Howler of the Wastes
IV
In a haze of pain and chill, Sigyn and Monkbat careened down the slope in the teeth of a frigid wind. Somehow, though night had fallen and the sky was a frigid miasma of snow, some sort of aurora played
before the clouds, hideously and unnaturally illuminating the scene.
“Hold!” shouted Sigyn as they gained the boathouse “let me go in first.”
“As you like.”
Sigyn went to the spot were the fur-clad being had lay. All that remained was the thing’s coat, her spear and Garai’s throwing knife, all lying in a viscous pink puddle. She retrieved the weapons and carried them to the ice runner. It was secured at the edge of the pier, near a block and tackle device used to lower it to the water. Placing the weapons and the pack of items liberated from the cabin inside, she returned to the remains of the creature. Taking a tarp that lay over a stack of crates, she covered the revolting puddle.
“Monkbat! Come!”
The Hyrkanian came as he was bid, shivering and teeth a-chatter.
“The cabin, it is aflame! I heard shouting, and other sounds. Ah! Erlik!”
“Keep a reign on yourself, Hyrkanian!”
Monkbat glanced back at the cabin. Odd, suggestive shadows played in the reddish glow that now filled the windows
“I…I would not die here Sigyn. I fear not death, but…this is…”
Sigyn seized his furred collar and shook him. “Help me lower the ice runner! We must be away!”
The twain attached the block and tackle and released the ice runner from its moorings.
“Get in, Sigyn. Your leg. Get in and I will lower you!”
Sigyn did not argue. Climbing into the narrow craft, she deployed the bladed outriggers and prepared to run up the crafts small triangular sail.
Then Monkbat released his hold on the winch, causing the ice runner to drop the last few feet abruptly, jarring Sigyn severely. The Hyrkanian let out a shrill, soul-rending shriek. There seemed to emanate from all Four of the Hyrkanian’s Winds, a low, deafening, inhuman
howl.
Sigyn recovered herself and looked up to see what was amiss. Monkbat stood trembling, gazing upward. His eyes near starting from their sockets and his frothing mouth working speachlessly. With another soul-piercing wail he turned and ran headlong from the boathouse.
“No! Monkbat, come back! You damned fool!”
Cursing, Sigyn used her axe to sever the ropes binding the ice runner, then, using her spear, she began poling the craft along the frozen surface of the Vilayet.
Again came the
Howl. A low booming sound that Sigyn felt reverberate deep in her bones.
“Do not look!” she muttered. “Do not…the sail…the rudder.”
Having moved the craft into position, she set the rudder as to steer toward the clear open sea to the the south, and tied it off.
Again, the Howl.
Sigyn ran up the sail. The fierce winds threatened to shred it, or break its slender mast, but it held and the ice runner sped across the ice.
Again, the Howl.
A wave of weakness and nausea washed over Sigyn and she slumped down by the tiller. She closed her eyes.
“No, mustn’t sleep. Mustn’t fall. Ymir! Aid me.”
The Aesir she-wolf opened her eyes, and unthinking,
Beheld.
Impossibly high above among the churning snows, delineated by the eldritch aurora, was the Howler. Its body, gaunt, grey and colossal, swayed and arched. Its head and face naught but obscured, shadowed suggestions behind red, glowing orbs. Sigyn wailed at her misfortune that she should be fated to behold such an affront to nature, a blasphemy to all that men would name good and wholesome. She raised herself up, and shrieking in horror and rage, hurled Garai’s knife at the shadowy colossus. It spun end over end and disappeared. She threw her spear next, the Howler did not react. Perhaps she missed. Perhaps it could not be hurt.
Perhaps it was league upon unknowable league away.
Again the Howl.
Sigyn’s next conscious thought was of stifling heat. Sweating.
She rose and looked about her. Blue sky was overhead, and the narrow little ice runner sailed gently along an azure sea. The blizzard was gone, and no land was in sight. Still swathed in her furs, Sigyn had become hot. She stripped off her furs and armor and enjoyed the breeze on her skin. The events of the previous night would have seemed a nightmare, had her wounds not ached so. Aye, as a dream.
But there was the cylinder.
It had become dislodged from the pack and now rolled about the bottom of the ice runner. She picked it up. About a finger’s width from one end there was a tiny gap. A lid. Why she opened it she could never recall, but open it she did. She spun the lid for what seemed and eternity, the threads were impossibly fine, the workmanship needed to produce them was unheard of, even amongst the clever artificers of Khitai.
At last the lid came free. She peered inside. Within was a pinkish convoluted mass that…
throbbed. It was obscured by a web of fine threads or wires. Sigyn upended the cylinder. With a sickly sucking noise the contents spilled out, arrested from falling into the bottom of the craft by the net of fine, silvery wires that secured it to the cylinder. It hung suspended, throbbing wetly.
It was a living, human brain.
With a curse, Sigyn hurled the obscene object into the depths of the Vilayet.
The End