RED-AUTMN SEEKS HIS FATHER’S BONES

RED-AUTMN SEEKS HIS FATHER’S BONES, By Jonathan Olfert, art by Miguel Santos

 

At forty winters, Red-Autumn climbed into the forbidden tomb with an old man’s carefulness, clumsy in the dark. Engraved stone chewed his fingertips raw. There’d be worse pain tonight, succeed or fail.

He caught his breath at the top of the carved barrier-slab. From here a branching passage coiled down into the hill-tomb, where King Loshar Shon rested among the bones of a dozen servants. One in particular.

This late, only watchmen’s fires marked the nearest villages. Red-Autumn flinched at memory: more than once throughout his life, he’d tried to breach the tomb his father helped to carve. Watchmen had beaten Red-Autumn brutally for disturbing what lurked there now. Try it again, gray-beard, they’d promised, and you won’t walk away. So although he’d brought an unlit torch, he limped down the shaft by starlight, then by feel, sore fingers tracing the stonework. Only when the curve blocked all the distant fires did he strike pyrite against flint.

The torch dripped sizzling fish-grease. Its light revealed branching tunnels, engraved with vast and complex spirals that Red-Autumn remembered from childhood visits in better days. He kept his gaze away. Any spiral, if seen by human eyes, could become a gateway for a whirlpool spirit — and that deadly natural phenomenon had become much more likely, anywhere in these lands, since the raising of this tomb.

Had Father known that Loshar Shon’s great spirals could draw the spirits in unprecedented eagerness and strength? Had Father known he and the other craftsmen would die for the king’s glory? Had there been resignation in his face, or fear, or only pride in the arts he’d never had a chance to teach his son? Thirty winters later — a lifetime — Red-Autumn couldn’t honestly remember.

The spirals stirred, as all spirals did under light these days. He switched the torch to his left hand and drew his belt-axe: oak and smooth flint, engraved by bog-witches for work against inhuman things.

But the tomb’s guardians were no barrow ghouls or water-haunters. The liquid shape that curled out of the nearest spiral had the wrongness of a spoiled butchering. The same colors, too: oily green and rotten reddish-black. And like a butchering gone wrong, the huge whirlpool spirit spilled out faster than Red-Autumn could handle.

He’d planned this moment but found himself unready. Rather than shear off the whirlpool spirit as it emerged from the spiral, he stumbled back warily. When these beings came through the spirals in actual whirlpools, the natural way, water diluted them. Down here the powerful carvings gave spirits a stronger, more defined shape. Inquisitive curls of rot, delicate as an unfolding fern, lashed out at Red-Autumn hard and hungrily.

This was, he lied to himself, no different than chopping wood, and he’d done that kind of labor all through his lonely life. The flint axe bit through the nearest tendril almost of its own volition. As a curl of spirit-substance writhed into acrid smoke, Red-Autumn set his feet and got to work.

Whirlpool spirits, whatever they truly were, fought like men with a hundred whips at their disposal. Sick green and deep red left bright hot stripes on Red-Autumn’s arms, chest, face. The spirit bit through his fur clothes and yanked at his axe in intentional ways.

He tore the axe from the thing’s grip again and again, jamming the torch into a substance that wasn’t quite flesh, might not even be alive in any way he understood. When he sheared off tendrils and embedded the axehead into darker masses, the flint blade came away clean. A whirlpool spirit yielded no gore to the human world.

A final chop sank deep. The creature erased itself into smoke as if retreating from reality into dream. To wait, perhaps.

Red-Autumn, heart hammering, lurched deeper into the tomb and felt the smoke sting his lacerated shins. He paused only to treat his wounds with herbs and honey. This cursed place robbed the medicine of its beauty and goodness: the herbs smelled moldy, and the honey tasted sour as bad mead. Red-Autumn smeared it on anyway, to ease the pain and keep his blood inside his skin.

The stone passages branched out, and both memory and torchlight gave imperfect guidance. He’d lost himself down here before. With a grimace, Red-Autumn limped in a direction that felt like it led closer to the heart of the hill. Loshar had ordered earth heaped up starting early in his reign: his grave-hill was larger than any Shon had raised before. Whether he had killed the craftsmen with his final breath or whirlpool spirits had done it for him, their bones could very well be at the heart of the tomb. Red-Autumn had only glimpsed that broad chamber twice, before spirits drove him back or watchmen dragged him away. Tonight had to be different.

Higher ceilings and increasingly complex carvings suggested that Red-Autumn had chosen the right path. All too easily, he imagined whirlpool spirits swarming on the other side, ready for his torchlight to hit another spiral and let them burst free.

There. The edge of a giant compound spiral caught the light and writhed eagerly. He pulled back and stamped out the torch down to the last embers, and listened.

The deepest darkness of his life closed over him.

He’d often gone down barrows and lesser tombs to arm himself, prepare himself, for this one. The secrets of tombs should have been his birthright, his trade. He’d walked haunted wastelands on starless nights, descended into caves where no fire could burn. None of that darkness held a torch to the oppression of Loshar Shon’s tomb. If not for his aches and pains, he’d have thought his body was falling away, peeling from his spirit like an overripe fruit.

Absolute blackness, pure silence, not a whisper of a breeze this deep in the hill. No rush of tendrils that weren’t quite flesh. So long as no light and no gaze hit a spiral at the same time — so long as he never gazed upon his father’s art — he’d be alone.

He put his dead torch in his belt, wincing when the hot head touched his skin through torn furs. The ridges of the great spiral, widely spaced and deeply carved, rasped against his palm. He moved along the wall by touch.

In Red-Autumn’s childhood days, spirals didn’t let whirlpool spirits through into the human world nearly so often, nor so strong; his father, Dovel Swift-Singer, had worked in peace and in decent light. Bog-witches claimed that carving these massive spirals had shifted a balance — far from the first time Loshar Shon’s pride brought ruin.

Such memories could grow oppressive for an old man of forty winters, a man with no children, no future. The dark stripped away thoughts except those that Red-Autumn would rather not think.

And his hand still rested on a spiral big enough to kill every one of those villages outside. They had good reason to call this place forbidden.

 

 

Though he walked slowly along the engraved wall, Red-Autumn’s shins crashed against a clattering weight. He froze as if noise could shatter the protection of the darkness. Crouching, he laid down the axe and felt at the obstacle. His fingers traced leather — no, desiccated skin — and then the holes of a skull.

“Father?” he said by instinct, though this could be any of the craftsmen or even a thief.

The passage offered only silence.

These beads rattling on the dry body’s chest — was that a half-remembered necklace of amber and shell? Was this extra hole in the skull the mark of a human weapon or a questing tendril?

To keep his bearings, he leaned against the wall and knelt by the corpse. He risked a spark, pyrite clacking on flint — too dim to see much. The spiral shifted hungrily against his shoulder, but he struck another spark, then a third.

Amber and shell gleamed around the dead man’s neck: the kind of work Red-Autumn should have learned as he left boyhood. A better livelihood than what he’d scraped out by sweat and, sometimes, blood. But Dovel Swift-Singer had died before his son could learn his arts of stonecarving and sorcery. No wards of protection for a boy growing up alone.

“Father,” Red-Autumn choked out, and tendrils snapped out from the wall.

The striker stones skidded away. He scrambled for his axe. The huge whirlpool spirit coming through, slow in the darkness, gripped his left arm and leg with oaken strength. Another tendril coiled around the dead torch in his belt and splintered it. His fingers brushed smooth wood and he snatched up the axe. A heartbeat later, the spirit yanked him sidelong against the wall.

Against, and through.

After the first punishing impact, the spiral-carved stone yielded in a way that stone should not do. As a desperate young hunter, he’d crossed a bog-witch and been pulled under the muck. This kind of dark, this buffeting pressure, brought that memory roaring back. He got firm hold of the axe and clutched it to his chest.

Tendrils dragged him from constriction into open space: a deep pit-chamber under unfamiliar stars, a place that he’d never seen and that should not exist. The air hung heavy. The whirlpool spirit unlatched from Red-Autumn and ebbed back into the stones.

He leaned against rough rock to catch his balance and his breath. In better days, his wounds — the whips of tendrils, the force of his passage — would have been nothing. But watchmen’s boots and fouler things had left their mark over the years.

And yet, unsteady as Red-Autumn was, the presence that he sensed here — the man who had to be here — hesitated. A silhouette in the darkest niches.

“I know you don’t fear me,” the old man said to the dark, hefting the axe. “What holds you back, Loshar Shon?” As the likeliest answer struck him, Red-Autumn coughed — it tasted like blood — and laughed until the chamber resounded. “This is no lair of power; it’s a prison-pit for a broken shade. Has a king been cowering down here for thirty winters?”

“Spoken like a man who hopes a reckless death will make his life less paltry.”

That silhouette detached from the gloom: a large man, intermingled with the unflesh of a whirlpool spirit — his humanity stretched apart by the width of a finger or a fist, at joints or places where joints shouldn’t be. Loshar Shon’s left hand curled in eager tendrils; his right held a beautiful ritual mace. Starlight stole the color, but that macehead was rose quartz, ground smooth with deep rippling grooves.

“My father spent a full winter on that mace,” said Red-Autumn, voice thick with blood and hate. “Wasn’t his life enough for you?”

A guttural snarl shivered the rocks and shadows. “Dovel cursed me, fool. The mace was the least I could take in return.”

“My father was no curse-worker.”

“And yet here I am. I remember his little boy worshipped him. He carved his treachery into the walls, without a care for how far his curse might spread, and still you followed him around like a pet. Did you never grow up enough to see Dovel for what he was?”

The dead king’s sneer hung in the air, cutting off whatever else Red-Autumn might have said or even asked. The sneer let Red-Autumn put doubt in its proper place. He could ponder memory and truth if he survived. First there was work to be done.

Despite his limp and the night’s wounds, Red-Autumn charged like a much younger man.

A web of whirlpool spirit jetted out from the walls and Loshar Shon’s body. Red-Autumn sheared the largest tendrils with furious, desperate chops that he felt all up his aching arms. Lesser strands bit skin and snapped as he bulled through. His progress slowed to one planted step at a time. But he made that step, and then the next, even as whirlpool spirits latched on.

Here — wherever ‘here’ might be — they didn’t dissipate to acrid smoke, they splashed, reeked, sizzled. When he sheared a tendril, fluid stung and outright burned, sloshed through his leather boots and hissed on his wounds.

He knew, bone-deep, that he would not survive this. Worse, that his father’s remains would never see the light of day, let alone a decent grave. But destroying the man to blame struck him as fitting consolation.

It seemed Loshar Shon felt likewise about settling for revenge on his enemy’s son. Loshar — some blend of dead flesh, soul, and inhuman spirit — lunged in and brought down the mace at Red-Autumn’s skull.

Nimbleness was a young man’s game. Instead of trying evasion, Red-Autumn met the blow on the oak haft of his axe. His bad knee buckled; he kept his balance and pushed up again before that knee touched the ground.

The pair of them shoved, grappled without dignity, face to snarling face. He got a hand on the mace’s carved haft. A tendril caught his striking axe and froze the edge a hairsbreadth from contact with Loshar’s temple. Loshar was hardly a man: his face was a gnarl of leathery flesh and spirit-substance and a copper circlet gone green.

Red-Autumn let go of the mace and punched him.

Once, twice, he rocked Loshar back on his heels. Slippery fluid sluiced hot over Red-Autumn’s fist and down his left arm. Then Loshar’s foot came up, planted itself in his belly, and shoved him back against the squirming rocks.

Ropes of unflesh writhed against Red-Autumn, seeking a grip on his arms and legs. Pinion him outstretched and he’d last only moments. Bizarre stars whirled high overhead, or maybe Red-Autumn’s injuries — a welt here, a dozen cuts there — had caught up with him. He fought for alertness, one last burst of clarity.

As Loshar hammered the mace down, Red-Autumn leaned hard to the right and yanked against the whirlpool spirit that bound him. A twining mass stretched out between his left arm and the niches of the wall, a tight high web that caught the mace. Unflesh swelled and ruptured at the impact; caustic slime matted Red-Autumn’s furs and shaggy beard. Sweat and violence had stripped away the honey-herb dressing on his wounds. In ten or twenty places, the dying whirlpool spirit burned him deep enough to eke out a groan.

But die it did. While his witch-blessed axe could slice away a spirit’s tendrils or hack into its core, that quartz mace — Dovel Swift-Singer’s mace — burst the fat webbing like a sun-ripened corpse. And as it fell apart, it set him free.

A wild swing of the axe gave Red-Autumn space and made Loshar remember caution. Red-Autumn lashed out again, feeling every one of his forty winters.

To his shock, he connected.

The corner of the blade sliced a furrow across Loshar’s chest. The king, dead or not, shrieked as unflesh mixed with whatever passed for blood in his human elements.

Red-Autumn set his feet properly and chopped like he was taking down a tree. The oak axe-handle fit his grip as well as an axe ever had. When the blade sank deep into Loshar’s left ribs, Red-Autumn ripped it free briskly and chopped again.

The mace fell from Loshar’s human hand. Carved wood clacked in the gloom, then stone against stone — a heartbreaking crack. The mace-head, a full winter’s work, split away from the haft and clattered on the ground in halves.

Limping back across the pit, Loshar spoke despite the gaping wounds in his belly. Ropes of intestine mingled with eager, vibrating tendrils of rot. “You come for your father?” he gurgled. “I can raise him. Give you back the life you lost. Only say the word.”

Red-Autumn’s breath came out ragged, rattling in his lungs, but he mustered a sneer. No matter how he’d pleaded to the bog-witches for a vision or a miracle, those dry bones in the tunnels had sat empty for thirty winters. Empty and silent.

“Raise the dead?” Red-Autumn said, each word an effort. “No, if you could conjure company, you’d have done it already. I know loneliness when I see it.”

He stooped, came up with half the broken mace-head, and threw it at Loshar Shon.

Whatever virtue — or curse — Dovel had worked into the weapon, the chunk of quartz thunked harmlessly against Loshar’s chest. Loshar flinched regardless.

In the space of that flinch, Red-Autumn lurched across the pit and laid him open. The axe carved a line from Loshar’s inhuman left shoulder down to his right hip.

Red-Autumn spat inside the gaping body that was no longer a body and chopped again. Loshar’s spine shattered like an old tree that forgot how to bend. Fluids hissed around Red-Autumn’s feet and splashed hot all up his calves as Loshar crumpled.

The hacking turned methodical as butchery. Limb from limb, head from neck, human from spirit: with all the strength he had left, Red-Autumn broke Loshar down to nine distinct pieces. He knew deep down that if he paused, he wouldn’t — couldn’t — keep going.

He staggered at last in the inhuman gore and slumped against the wall. The axe fell from his gnarled and aching hands. His grip uncurled, slow as a flower turning to the sun.

Stillness fell over the pit. Last words came to mind, but Dovel had been gone far too long to hear them, so Red-Autumn held his peace. To speak to his father now would be to speak to himself, and — a laugh bubbled in his lungs — he’d done enough talking to himself over the long cold years. So he held his peace and let himself slide down the wall.

His hand bumped against the other half of the rose quartz mace-head. His bloody fingers traced the rippling patterns, the smooth channels and ridges. At last, he held it tight to his chest and let relaxation, rightness, sink into him.

Was that the morning giving strange colors to the sky, up at the mouth of the pit? What world was this? What other beauties did it hold, and out there somewhere, far from this cursed place, was some father teaching his son to make his own beautiful things?

 

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Jonathan Olfert writes fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and paleofiction.  His stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Old Moon  Quarterly, and other venues.  He and his partner live in Atlantic Canada

 

Miguel Santos is a freelance illustrator and maker of Comics living in Portugal.  His artwork has appeared in numerous issues of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, as well as in the Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 2.  More of his work can be seen at his online portfolio and his instagram.