Lore of the Underlings: Episode 7 ~ Ho-man Holds Court

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

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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 John
Cap’s unwrapped attention. He bent an ear to listen in. He squinted
to spot the source of them.

“How many billit is that, my friend?”

“I stopped counting after seven…”

“If only they ranked us Guard by bones.”

“Oodor-ull, you’d be number one!”

The fool’s gold flicker of rich, oily
lamplight painted a gallery of faces, portraits of Keep’s people
young and old who were oddly spaced out in uneven rows. Some the
stranger seemed to know from an earlier thrilling episode. Others
were still a mystery to him, only a blur in the warm gilded
glow.

In either case, the noises they made grew
louder and louder, filling his ears. Grunting, gulping, gnashing,
guzzling — not to mention a belch or two. And, just maybe masked by
those feeding sounds, a hint of sadder undertones...

Then men began singing and clanged their big
mugglets in one great crescendo that nearly hurt.

On top of it all, John Cap’s stomach growled
from the smells of the guardsmen’s hearty feast. The young man had
not eaten in days, but for that bite at Eela’s fruit. He was smart
enough not to expect food now. No one threw him even a crumb. In
fact, they just ignored him.

And yet drops of sweat had started to bead up
on the stranger’s suntanned forehead, ready to drip from his rugged
brow. “Who the devil turned up the heat?” he wondered, whistling
long and low. As he did, the liquid rolled down his cheek till the
salty wet met his handsome lip. He seemed to savor the taste of it.
Something familiar… human…

That’s when he noticed a score of torches
around the perimeter of the room. They flamed and flared as if in
anger — warning, foreshadowing what was to come. They hissed like
an upset nest of vipers, telling all in serpent’s tongue.

The fire had John Cap hypnotized. He froze
and stared at it licking the air, fanned by an ire that burned
somewhere near yet deep deep down in the heart of darkness.

“Name and address…” asked a voice. It was
plain as day and very close.

A gangly man with pockmarked skin stood over
the still-kneeling stranger. He held a leafy ledger in hand and a
sharp quilled stylus poised to write.

The query took John Cap by surprise. “Huh?”
he started. “Sorry… What?”

The quizzical fellow repeated himself and
offered up a patient smile, apparently sensing his subject’s
confusion.

“For the record,” he explained. “Just the
standard questionnaire.”

The young man replied with a half-hearted nod
as if unsure he understood. “Okay. In that case, I’m John Cap and I
come from…” He hesitated. “Elsewhere.”

“
Tom Cat
— I like the sound of that.
But I don’t have a clue how to spell it.” The man scratched his
head and scrawled something down. “Well… close enough I guess,” he
laughed. “And this land of Elvesware, is it far?”

John Cap shrugged his big, broad shoulders.
“Hard to say, mister. Yes and no. I just know for sure you can’t
get there from here.”

The thin man wrote some more in his notebook,
etching fine lines on its colorful leaves. Each rune he made bled a
blood-like sap that left a trail of red behind.

“Hmmm.” He stopped. “There’s no line for
land. You’re the first foreigner that we’ve had.

“Wish I’d brought the long form…”

He muttered a moment, tapping his head with
the non-business end of his pointy pen. He seemed to be debating
something. John Cap used the pause to study him, a fellow of
roughly thirty years with eyes of gold though a pasty complexion.
His hair was a tale of two citizens too. In front it sprung from
his scalp like scrubgrass, all short spikey tufts nearly grazed to
the ground. The back he wore long as a chevox tail; it fell across
his narrow shoulders down to the blades in silky brown.

Yet he had but a wisp of what you’d call a
beard — an odd blond goatee almost too light to notice.

At last the questioner took a glance at the
shadowed fore door of the tent. He suddenly looked a little
anxious. “Anyway, we’d better carry on. It won’t be long before the
fun.”

“Um, before we do that,” piped up John Cap,
who now kneeled knightly upon one knee, “I’d just like to
know…”

“Last-meal menu? That’s page three. You can
choose billit or billit-free.”

“Well…”

“Funeral pyre options and fees? Our new
no-smoking policy?”

“Well, actually, no, if that’s okay. I was
just hoping to catch your name… and maybe some explanation…”

The penman leaned in and winked at him.
“There’s not much time,” he whispered. “But I’ll tell what I can,
Tom Cat my friend.”

The young man grinned, opting not to correct
him. This new pet name was the least of his problems.

Then without warning a half-gnawed boar rib
beaned the scribe off his oblong noggin.

“Ho-man!” bellowed one of the Guard, “why has
this hearing not begun? Who dares delay us, the core of our war
men?!”

Ho-man felt for the dull red welt that was
starting to form above his ear. “Sorry about that, Xyzor-ull sir,
but we need the grand inquisitor. Just stepped out for a moment or
two. He’s bound to be back fairly soon.”

“The grand… You should have said… Never mind.
Let him take his treasured time.”

When the Guard had finished, Ho-man bowed and
turned back to the pre-tried teen. “So, old bean, as I was saying…”
He squatted down on the sooty ground, ready to do some
spilling.

“As you might have heard from our honored
Guard, these days most folk call me Ho-man, though that is not my
given name. For I was the first born of this oasis and honored as
Homeboy, my claim to fame. Yet sadly my surname was also reset on
that sweet and bitter summer’s day… the day when my mum died
birthing me. Since my dad had already passed in The Crossing,
another family who took pity adopted this half-blessed,
double-crossed orphan. That’s how I joined the Havvum clan.”

Ho-man wiped a tear from his eye with the
backside of his prose-stained hand.

“And they raised me well, in the Treasured
way. Made me what I am today,” he chirped in his usual chipper
voice. “Record keeper of our Keep and clerk of the Treasuror’s
court, of course!”

John Cap appeared to be lost for words.
Luckily the clerk found more.

“Oh, and if I forgot to mention — I’m
grateful to get such a kind kind of question.”

At that Homeboy Havvum reopened his notebook
and drew what looked like a happy face. Then he flipped to a mark
on a far-flung page.

“We’re required by law to state your
age.”

The young man readily gave his answer but
something bright distracted him. “Seven…” he turned to take it in,
“…teen.” It was white and blinding. Then…

“Ogdog?!” He uttered the name in wonder
underneath his bated breath. “Sure glad to see you here… I
guess…”

There bathed in beams at the chamber’s dead
center and all aglow like an omen of death, his comrade the
battle-hardened changeling stuck up from the blackened earth. He
was still in the form of a sword of tusk — a long, broad alabaster
blade — that someone had made a point of thrusting deep deep down
through the floor’s scorched crust. In anger, by the looks of
it.

Sight of that mock but lifelike weapon made
him ponder even more.

“What exactly am I here for?”

But Ho-man was once again watching the door
and did not even hear the query.

The visitor couldn’t help but notice how this
soul differed from the rest. Not your average Sylander. He had a
style the others missed.

It began with his mug, which all but beamed
despite a mouthful of tea-stained teeth and the ironwood fillings
that capped them off. Smiles were hard to come by here, often even
frowned upon. A grin like this one’s was uncommon, so
happy-go-lucky and ear-to-ear. And speaking of ears, his two
appeared to be dressed for anything but a hearing — courting
disaster you might say — for each one wore a ring of fire according
to the naked eye. In fact it was merely a pair of flameworms, pets
he liked to keep close by. Not really jewelry but eye-catching
still… for a modern family guy. At least his clothes had the same
design and hemlines as the other folk’s, though Ho-man’s were
fashioned in colors and patterns with an extra flash of magic. Call
it a flair for the dramatic. Or maybe a flare that bared his heart.
The ensemble surely made a statement, intentional or not.

John Cap cleared his arid throat and finally
got the man’s attention.