Lore of the Underlings: Episode 7 ~ Ho-man Holds Court
Tales of tongues unknown
Translated by John Klobucher
(he wrote it too, but don’t tell anyone and spoil the fun)
Copyright 2014 John Klobucher
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Cover art by John Klobucher
Table of Contents
Episode 7 ~ Ho-man Holds Court
About the Author
Episode 7 ~ Ho-man Holds Court
“How can you tell if you’ve gone to hell?”
John Cap groaned and tried again to pry his heavy eyelids open. Everything around him was red, not to mention sideways. And spinning.
“Guess that answers that… pffft!”
The young man spit out a mouthful of soot, a bitter powder he’d somehow inhaled. Flecks of it stuck to his tongue and lips. He found his face half buried in it.
He struggled to lift his groggy head from the pillow of pale-gray, ghostly ash. His body rose but then fell back to bed in cinders of something recently burned and reduced to a fine, warm dust.
Only now did John Cap hear the music. It was a twisted, jagged jig that droned and whined from an unseen band. The phantom sound raised the hair on his neck — yet it was merely accompaniment. The main act was something to be seen.
With one more concerted effort, the stranger finally made his knees. He was less lucky clearing his sky-blue eyes of the bloodshot glaze that clouded them still. Blinking was no use at all. Then he found to his surprise that his hands were unbound, let loose at last. “Odd mistake for the guards to make,” the foreigner muttered to himself. He pressed a fist to each sore socket and rubbed both eyeballs long and hard.
It worked, and there they were again…
The hellion horde that had kid-napped John Cap encircled him still with weapons drawn. Yet here and now in this hallowed hall they seemed to have a higher mission. Some sacred deed. An ancient act.
It was a twitchy ritual dance, the wheeling reel of souls entranced or all enthralled by power that a stranger must not understand. Round and round they ringed their guest in cold, concentric emptiness. They played ripples in the abyss — blood red, fluid, crimson-tied, fevered since they’d cast aside their shrouds of deathly black for masks of scary scarlet leather.
Suddenly they came to a halt and chanted something sweet and tart:
Break the siege bread
Mete that meat
Cut a head cheese
Eat eat eat!
May the Semperor
Bless this feast
The chamber burst into raucous cheering from somewhere behind the chorus line.
“Hear hear!”
“Bravo!”
“Some thanks-giving!”
In answer the dancers took a bow and shook their axes gleefully.
“Bone appetite, lord judge and jury!”
Then, duty done, they turned back to children and all ran giggling out to play.
With the wee ones out of the way, John Cap had a whole new view and a moment or two to take it in… beginning with the thin beams of sunlight arrayed around him like bars of some prison. A jail for a man from a shadow land who’d broken out of prism. He counted seventeen of them.
They poured down from the dome above, seventeen streams of the ethereal, only to spill upon the ground, the chamber’s base and earthly floor. As they passed through the heavy air they lit up the clouds of smoke like ghosts. Seventeen pale, ironic spawn from something born so pure.
“Meat me, Peggy!”
“Quench us, wench!”
“Over here woman…”
“More boar!”
Voices from beyond the beams now claimed John Cap’s unwrapped attention. He bent an ear to listen in. He squinted to spot the source of them.
“How many billit is that, my friend?”
“I stopped counting after seven…”
“If only they ranked us Guard by bones.”
“Oodor-ull, you’d be number one!”
The fool’s gold flicker of rich, oily lamplight painted a gallery of faces, portraits of Keep’s people young and old who were oddly spaced out in uneven rows. Some the stranger seemed to know from an earlier thrilling episode. Others were still a mystery to him, only a blur in the warm gilded glow.
In either case, the noises they made grew louder and louder, filling his ears. Grunting, gulping, gnashing, guzzling — not to mention a belch or two. And, just maybe masked by those feeding sounds, a hint of sadder undertones...
Then men began singing and clanged their big mugglets in one great crescendo that nearly hurt.
On top of it all, John Cap’s stomach growled from the smells of the guardsmen’s hearty feast. The young man had not eaten in days, but for that bite at Eela’s fruit. He was smart enough not to expect food now. No one threw him even a crumb. In fact, they just ignored him.
And yet drops of sweat had started to bead up on the stranger’s suntanned forehead, ready to drip from his rugged brow. “Who the devil turned up the heat?” he wondered, whistling long and low. As he did, the liquid rolled down his cheek till the salty wet met his handsome lip. He seemed to savor the taste of it. Something familiar… human…
That’s when he noticed a score of torches around the perimeter of the room. They flamed and flared as if in anger — warning, foreshadowing what was to come. They hissed like an upset nest of vipers, telling all in serpent’s tongue.
The fire had John Cap hypnotized. He froze and stared at it licking the air, fanned by an ire that burned somewhere near yet deep deep down in the heart of darkness.
“Name and address…” asked a voice. It was plain as day and very close.
A gangly man with pockmarked skin stood over the still-kneeling stranger. He held a leafy ledger in hand and a sharp quilled stylus poised to write.
The query took John Cap by surprise. “Huh?” he started. “Sorry… What?”
The quizzical fellow repeated himself and offered up a patient smile, apparently sensing his subject’s confusion.
“For the record,” he explained. “Just the standard questionnaire.”
The young man replied with a half-hearted nod as if unsure he understood. “Okay. In that case, I’m John Cap and I come from…” He hesitated. “Elsewhere.”
“Tom Cat — I like the sound of that. But I don’t have a clue how to spell it.” The man scratched his head and scrawled something down. “Well… close enough I guess,” he laughed. “And this land of Elvesware, is it far?”
John Cap shrugged his big, broad shoulders. “Hard to say, mister. Yes and no. I just know for sure you can’t get there from here.”
The thin man wrote some more in his notebook, etching fine lines on its colorful leaves. Each rune he made bled a blood-like sap that left a trail of red behind.
“Hmmm.” He stopped. “There’s no line for land. You’re the first foreigner that we’ve had.
“Wish I’d brought the long form…”
He muttered a moment, tapping his head with the non-business end of his pointy pen. He seemed to be debating something. John Cap used the pause to study him, a fellow of roughly thirty years with eyes of gold though a pasty complexion. His hair was a tale of two citizens too. In front it sprung from his scalp like scrubgrass, all short spikey tufts nearly grazed to the ground. The back he wore long as a chevox tail; it fell across his narrow shoulders down to the blades in silky brown.
Yet he had but a wisp of what you’d call a beard — an odd blond goatee almost too light to notice.
At last the questioner took a glance at the shadowed fore door of the
tent. He suddenly looked a little anxious. “Anyway, we’d better carry on. It won’t be long before the fun.”
“Um, before we do that,” piped up John Cap, who now kneeled knightly upon one knee, “I’d just like to know…”
“Last-meal menu? That’s page three. You can choose billit or billit-free.”
“Well…”
“Funeral pyre options and fees? Our new no-smoking policy?”
“Well, actually, no, if that’s okay. I was just hoping to catch your name… and maybe some explanation…”
The penman leaned in and winked at him. “There’s not much time,” he whispered. “But I’ll tell what I can, Tom Cat my friend.”
The young man grinned, opting not to correct him. This new pet name was the least of his problems.
Then without warning a half-gnawed boar rib beaned the scribe off his oblong noggin.
“Ho-man!” bellowed one of the Guard, “why has this hearing not begun? Who dares delay us, the core of our war men?!”
Ho-man felt for the dull red welt that was starting to form above his ear. “Sorry about that, Xyzor-ull sir, but we need the grand inquisitor. Just stepped out for a moment or two. He’s bound to be back fairly