Ch: 84 Goose or Gander, Gravy Goes Great
From a low hillside, under the cover of a thicket of freshly budded spiceberry bushes, the party from Wheatford watched the strangers bustle about.
At the foot of a limestone massif, a now departed spring had carved a low opening in the stone. Wide and irregular, much of the entrance was plugged with loose rubble from the hillside and wild brambles. The passable area was wide enough to allow four people to walk abreast. Most humans would not need to stoop to pass through. Above the entrance, a sheer face of limestone rose to the hilltop many yards above.
Two people were out in the clearing, spreading small piles of salt or some other white substance in a careful pattern.
A few others worked diligently, clearing brush with axes and painting offensive symbols around the cave mouth. None of them spoke or slacked off, no distractions or goofing around. They worked in a seamless, silent coordination that felt disturbing.
“Yeah, these are our guys. Regis says Mykonos is terrified and in pain, we need to do this or he’s going to try.” Becky whispered. “Annie can’t hold him back much longer.”
“You heard her. We are going in hard, try and keep as many as you can alive.” Tony gave the musician a hard look. “Rolf says your nonsense gave you an edge in his fight… is that true?”
The whole group nodded grimly. Ivy shook herself loose and started stretching. “Let us handle communication and support, Gary suspects these people are under at least some outside influence… we can screw with that.” The musician nodded in agreement and displayed a very disturbing smile.
“I can taste it from here, influence from beyond... We are going to fuck these assholes up. Let’s get ready gang…” The madman set to distributing items to his comrades, musical instruments appeared wherever he went in the small group. Vera Anglin watched silently from the sidelines scowling unhappily.
Tony, the Sparrowhawks, Khan and Luna advanced on the small group in the open glade. Weapons leveled and ready for action, they marched in time.
“This is a lawful interdiction, drop your weapons and stand to. We will not give another warning.” Tony shouted through his amplifying enchantment, as they quick marched forward as a unit.
“Our mages are already blocking magical communication, you cannot escape. Surrender.” His shouts fell in time with the footfalls from his line of fast marching spears.
Within seconds, two cultists, one with a woodcutter’s ax and another wielding a shortsword, bolted from the marching warriors, wailing a wordless scream of alarm.
Each figure took up the shriek as they snatched up weapons and tools. They formed a ragged knot in the entrance, surging to and fro with animal fury.
More cultists joined the throng at the entrance until they silenced the unholy wail and began advancing in unison. They flung themselves at the warriors with no regard for subtlety or planning. Instead, they lurched forward together as a unit, bristling with tools and weapons, moving as a solid mass.
The filthy line of single minded cultists impacted the front of the Adventurers and pushed Rootedbear back a step, as an ax shrieked against his shield. Weapons clattered and shouts rose from the melee in the clearing as the two groups came to grips.
A man from the rear of their tangled knot began to spasm and twitch, before hurling a noxious spray of something from his mouth, it spewed forth in a stream, arcing over his allies, to rain down on the attackers.
Rootedbear caught a face full of the stuff and began gagging and choking immediately, losing the initiative and faltering in his advance. A spear slipped past his shield and clattered against his breastplate seeking an opening.
Tony lashed out with his massive sword, taking the head off the spear and shearing into the unlucky spearman’s abdomen. Order’s shining armor held the front, while the big warrior cleared his eyes of the stinging sludge. “Poison spray! Watch for it!” He shouted, once he could speak again and resumed the front.
“Ready? One, two, and…” Ivy wound the band up and turned them loose.
Gary’s new guitar howled into an instrumental rendition of ‘Screaming For Vengeance’, sending the strangers into a frenzied and confused panic. Ivy had a snare out and had the beat screwed down tight while the rest of the Bathers were formed up and holding it down.
Judas Priest was the absolutely correct choice, once the magic hidden in the raucous music took hold, the cultists’ bizarre synchronicity fell apart.
The strangers heard the music only moments before the combined gifts of Gary, Shai and Becky entangled and flooded the clearing and cave, with a complex interplay of compulsion and interference.
Ivy blanketed the area with static from a ritual circle hidden a few yards in the woods, preventing any scrying or magical long range transmission.
Gary took slow and careful control of their pace and movements, getting them to hesitate and fumble, while energizing and invigorating his allies. Becky’s new harp joined with its enchantments, enhancing and expanding her burgeoning gift for aura manipulation, illusion and deception.
Shai took the allies in hand, synching them up into a solid, cohesive and flexible unit. Her gift simply let them dance to the tune in their own way, without entangling themselves.
A woman in the rear of the cultists struck an odd pose, as her hair flew out in all directions. Crackling waves of sheet lightning gathered at her fingertips, illuminating her ominously.
When the music ensnared the cave mouth, her face went slack and her spell began to fizzle and ground out. A blinding flash and sudden crack erupted from behind the cultists’ line as she shrieked briefly and slumped to the dirt, twitching. Two nearby cultists took shuddering, staggering steps, before crashing to the earth, locked in trembling spazms.
The re-energized assault team rolled over the man with an ax, before he had a chance to do more than look confused. Rootedbear swatted him aside with a shield rush, sending him into Khan’s path in a tangled sprawl.
The veteran warrior stomped the prone man’s knee with a definitive snap and kicked his ax across the clearing, ending that cultist’s part in the action decisively.
The remnant of the scant dozen strangers began backing up in loose formation, retreating for the cave mouth. Their largest warrior screamed wildly and threw himself at Luna, on the right flank of the approaching force.
Her broad, leaf bladed spear point danced across his scimitar in an exchange too fast to follow. The one eyed veteran’s opponent stumbled back, looking confused and far less angry.
His sword lay on the ground, with his right hand, while his right hip seeped red into his clothing and the soil at an alarming rate. He dropped to the earth after taking half step in retreat, right in front of the cave mouth and its filthy inscriptions.
The makeshift weapons of the strangers continued to poke and jab, with none of the eerily precise and crisp movements they had displayed.
The new first man in their ragged formation took a slash at Evard, the scout. He blocked with his spear and swept the man’s sword aside. Larksong thrust out with her lance and skewered him neatly through the thigh and into the earth.
While he was struggling with that trouble, Evard dashed the cultist’s sword from his hand with the blade of his short spear, letting more of the man’s blood stain the soil.
All over the formation, things were ending quickly and poorly, for the defenders. Their last member came scrambling out of the darkness, wielding an obsidian dagger, screaming obscenities and frothing at the mouth.
Runningtree swept the butt end of her spear up in a vicious parry that connected with a sharp, wet sound. The iron knob balancing her spear shattered the man’s hand and dagger, sending a spray of blood, fingers and volcanic glass across the cave wall. It was an improvement over the art on display already. He folded up around Larksong’s spear butt, gasping for breath and clutching his damaged hand in a confused and helpless mass on the floor.
The Bathers marched in, Gary and Becky kept the music going under Ivy’s direction, maintaining her rituals. The others bustled about, securing prisoners and tending the wounded. Khan and the Sparrowhawks fanned out, searching the limestone cavern for danger and clues.
A shout from Luna brought Liam and Tawny running. “Healer! We found our shepherd, alive! Gotta hand it to that big moose.”
The musicians fell silent as the others returned with the injured man. “He’s going to be ok, no serious injuries on our side, only eight fatalities on theirs. A fine afternoon’s work.” The big Order knight looked over their four sullen, silent prisoners.
“It’s odd, they are all iron rank and fully Contracted, but I sense no divine auras… They seem empty, nearly mindless beyond violent impulses.” Tony remarked.
“They are stuffed full of outsider Contracts. You can’t have the gods and spirits find out about the competition. That would ruin their little game.” Gary snarled, making Shai’s skin crawl.
“Dinnae get overwrought, we come not to murder, but fer justice.” Shai tugged at his sleeve, dragging him away from the prisoners.
“You guys can’t read what they wrote on the walls…” He growled. “I think there’s barely enough human left in these guys to keep them alive, without their puppeteers pulling the strings. It would be more like tidying up than ‘murder’ or whatever…”
His finger quotes required him to stow his spear at least. Shai took his hands in hers, to keep him from pulling the damn thing back out.
“The boy makes a good point. I may be partial, seeing as I woke up strapped to an altar, staring at a knife dangling over me.” Mykonos grumbled. “Where's Regis?”
“I told him to wait out at the road, he’s very sweet.” Becky soothed the ruffled shepherd. “Let’s take these losers out in the sunshine. This cave sucks.”
A small stone fell from the cavern roof, it hit Becky right on top of the head with a startling and mildly painful jolt.
“Hey!” She shouted at the faintly echoing, stoney laughter that could just barely be heard.
“Dinnae be an arse Rocky, I am knowing where ye live…!” Shai shouted into the darkness, drawing strange looks from the others.
“We have a friend, the neighborhood.” Gary mumbled distractedly, while scrubbing at the offensive graffiti with a stiff bristled broom he pulled from nowhere.
“A friend in the neighborhood you mean?” Evard asked, while searching the crates and boxes of supplies scattered around.
“Nope, they are the neighborhood. This mountain range is a bit of a character. Looks like these assholes were just setting up. Good thing too, Ivy says their ritual would have drawn something really unpleasant.”
He stretched and shook out the heebie-jeebies with a physical effort.
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“Our conch creature in Evard Village was a helpless bystander, she just wanted to go home. This looks like something aggressive and predatory, our friends had big plans for my new hometown.”
Once Gary was busy, not murdering any cultists, Shai went to go summon her home. Rootedbear and a few others still had toxic magical vomit on them and needed a bath more than healing.
Runningtree and Evard watched the madman’s antics in the aftermath of the battle. He used his broom to obscure each rune and image, scratching the crusted blood and pigments into a pile, which he carefully collected from the cavern floor.
He carried the whole mess in a sack, out into the forest. He marched down a game trail into a tiny meadow with a seeping spring among the stones. He swept away the leaf litter and dumped his sack in a pile on the dusty patch of ground.
Then he went about, sweeping up each pile of powder scattered around the cave entrance, sacking it up and adding to his heap of nasty muck. He repeated the process with the blood stains, collecting a pile of bloody dust from the field. That too, went in the pile.
“What are you doing boy?” Evard asked, moving closer to watch the proceedings. The tiny meadow was ringed with curious onlookers, only those guarding the prisoners or on watch were absent.
“I can’t really do ritual magic like you guys do, but I’m really good at magic rituals.” He murmured distractedly. “Old school, really really old school. My teacher has been out of circulation since… I guess you don’t know anything about mesopotamia… For a long ass time.”
The boy circled his pile about two yards out, driving small hardwood stakes into the rocky soil with a wooden mallet every step. He strung a braided rope of spidersilk on the little stakes, tying the thing with an elaborate knot and a little ball of beeswax.
Evard looked at the ankle high fence with amusement. Tiny, bright colored tiles of various shapes, in wood, ceramic and metal dangled from the strand, it was adorably festive. “A corral for snail herding? Planting a flower bed?” He asked with a chuckle.
“Flowers… No, if I work this right, something should sprout though. You might not wanna watch this part, it gets a little gross.” He stared at the observers with growing impatience, for a few moments. “That means be somewhere else. Scat, I have to do some… stuff.” He fixed his gaze on Vera in particular.
“Ohh no, I’m watching you close, duke’s orders.” She grumbled, seeming even less enthusiastic than before as the others began to disperse.
“She speaks! Vera, I knew you had it in you, but seriously, get lost. I have magic to work, old magic.” He grinned shyly. “I need some privacy.”
“Nope.” She grunted.
“No really, this is private time, see how everybody else is leaving…” He glared at a shadowed patch of withered vines off to the east. “I see you, Larksong. Trust me you would rather not watch.”
The bushes gave a disdainful rustle as she departed leaving only Gary and Vera. He stared at her, then glared at her in silence for an awkward and endless time.
“You really won’t go? Or turn away?” He demanded, growing ever more irritated.
“My eyes stay on you until this task is finished. Duke’s orders. End of conversation, you may proceed, simply pretend I am not here.” She droned, her voice flat and bored.
“Run along Vera, I dinnae ken this strange magic, and would observe fer meself, Ye are nae needed here.” Shai announced, joining the party. She pulled a camp chair from her gift and sat down on the edge of the clearing.
“Not negotiable, Orders.” She grumbled.
The musician glared at the two women. “Ok, so it’s a class. Magic rituals ‘one oh one’.” He said sourly, mixing in some english to keep Vera on her toes. “Breaking all my damn taboos…” He complained as he worked, using a bronze trowel to dig a shallow hole in his pile of crud and cave floor sweepings.
Satisfied, he stepped out of his tiny fence and circled it another two yards out from his silk ring. Slowly and carefully he poured salt, drawing an elaborate ring with many looping hooks, reaching inside and outside the perimeter. Standing between the spidersilk enclosure and the salt ring, he began to disrobe.
“These rituals are based on the natural magic of this world. Ritual and Contract magic are human inventions, yo… we use it to up the power and speed of casting.” He said while scrubbing himself with a pail of water, drawn from his backside.
“With or without Contracts, anyone who learns the rules can do this. The downside is, it’s very low energy, unless you can tap into the essence of reality just a little.”
“Typically it would take a dozen people in deep meditation together, synchronizing their auras to power the magic. A coven, if you will. I have a gift that helps with that, so this works for me.”
He smiled just a little smugly for a naked man in the woods. Gary scrunched his bare toes in the soft green herbs and grasses, feeling the mycelium and worms wriggling below. “Yes, it’s ready… last chance to leave ladies.”
“Not going to happen, until this action is over you won’t even piss out of my sight. If you need to wipe your ass I will hand you a leaf.” She grumbled, looking like that dissertation required real effort.
Gary drew the big bass bamboo flute from his Pockets! With an unhappy sigh. Low and haunting notes began to drift from the tiny clearing as he began to play, slow and low.
He began a slow twirling dance, unstructured and loose. He spun in gradual orbits between the two circles, playing his terrible song.
The key was just off of any sane register, resonant, terrible and wild. It keened and wailed in hollow misery, curdling the stomachs of the listeners.
From the woods, owls and whippoorwills raised his tune a little higher. Larks began singing in counterpoint to his haunting melody.
The flute vanished, just as a small hand drum appeared, thudding away, while he whistled the melody two octaves higher. Woodpeckers and thrushes took up his beat, as he switched to the viola.
All the while he kept up his slow, twirling steps, in time with the ever increasing tempo. Keeping his conical heap of crud always on his right, he danced sunwise around the ring for several minutes, while the local fauna joined his expanding music.
The music slowly wound down, drifting into a calm, crystalline silence that fell over the entire meadow. Likewise, the man eased his dance slowly, drifting in slower circles until the music ended.
He stepped over the rope, into the inner circle and got to work. With brisk movements he plucked an eyelash, a nose hair, a hair from his head and a pubic hair. He sprinkled them on the pile with a tear from each eye and a wad of spittle. He dug in his nose for a nugget, which he flicked into the heap with a wink, while digging in his ear with a pinkie.
A bronze knife appeared in the madman’s hand while they watched in disgust. He cut a short, shallow line in his inner forearm and dripped a small stream of blood into the pile of filth.
Shai realized where this was headed and decided to leave, she grabbed Vera by the ear and pulled her ungently along. “I am under orders girl, I am to monitor this boy constantly…” Vera complained, trying to shake the mighty smith woman off.
“Tis true, an ye do truly wish tae watch him piss and drop a shite in his magic circle ye may…” Shai hauled the smaller woman back to the main clearing, safely out of sight and upwind, as luck would have it.
“An it come time fer the last addition ye will nae watch. Bank on that. My boy will nae abuse himself, while under another woman’s eye.”
“I have never seen such a ritual… is he really going to include…?” She shuddered with revulsion.
“Aye, no doubt he shall add ear wax, void his waste intae the mess an then spank his filthy self like a monkey.” She shook her head in despair. “Suren I dinnae wonder why this craft did leave mortal ken, tis better forgotten.”
#
Back in the small glade, Gary squatted to get to work. He used a stick from the forest to stir his foul mixture in and over itself, slowly incorporating the ‘liquids’ and ‘solids’ into a stiff claylike mass.
When his stick broke, he continued working it with his bronze trowel until it formed a smooth disk, six inches thick and eighteen inches across.
He used a length of old guitar string to cut the clay disk loose, the silvergrass slipped through with hardly any resistance. He slid a wooden shingle under his creation and lifted the construct away.
Gary buried the patch of soil with the leaf litter and forest detritus he had swept away originally. He left little sign of his activities, once his tools and tiny rope fence were packed back away.
#
Dressed again, after washing up in the spring, he stumbled back into the clearing, carrying the heavy clay artifact.
Shai had her house set up at the edge of the clearing and was busily helping with the prisoners. Tawny and the other healers of the group looked exhausted after patching the surviving cultists back together. The two still conscious struggled against their restraints despite their injuries.
Broken leg guy was bargaining hard for a dislocated shoulder, he lurched and struggled with animal intensity, grunting and snorting incoherently.
“Sorry guys, my spell is time sensitive, did these assholes start talking yet?” The musician asked, as he carried the strange object to the cave entrance.
“They can’t talk. Lady Trelawny says they are more than animals, but not much more. We will learn nothing from them.” Vera fell in beside him, not too close to his vile project, to be sure. “Their minds have been destroyed in some manner. Your sanity remains an open question.”
“I’m craaaaazy, Vera.” He moaned the ‘crazy’, making it reverberate through the cave nicely. “Moontouched, faetouched and barely fit to go out in public untended. Now shut up and watch me do weird shit.”
Mykonos’ altar made a fine worktable, he dropped his slab of clay and filth on the stone and sighed sadly. With care, he took a bundle of small wooden tools and carved the first strokes of an endless spiraling mass of tiny marks and characters into the stuff.
Listening close, Vera could barely make out a steady chant bubbling from his lips, a slow and constant stream of nonsense and real words, mixed and jumbled together.
Before long he silenced his almost inaudible, rhyming chant and headed back out, Vera following after. “That needs to soak up the essence of what these guys were up to…”
He tried and failed to dust off his hands, his face twisted up in mild disgust. “I need a bath, for sanitary and ritual reasons. In an hour, the next step happens. Nobody touch my project please.”
“Rest assured, no one wants to touch your pile of shit. Gods, I hate witches.” She grumbled as she followed him outside.
“I think I prefer sorcerer… warlock maybe, I do have some outsi…-” He halted his sleepy mumble abruptly, as his head snapped over to glare at her.
“I see, Dukie wants to catch me slippin, my crew rolls too tight, so he needs you to snitch and snoop. Or is it your god? Mine says he has been avoiding me, in the places where my friends hang out. What’s your god hiding?”
“Neither the duke nor I answer to you, my deity certainly does not. How much do you think the Bloodwashed One cares for your paltry existence? Were he to ask it, I would simply snuff your life and answer for the deed with my own.” Her steely eyes held no remorse or hesitation as she spoke.
“And that’s why War never gets invited to the good parties, fanatics don’t play well with others.” Gary sneered. He shot a glance at the prisoners, tied to trees near Shai’s garden gate. “These assholes probably thought just like you do… follow orders, obey their gods… no questions or hesitation. We had guys like that in my… hometown.”
Inside the gate he headed right for the bath with Vera, reluctant and irate, in tow. “If you gotta follow along, I’m just gonna prattle and use you as a captive audience.” He sighed while sinking into the pool after washing up.
“My bandmates and I have gifts that work together for area effect compulsion and crowd control. While we were working on them, someone else was working back. From outside our reality. We could feel it pushing and prodding for control.”
He leaned back in the water, floating idly. “Ivy’s communication interference ritual fuzzed their connection, then Becky and I snipped the strings. They feel like just empty puppets now, but the cut ends of the strings remain for a while yet. That’s my angle, their boss is still fishing around hoping to regain control.”
“An outsider is influencing this area? Impossible. We are within five miles of Wheatford’s temples!” She snapped, sputtering bathwater around herself.
“Yup, it’s impossible. Hey, thought experiment… Imagine if I never saw a duck, except for when they paddle in the pond, how would I react if you told me they could fly?”
He smiled an infuriating and cheeky little smirk. “You think it’s impossible cause they never do it, not anywhere there are survivors. That’s not an accident, we are being managed, like a garden, planted and culled when needed, left to grow until it’s time to harvest.”
“What we interrupted here is the farmer’s attempt to plow under this field, cause a noxious weed has started to spread. That’s me and my friends, either we would die in the event, or flee and be hunted down later, in the resulting chaos.” He put on a mournful expression of grief.
“We are so stubborn, we broke his plow. While he is getting it fixed for another try, we are going to steal the farmer’s plowhorse. He left the reins dangling… you could say he’s asking for us to take it for a joyride.”
“You make no sense boy.” Vera complained. “At least this is a comfortable duty.” She slumped down in the pool and soaked in silence while the boy thought out loud.
“The magical aura they established is still lingering, just broken and disrupted. I plan on using that incomplete ritual to do a summoning of my own. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, as my grandpa always said.”
He rose from the pool and began to dress, after a fashion. His robe seemed to appear from nowhere, simply falling from the shadows of the shrubs and bushes all around.
“We are going to gather all the loose threads and weave a little welcome mat.”
He moseyed into the cave as the sun was beginning to hang lower in the sky. He emerged a few moments later bearing his noisome platter of… crud, Vera still in tow.
He set it on one of the cultist’s supply crates, and pulled that roll of small tools from nowhere. He began to hum and whistle as he sculpted, starting with a series of simple runes and inscriptions around the edge of his disk.
In intricate detail he began stippling and incising the clay surface with an assortment of simple bamboo instruments. With careful and precise motions he drew a tiny line here, completing a glyph, a dot there to complete a line of incomprehensible text. He circled the disk of obscure and horrible arts delicately, completing lines and phrases in sticky, vile clay.
Each stylus was selected with care and used for a time, then set aside near a small fire ring he set up close by. He slowly and with great deliberation began building a tiny stack.
Each used stylus became a log on a miniature bonfire, complete with a ring of tiny celebrants made from grasses and twigs.
They were arranged in positions and poses suggesting a ring of dancers. The knee high mannikins were primitive bundles of local plant life, bound together around a stick that was simply stabbed into the earth.
“My clay disk contains their blood and the magical elements from the ritual they planned, along with a good bit of me, as bait. As soon as the sun goes down we can start.” He addressed the gathered curious onlookers with a sad smile. “The rest of you might want to leave… things could get weird. This show is not for all ages.”
“Gods, are you stripping again?” Vera grumbled in exasperated fury.
“The nudity was for ritual and magical reasons, Vera. Now is the part of the program where I wear pants. They are gonna need to be pretty seductive if they wanna see my ding-a-ling.” He smirked and pulled a small flute from his… whatever. “Take a seat and watch, just don’t interfere or freak out.”
Tawny had her hands full with the shepherd’s injuries and the prisoners’, the rest of the Bathers gathered in camp chairs near the garden gate. “You guys, just follow along and keep the music flowing. This is a delicate operation.”
“Dabbling wi outsiders be taboo, foolish boy. Even if Ducky approves… We shall be watching ye close.” Shai grumbled as she warmed up.
“Just stay cool, Ducky says this is as safe as summonings get. He cooked this ritual up a few days ago, we have been waiting for the time and place.” He turned that mad, crooked grin on her and she smiled.
“Ivy, gimme a beat…”