A NIGHT IN ALLIANS

Cantos III: Weep In Thy Solace

The stag's announcement -- A proposition -- Enter the manhole -- Infected by weeping disease -- A glass coffin -- The lich

The stag inspects the two men with his vacant gaze. A couple of the robed and beaked step forward and lift and prod their canes on Oynstein’s mailed shoulders and the red surcoat. He watches unmoved and curious. They glance at each other and turn their beaks to the keeper and shift their canes and prod his chest with gentleness like wasps testing the integrity of a new nest. The keeper glances at the stag and watches the arms lean and greatly furred and spread across the room.

Until this pestilence be resolved and cleansed from our unclean veins none shall suffer to depart these mures.

How about tomorrow? The keeper asks.

Nay.

A week?

Nay.

He opens his mouth and pauses and seals his lips.

Where did it come from? Oynstein asks.

The stag points his spindly finger to the door.

Tongues spake of a manhole beyond the library. None that ventured the noisome pit did e’er return. Now doth its rot spread through many the streets. Our subjects embraced the Shimmering Fields and more lie abed with this sickness and we possess neither the means nor the manpower to withstand so great a malignance as this pestilence.

The keeper glances at Oynstein. He looks back.

I seen it before.

What?

The manhole.

Did you peek in?

He shakes his head. I think something sighed down there. Stayed and listened. It sounded like it looped.

Loop?

Like it kept sighing over and over in the same kind of noise or something.

What was in there?

Don’t know. Never checked.

How come you don’t look paler today?

What?

I says how come you aren’t writhing on my floorboards now.

Maybe the miasma wasn’t there yet.

They look towards the robed stag. He shuffles forward drifting along the floorboards and ceases a few inches from Oynstein and bends forward and stares towards the hounskull.

Wilt thou take upon thyself to descend into that accursed pit and make an end of the seed of this sickness?

He turns his head to the keeper. They exchange stares with words unspoken. He turns back to the stag.

What’s in it for me?

The stag tilts his head.

Aside from not dying from the sick.

He shifts the spindly and furred hand erecting four fingers at Oynstein’s face.

Forty silvers pieces. This commission I wilt set before thee and no more lest our treasury be drained and the sick left without succour.

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Climbing down the manhole he stumbles upon an aged and bearded gaunt tethered on the grimy sewer floors by roots of unknown origin and coughing and wheezing. A misty green slither out of the open pores on his leathery skin. Oystein swings and strikes the spiked ball into the writhing skull and repeats until the brains burst and the pores hiss noisily. Blood coagulates in the hedge knight’s eyes until they weep like viscous tears and he groans and curses stumbling away from the roots. He blinks and liberally wipes his bloody tears looking about the sewers dimly lit by small torches and he turns and moves southwards along the tunnel into the next chamber.

At the center of a tomb riddled with poisonous molds is a glass coffin sealing a naked skeletal cadaver in its incorruptible sleep. He looks dimly at it as if seeking some unwelcome answer. It never rises. He moves on further taking the leftmost tunnel and at the end of it he pauses by a broken door ajar and hung by its rusted hinges.

See the figure occupying this chamber that once housed a collection of educational archives now lost to the sewer’s rot. It is thin and ragged and reek of a stench reminiscent of fermented and stale cheese left to the mercy of flies and worms and the oppressive elements. The lich bellows at Oynstein as if greeting his intrusion with malice and Oynstein half-blinded by the weeping blood charges on like some brute.

The spiked ball flies aiming to assault the lich but meets its necrotic barrier and cracks and shatters like a great star upon its catastrophic end. Oynstein curses aloud and draws his shortsword circling the lich. It glides along the floor reaching its finger to his shoulder and when it withdraws he abruptly freezes in his tracks. He grunts and attempts to force his shoulders to move and they do so breaking himself free of the paralysis’s grasp and he thrusts the short blade passing the lich and grazing its ribs. It moans in mild annoyance turning and lurches towards Oynstein with an outstretched fist punching between the slits of his bascinet. It hurts. His forehead throbbing and bruised. A trickle of blood trailing down his nostrils. He thinks it had been a mace that struck him but he sees none held in the lich’s hands. This time his shoulders would not obey his bodily demand to break himself free and as he breathes noisily following the lich with his bleeding eyes it lifts and tosses his bascinet to the corner of the chamber and cups his cheeks and with a saintly mercy it digs its moss-coated thumbs into the sockets of his eyes bursting the sclera into milky mush and presses its grasping hands onto his temples and grinning with delight at his gaping maw that produces a loud shriek akin to a disturbed frog until it is cut off by a sickening noise of exploded flesh and torn skin and fractured bone. He collapses onto the floor facing the lich’s feet and missing his unkempt crown and the top of his head and his jaws open and permanently screaming in silence.