The Evil Eye - A Sword & Sorcery
A Tale of the Great Cave and a link in the Chain Story
Greetings traveler!
I’ve been invited again to contribute to Michael A. Stackpole’s collaborative publishing project, the Chain Story, where different authors write stories in their own worlds, which all contain a shared story element.
You can learn about how the Chain Story works, read from the first link in the story, or begin with The Evil Eye, which revisits my Milton-esque underworld depicted in Ashen Rider.
Also releasing today with the Chain Story is Thomas Grayfson’s Pigbourne, a bloody tale of anthropomorphic heroes reminiscent of Brian Jaque’s Redwall, and picking up an inter-dimensional thread from Brian Young’s Chain Stories.
You can either download the PDF, EPUB, or read The Evil Eye right here on substack.
HOW DOES ONE BREAK A CURSE OF THEIR OWN MAKING?
Gora Younger, the First Son of the Chieftain is exiled from his village in the Great Cave after vainly pursuing his betrothed, who left him to live beneath the sky.
After years sealed away in the dark, Gora is summoned home to investigate a demonic presence that has taken the tribe’s best warriors and afflicted the Chieftain with a strange malady, slowly turning his flesh to stone.
Diving into uncharted depths alongside a healer from a strange city, Gora must dispel a curse that has long shackled his people… and his soul.
I
“Hear my words, boy,” cried Dorma the Long Eye atop her jagged seat of lashed twigs and ibex bones. “The girl you seek has chosen a life beneath the sky. Her fate is no more yours to decide, than mine!”
Gora Younger glared at the old woman. His chieftain father had once dubbed her Dorma the Hag, and how very haglike she was, all withered folds and jutting joints and sunken eyes. What fell magicks had she employed to remain so vigorous after living so unnaturally long?
“If Eshil is here of her own free will, then I shall go.” Gora tightened his grip round the haft of his father’s bronze axe. He could only pray that he might justify his theft by bringing back the hag’s ghastly head. “But I must hear it from her mouth. If you refuse to prove to me her freedom, I will command my men to raze this village until we find her.”
Dorma’s warriors shifted as one, their fingers twitching round the shafts of their flint-tipped spears. The hag spat a laugh, then a roll of spewing coughs. She bared her teeth, slaver spilling between her fangs as if she were a rabid cur. “I will not subject her to your poisonous touch. You are no chieftain, and thus you may make no demands of me.”
The alliance between their peoples had been tenuous at the best of times. Dorma the Hag prodded at any opportunity to spark another war.
Gora barked a command. His own warriors brandished their bronze-bladed spears, raised their oaken shields and assumed a tight formation around him. They were grossly outnumbered within Dorma’s domain. But the hag’s foolish savages were dressed in naught but hide rags, armed with little more than sharpened sticks. Gora’s men wore helm and harness, having spent their lives mastering the art of combat.
“I shall give you one more chance, hag!” Gora said, donning his own helm and drawing his father’s axe. “Show me that Eshil is unharmed, or your people die like dogs!”
Dorma raised her staff above her head, carved from a gnarled branch of a sycamore, lined with owl feathers, and chanted the black words of a hex surely meant to destroy Gora’s ranks before the fight even began. Where the People of the Great Cave had metalcraft and superior armaments, Those Who Chose the Sky had sorcery most high.
Gora Younger braced himself for a painful death, never looking away from her evil eye.
“Stop this!”
Gora swung about and saw his beloved Eshil running out of a hut. Her dark tresses were tangled and matted, her lithe figure defaced by the savages’ rags and her bare feet soiled by mud and detritus.
“Eshil! Have they hurt you?” Gora dropped his axe and reached for her. She shrunk from his touch, and backed away from him, her beautiful deep brown eyes poisoned with terror. “Eshil...”
“Be gone, Gora Younger! You wanted to hear mine voice? There—you have. I have chosen the Sky. I will not live out my days in your bed, consumed by darkness!”
Her words, sharper than any spear, struck Gora harder than any hex. It never once occurred to him that Eshil might have chosen to leave the Great Cave, to leave him, the First Son of Chief Hano the Slayer.
“We are to be married, Eshil!” He cringed under his own boyish whine. His warriors’ baleful glares hot on his back.
“No longer, Gora Younger. I am free of you—and that wretched place you sequester yourself.”
That night, encamped under the shade of the Great Cave’s entrance, Gora lamented the loss of his beloved. He screamed and wept and beat his father’s axe against a fallen log until the blade chipped, then he threw it clattering onto the stone floor. Falling to his knees, he beat the ground until his fists were bruised and bloody.
He cared not for the prying eyes of his warriors. He had already lost all their respect; there was nothing further left to lose.
Thunder rolled in the distance, a sudden flash of lightning and summer downpour plagued the darkling skies and muddied the earth beyond the Great Cave’s threshold. Gora looked up, beheld the flickering images of a land besieged by Nature’s untamed spirits.
He had never known the prosperity his father had oft spoken so fondly of. The peace they all shared before the Seed of the Gods, the precious substance which had once lured people near and far to Great Cave, was corrupted by Dorma’s wicked dissenters, who had chosen a life of servitude to the Sun, to Nature’s wrath. They would rather burn and freeze and drown than live in harmony under his father’s just rule—and thus, all have suffered the Gods’ torment.
“May never another man look upon you, Eshil,” Gora declared in the dead of night, his own blood streaming from his battered hands. “May your face be forever marred by this misdeed you have wrought upon me, who would have loved you.”
As he feared, Gora Younger had indeed lost his warriors’ respect. Every man left his service the day they returned to their village in the Great Cave. How could he blame them? He meant to throw away their lives in the name of a runaway, and he had claimed his father’s axe before it was rightfully bestowed upon him.
Chieftain Hano the Slayer, summoned his son and berated him before the royal retinue and a judgmental throng of the dwindling people that he was one day to rule. “You are a child in a man’s body!” Gora’s father sweltered. “You would have wrought destruction on our people! You would have led your men to an accursed death beneath that whore-witch’s sorcery!”
Ever and anon spouted Hano the Slayer, who might have been called Hano the Debater, had he not slain the monstrous cave bear that once haunted the Great Cave, whose pelt he still wore upon his aging head. The chieftain’s litany went on for hours, and all in attendance were captive, forced to watch the First Son’s unraveling. When he was a younger boy, full of swaggering pride, brimming with bravado and the need to prove himself worthy of his father’s throne, such debasement had rattled him to the core. This day, however, Gora thought nothing. Felt nothing.
His eyes wandered to his father’s guardsman. Mar Firespear, who had trained Gora in the ways of the blade, watched on, his hard face made of stone. The mottled scar tissue painting his jaw that had earned the man his name, and usually so telling of his hidden emotions, was still as a hunting spider awaiting its prey. Even those who had served Gora held no sympathy for their First Son. Domo the One Eye gazed over Gora’s head. Even Lairn Younger’s face, still smooth with boyhood, was devoid of compassion.
“You are banished, Gora Younger,” his father said, closing off the forum from further discussion. “You are no son of mine.”
Gora had resigned himself to a solitary life in the abandoned mine shafts, subsisting off the meager meat of crickets and beetles and spiders. Sometimes he caught a fish in the underground pond beyond the shaft. Only when desperate and starving did he venture beneath the Sky to forage and hunt.
He spent his days vainly harvesting the corrupted Seed of the Gods. His father had told him stories of the Seed’s pearly luminescence, the brilliant power it once boasted. The stuff coating the warbled ceilings and rough walls was the color of pitch, and Gora scraped it free with maple sheets, collecting it in a sack of woven birch bark. Through a few chance encounters with a foreign alchemist on his way to visit the village, Gora learned to process corrupted Seed through bronze mesh filters with a mixture of water and guano, yielding a purified, brown powder. Though it lacked the pearlescent ivory quality of the Elder’s tales, the purified substance bore again its ancestral sheen which scintillated in the firelight.
Such a practice would have been deemed useless by Gora’s people. The travelling alchemist had seen potential in the purified Seed, but the foreigner’s limited grasp on Gora’s native tongue made understanding that potential impossible. Yet harvesting what was once the most precious material known to his people gave Gora purpose, if only a hollow one. He carried always a pouch of it upon his belt, for it was the one thing of his kin that he still had.
It was something to hold onto. Priceless to an exile, sealed away in the forever dark.
For years, Gora survived on the fringes of the Great Cave, straddling the border of encroaching shadows, where can be heard the screams of the lost and dying. The Elders had oft spoken of hellish beasts lurking in the unknown depths of the Great Cave, or lost souls wandering through uncharted caverns. Gora wrote off such things as old wives’ tales, meant to scare children into behaving.
So too was he plagued by nightmares of viscous shadows, and the echoes of a woman’s gentle call for a name he had never heard. ‘Tarru-syn…’ When he closed his weary eyes after a long day at work, he saw unnatural cerulean lights coruscating within the eye of a cut tanzanite set within the base of a tall, pointed stone—a monument to all his failings, cursed to always remain etched in the backs of his eyelids.
And so time went on, it’s passing imperceptible in the perfect darkness of the Great Cave. Until one day, an Elder sought out Gora Younger in the humid mining shafts, where the blackened, corrupted Seed gathered and dripped like ashen drops of rain.
“First Son...” The old man bowed, his neck craning beneath the weight of his flabby head. How he had managed the trek at all was a mystery. “Your father—he is ill.”
“I see,” Gora said, unbothered. “I am sure his Second Son shall make for a fine successor.”
“This is the problem, First Son. There is no heir.”
That came as a surprise to Gora. Last he heard, his father had taken a third wife, with the sole intent of siring an heir. Perhaps the chieftain was growing impotent in his old age. Despite his father’s reputation and his success in governing the people of the Great Cave, Hano the Slayer had never been a vigorous man. More cunning and scrutinizing, strategic and capable in ways other than the spear. A more apt name for him would have been Hano the Wise, or perhaps even, Hano the Callous.
“What would you have me do, Elder? I am a disgrace to my father’s legacy. I have tarnished the name of my grandsire. I cannot return now to rule our people.”
“No—of that you are correct. However, if you were to redeem yourself to your father, before he passes into the Ancestors’ embrace...”
Gora shook his head. “I see no avenue to redemption, Elder. I am a sorry excuse for a man. I could not even keep hold of my betrothed, as you surely know. I chased her away to live under the Sky.”
“Come with me.” The Elder held out his empty hand, as if to offer a gift of grain. “Speak with the villagers. A demon plagues us; our warriors dwindle. Regardless of your crimes, you can swing an axe!”
Gora Younger accompanied the Elder back up through the mine. He imagined the sneers and glares he might gather upon his return, the jeers and insults awaiting him beyond the village gate.
Flesh scraped against stone, and the Elder tripped, falling down an incline and cracking open his skull, his torch careening into a tenebrous crevasse.
Gora had spent his first true years of manhood accompanied only by shadows and distant torchlights that seemed as naught but dying stars. Darkness could hide little from him. Were it not for Gora’s exile, he might have panicked, trapped in the murk to die alongside the Elder, who bled so swiftly from the gaping wound in his head. Nor would Gora have seen the anomaly in the terrain that the Elder had tripped upon: a carven statue in the likeness of one of the warriors, who had once sworn his spear to the First Son’s service. What had Lairn Younger achieved, which had warranted such an honor?
Without a second thought, Gora scooped the old man into his arms and ran through the caverns. Having dwelt so long in the narrow, denticulate corridors, he knew when to duck his head, when to turn to the side and suck in his gut. The most daring stretch was called The Fat Man’s Lament, for the walls squeezed at chest height, spreading out only at the shoulders. Gora heaved the Elder above his clavicle, his core clenching and burning with the effort, and inched through the Lament for ten agonizing minutes until they reached the other side.
Gora did not recognize the watchmen posted at the village’s gate; all were boys barely of fighting age. They yipped for aid and the oaken gates swung open, groaning beneath their own hulking heft. Gora was surrounded by whispering villagers as he entered into their midst for the first time in recent memory.
A foreign medicine woman and her retinue of man-servants rushed out from a hut. Gora had not met the woman, who was comely with long sandy hair bound behind her head, and significantly older than he.
“I am Joan of Thakra,” the woman said, her voice coarse with the language of Gora’s people and heavily accented. “How long since he fell?”
“About two torches.”
“Gods! I must be swift.”
Gora gingerly laid the Elder on his back. Joan began to work, withdrawing strange tools and implements from a leather sack at her side that were entirely alien to Gora’s eyes. As was the medicine woman’s olive skin, the fairest shade he had ever seen.
Joan pressed a thin blade, cast from a silvery metal unknown to Gora, into the Elder’s wound, draining it of fouled blood, then she washed the opening, pouring cool water from a red-clay jug. She barked a command in a strange tongue, and one of her followers fetched her a mortar filled with a meal of the purified, umber Seed, which she sprinkled into the wound, followed by a smear of honey.
Bandaging the Elder’s head with linen, she looked up and said: “All we can do now is pray.” Joan withdrew a silver sun pendant that hung beneath her tunic and bowed her head, joined first by her man-servants. The villagers exchanged nervous glances, afeared by the strange words uttered to strange gods.
Gora Younger looked on in awe, and overcome, he fell to his knees and prayed to his own gods for the survival of the one man who had sought him out. “Gods... please save this one, who believes I can do good for my people—for not even I possess such faith.” In his reverie, Gora did not see his kin sink to the ground, joining him in his supplications.
Joan’s voice pitched and she raised her hands in glorious incantation. Gora felt the wind stolen from his lungs, and a gale blew past him coalescing around the medicine woman. Chanting, the medicine woman’s sonorous voice doubled, then tripled, and a bright golden light ignited in her palms. She howled and slammed the light into the Elder’s chest.
The Elder sat up, his bandaged head dragging behind him as his torso rose, as if he were pulled by an invisible rope. He opened his mouth in a silent howl and before falling dead, uttered his final words in a rasping voice, not his own.
“The First Son must answer for his contempt... lest his people forever suffer under his curse!”
“Do you know what the Elder spoke of?” Joan asked Gora, once she and her healers fought back the panicking villagers and retreated into the safety of the chieftain’s cellar.
“No.” Gora stumbled over his thoughts, remembering those mighty regrets he had wished to keep buried. “How can I be sure you did not implant those words in his mouth?”
“My lady cast a spell of miraculous healing, you dolt!” one of her manservants chided.
Joan put up a pacifying hand. “You speak to the First Son of the Chieftain. We are his guests.”
“He speaks true?” Gora said, tilting his head. “You tried to heal the Elder with a hex?”
“Not a hex. A miracle.” Joan grimaced. “Though hex is perhaps a better word. The powers I call upon... are not reliable while I remain hidden from the sun.”
“And what of my father? Can you heal him?”
“I’ve already tried.” After a moment, she looked up at him, her bright eyes burning red. “Something is very wrong, Gora Younger. Your father has developed a growth on his chest, and it spreads daily, turning his skin gray and hard as petrified tree bark. He’s become incoherent, and not even I, aided by the power of the High Noon, can find a way to pull him from his stupor.”
“Have you noticed aught else?” Gora asked. “The Elder told me the village is under attack by demons. That our warriors dwindle.”
“Superstitious nonsense!” cried the manservant.
“We ought to pray that it is so.” Joan placed a hand on the servant’s shoulder, smiled as he sighed and bowed his head. Turning to Gora, Joan whispered, “I’ve heard tell of strange happenings below. Warriors have descended the depths, beyond the mines—beyond the maps. None have returned.”
“Then I must travel deeper into the Cave. Deeper than any before me have trod. Only then might I save my father.”
“Aye,” Joan said. “And I’ll come with you.”
II
Gora had insisted Joan stay in the village to treat his father. But Joan insisted that she accompany Gora, refusing to stand idly by while the First Son marched alone to Mother Death’s door. “If you fall, First Son, we all do,” she told him.
Gora said nothing to that, although he treasured the confidence of a handsome, capable woman. They agreed to leave on the morrow.
Before they embarked, Gora presented himself to his sickly father, who was bound to his bed, glassy eyes fixed upon the ceiling. The chieftain’s once sharp features had sunken like a mudslide in the valleys of his face. A gray growth of hard skin protruded from the collar of his tunic.
“Father...” Gora Younger bowed, trembling before Hano the Slayer. “I am not worthy to stand in your presence.”
Hano sucked in a whistling breath and lowered his gaze to his disgraced First Son. “No...”
“I will restore you,” he swore, mustering all the certainty and unearned confidence he once wore like a badge of honor. “I shall descend into the depths and cleanse the malady plaguing our people.”
“No...”
Gora rose. The ancestral bronze axe hung on the wall, where it had likely remained since it was stripped from Gora’s possession. He ran his fingers along its cool blade, remembering the weapon’s perfect balance in his hands.
“N—no...” his father croaked.
Withdrawing the axe from its perch. “I am not worthy of it,” he said, wracked with anguish at the sight of his withering father. “But I shall earn the right to again wield this weapon. For now—I am your arm. You must bear the shame of an exile wielding your axe for the sake of our people.”
He did not await his father’s mindless response. Gora slotted the axe’s haft into his belt and left the dying chieftain wheezing his bitter protests in the dark.
The descent into the deep caverns was slow and arduous. Joan and her manservants required assistance with every step, every handhold. Making matters worse, the men dragged a chest filled with the supplies of their mistress’s practice. It seemed they had packed the entirety of her worldly belongings into that chest, and thus they lagged behind, struggling and heaving, their groans echoing across the rippling, narrow walls.
All but Gora required torches to make their way, which made guile impossible. Though there were no known foes lurking in the depths of the cave—aside from the venomous snakes and the dog-sized, four-legged dragons prowling the cave floor for rats—Gora feared unknown foes. If demons truly dwelt in the pits… they would all perish before ever they knew what they fought against.
Fortune was on their side; their trek went unmolested until they encountered a fault presenting a singular path, leading directly down a barbed throat, plunging into void.
“A rope, perhaps?” Joan suggested.
Gora shook his head. “Too far for any rope we carry.”
“This is insanity,” one of the manservants grumbled. “You expect us to climb?”
The First Son nodded. “My people climb all paths in the Great Cave. It’s the outsiders who limp along by rope.”
“You’re sure,” Joan said, a pall falling over her face as she peered over the ledge, “that we can’t just hang down a line?”
To demonstrate, Gora picked up a stone and dropped it into the hole. His heart beat seven times before they heard it clatter upon the hard floor at the bottom.
“Point taken.”
“I refuse,” cried the manservant. “This is leagues beyond our agreement, my lady.”
“If you wish to trudge back through the dark on your own... I’m more than happy to see a whining child leave my service. But I’ve a feeling that’s not what you wish to do.”
The manservant did not protest further.
Joan turned to Gora. “We’ll have to leave behind the supplies.”
“If my people could stomach my presence, it would only take two or three men to carry down your chest. But yes, with our current company, all we can hope to bring is what we may carry upon our backs.”
Using linen sashes they strapped to their backs food and water, bandages and sutures, pouches of natron salt, and jars of honey. Gora doffed his sandals, trusting the soles of his feet more than leather. Much to the dismay of the manservants, Gora commanded that they descend first, for they were the most likely to lose their grip. Joan went after her followers, and Gora last.
The shaft was almost entirely vertical but narrow enough so that they could extend their limbs and press their backs against the opposing wall to rest. They had left their torches guttering above on the ledge, which, for a time, cast a meager light for the outsiders to see by. They had not climbed far by the time the torches burned out, and the weeping manservants had to make do with their other, underutilized senses.
After the time it would take for another torch to burn out, Gora regained his dark vision and rested against the wall as he watched the gray shades of his companions clumsily grope about the stone, inching their way down. He knew they would climb longer than the outsiders wished to stay awake, but he refrained from giving voice to the notion; there was no sense in worrying the already shaken outsiders further.
Leather scraped against stone, the dull thud of a skull striking rock. Gora held his breath, awaiting the splattering impact that came five heartbeats later. A shiver rolled down his spine, and he swore he felt a vengeful spirit pass him by on its swift ascent back up the shaft.
“How many?” Gora called.
“I’m—I’m still here,” Joan said.
“Aye,” said the less talkative of the manservants.
“It is slick below.” Gora pressed his back into the wall, extending his core to its limits while he let go of his handholds to withdraw the coil of rope hanging from his belt. He tied the rope round his waist and dropped it to his companions. “Don’t touch it unless you smell Death’s stinking breath! Lest we all perish atop one another.”
Thus, they inched. More careful than when they began. Sure enough, after many long hours, yawns bounced through that ragged throat of rock. Gora did not have to explain that sleeping was not an option until they were again on solid ground.
Another skidding slide; and Joan spat a curse. Gora braced as the rope snapped taut, his bare feet tearing against a porous ridge. A collective sigh. A pause. And they began again. On went the descent, all thumping hearts and lurching breaths seized in the backs of their throats. The climb was nearly too much for even Gora, so it was a wonder—or perhaps a miracle, in Joan’s own words—that eventually they made it to the bottom, within the time it took to lose count of the torches they would have had to ignite.
As his bleeding feet again touched solid earth, Gora’s gasp came with a chorus. The outsiders would only believe in their safety once their guide permitted it. Gora and the remaining manservant collapsed to their rumps while Joan crawled on hands and knees seeking the dead man splayed in a crimson puddle on the stone. Having found the body, she uttered a strange verse in her own tongue, gesturing upon her chest in reverence for her fallen servant.
Joan rose and turned towards the men. “I assume you two are bleeding as well?” She did not wait for their answers, for the manservant had not the breath to speak, nor did Gora have the desire. The smell of iron and salt confirmed all the medicine woman needed to know.
After all their hands and feet were cleansed with natron and wrapped with honey coated linen, Gora sparked up a fire to warm the outsiders as they slept. He considered joining them, gazing at the smashed corpse of the fallen servant for several long minutes. At last he sat resting his aching back against the pit wall. But the cool rock did little to soothe his rising fears. Despite his eyes swimming drunk with fatigue, Gora and his superstitions kept watch for marauding demons.
Gora’s dreams consisted of pulsing lights emanating from a strange stone he had never seen. A woman’s voice, almost familiar, called for him from afar. The name echoed within his mind: Tarru-syn…
Tarru-syn…
He woke with a start, drenched in cold sweat.
The remaining manservant was still fast asleep. Joan stood, panting with the effort of working another of her miracles. The First Son rose and marveled at the medicine woman’s sorcery—a shimmering globe embraced the troupe, golden streaks glowing faintly in the perfect dark of the cavern.
“What is this?”
The medicine woman smiled softly as she finished packing away the last of her supplies. “An incantation of protection. We had unwelcome eyes upon us in the night.”
“I failed in my vigil.” Gora looked at his feet, clenched his fists. How could he allow himself such indiscipline?
“Worry not—I woke just as you dozed, and I cast my sorcery so you could sleep in peace. We must be wary, going forward. It seems your Elder was right.”
He felt for the axe hanging at his side. “This is black news.”
“Tell me, First Son, what you withheld from me before we embarked. I believe I’ve a right to know.”
Gora grimaced, turned away from her.
Joan reached out, touched his arm. Her fingers, though callused and worn, were also soft and tender. “I will not shame you. But I must understand if we are to survive this endeavor.”
“The Elder spoke true...” Gora whispered, clenching his fists. “Years ago, in my youthful anger, I cast a curse upon a woman who fled my marriage bed.”
The medicine woman nodded. “We must break this curse.”
“Yes. But I know not what it has to do with demons in the deep.”
“We shall find out. Thank you for your honesty, First Son.”
Joan roused her manservant, and they broke their fast on hard einkorn bread and bits of salted ibex flank. Gora glanced at the dead man at the edge of the magic circle, only his face covered in fresh linen.
“The least I could do.” Joan’s usual sharp eyes were sallow with fatigue. Gora saw on her face a lifetime of failures, which had chased her from her homeland and into the strange wilds Gora’s kin called home. “We all deserve a proper burial—but there’s no way to go about it here.”
“No,” Gora agreed. “This is why we burn the dead.”
A look of disgust smeared across Joan’s face. “That is barbaric.”
“And burial is a disgrace.”
“Agree to disagree.”
Gora tilted his head, missing her meaning. Joan scoffed as if it were obvious. Outsiders always spoke in vagaries. Though it no longer bothered him the way it had when he was younger, ardent in his entitlement as First Son. Still, he preferred to speak in plain terms. In the distant kingdoms of cut stone, he mused, there was ample time for leisurely contemplation of slant meanings. But in the woods above, and more pressing, within the dark of the Great Cave, there was naught but truth. Anything less meant a swift death.
Fed and as ready as three reluctant souls can be to delve into unknown shadows, Joan dispelled her sorcerous barrier, and the troupe continued their descent.
Going forward, the caverns yielded more breathing room. In the center of a large antechamber, they came across a carved stone relief of a warrior, full bodied, and wearing the bronze helm worn by Gora’s kin. It was much like the statue the Elder had tripped on, except the face had eroded away, and was unrecognizable.
“Who might craft such things?” Gora asked. “All the years I have lived here, and none have I known who could work stone such as this.”
“In Thakra, none but the richest and most skilled artisans can carve such details,” said the manservant. “I cannot comprehend why someone would leave such treasures down here—nor how they’d get it here in the first.”
Joan scrutinized the stone man. “I’m not convinced that this is art.”
“What else could it be?” Gora asked.
“There are no limits to the potential of miracles—and curses.”
They continued on, and the cave walls expanded, growing wider and taller. Gora adopted a quicker pace, taking point far ahead of the troupe. He remained close enough to the bobbing of Joan’s torch, but not enough to hear her man-servant’s huffing and groaning. The First Son did not believe the medicine woman’s follower long for the world—it was a mistake bringing along novices to the land. One could get away teaching whelps on the road overland, but underland travel was a beast all its own. You are either borne to it, or you die.
Although, Gora thought, smirking as he remembered Joan’s lithe, tethered muscles pulsing as she scaled the chute, the medicine woman had proved herself an asset. If only they had true warriors at their backs; together, they would be unstoppable.
As his fatigue reared again, and Gora searched for an adequate campsite, he saw something he had never thought to see in the chthonic black of the Great Cave. Light. Not the guttering of torchlight or a campfire, but a lavender luminescence slicing the shadows. It seemed less than a torch’s time away. He unstrapped his pack containing his rations and supplies so his companions would know he meant to return, and he went off after the mysterious glow.
Drawing near, the air grew heady and fetid; the hairs of Gora’s nose curled with revulsion. The stench reminded him of a rotting corpse, yet somehow more pervasive, all encompassing. He was not surprised to discover the source of the glow was also the source of the stench.
The walls conjoined in sharp angles, closing round a looming doorway that seemed carved by hand. Etched around the opening were strange runes inlaid with glowing amethysts, all fragments of a shattered whole and otherworldly in their decadence. Who had built such a structure so far in the gloaming depths, not even the most ancient myths of Gora’s kin offered an answer.
Beyond the threshold was a hewn passage with a flat floor, straight walls, and a curved dome ceiling pitching into a sharp corner, beyond which smoldered a lighter glow. Gora considered forging onward. If demons were about, surely, they lurked beyond this gate. He gazed over his shoulder, saw the bobbing of torchlight, and thought better of it. If demons were about, he thought, it was better to have a caller of miracles at his back.
Despite the alluring urge to carry on, he doubled back and helped his companions make camp. They would investigate together, on full stomachs and with rested minds.
“It’s some form of Elder Kaltharc...” Joan said, squinting at the strange writing on the wall. “I can’t make it out.”
“Abandon all hope...” whispered her manservant, backing away from the doorway. “All ye who enter.”
“What’s your man on about?”
“That’s what it says?” Joan asked, pointing at the runes.
“Aye, my lady. This is no mere doorway—it’s a gate.”
“A gate to where?” Gora demanded, disturbed to see the horror the frail man’s words had smeared upon Joan’s face. “What is the meaning of this, medicine woman? What is this gate?”
“This is an entrance to Pandemonium, First Son,” Joan murmured. She had gone ghost white, her gray irises trembling within the whites of her eyes. “This is where our world ends and the underworld begins.”
Gora scoffed. “If this is so, then this be the source of the demons. We must continue.”
“Aye.” Joan swallowed. “We must.”
“Nay.” Her follower backed away, eyes wide, darting about frantically. “I shan’t! I won’t!”
“Then go with my blessing,” she said, staring at the ground, her voice somber. “Tell the villagers what we’ve found, if you make it back.”
“Aye, my lady. I will carry the message, but I doubt I’ll have the chance to deliver.”
“You’ve a better chance on this side.”
The manservant nodded and ran off whence came the troupe. Joan muttered a prayer in her native tongue. Gora did the same.
III
Gora and Joan crossed the threshold to the underworld. There was no perceivable difference between the waking world and the realm of the dead, but the carven passage soon inclined near to the point of slipping and tumbling down into the murk. Though they managed to keep their footing by walking slant in wide zig zags, bounding wall-to-wall, Gora doubted they could return by this route.
Perhaps he might die there, in this so-called Pandemonium. And that would be well, so long as he buried his father’s axe in whatever fell creature had made his village its plaything.
The slope opened into a vast landscape of phthalo grasses bent by a gentle, musty breeze. It was almost as if they had emerged from the Great Cave on to the Lands Beneath the Sky; yet there was no sky. Only a dim iridescence casting in gray the shadows of swollen stalactites hanging from a jagged ceiling like weeping amber. In the place of stately oaks and maples and sycamores were instead gangly mushrooms, thrice taller than a man and topped by myriad heads, some bulbous and fat; others flat and ribbed on the bottom; all glowed faintly like blue topaz. Islands of pock marked igneous rock dotted the expanse, connected by a network of overgrown land bridges, whose creeping vines spilt over the edges, draping far below into a roiling sea of shadows. Nothing—rolling over nothing.
The medicine woman faltered in her resolve to charge forward, shaken by whatever stories about this place had been passed down by her people. Gora led on, following the gentle call echoing from his dreams against the wind’s gentle prodding, which had to originate from somewhere.
The malodorous stench of rot grew the farther they went, as did the ranks of statues. Some resembled Gora’s kin, but there were also strangers dressed in strange garbs, clusters organized in like groups, the air around them shimmering as it would above molten rock. He began to fear Joan’s summation was correct; they were not the work of an artisan.
Turning a corner, Gora saw in the distance a beacon like a shining emerald which pierced both shadows and uncertainty. Seeing the light, high upon its perch, his heart thumped and his mind emptied. He took off running.
“First Son!” Joan cried, scrambling to keep pace. “We mustn’t be hasty!”
But haste was all Gora Younger concerned himself with. The beacon had summoned him, commanded his presence, and his intentions narrowed into a singular, concentrated blast of vigor that took him bounding through the damp grasses and narrow spans between islands. At the end of the path stood the obelisk of his dreams. Countless runes of countless tongues were etched along its towering length, all alien to the people of the Great Cave. In the center of the obelisk, was a massive gemstone, the source of the beacon. The blinding light guttered as they drew near, taking on the natural glow of a green funeral pyre, fueled by azurite dust.
Four stone men, two carved to resemble Great Cave warriors, the others dressed in strange metal armor, stood before the obelisk in a crescent formation. Each held their hands together, thumbs upon their foreheads.
Without a thought in his head, drawn by the content of dreams, Gora Younger reached out to touch the stone, which so sweetly called to him.
“First Son!” his companion screamed behind him. “Behind you!”
Gora turned, sluggish and reluctant, as if fighting to wake from the warmth of fur blankets and a pile of ample hay. Then, beset by the horror of a waking nightmare, he saw whom the stone men in bronze helms resembled. One wore a familiar, hard expression, and a mottled burn, that Gora had once gazed up at all those brutal seasons spent learning the ways of the blade. The other sported a lone eye and had the face of a man who had once stood behind Gora, unwavering, as Dorma the Hag threatened their doom.
“Mar... Domo... It cannot be.”
Stone cracked, snapped, and splintered. Mar Firespear’s stone face pinched, as if he were shedding crusted mud. His fingers crackled as he closed them round the haft of his earthen spear. Domo the One Eye rolled his shoulders and hefted his hulking petrified club, which had once been fashioned from the femur of a mammoth.
Gora dove, skidding on the ground, tearing open a wound on his shoulder to avoid Domo’s crushing overhead blow, thundering against the hard bedrock. Twisting to his back, Gora kicked his heel into Mar’s hard chest as he advanced, sending the stone man stumbling back a step, which gave Gora just enough space to scramble to his feet and draw his father’s axe.
Joan sprinted to intercept the remaining stone men in foreign armor, pulling free her amulet from beneath her tunic and chanting verse in her native tongue. She raised her arms and sent a wave of shimmering golden light cascading upon the would-be flankers, who stumbled and buckled beneath the force. She bared her teeth and let loose a war cry, weaving another spell as they swung about and advanced on her.
Mar Firespear thrust his blunted stone spear. Gora batted it to the side with the flat of his axe and then brought it back up and cracked down upon Mar’s impenetrable chest. Amid the clangor of bronze against stone, Gora charged, tackling the stone man. They crashed to the ground. Gora shouted as the fingers of his offhand shattered beneath his mentor’s inhuman weight. Gora heaved, lifting Mar’s torso to free his injured hand. Snarling, he shoved his palms forward, shattering his mentor’s head against jagged earth.
Light flashed, and thrumming thunder raged as Joan laced together spells, calling upon powers well beyond her ken. She barraged the armored stone men with wave after wave, hoping to reduce them to dust. Yet they inched ever forward, scraping stone swords from stone scabbards, poised to strike killing blows.
One advanced, lashing a deathly swipe. Joan countered with a malformed barrier; the magic splintered under the force of the strike. The other lunged in perfect parity with its partner, its sword slamming into Joan’s arm, snapping bone.
She screamed and fell floundering to the ground.
Gora’s chest burned as he watched her fall. “Joan!” He rose from the remains of his mentor and made to defend her, but Domo One Eye’s great club grazed Gora’s back and sent him tumbling painfully forward.
Joan’s attackers converged on her, and rather than pierce their blunted blades crunching into her chest, they knelt over her and pinned her in place.
The Obelisk’s light flickered, the runes flashing in random, incomprehensible patterns. The stone groaned, uttering the language of Hell. Heat sweltered, the air shimmered, as demon sorceries exploded from the monument.
A rent opened in the air, and stepping out of it was a monstrosity boasting the shapely figure of a young woman, though it wore the green scaly flesh of a serpent, writhing appendages nesting upon its head. A din like the hissing and rattling of beads in a gourd savaged Gora’s ears.
Domo clamped his massive hands round Gora’s arms, wrenching his axe from his good hand and pulling him to his feet. Bound to do naught but watch, he realized the appendages jutting from the demon’s head were themselves serpents. A hundred or more rattlesnakes, snapping and wheezing with anticipation.
He gazed into the demon’s leer and he knew the beast’s deep brown eyes. “Eshil... It cannot be...”
The demon laughed, a cacophony of voices, stitched into one. “Any other man, Gora Younger, would have turned to stone where they stood. I knew you’d come. I’ve long called to you.”
“What has become you?”
Joan struggled against the strength of the stone men. A noxious grin cut across Eshil’s scaled face, a glint flashing in her all-too-human eyes, she stamped a foot on the medicine woman’s sandy tresses, cracking her head against the floor.
“Don’t you know? They are your words which have haunted mine dreams. ‘May I never look upon another man.’ Alas, ‘twas your curse that led me into the arms of Tarru-syn…” she knelt, lowering her head to catch Joan’s panicked, averted gaze. “It seems you too have looked upon another.”
“I could not know!” Gora struggled against Domo’s earthen grasp. “How could I know?”
“Why did you pursue me?” she hissed, baring her fangs. “You cursed me for fleeing a life I could not live. And thus, I am now stripped of any life at all!”
“It need not be!” Joan stammered.
“What is this? The outsider speaks! What say you, then? Tell me your final words.”
“We have come to lift the curse,” Joan said, holding her eyes tightly shut. “We wish you no harm.”
“I am damned! There is no future in which I walk beneath the sun as I once did.” Eshil dropped to her knees, grasping Joan’s face in both her clawed hands, piercing her jagged nails into the medicine woman’s cheeks. “Gaze into my eyes!”
Joan screamed as Eshil forcibly peeled back her eyelids. Locked into the demon’s gaze, her breath hitched, and the medicine woman went limp. Gray flesh crept from beneath her tunic, consuming the entirety of her form, and Joan of Thakra was no more. Only a cold statue lay in her place.
Gora Younger’s heart thumped, blood squeezing through his veins like tar. Once. Twice. And he roared, his entire body flooded with a coursing river of rage. He tore free from Domo’s grasp, pulling the stone man over his hip to crash hard on his back.
Before the other stone men could react, Gora had reclaimed his father’s axe and sent a knee into Eshil’s chest. The demon, who was once his lover, sprawled backward, coughing and hacking. Grasping Eshil’s forehead with his broken hand, Gora Younger raised his axe and brought it down upon the demon. She wailed, a banshee’s scream that made his ears bleed. The ground shook, stone groaned. Every rune on the obelisk ignited at once, then died in an instant.
All was quiet for a time. Gora rose, and gazed mournfully at Eshil’s still, serpentine face, and the bleeding severed heads of the snakes that had taken the place of her long, dark hair.
Men moaned behind him. He swung about; Domo the One-Eye and the foreign soldiers slowly returned to flesh and blood. He kneeled, and took Joan into his arms, who was again as warm as he had imagined her to be.
“Are you hurt?” he whispered, brushing the hair from her face. “Can you stand?”
Joan sucked in an uncertain breath. “I believe so.”
“Good.” Gora looked at Eshil, seizing on the ground. “You must help her.”
Together they rose, careful of Joan’s broken arm.
“I must be swift,” she said. “This will require nothing short of a miracle. Do you still have the dust of the God’s Seed?”
Gora unlaced the pouch from his belt; the same which he always carried.
The medicine woman took it and sprinkled the dust over the hundred wounds lining Eshil’s scalp. Falling to her knees, Joan withdrew her pendant and began to pray, just as she had prayed over the Elder that she had failed to save.
Gora did the same, and though he did not know it, Domo the One-Eye and the foreign soldiers followed suit, disoriented and overcome by their escape from damnation. Golden light surged, coruscating wildly, beating back the shadows encroaching from all sides.
Upon waking, Eshil did not speak about what had happened, nor what she had intended to do if Gora Younger had failed to thwart her. She only confirmed that she knew the path out of the uncanny realm and agreed to lead them back to the Lands Beneath the Sky. The many severed snake heads had withered to dust, and so too, had Eshil’s fell sorcery, her curse, to turn the living to stone.
They lingered for a time by the crumbled obelisk. Gora splinted Joan’s arm, and she splinted Gora’s hand. She treated Eshil’s scalp with natron and honey, wrapping it with the last of the clean linen. Most of all, they all needed to rest and to sup, splitting the meager rations Gora and Joan had brought with them. Seated at the cold edge of the campfire’s warm glow, Eshil ate alone.
Gora Younger and Domo the One Eye burned the headless remains of Mar Firespear, who had served as mentor to them both, and every boy they came of age alongside. Domo had not graced Gora with his singular gaze since the day he was banished by his chief father; but kneeling before the funeral pyre of a man they both admired and loved, built of dried otherworldly grasses and fibrous mushroom stalks, they wept together.
Eshil silently guided them through an unfamiliar course across the land bridges. The breeze had changed direction. Perhaps it had always drifted such, and Gora was too blinded by enchantment to know. They left behind the luminescent landscape to be swallowed by a smooth, hewn passage, and then the familiar jagged stone of the Great Cave.
They neared the edge of fatigue once they emerged by an uncharted path beneath the stars of the open sky. They sucked in the fresh air, reveled in the scent of tree sap and the fresh aroma that comes with spring rain.
Eshil started down the rocky slope while Domo and the foreign soldiers built their campfire. Gora followed her to the treeline. He had so many questions.
“Eshil!” he called to her back.
She stopped, fists clenched, eyes fixed to the ground.
“Where will you go?”
She turned, her dark eyes, yet unchanged, glistened by the moonlight. “Anywhere beneath the sky, Gora Younger.”
He wanted her to come home, considered commanding her to do so, as the man who had defeated her in mortal combat, and chose to spare her life. Tradition decreed that she owed him a blood debt.
A hand grasped his shoulder. He turned. Joan stood behind him, a melancholic smile upon her gorgeous face, pocked with puncture wounds from Eshil’s viscous claws, yet emblazoned with the potential of a fruitful future, just within his grasp.
All he needed to do was take it.
Gora nodded to Eshil, as he should have the first time she left him. She walked off towards the horizon, on her own.
“Thank you. For saving her,” Gora said to Joan. “She did not deserve such a cruel fate.”
Joan grasped both his arms and he turned to absorb her lustrous eyes that had seen oceans on either side of the world. They embraced beneath the watchful light of the moon.
The Lands Beneath the Sky seemed so bright to Gora, who was accustomed to living his life in perfect dark. Even in the dead of night, the land was bathed with an alabaster glow, and the wind was sweet and redolent. He understood, then, what it was that Eshil had long desired. He prayed that the gods might forgive him for his crimes against her, and those he committed against his people.
Another week of travel and subsistence brought them home, to the village in the Great Cave. The watchmen yipped their calls and opened the great oaken gates. The villagers congregated in the square, whispering and touching Gora and Joan, whom they knew had saved them from some unseen evil.
Hano the Slayer, cured of his accursed malady, awaited them in his longhouse. Gora Younger fell to his knees before his father and presented to him their ancestral axe. He thought the chieftain might snatch the weapon from his hands, and free him of his head for stealing it a second time.
Instead, Gora’s father bid he rise.
“Thank you, Joan of Thakra, for what you have done for me while I was ill, and aiding the restoration of my people.” He nodded to her and turned to face Gora. “You have saved us, my son, and restored honor to our name. You are an outcast no longer. My time is nigh, and thus I name you, Chieftain Gora the Savior.”
Hano’s warriors slammed their fists to their chests, and the elderly chieftain descended from his throne and placed his bronze crown upon the head of a son whom no one thought would wear it.