Free Lore of the Underlings: Episode 7 ~ Ho-man Holds Court by John Klobucher

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
    Smashwords Edition
     
    Visit John Klobucher’s author
page at Smashwords.com
     
    ~ ~ ~
     
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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