A Grey Tithing was afoot, dancing to the iron song of the Underdark.
The slovenly things trundled, animal-like crawled, toddled, baby-like bawled and self-worshipfully cradled their heavy-jowled maws.
‘Master, master—our mighty Master!’ sang Leftclaw and Rightmaul.
He was beyond himself, beyond his identity, beyond even ecstasy; one with the sacred act.
The claw hammers came alive in his hands, the hafts beating together in wooden time, herding the beastly worms of jiggling girth.
The hammer heads clanged, the claw backs keened, and within him, as the world melted, his attachment to its hideous herds was rhythmically weened.
‘Master!’ they sang, in their iron song, and leapt in his hands, Rightmaul knocking in a bemused worm’s forehead; smashed and dashed just like that.
‘Faster!’ rang their iron song, as Leftclaw tore the shoulder from some meat-stick that was trying to enforce some civic code or another one of Man’s pathetic attempts at keeping Fate at bay.
He picked up speed, charging for the two gifted twins who were being harangued by two dastard men of sinister aspect.
‘I am honored to be your Master—iron friends!’
Their steely song rose in his blood, in his throbbing brain, “Master, Our Master—we feared We to be unworthy—we sang we thrumed and we keened for you; honor is Ours to be taken up in your masterful hands!’
That fat thing’s knee was so brittle that it blew entirely back as Rightmaul smashed through its gory ruin.
‘I am honored that you found me on this lost strand! The honor is mine!’
‘Master, you summoned us up from the Underdark—we sang in your Innerdark and now we take up the dread keening for you across our sandy bier—faster, faster, Our Mighty Master!’
So they keened their iron song, they the hammers, and he the master of the tong—
Brit’s feet left the rise where the surf had carved a little bluff, where her sultry scent suffused the sand with her passing grace.
The two sinister men, not fathers by their bearing, not related to the twins according to their looks, were engaged in separating the boy twin from the girl twin, both children seeming to be halfway to youth, perhaps six or seven. This separation was being achieved by sour lies about their hero and laced with sweet lies about some fairy tale life ushered by these two fawning creatures.
Doubt crept across the faces of the foundling twins yet slowly, a doubt that was erased by the steely truth of the hammer song. The boy on his left and the girl on his right, both hugging one another as if in loss, met his eyes with clear wells of beaming hope and the hammers sang with joy:
‘For Master!’ they keened as each yore hammer sank its steely fangs into the bent backs of the fiendish man-things, who were lovers by their prissy tell. Each squealed like a womanly sow at the slaughter pen, Rightmaul striking deeper and cleaving into lung and heart—Leftclaw, not to be out-done, chopping cross-wise and cleaving the sissy spine in twain.
He stood over the gifted twins and they beamed up at him in adoration, surrounded by the ruin of their soul stealers. They were clothed in white shifts, not seeming like beach goers at all. The girl spoke with her hands clasped under her darling chin, her blond hair framing her freckled face, “We do not know these men. Our mother has died and we are to be sold into this place.”
The boy, whose blond hair had been shorn about the ears, tilted his head his arms akimbo and danced, “We prayed and Lady light brought you! Will you be our Father?”
He looked, starting, as sirens closed in behind him and the area around them stood empty save for the leaking corpses of the two fiends. The girl held a pink garland, the boy a white garland, both of flowers woven upon shell-beaded string, strings that hummed like love and silenced the keening madness of the yore hammers.
“I have no time left for fathering. I’m at the end of my days. I might battle the Body Takers for a time so that you might gain some distance from the death place of these Soul Takers.”
An engine gunned onto the beach behind him, marking the arrival of a police cruiser by the wide fenced path whence he had come to this awakening departure.
"Run when I turn. Run for the thickest herd and get lost among them—run south as I run north!"
“Bless you, Might!” cheered the boy, flashing his soft green eyes up at him I wonder.
The girl, the leader of the two, grabbed his hand and smiled up at Brit with her moistening green eyes, “We love you, Might—we won’t forget!”
They ran, screaming as if in play, concealing their sudden kinship with him in a skipping, peeping way.
Another siren sounded and another cruiser engine gunned northward, coming to meet him in a pincer attack. He turned and saw them there, one officer to the west having emerged from the way he had come, and two officers rolling up from the north before the massive crowd now gathered and scattered, milling in fear, then eddying in curiosity, their masters on the scene of their panic calming them like the shepherd’s arrival assures the flock against the wolf’s fangs.
‘The kids make this worthwhile—for the children!’
‘Yes, Master, oh Mighty!’ keened the yore hammers and he had to turn and glance at the two little darlings skipping along the surf’s edge to freedom—and they were gone.
He was smitten with doubt.
Where they had been, was merely foamy surf and two waddling gulls pecking at some sea shells, their footprints of the gifted twins having been erased by the surf.
‘They are free,” sang the yore hammers, ringing like church bells in his inner dark.
Doubt fled him, the iron song rising within his being, his chest expanding, his shoulders relaxing for the final effort against evil.
He paused, reached for thought and found it not there and its quest not to his liking.
The police engines stopped revving as both vehicles banked to a stop, the single cup directly up sand to the west, the male and female cop team 30 yards further north. They were setting up a cordon, the north vehicle ready to intercept him. They were waiting for reinforcements.
She was so beautiful, tasted so full, felt so firmly soft—he was Her reason for breathing; she oathed to a yore that reflected into this wan time but thinly anymore. A bleakness had abided too long within the corpse of the Arуan throng, and thirsted mightily to sing its iron song.
He roared: “Might!” and surged up the beach, only three steps right and the rest to the thunder-smitten west, where slate and gray gloom closed in and blotted out the no longer visible sun, lightning sheeting the sky, as night was heralded by soaking dawn.
…
This ends the open posting of Writ Hate.
The final three chapters will be posted at Lynn Lockhart’s substack:
Thunderer
Write Hate: Chapter 8
Gray Rising
…
Grifter
Writ Hate: Chapter 9
Gray Shining
…
Drifter
Writ Hate: Chapter 10
Gray Tidings
