Extract from The Temple Beneath the Scarlet Forest

Alasdair Baird

The roar of rushing water grew closer. Ikal lay on the canoe floor, staring up at the orange evening sky, trees flitting past on either side, swifter and swifter as the canoe was sucked towards the falls.

He had foreseen this, that he would be smashed like a piece of flotsam against uncaring rocks. Yet he had not striven to alter this fate, had remained motionless on the floor of the boat. The villagers had known what they were doing. The thorned vines binding his wrists and ankles behind his back bit deeper each time he moved. ’Twas a funeral canoe, wide and heavy-bottomed, impossible to overturn, and the gag would have carved into his mouth had he attempted to cry out. The riverside settlements he had drifted past would not have dared touch the boat anyway. They apprehended well its purpose, carved with symbols of condemnation. Foreworn, lying in a pool of his own blood, he felt peace approaching. The pain would cease soon.

Vultures circled overhead, long wings flapping languidly. Awaiting him.

The water’s roar rose to a deafening crescendo as the canoe tipped over the falls. Ikal’s stomach lurched. The air became crushing water. The suffocating weight of the waterfall crashed onto him and the canoe tumbled, taking him with it. Water forced itself over the gag. Ikal welcomed it in.

The ground thundered and shook. Ground?

Ikal’s eyes burst open and he vomited water against the gag. He lay face down in mud, instinctively heaving water out, air in. River water lapped at his bound feet, stinging the open wounds. Shattered pieces of wood bobbed against his half-submerged legs. The rumbling of the ground intensified, setting Ikal’s head bouncing, but he could not tell where it came from. He wished that, whatever it was, it came to take him soon.

He picked his head up and peered through the long hair plastered to his face. He looked across a verdant valley. The river he lay in meandered downhill to meet another slicing through the valley’s centre. Sitting on that river was the strangest thing Ikal had ever seen. A hill, covered in lofty columns of stone, all crowded together like a porcupine’s quills. The villagers had talked of that place. A city, they had called it. People lived in those great stone trees. Ikal stared, transfixed. The sight almost made him want to live, so that he might see the inside of those stone trees. Almost.

The rumbling swelled to an ear-splitting cacophony. Thousands of bison materialised downhill from him, stampeding across the valley. Hoofbeats drummed through his bones. Ikal felt no shock, but rolled sideways towards the herd, indifferent to the thorns slicing his wrists and ankles. He bowled downhill gleefully, welcoming the everlasting peace the hooves would bring.

Ikal jerked to halt in the cleft of a rock, a mere fathom above the herd. His bindings were caught on something beneath him. He writhed and twisted, but remained stuck fast. He yowled at the cruelty of the Gods.

A shout responded to Ikal’s. A bison loomed, steam rising off its furred mantle. Atop it sat a young woman in leathers, hair shorn short. She was clambering down from her mount when another bison stamped close, ridden by an elderly man, short-haired and clean-shaven. Their skin was the same dark russet as Ikal’s, but he had never seen people with so little hair before.

The woman approached on foot, eyes wide as she beheld Ikal. The man leapt from his bison and wrenched her back with a hiss.

‘What’re you doing?’ A strange, clipped accent.

‘Helping,’ said the woman.

‘Stupid girl! Look at him. Tell me what he is.’

‘A barkie in need of help. You saw that canoe go o’er the falls. It’s a wonder he still breathes.’

The man grasped her with a sinewy forearm. ‘Bah! He’s bound and gagged. Who did that to him, eh? Why send him downriver? Why not simply kill him if they want him no longer?’

Ikal nodded at the mention of killing. The movement sent fresh rivulets of blood trickling down his face, wrists and ankles.

‘He needs help.’ She pried herself free and strode towards Ikal.

‘Stupid girl!’ cried the man. ‘Didn’t you heed the story of the village beneath the falls? Haven’t you seen the ruins?’

Ikal did not know the story, but the woman clearly did. She studied Ikal, and he could see the fear infect her countenance. The same fear that had infected the villagers when they had discovered what he truly was. A fear so great that none would dare kill him. Once it came, it never left.

She took a step back. ‘We need only cut his bonds and leave. We needn’t touch him.’

The old man spat. ‘I’d cut you down myself before I allowed you to curse my herd.’ He gestured at the unending throng of bison moving across the valley behind them. ‘The herd won’t wait.’ He mounted his bison and rode away.

The woman looked at Ikal, holding her breath.

In Ikal’s experience, soliciting a quick death was troublesome enough with full use of his limbs and mouth. She regarded him, then the herd. Ikal knew she would flee. He shut his eyes and focused on remaining still, so that the vultures would come to claim him.

He did not hear her leave. When he opened his eyes, she was gone, but there was something new on the bank next to him. A rectangle of wood, carved with gnarled symbols like the roots of an old tree. The villagers had talked of the queer customs in this valley; they hacked away at trees, in the hope that the mangled wood might grant boons. Breath rasping, Ikal silently thanked the woman for her boon. He hoped it would grant his death. The vultures were landing nearby, hopping closer for the first peck. At long last. His lips curled into a bloody smile.

To Ikal’s dismay, just as the last of the sun’s light was bleeding out of the sky, the vultures flew away. Altogether, at once. Ikal whimpered at his wonted fortune, to be within moments of rejoining the Earth, and to have the harbingers of his everlasting peace flee. The omens could not be clearer; he was being forced to dance for the Gods a little longer. Down the valley, thunder clapped and growled.

***

As Loru worked his way along the narrow cliffside path, leaning on his cane, he cursed his aged knees, he cursed his insubordinate apprentice, he cursed the Captain of the Guard, and he cursed whoever that third fellow was standing next to the other two. The three of them were passing around a spyglass, goggling at something above, but Loru concentrated on the path ahead, for to his right was a precipitous drop. All the same, it was difficult not to marvel at the splendour of the rare view. Below, cobbled streets and towers of stone gave way to wooden shacks as the city sprawled into the river’s floodplain. The pre-dawn light illuminated the morning mist. Loru could even make out the brown smear of the migrating bison across the river, but when he looked down the cobbled roads beneath seemed all too far away. He turned back and leant on his cane. Best not to look. Ahead, a dark mass of storm clouds roared as it approached the city. An inauspicious portent.

Loru was undignifiedly gasping in lungfuls of air by the time he reached the trio. Tarut, the hulking captain of the guard, leered at Loru over the heads of the other two shorter men.

‘Good of you to join us, Scholar.’

‘Yes, well, it is somewhat earlier,’ said Loru, panting, ‘than my typical morning stroll, but you know I would do anything to earn your esteem, Captain.’

Loru scowled at Kull, who knew very well that his primary duty as apprentice was to serve as a stout arm to lean on in times such as these. He had scurried ahead with the captain and the other fellow, leaving Loru in the lurch. The boy looked down the spyglass, mouth agape, apparently unaware that his venerable master was adjacent to him, huffing like a ragged bellows. Standing to Kull’s right was a scrawny young man, who Loru could now see wore the leathers of a city guard. The chap was shuffling his feet around, covered in a sheen of sweat despite the cool morning.

‘And to what,’ said Loru, ‘do I owe the pleasure of such an invigorating excursion before dawn?’

Tarut gestured up the slope, the muscles bulging from his brown scalp as he ground his teeth. Was the behemoth nervous? Loru swept his gaze up the cliffside. The King’s palace perched on top of the Hill, bounded by a sheer wall of sparkling white stone. There were multiple vultures, many vultures, gliding around the top of the wall. Sinister portents, this morning. Loru squinted. The vultures were circling something on the crenelations, a supine figure, perhaps? Loru swatted at Kull’s hands until the boy passed over the spyglass.

‘How in the name of Under did he manage to get up there, Captain?’ Loru squinted in disbelief down the spyglass, at the corpse impaled atop the spiked crenelations. ‘That must be the highest point in the city.’ The body faced upwards, as if it had fallen backwards, but there was nothing around it to fall from. Impossible. Loru did not like it one bit.

‘You explain, Scholar.’

‘The King is unharmed?’

‘Sound asleep.’

Loru fiddled with the spyglass. However this had happened, it did not forebode well for poor old Loru the–

‘Well?’ said the captain, glaring at the corpse.

Loru handed the spyglass to Kull. ‘You suspect magic?’

‘What else? The palace guard reported a colossal black and white bird overnight. Banshee vulture. Darkness broke. There he was.’

‘He looks more like a man than a mythical creature to me, Captain. And those vultures look decidedly normal-sized and brown.’

The captain turned his glare on Loru. ‘No sarcasm, Scholar. A man almost breached the palace.’

Yes, and on your watch, Captain. ‘And what would you have me do from down here, Captain? I fear my knees are not what they used to be. Climbing the walls may take me some time.’

Tarut bared his teeth. ‘Not necessary.’ His muscled pate was too thick for Loru’s singular wit, as usual. The captain shimmied around the others – an amusing action for such a large man – so that he was now on Loru’s left side. He retrieved a wooden disk from his pocket and thrust it at Loru. ‘Animate this relict, Scholar.’

Kull gasped. Flabbergasted, Loru gulped and stared at the disk, wrought of wood yet glinting like burnished bronze. When was the last time he had animated a relict – no, when was the last time he had seen a relict outside of his own defunct collection? Two decades, at least. Possibly three.

‘Captain, ahem… I…’ Loru found himself unable to string together a coherent sentence. Unusual, for him.

Tarut pushed the relict into Loru’s hands. ‘Do your job, Scholar.’

Loru struggled to stay his trembling hands and uncertain mind as he ran his fingers over the relict. The centre of the disk depicted a black spider monkey, long tail and fingers grasping branches as it climbed. Spiralling out from the central picture were raised ridges of the continuous, twisting wood-script.

Loru mumbled as he felt the script. ‘The wood is fustic… likely from the Second Era… Captain,’ he exclaimed, forgetting himself, ‘where in the bloody Under did you get this?’

The captain’s scowl made Loru feel as if plunging down the cliff to the cobbles below might not have been such a terrible idea. Tarut’s enormous hands clamped Loru’s spindly fingers around the relict.

‘Do it, wood-whisperer.’

The captain’s granite-block face was menacing, undeniably, but Loru detected a new emotion there. Uncharacteristic anxiety. Something was afoot. Tarut needed him. Loru had control of the situation, despite not knowing what that situation was.

‘Certainly, Captain.’

Tarut was evidently desperate to retrieve the body before anyone woke up and discovered the high-altitude corpse. Why? Simple embarrassment at such a blunder on his watch? Or something more? Perhaps if the metaphorical noose were tightened…

‘Kull,’ said Loru, smiling at his own idea, ‘why don’t you have a crack at animating it, my boy?’ It was high time for the obstinate scamp to actually learn something.

Kull felt the wood-script uncertainly and, with the others’ expectant gazes on him, took a deep breath in. Loru knew it would come to naught from the first. His whisper was breathy and guttural. The intonation was all off. And too wet, too much saliva. Nothing happened. The boy closed his eyes and took another deep breath.

The captain wrested the relict from Kull and forced it into Loru’s hands. ‘Quickly, Scholar.’ The sun was indeed clearing the horizon, and there would soon be onlookers aplenty to notice the body skewered atop the walls.

‘Very well, Captain.’ Loru tutted and felt the script again. Deep breath in.

Air hissed between Loru’s pursed lips, almost tunefully. Smells that were not there flooded his nostrils. Damp earth, the metallic tang of an incoming storm, the pungent aroma of damp fur. Numerous small spikes projected from the face of the disk, like a tiny mountain range.

Taking care not to touch the spikes, Loru offered it to Tarut. The captain shook his immense head and gestured at the other guard. Ah. Now the nervous, scrawny subordinate made sense. Tarut was not willing to risk his own gigantic body. Loru passed the relict around to the guard.

‘For the young master?’

Sweat trailing down his forehead, the guard examined the picture sceptically.

‘Ateles fusciceps,’ said Loru, ‘the black-headed spider monkey. It’s alright, young man, simply place your hand over the spikes. There are no side effects.’ He might be left with an insatiable desire for fruit lasting years. If he survived. ‘It will not hurt.’ It was, in fact, often excruciating, but now that Tarut had what he needed, Loru wanted the palaver over briskly so that he could leave and figure out what in the Under was going on.

The guard placed his hand over the spiked surface of the relict and grimaced. He tried to yank away, but the relict was suckled to him fast.

‘I can feel it sucking my blood,’ he said, somewhat unnecessarily, through gritted teeth.

‘Yes,’ said Loru. ‘They tend to do that. That is somewhat the whole… point.’

No response. Singular wit, wasted on imbeciles. The guard stared in horror at his throbbing hand. Kull and Tarut in turn stared in horror at him. Loru had to remind himself that none of the others would have ever seen magic – proper magic – done before.

Beneath the lad’s hand, Loru knew, the blood would be pulsing down the spikes and drawing a thin line of crimson across the wood-script, as if a calligrapher were tracing over the symbols in red ink. The guard continued wincing – melodramatically, Loru thought – as his hand sprouted thick black hairs. More hair erupted in a wave up his arm, then his torso, face, other arm, until all visible skin was covered in a monkey’s fur. He balked at the sight of it all. Tarut and Kull wore identical grimaces. Loru stood in awe of the majestic craftsmanship of the ancient wood-smiths. And the best part was yet to come.

The relict pulsated like a feasting leech. The guard curled into a foetal position and retched. His limbs and fingers elongated, his toes stretched out from his sandals, a bump appeared where his previously-vestigial tailbone pressed against his breeches. He screeched and collapsed onto the path. The relict detached from his hand with a pop. Tarut picked it up and stowed it away.

‘Is he dead?’ asked Kull.

Loru prodded the monkey-guard with his cane. He did not move.

‘Possibly,’ said Loru.

‘Fuck,’ muttered Tarut.

‘Kull, would you be so good as to bend down and listen to the chap’s breathing? Old knees and all that.’ In fact, it was often prudent to remain distant from recently developed fangs.

Kull knelt and listened at the monkey-guard’s flattened nose.

‘He’s breathing, master.’

‘Ah, excellent. He is simply fatigued.’ Before anyone could stop him, Loru hefted his cane and dealt a vicious strike to the monkey-guard’s abdomen.

The long, furred limbs writhed and the darkened eyes snapped open. Kull did not have time to retreat before the monkey-guard bared a simian snarl and throttled him. Loru had to thwack the monkey-guard with his cane multiple times, until he released Kull and looked at them with a more human expression.

Loru waved his cane up the slope. ‘You may proceed. Remember to exercise caution. Even spider monkeys may fall, if they do not exercise caution.’

The monkey-guard rose and began to climb clumsily. He picked handholds gingerly at first, but soon found a rhythm and raced up the slope.

‘I think the transformation rather improved his appearance, if anything. If that will be all, Captain?’ Loru made to pass Tarut.

The captain stopped Loru with a firm hand on the shoulder. ‘Not so fast, Scholar. What happened here?’

Loru sighed. He wanted to work that out as far away from Tarut as possible. ‘Kull, my eyes are not as sharp as yours. Provide a description of the cadaver, if you would.’

‘Ripped brown rags… no shoes… long plaited hair and beard.’

‘A Sao man, then. A “barkie”, as the youth are wont to say.’

The captain nodded. ‘The palace guard blamed a barkie hex.’

Loru suppressed a scoff. Such absurd notions had been disproven a century ago. But he did not want to reveal what he suspected the true cause of the cadaver was. Magic. Proper magic.

There was a noise from above, half shout, half howl. The monkey-guard was at the foot of the palace wall, waving something in his hand at them.

‘Ah,’ said Loru, feeling queasy. Perhaps his suspicions were about to be proven correct. ‘Our barkie chap appears to have dropped something in the throes of death.’

The monkey-guard climbed down the slope and Kull scrambled up as best he could to meet him. For a moment, Loru and Tarut were left in silence. Not companiable silence, but the all-enveloping, sticky silence that only occurs with two men so very different as they. Why was Tarut so desperate to cover this up?

Kull was scrabbling down the slope to them now, clutching something. The monkey-guard had already made his way back to the palace wall and begun climbing it, with admirably simian form. Was Kull… smiling as he made his way down? Loru did not like the portents today, not one bit.

Kull skidded to a stop. ‘It’s a relict, Master. I have not seen its like before, it is almost as if–’

‘Quiet boy, let me see.’

Loru took it from him. The same shine of burnished metal, but the wood beneath was a deep gold. The wood-script around the edge was whirled and twisted and threaded through with a line of crimson blood. Loru’s breath hitched in his throat. No wonder the boy had not recognised it. Ancient. Possibly older than the First Era. How was it possible? And the picture. The centre of the face depicted a wide-winged, black and white banshee vulture. Loru caught a whiff of rain on the horizon, of decaying… Tarut loomed over his shoulder, trying to look. Loru covered the picture with his fingers, pretending to feel the wood-script.

‘What is it?’ asked the captain.

‘A relict,’ said Kull. ‘It would have changed–’

‘It is certainly a relict,’ interjected Loru. There was no hiding the obvious. The one time he did not want enthusiasm from Kull, and how did the contrary imp behave? ‘But the scheme is rather simple.’ Loru racked his brain for a plausible explanation. ‘The picture on the relict is too worn to make out, but I can decipher the symbol for “flea”. Fleas, interestingly enough, are capable of leaping over one-hundred times their height. Clearly, our poor chap jumped so high that he fell onto the King’s impressively pointy wall.’

‘But, Master,’ said Kull. ‘What about the logographs, the pic–’

Loru jabbed surreptitiously at Kull’s shins with his cane. ‘I am quite sure, boy.’ Kull appeared to get the message.

‘Hmm,’ mumbled the captain. His face was screwed up with something. Cogitation? A worrying prospect for such a brute. Suspicion? ‘How did he use it, then?’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘The dead man. How did he do magic, if it wasn’t a Sao hex, but a Kufasho relict? I thought you were the last wood-whisperer.’ His eyes bored into Loru’s.

Loru wished he knew. ‘Well, ahem, yes. Young Kull is also in training, of course. But anyone, really, can attempt to invoke a relict, ahem, with a small knowledge of the wood-script.’ He licked his suddenly dry lips. ‘What I am trained in is performing the animation properly. Accidents are more than likely with the novice, as must have happened to our chap on the wall.’

Loru could not discern whether the captain was credulous or plotting to have the two of them knifed in their sleep.

‘Right.’ The captain thrust a hand towards the relict. ‘The King will need an explanation.’

Loru clenched the relict to his stomach. ‘Captain, you surely would not forbid an old scholar the chance to carry out his life’s work?’ His voice had become pitchy. ‘It is spent now, unusable. It poses no danger.’

The captain kept his hand extended towards it. Loru was certain the precious relict would be wrestled from him. Then, there was a commotion. Around the hill from the cliff, on the main road of the Hill, a group of people were shouting, pointing at where the monkey-guard was wrestling with the impaled corpse on the wall. Tarut focused on the bystanders and managed a gruff ‘Go,’ before sprinting towards the road.

Loru stooped over his cane and exhaled. Two ancient relicts, previously unknown to the world, used in the space of a day, after decades of nothing. It was the discovery of a lifetime, of a generation, yet Loru was being forced to keep the whole business secret.

‘Why did you lie to the captain, Master?’ asked Kull. The boy was becoming irritatingly probing as he matured.

‘Best we talk about this back at the temple, Kull. Let me lean on your arm.’ The only thing he was good for, it seemed.

They looked up the wall as they walked along the path. The monkey-guard was perched between the spikes, struggling to dislodge the corpse. Several of the circling vultures, apparently disagreeing with the imminent removal of their meal, alighted on the wall and pecked at the monkey-guard, beat him with their wings. The corpse was knocked loose and plummeted towards the cliff. The monkey-guard soon followed, shrieking and flailing at thin air. Both smashed into the cliff with a crunch. Kull hauled his master out of the way as the bodies rolled down the hill. The Sao man’s body was stiff, but the monkey-guard’s limbs flopped like a ragdoll as they morphed back into human form, shortening and shedding fur, leaving tufts snagged on the cliffside. Loru quailed as he glimpsed what used to be the guard’s head, skull caved in and speckled with pink chunks of brain. A truly horrific end. So suddenly it could all come tumbling down.

Despite Kull’s protestations, Loru continued blinking after the corpses. He could not shake the feeling of import, that the events of that morning were simply a beginning. Both bodies rolled to a stop on a rocky shelf. The vultures swooped down. Some of them tucked into the monkey-guard assiduously, but the majority simply stood over the Sao man, as if protecting him. Strange portents indeed.