The Mouth of the Underworld
They were up with the dawn the next day and moving again, but Qanath had begun to wonder if this journey had an end. She had traveled so far from civilization that teahouses and street theater had begun to feel like a dream. Havec had warned them they were walking headlong into the supernatural, which was bad news for any number of reasons. Not least of them the fact that Havec was their guide.
He remembered very few of his people’s legends, let alone the daily rituals of witchcraft and propitiation that might have kept them safe. There was a place deep in the mountains where the mundane world touched the realm of his people’s gods, and while the shamans mostly stuck to the lowlands healing the sick and blessing the crops, this was where hedge-witches came to gain twisted powers.
Which was all well and good, but how those powers worked and who those witches were, that remained unclear. Havec was fairly certain his mother wasn’t one of them but admitted that he had misread her on several subjects. They had no idea who was actually traveling with her; they had assumed her companions where warriors, other members of her chosen guard, but on what basis? They had no idea who had been in the chalet other than his mother and cousin; they hadn’t bothered to look around the first time they were there.
As the morning wore on, Qanath began to grow increasingly warm. She wasn’t the only one pushing her heat-source to the edge of her saddle and unbuttoning her coat. With the sudden heat came a foul odor on the air, the rotten-egg stink of sulfur descending upon the pine forest in damp clouds.
It was nearing midday when they came over a final fold of pine-clad hill to find the land before them nude of all vegetation and rent by deep fissures letting loose clouds of superheated steam. Bubbling hot springs of fantastical jewel-bright colors glugged and blubbed sluggishly, and the air stank, coating the tissues inside the mouth. The setting felt ominous, the morning unnaturally still. A breath of wind intruded into the valley and the fog was torn, revealing a gaping maw in its rear wall.
No one was surprised when Havec dismounted, saying simply, “Here we are.” If ever there were a path into an underworld, this was it. Hib and Moida, he left behind to watch the horses, and she had the suspicion that, if he could have gotten away with it, he would have made all of them stay. He hadn’t spoken for the whole of the day, and his jaw was rigid, eyes devouring the landscape.
They picked their way cautiously between the gusting vents of hot air and the simmering pools of azure and turquoise, leaving their coats behind. Qanath took a handful of crystals with her, since they were walking into a cave, although a part of her wondered if it was necessary; this spooky place where they were going must surely have light of its own, eldritch glowing moss or mystical veins of refulgent stone in the walls. The soldier-priest, she noticed, took both spear and sword. Amril took only Ara, his weapon of choice.
As they approached, the mists closed in, swirling fitfully in protest to their presence in this place where mortals had no place. The cave-mouth, when they came to it, loomed alarmingly out of the fog. It was wide enough that twenty people could have walked through it abreast, but barely tall enough to clear Amril’s head. Together, the five of them passed inside.
The crystals turned out to be unnecessary, but not for the reason she had thought: they found what they were looking for directly within. Beyond the entrance lay a single broad chamber, not much wider than the cave mouth but soaring to a vaulted ceiling high above. Around the walls, a number of crabbed human figures caked in unimaginable filth stood vigil, and these had to be the hedge-witches Havec spoke of. She had never seen human beings so clearly tainted by evil.
The queen stood toward the center of the room, as rigidly-upright as always, cold eyes fixed on them. She didn’t appear to be the person they had come to see: she stood deferentially at the arm of a blockish, throne-like chair covered in calcified ripples. In the chair sat a man, his hair and beard colorless, swathed in a robe of icicle-crusted fur.
Qanath’s first, witless thought was that this must be one of Havec’s people’s gods. The man was handsome, with a commanding gravitas in his bearing, and both his presence in this place and his pallor were strange. She had never encountered foreign religions before, but this seemed like exactly the sort of being his people might pray to. A deity of mountain heights and cold wind and prideful poverty.
Then Havec said, “Dad?”
***
There was a breathless interval where the others didn’t seem to understand; he’d spoken in his own tongue, and only Qanath had heard him speak enough, of his family and to his people, that she might recognize the word. For the time being, he had no interest whatsoever in the opinions of his friends, because here his father was sitting at the mouth of the underworld, at least a little bit alive. Looking at him, pale and spectral, it was easy to put two and two together. To say, ‘Ah, of course, he sold our people to the hedge-witches, granting them license they’ve never had before in exchange for bringing him back to life.’ One certainty dwarfed by the thousand questions it raised.
The very first of them was obvious and intuitive: “Why?”
“Our country needed a leader. A strong leader to shepherd it.”
“A leader that could never have been me,” he growled.
His mother sniffed, saying coldly, “Was that ever in question? Look at the company you keep.”
His father, however, tsked gently. Havec noticed that his face didn’t actually move, his rigid lips not bending to shape his words. His resonant voice was everywhere, easily heard, but it wasn’t clear that it was coming from his mouth. He hadn’t stirred since they entered, and his chest didn’t appear to be moving. Havec found this unsettling, but when you were facing your long-dead father in the flesh, it seemed silly to complain that there was strangeness.
“You’re too harsh on the boy, Gheara,” the man said sternly, “you always were. Havec is a good boy who loves his daddy like a good boy should, you know his heart was always in the right place. You do want to help your daddy, don’t you, son?”
He didn’t entirely like being spoken to in that tone of voice but kept his umbrage to himself; his father had been dead for six years, it was only natural he wouldn’t yet be up to speed on the fact that time had passed in his absence. “Of course I want to help you, Dad,” he said weakly.
“There, you see?” his father said warmly. “You always got so upset when you caught him looking at the other little boys, but Havec is the one who brought me something I could work with. Not you. Even if these crones could crush me into Hemell like they claim, why would I want another dead body when I can have my pick of these fit young men?”
While Havec was still gaping at him, he added conversationally, “Which of them is better, boy? What do you say?”
His mother, however, said sharply in the Tabbaqeran tongue, “Which of you is his lover? Confess.”
There was a moment of suspense when no one spoke; only Havec knew what was happening and he couldn’t decide what to do. He wasn’t about to answer truthfully, to tell them which of these men he judged superior so his father could murder that man and put his body on like a suit. But was it better to bluff or openly refuse? He even entertained, for one unworthy instant, the thought that he could point at Smooth Guy, and that easily they would be rid of him.
The monstrous thought made him cringe, and into this crucial moment when he was thinking instead of acting, The Thing stepped forward boldly. In a bright voice, as if it sensed nothing amiss, it said, “That’s me, I’m the one who loves him most.”
The hedge-witches reacted so swiftly that, even knowing what would happen, it caught Havec off-guard. One of them uncoiled like a striking snake, flinging a wedge of sharpened schist directly into Hair-On-End’s heart. It struck him with a spurt of blood that looked black in this fog-shrouded space, and he collapsed. He was shrieking terribly, clutching at his chest. Qanath screamed and Farait crouched, both hands flexing on his spear.
Then Arandgwail dissolved around the crude stone knife, which clattered harmlessly to the floor. Chortling merrily at the trick he’d played on them, the shyin solidified back into human form a foot away. Clutching his ribs, he rolled about on the rocky earth, laughing at his jest. There was a stunned silence while everyone stared.
Then there was no more time for thinking, because his mother was screaming orders and the hedge-witches charged into the fray. There were ten of them altogether, some of whom must have been traveling with his mother while the others waited here. Attending to his father’s corpse, one assumed. Their emaciated bodies were draped in a few scraps of rotting hide that hid their genitals but little else. They were covered in whorls of lime and dirt, and what looked and smelled like blood and fecal matter.
He took a step back as they closed, not in retreat, but to put himself closer to Qanath. She had no weapon to defend herself. However powerful her sorcery might be, she had told him it wasn’t really useful in a fight, not unless she’d had an hour to prepare. The first woman who came at him never got close enough for him to engage; with the spear, Farait’s reach was considerably longer than his, and he smacked the knife out of her hands while Havec was still centering his weight in readiness, than ran her through. Torn between admiration and annoyance, he chose to pretend this hadn’t happened and turned to confront the next.
Pivoting, he freed both swords and faced a man with a knife in each hand. They went through a few exchanges that minded him forcibly of sparring with Xar, high low high low high. He had the reach of his opponent, though, with weapons twice as large. When the man broke pattern and tried to step inside his guard, Havec hacked at his wrist with one sword while he stuck the other in his throat.
“Stay away from my son!” his father bellowed in the background. “That boy is my seed, leave him alone.”
The hedge-witches didn’t heed his instructions, and it wasn’t clear who was in charge. Only two of them had gone for Smooth Guy and Hair-On-End, and those men were both down on the ground ripping one another’s skin off with their nails. Havec had no idea what was going on there, other than some creepy shit that had to be the doing of the shyin. He wasn’t the only one who had come to that conclusion, because the hedge-witches were all giving The Thing a wide berth now, focusing on the safer target that was the men carrying weapons.
Another woman ran at Havec, and he kicked her away, then put his back to her when she fell down. Farait had lost his spear in the intervening seconds and Havec saw it lying in pieces on the floor nearby. He had his sword out, facing a man who might have been Erl’s filthy evil twin, wielding a greatsword that in Havec’s opinion was too cumbersome to be much use. When he raised it over his head, readying another massive sweep that would plow through an opponent with the implacable force of a glacier, Havec stepped up to his shoulder while he was still winding up and drove a sword through his kidney and out his gut.
His mother had withdrawn only by a single step, watching the fight with great interest. She thrust a finger at Hot Priest, shouting, “That one! That’s the one we want.”
“Fucking hell, Mother,” he snarled. The woman he’d knocked down was back on her feet. As she made to charge past him, he kicked her again. This time, she turned into a patch of wintry mist and his foot sailed right through. It staggered him, and he stumbled forward a step, almost going to the ground. This was just as well, because when she rematerialized seconds later, raising a spear to cast it at Hot Priest’s heart, he was down on one knee at her back. It was the matter of a moment to hamstring her and cut her throat as she fell.
Standing, he cast a glance at his mother, still standing proudly at his father’s corpse’s side. “I get that you don’t approve of me, but must you go out of your way at every turn to ruin my life?”
“Neither of us ever wanted you to be unhappy, son,” his father said earnestly, “your mother sent you away to keep you safe. There are bloody deeds in our future and neither of us thought you would be ready to participate.”
Havec laughed as he spun away to face the rest of their foes. “I guess she didn’t tell you what she did with me.”
