A NIGHT IN ALLIANS

Cantos I: The Cold Stones

An impalement -- Mortician -- A zukuma and a wraith -- A religious execution -- Crazed herbmaster -- A fight -- A leashed False Seal -- Ruins -- A trapdoor -- Femur tunnel -- Gutted Horse -- Supper -- Fallen pig -- Hospice

He stands in the central square of the frostbitten land of black glass-spires and cold stones under the pitch-black canvas of the silent cosmos pockmarked by faint stars and the moon ignorantly bright and vibrant. A gaunt humanoid beast on a platform matted with fragments of hair impaled on a polearm along its height and staring listlessly towards the endless void. The pointed end poking out of its gaping and stiff maw. Denizens robed or furred pass through the square unblinking and trudging to the winding streets. Some look up towards the beast in passing. The breeze blowing past Oynstein and he shivers in the cold wrapping his mailed arms around his surcoat yet not as intense as a raging blizzard in Kurgus’s vast white where he sheltered and nooned under an overhang of rock riddled with stalactites like fangs.

He counts his silvers amounting to a hundred and he checks his current provisions. Enough for two days in the unforgiving field. He moves on. The streets of Allians lit by torches bluish as a drowned corpse.

He comes across a yard of dead weeds and soil lush with patches of snow. One of the city gates to the west is shut and unguarded and he turns northwards and stepping further and pausing. A wooden door bearing a red X painted in some pigment reeked of copper. The word “Mortician” chalked plainly across a board of planks above the door. He steps in and shuts the door behind him and turns. The shop’s kitchen is populated by curtains of cadavers hung on iron hooks and surrounded by them like audiences of a theatrical lecture is a table occupied by a burly and furry mass with a snouted head and lolling tongue. A garbed figure over the mass all black and feathered and seemingly blending with the darkness of the common room beyond the kitchen. The figure masked and beaked and a wide-brimmed hat fashioned from cured human leather sits on the skull.

She raises her head and stares at her visitor. Hounskull and surcoat. He places his hand on his chest and points his mittened thumb to the door.

Sorry for intruding.

What?

You know where I can find a bed?

She stares on. Her gloved fingers tugging the grey fur of the dead. She nods.

Go straight on.

Straight on?

Straight.

Okay.

He exits. She watches him depart and she tilts her beaked head and incises the hide along the abdomen in a Y-shaped configuration.

A crossroad split into three paths. He takes the middle street flanked by buildings decayed and abandoned and half obscured from the moonlight by rows of terraces. In the middle two figures move erratically under the half-light like ballet dancers ravaged by narcotics. A wraith formless and fogged save for its skull trying to evade the wild swings of a flat edge of a huge warhammer wielded in the hands of a zukuma berserker naked and grey and hard-skinned and grunting from its sharp gaping maws. The wraith ducks bracing for another swing but the hammer feints and soars above the zukuma’s head and in a flash it falls squarely onto the skull shattering fragments of bone and spreading across the snowy street. The zukuma looks over where the skull once was and leans the shaft over its shoulder.

Oynstein steps back. He turns and strolls towards the crossroads and when he looks back he could see the zukuma no more. He takes the left fork watching a couple of denizens walking into the middle street and he doesn’t pause to witness their fates.

Twenty one souls congregate in one spot around a fire at an arcade that is sloping downhill. Four out of five men shrouded in white and blue garbs looking up to a pair of ladders leaning against the walls and bounded and writhing on the steps is another man naked and strung around the neck and the ankles and the wrists behind him. His entrails tangled and hung like small banners in a fair. He gazes at the night screaming. The fifth cultist scraps an obsidian blade deeper into his chest where blood pools and oozing down the slit abdomen and slightly coating the cold entrails. A cultist on the ground turns to the crowd and lists the heretic’s crimes against the College Of The Unholy Corruption and their worn-out tolerance towards his misdeeds of two years. Some among the crowd jeering at the mutilated heretic and calling for his offal to be cast into the blaze.

Oynstein watches the beating heart torn and casted out. He turns his head to the streets and flinches and steps back. A shrouded figure whose face is obscured by a bark mask carrying a bloodstained sword gazing at him through the large eyeholes and muttering about an autopsy lesson. He draws his shortsword when the figure slashes the winding breeze in the air and shrieks and charges towards him in a frenzy.

The crowd and the cultists save for the executioner turn towards the commotion. Oynstein backs up swaying the blade at the herbmaster and swats aside a thrust of the opposing sword and plunges the short blade through the fabric and the skin of his neck through the jugular veins. He chokes behind the bark mask retching and jabbing the blade onto the mailed torso to no avail and retches louder when he feels his neck split and his breathes cut short and he drops onto the street gagging and falls silent and still.

Oynstein looms over the herbmaster. He stoops on one knee frisking under the robes and he pulls out a parchment and unfolds revealing a map to a sanctuary where its existence and geography impossible to be conceived. He crumbles the parchment and tosses it onto the robed back and he raises his hounskull head to the witnesses of this newer spectacle. Nobody moves. He looks up to the heretic. His head hung and limp over his shoulders unmoving since the fight. He sheathes his shortsword and lightly kicks the herbmaster’s head and looks towards the dead end of the arcade and turns and backtracks to the crossroads. They watch him. Some move and stand over the herbmaster with knives visible within their fingers.

At the third fork he crosses a bridge matted with mounds of snow over an ice-cold stream of water and he comes across another square with three forks. Among the faceless buildings and dark windows a library stands out. Its roof coated in the snow and a grand door sporting a sign demanding an entry fee and warning of thieves. A leashed seal-like creature skittering on arachnid legs and leaning against the library’s walls. It barks and yelps and curls up like a worm gazing towards its master. Bidepal. Pointy ears. Canines. Noseless. The master and the false seal gaze at their curious onlooker. Oynstein takes a step back and hangs his hounskull low and they watch him passing by and the master snarls in his direction. He pays no heed and quickens his pace to the leftmost fork of the clearing and it tugs the leash and quits leaning and leans the bigger end of a giant club into a mound of snow.

He crosses another bridge and meets another dead end. Only the ruins of some structure which purpose was long lost. He scans his surroundings seeing nobody save for himself and he approaches the ruins looking over the ground and crossing over fallen stones and rotted timber.

His mailed foot blindly stepping into air and slipping inside a hole. He falls into deeper ground and drops on his spine with a pronounced thud wheezing loudly and holding out a scream as the pain sears across his nerves threatening to sever. He sits up and lifts and tosses the hounskull bascinet to his lap and lets out a weak but strangled groan and in a spastic rush he rummages into his sack and fishes out a vial of life elixir and uncorks the lip and swallows one dose.

He replaces the cork and chucks the elixir into his sack. The pain subsiding but not enough to fully relieve him. He gazes at the moon and draws another wheeze and slowly rises on his feet. He looks around and spots a small set of staircases leading back to the city grounds and he moves on slow as a crippled leper.

He slightly regains his pace outside the ruins and over the bridge and he turns to the rightmost fork strolling along another land of terraces like monumental pillars sheltering from some wrath of a displaced deity. He remembers the mortician and questions her general direction. He looks around for signs or willing denizens but beyond a few silent lurkers he could find no help and he moves on.

He passes through an ascending tunnel riddled with femurs lining some of the curved walls and ceiling in two arches and beyond a dead-ended clearing a tavern sits idle in the drizzling snow. The sign depicts a rearing horse strangled by something ropey and the words Gutted Horse forged in iron just below. He lightly pushes the door open. It complains with a creak and he shuts behind and gazes at a table with three patrons huddled together like secluded monks. He walks to the counter laying his eyes upon the tavern keeper that stares manic and wide and corpse-painted and idly flooding the counter with beer spilled from two iron mugs in his spindly hands like waterfalls.

Oynstein looks away from the crazed eyes and focuses on the flooded counter. He hands out five silvers to the keeper and asks.

Is there to eat and drink here?

The keeper looks on. He sets the mugs on the beer-coated counter and palms and counts the silvers and he turns and moves to the kitchen. He comes back with a new mug of beer and a bowl of braised chicken with apples drenched in more beer and gently sets it on the counter still gazing at Oynstein like some demented owl. He receives his victuals and nods nervously and turns away finding an empty table and settling down and doffing the bascinet. He eats the chicken but makes no effort to touch the apples and he washes down with the beer to his fill. When he is done he rises and replaces the bascinet on his head and he approaches the huddled patrons. One coated in something reminiscent of oil and another coughing non-stop in his hand and belching and another reeking of booze and surrounding his head with emptied mugs like candles gathered round an incorruptible skull of a saint.

Oynstein raises his hand. You know where I can find an inn here?

The boozehound lazily tilts his head looking up to his hounskull. He turns and rests his chin on the table shutting the eyes. Neither party answer his inquiry. He looks over the trio and he looks at the keeper still staring at him and he looks at the mugs and he turns and exits the tavern exchanging no further words.

Back through the tunnel and the rows of terraced buildings a heavy mass falls and lands on Oynstein’s bascinet and he drops and sprawls on the ground together with a pig carcass like drunken roommates. He stays unmoved and fifteen minutes later he comes to his senses again shivering in a new chill unleashed by a mild winter breeze. He slowly shakes his helmeted head and wraps his arms around his surcoat casting his face downwards to the snow trudging onwards to a fork yet explored opposite the street.

He comes across a two-storied hospice arranged along a sodden arcade. The paintworks on the surface were vibrant and it once boasted itself as a welcoming sanctuary for the urban poor and the ill. Today all traces of the paint’s opulence were buried in the colorless cold and the roofs blanketed in mounds of snow and only the blue torches along the walls dare to attempt an imitation of its material elegance and physicians and barber surgeons and the plagued and the weary populate the hospice walls.

He steps inside and through the sterile lobby he heads for reception and stands behind the counter. A corpse painted girl reading a grimoire concerning necromancy and utilizing an animated brethren to selfish use for profit. A pair of black bangs drape over her shoulders. Her peripheral vision picks up movement and she raises her head to Oynstein.

Got a room you can spare?

She stares at the hounskull like some meek rodent and nods.

How much? Oynstein asks.

Three silvers.

Where’s the room at?

First sixth at your left. It’s the nearest you can get from the stairs.

Upstairs?

Upstairs.

Is it safe?

What?

He shakes his head. Never mind.

He doles out the three silvers and she pockets in the drawer and resumes to her grimoire. He turns and walks along the carpeted hallway and climbs the staircase and following the girl’s instructions he enters his room eyeing at a pale tall figure standing further in the halls and glaring at him. He locks the door and turns. A bed and a table and a lidless chest and a window. He drops his sack near the bed and stares through the glass glazing over the blue glow of the arcade and he turns and retires for the cold late dark shivering and chattering his teeth.