Angler In Darkness

By Edward M Erdelac

EDWARD M. ERDELAC, Author of Andersonville, Monstrumführer, The Van Helsing Papers, and The Merkabah Rider series presents his first collection of short fiction, spanning nearly a decade of fishing in the sunless depths of the imagination, some brought to light here for the first time.

A frontiersman of bizarre pedigree is peculiarly suited to tracking down a group of creatures rampaging across the settlements of the Texas Hill Country…..

A great white hunter is shaken to his core by a quarry he cannot conceive of….

A bullied inner city kid finds the power to strike back against his tormentors and finds he can't stop using it….

Outraged plumbing plots its revenge….

Here Blackfoot Indians hunt the undead, the fate of nations is decided by colossal monsters, a salaryman learns the price of abandoning his down life, and even the Angel of Death tells his story.

EIGHTEEN CATCHES FROM AN ANGLER IN DARKNESS

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward M. Erdelac
• Release date: Aug 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543231953

Edward M Erdelac

Edward M. Erdelac is the author of ten novels including Andersonville, Monstrumfuhrer, and The Merkabah Rider series. His short fiction has appeared in over twenty anthologies and periodicals. He's also written everything you need to know about boxing in the Star Wars Galaxy. Born in Indiana, educated in Chicago, he lives in the Los Angeles area with his family.  

Book preview

Angler In Darkness

A Collection of Stories by Edward M. Erdelac

To my mother, for her constant assurance throughout my life

Frateretto calls me, and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness. – King Lear, Act III, Scene 6

CONTENTS:

Author’s Note

The Mound of the Night Panther

Killer of The Dead

Bigfoot Walsh

Devil’s Cap Brawl

Spearfinger

In Thunder’s Shadow

The Blood Bay

The Exclusive

Tell Tom Tildrum

Mighty Nanuq

A Haunt of Jackals

The Better To See You

Conviction

Crocodile

Philopatry

Sea of Trees

Thy Just Punishments

The Wrath of Benjo

Author’s Note:

You won’t find a giant fish in this book, so it’s a bit of a (pardon me) bait and switch, I know.

The title of this collection has its origin in my notion that the stories I tell are not so much outright fabrications as things that have happened somewhere, sometime, which I am only retelling. I believe that a writer’s mind works something like the bait on a fishhook. In my daily experiences, in my studies and reading, I am sinking a line into a deep pool, and certain things at the bottom, attracted to something in me, swim up to greet it. Not every story comes to me. I probably won’t write much hard, existential science fiction in my life. My brain isn’t wired that way, and so those stories swim past like trout with an aversion to whatever metaphorical nightcrawler encompasses my experience. Yet the stories a writer is meant to tell take the bait and breach the surface, attracted I think, to the one person in the all the various universes best suited to relate it.

The stories in this book are the catches I’ve landed. Sometimes they arrive flopping and ready for the pan. Usually they need to be flayed and cleaned of the detritus they have picked up in the muddy deep mingling with other tales to get at the portion I serve up. I know what I write isn’t for every taste, so I guess you can consider yourself a connoisseur.

A story collection is a bit like a mix tape I think, and as a kid, I always arranged the tracks according to some predetermined theme. I’ve ordered the stories in this book chronologically not according to publishing date, but to the time period in which they take place, ending with the futuristic stuff. It should be easier for you to flip to the type of story you’re in the mood for that way.

Where I’ve had some insight to the story’s creation which I feel you might find interesting, I’ve included it as a mini-preface. You should probably read them last though.

—EME, Valley Village, 11/30/2015

The Mound Of The Night Panther

Cahokia is speculated to be the first metropolis of North America, a hub of Mississippian indigenous mound building culture which mysteriously disappeared or was disbanded sometime prior to European contact, perhaps due to disease.

I first came across it in the form of a huge diorama at the Field Museum in Chicago, where I was impressed by the size of it and the fact that it was literally only a skip and a jump outside St. Louis. My wife and I visited our son there when he was enrolled at Webster University, and I detoured us to the site on a winter’s day.

The mounds for the most part, are still there. Monk’s Mound, so called because a group of Trappists lived at its summit at some point, dominates the landscape, and scaling it, you’re rewarded with a commanding view of the entire site, as well as the Arch and the reconstructed woodhenge. The wind howls and whips your clothes at the top, and a ribbon of concrete road which cuts right through the center of Cahokia almost assails the base.

Walking around, the various artificial hills are marked with informational signs by the park service, including the infamous burial mound which for me, exuded a sensation of dread, knowing its weird contents.

I found an earthworm wriggling in the snow there, warmed it in my palm, and dug a bit into the ground with my finger before depositing it and covering it over.

––––––––

Auguste Oudin had come down the Father of All Rivers to Illinois from Quebec three years ago in a forty foot canoe with the Seminarians and Henri DeTonti as a courer des bois, paddling, signing, and trapping for the young priests. He had helped them build the log cabin mission at Des Tamarois in the Wedge, and fought off the Sioux, only to see the black robes arrive and bicker with their predecessors over the right to save the souls of the French and the Indians.

Being a métis with an Ojibway mother and a French father, that put him smack in the middle. Once enough bug tit priests settled in to argue ceaselessly over the same God, he knew it was time to move on. But he was a man with little prospects, and no contract with any of the big trapping companies.

So when he traded the Cahokia boy a carving knife for the gold-flecked chunkey stone, he knew he was very near to getting the stake he needed. Perhaps he would retire young, start his own trading post, get a couple of Peoria women to sit and smoke with him, watch the river go by. With what gold sparkled in the smooth stone discoid he could nearly do it already.

But something the boy told him convinced him there might be more to be had.

The chunkey stone was round and black as obsidian, speckled with gold like stars in a night sky. It was concave on both sides, with a perfect, small hole drilled through the center. On one side of the stone, etched in clean lines, was a fanciful figure, a genuflecting Indian in a pillbox hat and heart-shaped apron, one fist raised, clutching a bundle of sticks, the other arm in the act of bowling.

Chunkey was a game Auguste had seen played by different tribes. The Indians went crazy for it, wagering even their women. It seemed a silly sport to him. An old man would cast the chunkey stone along a hard packed, sand-strewn patch of clay. Men would chase after the rolling object, hurling six foot long striped hickory poles at it, betting on who would get theirs closest.

Making one of the river smooth stones took craftsmanship. Most were heirlooms families weren’t wont to part with, but Auguste had caught the boy sitting alone in front of his mud wigwam rolling it back and forth between his spread knees. Recognizing the flash of precious gold within, he had stopped to barter for it.

The boy had told him it had come from the place of his ancestors, a group of mounds on a big floodplain nine miles north of the settlement. He said he had camped there with his uncle and just picked it up off the ground. Auguste had seen mounds all over the American Bottom. He had heard of treasures sometimes being dug out of them. After securing the stone and detailed directions in trade, he bought a new knife, a pick, and a shovel and set out the next morning from Cahokia, north through the wilderness of cypress and sucking mudflats, over beaver dams and around stagnant, reeking backwater lakes green with thick tangles of watercress.

Following a swath of ancient cut stumps, the forest dwindled at last to a grand emerald plain broken not by the few modest humps he had anticipated, but perhaps a hundred or more towering earth mounds, both mesa flat and ridge topped.

The central heap dominated the others. It was immense, rising a hundred feet above the plain, bisected by a rotting wood staircase that led all the way to the top. This lordly mound was not only two-terraced, but vaguely pyramidal, the sharp angles having softened over time into a great, grass covered, molten monument.

But a monument to what?

It must have taken years, or thousands of laborers, or both to create this. He had never seen the like. Surely they were not simply barrows. They would have to contain hundreds of bodies. Most of the woodland tribes in these parts favored scaffolds for their dead. They seemed to be arranged in some predetermined, rigid order. Those stairs, what had they led to? Some sort of platform, or perhaps a series of lodges?

It seemed unfathomable to Auguste that Red Indians were responsible for this construction. He had never known any tribe to dedicate themselves to so permanent a dwelling. Wigwams, maybe. Palisades around their winter camps, but this?

Yet the boy had said this was the place of his ancestors.

South of the greatest of the mounds, situated at the center of the complex there lay an expanse of flattened ground, as flat as if it had been tamped down by a great foot.

Hiking to the center of the area took nearly till sunset. There he found an old stickball pole, such as was planted in clay playing fields all up and down the Mississippi, but capped with tarnished gold. He could barely discern the figure carved on the head. It was a kind of birdman with its wings outspread, similar in the style of the face to the chunkey player on the reverse of his gold flecked stone.

He laughed at the sight of the thing and spun on the heels of his leggings like a boy, the mounds turning around him. Surely somewhere in these big piles of dirt and clay his fortune lay buried.

But he stifled his laughter almost as it had rung out across the emptiness. For just an instant, he got the unmistakable, hair-raising impression that the flat field was bare of grass, that it was instead a red earth plaza filled with a multitude of half naked Indian figures. He smelled close sweat and tobacco smoke, and heard hoarse, wild cheers all around. When he ceased his foolish capering, nearly collapsing in surprise, the mirage was gone. There was no one to be seen, nothing to be heard.

He shivered uncontrollably at the suddenness and clarity of the hallucination. Whatever had happened, all was silent and empty again.

Yet, was he truly alone?

It was likely that the mounds had gone undiscovered by Europeans. It was nine miles into the wilderness from the nearest white settlement, far enough away from the river to be hidden from the traffic. But it did seem improbable that such a site could go uninhabited by at least some remnant of the original builders, or a tribe that had come after.

He took up and primed his flintlock, and left the gold capped stickball pole where it stood. He crept with new respect among the stretching shadows, wary that some savage might come rushing out with a club or a tomahawk, ready to hear the whistle of an arrow flying at him from the bow of some occult archer.

But nothing happened.

He decided to make camp, but not in the shadow of the big mound.

Something about that monolithic edifice unnerved him. It stood so starkly on the plane, so imperiously above its brothers and sisters. It seemed to watch him with silent, grim disapproval. There was something else too. It seemed wrong. His gaze lingered on it, as one might linger on the sight of a familiar room whose furniture has been rearranged. He had never seen this place, but that was the notion he had, that something about the big mound was out of place.

To the west he found a circle of about thirty upright cedar poles, brittle and weathered by age, some of them leaning or fallen. Perhaps it had been the frame for some circular dwelling, or a kind of henge.

Whatever its purpose, it afforded him a view of the great mounds, yet lay outside their influence.

He drew his beaver blanket over his shoulders as the chill of the oncoming night crept up his spine. He lit a bitch lamp to melt some deer fat and fry a few gallettes for supper.

The sun set, he then lit his cooking fire and poured the melted fat from the cup into his frying pan. From his wooden cassette he took out a sack of flour.

The galettes were greasy but satisfying. He washed them down with water from his canteen and watched the stars begin to bloom in the dark field overhead, perfectly encircled by the standing poles. He could see Taurus directly above, and what his mother’s people had called The Hand constellation.

He took out his pipe and some shongsasha, packed the rich smelling red willow tobacco into the bowl, lit it, and heard it sizzle. He lay down on his back and blew a fog across the night sky.

That was when he heard the approach of the lone, steady footsteps crushing the grass beyond the ring of poles.

He sat up abruptly and fumbled for his musket, putting it to his cheek.

At the end of the barrel, between two of the poles, there appeared an old, ratty haired Indian man wearing a long robe of fox tails and sea shells.

Leave it to an Indian to ignore the smell of dinner but come snuffling like a beggar raccoon at the aroma of tobacco.

He growled at the man to stand where he was, but the old hermit came on, unheeding of French, English, or Ilinioüek.

He looked as old as the mounds themselves, his scraggly, web white hair shining with fat, his black eyes deep set in a lined and drooping face. The shells clinked as he came.

The old man ignored the threat of the musket and stood staring down the barrel at Auguste for a long time. He closed his eyes for a bit. Auguste felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir. He wasn’t sure why.

Who are you? What are you doing here? the old man asked after a bit in raspy, fluent Ilinioüek. He opened his dark eyes.

You old rascal! Auguste cursed, shaking off his trepidation and lowering his rifle. I nearly blew a hole through you.

Answer me! the old man demanded. The authority behind his voice was so startling Auguste found himself obeying.

The old man listened to his French name, but cocked his head and peered at him closely.

Your mother’s people, he ventured. They’re from here, aren’t they?

What?

They do not come from across the big waters.

No. Ojibway.

The old man nodded to himself and sat down slowly on the other side of the cooking fire.

What about you? Auguste asked. You live here?

The old Indian gestured to the tobacco.

Auguste pursed his lips and passed it over. The old man produced an ancient calumet from beneath his robe. He packed it and said nothing.

Any more of you out there? Auguste repeated.

The old man lit his pipe.

Auguste looked out into the darkness. Satisfied that the old man was alone, he laid his musket aside and sat down.

What was this place?

The old man looked at him again, and blew smoke. He set his pipe down and opened his cape, affording a glimpse of his bare, pale chest, tattooed with strange concentric patterns. There was a lightning whelk shell columnella pendant, a kind of carved white dipper, dangling from around his neck. Auguste saw figures like the birdman and the chunkey player dancing on the bowl.

Do you know Asi? he asked, taking out a cracked leather bottle and popping the stopper.

He did. The French called it the black drink. Spaniards called it casseena. It was a purgative made from yaupon holly leaves, heavy in caffeine. A lot of tribes used it for purification.

Then let us drink, that there be no lies between us.

The old man poured a large measure of the syrupy black stuff into the shell and raised it to his lips, then took the dipper from his neck and handed it to Auguste.

Auguste wrinkled his face. He hated the stuff, but it would be disrespectful to refuse. He drank deep as was required, let the thick, heavy mass seep down into his belly, and passed it back, feeling the rumblings of its return already. It tasted a bit off. Who knew how long ago the old man had brewed it?

In a few moments both of them turned aside and retched, vomiting the Asi into the grass. It left an awful aftertaste beneath the familiar sweet casseena flavor, like spoiled marrow butter.

Now it was proper to ask.

Old man, what was this place?

The old man eased back onto his elbows.

This was The City, he said. For hundreds of years it stood, the center of the world for all the people, no matter their nation.

Who built it?

Red Horn and his brother Wild Boy built The City and ruled here.

Auguste had heard stories of Red Horn and Wild Boy. They were twin brothers revered by the Ho-Chunk and under other names by other tribes. They were supposed to have been born to the Earthmaker and had strange powers. Red Horn could move as fast as an arrow, and Wild Boy hunted and ate thunderbirds with his sharp teeth.

Auguste’s father had told him once about the big city of Rome, Italy, how it had supposedly been built by a pair of twin brothers suckled on a wolf’s tit.

You do not believe? the old man asked sharply.

Auguste had smiled without realizing it. He had been thinking about that Roman story and about how far it had come.

That Indians built this place, or that Red Horn and Wild Boy were real?

Yes, the old man said.

Auguste shrugged.

It doesn’t matter who built it, I guess. If you say it was Indians, alright. What happened to it?

First tell me how you came here, said the old man, leaning in.

Auguste didn’t hesitate. The old man lived around here, so he knew the lay of the land. Maybe he could save him some time. Likely he’d guide him to gold for more tobacco. He reached in his cassette and held up the gold flecked chunkey stone.

I came to find more like this.

The old man held open his palm. Auguste passed him the stone.

A boy told me it came from here.

The old Indian rubbed one weathered hand over its surface, turned it over and felt the grooves of the image.

Do you know where I can find more like that? Auguste pressed. Glittering like that? Yellow, like the cap on the stickball pole out there?

He pointed into the dark in the direction of the high black shadows, blacker now than the night sky.

The old man held the stone up, peering at him through the tiny hole in the center.

You know where this came from? The yellow metal inside this? From up there, he said, pointing to the starry sky. There, in the Hand. Seven hundred years ago, when a star caught fire. It broke apart like a pumpkin, and rained the yellow metal. And with the metal, the Mishibijiw came too.

Mishibijiw? Auguste repeated. He knew that name from his childhood. It meant something like Night Panther. It was a kind of monster. His mother had told him Night Panthers swam in the waters of the Underworld. They were part wildcat and part snake or something.

She fell from the sky a few days after the star burned in the daylight, the old man went on. She lay all night in the wet grasses, in a smoking lake of yellow metal. There was just a village here then, one little village of farmers who prayed to Corn Woman. The village of Red Horn and Wild Boy. And when the sun came up, the Mishibijiw began to burn. The brothers took pity and threw dirt over her to keep her safe. That was how she adopted them. They were her sons after that, and she gave them powers. The power to run fast as an arrow, to hunt like the puma, to see in the dark as though it were day. The moon became their sun.

So what happened to the lake of yellow metal? he insisted, knowing how an elder would go on if he were not kept focused.

"It cooled and hardened. The brothers hammered it, and the men they chose to be their servants wore it. Soon the servants became priests. They tore down the village and the shrines to Corn Woman, and made the people worship the brothers and their new mother. That was how The City was born. It grew greater and greater. It filled this land. Like the Mishibijiw, it drank up the smaller villages, pulled all the tribes closer.

They built a great lodge on the Mishibijiw’s mound, and over there, he said, pointing to a ridgeback mound that stood like a buried barn to the east of the big one, they brought the priestesses of Corn Woman and buried them in the ground for the Mishibijiw. She stretched out her arms and sucked them dry. And the brothers lived on top of the big mound in the great lodge with their servants, and built a wall around the mound. They told the people this would keep them safe from the Mishibijiw and the people were afraid, so they listened."

Why didn’t they just kill the priests? Auguste asked, reluctantly being drawn into the old man’s story.

They were afraid of the brothers and of the Mishibijiw.

The brothers? You mean their sons?

I mean the brothers, for they lived on top of the mound as long as it stood. That was another gift of the Mishibijiw. But like her, they had to suck blood. That was why they held the games.

What games?

Once a year they would send out their soldiers and priests. A great meet would be called, a festival of renewal and sacrifice. The villagers would send their representatives, their stickball teams and their chunkey players, and sometimes any Corn Women worshipers they caught, for there were still people who prayed to her in the fields. The priests would club these worshipers into a great hole on top of the sacrifice mound, and bury thema alive for the Mishibijiw. Then the games would be held in the big plaza.

He gestured to the sky. Auguste shuddered. Maybe there had been something more in the Asi, for it seemed like the sky rippled like a black pool, and the old man’s words conjured the great dark city to life.

* * * *

He saw it as it once was, in the full height of its power. It was not just a city, it was a thriving capitol; a center of trade and learning and culture, teeming with life. The great mounds bereft of overgrowth, the naked dirt as black as coal, rising above a maze of thatch roofs, above a haze of rich smelling smoke from thousands of pipes and cooking fires.

There was the big mound, the Mishibijiw Mound, fully dressed in its youthful glory, capped as if with an ornamental headdress, a great platform ten feet high at its summit upon which sat a massive, palatial lodge with a forty foot high roof of bright yellow thatch. The mound was belted too by a high palisade wall of red cedar on the first terrace. The rotten dry steps were in their full red vigor, running neatly down the front like the piping of an officer’s coat.

Upon all the mounds there sat similarly opulent lodges. Lesser homes dotted the landscape beneath, arranged in neighborhoods, an obvious distinction between classes Auguste had never heard of before in any native community. It was almost like a white city, where the upper castes surveyed the laboring classes from their high and mighty homes. But none of these homes, rich as they were, compared in size or glory to the brothers’ windowless lodge, which was painted with glorious red and blue patterns, pictures of the brothers and their servants, scenes depicting their many great deeds through the ages.

He felt himself sink into the beaver blanket and the deep grass beneath as bronze fleshed figures moved between and over the mounds. Men, women, children, elders. Atop the sacrificial ridge, the priests in their glorious thunderbird regalia, decked out in feathers and shells, stood by as the tattooed, knot-topped warriors systematically clubbed a row of naked women, their heads bowed, their bodies smeared all over with white paint, eyes dark in the pale flesh, blood bright as it burst from their scalps. They tumbled one after the other into a trench lined with white sand. Some continued to shudder as the priests ordered the black earth thrown over them.

In contrast to the victims, the shining, healthy skin of the churning multitude of men and women sweating beneath the sun on the red earth of the grand plaza below was blued with intricate designs and festooned with awls and bones and brilliant copper jewelry. They ringed the plaza, betting furiously, cheering at the action underway within. It was the same vision he had briefly glimpsed before, but clearer. More real.

Hundreds of men yipped and yowled in a war-like din, waving sticks and elbowing each other, shoving their fellows down in the dust to be trampled by the rest as a leather ball bounced across one half of the playing field. A hundred more chased a rolling chunkey disc, with several smaller games going all at once in a barely contained chaos of activity and exertion.

Feathered priests stood on platforms on the shoulders of slaves, flanked by fierce looking armed bodyguards, watching, refereeing the action, calling the winners aside, raising their arms in victory for all the gathered people to cheer them as heroes.

* * * *

The games, the chunkey games. This very stone, said the old man, handing the disc finally back to Auguste.

He numbly accepted it, still reeling from the potency of the vision.

"That was the brothers’ downfall.

Far in the maize fields of one of the outlying villages, the Corn Woman worshipers conceived of a plan. Every year, twenty champions of the games were taken up on the Mishibijiw Mound to see the brothers."

* * * *

Again, as the old man talked, Auguste seemed to see the scene unfold.

The champion players, drunk on local spirits, draped in raiment that rivaled the priests’ own, were given golden stickball sticks and golden chunkey stones like the very one he had gotten from the boy. They were led from the plaza up one hundred and fifty six cedar steps, through the guarded palisades to the very crest of Mishibijiw Mound, to the foot of the brothers’ great windowless lodge.

The slaves swung wide the tall lodge doors, painted with a pair of great red hands with staring black eyes in the center - the Ogee - the symbol of transition from this world to the next. The champions filed into the cool, sunless lodge, the people below straining to see within. The champions turned to raise their fists to their cheering admirers down below. Then the slaves closed the doors behind them.

They were never seen again.

* * * *

It was said that the champions were taken into the sky by the brothers, after being awarded every earthly delight, said the old man. "They became as gods themselves, and their names were remembered with honor, inscribed on the temple walls by the priests. Life in the country villages was hard, you know. There was little meat, much disease. Men wanted to leave that life, so they trained all year for the honor.

But really they were killed, and the brothers drank their blood to sustain their undying youth and powers."

The old man opened his shriveled hands.

"No one but the priests knew this for certain of course, for no one ever lived to tell. But perhaps Corn Woman told her worshipers, or perhaps the poorest tired of the oppression of The City. Who can say? Whatever the reason, in a certain little village Corn Woman’s people trained their twenty players very hard one year. The last year of The City.

They came to the great festival. They competed against the best players of every other village. They won every time. The fools."

* * * *

Auguste could see them. Scrawny crop growers with bad teeth. Farmers, not a warrior or a hunter among them. The other players, the city-dwellers, they laughed to see these little grim faced corn stalk men step into the plaza with robust giants twice their size. They derided their plain unadorned sticks and their shabby sackcloth aprons. But no one laughed as they outdistanced longer limbed opponents, knocked skulls, broke bones, and wielded their plain, unadorned sticks with unerring accuracy.

* * * *

How was he seeing these things? Auguste shook his head, blinked his eyes rapidly, ridding himself once more of the hallucination.

Old man, what the hell did you put in that Asi?

The old man chuckled slyly.

Why, what do you put in yours?

* * * *

Auguste saw the twenty little farmers ascending the steps, not laughing and clapping each others’ shoulders as the other champions had done. Below, the peoples’ cheers were almost strong enough to carry them to the top of the mound. They were a roiling sea of flesh below, roaring their unrestrained approval. This little no-name village of skinny corn growers had dominated the games. Not a single champion was not one of their number. This had never happened in The City’s history.

It never would again.

Auguste watched their ascent as if among them.

He passed through the palisades, sparing a quick glance at the burly guards who gawked with open admiration at them. He looked down and saw the familiar gold flecked chunkey stone in his hands, but strangely, they were not his hands. They were the ruddy scarred hands of a field worker, bare armed. His hard, lean legs, shining as they mounted each wooden step, protruded from beneath a simple sackcloth apron, dark with sweat.

What was going on?

He was atop the mound now, his brothers all around him.

As the shaven headed slaves lifted the great bar from the red handled doors and swung them open to the darkness within, he turned and drove the golden chunkey stone deep into the smiling face of the nearest priest, smashing in his jaw, sending teeth and blood flying.

As the man fell back into what would be a bone crushing roll down the long stair, his hand found the black flint dagger at the priest’s waist. The priest fell away and the knife was in his hand. He turned and ripped open the naked belly of a spear carrying guard, spilling his glistening intestines over his feet.

One of his brothers caught the spear as it fell and rushed headlong into the great dark lodge. All around, the other eighteen champions had broken into perfect, unified action, seizing the guards and the slaves and the priests alike and squeezing the life from them, or wrenching their heads nearly completely around, or killing them with their own weapons.

Fourteen rushed into the lodge, armed with flint knives, clubs and spears, even the golden stickball sticks they had been awarded.

The rest turned to guard the palisade gap, each pausing only to inscribe a circled cross on their foreheads with the blood of the slain. Then they pitched the dead down the steep stair, forcing the huffing guards below to dodge the tumbling bodies as they rushed to ascend.

Auguste was with those who went into the lodge.

It was dim inside, after the outside brightness, and hard to see. Besides being without windows of any kind, the seams of the lodge had been sealed with mud or pitch. Not a single sliver of sunlight penetrated the cavernous gloom.

There was a deep rooted reek about the place too, a musty, aged smell of undeniable decay.

The first thing he heard was a shrill scream. Then he saw the man who had rushed in ahead of the rest. His spear had been driven up underneath his apron, between his legs, the point slashing open his cheek as it protruded from behind his collarbone. He could hear the blood raining down on the floor from the wound. Blood and piss.

The man was suspended in the air, held aloft by the spear. A pale, mohawked figure in a seashell and fox skin robe, golden ear spools in the shape of scowling faces dangling on either side of his head, held the spear with one hand, a monstrous display of strength. His eyes were entirely black and red rimmed. He bared his teeth as he gave a high war cry. The teeth were like a dog’s, sharp and yellowed.

It was Wild Boy. He flung the spitted corpse of their comrade right at them, bowling three of them over.

Then Wild Boy was moving, so fast he could hardly be seen. He slapped one of them with the back of his hand, and the man’s head went spiraling off his shoulders into a dark corner. Another man broke his stone club across Wild Boy’s face and was punished by having his belly ripped entirely away from his bones and flung in another man’s face.

Auguste saw him kill six of the fourteen in as many heartbeats. Slippery blood pooled quickly in the dark, like a lake of Asi on the floor.

* * * *

Why was he seeing these things? He retched, and vomited more Asi.

The vision would not cease.

It shifted momentarily from the gory scene to another place, an earlier time.

He remembered a filthy, wrinkled old priestess crouching