A CHAPTER FROM ANYAGA'S FINGERS,

A NOVEL BY

BRENIN RHODES & DAVE McCOMBS

Alone and without torchlight, Renfast hunched with his hand to his nose. Blood began to dribble from between his fingers –- his good fingers, now that the two fingers of his right hand rested at his side hot and itchy, swollen, searing. At his feet lie what remained of his sword.

Memories repeated. In the dark, his mind projected images of the creature that had broken his sword and his fingers.

“What were they?” He had muttered it a dozen times before, like a mantra. Then: “Why did the wizard run, damned fool?”

They had become separated. The torches blew out an instant before Jerazael let loose magic mirrored on his mad eyes. Then came the screeching -- the wizard’s louder than the creatures: more shrill, horrified, but Jerazael drove forward beyond any sense of self-preservation . . .

Boots scraped stone. He had returned.

Renfast shivered: lost, and now worse! He imagined Margon circling, nostrils sniffing above a shark’s grin -- smelling blood.

Margon conjured limelight. Instantly the leech appeared in garish monochrome. Teeth flashed -- close enough Renfast could taste Margon's breath.

Renfast’s nerves prickled, drained down his limbs, squirt pain anew into his nose and fingers. “Foul cannibal!” His heart thudded heavy in his chest, and Renfast was not used to noticing how his heart felt at all.

The physician drew up his satchel. Renfast eyed the bag sidelong. He wondered what instruments Margon might pull from there. How did he keep the leeches alive in that?

With the onset of light, Renfast’s fear fanned out. He searched the extents of the illuminated ruins, twitched with every flicker. “They are out there.”

“Yes,” Margon said. His touch was gentle, had warmth that belied the apathy of his expression. Renfast flinched; then the leech’s fingers traced past the broken fingers, up his arm, and pressed at the shoulder. “You have the arm of an archer: bone spurs on your wrist, here, and here on your shoulder. Ah, but this shoulder was out of joint. It is still weak from an old injury. This is why you parried badly and broke these fingers. You should not have drawn your sword with this arm.”

“I cannot use the other!” Renfast pulled away. Blood dribbled from the hand that held his nose.

“Is it not said in the art of battle that both hands must know the sword?” Margon opened his satchel.

Renfast scowled. “The art is not the same everywhere.”

“But of course.” Margon smiled in a way uncomfortably like a grandfather. Shadow was too deep on the leech’s lips to show teeth. The man’s placid eyes looked at Renfast’s unstrung bow tethered to a now-useless scabbard. “No doubt you would have drawn bow but for the dark. You have the hands of a marksman. Yet, you also have long hair and no worry that it will tangle in the bowstring. Yes, the art is not the same everywhere.”

The leech’s pronunciation had become deliberate as he spoke, deeper in tone, hushed. Renfast became aware of increased patience as he sat, of absorption in the words. No -- it was not the words that mattered, but the tone, the way Margon said the words.

Margon put herbs into a cup, ground them with a pestle; with a brush, he swirled the powder around the cup, refining it. From his flask he added water. His brush whipped the tea to froth. He dripped milky liquid into the tea, refastened the vial, rewrapped the herbs, squeezed the water from his brush, and returned it all to the satchel.

He handed the cup to Renfast. “Drink it slow. Ah, and” -- Margon retrieved a roll of linen from the satchel -- “tear this into scraps. Plug your nose with it so you do not bleed into your drink. I will return to mend your breaks.”

Unease sank into Renfast’s chest. “Where are you going -- and what are you doing?”

With the point of his finger, Margon had begun to draw a circle around Renfast in the sand. Margon paused to toss aside rubble, pieces of pottery in the way of his circle. He drew a smaller circle inside the first. In this ring, the leech began to write letters. Renfast had never seen letters like that: strange, and somehow, they raised the hairs on Renfast’s neck.

“I say, what are you doing?”

Margon said nothing until he completed filling the ring with letters.

“Stay in the circle and you will be safe.”

“I do not like the look of this circle -- where are you going?” Renfast started to rise, but seeing the circle drawn around him, faltered.

Half in darkness, Margon looked back. “I am going to find the others. They hide also, or, I think, we would have heard them die.”

“Did you not see the madness in the wizard’s eyes? Did you not see him run? Do you forget how we became lost in the first place?”

“Hear the echoes of your voice,” Margon raised his hands into the darkness, indicating the ruins leering half-seen. “In this sunken city, we would have heard them. They are staying still and quiet, either in wisdom or in death. Either way, I will find them.”

“And if you do? The wizard cares nothing for me. It is the last I will see you -- but it does not matter. I will not budge from this place. I will not follow that man. ‘Quiet in death’ you say, and I can see no other fate for them in this evil place.”

“We shall see.” As Margon left, the light fluttered out.

Yet, the dead city persisted in Renfast’s memory, soured into something twisted and menacing. Renfast drew his knees to his chest and sipped tea.

#

I am called Margon.

In Calgroth I was servant to a secret god. Here, I must continue my secrecy . . .

But one day all will know the Great God.

For one of Nairthrak has come upon a ring, and I am sent to ensure he shall come upon the remaining four . . .

The city had not been built here. Some earthquake had uprooted the whole city and brought it to rest in this cavern. The wreckage that remained told the story.

Margon’s sense of it came through touch. His hands only brushed what lie in his path, and yet he recognized painted relief; he distinguished icons of leopard, sun, moon, and gods of another age. More than the details of a dead civilization, he sensed its great size as well, and so perhaps fittingly, saw the greater city in the ghostly tones of his mind.

The tops of the common buildings were demolished; only a few kept the old roof and balcony that had been living spaces. The less common buildings were scattered; side aisles and central naves had turned into mazes blocked with fallen shafts and capitals. Margon had to wind a beetle’s path through the city. The cobblestone between buildings had been upturned into a path tumultuous with hidden pits to twist the ankles. All the way aside, there were many places that sheltered things that waited in the darkness.

At every such place Margon passed, another creature joined those already following.

Nevertheless, the creatures kept their distance from Margon. They recognized a man who was death’s familiar.

Tendon dried to leather snapped off bone. Bone ground in joint. A corpse, flattened on one side from lying for centuries, stretched and snapped upright. In its sockets, an orange and astral fire paired, and then receded into the dozens of lights hovering behind it in the gloom.

You dare not assail a servant of the Great God, Margon turned back to the lights. Or has He made you blind to me?

The automatons of another age crackled, bones and armor clicked together in a senseless moving throng.

I will not lead you to prey.

Margon stilled his mind and hurried on, soon alone again in silence.

#

Renfast liked the squeaky sound his tongue made on the teacup’s inside. He had licked it more than clean: he had licked it like a dog determined to get even the memory of what had been in there onto his tongue. Damn fine tea!

He let his hands flop to the ground; the fingers holding the tea cup gave warm fuzz up his arm, reminding Renfast they were broken. The reminder felt good. Everything felt good. His belly itched, but like a bubble of glorious warmth; it rose and fell, jiggled with the piglet-snorting of his giggles. He laughed more at his snorting, wheezing through a nose plugged with linen.

Renfast stretched out, forgetting the circle drawn around him. His feet swept through the lines, piled sand under his heels.

He liked that sensation, his feet running along the sand, cold weight gathering underfoot. Renfast did it a few more times, then sighed like a man cushioned by goose down instead of sand and rubble.

Out in the darkness, there came the sound of a slow clack and shuffle.

#

Margon, much like a viper, could sense them by their warmth in the tomb-cold. He had been blessed.

Ahead: on the other side of a crisscross of fallen pillars disarrayed into segments, one of them was huddled between two of the segments -- the cavalryman. Margon could hear the man’s plate scratching against the stone. The wizard . . . the one to keep track of . . . there: aside a fallen capital, an unnaturally warm presence from the pulse of the powders in his veins. Where was Thalin?

“Here, leech.”

“Thalin,” Margon answered, more as a reaction to being startled than as a greeting. You conceal yourself well, even from the senses of a holy servant.

They crouched together in the dark.

“The wizard waits, finally subdued. His madness is quelled by this black antiquity. He has respect, at least, for powers great enough to liven the dead.”

“Good. I will bring him a way to pass through this place untouched, and so mayhap earn his trust.”

“That is, trust such as Jerazael has for any man. This long time I have served him, yet I doubt I have won trust enough that he would have listened to my counsel -- had I been forced to convince him of your worth as another 'dog at his heels.' You win little with this man.”

“But I offer him a way to something that he must have.”

“Indeed. Yet, do not dismay if he wishes to cast you aside after his prize is found.”

“That I will confront when it is upon me. There are more prizes he must find, and I will see that he finds them.”

“Yes. Such is the lifeblood of our conspiracy, physician. But know this: your life is forfeit should it be needed to fulfill that task.”

“So it may be for all our lives,” Margon intoned. He turned to go to the wizard, but Thalin’s hand stayed him.

“Where is Renfast?”

“He is broken, fingers and nose. His sword is broken also, but such was its value. It was iron with a steel edge, a peasant's weapon! Renfast need not concern us.”

Thalin’s grip tightened. “No. Renfast is worth more than your miners. He is worth more than his father's sword! Go fetch him. Return together. I will say nothing to the wizard until you return.”

“As you will.”

#

Renfast laughed and laughed. The floppy, leathery thing kept pounding at his face. But what did it matter? Nothing mattered any longer.

And a moment ago had believed he was so happy! No, not happy, he thought. Comfortable. Numb. The hand that attacked him turned to a fist and his nose cracked loose again, spitting out the rolled linen and pouring blood. Numb. His body was dying: but it only tingled, buzzed, unable to express its end with pain.

When there was no pain, there was laughter -- even when the attacker brought a bone club to Renfast's head. Blood poured down his eyes, and he laughed to see it smear his vision. Bony rakes tore at his hair, ripped clumps from his scalp. He heard the tearing in his ears, muffled, and felt the blood on his eyelashes. He laughed.

Betrayed!

Being clumsily torn apart was mercy after that.

Then there was light in the gloom, terrible unforgiving mortality come back to claim him. The merciful hands of death were gone and there were pointed teeth in his face, saying, “I found the others. Come with me.”

#

“Gods, at least stop his bleeding, and out of sight, if you wish to make yourself useful!” Jerazael turned from Margon and Renfast; robes twisted around the wizard in the haste of his turn, his back to Margon’s obedient bow.

“I have no time for the lame and drunk. I must continue on.”

Yet even Jerazael, in the height of passion, turned aside to vomit at the sight of Renfast. This moment of reverence paid, he turned to the others, white and beset with a mad fervency inked out by Margon’s witch-light. “I must continue on, be it the death of you all!”

“What madness has taken you?” Duric stood a bloated metallic flash in the dark.

“Shut your mouth before I have the leech sew it shut, ballast to this whole fool’s parade that you are!” Jerazael’s carefully-filed nails cast a jaw of teeth on the ruins beside his shadow.

Jerazael swept his hands down and Duric thought he saw the black of the wizard’s robe limned in fire.

“I continue on, and you will follow!” Jerazael caught the swing of his pedant. He sniffed; blood highlighted his nostrils.

“Quiet!” -- Margon’s accent almost too thick to understand -- “Have I not enough trial to keep the bones away, and to take care of this man, that you must shout to announce our whereabouts?”

Jerazael hissed and there was silence.