CHAPTER ONE
Looking for Mr. R
(Antiquity)
1.
That venerable fairytale of the Miller’s daughter and the Dwarf who helped her spin straw into gold has a happy ending in the popular version. The events that inspired the legend, not so much.
The Spy who was the son of the Miller embarked upon a perilous mission into the Western Mountains. The cart tracks and game trails he followed were tortuous, wending through darksome forests full of robbers and all manner of wild beasts. Such were the dangers of travel in most regions of the world in those days. He chose to walk and was accompanied by a grizzled mastiff who’d served him faithfully through many a bleak hour. He carried a dagger, a water skin, a few coins in a dried-up purse, and a tiny crucifix around his neck. Just those meager possessions and his heart, which burned for the Queen. That devotion guided him through thorn thickets and quicksand, over rockslides and across rivers. It comforted him all those dark, dark nights as he and the dog camped along the trail, wrapped in his cloak, fire dwindling to embers, wolves howling among the trees. The stars glowed cold as stones, cold as the snowy caps of the peaks he climbed closer to each passing day.
He thought of his sister, the Queen, also daughter of the Miller, albeit of a different mother. She’d elevated herself unto royalty by convincing the old King she possessed the secrets of alchemy, that she could spin flax into gold, or some similar horseshit. The Spy couldn’t be certain what particular deception his lovely sister had practiced for this high-stakes roll of the bones. He loved her all the more for her foibles, her casual cruelty.
The Spy knew damned well, however, that while Sister possessed a golden tongue for sucking cock and other manipulations, she was no fucking alchemist. Thus, when the old King called her bluff and imprisoned her in a dungeon with a pile of straw and a dawn deadline, literally a dead-line, the Spy, who was at that time a humble groom, figured her head would roll into a basket before noon the next day. He sent his nicest black peasant ensemble to be cleaned, and picked a bouquet of white roses for the pauper’s grave.
Imagine everyone’s amazement when she emerged from the cell twelve hours later with several baskets of gold wire and a formula scrawled on a parchment for repeating the process under spectacularly rare astrological conditions. Her smug little smile and coy eyelash batting aside, the Spy sensed her fear.
In the three years that followed, all through her lavish marriage ceremony to the Crown Prince, which half the population of the neighboring kingdoms attended; the opulent honeymoon; the abdication of the old King, and her subsequent elevation to queen and consort; the gala balls and garden parties of epic extravagance; the rosy pregnancy; only the Spy detected a black cloud of gloom piling around her in a gathering storm. Only he paid heed to crows in the branches of the willow tree in her favorite garden.
Despite a ruthless nature and innate talents for subterfuge and skullduggery, he was the Spy entirely due to his sister’s generosity. She’d rewarded their father with retirement to a country estate and her brother with a post at court in the clandestine services. The Ministry of Red Hot Pokers, as certain wits dubbed the office.
The Groom was happy to be shut of his prior job. No more getting kicked by nags during shoeing, no more pitching shit or fetching water for the irritable stable master. No more shagging brawny farrier’s daughters and warty hags in back alleys (or so he thought)! It was going to be frock coats, feathered hats, and high-tone pussy until he keeled over.
Things went in that general direction for a while. Until the Queen showed pregnant and the creepy Dwarf started hanging around the palace…
During a polo match the Spy noticed the Queen staring at a dwarf in a cassock who was lurking near the bleachers. Horrible creature—and the Spy knew from horrible after his many misspent years on the mean streets among lepers and beggars, and maimed veterans of foreign adventures. He’d seen his share of pox-ridden, congenitally defective, gods-cursed twisted caricatures of the human form in alleys and brothels alike. The Dwarf, hunched and scabrous, peeping at the world through gimlet eyes and grinning with the malice of a butcher or coroner who enjoyed his job for all the wrong reasons, was something special indeed. The Spy figured the fellow for a mendicant or an entertainer, an itinerate jester. Then the Dwarf tipped the Queen a sly wink, eyeing her by then prodigious belly, and the Spy smelled trouble brewing.
That night he separated her from the entourage of ladies-in-waiting and snot-nosed footmen and brought her into the garden under the weeping willow. He came right out and asked if she was being blackmailed regarding the fact the baby did not belong to the virile young King who’d, ironically, made a virtue of siring hundreds of bastards during his boring wait for the throne.
“Have you told anyone it’s mine?” the Spy said, holding her small, chilly hand too tightly.
“I’m not stupid,” she said in a tone that indicated she thought he sure as hell was. “I prefer my head where it’s positioned rather than mounted on the wall in my loving husband’s study.”
“Then who’s the pygmy working for and what do they want?”
“The Dwarf never told me his name. He’s an imp of Hell.”
“This doesn’t sound very good,” the Spy said. “The pigfucker smuggled in the gold and now he wants a royal favor, is that it? God’s blood, honey. You’re in a real bind if it’s political.”
“He doesn’t desire a political favor.”
“Really. No maps, no troop movements, no appointments to the cabinet?”
“Nothing of the sort.”
“Your sweet ass?”
“He wasn’t interested in the royal preserves.”
“Well, shitfire. Fuck. Piss. What’s his game, then?”
“The Dwarf spun the gold, not I. He’s come for his prize.”
“What, dear sister, have you gone and done?”
Sister grinned exactly as a fox in a trap baring her teeth, and told him what pact she’d made to produce those fabled baskets of gold wire and thus get her family out of the poorhouse. It hadn’t involved the Spy’s biggest fear at the time—her blowing the misshapen Dwarf. No, it was far worse.
2.
A few nights after the Prince was born, the Dwarf arrived on a cold draft, then went away empty-handed. However, the reprieve would be short-lived. He vowed to return in three months to the minute and collect payment—the tender babe who presently nuzzled the Queen’s fair breast. Although, if dear Queenie could learn the Dwarf’s name during the interim, why then he’d declare the whole sordid pact null and void and they’d take crumpets and tea instead.
Fat chance.
The Spy learned of this the next morning when he was summoned to the Queen’s parlor alongside several of her majesty’s other best men. She kept the briefing short and sweet and the Spy figured he was the only member of the cadre to know the whole ugly truth of the mission. He also doubted that even he was privy to everything. Sister being a sneaky bitch and whatnot.
The Queen dispatched them to the four corners of the land. They had seventy days to learn the Dwarf’s name, else there’d be hell to pay. Should someone happen to find the sawed-off bastard and stick a knife into his ribs, all the better.
Predictably, the other men, whipped into a patriotic lather, leapt upon their trusty steeds and bolted hither and yon to begin the search. As the best of the best, the Spy employed unorthodox methods to secure the lead that later sent him across the kingdom to the mountains and the darksome territories beyond.
He spent even more time than usual in taverns and nunneries. He poured drinks for off-duty bailiffs, finger-banged lonely scullery maids, beat merchants and pimps. He held a groom’s left foot over an open flame. The Spy despised grooms with a passion. He bribed, blackmailed, and cajoled. To hilarious effect, if not much utility.
Everyone knew of the Dwarf, but not his name or whence he came. He was a shadow flickering in and out of reality. Rumors abounded—some claimed he was an assassin in the pay of a rival nation; he was the last scion of a ruined noble house, reduced to begging and prostitution; he was an evil magician descended from the Salamanca Seven who trafficked with demonic forces and had lived far in excess of any mortal span; he was a devil, an incubus, the decrepit human form of the Old One, the Serpent. One syphilis-addled courtesan claimed the Dwarf consorted with worms and the Lord of the Worms. She refused to elaborate.
Those who spoke of meeting the Dwarf made the sign against the evil eye and spat, or clutched their crucifixes. A strapping barmaid who moonlighted as a doxie for the well-heeled gentlemen in the High Market swore the Dwarf was in tight with mercantile princes, that he taught them secrets of the black arts in return for abominable favors. She’d seen him unhinge his jaw to devour a screaming baby which he’d received from a harlot as recompense for his services to a certain burgher. The barmaid had been sleeping it off after an orgy. None of the principals realized she was lying beneath a mound of cushions on the other side of an ornamental screen when the dark deal was consummated. She was a young lass, a former redhead, except her hair had gone white as the mountain snow, allegedly upon witnessing the horrible murder.
The Spy nodded politely, believing none of it. Nonetheless, he did due diligence and investigated the merchant in question—a burgher formerly of Constantinople named Theopolis who specialized in antiquities and dwelt in a posh manor on the upwind side of the city. Quiet inquiries revealed Theopolis to be no more devious or unscrupulous than any other of a hundred merchants; no more or less perverted or corrupt, no more or less exotic in his leisure proclivities.
Desperate for any lead whatsoever, the Spy broke into the house while its master and most of the servants were on the town drinking and whoring. Nothing seemed untoward. The house was sumptuously appointed in a variety of styles as befitting a man of Theopolis’s means; a few tasteful volumes of erotic lore, a handful of risqué statuary, a titillating nude portrait of some long-dead diva. Perhaps several of the pieces of armor in the hall or a baggie or two of the spices in the bedside drawer might be of questionable legality, but certainly nothing sinister or helpful in tracking down the damnable Dwarf.
On his way out the window, he hesitated, then doubled back to check the bookcase in the master study, and Lo! did find a cunningly concealed lever. The cramped brick chamber hidden behind the case was fitted with shackles and chains and arcane torture devices. An onyx floor plate gleamed by the light of his candle. A skeletal serpent bent into a C configuration was deeply etched into the plate. Serpent wasn’t accurate; perhaps a worm. Whichever, it was altogether unwholesome. In a bamboo hamper, its lid also engraved with the occult symbol, were the bones of children. The Spy counted enough discrete segments to constitute nine or ten infants and toddlers.
It appeared he had a lucky winner.
Later that night he abducted the drunken merchant from his bed and interrogated him in the wine cellar. All Theopolis would admit to was that the Dwarf belonged to a powerful family who dwelt somewhere in the Western Mountains. The man also predicted the Spy was going to wind up suffering a fate worse than death. The Spy thanked beaten and bloodied Theopolis for his information and dumped him in a burlap bag full of stones off the Swangate Bridge. While the bubbles were still popping in the water he set forth on the Western Road.
This was the end of the first month.
3.
He and the dog traveled on highways, then roads, then trails, and finally tracks that vanished for leagues at a stretch. The cities shrank to towns, villages, hamlets and thorps, each farther and farther apart, then there was only the occasional woodcutter’s hut in the depths of the wilderness. Fellow pilgrims were seldom seen. It was a lonely journey.
After much hardship he came to a remote valley populated by dour, sunburned folk who tended sheep and goats and raised beets and radishes in the turf. A province of peat-cutters and burners of cow chips. The kind of place overlooked at court and likely awarded to some down at the heels shirttail noble as a booby prize.
The countryside was largely untamed beyond primitive farm plots and unfenced grazing lands. Copses of pine were broken by stony pastures and hillocks. A river thundered down from a glacier caked in black dust. The far end of the valley rose into a high, desolate moor stalked by wolves and dotted with the ruins of ancient fortresses and the weathered cairns of defeated barbarian tribes. A rugged and gloomy scene that disturbed the Spy’s anxieties while also exciting him with its potential as the spawning ground of the miscreant he hunted.
The Spy struck gold right away.
A graybeard farmer had occasionally seen the Dwarf in the nearby village. Name? Who could say? Folks called him the Dwarf. He lived in a cave and came down to the lowlands for supplies once or twice a year during the festivals where he’d get drunk and dance with the pretty maids who weren’t nimble enough to escape his lecherous advances, and horrify the children (mostly he’d horrify the mothers) with gruesome tales of sexually deviant fairies and monsters. Made his way in the world as a crafter of jewelry and a wolf trapper. Privately, the farmer suspected the Dwarf was a professional tomb robber who filched most of his trinkets from the ruins on the moor.
In any event, a right homely bugger, that little man, and long-lived.
“Long-lived?” the Spy said.
“Aye. First I clapped eyes on ’im, I was a sprat. Saw ’im again, caperin’ along the Moor Road, just last spring. ’e ’ad a sack slung o’er ’is hump. Must’ve ’ad a goat in there…That bag was jumpin’ somethin’ fierce.”
The farmer offered his barn as refuge since the village was full of wicked folk and no place for any God-fearing Christian. When pressed for examples of this wickedness he simply spat and made the sign against the evil eye and grumbled into his beard. On parting, he warned the Spy to beware the Dwarf. “Ye wanna steer clear o’ ’im and ’is little friends. Ye shall come to a nasty end nosin’ ’bout that gent.”
The Spy knew the refrain. He wondered aloud as to the nature of these little friends.
“Ain’t ever seen ’em, just ’eard of ’em. Cripples and deformed ones. Some ain’t got no arms or legs is what I ’ear. They crawl along behind ’im, see? Wrigglin’ in the dirt all ruddy worm-like.”
“He’s got an entourage of folk without arms,” the Spy said, raising his brows toward the brim of his cocked hat. “Or legs. Following him wherever he goes.”
“Some got arms, some don’t. Some got legs, some don’t. Some got neither. That’s what I ’ear.” The farmer shrugged, made the sign of warding again, and would say no more on the matter.
The Spy slogged his way to the village and took a room at the dingy inn. His disguise was that of an ex-soldier trekking across the kingdom to his homestead near the borderlands. He claimed to be a prospector and that he might linger a week or two surveying the hills for likely sources of gold or silver. None of the sheepherders or goatswains who staggered in for a pint of grog after a day in the heather seemed to give a damn.
He bedded a couple of the serving wenches who were pleased with his appearance and moreso by the fact he at least didn’t smell of cowshit and actually had two silvers to rub together. Both had seen the Dwarf as recently as the previous month. Both were frightened and repulsed by the creature’s demeanor, though he’d not done much to offend either of them directly. Yes, they’d heard of his deformed kin who were said to remain hidden in a mountain cave except rare occasions when they accompanied him on excursions into the moor. The rumors the wenches shared were not enlightening. Except for one—according to certain old goodwives, the Dwarf and his kin made mincemeat of babies and their cave was carpeted with the bones of several generations of wee victims. There’d be a proper torch and pitchfork army marching on those cannibals one fine day, avowed the wenches.
The Spy did not learn the name of the village. The buildings were from olden times, fashioned of mud and brick and thatch with small doors and smaller windows sealed with sheepskin. Doors got barred shortly after sunset. Pagan tokens hung above entry mantles and the bones of animals were common decorations in yards. Conversations dried up when he entered a room or passed by on the street and the people smiled at him and looked at their feet or the sky.
The local denizens were a queer lot—the folk dressed archaically and spoke with an accent troublesome to his ear, such that he missed every third word when they conversed slowly in normal tones, and lost the gist entirely when they muttered amongst themselves, which was often. On the whole, the population was homogenous as a pod of toads. Not counting the wanton barmaids, who’d been born outside the valley in a more populous area, the women wouldn’t speak to him. The women weren’t shy by any means; they smiled and winked and brushed him in passing, but simply wouldn’t exchange words. Many of them were pregnant, but the Spy was surprised to see no other children in evidence. The youngest person he noticed was old enough to shave.
A half mile north of town lay a bluff upon which loomed a temple built in ancient times. On the Spy’s first evening ensconced at the inn, he witnessed a commotion in the taproom. Proprietor, staff, and guests set aside mugs of ale and haunches of roasted goat and gravitated outdoors into the square. A procession of villagers marched from the square and up the lane to the temple, lighting the path with torches and lanterns. They marched in absolute silence, led by a trio of figures garbed in rust-colored cassocks and frightful pagan masks that resembled no beast of fact or legend familiar to the Spy.
Once the stream of petitioners had disappeared into the distant edifice, its exterior remained cold and dark for the better part of two hours, whereupon the procession returned to the village square and dispersed. The innkeeper was one of the bizarrely robed leaders of the ceremony. He removed his unpleasant mask that appeared to be a waxen hybrid of an eel and a predatory insect, and stamped about the taproom, stoking the hearth and clearing flatware as if nothing unusual had transpired. Later, the serving wenches kept their eyes downcast and deflected the Spy’s queries regarding the incident with inelegant, but exuberant ministrations of love.
The next morning, he ate a hearty breakfast and decided to visit the site. The dog followed him with a decided lack of enthusiasm. The dog had communicated through growls and groans and baleful glares at every villager who passed that he didn’t like this place one bit. The mountain air agreed with his canine sensibilities not in the slightest.
The temple on the hill was by far the grandest monument the Spy had seen since departing the capital; extravagant beyond the wildest imaginings for such a remote province of the kingdom while also existing in a fabulously decrepit state; certainly a relic from an ancient era. A forbidding structure of granite blocks and carven pillars, the whole shot through with cracks from age and earthquake (a massive shaker had hit the region about ten years ago, according to the innkeeper— The Worm turned, he quipped with a sour grin) and covered in unwholesome northern black mold and thorny vines.
Instead of the traditional crucifix, a massive ring of hammered brass hung above double doors the likes of which belonged to a fortress. The ring was broken in the upper corner, much as the monstrous symbol he’d encountered in the burgher’s cell, and it canted at an extreme forward angle, presumably as a result of the earthquake. The effect was that of a giant torque poised to descend, literal hammer of the gods style, on petitioners shuffling through the gates.
The interior was dim and cavernous, reminiscent of Roman and Greek temples of the Hellenic; naves and altars to a dozen gods were arrayed in alcoves. The Spy recognized Jupiter and Saturn, Diana and Hecate, and busts of the Norse pantheon, in particular a feral depiction of Loki undergoing torture for his crimes against Baldur, and another of Odin weeping gore from his plucked eye socket. The Spy’s father was a learned man despite toiling as a simple miller, and his sister a supremely ambitious woman, and between the pair it was books and lessons in classical history throughout the long, bleak winters.
There were other gods represented that he did not recognize, however. Situated deeper inside the temple hall these statues were much older and the writing upon their placards was foreign to him. Upon reflection, he concluded this place had been constructed or renovated piecemeal over the centuries, with the modern additions, gods and architecture alike, tacked on near the entrance. Thus, proceeding into the torchlit gloom was to travel backward into antiquity.
His hunter’s senses were sharp and he knew a hostile gaze had fallen upon him. On several occasions he caught movement in the corner of his eye; small shadows moving inside the larger ones of the pillars and arches. Low and thin and fast; at first he thought it must be children, whatever the pagan equivalent of altar boys were. He soon decided this was incorrect, although he couldn’t quite name how or why. He recalled what the farmer said of the alleged “limbless kin” of the Dwarf, and shuddered.
At the opposite end from the main doors were two huge pillars of basalt and a thick curtain of crimson. On the other side was a nave, larger than its neighbors, and a crude altar of primordial black stone, hewn from the spine of the Earth herself, and roughly fashioned into a pyramidal shape, flattened at the apex in the manner of certain jungle civilizations. The ziggurat was nine feet tall, and approximately twelve feet broad on a side. A shallow depression was carved in each face at eye level.
Above the altar and inset at the heart of a soot-streaked tile mosaic was another broken ring symbol the diameter of several men standing on one another’s shoulders; this version was constructed of countless pieces of interlocking bone aged to a decayed black. Dragon’s-blood incense wafted from wrought-iron braziers and mingled with the torch smoke in a haze that caused the ziggurat and the effigy to distort and bend like reflections in stained metal.
The Spy took a torch from a sconce and raised it high to better examine the broken ring and the mosaic of murky imagery that enmeshed it—a hunt or revel in a forest; maidens with babes in arms fled dark figures whose eyes blazed red and who grasped with elongated arms and spindly, clawed hands. He saw, as his light glanced from surface to surface, that the bones of the broken ring symbol were real human skeletons of all sizes, mortared and fused to create a piece of unholy art.
Upon determining the sheer numbers of corpses involved, and inevitably recalling the burgher’s collection of children’s bones and the tavern wenches’ pillow talk of a cave carpeted with baby bones, his knees shook and he nearly lost his resolve. The Spy was by no means a pious man, nor afflicted by undue superstition. Even so, this sight quickened in his breast a chill dread and reminded him that he was a man without friends, far from home.
“Welcome to the House of Old Leech,” a woman said. She stood in an alcove, watching him. Clad in a diaphanous gown, a crimson diadem at her throat, she was dark of hair and eye and lushly proportioned. Older than the Spy by a rather wide margin, her flesh was taut and she radiated carnality as voracious as fire.
A priestess, he assumed. Instantly smitten, only a sliver of his fevered brain was capable of rational thought. “Hullo, priestess,” the Spy said. He affected an archness of tone. Beautiful seminude women jump out of the shadows at me every day, cheerio! He tried not to stare at her breasts, focusing instead on her eyes, and that seemed equally dangerous for she appraised him with a measure of intellect and cruelty that even his sister the Queen could not match. It was the kind of gaze to flay a man’s soul, and it reminded him that not so long ago he’d mucked horseshit in a stable, far from the good silver and polite company. He cleared his throat and said gamely, “This is an unusual church, if I may say so. I confess surprise that such blasphemies are openly conducted. And the coin required to maintain the roof. Ye gods…”
“And you missed the orgy, too.” The woman approached with a slowly widening smile. Thankfully, she possessed legs, and nice ones. Up close she smelled of perfume and pitch. Her eyes were painted in a soft glitter and her lips were the deep red of the diadem. “These lands are administered by Count Mock who is fond of the old ways. He’s filthy rich and the crown seldom pays heed to the doings along the frontier. Left to their own devices are Count M and his people. You may find the Valley exists under a different set of traditions and customs than you are familiar with.”
“Yes, if by different you mean uncivilized. The Count must’ve paid off the diocese as well. Yours is the only place of worship I’ve witnessed in the entire valley. That is passing strange, my lady. Surely there are Christians dwelling among you pagans.”
“Christians are welcome. All are welcome. All flesh is food of the god.”
“Who is Old Leech? The name isn’t one I recognize.”
“You’re surprised? There are in excess of twenty thousand gods acknowledged to exist. Unless you are a scholar or a master theologian, you’d be hard-pressed to name a hundredth of them. You don’t carry yourself like a philosopher. A mercenary, perhaps.” Her accent was more foreign than that of the villagers. While the peasants spoke with a rustic twang, hers hinted of a cosmopolitan education in a distant land. There was a nearly imperceptible lag between her words and the movement of her lips; the sound of her voice echoed in his head an instant before it issued from her mouth. He wondered exactly what was in that incense…
“I’m an ignorant clodhopper, which means I should feel right at home here. Are you a caste of healers? A gaggle of old leeches?”
She laughed into her cupped hand and watched him sidelong. “Curiosity killed the cat.” She boldly hooked the chain of his crucifix with her nail and its silver chasing reflected in her eyes. “Good Christians should not seek knowledge outside the Holy Book.”
“Really, there’s very little good in me,” he said, trembling at the heat of her skin close to his own, the swirl of exotic perfume that clouded his mind.
“I bet.” The priestess glanced down and seemed to notice the dog for the first time. “Oh, cute dog,” she said and patted him on the lumpy head.
The Spy opened his mouth too late to warn her—the dog was a savage and had chomped off the fingers of more than one person who’d come too near, but now the brute whimpered, cowed, and shivered in ecstasy or terror at the woman’s touch. The Spy understood the emotion. He said, “Priestess, are we alone? On my way in I could’ve sworn there were children moving in the shadows.”
“Kids are in short supply around here,” she said. “Unless we’re talking the kind with floppy ears and an ivy fetish. What spooked you was probably a few of the limbless ones creeping up. Don’t worry, they won’t brave the light just for a taste of city dweller flesh.” A gong sounded through the alcove and the air rippled and his teeth chattered. She stepped away from him. “By the way, I’m not a priestess. I’m a traveler.”
“Your manner of speech…Where are you from?” He chose to completely ignore her reference to the limbless ones.
“Wouldn’t mean a thing to you, handsome.”
“Ah, a woman and her secrets. What are you doing here?”
“I am undergoing an initiation. A croning, of sorts.”
“The rite of passage. Maidenhood and fertility giving way to wisdom.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Mum was a druid.”
“Really?”
“No. I’ve shagged a pagan or two, though. When is the rite? Will it happen here?”
“It’s already begun, and no. All of this,” she gestured to indicate their surroundings, “is for the hicks. The real action is at the castle. Your turn. Why have you come to this charming nook at the ass end of the kingdom?”
“I seek the wealth of the mountains.”
“All you’ll find here is shit.”
The gong sounded again; a bone-rattling vibration that caused dust to sift from the upper reaches of the chamber. She flinched and fear and exultation flickered in her expression. He grabbed her arm and stepped in and kissed her. It seemed the thing to do, under the circumstances. Her lips tasted bloody and hot.
She caught his forearm in a grip far more powerful than her stature belied and pushed him back with the ease of a mother fending off a child. “That’s quite enough out of you for today, Miller’s son.” She turned and moved quickly into the darkness. She called, or perhaps he imagined that she did so, as the echo was as from a canyon bed: “Go back, go back. There are frightful things. The stables never prepared you for this.”
The Spy remained before the altar, dazed and rubbing his arm where the woman left her black and blue fingerprints. He’d traveled incognito, yet she’d known him and, by her own words, so did the Dwarf. This frightened him until he mastered himself and banished that futile line of conjecture. Every dram of his blood was property of the Queen. Danger was immaterial—he was in no position to abandon the quest regardless of what awaited him. As for the cryptic warning of the lovely petitioner, that wasn’t anything to dwell upon or invest with greater merit than it warranted. Word in such small communities traveled like fire in dry grass. There was no mystery here. He truly hoped that thinking it made it so.
There are frightful things.
He glanced from the dog who yet cowered and skulked to the great effigy of Old Leech. Feeling as an actor highlighted upon a stage, an instant of dark epiphany assailed him, permitted him a glimpse of a vast, squamous truth of the universe as it uncoiled. Nay, despite its myriad constituent skeletons this abomination wasn’t a dragon, or a serpent, or the Ouroboros with its jaws come unstuck—this was a colossal worm that had swallowed whole villages, cities… A leech of nightmare proportions, a constellation rendered against granite, and it had shat the populations of entire worlds in its slithering wake through the night skies.
He left the temple and kept his hand on the dagger hilt all the way back to the inn.
4.
The Spy banished the disappointed serving wenches from his quarters and slept with the door locked and barred and his boots on in case he was compelled to flee through the window in the middle of the night. This took him back to his days of sneaking around the boudoirs of many a married lass in the city.
A week passed and he dreamed of the woman in the temple. In these dreams a chasm divided the temple floor and she stood on the opposite side, shining with a crimson radiance. She laughed at him. Her eyes and mouth dripped black and she glided across the smoking fissure. When she was almost upon him she grasped her own face and pulled. There was an eggshell-cracking sound and her face came free, and he’d awaken in a sweaty panic.
By day he tromped through the fields and pastures, interviewing farmers and herders with a scant pretense. Most of the people refused to answer his questions and those few who were more forthcoming provided nothing of substance regarding the Dwarf.
His perambulations carried him to the moor and its leagues of foggy, marshy vistas. He poked around the foundations of ruined towers and barrow mounds and toiled like an ant in the shadow of the moss- and lichen-covered megaliths. He investigated a large cave on the rocky slopes of Black Bear Mountain, and there was indeed sign a bear dwelt in its depths—bones and scat. The bear itself was absent, however. The Spy was glad of that; he hadn’t brought a spear or bow.
By night, he took his mead near the taproom hearth and dried his clothes which were invariably sodden and muddy from his excursions, and listened to the yeomen mutter and gossip at the big table. The peasants contended with boars and brigands, crap weather, mean wives, and occasional plague.
Of course, he knew an answer or two might lie within the walls of Count Mock’s castle. Unfortunately, the Count refused to entertain strangers and without a pretext, the Spy would be clapped in irons or worse. Sneaking in was risky; the Count’s abode was an old fortress after all, and designed to thwart such enterprises. So the Spy fretted and schemed and wandered the valley hoping the gods of light or darkness would take pity and throw him a bone.
A peddler stumbled in from the wet and cold one evening; a ruddy, lanky man from the capital, and he sat with the Spy and related news of the civilized realms and confessed, in a hushed tone and with many furtive glances around the inn, that the valley and its denizens were not pleasing to him by any means. The Peddler traveled many routes to ply his trade and had visited the region thrice in the past. He always concluded his business in the village and up at the Mock estate as hurriedly as possible. The Count extended an open invitation to the trader, desirous as the noble was for certain tobaccos the Peddler was sure to keep on hand.
Thus, the Spy asked the Peddler if he’d care for company upon the next morning’s journey to Mock’s castle; a strong arm to indemnify against the depredations of brigands and wolves. The Peddler was only too delighted and the pair departed the inn at dawn; the Peddler leading two surly pack mules, and the Spy with his faithful hound.
The weather was valley-fair, which is to say, drizzly and dreary. Rain led to sleet and threatened to become a blizzard. The men walked until sunset, following a path parallel to fog-shrouded peaks and a small forest of twisted, leafless trees, and arrived in the waning light at the gates of a crumbling castle. The building jutted from a mountainside, its gate accessible only after crossing a gorge via a rickety drawbridge. The drawbridge existed in a state of disrepair and was missing a chain and so remained permanently lowered. The rusty portcullis in the gatehouse also appeared inoperable. These details heartened the Spy who ever prized avenues of speedy retreat when encountering the unknown.
Standing in the dilapidated courtyard in several inches of mud, he surveyed the mossy roofs, potholes and smashed statues, weedy gardens and algae-choked fountains, and couldn’t discern much difference between Mock’s abode and some of the better-preserved ruins on the moor.
“Well, crap,” he said. The dog growled in agreement.
“Aye, this place always gives me the shivers,” the Peddler said as an aside.
A platoon of evil-looking servants in dark garb emerged to tend the mules and lead the travelers inside the main keep. One of the men made to leash the dog, but the Spy dissuaded the fellow with a cold, sharp glance. Inside they doffed soggy cloaks and were seated at a banquet table in the main hall. Oh, it was a gloomy and ancient chamber, its stones cracked and moldy, suits of armor gathering rust, pennants moth-eaten and rotting. The scents of smoke and mildew were strong.
Soon, the Count descended the grand staircase flanked by his sober, iron-haired daughters Yvonne and Irina, both of whom resembled in a familial way the woman hanging around the temple. Count Mock was a doddering shell of a man, quite elderly and bald; his chin receded and his eyes were filmed like a snake, and he drooled.
All three dressed in black.
The dour servants bustled in with platters of stringy roast beef and potatoes and a cheap thin wine. Irina fed her father by hand and dabbed his slack mouth with a napkin. Yvonne conversed on behalf of the Count and asked the Peddler many questions regarding his stock, most especially whether he’d brought the flatland tobacco her father loved. Neither woman expressed the slightest whit of interest about events in the kingdom or the wider world.
Neither directly addressed the Spy, as befitting his lowly status as a servant to the Peddler, however they studied him on the sly throughout dinner. For his part, the Spy kept quiet except to mumble superlatives regarding the overdone meat and stony potatoes. Through the course of casual discussion, he learned the Mocks commanded the vanguard that pacified the local barbarians a hundred and fifty years back and were awarded title to the region when the dust cleared. Apparently nothing of interest had occurred since those glory days.
Nobody mentioned anything about dwarves and the Spy didn’t judge a good opportunity to work the subject into dinner conversation. Particularly since on occasion the Count’s dullard countenance animated and he stared directly at the Spy and yelled, “Run for your lives! Run!” This followed by a bout of gasping and coughing, then a relapse into vacuous silence.
During a dessert of blood pudding and dates, Yvonne said to the Peddler, “It is meet that you arrive on this eve of eves, good Peddler. We’ve watched the calendar and the fogs of the season in anticipation of this moment, your fourth visit to our humble estate.”
The Spy, wary as a fox near a kennel of wolfhounds, ate and drank modest quantities, and later, when deposited in his chamber for the evening (instead of the stables, as a courtesy to the Peddler), immediately searched the premises for dangers undreamt of by ordinary guests. In the span of minutes he uncovered a loose block beneath the bed that doubtless concealed a spring or spikes, and peepholes drilled in the ugly tapestry near the wardrobe. He estimated himself well and truly in a perilous circumstance and was comforted solely by the fact he hadn’t spotted evidence of castle guards and the servants didn’t handle themselves as trained fighting men.
The hour grew late and the halls quieted. He crept forth with the dog at his heel. Man and beast prowled those dim passages and winding, drafty stairwells, peeking into rooms and antechambers, in quest of what the Spy wasn’t sure. The words of the sisters to the Peddler regarding their anticipation of their arrival haunted the Spy, as did the terrified demeanor of the Count during his interludes of lucidity. Clearly the noble sanctioned the pagan temple, else it would’ve been put to the torch and razed; and clearly the temple was connected to the Dwarf. For all the talk of caves and mountains, all roads to that sawed-off blackmailer led through this castle.
He and the dog descended from shadow to shadow down, down into the cellars. He encountered no guards along the way although the normal coombs for storage of wine and other goods roughened and became damp and showed evidence of having served as a dungeon He sneaked past a series of empty cells and a dusty room equipped with rack and iron maiden and dissecting table, then through a low arch scarcely wider than his shoulders and more downward curving stairs. The subbasement was correspondingly wetter and dimmer than the rest of the gloomy fortress, lighted by infrequent torches and dingy lanterns in recessed niches. Water dripped and small streams ran from cracks in the foundation and made the eroded stone steps treacherous. Bats squeaked and flapped, agitated.
Somewhere ahead came the low sonorous cadence of chanting.
The Spy had the queer and unwelcome sensation of sleepwalking, or trudging through a vivid dream that was rapidly becoming a festering nightmare.
Did they say it was beef at supper? You fool! The voice hissed from the deep black near his left-hand side and he almost went for a tumble down the steps such was his surprise. He squinted and found no evidence of a lurker, nor were any more whispers forthcoming and he soon wondered if his nerves were betraying him. Meanwhile he reached a landing and traversed a narrow tunnel. His path drew ever nearer the chanting and the hairs on his neck prickled. The words were similar to Latin, yet another language entirely. Though the chant was incomprehensible it conjured images in his mind of noisome maggot nests and a river composed of wriggling worms and gore, of himself and the woman from the temple coupling in a hellish cavern as a toothless maw of a colossus descended and engulfed them.
He cursed and bit his tongue until it bled, and kept moving.
The tunnel let into a small box canyon on the opposite side of the mountain. The area was illuminated by a bonfire near a dolmen of great, great antiquity. The dolmen, four vertical henges of prodigious girth surmounted by another flat rock, was graven with runes similar to the many barbarian megaliths and cairns upon the moor. A boulder lay to one side of the dolmen entrance and this stone was fitted with manacles and chains.
The beautiful woman from the temple languished naked, manacled at wrist and ankle. She serenely gazed toward the bonfire and its attendant figures in black cowls. There were thirteen hooded and robed figures and the Spy suspected that these were the servants of the estate gathered to participate in a blood sacrifice.
He and his hound observed this spectacle from a ledge perhaps fifty yards distant. He pinched himself, glumly hoping to wake from this awful dream, and surely it must be a dream for no confluence of malign events could logically occur in a sane universe.
Any shred of naïve assumption that the universe was in anywise sane dissolved, along with much of his own sanity, when Yvonne and Irina threw back their hoods and produced jagged daggers. Irina sliced the bound woman open from hairline to hip in a prolonged sawing motion. Blood spurted from the wound. The attendants chanted and the woman screamed and her screams escalated into a lunatic laughter that gathered strength and echoed like thunder from the canyon walls.
Summoned by the laughter, the chanting, the copious flow of blood gleaming dark as honey in the bonfire blaze, the Dwarf, garbed in a cassock, hopped and skipped forth from the dolmen. He tore away the cassock and his liver-gray flesh hung loosely upon his squat frame as if it were a hastily donned and ill-fitting costume. He leaped forward with violent alacrity and seized the woman in chains and wrenched at her. The Spy felt nauseated, convinced that the little man was actually peeling her alive.
Then the Limbless Ones squirmed from the darkness to join the fun. At the sight of them the Spy’s perceptions bent and buckled inward and smote him senseless. He shrieked and ran back through the tunnel.
5.
He made it to the Peddler’s quarters, his body bruised from many falls on the slippery stairs. The Peddler had been sleeping soundly and reacted in a groggy manner that suggested he’d consumed drugs. He’d eaten and drunk far more than the Spy himself had dared.
The Spy slapped and chivvied and threatened the confused man and drove him from the castle sans mules, supplies, or payment for the tobacco he’d handed the Count and daughters. They fled across the forsaken landscape. Eventually the Peddler shook free of his stupor and joined in casting fearful backward glances for signs of pursuit.
Upon reaching the outskirts of the village they composed themselves and repaired to the Spy’s quarters at the inn. Safely ensconced, they shared a flask of wine the Spy had previously stashed in a cupboard and were soon three sheets to the wind.
Darkness engulfed the village. The men, shaking with cold and nerves, huddled around a candle. The Spy, numb from the horrors he’d witnessed and the knowledge he’d failed his sweet sister, grasped the Peddler’s shoulder and confessed why he’d journeyed to the valley.
The Peddler finally said in a besotted slur, “Wait, wait. Not a traveling soldier or sell sword? The Queen’s own spy… Are you by chance the son of a miller?”
Having difficulty lifting his head or speaking in complete sentences, the Spy grunted that this was indeed the case.
“By the gods,” the Peddler said, his eyes as large and round as tea saucers. He told a story then of how once, as a young, green trader upon his first visit to the valley he’d gotten lost in the mountains during a thunderstorm and taken shelter in a cave. The Dwarf was drawn to the cheery blaze of the Peddler’s fire and the two spent a long evening smoking from the Dwarf’s hookah and swapping tales as the wind howled and lightning cracked the sky. The Dwarf claimed to be a hermit who subsisted by trapping and gathering herbs and that he dwelt in several caves and huts scattered throughout the area.
An exceedingly odd thing disquieted the Peddler. Perhaps his senses were distorted by whatever powerful herb was percolating in the hookah barrel; nonetheless, he’d received a fright when at one point it appeared the Dwarf’s face was melting. Right before the Peddler collapsed unconscious, the Dwarf lifted the man’s chin with a razor-sharp fingernail and told him to relay a message to the son of the miller when they met one day. The message was, There are frightful things, Groom. Time is a ring. My name won’t save you or your sister. We who crawl in the dark love you.
The Peddler paused, lost in memory. His eyes cleared and he said, “I was alone come dawn. The storm yet raged, so I hunkered in that cave for three days and three nights. There was another chamber farther in back. I realized the Dwarf had dwelt there long ago by the rotted bedding and clothes, a few mugs and tarnished bits of silverware. The rest was dust, cobwebs, and bat shit. Or so I thought until I found a bundle of clay tablets beneath a loose stone. These comprised essays and a journal by a self-styled naturalist who’d been driven from his community. The charges against him included child murder and witchcraft and trafficking in black magic, all of which he adamantly denied in his notes. The people feared him because of his small stature, his misshapen bones, and claimed he was son to a warlock. I couldn’t follow his words completely, for the language is difficult and the account had been carved before our grandfathers were even born. The gist of his latter entries was that he made friends with visitors from another kingdom or tribe who visited him from their own caves that lay deeper in the mountain. These men knew wickedness as a potter knows a wheel and over time they corrupted the Dwarf, swayed him to their cause. You say the Queen struck a bargain with this fiend and seeks his identity? That makes sense as a True Name is a token of power. Well, I beheld it all those years ago. His signature was engraved in the old tongue in the clay. I will not say it, for it must be one of the many names of the Prince of Darkness.” He brought forth quill and parchment and scrawled with a shaking hand the name he’d seen written on the tablets.
“What a strange, ugly name,” the Spy said, so drunk that two of everything shimmered in his blurry vision. He stared at what the Peddler had written and thought with grim amusement that in some ways the name made perfect sense, a cunning play on the Dwarf’s stunted growth and the fact his flesh was rumpled as a bad coat. A demon jester. How droll.
“He is a strange, ugly little man,” the Peddler said. “Although, I trow the Dwarf perished and what now walks the earth in his skin is something altogether different.”
“If the worst should befall me, promise that you’ll bear the Dwarf’s name to the Queen. In the morning I shall depart via the West Road for the capital. You must take the low roads. One of us may survive to bear witness.”
“Of course,” said the Peddler. “God save the Queen.”
“God save the Queen. But which god?”
The candled guttered and died.
The Spy lay helplessly against the warm bulk of the dog. The dog snored. The Peddler snored. A door creaked, then floorboards. There was a steady, thick dripping, the sound of bare feet squelching. The blackness reeked of copper and the Spy’s heart beat too fast.
She said into the Spy’s ear, “We meet again. Yes, time is a squirming, hungry ring that wriggles and worms across reality. It eats everything, lover.”
He tried to speak, to cry out a warning. Too late.
In the chill gray light of dawn, the Peddler roused and discovered that he and the dog were alone in the room. There were a few bloody footprints. No other trace of the Spy, however. So, the Peddler hurriedly departed that cursed village and took the mournful dog with him. He traveled day and night, pushing himself past exhaustion in order to beat the appointed date. By miracles of perseverance and providence he barged into the Queen’s court and delivered the message mere hours before the deadline. Afterward, he vanished from his guests’ quarters despite the presence of a contingent of armed guards, and was never seen again.
Subsequent legends of the Queen’s fateful showdown with the Dwarf notwithstanding, the creature’s prophecy was quite accurate: knowing his name didn’t save the Queen or anyone else.