Date: 2011-08-02 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction & Fantasy; Fantasy; Anthologies; Sword & Sorcery; Literature & Fiction; Anthologies & Short Stories
Description: When a warrior monk discovers his master slain, he sets out to punish the perpetrators. On the way, he is forestalled by an unforeseen force . . . a seductive sorceress who has other plans for him, less trivial than revenge. Can the warrior outwit her charms? Does he have a choice? Dark fantasy, 8800 words.
Rights: All rights reserved (#2802632927150716)

When a forest-seeking warrior-monk discovers his master slain, he sets out to punish the perpetrators.  On the way, he is detained by an unforeseen force … a seductive sorceress who has other plans for him. Can the warrior outwit her charms?

ENCHANTRESS OF RURNE

Chris Turner

Copyright 2011 Chris Turner

Cover Design: Chris Turner

Published by Innersky Books

This is a work of fiction.  All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

Get FREE Books

Subscribe to Chris’s mailing list and get a free book!

innersky.ca/freefantasy4

Enchantress of Rurne

I

In the evening’s gloaming, Taar glanced furtively over his shoulder. The tall, fern-like trees were like witches’ broomsticks pointed to the night sky; the terrain, over which the stars were just starting to show their frosty glare, was unfamiliar. Dark forests and musky lowlands, so unlike his native Jinjan sprawled everywhere. Jinjan—so pleasantly graced with rolling hills, golden countryside and glistening peaks on an aquamarine horizon, seemed very far away.

The thin dirt trail that dogged his feet gave him no solace. Mischief and mishap laced its very ambience. His well-worn boots were fire-blackened; his mulish tangle of hair fell in singed clumps, which a skirmish in a burning fane had not helped. Doggedly, he kicked at the wet dirt, full of odours, taking vengeful breaths from a dry mouth.

Lights glowed ahead: a small hamlet? A good sign. Not much farther could he tread without food and rest.  For three days he had been on the trail of a crew of rogues who had murdered Perias—his master, Alassian forest monk and self-studied magician who had initiated him into the Sizocerene arts of sorcery. Over the crumbling Fallen Wall Taar had ridden and on past the deserted village of Boarspirit, finding it burned to the ground and picked clean by God knows what hands, human or not. After picking up his assassins’ horses’ prints, he had followed up through leagues of wooded hills and windy crow-haunted valleys. Beyond its limits of endurance he had pushed his bay where it had foundered on a hill, leaving the warrior stranded, forced to travel the rest of the way by foot.

The wineskin at his belt was empty. Darkness was upon him; the prospect of shelter seemed questionable.

The sky was a remorseless shroud showing only a plum-hazel band of cloud on the western horizon. In the fading glimmer, Taar noticed a grim raven perched on a goblin-ash. The creature contemplated him with eerie introspection. An omen of evil? Perias would have chuckled. “Ah, Taar, you are a clever man; full of gloomy predilections and strange twists of fate. You came to me seeking wisdom, knowing that in this dark world, man cannot live by sword alone. Mage?—Sorcerer?—Monk? Ha! What are these but foolish words spoken by naive souls scrabbling after fame and fortune. Think you to grasp the Alassian philosophies? Are you worthy to master the arts, and conquer the senses?”

Even while nursing his own pangs of doubt, Taar had assured Perias he was worthy—Perias who had listened with a bark of amusement. He had set a gruelling initiation for his acolyte. Once the silver-haired monk became aware of Taar’s keen ambition and his drive for liberation, he eventually acceded to his request for teachings.

Three years had passed. Now thanks to Perias’s tutelage, Taar harboured a decent command of a few useful spells—good enough to ward off the fatal leap of a creature, though there remained a humbling awareness of how scant his command of magic was.

Knots of sorrow twisted Taar’s guts. No more was his dearest teacher alive left to guide him. Now only an apprentice’s devotion sent a bitter friend upon a grim mission.

He tightened his fist about his pommel. How his master’s slayers would pay for their heinous act! From end to end of these cursed lands he would traipse to exact revenge!

The lights ahead grew to fangs of flame. Smouldering over the rim of a crumbling wall were thrust-up torches. As Taar approached the courtyard, he saw an empty place, unmarked by any living creature, enclosed by a huddle of ramshackle wooden huts. The smell of roasting venison wafted from under the door of the local inn, evidently the village’s largest structure. The portal was twice the height of a man, made of burnt stone and green timber. He could neither see through the grimy ground-level casements nor past. They emitted only a dullest yellow glow. The misshapen troll’s head nailed to the door caused Taar no great surprise: such was common in these backward frontier-lands.

The door gave way with a creak. Taar footed his way down a flight of steps and past a witch-oak beam, under which he saw more crudely-carved heads. His eyes took in a stuffy room with the logs crackling away. Around a rude hearth eight or nine figures huddled, engrossed in private amusements. Roguish-looking, thick-bearded men. A silent person sat apart, dressed in dark leather, possibly a woman, though Taar could not be sure. The figure’s back was turned to him and plunged into shadow. The smell of musk-ale was thick enough to be carved with a knife. A row of boars’ heads mantled the cracked elm wall behind the innkeeper, whose belly protruded over a grimy slab of oak. To his right, a bevy of iron-bound wine barrels was stacked high.

On Taar’s intrusion all laughter immediately faded and a heavy silence reigned. Nine sets of weasel-eyes peered over at him, but Taar did not mind. He sauntered over to the bar, cast an exaggerated swing to the length of silver blade sheathed in its jewelled scabbard—a blatant assertion that an accomplished swordsman was present. One who would bat not an eyelid at some fresh practice.

The landlord seemed amused, leaned over, intrigued by the newcomer’s heavy tread. His unfriendly gaze lingered. The dark, saturnine face of Taar did not reassure him; it told of grievous tales, as did the scars that marked the right forearm and the gash on the left cheek. Thick knuckles gripped the custom-gilded pommel of his blade. Tousled hair the colour of sand ran down his neck of tanned ochre; the lips were proud and curled back under a hawk-like nose. The ashen-grey eyes gleamed with a tragic sense of adventure—with unwritten respect for the wonders of the world.

The innkeeper mumbled, “What shall it be, traveller? Goat mead or boar’s blood? We don’t see many strangers wandering into Hunter’s Rest.”

Taar did not reply; the man’s dialect was strange. He made a curt motion to the keg of ale. “Ale—no blood.”

The innkeeper twitched his fingers. “A mug’ll be two penzers.”

Taar threw a bronze coin on the carven bar slab. It rolled to a halt, glittering in the flickering light of the oil lamp stuck between the boars’ heads.

“Ah, a man of coin!—my preferred kind. One mug of Hunter’s ale on its way.”

Taar’s voice twanged in the local tongue like strung wire: “I’m looking for two rogues, possibly three. Thieves. Men in a great hurry. Probably wouldn’t have stayed any longer than to glut their bellies with a few scraps of meat.”

“Perhaps I saw them and perhaps I didn’t. What does it mean to you?”

“They have something of mine, which I want returned.”

The innkeeper gave a grave laugh. “Well, that’s fine and nice.” He leaned over the table and put a meaty hand out to his mouth. “Hey, Roraol, Corben. Listen, this slanty-eyed Jinjan here says—”

The landlord choked on his last words as Taar’s mallet-like fist shot out, grabbed the innkeeper’s wattled neck and lifted him to put his head level with the up-strung boar heads. “Quietly now, old fool. Let us speak if we have something to say, otherwise let us hold our slippery tongues.”

Amid the gathering, five stools scraped back. Five men sprang upon Taar; crooked scimitars and knives flashed into their greasy palms.

Taar whirled. “Easy lads. I’ll take any of you, one or all if I must.” He unsheathed his sword and bared its naked steel, glittering in the fire’s greedy flame.

The local ruffians halted, not liking the feral look in the stranger’s eye, nor the way in which he wielded the grim, silver, rune-lined sword while effortlessly holding the burly landlord aloft.

The landlord muttered a strangled croak. “You’ll hear no words from me. Unhand me!”

Taar gave a gracious tilt of head. He hooked the innkeeper’s leather neck-flap on the boar’s tusk and let him hang there while the innkeeper’s rancid boots dangled in mid-air.

The tall figure whom Taar had noticed before sauntered forward and caused the swordsman small surprise. At first glance, she was a scintillating creature in any light that Taar had ever seen. Wavy hair parted in the middle, red with tawny streaks flowing to the right, oyster white to the left. Twin dirks lay tucked in her silver-green snakeskin belt. Rising from ankle to neck rippled a costume of black leather, smooth as satin and as tight as rope, emphasizing brazen hips and taut, shapely breasts.

“I know of your thieves,” the stranger announced tersely. “They are not all men. One’s an old witch, and the other two are hired ghoul-men. I saw them yesterday around sundown. They were taking to the western road—to Zantius then on into Shnuor’s forest when I arrived in this stinking hole of Trollnook.”

Taar strode forward, incensed. “What is this, woman? Speak!”

“Patience,” she said. “You’ll not catch them at night. Let us sit down and converse.”

Taar grunted; they took stools at a table farthest from the muttering, seething locals. Taar was puzzled, for he rarely took anyone’s command so readily. He sniffed at the air. There was the strange scent of myrrh in the air about this female. Balsam also? Hickory? He thrust his speculations aside. “What of these people? How did you see them, and what makes you think they are the ones I seek?”

The woman answered glibly, aware of the burning fervour in the foreigner’s eyes. “I can tell you their names. Wislox and Daig—villains from Cutter’s Pond. The old crone is a changeling—calls herself Welfstang. What feud would you have with these lowlifes?”

Taar’s lips curled in a sneer. Undisguised hate brimmed in his scarred face. “I am Taar, swordsman and mystic from the east. They killed my master for the Tu-Steev, a magical knife cutting through steel. I knew little of my master’s slayers, only that there were three of them, by the sign of the footprints they left outside his forest hut.”

The woman nodded silently. “If I wasn’t already engaged in business of my own, I would go after them with you, for I owe dear Welfstang a debt.”

Taar waved away the kindness. “No thanks, I must go.” He rose to leave but she put a hand on his arm. Her grip was hot and strong and Taar felt many peculiar sensations creeping up his arm. He felt languorous pleasures, heated baths, scented oils, fleshy, luxurious sex … The dazzling clear-cut gem clasped on her index finger caught his rolling eye and gleamed with the intensity of an enflamed city. “You must stay with me the night,” she asserted.

Taar’s teeth flashed in surprise. “What does the honour? Surely not the beautiful scar running cross my cheek?”

“A man’s outer scars mean nothing,” she sneered. “’Tis the inner man which is of importance to me.”

“Profound words, lass,” he grunted, looking her over with growing interest, and not without some attraction. “What’s your name, and why are you here alone amidst these rogues? The minute I leave these premises they’ll be up to mischief with you in no time.”

The woman laughed, her sultry mouth a display of mockery. Her laughter exemplified as much concern for a man as would a lioness staking a herd of goats. “Let’s just say that these bullies have grown wise not to lay a hand on me.”

“As you say,” Taar replied, blinking.

At the bar, the innkeeper’s cronies were managing to unhook him from the tusks. The landlord landed with a thud on his butt bringing the stuffed head toppling down on his head. Pitching the trophy aside, he glared at Taar with malice. “Found a new friend, have you, slanty-eyes?” He heaved himself erect. “Be careful with little Sowela here; she might prove a little more coltish than you expect.”

Taar guffawed. “I think I can cope with one lone girl, innkeeper. You on the other hand—” He downed the last of his ale and expelled a breath “—are hopeless. Let’s go—Sowela, if that’s your name. I shall gladly take up your offer, but I need some rest and recuperation before tomorrow’s hunt.”

From the corner of his eye, he caught a strange shimmering light, causing his eyes to drop to the glistening emerald upon the woman’s finger. It tickled at the edge of his imagination, sending roaring passion up through his loins. He started uncomfortably. Who was this alluring minx?

A nameless stir still flared in his breast. The innkeeper’s vindictive smirk caused him to frown as he left.

II

Out in the chill, Sowela led Taar west along the main road toward glowering purple trees framed on the horizon. He was surprised that she had no horse, but he made no comment. He saw the Hunter’s Rest sign shivering in the vagrant breeze, also the stanchion from where he had snatched a blazing torch.

Sowela stopped before a footpath cutting into the wood. She pointed a jewelled finger: “It is three or more leagues west to the frontier of Danzinia and to the city of hundred-spired Zastius.”

Taar whistled. “The Danzinian border lies so close?” He did not realize he had made so many leagues since the Sekkian uplands.

The swordsman rubbed his chin; his eyes narrowed to slits. “It is said that if a man keeps travelling west, he reaches the Purple Sea—a place where ships sail to the islands peopled with strange tribes amid mountains of jet.”

“Of that I would not know,” she commented. “Shall we go? Rurne lies this way.” She lifted a white hand to the trail.

“Rurne? Into that gloomy tangle?” He gave an incredulous grunt.

“Of course? Where else?” She tugged his arm, leading him under the beckoning eaves. They left the smoking torchlights of Trollnook behind with the swordsman feeling a small pang of misgivings.

His suspicions were not without substance; more puzzled than ever was he to learn that the alluring Sowela would live in such a remote place as Rurne. Where? Why? It made no sense to his logical mind.

The trail was thin and little used. Over willowy boughs and ages of fallen leaves they trudged with the harvest moon waxing like a bloated pig. Warm mist, blue in comparison to the sallow glow cast by the moon, hung in between the old trunks, gnarled and weathered. Dank chill and moss sprouted everywhere. Spidery leaves swayed in the unholy rhythm of breezes and cool vapours coursed through the narrow, tree-crowded aisles.

Taar did not know how long he trudged with Sowela along this mysterious route, only that he ever disliked the eerie presence of the twisted bushes and the strange birds hovering over his shoulder. Like two wraiths he and his guide moved as one through the ever-thickening gloom. He gripped his sword, glanced about uneasily. Pale waist-high mushrooms tottered on thick stems and grew in disquieting numbers. Ringed fungus gripped the trees like lampreys. The tangy smell of musk drifted in the air; something more sinister too which Taar could not identify. Rotting things lying deep in hidden troll-haunted swamps that had not seen the daylight for centuries. Overhead the canopy stretched, and always did his enigmatic companion lead him with an effortlessness born of self-assurance farther and farther toward the glowing moon, which was like a gleaming eye lurking in a witch-breed of stars. While his belly grumbled with hunger, every wayfaring instinct told him that this forest was a place of lurking evil.

More primal than ever did Sowela appear in the exotic moonlight. Her hypnotic eyes seemed to wander over his muscled torso and burn like an expectant she-wolf’s. Her movements were lithe and surreptitious; her arms hung by her sides, her carriage seemed slightly bent and insolent; the trees, more her secret companions than nameless items of flora, seemed to bend to her passage.

Taar’s sudden desire for her flesh flashed again and the woman’s seductive aura became a promise of rapture, to which he was drawn like a magnet, feeling a lover’s ache for the warm, inviting woman-ness lurking beneath that soft leather. Always at the edge of his awareness was her churlish laugh, a sound enticing his imagination, while her scintillating ring glittered in the torchlight and mesmerized his waning will. Her smile was a mischievous leer, promising fey fortunes; her scent worked sensual magic on his will and enveloped him in a cloak of passion.

No longer could he withstand her fierce attraction. He made a clumsy grope for her waist but she slipped away like an eel.

“There shall be time for that later, Taar of Tumestoi—there will be time—at Rurne.” Her chuckle was instinctively chilling.

Not for years had Taar felt such heated passion. The woman was probably leading him into some deadly trap, as did everything his twenty-five years of martial training tell him, but a man like him caught in a spell, was a dangerous combination. His legs dragged him forward with a force of their own—beyond logic and reason, to a place called ‘Rurne’. He gritted his teeth, cursed his random fortune, and wondered what had brought him on this unearthly pilgrimage.

Long had Sowela abandoned the hunter’s trail; now they marched as one through virgin forest thick with elf shrub of pale, water-beaded bark and of girth he had not seen before in his native Jinjan. He swung his torch, risked a look behind, watched beguiled as the trampled ferns seemed to rise again like living automatons, masking any signs of their passage. The trees were black as stalks in a pikeman’s row and seemed to stride forward, close rank, to form a protective shield around their selected guests.

Taar shook his head. Just an illusion. He was fatigued beyond measure and depressed at his master’s death. Surely he was given over to languor by the dark, unfriendly place and Sowela’s bewitching presence.

The brooding arms of the forest gave way. A rounded hill stood wrapped in krall-bush and twisted conifer. A narrow path wound alongside the hill and up to an ink-stained hedge. A tower or spire, all shadow and dusk, seemed to rise skyward like an ogre’s bastion over the crest of the hill.

Down the path Sowela led him, then along the edge of what appeared a dark pool, as unmoving as glass.

Taar’s jaw dropped; round the hill he saw a strange sight: a jungled castle of antediluvian grandeur cut into the mossy tree-slope—whether crafted of mud or stone he could not tell, for the lofty battlements marvelled the eye and ranged upon high. On the crenellations spread gigantic trees whose tops reared like dumb bells and whose monstrous roots prowled down the weathered stone like hard, ropy vine. A tower squirmed amongst those trees, tilting upward toward the sky, completely covered in vine, much higher than the hill itself. From its summit a single window glared with a yellow glow and wafted smoke that caught the amber bloodshine of the moon.

Who had crafted such an eldritch place? Surely not this enchantress who tugged him along so gaily, with such purpose?

Under the hill’s shadow, Taar was led across an esplanade of shattered tile then under a great iron-toothed gate. Each gatepost was capped with bears’ skulls and other spine-shivering skulls. Ghoulish lanterns, lit by unknown means, ranged upon an iron trellis that straddled the walkway. Taar discerned cold grey-iron stone growing out of the old gloom.

While four-winged condors fled against the mourning moon, out of the coppery shadows suddenly emerged a great moving shape bearing trident and ball and chain. The thing was blacker than black and had no distinguishable form. Taar only guessed that it was powered by some evil force. He stepped back, drawing his sword but Sowela waved a hand. The guardian, fell to submission, and let them pass.

Under an archway the two moved, past the guardian, cool as death, then out into the dark spaces beyond. Bare basalt spread underfoot into an unlit chamber crowded with dark walls and python-like roots. A flight of weathered steps appeared behind an archway, spiralling up into darkness. There were no lights in this keep and Sowela led Taar by the hand, a duty and privilege which he could not refuse.

Up and up the winding stair they climbed, with Taar’s torch guttering in the small draughts, into the clouds it seemed, and the memory of the yellow glow atop the tower burned in his astounded brain.

“Since you will be staying the evening, I demand of you a task.”

Taar growled in protest, “Who says I’ll be staying the night. I’ll not do errands for a witch!”

A scathing sound hissed past Sowela’s pursed lips. “Oh no? You who hunger for my flesh? Carefully now, or you may end up like the others.”

“What others?”

Sowela grabbed his wrist and pulled him along up four more steps into a circular chamber lit by three torches hanging on brass sconces. Taar felt weak, he could not resist her pull. The floor was mud-brushed stone and full of dust and emptiness save for a domed hump that covered some fiendish, shadow-haunted entranceway cut downward into the floor at a forty-five degree angle. Sowela gestured toward the passage—a command more than an invitation. Taar crept forward, more cautious than afraid.

He thrust his torch under the overhang and craned his neck to see past another rusty iron grate. There in that black pit lolled many men, though now nothing more than gibbering creatures. Sinister moans slobbered from their lips; eyes were like vacant pits, spy-glasses, grim vistas into dead brains. Gnarled, thumbless hands grasped the bars and shook. Snakes and other creatures dwelled in that rank pit, creatures which had had their ways with the men, for even now, one man was missing an arm and was tugged back by a malevolent force as a brown, wedge-headed thing slithered up his leg.

“Black demons of hell!” hissed Taar. “What manner of inhuman filth lies in here? He hauled himself back, his eyes blazing with wrath. “Have you no mercy, vixen? Why do you torture these men so?”

Sowela flicked a contemptuous finger toward the bars. “Regard all the weak fools who have failed in their attempts at my ‘mission’. I keep them locked up so that their tongues won’t wag at the Hunter’s Rest as to what a delightful creature I am.”

Taar made a hateful lunge. Sowela stepped aside, slapped his rugged face: a blow as hard as any man’s.

Taar snarled, stabbed out a fist as such would knock a man flying to his knees, but found his arm pulled back by invisible strings. Another smarting blow struck his cheek. He staggered back, cursing. The enchantress had cast some foul spell over him. He reached for his pouch—looking for Perias’s magic pebbles. His hands would not obey. His few paltry spells seemed uselessly ineffective in her midst. This she-devil was stronger than he would have imagined. Her weight and size were pure illusion. The seductive attraction pulsing in the pit of his stomach was not an illusion. Suddenly the magic cast a cold shiver up his spine. How could he harm this fair flower rooted so impudently before him?

A moan drifted from the dungeon, jarring him out of his reverie.

“Would you like to join them?” she inquired. “I myself would consider myself fortunate to be the one next on trial.”

Taar shook his head with resentment. “Why not pen me like the others then?”

“I need a man of strength. A warrior, like you. You are perfect for my needs.”

Taar laughed, a harsh, metallic sound. “There are many ‘warriors’ in these naked lands.”

“Perhaps. But not like you. There is a cold passion running in your blood. One colouring your soul a black-orange, and even a green, and that is rare. I see in your aura a man who travels past dooms and pits till death calls, as it does your master’s murderers. ’Tis that tenacity which I like. When I saw you in that reeking dive I knew you were the one, the one spoken of in the Book.”

Taar scoffed. “What book?—and I curse your conniving means, woman.”

She ignored the remark. “Others would be fickle; they would abandon my cause at a whore’s call and I would be forced to chain them with my magic and keep them alert to their cause. Should I waste time fettering cowards with spells? No!” She laughed like a wolf, the snarl of ancient savagery. “It spoils a man’s initiative. We shall do the deed by blood bond.”

A dirk flashed in her hand. She slashed a piece out of Taar’s fine roan-leather jerkin along the upper arm, exposing the brown skin in the torchlight. Running the blade along her own thumb, she drew blood, then jabbed the tip of the jewelled knife under his unyielding skin. Taar felt a prickling in his arm which shot up into his throat as the blood of hers met the blood of his. Pounding hell-fire racked his body. A strangling blood bond formed, wrapped stronger than any chains to this mysterious woman. Like nothing was her mesmeric ring compared to this sinful sap that flowed now through his body—ichor that was joined in everlasting union. He felt an insatiable allegiance to this creature, as if he would travel the ends of the world for her. Woe! How could he have been so unlucky?—so naïve? What foul fate had he incurred?

“While blood flows in my veins,” she croaked, “you shall truckle to my bidding. So it was spoken that one day I would twice join with a resolute man of the sword who would come to liberate me from the demon’s curse.”

“Demon?” rasped Taar. “What’s this about a demon?”

She looked at him, her large, amethyst eyes filled without pity. “Poor fool. You have no clue. Long ago a spell was laden on me—one so strong that I could not break it, though I had many great gifts and marvels at my disposal. I was but a child of seven that one day I wandered too far in the woods and became lost. A place not unlike this, though it feels worlds away. I fell to the turf sobbing in my sleep, in a vine-knitted copse where I awoke from the most horrible dream, if dream it was, for I had witnessed something too terrible for words, that no child should ever see.” She paused in bitter reflection. “From then on, the seeds of a dark path were instilled in my spirit … and they tempted me. Aye, I was to be the most formidable sorceress in all Tandarland. But alas, the demon saw to that. I can barely venture a league from Rurne without his energy glutting mine. I must walk free of this curse!”

“I refuse to be your glove-puppet.”

“Try, but you will fail.”

Taar was silent for a time. He summoned his spells but they had deserted him. Whatever influence this devilress had over him, it included his command of magic. “I will do this deed of yours, witch, though I know not what it is.”

Toward the growing light they climbed, Taar struggling with feet of lead; the enchantress dogged his heels, brimming with a sense of exultation.

III

The two emerged into the tower’s crows’ nest, a circular chamber of high-peaked roof and mud-like walls, bare save for two emblazoned tapestries chased in gold. Taar saw vines creeping in past the windowsill. Thorned branches played twining fingers down the stone floor. A black cast-iron pot boiled over a glowering fire while silver-green smoke fumed out from the open window. A soft divan reposed nearby, alongside an oaken desk littered with folios and iron-bound books whose pages were lit by twin candelabra. An alabaster altar stood aside the desk, glowing with candles and torches and populated with pantheons of strange semi-human figurines: nymphs, dryads, beasts, snakes, reptiles, all manner of beasts adorned with countless gems glittering frost-like in the candles’ guttering glare.

The floor, Taar saw, was covered with a heavy mat on which was inscribed various glyphs and strange symbols: of crescent moons, stars, candles, sickles painted in red, black, yellow and orange, underscored by ancient writings beyond Taar’s ken. Some of the more cryptic runes he recognized as markings of the black tongue of Koppor, spoken by those demon succubi people who crafted the ancient Ziggurats of the southern wastelands.

The enchantress led Taar past the altar and over to the desk where she buried her eyes in pages of runes of spell books.

Taar gazed disconsolately out the window. He saw wispy branches trembling in a chill draft far below. A pool was as still and ominous as black ice. No twinkling lights of villages bade welcome in those long leagues of lonely forest. It seemed he stood miles above an endless wood, trapped in a dream, in an isolated, vine-covered tower.

On the sill Taar picked up what looked to be a sinister clock powered by a beaker of sand. Its face showed time by hands carved of human finger-bones. He toyed idly with the curio, tipping it sideways and watched dully as the sands shifted and the claw moved back half an inch.

Sowela leapt over and snatched the ornament from his grasp. “Leave this alone. ’Tis my life-register! Now listen to the spell that describes the mission with which I charge you:

“Let he who is brave enough to face the underworld blight with steel alone, be the bait! Hear, o necromancer! Scream the summoning with eyes wide! Unleash the mystery of Reclamation. Into the shrine of jade and onyx shall the demon’s force be bottled. Thus speaks Ancast the witch!”

Taar shuddered, listening with disgust and confusion. “What need you of me?”

“Fool! If the demon notices me, he’ll know it is a trap. Which is why I need somebody else.” She pointed to the frothing cauldron. “Those smokes are my efforts to concoct the potions of the Reclamation to thwart his terror. As I hinted, I was cursed by words that should have never crossed my lips. I was only an adolescent then, a natural in the Black Arts, but delving foolishly into the realms best left untouched, I fell prey to Horkinhar’s wrath. I harboured not the knowledge to combat the unheard-of territories with his sinister force.”

“Whose wrath?” sneered Taar.

“A demon of the night worlds, beyond Tethys!—a demon whose name I am loath to whisper! Do not repeat his name, for you shall know the terrors of the gulfs beyond, swordsman.” Her violet eyes lost some of their menace and glazed over like ceramic. “How he lusted for me! I was the most sexual creature he had ever encountered. He could not take his mind off me …

“He sentenced me here in jest, to Rurne, his wretched hill-keep, so that I might be his plaything on the night of each full moon. This is his castle; these are his rooms; so I have taken residence for an age. The demon-king lets me tinker with my potions, but oh, how he laughs at my feeble attempt to foil his everlasting curse!”

Taar smiled without remorse. “Such are life’s vicissitudes.”

“Shut your mouth! You must face the creature. Together we will defeat the menace or perish. Only because I am strong can he enter the mortal realm.  Each moon he takes my feminine force, adds it to his own power in order to combat the material barriers at the threshold of the mortal and spirit plane. This is your task! Bait the ghoul, draw him into my trap so that I might walk free from his curse, and fall prey to no more of his insidious lusts.”

“Alas,” declared Taar sourly, “this is a thing beyond my ability.”

“You will do as I say or suffer like the rest!” She strode briskly over to the altar and selected an eight-inch bottle crafted of jade and banded with onyx and gold that seemed to glow with an inner light of its own. “This is Ancast’s vessel.” She placed it at Taar’s feet. Into the cauldron she plunged a ladle and splashed frothing liquid in a circle about five feet in diameter around Taar and the bottle. The liquid hissed. Some of it ate through the mat and up came a turquoise smoke that stung Taar’s eyes. The odour was of the same pungent hickory that he had perceived upon their introduction.

Sowela cried: “Here stand you with the bottle to face the demon. The shadow shall not be an easy foe! While he is distracted I utter the spell and his force shall be snatched into the bottle.”

Taar scrambled quickly out of the circle.

“Swear it!” she cried.

Taar swore it. Nothing else could he do.

Sowela glanced at the clock and gave a satisfied nod. “The demon shall not come till midnight. In the case that you are to fall to him, which sadly is a high probability, I shall at least taste the warmth of your flesh.”

Letting her soft leather slip to the floor, she leered. As naked as Eve she stood, fully revealed as a lithesome ivory nymph. Her silken breasts were ornaments of pure living blossoms, her lips sultry slashes of pink-rose, her multi-coloured locks swung down to exquisitely-shaped, honey-sweet hips. Though Taar despised the treachery of this witch, he was not of quality to resist her.

Perias would have agreed. Down onto her velvet divan she drew him, where, against her enchantment, Taar was powerless. Her embrace was like a torrent of fire. Through Taar ran an electric current, of mingled hate and lust and other irreconcilable emotions raging in a moon-tower of abandon.

Time seemed to pass like aeons in a land of exotic splendour. In their erotic embraces neither Taar nor Sowela were aware of the chilly cloud that came shuddering through the window, and came creeping across the floor like a snake. Nor were they aware of the grim, loathsome thing that spawned in that slow-swirling mystery. It inched its way slowly upon the two lovers on six silent hooves.

In her passion, Sowela felt a faint movement tickling her naked breast. She glanced aside to see a huge goat-like head rear over Taar’s lean shoulder. Three curling ox horns grew from a blasphemous crown; unblinking orbs seared forth blazing blue light. The sight rendered the sorceress senseless. Her limbs seemed petrified like wood. Never before had her master arrived before the hour of twelve! Then she remembered, how her new lover had been toying with the time-teller by the window, and spasmodically she rocked beneath him and let loose a frightful screech. Taar whirled and beheld a depraved sight: a red-furred monstrosity the size of a horse with a llama’s neck, a goat’s head and a bull’s body. Blue-grey mist swirled about its high, spiked hooves.

Snatching for his sword, he let the Alassian blade arc a gleaming path upward, shearing a furry leg to the bone. The lifeless limb flew tumbling across the floor. But the demon only raised a yellow-bearded jowl and laughed—a bloodcurdling guffaw that froze blood to ice. Forward Horkinhar limped on its five remaining legs, and then, all at once, a stream of serpentine tentacles erupted from its back and rippled out toward the divan.

Taar made hacking play at the rush of tentacles and checked the first rippling appendages, but was not in time to prevent the blade from being snatched away. A new battalion of gummy loops flew through the air like coiling arrows and rippled around his muscle-taut form. Before he could counter, a score of writhing appendages slithered about his thewed shoulders, then as quickly, slipped under Sowela’s slender, naked waist and whipped her up into the air. The foul links constricted the two together in a repulsive, mocking embrace. There they floated two feet over the divan, stuck together like two luckless pieces of serpent meat. The coils wrapped tighter and Taar’s incredible strength was squeezed out of him.

The first ghastly touch of those gummy loops brought a blinding, snapping madness to his brain, plunging him into an erotic world of shadows. Perias had warned him of the world of the Shadow—where the air was a medium of weightless water and pulsed with an otherworldly, sub-aqueous light. The demon thing loomed like a puppet born of nightmare, and Taar could perceive Sowela locked in insuperable loops, but she was only vaguely formed and half human herself. Her soul had been ripped away for so long by this blasphemy of the nether depths, that she was long on her way to losing her female form and taking on the characteristics of his abysmal, perverted world.

Fighting back his horror, Taar heard his master’s voice echoing in his brain:

“Remember, Taar, never speak your name aloud in a demon’s presence. Show fear only at your peril. Mortal weapons are useless against them, as you will discover. Embrace the magic as I have taught you. Mayhap Taar, you will succeed in confronting your worst nightmare, hidden terrors as you can never imagine!”

He could have cried out, for when he squinted through that watery light, there was poor Perias joined in the ranks of the dead, sad and withered. His head was dangling at the stem, his limbs racked with awful wounds.

Then his form shimmered and the scene changed to one of the past. The surroundings were murky but the characters clear. Taar could see himself and his master, riposting in mock battle around a magic fire in a glade before his hut. Perias was throwing pulsing orbs of green light at him while he parried with his ensorcelled blade wiped thrice in the magic of Rlon.

The image faded; he was gone; now the old man was caught in a web of treachery, breathing his last gusts of breath while two bloody-handed brigands slashed down on his quivering limbs with rusty mattocks, and in the background a cackling old hag made off with his enchanted scimitar.

Whether it was a side effect of the Shadow or not, Taar saw other people gathered about like zombies: friends, old acquaintances, relatives, all emaciated and grisly memories in all aspects of death and undeath to the point of revulsion.

Taar was thrust back into reality. He knew no greater horror than the glaring, goat-like face that bent so close to kiss him, and the squeezing, strangling coils that tightened ever around his bulging thews. Gagging in the demon’s reek, he spat the words ‘Ank Urgh Akula!—’ the words Perias had given him. Then he sagged, wincing with the pain of the effort of speech.

The demon’s slavering mouth stopped an inch from his throat. A hideous guttural voice rang forth from blasphemous gulfs: “Who are you, insignificant flea, to parrot the Chant of Dismissal?”

Taar gurgled incomprehensible words—the last he knew of the old incantation as ancient and evil as ever that Perias had taught him.

The demon shook with anger and dismay. Taar felt an inch of coil give slack, and welcome air return to his lungs.

Horkinhar howled: “Ank is only the first word of the Chant! Know you not the rest?”

“Zost!” Taar gasped. The incantation was so close to completion, but so far. Death was calling.

Squirming in the serpentish coils, Sowela howled her fiercest invocations. Her prince laughed with macabre ecstasy. All her magic seemed to have abandoned her in the presence of this bane. Taar could feel her heart beating against his breast, feel her animal-like warmth flooding him with a power that he had never experienced, but her soft skin was stained an unctuous green from the demon’s slime, and he grimaced with loathing at the thought of the countless grisly couplings this woman and her demon had shared.

Horkinhar pranced forward, its horned shadow looming over the two like a nightmare’s climax. “Tell me your name, plaything, and let darkness enfold your myopic being! Can you not hear it? Listen! The gongs of doom toll for your soul!”

Sowela wheezed. “Kill the infidel, Horkinhar. The swine tried to take your mistress by force!”

Taar’s breath raged between his teeth.

Through wide, glaring eyes, the demon saw the jade and onyx bottle lying on the enchantress’s mat and an evil intelligence began to dawn in his consciousness.

“Take you by force, did he?” The gigantic goat’s head swivelled mirthlessly in Sowela’s direction. “You seemed to be enjoying it, so I recall. Why not cuddle a little closer?”

Reptilian muscles jerked and coils constricted with hideous elasticity that made both of them writhe in pure agony. Sowela’s body was contorted into a hunched ribbon. She gasped, her eyes wide with limitless fear. Taar squeezed his eyes shut and felt his bones on the verge of snapping.

The demon gave a cruel laugh. “If such were possible, you, boy, would rather die than tell me your name. But what need I of your corpse when I have an earthly trophy beyond imagining?” The bloated, yellow-bearded face drew close. Out flicked a rasping tongue that licked Sowela’s pale, sweat-beaded cheek. “My little sylph! How you have much to make up for your indiscretions!”

Four coils unwound and Taar rolled onto the divan and bounced to the floor in a shrunken heap.  But the very same coils wound quick as spider’s thread about the girl, who loosed an unearthly shriek that sent shivers down Taar’s back.

That was not all that pricked the small hairs on the back of Taar’s neck. Unexpectedly a black, swirling void seemed to open up from nowhere on the mosaicked mat. Taar swore. He caught a glimpse of a blasphemy of goat and bull hopping away on five legs toward the gap. The demon made a last monumental leap into the whirlpool, taking with it a naked, writhing form struggling on its back, looped in slime-sheened hoops of wrath and doom.

Taar watched spellbound as the demon took its prize into black nothingness, then down into whatever depths such things go. The void shimmered in violet haze and speckles of gold, then vanished.

Taar squinted about in an unreal daze. The chamber stood still as a mummy’s tomb. The fire was cold ash. The candles guttered in a soft, chanting wind that wafted from the window. The blood pounded in Taar’s ears. He tried to reclaim his sanity, but could only shake his head in apathy. Surely he must be witness to some foul dream? The overturned bottle lay on the floor. This was no idle dream. He picked it up and was about to put it back on the altar when sudden anger took hold and he hurled it through the window. He seized the clock, and threw it too, and they both fell smashing on the rocks, crushing Sowela’s last hope for emancipation from Horkinhar’s eternal lusts—but of that he could not know.

The chamber was becoming frightfully cold. Soon the candle would extinguish, leaving him in darkness. Shivering with exhaustion, Taar gathered his garments and his blade.

IV

Moans of distress echoed faintly from the stairwell and reminded Taar of the huddle of men imprisoned half way down the tower. He snatched up a faltering candle and scuttled down the murky flight on rubber legs.

He was directly above the tower’s armoury. Under the domed chamber he found the prisoners as before: gibbering and moaning, imploring him to pry open the grate. He paused, held his breath. A force of dread waxed thick in the air and was advancing with speed.

Rurne’s guardian was returning.

On noiseless feet, Taar crept over to the stairwell. He could feel an ancient presence—the same crawling menace when he and Sowela had entered the gate-guarded keep—a black shadow darker than dark bounding up those time-eaten steps. No doubt the guardian was aware for the first time of the terrible turn in its mistress’s fate.

A helpless rage washed over Taar. Where was he to run? He thought to hold his ground, bare his sword, but in wise practicality, he quickly hid in the shadows, knowing that against this creature he was no match.

He pressed himself against the prison grate, crouching so low that only the top of his head could be seen above the level of the floor. Twelve paces away, the malevolence lurked, brooding, scanning, sizing.

The thing poised, waiting like a hungry predator. Taar moved, his eyes flicked upward a fraction.

Its bulky mass filled the entire C-shaped stairway. He also discerned a yellow pinprick of eyes and the thrust of a horn pitched in a dense mass of a million silently-buzzing black flies. So this was the guardian’s form! But he could not be sure, so eclipsed was he in cumulative horror of what he saw before him.

The dark monstrosity hesitated, sensing an unfamiliar presence.

Taar sagged. How could he fight a foe he hadn’t a clue what it was?

He felt the warm touch of his magical beads in his pouch. If he were to roll them in his open palm, perhaps he could cast some kind of primitive telekinetic ripple. Rubbing the three scorpion-stones together, he whispered an old spell. The fires on the torches flared but their shafts did not budge. He scowled with disgust. So weak was his magic, so short had been his training!

He considered his options. Engage the beast? Hunker in the dark, hoping to stay undetected? Doubtless the ghoul, which was fast sniffing him out, would be more than disgruntled to discover him here and not Sowela, if indeed this were her abhorrent guardian and not some ghastly plaything bestowed upon her by the demon king. If the latter were true, he was done for. A prickling sensation tingled his skin, and a memory in a dimly-lit ale-room, where he had heard a frightful tale whispered by a well-travelled wayfarer who had witnessed the rites of Kopporian shamans on high hills chanting cantraps to summon minions worse than their masters—minions endowed with powers that made freezing a troll on the spot and blasting it into oblivion seem a childish exercise.

It did not occur to Taar that this creature was neither Sowela’s pet nor the demon creature’s, but something more elementally ancient, something that had inhabited this hill before men had walked the steppes and roamed the hills.

For the moment, the creature’s intent was bent on the high tower. Its impending presence vanished out of the chamber.

Frantically Taar began hacking at the prison’s locks. Ever and again he struck with his blade, pried at the rusty prongs and iron bars embedded in the overhanging stone. The layers of rust were still enduring and would not give. Within the pit, five living men howled in dreadful anticipation, their white faces lit with pasty expectancy, their parched lips working in turbulent distress.

But now, the creeping shadow fled back toward the tower’s middle, alerted by desperate sounds ringing below. Taar grimaced, feeling cold anguish well in the pit of his stomach. Back from the grate he edged and the men’s frustrated cries were heartrending. Curse the witch Sowela!

Horkinhar’s call sliced the silence. The demon was returning. An echoing boom rocked the chamber and Taar fell to his knees. The tower groaned like the creaking of a hundred ships bending in a storm. All about him the walls heaved and buckled. A great slab of greyish stone toppled, missing his head by inches. He jerked back two steps, down the stairs, hoping that by chance the menace would not dog his heels. He hated himself for his cowardice, but there was no choice. Impossible to free the men and escape at the same time. Down those cursed stairs he leapt, taking four at a time while the cut in his upper arm throbbed.

Aching within him was Sowela’s infectious bond. Her lustful presence was as of some fleeting past. Poor doomed Sowela!

Grimly, he pushed down the mounting panic growing in his breast. Out from under the overgrown arch he fled, staggering like a madman past the iron-trellised hedgeway, ducking tumbling stone and dodging fallen limb. Twice he was almost sprawled senseless by massive trunks plummeting from high. On another occasion, he was almost buried by a storm of basalt.

On he stumbled.

Standing a hundred feet back from the hill, he halted, gasping for precious air. He looked over his shoulder. The slope was a shifting mass of chaos and destruction. Huge trees uprooted and sheared. The castle swayed, gave one last abysmal heave then came crashing down into shards and clouds of grey dust along with the men who were imprisoned there.

Taar shook his head in black defeat. Had the wretches deserved this useless doom? The demon Horkinhar had seen to the destruction of Rurne’s outpost—a final vengeance on man now that Sowela’s task was done.

What had become of the black shambling thing, Taar could not say, but he doubted that it had died in that crumble. Soon it would be lumbering after him on noiseless feet.

He limped off into the forest like a broken crow; only the sallow moon floating in a sky of pitch remained to recall Sowela’s deeds and what had gone before. A distasteful ordeal all in all … now another awaited.

V

In the days that followed Taar caught up with Perias’s murderers. The rogues were sheltering in a wood near Traghem, hunched around a small fire, munching fried pheasant wings, licking their lips.

As promised, Taar took his initiative grimly, approaching the campfire without stealth.

The two lackeys, Daig and Wislox, jumped to their feet. Rushing him with daggers bared, they hurled insults, but he fascinated them with Perias’s Singing Stones—talismans that were his master’s legacy, greedily guarded like a last breath. When the eerie sound found the knaves’ ears, they both fell, garnet-eyed, before they could unleash any assault.

Welfstang was another matter: the changeling was downright evil, and already he could feel his arms sagging, weighted like stones before he could prepare his vengeful incantation. Green patches of light webbed Taar’s mind like a spider’s lacework. Through the daze engulfing his brain he could discern Welfstang’s body transform into some huge form of winged malignance—half amphibian, half kraken, with slavering blue tongue and horned ears. A semblance of the Tu-Steev blade was clamped in her beak.

The warrior fell to his knees. He clutched his own weapon for frontal protection. His sight went dim. Welfstang’s soporific power had thrust out feelers like a hundred sprites. As Perias had taught him, Taar traced perfect figure-eights with his sword—so lightning-quick that nothing could be witnessed of their humming arcs, but a blur of steel. They formed a pattern of a near impenetrable screen. For long hours he had drilled on this very pattern of defending against dark attack when blind-sighted by changeling magic. Changelings and their fey magic were old when the world was young, and this fiend was no exception …

The monster’s Tu-Steev broke through his enchanted net and sheared off the tip of his blade. The blade bit in further to saw off his left pinky.

Howling in pain, Taar could feel warm blood pouring down his ear too. An earlobe dangled shorn. The fury of his attack, however, had unnerved the attacker.

Taar experienced screeching triumph—his broken blade cleaved through gristle and bone. The flurry of fetid wings ceased. He hung in limbo, while his beleaguered sight returned.

Squinting in the smoky darkness, Taar saw the changeling at his feet quivering, a wretched crone of misshapen dimension. Her sightless gaze stared past his own, dwindling to nothing. A glaring green gash showed in her side.

In the hag’s overconfidence, she had invaded his net. What an arrogant, foolhardy thing to do!

He pulled the Tu-Steev from the crone’s mouth. The knife was warm, curved, an object of scimitarish origin, gleaming with a magnificent effulgence. The sad, dwindling moonbeams held no match for its brilliance. Fingering the hilt, Taar shore off the changeling’s head, burnt it in the fire and buried the embers in a deep pit, as it should be, so it could not reorganize itself into some frightful rebirth.

He found the garments of Welfstang’s hirelings useful for wiping down his dripping blade. The corpses would be eaten by crows.

After bandaging his knuckly stub with strips from his vest and available musk-spruce sap from the trees, he covered the Tu-Steev with snakeskin and placed it in his own pouch, knowing that its merest brush would slice off another finger.

Cautiously, he began weaving his way through the forest. Weary steps were all that sounded in the tangled wood, guiding him on a path back to Jinjan, yet strides tempered with satisfaction, and in sync with a faint pulsation in his veins.

* * *

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review.

Thanks, again! Chris Turner

Enchantress of Rurne

* * *

Turn the page for a note from the author

* * *

This ebook is part of the Fantastic Realms anthology.

If you like this story, read the full collection here:

Fantastic Realms

* * *

Other books by Chris Turner:

* * *

Avenger : a swords and skulls fantasy

Beastslayer : Rise of the Rgnadon

Conan: The Dragon of Skar

Forsaken Magic

Freebooter

Denibus Ar

Future Destinies

* * *

And read all of Chris’s free books here:

http://innersky.ca/booktrack

* * *

Click to discover other titles by Chris Turner