Rolling up from the ash, she saw Tahti standing far across the ice, the black book raised skyward. She heard the chant skipping like a stone over the water. “Yog-Sothoth” was all she could decipher as words come from a human throat.
The rest of the bodies followed Henrik’s downstream. Now the waters were choked with silent gliding corpses.
The dog howled again. By now its face had elongated into a white cone ending in a stretching tentacle, a strange thing in the moonlight. A wall of Old One crept forward toward it like a waterfall of gnarled sinew and stench. In a lurching tide of catastrophal scale, Tähti went under. An eyeblink later, Aili joined her lover. Unknown to all, she had been queen of a dead race for a matter of seconds.
Bow Down Before the Snail King!
Caleb Wilson
Storks
There were only a dozen storks. But on that murky midnight, with the fire burning low and blue from the stink of vanished cities that bubbled up from beneath the plains, there might as well have been a hundred.
Charops’ drab leather outfit was somewhat beak-resistant. Not enough to make her comfortable; the horror birds were known carriers of pestilence, so filthy that their diseases bore diseases. She jumped over the furrows of fallow civilizations, stabbing wildly with her long Strategist’s knife. It was a versatile blade, but better suited to the considered application of force ten times what was needed, measured stabs in the back, and the trimming of extraneous lines from contracts than to fending off a clacking, hissing, disease-ridden flock.
Ichneumon the Weird was stumbling along somewhere behind Charops. Certain stork bait, unless the Weird could get her shit together — which made Charops furious, or maybe that feeling was sadness.
A stork exploded as a slightly larger than life-sized pink stone statue of a stork appeared inside it, displacing feathers, guts, and bone. The bloody statue hit the grass, and Ichneumon stuttered out some quavering mixture of glee and agony. That was one way to do it.
Kobius, the man-at-arms, bared his teeth and growled. He whirled a spear as he ran, slapping it up and down, the haft bouncing like a branch in a gale, gore arcing from the blade. He was wearing stork plumes on his hat, and Charops wondered, as she gasped for breath, if he had found them already detached from their original owner. Either way, it seemed that the storks had taken offense at Kobius’ choice of attire.
As for Loron, whose skimpy linen robe seemed so ill-suited for travel outside the courts and couches of Zend... Loron leapt along lightly as a dried leaf.
May we all age so gracefully as Loron.
The Municipal Expedition
Loron, that notorious old poet and flatterer, had found evidence of a treasure hidden in the south. As was the right of every citizen of Zend, Loron petitioned the King’s Vizier to launch an expedition of recovery, with any proceeds to be split evenly between himself and the crown. The Plaster Eminence granted Loron’s petition, though she must not have thought highly of his chances. If she had, she would have authorized a bigger expedition.
The municipal companions were Charops, a Strategist of low rank but high promise; Ichneumon the Weird, whose unsettling presence meant she was sent away from Zend as often as possible; and the man-at-arms Kobius. Kobius had survived the flock of storks they met two weeks south of Zend, but not the sting from the invisible asp he stepped on five days later. His corpse lay beneath a cairn, unless jackals had found him. Charops wondered how long it would be until she forgot his name.
Four weeks south of Zend and Havernar, the expedition finally arrived at the dry river valley marked on Loron’s map. According to the map (according to Loron, who refused to show anyone else the map), the “Hall of the King of Snails” was tucked away at the far end.
Charops felt the weight of the plains behind her as a haunted presence, stretching north many leagues to the mountains that guarded the cradle of civilization.
Ghastly thought: when they were done here, they’d have to cross the plains again, in the other direction.
Hieroglyphs
Loron had disappeared along the tree line to their left. Charops was more interested in two mossy pillars of stone, almost hidden behind the laurels.
“That’ll put a pause in their parade. Blood under my sandals. Ah, a gate, until... ” said Ichneumon. She was wearing her customary outfit of red brocaded cloak, red smock, red shoes with long, curled toes, and red skullcap. Short yellow braids stuck out from under the cap.
“A gate until what?” Charops asked. Ichneumon’s conversation tended to suffer when she was distracted. “And where’s Loron?”
“The statue just splitting. I really didn’t know it would just... the ankle would just crack. And that it would all start to fall. Sorry. I mean, these pillars used to be part of a gate.”
“Until... ?”
“Until history. Sorry about the screaming. I think he’s over there.”
Ichneumon gestured vaguely, and a moment later Loron stuck his head out between the trees.
“It’s this way. The map is quite clear. Are you coming, or are you coming?”
“Hey, hieroglyphs!” said Ichneumon, pointing to carvings arranged inside a vertical cartouche on the pillar.
“Can you read them?”
Ichneumon scraped back moss with her fingernails. “Sure. Old Lesathi. The name of a plant. I think. The statue had hieroglyphs carved on its face, you know. Impossible to drop that.”
“What plant is it?”
“Never heard of it. I don’t know if it has a name in Zendian. It would be something like... shell oak? It might not actually be an oak. Might not be a plant at all.”
“I’ll be over here,” called Loron, “waiting for you at the hall, which is where you’ve been hired to take me, which is marked on my map — ”
“Yes. A moment,” said Charops.
“— waiting, impatiently —”
Strategist and Weird forged between the pillars into a choked clearing where the sun shone over mounds of greenery, a battlefield where nature had long since triumphed. The air was still, hushed as the dreams of graveyard statues. There had been a town here, or something like a town, but the buildings, all unbuilt by history, weren’t buildings any more, just sunken foundation holes, or corner stones and shed roof tiles hidden under quilts of vines.
Charops didn’t see much to catch her eye at first. But a lot that’s worth seeing must first be uncovered. Like this: a wooden wagon lay beneath the weeds. The boards were worm-eaten and soft with rot. Charops poked at them with her boot.
“Look, the wheel has been removed,” said Charops.
“Interesting,” said Ichneumon. “Not in itself, I mean — wagons are boring — but the decomposition, or lack of it; I mean, this wagon can’t have been here for all that long or it would have rotted away completely. A decade, maybe? He was just flattened, you know, blood came shooting out his sleeves, you know? Ah, damn, I mean to say, considering that the rest of this place is antique, it’s interesting. The wagon. Everything was sliding into the pit. I mean, I’ll bet nobody’s put old Old Lesathi hieroglyphs into stone in five hundred years. Except Weirds in the Folly.”
Charops saw another shape, longer and lower than the wagon, also hidden under the vines. Ripping back the vines like she was yanking the blankets away from some bedchamber indiscretion, she revealed a fallen obelisk of stone.
“Ooh!” Ichneumon bent over the obelisk and its more extensive hieroglyphs, while Charops sat on the edge of the wagon and considered the overcast sky.