Where Candles Will Not Burn
By Lorne Dixon

The winds blasted down from the Hawk Nest Mountains, rustling the carriage flags and bow quills, carrying the carrion scent of rotting fish and putrefying compost through the riding party.  The horses breathed deeper, exhaling thick funnels of white mist, and their lazy gallop quickened.  Winter had turned the marshland valleys into gardens of frost and ice, as treacherous as crossing a lake too early in the cold season, when the cover of ice could be thick as a saddle, or thin as a meadow's leaf.  A misstep in the frost could break a horse's leg, especially if the beast lodged his hoof in a trapper's snare buried under the snow.  There were many dangers.

The dogs did not suffer as they scouted out the path, sniffing the air for predators and testing the snowy earth with nimble paws.  They enjoyed the brisk weather while the riders cursed it, going about their job with playful leaps and quick barks, sometimes burying their muzzles in the snow and exhuming a nest of hibernating red mice.

They had been sent out of the high spires of the capitol by His Lordship Gauthrum Redblood Caulstone to investigate the concerns of one of the Kingdom's furthest outposts, a small furrier community on the northern edge of the territories, Devil's Collar.  The Collar had sent a courier with news that a terrible plague had upset the town, that forty men had been lost and an equal number of their women.  His Lordship assembled three of his trusted servants—a healer, a court historian, and an old archer familiar with both maps and warfare—and sent them into the frigid countryside.

A warbling roar echoed down from the sharp peaks of the mountains.  The horses froze in place with a shiver and the dogs kept low, ears withdrawn, eyes squinting into the wind.

Dekus, the bald healer, turned on his saddle and asked, “You’ve heard the rumors, yes?  The stories told in the parlors and down in the market square?”

“Small minds dream of monsters,” Myrriot responded, taking his hand off the reins and reaching for his bow.  “His Majesty does not entertain demons.  If he did he would have sent a battalion, not an old man who can barely stretch the string on his weapon.”

Dekus and Hadrian watched as Myrriot drew his hazelwood flatbow, slid an arrow into place, and sent it skyward.  A seagull squawked and fell.  The dog rushed to intercept it.  Hadrian grinned, “But, of course, this is not just any old man, but one who fought back the legions of Majecore barbarians at Kindder’s Fields.  I wrote the threnody for the lost of that battle.”

Myrriot slid his weapon back into its sling. The dogs returned with the gull.  Myrriot reached down, retrieved his arrow, and tossed the bird back to the dogs.  “That was decades ago.  The young man you recorded might as well have died in that war.  He does not stand here today.”

 “I’m no longer a child, either,” the scribe said.

They rode through tall redwood gates into the outpost settlement known as Devil’s Collar.  Myrriot knew the infection must have cut deeply through the community of pioneers.  No guards had been posted at the gates and no archers manned the watchtowers.  They were wide open to attack from bandits and rogue army regiments.

As they rode through the center of the settlement they were surrounded by makeshift cabins and storage sheds.  Many of the doors were bolted shut and marked with smeared ash in the shape of a strange swirled glyph.  Dekus pointed.  “They’re marking infected houses.”

Deeper into the settlement there were no doors unmarked.

No one wandered the streets or watched from windows.

In the center of Devil’s Collar they found the large town hall.  Here a guard did stand, his blade raised.  When he spoke, Myrriot realized the guard was only a boy.  He guessed the youth had seen just thirteen harvests.  “Who are you?”

Hadrian prodded his horse a step into the lead, cleared his throat, and said, “We come at the wish of Lord Caulstone, the Father of this and all the land eastward to the ocean’s edge.  I am Hadrian Tamberlink, author of the Royal Court, and these men are Dekus Staumolt and Myrriot Hanstfire.  We have come to be of service in your struggle with the illness.”

“The illness?” The boy’s eyes widened.

They waited in silence.  The settlement’s flags clapped as crosswinds assaulted them.  Hadrian patted his horse.  “I think it's best if we see your governor directly.”

“Governor?” The young guard asked.

Hadrian dismounted and headed for the hall’s main doors. Myrriot and Dekus followed, leaving the horses and dogs outside.  The bowman kept a wary eye on the boy.  Hadrian swung both double doors open and they filed into the hall.

The air inside was stale.  The discernible scent of rotten fruit and human waste crept through the hall like a humid wind.  No candles were lit.  A few weak shafts of sunlight trickled down from the spaces between uneven roof shingles.  They listened as they walked, passing rows of tables, towards the governor’s loft.

Hearing something rustle in the dark, Myrriot drew the short blade he kept in a bear leather sheath on his hip.  Dekus reached into his pocket and found his medical knife.  Hadrian had no weapon.  He fell back and allowed Myrriot to take the lead.

“Announce yourself—” Myrriot called.

A shrill tittering laugh answered from the governor’s loft, followed by a deeper voice’s firm hush.  As they approached, Dekus brought out a cut flint and tapped his knife against it.  The sparks illuminated the hall in quick bursts but the darkness darted back, hungry to reclaim the hall.  In those flashes of light, they saw the horrible conditions—tables overturned, piles of broken pottery, a few cowering forms that might have been sleeping men or might have been bodies.

The brittle remains of potted shrubs book-ended a half dozen rock steps leading to the governor’s table.  Iron railing enclosed the entire loft.  They stepped up.  Dust danced through two fragile beams of light overhead.  Myrriot raised his sword into the spot where the two beams met.  The reflected light spread out over the loft.

An enormous man sat in the governor’s chair, his body spilling out over its edges, with a naked woman across his lap.  He wore many thick layers of animal skin.  She might easily have seen seventy harvests.  Her loose skin flowed across her body like water when she laughed.

“Who are you?” Hadrian demanded.

The old woman’s laughter grew louder until it became a series of sputters and coughs.  She spit onto the table to clear her throat and then ran the back of her hand across her lips.  Dekus recognized the effects of crone’s root in her eyes.  He’d used it to ease the pain of the dying on the battlefield.  The old woman didn’t seem sick.

The giant man sat up straight and nearly knocked the old woman to the floor.  “I am Sherborne, a trapper and trader from the northern lands.”

“And she?” Hadrian asked.

He snorted.  “I don’t know.  Don’t care.”

She started to laugh again until she drew his annoyance.  She quickly shuffled off his lap.  Dekus had seen many scars of the type that decorated her body and knew the type of man who would dress a woman in them.  She curled up in another chair like a napping cat.

“And where is the governor?”  Hadrian stepped forward, under Myrriot’s blade, and made sure the royal insignia on the breast of his coat was easily visible.  “We need his council immediately.”

Sherborne smiled.  “Governor Gwinnett is four days dead.”

Hadrian passed a glance at Dekus and then another to Myrriot.  Both understood that their undertaking had instantly become more complicated.  “Then who is—”

“If you’d like,” Sherborne pushed away from the table and stood.  His size was a masquerade which hid a fit, muscular body.  “I’ll take you to him and let him explain it.”

Dekus adjusted his grip on the knife.  “Dead men don’t talk.”

“Seems to me that was once a good bit of logic.  Back when things made some sense.”  Sherborn moved around the table with surprising speed and led them back down the stairs.  When they reached the ground level of the hall he added, “But things have changed here in the Collar.”

***

Sherborne led them through the settlement.  He stopped at a cabin door reinforced by iron bars.  He unlatched it, glanced over his shoulder and told them, “If you have gods, any at all, and you wish to keep believing in them, I would stay on this side of the door.  The thing on the other side eats faith.”

None of them hesitated to cross the threshold when Sherborne threw open the door, entered, and slammed the door shut when they were all inside.  They could see nothing in the darkness.

“Did you not bring a candle?” Dekus asked.

They heard the cabin groan as Sherborne leaned against the wall.  “No candle will stay lit anymore in Devil’s Collar. Not since … It’s better not to explain.  I’ll show you everything you’ll need to understand.  Now just wait for your eyes to align themselves with the darkness.”

They waited.  The stench of human excrement and vomit curled in their noses.  Hadrian pinched his nose.  Chains jangled and they turned towards the sound.  In the dark, the source of the sound might have been very distant or very, very close.

A weak, crackling voice asked, “Who did you bring to see me, trapper?”

Myrriot’s eyes adjusted first, bringing the atrocity in the corner into focus.  The thing was a man, once, but now stood naked and chained on two emaciated legs.  He was skeletal and his flesh hung from his shoulders like a wet cloth.  But it wasn’t his meager body itself that brought hot bile to the back of Myrriot’s throat, it was the budding growths which covered his body, wiggling protuberances, some as long as snakes, others just discolored knobs.  “What is he?”

Hadrian and Dekus saw it.  Both took a step backward.

“It was the governor, Noble Henrek Gaerystade,” Sherborn explained.  “He was a bastard even when he was alive but now he’s exactly the monster I always supposed hid under his smile.  He grew sick and died and came back.  Some said it was a miracle, but it wasn’t any miracle.  Or maybe it was.  Maybe it’s possible to be on the wrong side of a miracle.”

The thing that had been Governor Gaerystade chuckled and swung both his arms.  The chains clanged.  “You brought me a writer who can but barely read?  And a doctor with a slow sickness growing inside him that he cannot heal?”

Myrriot interrupted the beast, “What do you make of me?”

It smiled.  “Perhaps a winter coat.”

***

Sherborne led them out of the Collar through the front gates, down a wandering hunter’s footpath through the forest, and into a wide, oval clearing.  A layer of metallic ash covered the ground instead of snow.  Dekus averted his eyes once he noticed that the swirling colors of the strange sediment gave him a powerful sense of motion.  Regaining his equilibrium, he turned to Sherborn and asked, “What is this place?”

Myrriot was already moving towards the crater in the center of the clearing, a careful hand resting on the grip of his bow.

“This is where it struck.”  Sherborne followed Myrriot and motioned for the other two to come with him to the edge.  The crater was as deep as the height of two men.  In the center, illuminating the depths, was a perfectly round orb.  It seemed to stare up at them like a chrome eye, though the colors that swam on its face were wild and unnatural and it radiated a steady pulse of heat.  “It came down on a night when the sky seemed filled with constellations of stars we don’t normally see. I watched from the north woods, saw it sail down through the night sky, saw it strike the Earth with a horrible force.”

Hadrian started to wobble as he stared down from the edge of the crevice. Myrriot placed a strong hand on his shoulder to steady him.  “Don’t look on it too long.”

“He’s right.  That’s how it starts.”  Sherborne kicked some of the soil down onto the orb.  It slid off the smooth surface.  “What it’s done to the earth in this clearing it can do to your mind.  Then it starts to change the body.  But men aren’t made for that kind of change and the body dies.  But even that doesn’t stop it.”

Myrriot readied an arrow.  “Has no one tried to destroy it?”

Sherborne nodded.  “Fire and you’ll see.”

Myrriot fired.  The moment the arrow struck the orb it disintegrated into metallic dust, slid off its face, and disappeared into the soil.

“Anything that touches it becomes part of it.”

Dekus stepped away from the crater.  “Then bury it.”

“They have.”  Sherborne shrugged.  “And within hours it turns the new soil and uncovers itself.  They covered it with lumber.  They doused it with oil and tried to burn it.  Nothing works.”

***

They bedded down in the Hall for the night.  Dekus and Hadrian slept on dinning tables.  Myrriot sat on a bench and allowed himself a few minutes of rest at a time, never falling too deep into sleep, willing himself awake to check the area.  It was a process that had kept him alive on countless battlefields through nights when warriors at his side had died in their slumber.  The temperature had dropped as the sky darkened.  He pulled his jacket tight and watched Dekus snore out a cloud of thick white vapor.

Except for the sound of the wind moaning through the maze of cabins, Devil’s Collar was silent.  Myrriot had become used to the bustle of the capital—the chatter of distant voices, the lonely trot of a messenger’s horse well past the witching hour—

An inhuman scream shattered the calm.

Hadrian and Dekus shot awake and hustled to their feet.  A second scream soared through the hall, even louder and more desperate than the first.  Myrriot gathered up his gear and headed for the door.  “The dogs.”

They scrambled out into the moonlight, down through the street, to the hitching posts where their horses and dogs were tethered.  Myrriot dug his heels into the soil to stop when he saw what waited there.  The others stumbled behind him.  Half a dozen naked men stood over the dogs’ lifeless bodies, clumps of fur and smears of blood marking their faces, budding growths pulsing on their flesh.  Behind them the horses bucked and kicked as a few more infected men approached them with quarter blades bared.

Myrriot readied an arrow.

One infected man spun in place and caught site of the trio.  He opened his mouth wide, too wide for a hinged jaw, and belted out a quivering sound that was neither voice nor noise but shared characteristics of both.  The others turned and followed his stare.

Myrriot let the arrow fly.  An infected man flew back, his face impaled, a streak of blood trailing behind his destroyed eye socket.  The other infected men scattered.

“This is not disease.”  Dekus bent over one of the fallen dogs.  “It’s my nature to look for answers that can be explored through science and reason.  This is something which cannot.”

Hadrian caught his breath and asked, “Which tribe’s devil would you blame then, healer?  Those who believe in fire spirits?  Or the witches from the Far Sea?”

“Stop it,” Myrriot demanded.  “Argue later.”

“A shame.”  Dekus lifted the dog’s head off the ground.  Its throat had been bitten out.  The healer squinted.  “They placed that strange ash on its eyes—”

The dog’s head snapped around, eyes bulging, teeth chattering.  Dekus dropped it just as its mouth began to close on his arm.  As he retreated, the dog rolled off its back and stood on its hind legs.  Its fallen brother came to life and stood behind it.  The flesh around each dog’s maw pulled back, forcing their snouts into extended smiles.  They seemed to snicker and chortle as they wagged their long tongues.  Unnatural colors gleamed in their eyes.

Myrriot pulled his blade.  The dogs dropped onto all fours and rushed him, snarling and spraying blood and saliva, leaping with each step.  The warrior struck with his weapon, impaling the first dog through the back of its collar and pinning it to the ground.  The second leapt onto him.  Myrriot fell.  He held the dog’s snapping jaws at bay with a hand under its maw as he collapsed onto his back.

Dekus pulled his knife and took a tentative step forward.

The fallen dog, held fast by the sword, squirmed under the blade.  It pawed at the weapon, trying to dislodge it and free itself.

Hadrian stepped back and screamed, “Why won’t it die?”

The dog straddling Myrriot thrashed its head in violent, mechanical jerks.  He struggled with the dog with his blood coated hands and felt his fingers begin to slip.  Knowing he was only seconds away from losing hold of its head, Myrriot released the dog and punched into the hole in its neck and dug upward, clawing through cartilage, displacing bone, cutting through muscle.  The dog’s body became rigid.  Its mouth went slack.  Myrriot withdrew his hand and dropped a handful of the animal’s brains onto the soil beside him.

He tossed the dog’s carcass aside and stood.

“Why won’t it die?” Hadrian repeated.

Myrriot approached the squirming dog, took hold of the hilt of his sword, and twisted.  The head came off.  The dog stopped moving.  “They die once the body’s of no use.”

A voice called out from down the darkened street, distinct yet distant, urgent but without any hint of fear.  “We don’t die at all.  That word—die—does not exist in any language spoken in the outer vortexes where we come from.”

They turned to face the voice.  Myrriot had an arrow pulled before he completed his turn.  Dekus and Hadrian stepped behind him.  “Show yourself.”

“That would be impossible,” Sherborne said as his face came into view.  “What we are is much more than you could ever see with organs as primitive as eyes.  What we are is more like an idea, or a dream, or a song.  Skin and flesh and bone and blood are all meaningless.  You wouldn’t be the first to call us gods.”

Myrriot aimed.  “You’re no god.”

A ripple coursed under Sherborne’s skin as he came closer.  “In this doomed flesh, perhaps not.  Still, Sherborne was the first to find our vessel when it crashed into this planet.  We’ve lived in his flesh longer than the others.  We’ve domesticated him. Your human flesh is surprisingly feral, so unwilling to bend to our will.”

“You’re a disease.  Nothing more.”  Myrriot’s fingers began to shake as he pulled the bow’s string further back, almost to the breaking point.  “A disease to be eradicated.”

Others appeared behind Sherborne.  Dozens.  They shambled and lurched, some dragging malformed arms and squiggling tentacles, others on all fours, yet others with faces stretched and eyes bulging.  They smelled dead.  “It’s too late for that, Myrriot.  We can already feel you growing into us.”

A drop of blood slid down the bow’s string as it cut into his fingers.  It glistened with strange, alien colors.  Myrriot began to shake.  The bow collapsed in his hands.  The arrow dropped to the ground.  “The dog—”

Hadrian and Dekus moved back.

“Your flesh is porous, spongy.  A little blood can easily pass through your open pores and race through your bloodstream.  You’ll be completely ours before you even fall to your knees.”  Sherborne snaked an arm around another of the infected, a frail figure that shifted its appearance to that of an old naked woman and then to the governor.

The infected laughed.

Myrriot stumbled and brought his hands up to his face.  He screamed, spun, and fell to his knees.

And was one of them.

“Why didn’t you just kill us when we arrived?” Dekus asked as Sherborne approached.  He extended his knife in a feeble gesture.

Sherborne kissed the shape-shifter and then took a step forward.  “We don’t want to kill you at all.  Your bodies are too useful to us intact.  When we ride to the capital, surely the royal court will open its doors for you to report your findings on poor Devil’s Collar.  Why do you think we sent for help?”

Hadrian’s eyes flitted between Myrriot, still kneeling, and Dekus.  He could sense that they were surrounded, that the infected waited in the darkness on every side, that they were moving in, closing in step by step.  He glanced at Myrriot’s sword still protruding from the snow near the dead dog.

Sherborne stepped up to Dekus’ blade and extended one finger against the tip.  “If you should cut me, make sure that not a drop of my blood should find its way onto your naked skin, healer.”

Dekus retreated back a step but kept the knife drawn and his eyes locked on Sherborne.  “We’ll be leaving here now.  You and your kind won’t follow us.”

The infected roared in laughter.

The horses shrieked.  Hadrian turned his attention to them and watched as a dozen infected men pounced on the struggling animals with knives and brought them both down.  He tried to subdue the panic rising in his chest, the voice screaming for him to run, and edged a step closer to the sword.

Sherborne dropped a hand onto Myrriot’s head.  His fingers elongated and wrapped fully around, the knuckles curling under his chin, fingertips moving down his neck.  He lifted Myrriot’s head and turned it to face Dekus and Hadrian.  Between the thin fingers, Myrriot’s eyelids parted and inhuman eyes stared at them.

“I’d tell you its painless,” Sherborne explained, “but it’s not.  Every piece of you will die an agonizing death.  And you’ll feel it all, every violent shudder, every hellish twinge.  Your last moments as a human being will be spent in as much pain as your body can produce.  It has to be this way.  The pain is the engine that powers the transformation.”

Hadrian sprang for the sword.  One of the infected sprung, leaping at him, hands flickering into talons, mouth opening wide to accommodate rows of gigantic, jagged teeth.  Hadrian wrenched the sword out of the ground and swung it.  The infected man fell, the top half of his body collapsing to the right, the rest to the left.

Hadrian approached Dekus and Sherborne.

Sherborne grinned, his face beaming with amusement and raw animal bloodlust.  “Do you suppose you can kill all these bodies before we tear you to shreds, poet?”

“I don’t have to kill all of you,” Hadrian said.

Sherborne caught a glimpse of something in Hadrian’s eyes, a slight psychic tinge of familiarity.  He stepped back from Dekus’ blade.

Hadrian swung the sword and took off Dekus’ head.

The crowd stopped shuffling and quieted.  Sherborne squinted and sniffed the air.  As Dekus’ body crumbled to the snow, Sherborne’s eyes widened as a horrible realization spun through his body like an electrical shock.  He dropped to his knees and penitently lowered his gaze to the ground.

Hadrian stepped up to Sherborne and placed the tip of Myrriot’s sword on his shoulder.  The other infected men fell to their knees.  In the Old Language, spoken only in dreams in the Black Gulfs, he sang, “You risk too much … So late to this world—millennia after we arrived—and yet so eager in your clumsy attempt at conquest.”

Without raising his head, Sherborn mumbled, “We did not recognize—”

Myrriot’s sword cut off the sentence, his tongue, and the top half of his head.  As it rolled, Hadrian turned to the others and hissed, “Orbs have already fallen on the human cities.  We are already in power.  I was sent to hush your indiscretion.”

***

Hadrian Tamberlink, a creature known by many names and faces in many worlds, walked through the front gates of Devil’s Collar wearing the blood of many of his kind.  He left nothing alive.  Even those things that couldn’t die had been vanquished.  He didn’t bother to glance back at the outpost as it burnt.  No candle would burn inside the outpost’s gates but this was no ordinary fire.

 

END