact its web of roots, all tendrils and runners and tiny shoots that burst into flame when exposed to the air. That’s why you see them burning here, right there where they poke out from the wall. So seldom do these underworld dwellers show themselves above the ground. Well, but for a very rare flower of flame…” He slipped into a whispered voice. “Omen of evils to come, they say… A portent of plagues, flying snakes, and toothaches.” He picked up his normal volume again. “Anyway, as I was saying… The fresh-farmed plants must be rolled and packed by well-practiced hands and then spun the same day. Spooled on special spinning wheels made of something that does not burn. In this land I’ve heard they use malaphant bone. And tusks for stacking the damp spun oil to dry when it is done.”

Morio turned to his sinking friend who struggled to no avail. “So that’s how people make torchsticks and such!” he hailed with a cheeky smile.

Having had droned on for so long, the bugger forgot he was stuck in a pit. But now it was like he had ants in his pants or maybe a bumbler under his bonnet. He copied John Cap and wriggled about, working to worm his way out.

Yet nowhere did he get.

No mere mud puddle or piggly sty, it swallowed them more the more that they tried. Both men were up to their armpits in it, wallowing away.

Vaam stepped off of the stony ledge aiming to rescue them. Somehow she did not sink in. She was making a beeline for Morio when…

Abruptly with a mighty boom the first chamber’s great storied door burst open, causing each stranger to twist back and look. They saw from its yawn a flood of sunlight fill the middle room. For a moment it beamed happy hopes and dreams… until a black-clad figure came to cast his shadow in the stream.

Death sounds much sweeter the second time

It’s drummed into a stranger’s hide…

Morio recognized the voice. “Why, it’s my old pal from the field! Hi-ho and cheers dear chum!” He waved the hand that held the map then added a crisp salute at the end.

And a wink as well.

Syar-ull only howled back.

“Oh… um… that’s dear SIR chum! So tell me, how have you been?”

In silence the black Guard reached for the wall with his heavy gauntlet. He took hold of its darkest implement and headed down the ramp.

Meanwhile behind the warrior someone else peered through the door. Someone whose clothes had been tattered and torn and half of whose pants were in shreds on the floor. It was one of the plainsmen they passed before, in the initial chamber. He was sporting a red, pom-size bump on the head and shook a bloody fist at them. Then they heard an angry voice or two and the plainsman vanished from view.

“Apparently he was just saying hello,” mused a puzzled Morio.

The master Guard paused to glare at him and plot his position in the room. He seemed to cipher something… a cold eye marking each figure now. Satisfied, he resumed with footfalls hard upon the wood.

Strung up to re-strum a song of screams

The timeless music of my dreams…

At the bottom of the ramp he turned, sharply right to skirt the pit, marching along the shore of it on the unsure ledge. An odd catwalk it was, but he proved to be every bit nimble enough. As he followed its curve he passed the spot where the younger man thrashed about, futilely grasping
at the air. Syar-ull paid no mind to him — as if he wasn’t even there. He had his heart set on someone more plump.

He stopped at the point that was closest his quarry, although that was still some good distance away.
A pummel stone’s throw across the muck. A stare afar into the mire. And there he seemed to arrest time itself to savor the rounder man’s floundering end. For once and for all and once again…

“Leave it to you, fair mister sir, to come and save our bacon!” Morio all but blew him a kiss.

The pikesman let a short, sharp whistle out from the mouthpiece of his mask.

Two lesser Guard men came running and quick with rolls of woven sweetgrass. Syar-ull pointed. His men deployed them.
A narrow green carpet across the pit.

Make me the instrument of revenge

Funeral dirge,
march, requiem…

The dark Guard held high his device, unfolding its finger-like blades to slice… shining up six long and tapered stalks, which had been hollowed out to let… letting loose a tangle of leeching tubers… saber-toothed suckers… All set. He signaled to the henchmen.

Call for your pipers

Play it again!

With that he stepped out on the mat hell-bent to get things straight. His helpers followed just behind in single file five paces back.

But Vaam had watched their every twitch and matched their movement toe for toe. She closed in on her all-but-uncle, gliding over the mud below.

The Guard’s assistants were bewildered by this girl who nearly flew.

“She moves like an angel made in heaven.”

“Or witchy woman from you-know-where.”

“What is it that keeps her from sinking there?”

“Nothing of this world…”

“That’s just what I’m thinking.”

In the blink of an eye she stood between her friend and the would-be reaper, grimmer than she remembered him.

“Move aside! This one has a date with his maker.” The dour Guard strode nearer still. Now near enough to kill. “It is his bloody destiny,” growled Syar-ull.

Vaam held up a slender gray hand against the ghastly engine
— a silvery shield in the gold oil-glow.

“No,” she said in a calm, firm voice. “No. I am the first to go.”

“Do you not know where you are, foolish miss? This is a sacred place. A place where the greatest beasts are led to sacrifice their blood and bones…” He waved a hand toward the vessels and piles. “To give us their very souls.”

The pike master tipped his head to one side. “Is this what you wish for yourself?”

Vaam held steady. She did not respond.

Syar-ull looked her in the eye through his narrow visor. “Odd maiden… stranger girl… you give me no reason to show you mercy or play the fool myself again.”

She squinted back and hard at him. “Mercy is not what I seek from you.”

“Oh, such an insolent youth!” he laughed
— but his laugh was dark, his eyes hot white. “Then you shall have my best instead. Prepare to be let along with that…”

His mask turned coldly to Morio. It was blank and full of pitilessness.
In that instant a chill came to fill the hall and the black Guard shook as if possessed or visited by the dead unblessed. The voice of a misty past poured from him, talked out in tongues of a lost tribe and time. An old and unnerving sound. The hum of an ancient unknown tune he droned in harmony with the room.

o shadow of
lorde kyng pyr pray rule me ~ priests of the sempyre spake yore law ~ that not shall your flock be harvested wilde ~ but offered up cold to the soile in calm ~ in the dew when yon eye in the skye a-peers young ~ drink deep pale prince of this one

One ray of yellow found its way from the open door or hand-shaped window to land on Syar-ull’s well-armed fist. It lit up the implement glossy black for an even more menacing look.
An aura of ghoulishness.

“Welcome my sun,” he said to it.

The Guard of Guards took this sun as a sign. So he flashed his contraption in the air and cocked back the trigger to attack, taking dead aim at the alien pair. It shone in their eyes both vile and clean.

“Welcome to the machine.”

But before a single leecher latched, a voice called from the bleak Guard’s back…

“Hark there! Sir my sir!”

A Guard it was in sea-green armor, namesake of a south shore state. He stood in the doorway bathed in sun tide, two fellow coast Guard in tow behind.

Syar-ull chose not to hear him.

“Sir my sir!
I bring word from the Treasuror!”

The shoulders of the main Guard slumped though he did not deign to turn around. He kept his back to the beckoning voice and activated the device. Tubers and blades began to flail as if they’d come alive.

“It is an emergency master!”

“I’m busy Taan-syr. Set sail. Ship out.”

“The heir of Hurx calls his council, sir. At this very hour.”

“Not now coast Guard, cast off.
Ahoy and anchors aweigh with you.”

“A leaver has been apprehended.”

Syar-ull’s helmet spun around like a lookout way up in a tall ship’s crow’s nest, quick as a knight owl who’s spied his prey. “A leaver? Why didn’t you say so?!”

“There’s more. He’s ordered the soldier stranger
— that one — brought before him too.” The sea-shade Guard pointed out John Cap. “Why? I know not. Yet one can assume…”

The night-shade Guard answered with a grunt and turned to his handy men. His eyes burned whiter, more livid than ever. “I envisioned the end of these two in red. Now let it
be green instead.” He glared toward Morio and Vaam. “Treat both to a round of devil’s moss then. I trust this will be farewell for them.”

He quizzed the assistants. “Understand?”

“Sir our sir!” they barked in unison.

“We’ve had our fill of their foreign fare. So go make this a barbecue pit and roast the pair upon a spit. Skewered like oddcat and hogdog meat.
Two servings of strangers. A devilish feast. Cooked up in the heat of hell’s kitchen…

“And don’t forget to toast your guests, this beauty and the beast.”

“Surely sir!”

He’d seen and said enough by now. He turned his eyes away. Yet they inadvertently caught the gaze of the stuckling man who still winked his way.

“Be sure to leave no leftovers,” he added with a sneer.

“Gladly, sirliest sir of all.
Sir my sirly leader!”