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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 67: Slade 273
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 94
On the path the next day, at about noon, Slade felt disquieted. Paying attention to his warrior’s intuition, he stopped in his tracks, and looked around. When Shella began to question him, he raised a hand to be still. She gathered herself for an incipient attack, and followed Slade as he walked off the pathway to the right.
Going over low ripples that might pass for the name of hills in this flat wasteland, a mile off the trail he saw a taller single hill covered by dozens of Shivering Fruit trees. Looking right and left, he advanced toward it with the intention of reconnaissance followed by destruction. As he did so, he felt something prying at his brain, and threw up his blank mind.
“Can you shield yourself, Shella?”
“I think I can,” she said from behind him.
He spoke aloud the prayer to Modi for courage for Shella, and she thanked him and Modi.
Pushing closer, he saw the hill and its trees rose about sixty feet above the plain, and the hill was of a different type of stone--granite, he thought. But a few hundred feet from it, a manshape suddenly jumped out from behind one of the larger of the white stones of the wasteland.
“No, no, no, no, you are not to go this way. Go back now. I have powers of the ancient gods.” Slade considered the creature a ‘manshape’ because under the twigs, furs, grasses, bones, and other things tied around him and in his ragged hair and beard, plus the furred gloves, Slade was not certain he was a man at all. He looked and sounded mad, and Slade hated to think what he must smell like.
“I, too, am a warrior of the gods.”
“I am no warrior. I serve. I take sacrifice. You shall not pass! Not without sacrifice, anyway.”
Slade listened, and then twitched. Tolkien’s famous phrase heard here? It could be a coincidence. He checked for a verser but only spotted himself and Shella.
“You know of Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings?”
The man jolted, his whole body shook, and a clearer, less mad look came into his eyes.
“Are you from Earth?”
“Originally. She’s not.” Slade spoke calmingly aware that the man he spoke to was more than a little off.
“Oh, that’s nice. Old home week. I would have wanted to use the different realm to pick up girls, but all the ones here are ugly. Even the High Planner’s daughter is fat, and she thinks that this makes her attractive. I’ve seen attractive. I use to watch New York Model Week. Tall, skinny models from all over the world--” He began to look dreamy and as if he had half forgotten Slade was there.
“O.K., girls are pretty. What’s your name? Mine’s Slade.”
“Oh, I’m Lorenzo di Carlo. Hah, when I first got here, they thought me a noble because d’, y’know, but no, I was just an advertising man. But when I saw how they treated the commoners, well I glommed on to being a noble right quick, y’know.”
Both of them agreed. The local peasants had it rough for values of that word that even some Third Worlders from Earth might have found depressing and awful.
“How do you hide being a verser?” Slade asked as he took a seat on a stone, and Lorenzo did as well.
“Huh? An Earthman? I don’t. I mean it's part of the gig, I gather. I assume you’re not here to replace me as priest?” The man asked that question with an unusual if poorly hidden intensity, and Slade assured him he was not before going on to explain what he meant by verser.
At the end, the man stood, and he spoke darkly.
“Now I know what he meant.” The word ‘he’ was emphasized strongly. “One would come of whose blood I must drink, and I would sacrifice her to the Great God Renthaim, and I would live forever.” He drew a backwards curving bone dagger from a hidden sheath.
Slade moved smoothly to his feet.
“Uh, Larry, let’s think about this a bit. You’ve clearly been alone out here a long time.”
Lorenzo’s eyes turned calmer.
“I have, Slade. You don’t know how lucky you are. I didn’t get some scriff to make me sort of immortal. I was in danger of losing my job at the firm, and so someone high up in upper management offered me a grimoire. Said it had helped him. The bastard. He tricked me. I was so gullible. I cast the spells to summon Renthaim, god of fear, and ask him to bless my advertising campaign so that fear would motivate those who watched it to buy the product.”
An almost hysterical laugh later.
“You know what? I can’t even remember what the product was that I dammed myself for. He did ‘bless’ me, but the price was that I became his priest in this wasteland, and attended his shrine, and took in all the bloody sacrifices the stupid nobles bring. Instead of hot dogs with mustard, and folded New York style pizza and a steakhouse, I eat raw chunks of meat from the sacrifice.”
“Uh, why did you agree to this?”
“Oh, I didn’t, but the magic words I said at the end of the deal were actually the local form of ‘take me and make me your tool’, so I said it, even if I didn’t understand it. Deals with the Devil, y’know? Like if abracadabra actually meant ‘stab me through the heart’ in its original language--”
“Well, I don’t want to, but I will if I have too. Larry, I’m a very dangerous warrior, and I serve Thor and Odin, and I really don’t think you have much chance against me with that bone dagger of yours. So why don’t we call off this planned sacrifice?”
“The one where I drink your blood and stab your lady through the heart with my dagger on my altar? Eh, see, Slade, you may be a warrior, but I am the high priest of Renthaim on his holy ground, consecrated to him by decades of sacrifice by me and the poor fools before me. He promised me immortality and better worlds than this one if I but kill the man who would come to me. You came, and your sacrifice is here. Let us begin.”
The man suddenly was gone, and in his place was a ten foot tall hyena. The dagger clattered to the stone, and the hyena bit down on it, and Slade watched in disgust as the blade wormed its hilt into the hyena’s jaw and anchored itself there as an extra long tooth. This tooth had a snapping mouth of its own in the blade of bone. The hyena laughed, and Slade felt a burst of pure fear hit him, and bounce off, but then he saw the creature’s left eye explode, and wriggling worms over a foot long came out of it, still attached to the monstrosity.
“Kill it, Slade!” Shella shrieked, and Slade fast-drew his sword with just that intention.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #529: Characters in Action. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
