PART III
Black Magic - The Dogs - The Spectacle - The Rain Wyrm - The Towers - Sunless Dawn - Castle Levant
15 - Black Magic
Millie had not tried to stop Cass from going, and as she paced the floor of the vacant corner-room on the third floor, she wondered whether or not she'd made the right choice. She was not the girl’s mother, just a doting and concerned aunt who couldn't stop her, no more than she’d been able to stop the poor silly girl from letting them cut off her beautiful hair. No more than anybody would have been able to stop me at that age, she knew.
Cass had the fiery independence of the Bryngarten women. The shy young lady she’d been upon arrival was only temporary, it was apparent to her now. She wouldn’t even let Millie fix the choppy mess they’d left on her head, which she could not help but laugh at; discreetly, of course. Lena was going to be less understanding. There would no doubt be a tongue-lashing from her sister for allowing it to happen, no matter how little she could have done to prevent it.
Cass was practically an adult. Millie knew there was no denying it, and part of being a young woman in the city was the exploration of its plethora of faiths. Magic, though? The Earth God? Surely not, she thought, but Cass was not one to lie, and Millie herself had heard the multiple testimonies of her patrons. Nevertheless, she thought it still possible that it had been some sort of elaborate trick.
Nothing sat right with her about the bald-headed strangers in their matching robes. They’d gone marching down the street ringing handbells and shouting, a cacophony of noise. She and Cass had been awakened by it, and had met each other in their nightgowns in the hallway outside their respective rooms, bleary-eyed and confused. The trouble-makers outside had been brazen enough to pound on The River Sister’s doors and bang on its windows. As she and Cass had descended the stairs to the common room Millie held to her side a small oak club, and the two of them had listened through the door as the cultists shouted their absurd proclamations in the street before moving on. They announced a coming rain, and a ceremony that was to take place immediately, all the way across the river at Hundred Trees. Millie had heard the grandfather clock in the common room- three o'clock in the morning. What sort of church operates at that hour? Millie had wondered, and went outside.
Of course there had been no hint of rain in the air. Millie could usually tell, but before she knew it, Cass had gone upstairs to get dressed, and that was that. She’d tried to reason with her but finally relented. Since then she’d seen half the city stream past the inn down Locust Street.
It had been old Yvette who had reminded her of the prophecy after Cass had already gone. She’d been awakened as well, and Millie made a decanter of coffee for them and they sat there drinking it in the common room. Yvette was a more pious worshiper of Slybbon than she. While Millie aligned herself with the same goddess, the myths and intricacies of the faiths were of little interest to her. Water, Wind, Earth, Fire, and Time were the major religions of Yartha. Their myths were all tied together, but Slybbon and Hyne- Water and Earth, respectively, were often at odds in the mythology. It had never really made a difference to Millie. She knew a few followers of the Earth God and thought them to be fine folk, but what Yvette had said about the jealous prophet of Earth… about the betrayer, who brings invaders to the Riverlands and wields false power over water. Who were the invaders, though? It bothered her. What she’d initially taken as coincidence was now in her mind a step above suspicion.
She’d gone upstairs to find she couldn’t sleep. In the large vacant corner room facing Locust and Whistler, she paced and lightly cleaned the room in compulsion. She tried to brush her fear away as superstition, but there was a testimonial reason for it as well. Yartha was restless, and she could feel it. The skirmishes with the guards were becoming more frequent, as they’d been before the tipping point twenty years ago. Summer brought out tempers, on top of the hunger and the panic over the drought. She prayed that Cass and everyone out there would be safe, but if it was magic, she supposed it was in the hands of the gods, and she hoped the gods would be kind to them.
As if in answer, she heard a series of metallic clashes ring out in the street- the unmistakable sound of a swordfight, followed by angry, surprised yells. She ran to the window and looked down and saw men scrambling away. Moments later, a torch-carrying mob began to make their procession east down Chatter Street. Behind them a regimen of the Yarthanguard, blades unsheathed. Her stomach sank. With heart beating fast she went to wake the rest of the staff.
***
Syatt and Cass walked side by side through Hundred Trees. They moved with the crowd toward some destination and with the instinctual order of a herd. Seemingly from every corner of Yartha had come the assemblage, a microcosm of the city composed of lowborn and highborn alike. Syatt and Cass saw among the procession- a mother, dressed in the drab clothing of the underclass and holding tight to her two children's hands- a collection of aristocrats from the Cult of Coin with their heavy gold jewelry and golden half-masks fit tightly to their faces, a group of three men in drag with long, satin dresses and wigs of yellow and red hair, walking huddled and talking in hushed and excited voices, an old white-bearded man with a bright purple cloak and turban, at his side a gray-haired, similarly dressed woman, the man hunched over on a cane, and the woman looking about nervously as she held his arm. She had a smudge of clay beneath her eye, like Cass did.
Some of them had short hair, but even more were unsheared. The rumors of what had happened on Glass Avenue had spread quickly since the afternoon, and the number of people in attendance far exceeded the gathering which had been at the alleyway. The people had heard the tales, and were eager to witness the magic for themselves.
Those ahead of them followed the cultists with their blue gowns trailing softly behind them along the stone paths of the parkland overgrown with weeds. The way was illuminated by torches in hands, held against the darkness and at intervals along the path where stone markers in the shape of fish with sconces protruding from their upturned mouths were placed with torches. They made their way to the hill ahead of them and the pavilion at its top. Syatt could already see people beginning to climb it in the distance. They heard the occasional scurry of small wildlife in the vast underbrush, scattering as they passed, and could see the glow of animal eyes, no doubt curious about the sudden imposition of humans which had entered into their territory at the unusual hour.
“I've always believed,” Cass said as they walked. “My whole family believes in the gods. We follow Slybbon, but I've never believed in magic until today, if that makes sense.”
“It makes sense,” Syatt said. “I guess I didn't, either.”
“Is this scary to you?” she asked him. “I mean, it’s obviously scary. It should be scary, at least, and it made us all sick before, but…”
Syatt looked at her. The gleam of sweat on her face made it glow in the torchlight. “You want to feel it again,” he suddenly blurted out. “Is that what you mean?”
“Yes,” she said, immediately, and Syatt had not expected it. “When everything started to float in the alley, it was like my head was… empty at some point,” she said. “In a good way. I don’t know how to describe it.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Syatt replied. He debated stopping there but went on. “I don’t want to sound crazy or anything, but I’m not even sure why I’m even out here right now. It’s like I went out looking for it. Looking for magic? What? I should be back with Pox. Over in Endstown. We were supposed to be-” He looked up at an opening in the trees to the celestial sea, bordered by the black foliage of the parks' oaks and dogwoods, and judged it to be between four and five o' clock in the morning.
He was feeling worse about abandoning Pox as the strange night went on, and just as his nerves around her had started to calm. I'll forfeit my share of the coin to him, of course, he thought, but still felt it an empty gesture. He'll understand. I hope so. He might be pissed, but he'll understand. He’s most likely asleep, anyway.
Alma Bryde’s advice to stay away from the cult had entered into his mind as well, but Syatt had known from the moment she had advised them that it was something he would not be able to avoid. He didn't completely believe in fate, but still felt that what he was doing at the moment, more than any other moment of his short life so far, was somehow fated, and he had a strange premonition that the night to come would change his perception of the very idea of it, as well as his understanding of… it seemed to him like everything. Reality itself had become a shaky concept to him. Fragile in a way it had never been before.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
As they neared the hill they passed a large, pompous aristocrat shouting orders from his palanquin to his weary looking carriers. Cass rolled her eyes. “Surely he doesn’t mean to be hefted up that hill,” she said.
Syatt laughed. “I think that guy owns some mines or something. Pox was telling me about it. He’s rich.”
As they walked they began to hear the loud, unmistakable preaching of the man they’d encountered separately in the shrine at Glass Avenue, Brother Byron. Scattered all up the side of the hill were people climbing alone or in small groups. Like ants, Syatt thought. At the top of the hill the space beneath the pavilion was crowded with people already gathered, their collective murmuring another drone in the humid night.
There at the hill’s base were groups of robed cultists. They offered welcoming words and assistance up the hill for the elderly and otherwise indisposed. Shaved uniformly bald, their shared looks of perpetual surprise were unsettling to Syatt. He could hear Byron’s piercing voice ringing out from atop the hill. He stared up at the people formed under the pavilion, and when he turned to her she took him by the hand and smiled. "Let's go," she said, and leading the way they began to run up the steep hill.
He went with her, of course, all the way up the grassy hill with its light cover of dew, under the moon. They came to the fringes of the gathered crowd, and still she held his hand as they began to move through it. She took a look back at him and smiled for just a moment, her dark eyes swimming with excitement and daring. He thought then that he would be able to picture the scene in his mind for the rest of his life.
The normal civilians outnumbered the cultists by a large margin, Beneath the pavilion there were spectators at higher elevations. They stood on large oak tables in rows. He followed the path Cass made through the bodies, and as they inched closer to the front they began to hear gasps and noises of shock throughout the crowd. A few people had turned to leave, squeezing by them as they went the other way, some with fear stamped on their faces. Brother Byron's voice carried on, about what, Syatt had no idea. He’d long since stopped listening to the words, but the sound of him was inescapable.
Finally they opened up to a spot near the middle of the pavilion, the inner ring of the spectacle. The old man, who Alma had called Varnabas, was hidden from Syatt’s line of sight, but he could see Brother Byron surrounded by a loose ring of acolytes. Behind Cass, Syatt watched as her hand shot to her mouth and she gasped. Her other hand left his own,and she half- yelled, "Oh, oh, oh gods," She turned to him. When she did, Syatt was able to catch a glimpse of what she had seen, and he reflexively flinched.
Right away he could tell that Varnabas was dead. He was also naked, but that was the least of it. As people in the ring surrounding him turned to leave, the monstrous form was revealed. It looked to Syatt that the old man sat atop a huge mass of... something, until he realized, with horror, that whatever it was, it grew out of him.
Where the buttocks of the man who had been known as Varnabas ended, a huge, misshapen, "thorax" began. It was the only word Syatt had to describe it. The thing was reddish-brown in color, lumpy, and covered in what looked like the fine hair of a peach, or velvet. It pulsed and breathed as if there was something inside; some inner warmth. He saw with revulsion its small, fleshy and grub-like legs, pale white and blue-veined, wriggling in twin rows on either side of it, nowhere near touching the ground, seemingly useless.
Still connected to the insectile form, what used to be Varnabas was simply dead. Something kept his spine upright, and that same thing jutted and bulged in his chest. His head hung back, his mouth a gaping, toothless, tongueless chasm- pure white, the skin around it blackened as if burned. His arms hung loosely at his sides in capitulation to death. The once huge stomach hung now deflated in sagging folds of skin. His lifeless, bony legs were spread impossibly wide, and hung from the mass beneath him at odd angles as if in a process of breaking off. Eyes were unclosed, lifeless. It was as if something pushed itself up his throat, toward the blackened hole of his mouth. What had been left of his greasy hair hung in clumps to pale skeletal shoulders.
"This isn't what I thought it would be," Cass said, speaking into his ear. She sounded lost.
Surprised he was able to find any words himself, Syatt managed a weak "No," and swallowed hard. "I don’t know if we should be here right now," he said.
It came to him then that, curiously, there were no signs of mass-nausea in the crowd. Is this not magical? he wondered. What is it, then? Then the words of Brother Byron's words began to register to him. The tall man made gestures he made with his hands, grand and elaborate. He smiled, looking to Syatt like some freakish child.
"Fear not! Fear not!" he shouted. "This man is simply undergoing a transformation! He is not dead! Far, far from dead! He will become the rain and be born from the rain! He’s doing so as I speak! Praise his noble sacrifice which is not a sacrifice. Do not fear your savior!" His voice cracked and eyes bulged.
Syatt noticed a menacing group of men loudly arguing with the cultists on the other side of the crowd, and watched as one of them slipped past and grabbed Brother Byron by the sleeve. Byron jerked his arm away with a desperate shout as two of his acolytes pushed the shouting men back. Byron circled around, closer to Syatt and Cass, who stepped back with the rest of them. His eyes were the picture of desperation. "Remain calm!" he commanded, seemingly to no one in particular. Sweat cascaded in sheets from his hairless visage. It poured into his eyes, no brows to impede it, and he wiped at them constantly with the sleeves of his blue robe.
Behind him, Syatt saw the insectile mass beneath Varnabas shift, heard it gurgle like a huge empty stomach, and his heart leapt in sudden terror. Some of the people in front heard it as well, and they began to give panicked noises and then scream. No one in the crowd knew exactly what they were looking at, but they knew that it wasn't the miracle they had envisioned. They turned on the cultists, on Byron in particular.
"Black magic!" someone behind them yelled.
"Black magic!" came a voice from the other side. It stirred the already tense crowd.
"What looks like death to you is not death to him!" Byron pleaded, frantically trying to retain control of them in a slowly rising voice, then he screeched like some predatory bird, "I'm trying to explain to you that magic is sometimes not pretty! It does not mean-”
He stopped, as if he was processing some new information, then went on. "Even now he feasts with gods. They discuss his glorious return, I promise you," he told them. “He bargains for your salvation. It does not happen right away. Not his salvation that he bargains for. Yours. Would you be so ungrateful? Think!” His eyes were wild and the tendons in his neck stood out as sweat poured from his face. He wiped it with his sleeves. The acolytes behind him looked about nervously. “Do not mourn the man who was!” Byron screamed. “Celebrate the martyred prophet who will bring rain at any moment now, and celebrate yourselves- yes, you the donors are the true saviors. This man was but a conduit. Please, just wait."
He began to weep, but still wore his artificial smile. It was both terrible and unbearably sad to Syatt. There was a moment as no one moved or spoke. The entire crowd was silent but for errant whispers and mutterings, and then someone in the back shouted, "What in the hell are y'all waitin' for? Get that bastard!"
Byron backed away, his hands trembling in front of him. His face was drawn in a rictus of anguish. They advanced on him. A turbaned man lunged at him from the crowd and swung his fist. Byron was able to pivot and avoid the blow. One of the cultists, a hairless and grim-faced woman, stepped in front of Byron to grapple with him, and after a short tussle she was stabbed in the neck with a short dagger apparently hidden in her attacker's sleeve. Blood sprayed from its withdrawal.
No one really had time to react. There was a sudden, noticeable change in air pressure. Syatt's ears popped and he saw Cass wince and knew hers had too, and then his stomach turned somersaults, and everyone around him began to retch and vomit. Cass spewed bile at her feet, and he felt more of it splatter against his back and on his legs from the heaving and gagging people close behind him. Seconds later, all six of the heavy oak tables flew skyward. crashing into the wooden rafters of the pavilion's roof above them. There were onlookers standing on each of them to capacity. The lucky ones fell off into the crowd, scrambling in the air. Two flailing bodies dropped directly on top of the people in front of Cass, and one of their legs delivered a flying kick to her head, sending it crashing backward to connect with the bridge of Syatt's nose. Everything turned white, then black. He heard screaming. The crowd shifted violently as the people in front of them turned to flee and were spilled over and trounced upon.
When he could open his eyes he found himself still standing, but wedged suffocatingly between two men. He saw that the space where Cass had been was suddenly occupied by a completely different set of people. Blood poured from Syatt’s face. Many of the torches began to go out as they were dropped and trampled. The crowd became crushed together and then swayed dangerously, finally tipping over like rows of dominoes as they went sprawling into one another, spilling out under the pavilion, the fringes of the crowd fleeing down the hill in terror. Bodies tangled and wrenched and were crushed. Syatt was knocked to the paved floor of the pavilion to find himself in a new world of indifferent feet, stomped hands, pinned legs, and bruised ribs as the crowd fell to chaos.