Seductive Silence
written by Jordan Baugher
Copyright 2011 Jordan Baugher
Chapter 1
The girl wears no clothes. Thick, red locks wend their way haphazardly between her head and the curve of her hips. Walking along the trail with a sack of apples in her hand, she bobs her head and smiles, pleased to be warmed by the mid-spring sun after the passage of a cold winter.
“Oho, what’ve we got here?” says a dark-clad, stubbled man appearing from behind a tree.
“Looks like somebody’s eager to give it away,” says another similarly-scruffy man appearing from behind another tree as he appraises the nubile girl.
She smiles at the men, saying nothing.
The first man snorts as he approaches her. “Heh, women--they’re all the same.”
Once he gets close enough to touch her, it’s already too late. He sees her as if with new eyes, as if it’s the first time he’s ever really seen anything. The effect isn’t magickal; it’s more a side effect of the harsh realization of the statistical improbability of ever actually coming across someone considered to be one-hundred-percent perfectly attractive.
Stunned, the first man collapses to his knees. The second man sees what happened to his cohort and rushes up to the girl, also getting a full dose of her beaming body. He falls just as his partner did, kneeling blank-eyed in the middle of the road.
The girl giggles and runs her fingers through the hair of one of the men as she continues on her way. She reaches into her sack and pulls out an apple, taking a dainty bite from it. After a few ticks, she is gone and the men are all alone, each of them locked in a perpetual stupor.
Hernaldo cuts a dashing figure as he leaps gracefully from the balcony, landing on one boot, one knee, and one hand, barely touching the pavement and pausing only briefly to flash a smile at a well-bosomed girl standing in front of the inn before he sprints out of her sight.
His cape billowing behind him, he spins into an alley and pries open the heavy, iron lid leading into the sewer. After gently replacing it, he climbs down the metal rungs set into the stone walls and stops for but a moment, listening to the rhythmic thuds as they get closer and louder. Loose pebbles rattle around him in the dark, and he breathes a sigh of relief when the pounding starts to recede.
A rat skitters by his foot, but Hernaldo does not scream. Hernaldo pulls a scrap of paper from one pocket and a small chunk of trunkchar from the other. The only light comes from a storm drain overhead maybe a man-length away.
His message is short, only a paragraph long, and just as he begins the last line, the ceiling caves in just in front of where he crouches, a mini-avalanche of rock and dust splashing violently as it tumbles into the ankle-deep fetid water.
Hernaldo sizes up the hulking, nonhuman figure standing atop the rubble for only a split-twitch before turning and fleeing into the depths of the sewer. The light from the newly-formed opening into the sewer gleams off of various points of the figure. With a series of squeaks and the grinding of steel-on-steel, Hernaldo’s pursuer continues its pursuit, and the steady rhythm of ground-shaking thuds caused by its footfalls resumes.
“We should’ve turned left at the last fork in the trail,” Zanther says, ducking under a moss-covered tree which has fallen across the muddy path.
“That way goes around in a circle; it’s a fool’s path meant to confuse invaders,” Novanostrum says.
“How can you be so sure that this path isn’t the fool’s path?”
Novanostrum clears his throat. “The fact that I wanted to go this way and you didn’t, that’s what makes me confident we’re going the right way.”
An anaconda whips down from a tree above, swinging right toward Novanostrum. Zanther has his longknife off his back and swinging through the air before the serpent even sees him. The head and neck of the thing fall to the ground, the teeth and eyes still twitching.
“Don’t you remember any of this place from the last time we were here?” Novanostrum asks.
“The Mucklands all look the same to me. It’s all jungly and humid and muddy and deadly and irritating. I don’t see why we couldn’t just walk around it. Hell, we could’ve hopped a ship up to San-torus and flown back to Claustria on one of the trans-continental skyfreighters.”
“Open the present, don’t get wrapped up in the past,” Novanostrum says as he raises his staff and blasts a series of medium-sized fireballs in a seemingly random manner at the trees ahead. The burnt corpses of knifebeak bugbuzzards drop from the branches and fall into the stagnant water in a series of small splashes.
Zanther casts an aggravated glance at Novanostrum. “Your suicidal nonchalance reminds me an awful lot of my father.”
“Yeah, what’s he do?”
“Travels around the world on his skyship looking for treasure and seducing aboriginal women.”
“Wait...your father is Aristhmus Maus?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Who the High Hell hasn’t? He’s one of the most famous people on the continent. There used to be an article in the Gadabout about him almost every week. Wow, I can’t believe I never made that connection. I just assumed that Maus was a fairly common family name.”
Zanther grumbles. “I’ve never met any other Mauses.”
“Don’t you mean ‘Mice’?”
The wind blows Madra’s hair in front of her face. She stands on the roof of Claustria Castle’s main spire, peering through a tube with lenses on each end. Far in the distance, out in the Flatlands, she can make out men working on the dilapidated locomote tracks leading to the Submount Steamtunnels.
“Well, at least someone is doing something useful around here,” she says to herself.
“Excuse me, Your Majesty?”
Jarred out of her reverie, Madra stares Varello down, her feminine spite boring into his playful, whiskered face. “And how can I be sure I can trust you?”
He shrugs. “The truth is, you can’t. Be sure, that is. I am confident in my own trustworthiness, but, of course, my opinion is quite biased.”
A large hand grips Varello’s shoulder. “You can trust me, Your Majesty. And I give you my word that neither of us,” Marchand says as he tightens his grip, “will let you down.”
Varello brushes the hand off his shoulder, scowling at the bulk of muscle comprising the captain of Claustria’s royal guard.
Madra wags a finger at Marchand. “He may look like an old man,” she says, tilting her head toward Varello, “but he can kill a roomful of people without raising a finger from his lutestrings. I’m sending him to protect you.”
Marchand rolls his eyes. “With all due respect, Your Majesty, I hardly require protecting.”
Madra shoots a viperish glare at Marchand. “If the reports coming out of the Willowood are true, you’ll need all the help you can get.”
The air hums with the buzzing of insect wings and the incessant croaking of thunderfrogs, but from somewhere beyond the static of this background noise comes a sound which tickles the tiny hairs on the inside of Zanther’s ear.
“Something...unnatural is coming,” Zanther says.
“Oh?” Novanostrum shrugs his shoulders, uninterested.
Zanther’s eyes grow large, and he rushes toward Novanostrum, scooping him off the trail as he dives into some bushes. The noise that was previously just an incongruent soundwave sharpens, clarifies, resolves itself into a hard rhythm of heavy stomps.
On the trail in front of them, a figure enters their field of vision. A man with a dark cape runs by, panting heavily and dripping with blood from cuts and scrapes he looks to have sustained in running through the wild swamplands. He trips over a gnarl of treeroot and
takes a tumble, skidding face-first across the muddy trail.
Immediately after his fall, a loud burst of thunder echoes throughout the vicinity, and a hole appears in the back of the man on the ground. The heavy stomps grow closer, louder, until their owner appears from around a bend in the trail.
“What the bonk is that?” Zanther whispers.
“I..I’m not quite sure,” is all Novanostrum can muster as a response.
The stomps are produced by a manlike figure, manlike meaning in this case that two arms, two legs, a torso and a head are delineated. However, the similarities do not go much further. The body is covered with heavy plate armor, as are the shoulders and forearms and knees, but these pieces of armor do not cover a body so much as a shining brass skeleton. The elbows and knees are clearly visible, looking like nothing so much as round, brass ball joints connecting the rods of the arms and legs.
The head resembles a metal box with two short telescopes popping out of it. The right hand of the metal creature is comprised of a longknife, and the left arm culminates in what looks like six powderblasts mounted to a plate. A knifebeak bugbuzzard swoops down from a tree, the left arm rises swiftly and a shot rings out. The avian menace explodes in mid-air, and the plate and the guns spin around in a series of clicks.
The shot man in the path tries to crawl away, and Zanther reaches to tap Novanostrum on the shoulder, only to find that he is no longer crouching next to him. Zanther looks up to see Novanostrum back on the path and standing directly in front of the metallic malefactor.
The projectile-firing arm swings back around, pointing squarely at Novanostrum’s chest.
Varello and Marchand stroll through the Willowood in silence. In accordance with its name, willow trees stretch as far as the two of them can see, the cave-like walls of dangles of foliage interrupted only by a few crumbling stone structures: a well, the foundation of what might have been a house, a stairwell leading to nowhere, and so on and so on.
The sky above is overcast, a white ceiling to the furry cave. After touring the woods for perhaps a bellchime, Varello puts up his arm to stop Marchand’s forward progress.
“It’s close.”
“What’s close?” Marchand asks.
Varello sniffs, turns his head and sniffs again, then pulls back a willow-curtain to reveal a kneeling, rotting corpse.
“Our killer’s latest victim.”