A NIGHT IN ALLIANS

Cantos II: The Gathering

Inside the hospice -- A nobleman -- The library -- A dwarven man -- A sighing manhole -- An assassin -- A church -- Another execution -- Murder of girl -- The blacksmith -- New flail and accoutrements -- A hunchbacked guide -- The keeper of The Gutted Horse -- Travel and provision inquiries -- A visit

The unseen sun devours the late dark until the hopeless sky is a bright yet a lifeless grey above Allians’ frosted grounds. The snowfall pauses. The light shines upon the bed where Oynstein slept. He is armored in his chainmail and red surcoat and bascinet looking over the arcade where strollers scatter and move like laborious ants. He tries to look up to the sky but cannot manage a good angle from the window and gives up and turns and picks up his sack and shortsword and moves on to the door.

Downstairs the halls are brimmed with activity and illness. Hospice staff gloved and clothed in white haunt along the carpeted floors. Some faces are masked. The able sick confined to certain rooms for routine examination and balancing of their bodily humors and travelers likewise melded together with the staff visiting familiars or tending to their own needs for the morning. In the middle of the reception lobby an operating table is set and a staff masked in a stallion’s skull erects and poses a skeleton exhumed from a one-man crypt beyond the walls. The skeleton gazes proudly to the ceiling and supporting its elbow is a sword bedecked with false jewelry. Some gather round the skeleton admiring the bones and the sword and two scribble their quills on aged parchment sketching the subjects like apprentice draftsmen midway to fruitless mastery.

Among the crowd Oynstein asks a few if they know of a place to purchase steel. Neither does. One suggests the library and advises him to forward his inquiry to the librarian. He moves on.

In the snow riddled streets he hears a thunder of hooves closing in behind and he leaps to the side but catches the forearm of a charging horse on his flank and he ragdolls across the snow and the stones. A creature the size of an infant porcelain and undead sprints and sways its dress past him and two other horses follow in pursuit. The first ceases and a pair of tall black boots reeking of athlete’s foot dismount and step towards Oynstein. He rises to his feet. The rider is a nobleman clad in colorful garbs and a flat cap adorned by a single red feather plucked from the carcass of a great bird.

He points the blade to Oynstein posing like a fencer and wearing a sardonic grin beneath his moustache.

Interrupting our hunt you philistine spermswamp?

Oynstein snaps the shortsword from its sheathe and walks briskly to the nobleman. He yelps like a cornered dog and drops his sword and cowers onto the saddle and kicks his fungal heel and the horse rearing and breaking into a short sprint past Oynstein. He watches. When the horse is gone he sheathes the shortsword and moves on.

Outside the library a burly woman cloaked in the heavy fur of a werebear pushes a cart piled with mutilated limbs and plagued corpses. She calls out for the dead and dying and the sale of limbs for silvers and when Oynstein passes by she turns and asks if he would like some and he declines and waves his hand. The sign on the doors demanding an entry fee of eight silvers. He slots into a metal box and pushes the door open and steps in.

He browses the catalogues but could find nothing to stimulate his intelligence. Among the shelves he finds a Book of Boiling Blood and another titled Dream Gates and a Bestial Speech scroll. He skims and dismissively replaces them and he approaches a librarian behind the counter wearing a maniacal countenance and asks for directions. The librarian shakes his horned head and recommends him to try follow on north while the library faces his west. He turns and walks out of the door and moves on.

He crosses a filthy arcade encountering a dwarven-sized man dressed in rags sewn out of a burlap sack. Hooked into his heart and sticking out is an opium hook chained around his wrist. Oynstein bends down and inquires for directions but the man stares at his hounskull dumb and ecstatic and giggling uncontrollably. He rises and leaves the man. When he reaches three forks ahead he pauses.

At the base of the forks is a manhole missing a lid and emanating an unnerving sigh and scented herbs bitter and pungent. He gazes at it as if expecting an appearance but nothing emerges. The sigh exasperated. Oynsteins looks on. He stays for nine minutes crouching on one knee and watching the manhole and across every three-minute intervals the sigh would loop with the same cadence and length. He rises and turns and scurries back to the library and the bridge and to the decaying yard with the mortician’s shop and the city gates and he passes by the terraced buildings where the zukuma and the wraith fought.

He winds down a descending lane and stops by a fountain dried and broken and blanketed in algae and the vessel partially filled with melted snow. A faceless cherub standing on its foot blowing a horn. A frosty gale drifting through the lane like souls in immaterial transit. He looks up to the grey sky lifeless and indistinguishable from the grey clouds and he tilts his head back to the streets. A new presence scanning his chainmail and his surcoat and staring into the visors of the hounskull. She is hooded and cloaked and looks to be coated in soot and over the corpse-painted countenance a mask grinning and wide eyed with furrowed brows sits firmly on her face. A crossbow and a dagger slung and belted around her waist. She squints her eyes at Oynstein. Both scleras dark and crimsoned from subconjunctival hemorrhage. He stares back.

She lifts her hand waving at him like some sleazy saleswoman and from under the belt she produces a small paper folded in fours and she unfolds and displays a sketched portrait to him. It is a side profile of the nobleman infected with athlete’s foot. He stares at the portrait and pushes his hand out of the slashed mitten and points his pinky towards the noble.

He tried me under the terraces not far from the library, says Oynstein.

She tilts her head.

He was hunting some doll with two others. Maybe further south.

She folds the photo and tucks it under her robe and reaches her clawed hand to his shoulder and pats on it. He doesn’t move.

You know where I can find a smithy? He continues.

She jabs her thumb to the streets behind her and holds up two fingers and alternates between the two gestures. He stares dumbly.

Two?

She nods.

Like two.

He lingers. She keeps jabbing her thumb.

Two streets?

She nods eagerly.

Okay.

She pats his shoulder again.

I better go.

She bows her head and pats him once more as she passes on. He turns to watch her stroll across the yard and he turns back and resumes his descent along the lane.

He crosses a yard stepping over burrows and the upturned soil and failed crops and the carpet of weeds. A confectioner’s shop where the walls are weeping viscous sap-like yellow fluids sits opposite a lone stone building with a glass spire lancing towards the sky. The bricks walls shifting and pulsating ever so slowly that the longer he stares the more he perceives the masonry to be breathing at its own gifted will. A chorus of gravel choirs emanating from the windows of the church and then screaming. He swiftly turns to one of the two junctions when the church’s door is swung open.

In a desolate square where wingless crows hover round a platform of planks like strung bulbs three bodies lie on the dampened wood lifeless and decapitated. Blood pooling from the oozing stumps on their necks and skewered through an iron rod between a pair of wooden frames and slid apart like an abacus are three scalped heads. Their mouths agape and missing their tongues and they gaze across the square. Standing over them and wielding great axes are four men lean and muscled and clothed in flayed skins of the fallen. Their heads shrouded by blood-drenched capirotes with an all-seeing eye on each forehead.

A girl among a crowd of thirty nine wailing a name to the heads. One executioner points his finger to the direction of her cries and the crowd murmurs and jostles her forward and she struggles to free herself. When she is at the edge of the platform the executioner tugs and twists her hair and she flaps her arms slapping his fist and shrieking like a distressed rodent. He kneels on the edge and digs and squeezes his fingers into her scalp and he lifts his great axe and swings the curved broad edge down to her temple and splits into her face. Her eyes pop and threaten to slide out of the sockets. With great dexterity he slices off her blonde scalp in one swift motion and the girl limps and drops onto the snow-clad stones twitching. The executioner raises the scalp to the grey sky trailing blood onto the platform and chanting incoherently with a demonic rumble. The other three men follow his verbal example jerking the shafts of their axes and praying to the grey expanse.

Oynstein witnessing from the corner of the square near the junction he came from. He shimmies around leaning against the buildings and when he is past the platform and the crowd he looks up to see an iron sign depicting an anvil and he looks towards a door and twists the handle and steps in.

At the window a man watches the platform built like a bear. Big hands. Broad shoulders. Aproned. His head is covered in a savoyard helmet grimacing and skull-like on its faceplate with rounded eyeholes. He lingers for a couple of minutes and turns to face his shop and forge and he watches Oynstein gazing at a heavy suit of cuirassier armor perched on a stand and moving on and browsing the sharp and solid goods. He picks up a black shaft from the walls and examines a metal ball attached to its end with a flexible chain. Spikes adorned across the whole ball pointed like accusatory fingers. He raises the shaft and swings and twirls the ball round the air thrice and then he ceases and lowers the flail. He slides and tucks the shaft under his sword belt and he reaches for a round metal shield and from the miscellaneous stocks forged or imported he selects a firesteel and an oil lamp encased in glass and a lantern oil and a toolbox and a lone blanket and he hauls his purchases wrapped in the blanket in his arms towards the blacksmith and he kneels and spreads them out like some delicate showman prepared to exhibit his snake oils.

How much for all these together?

The blacksmith stares at the tucked flail and the shield strapped to Oynstein’s left forearm and he leans and scans the merchandise and the blanket and he looks down on his palm counting his fingers in silence. He scratches a finger on his palm listing the silvers and totaling the numbers and he raises his savoyard head gazing at Oynstein’s hounskull.

Eighty one silvers.

Eighty one silvers?

Eighty one silvers.

Oynstein counts and sprinkles the silvers onto the blacksmith’s palm. He bends down and gathers his new accoutrements into his sack and he checks the round metal shield on his forearm and the flail and the shortsword at his belted waist. He pinches the snout and adjusts the hounskull and the bascinet and raps his knuckles on it.

When he looks out the window the platform is empty save for the rack of heads. The crowd long dispersed. He looks at the blacksmith and opens the door.

Cometh soon, says the blacksmith.

He waves his mailed hand and shuts the smithy door behind him and moves on. He glances at the square looking for the girl but she was gone. A few bystanders look up towards the heads like curious attendants of a freak exhibit.

He walks along the lane passing by the cherub fountain and brakes when somebody emerges from a door and looks at him and grins. A hunchback crowned by a widow’s peak and missing chunks of teeth and half naked in his pantaloons and gazing with eyes wide open. He waves his hand.

Hello.

Oynstein doesn’t answer.

You lost? I can help you down the road. 10 silvers?

He shakes his helmeted head. I don’t have enough. Sorry.

Really? How about five for a short walk?

Not even close.

Come on. It’s dangerous out here.

I can watch myself just fine thank you.

You sure?

Yeah.

Those axemen at the square.

What of it?

They’ll catch you if you loiter.

I’ll walk carefully.

I mean it. You see what they did to that girl?

I seen it.

Where?

Where what.

Where did you see from?

I came upon it when she screamed some name. Rather I stayed away from the crowd.

But you watched the sermon still?

Just the executions.

Right.

The hunchback nods slowly.

Well.

What.

They promised one of us to be chosen at any time now mid-sermon.

Okay.

So, you know, I can guide you along. We watch out for each other?

I don’t know.

Come on.

Told you I’m low on silvers.

Okay then. Three.

That’s all I have. I need them for my food.

You serious?

Yeah.

The hunchback draws a letter opener from the pocket of his pantaloons. He raises his voice.

Quit messing. I’m guiding and you pay up like it or not.

Fuck you hunchback.

What did you say to me?

Oynstein swiftly draws his flail and lurches forward throwing the spiked ball to the hunchback. He gasps and raises his letter opener. The ball punches and lodges between his misshapen eyes and they slightly bulge. He takes two steps forward and reaches for his face but his hand jerks back when pricked by the spikes. He feels the ball dislodged from his facial tissue and when he drops the knife he kneels on the street like a filled sack as the ball homes itself into his fractured skull and he leans forward and lies and ceases to move.

Oynstein holsters the flail and pushes the hunched back to the side with his mailed foot and stoops and frisks the hunchback. In his mail mitten he palms sixty six silvers poured from a small pouch taken from the pocket of the pantaloons and he tosses the shriveled pouch and pockets the silvers himself and moves on leaving the hunchback to the wingless crows.

The keeper of The Gutted Horse sits at the counter watching a contraption of mugs pouring and transferring beer in an endless loop like rapids. He extends his tongue and laps up the flowing liquids like cattle upon a stream. The door opens and he snaps his head to it. Oynsteins walks in and leans across the counter.

You got provisions for the road?

The keeper nods still lolling his tongue dripping beer.

How long you reckon until I can get to Galgenbeck from here?

He yanks his tongue back into his mouth.

16 days?

On foot?

Far as I know.

How about Tveland itself?

Half of that.

Eight days.

Yeah.

Oynstein taps his finger on the counter.

How much for one pack?

Pack?

Food.

Just a silver.

You have enough for fourteen?

Why not sixteen?

I have a couple left with me.

The keeper looks at his sack and the flail and the sheathed shortsword and the surcoat and the round metal shield.

Well.

Can you get fourteen for me?

Sure. You just wait here.

Okay.

The keeper rises and retreats to the kitchen. A couple of minutes later he comes back cradling fourteen packs of brown papers bundled with strings and spreads them across the counter. The contents unknown and unlabeled. Oynstein pays the fourteen silvers and chucks the packs into his sack.

You got a waterskin with you?

Yeah.

Show me.

He rifles through the packs and his accoutrements in his sack and pulls out his waterskin. It is curved and sewn out of a bison’s hide. The keeper rubs his pale chin examining its size.

Wait here.

He returns to the kitchen and later emerges with another waterskin similar in size.

Hand me your skin and I’ll fill both here for you.

Oynstein does as told. The keeper twists a tap from a cask and lets the winter cold water flow into each waterskin and when they are filled to the lips he stoppers and hands them over to Oynstein.

I thank you.

You walk safe out there. Anything else?

Is there lunch here?

If you want.

Oynstein slides five silvers across the counter. Give me one.

The keeper takes the silvers and returns to the kitchen. He comes back with a bowl of black soup with a baked hog face and a mug of the winter cold. Oynstein dines in silence avoiding the hog.

The tavern door opens. A group of robed and beaked hospice physicians bleed and gather into the common room and gaze at the two. They watch. One masked and horned like a great stag and matted with bloodstains step forward and addresses.

Who amongst thee doth suffer in this miasma afield?

The keeper stares dumbly.

What?