The Golden Bridge of Nevesus
by D. G. Ironside
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
“Timeworn track” was a generous description: bare rock and scant sign. Yet Jadus seemed to know where we were. He might have been half-dead in body, but his mind was singularly sharp with a map: the sun, distances, and triangulation. If he was lost at any point, he fooled me with hogwash, and I was happy for it. We ascended on a drier day under overcast skies. Above us, Tiltas spewed out its ash cloud.
“The mount is oddly silent,” Jadus told me.
“What should we be hearing?”
“Hot air screaming to the sky, the roar of angry earth, the rumble of fierce boulders,” Jadus told me. How he knew these details I had no idea. I had spent three years as his closest confidant, amid places with nary a volcano. He liked to read, sure, but books are playthings to the truth. I scoffed.
“Did you just scoff?” he asked.
“What? No!”
“You scoffed, clearly.”
I paused to allow a full scrunch of my face. “Perhaps I cleared my throat,” I offered.
“You scoffed. A dismissive sound, for certain. You perceive my notions as a joke?”
“Not a joke, no. No. I am merely in disbelief of what is before us.”
“Sure. I bet that’s what you think.”
“No, no. Really,” I said. He looked at me with hard, sunken eyes. Yet I realized such a face was only his usual wasting. I cursed that I could not recognize his subtleties as I once did.
“Dammit, are you angry with me again?” I asked. He only registered my question as further mockery. He folded his arms and hmmffed the way he always hmmffed. I flushed with emotion despite myself.
“One cannot trust speculation alone, Jadus. Just because you’ve read things does not necessarily cast them in iron,” I insisted, but not as diplomatically as I intended.
“There is no requirement for you to accompany me, you know,” Jadus said, barking his discontent. Meantime, the horses had come still. When a horse wasn’t moving, it would listen. When horses were listening, they would always know when you were fighting. So awkward, bickering in front of the children.
“Correct. I know my presence isn’t mandatory. But I should not have to explain the ‘why’ of why I am here. Why I came with you.”
“Well, if you’re here voluntarily, there’s no need to show yourself as rude,” Jadus spoke, with stiffened volume, his chin at that high angle. “You can just as soon turn back. You don’t toil for Gregor anymore, like I do. Like I always have and always will. You have a choice, and I don’t.”
“Yes, a choice of which you are clearly envious!”
In reaction, he made that terrible sound he would make, a contemptuous laugh accented with a snort. It knocked off the tip of his nose again.
“You always do this,” I said. “Look at you!”
“You should talk. Look what you’ve made me do!” He climbed down off his horse to retrieve his cast-off beak. He appeared tragic and comic at the same time, tracing for the lost piece amid the pebbles.
“As if it was me that made you spill your nose,” I said, giggling. This enraged him, I could tell, but he chortled a reciprocal laugh, nonetheless. This was what we had been reduced to, guffawing at our petty lunacies. He tried to stay enraged. He wanted to burn with injustice, but he couldn’t. By the time he made it back atop his mount, I had spotted the distant shape within the ash, a receding cone before us in the wind. We had ridden up with the gusts behind us. The air had shifted to expose our target.
“Look there,” I pointed. Something manmade showed its rough edges above the stone slope. It was ragged black masonry, the crumbled ruin of a pointed roof. We gazed at it together for a long moment, ceasing our row with contemplation. At last, Jadus spoke to relieve the silence and we prodded ourselves forward to witness it more clearly.
“Does it seem a ridiculous, foreboding spire to you?” he asked, not really a question of me, but of the absent and villainous builders. It was indeed an ominous thing, a twisted nail of gothic black.
“I think the Dread-Cadge are begging us to get come near and get our freak on,” I said, trying to feign that I thought nothing of it.
“Don’t be so flippant. They could just as easily lock you in a trance, forever horrified by wicked images and a terrible dirge.”
I did not realize that. Sounded very buga-boogey. As we moved forward, I was a touch more cautious, and thought deeper of my own hauntings. I wished then for a barrel of whiskey and the time to swallow my inadequacies.
* * *
“Does the evil tower of Tiltas have its own name?” I asked, chattering my teeth.
“What’s wrong with that one?” Jadus asked, always so clever.
I was cold after the long climb, the column of ash blotting the sun, the gusts, the higher altitude, and with my afeared eyes, looking closer upon the hideous ruin. At such a range, the tower was akin to a sketch from a grimoire of sinister fairy tales, cobwebbed with ill shadows. We had moved into its frigid shadow as it pierced the sky in a jagged rise. Its odd walls showed ludicrous angles, a foreboding collection of jet-coloured stones scaffolded upon a natural outcrop.
This strange foundation appeared to have dozens of sub-layers and offshoots, a shamble twisted together. Gargoyles of stone and painted frescos of demons decorated its walls, battlements, and cracked turrets. No one in their right mind would have stepped another foot forward, and my horse knew as much, threatening to buck.
“Somebody built this thing to look ooooh scary,” I said, trying to control my disturbed mount. The beast detected a terrible odor that originated elsewhere than Jadus, a manifestation of acrid wickedness. I stared at a vile portico at the base of the construct that seemed to be inviting us to perish within. A massive and ornate double door waited, with a pair of devil-faces carved upon them. Jadus dismounted without concern. He comforted his horse with his soft words and deft touch, two skills of which I was bereft. I got to the ground and let him tie mine before it ran off.
“I’m quivering here,” I said, as he set the tethers. I looked up at the tower and shuddered.
“I understand,” Jadus said, “but I’ve been dead already. Nothing scares me.”
“Doesn’t seem a good choice, this. Have we forgotten what we’re here to do?” I asked, thinking all this jaunting about with dark towers was forgetting about the volcano, the fallen moons, whatever it was that Gregor wanted.
“It’s this, or we must survey an entire mountainside. We don’t have any clue to the fallen star closer than this.”
I slowly nodded my head. I was chilled down to my soul, and my junk was shrunk as two tiny prunes and a stack of small coins. Just as I contemplated my weakest points, the apparition appeared.
“Bwah!” I blurted. Jadus only took two steps away as the spectre floated forth from nothing, a grey-on-grey cloud of wisps with floating eyes of white fire.
“Beware!” it howled, shaping itself as a cloud of humanoid horror. Its voluminous hands were long-fingered claws of smoke, ready to drag a man to a hellish doom. It lurched at us with broad sweeps of its tendrils. I scrabbled on the slope to retreat. Either I would need new boots because of worn leather or because I was going to piss in them.
“Mind yourself, spirit!” Jadus ordered, with insufficient gravitas. Even so, the admonition worked, and the wraith abated, tilting at us no more. Instead, it dripped beads of hissing fluid from its ill-stretched mouth and spat words to us.
“Beware the Dread-Cadge, beggars to the god of fright, as I am one of their aged souls, now a wretched wraith to honour a fearful past!” it wailed, its voice reverberating the timbre of the dead. “For there is only doom for intruders and interlopers upon this unholy mount!”
“Um, ghosty,” Jadus said, his arms folded, “you should chill.” The spirit only stood as steady as its ever-flowing stuff would allow, enduring such a rebuke with intransigence.
“We are no threat to you or any of the Dread-Cadge, living or expired,” Jadus went on. “We instead seek the sky-rock that fell upon the mount, days past. If you know its landing spot along Tiltas, we will retreat away to find it. If not, we only desire the sight of its landing zone from your tower and, again, we would be gone.”
When Jadus decided to get all matter-of-fact, I just listened, and this was more courage than I’d seen of him in since forever. The ghost seemed somehow allayed by my ex-lover’s tone and forsook its unsettling stance. If the thing had shoulders, they dropped.
“Well then,” the spirit intoned. It appeared to snap off its own fingertip to inhale the soot that flowed from the detached piece. It breathed deeply. “Thanks for the sincerity, bud. I’m guarding our groove of wary-scary, if you know what I mean. We saw that star come down and we know where it lives.”
It exhaled long and luxuriously, leaning back against one of the columns on the portico, sighing in and out upon itself as if it were on a lazy break from labor. From where I was, my skin grew pimples from the radiation of cool.
“Well?” asked Jadus. “Are we to wait all day?”
“You told me to chill, and I did that,” the apparition countered, one fierce eye looking up. “Beneath our tower is a tunnel that climbs to the heart of Mount Tiltas, and beyond, a broken archway to the place where the star now rests. It crashed and destroyed a secret chamber within the top of the mountain. If you can wait three shakes, I’ll lead you there.”
“Wait,” I said, finally speaking up.
“Exactly,” said the ghost.
“No. No, you wait,” I said. “The top of Tiltas is a volcano. You would be leading us to certain doom into a cave of molten rock.”
The ghost only cackled with mirth, a sound that reminded me of a mischievous bard telling spine-tingling tales near a fire, perhaps an impish troubadour with a pompadour and wiry moustache. Or merely, I remembered, a past dalliance gone wrong, my thing for singers.
“Your assumptions are wrong,” the ghost groaned. “Tiltas is no volcano. Only the fragment from the sky itself spits ash, burning and spitting all dust and smoke. I have barely drawn air for days.”
I scoffed.
“Did you just scoff?” the ghost demanded.
“Uhh, no,” I said with a grimace. “It’s only that you... well, you’re deceased, and smoking of your own form, besides!”
“Never mind,” interrupted Jadus. “This explains much, spirit, and tells why the mountain rumbles not, nor tremors as a volcano should.”
“There’s a wise man there,” the ghost said, turning to Jadus. “I see the portal to death has half-opened for you already. Of wisdom there is much, lurking on the other side.”
Jadus nodded his jaundiced jaw.
“The rock smolders here upon the earth, as it did in the sky,” the ghost told us. “This, because it is no ordinary thing. Instead, we among the Dread-Cadge believe it is a segment of the lost Bridge of Nevesus.”
I scoffed again, readying the full expression of my contempt.
“Are you meaning us to believe that this chunk of fallen rock was part of the mythical burning bridge of gold that beckons forth and from the spheres of the heavens? A sliver of legend and ancient scripture, made real? No doubt you’ve lost your mind!”
“I lost my mind the day I died,” the spectre countered. “What motive have I to lie?”
“A thousand secret motivations, dead man,” I said. “None of which is less than a trap!”
“Stop this bickering and lead us on, spirit,” Jadus said. “We shall craft our own conclusions.”
The spirit ground its foot against the stones beneath, extinguishing the butt of its own cast-off digit. “If my guidance should get you two whistle-farts quickly gone from our spire and our lands, then gladly I shall,” it said, exhaling through its nose.
* * *
Copyright © 2019 by D. G. Ironside
