James Silke: Prisoner of the Horned helmet

Bone blurted, “That is a whole mess of muscle and metal for one man to murder, to say nothing of it being Kitzakk!”

“That, lads,” Brown John glared at them impatiently, “is precisely why we are here.”

Bone scowled with his entire face, two chins and both ears. “Well, if there are five scouts down there, the Kitzakks are coming for certain.”

“Yes,” said Brown John solemnly. “It is no rumor this year. They’ve been sighted in all the passes. So get to work. The kind of magic we now trade in can not be made by tossing dancing girls about a stage. It’s man’s work. Best done unseen and fast. We don’t want the Dark One, or anyone else, to know what we do until it is done.”

Brown John and Dirken glanced up and down the crossroads to make certain they were unwatched. But Bone stared at the dirt pile.

“Now just a minute.” He put his fists against his hips, looked at his father and brother. “If they’ve been down there two whole days and nights, they’re going to be nasty ripe.”

Dirken grinned darkly. “We’ll bring them up in pieces. If you forgot your spoon, you can borrow mine.”

Bone winced.

The old man said, “Bone, you bring up the large pieces. Let Dirken handle the arms and heads, we don’t want to lose any fingers or teeth.”

Bone grimaced sickly, but obediently helped Dirken drag blankets and ropes out of their wagon and down into the gorge.

Late that day, when the Grillard’s wagon was rolling west on Border Road, Brown John sat between his sons in the driver’s box. Silent. Grave of expression except for a faint flicker of pride behind his eyes. His sons were filthy with dust and blood, exhausted, and grim faced. Their expressions had not been fashioned by their theatrical training, but by the day’s work. Today they had played roles they had never played before, roles they were going to have to master, and had taken to them nicely. The colorful wagon had also taken to its new duty: It now hauled the slimy, swollen cadavers of eight Kitzakk scouts tied down under a blanket on its bed. It was doing a real wagon’s work, and doing it in style, sporting a nauseous perfume.

In the midnight darkness of The Shades, the Glyder Snake was as black as a buried stick, as invisible as a creek meandering through the ocean depths. It hid at the edge of an open track twenty feet wide and many miles long which ran in a straight line through the tall spruce, hemlock and pines. Faint moonlight cast a glow on the track’s ground cover of fallen leaves. The snake wiggled into the moonlight, lifted into an arc of a cold blue and pointed across the track. The glowing blue light revealed the jagged stone about two feet high supporting the tiny snake. The sounds of crushing leaves and twigs came out of the forest behind the Glyder Snake, then a massive blackness the height of the stone appeared beside it. The blackness had two fist-sized yellow eyes. It was the head of a full-grown Sadoulette python. Its body receded into the darkness for forty feet. The Glyder Snake was not big enough to serve as its tongue.

A graceful figure emerged from the forest, stopped in the yellow glow of the python’s eyes. The Queen of Serpents.

Her enveloping black robe was travel stained. Her almond eyes were cold and calculating. She studied the opposite side of the track. There spruce and hemlock rose to towering heights supported by thick exposed roots taller than herself. Between the roots were shadowed caves and passageways.

When Cobra’s eyes found what the Glyder Snake pointed at, they flickered with the first satisfaction she had felt since having sent the Dark One to Lemontrail Crossing seven days earlier. It was a wide section of roots grown together to form ribbed walls that were covered with moss, vines, plots of grass and beds of needles. These walls rose nearly thirty feet to vanish into black shadows cast by the branches of the trees they supported.

Cobra bent and stroked the Glyder Snake. “Well done, small one,” she whispered. “You may go now.”

She pulled her hood over her face and stepped into the moonlight, moved like a drifting shadow across the track. The python followed, a serpentine blackness as thick as a young pine. Reaching the wall of roots, she crept up one of its natural trails, and the giant snake slid up the roots into the darkness of the trees overhead.

The moonlight had left the sky by the time the Queen of Serpents found the cluster of hanging vines which concealed a recess big enough for a crouched man to enter. She felt around inside the recess, touched the edge of a man-made door, a string latch. She pulled it, pushed quietly on the door, but it resisted. She lowered the latch, placed her fingertips on the door, then moved them about until she sensed the thickness of a locking beam on the other side.

She took a breath, blew on the tips of her fingers and placed them carefully against the spot. She closed her eyes. Her body began to tremble. When the trembling reached her fingertips, she slid them across the door, and the sound of the sliding locking beam came from within. There was a dull clack of something falling to the floor beyond the door. Her eyes snapped open. She held still, listened for a long moment. No sound. Her tongue darted eagerly between her scarlet lips. Then she slid the unseen locking beam clear of the door.

When she tried the latch again, the door swung inward, and a faint glow of firelight emerged to illuminate the sculpted whiteness of her face. She stepped out of the recess, looked up into the shadowed branches overhead. There the large yellow eyes of the python watched her. On guard. She dipped her hooded head, glided across the recess and through the door.

Thick roots formed the walls of a shallow entryway. The dark mouths of crawl holes opened among them. A larger hole in the floor opened onto a stairwell hand carved from a single root. An orange glow came from somewhere below.

Leaving the door open, Cobra silently descended the stairs until she could see the lower room.

It was hewn out of living roots. Irregular seams climbed the sides of uneven walls where the roots had grown together. The floor was hard dry earth, a deep red ochre. A stone fireplace and chimney had been built within the cavity of the roots. Beside the fireplace stood a woodpile, an anvil and assorted tools: hammers, tongs, a barrel of rainwater. The floor was cluttered with empty earthenware jugs, wooden cups, broken crockery, and bones recently chewed clean of meat.

At the center of the room was a table. On it were several cups, a wine jar. The far wall supported a wide, deep shelf with a washbasin, a dirty cloth, a pitcher and barber’s knife. Beside the shelf wooden pegs held assorted black furs, a helmet, and armor and weapons stolen from Kitzakks.

The helmet was strange: the bowl of a Kitzakk helmet, a mask of crude iron, and reinforcing belts of Kitzakk steel bent around both to attach them. The belts had been crudely bent by fire and hammer and fit badly. One had sprung loose and dangled awkwardly.

Cobra smiled knowingly and edged down the stairs to the floor, hesitated. In the shadow beside the helmet was a huge axe with a new handle which belonged to the Dark One called Gath of Baal.

She trembled slightly, and glanced about at the deep shadows of the many recessed areas, then at an alcove around a corner. It was heaped with furs covering a large mound. Her breath raced. Color flushed her face, throat. She drew a tiny dagger from a sheath strapped to her forearm.

Its blue steel glistened like wet ice. The blade was needle sharp, just long enough to plunge into the heart of an onion. The cutting edge was finely honed, sharp enough to trim a baby’s lashes without the baby noticing.