'What think you, brother? A good week's work!' A leathery arm waved eastward. 'All the lands of these pustulant braggarts are now ours.'
'Not quite.' Buried deep with Kobkale's profound repulsiveness was a mind steeped in abhorrent knowledge and sharp of thought. 'Some may continue to hold out against us.'
'Think you so? Genuinely?' Kushmouth frowned, an action that drew eyebrows like dead larvae halfway down over his protuberant eyes. 'Don't you think the destruction of the primary city of the Gowdlands will cause all the others to bow in terror to our will?'
'Mostly, yes. But there may still be some who think it better to resist than to acknowledge our suzerainty. For them, laying waste to a town and its inhabitants will not be lesson enough.' Kobkale glanced skyward. 'A greater lesson may be wanting. The everlastingly stubborn must not merely be terrified: they must be reminded of that terror every day. They must be reminded of their helplessness as much as of our power.' Turning from the rampart, he gathered his black-and-gray robes around him.
Depraved anticipation filled Kushmouth's grotesque face. 'You have something in mind, brother!'
'Most assuredly. Gather the Clan.'
They assembled atop the captured castle keep. When Kobkale put forth his proposal, there was no dissension. All present thought the notion admirable, which was to say surpassingly malign. It should ensure the subjugation of the peoples of the Gowdlands forever, and render them pleasantly malleable in the hands of the Clan and the Totumakk Horde. No chastisement more terrifying had ever been proposed by a member of the group. Kobkale was duly applauded.
This time there was no need for them to bind themselves together in the form of a giant. Instead, they gathered in a closed circle, gnarled hands clasping misshapen fingers, and focused on an imaginary point midway between them. Individually, every member of the clan could perform one kind of powerful sorcery or another. When they combined their efforts, conjoined their exertions, nothing necromantic or normal could stand before the force of their malign vision.
In accordance with Kobkale's instructions, the secret words were whispered, the special incantations invoked. In the center of the circle, unmoved and unaffected by the howls of despair still rising from the doomed city, a dark
With a vast, guttural sigh, as of Death itself exhaling, the sphere suddenly spewed skyward. Reaching the clouds, it began to spread outward in all directions. Gazing at it, a delighted Kmeliog brushed back the worms that were her hair and thought of a monstrous quantity of ink spilled on a floor, only all of it turned upside down.
Where the darkness touched, the light faded, until only grayness remained. All across the Gowdlands, and beyond, natural light was blotted from existence. With the light went every suggestion, every hint of color, until all the known world found itself existing in a state of enduring grayness, permanently somber and sad. When on the following morn the sun rose, it would not shine, but instead cast only a cold ashen glow on a world cast down into an abiding melancholy.
Concluding the hex with a necromantic flourish, Kobkale and his clanmates contemplated what they had wrought, and were much pleased with their effort. None of them had ever cared much for color anyway, so its absence did not trouble them. Even the fires that leaped from building to building in the town below were devoid of brilliance, the dancing flames no longer blushing red and orange, but only an all-consuming, all-destroying gray.
'Genuinely, genuinely!' Kesbroch clapped thick hands together in delight. Devious and irresistible were the ways of the Clan whose destiny it was to dominate the whole world.
He was not alone in his praise for their brother's counsel. Later that night, in the great hall of the castle where they had taken up residence, the other members of the Clan raised a toast of the blood of slain virgins to their noble Kobkale while they feasted on the tender meat of freshly butchered young children who had been dragged from their hiding places throughout the city.
Genuinely (as the Mundurucu were wont to say), the overarching pall of grayness that descended upon the Gowdlands sowed fear and consternation far and wide. Communities that had yet to feel the heavy foot of the Totumakk trembled and cried out as every trace and speck of color vanished from familiar surroundings. Flowers lost their tints, while paintings became as simple ink drawings set down beneath gray wash. Pinkness disappeared from the cheeks of young girls, while no longer could eager swains speak to their loved ones of eyes of dancing blue, or green, or any other hue. The world was plunged into a morbid, dreary grayness, where everyone could still see, but had lost the heart to do so.
Forced to dine on leaden grass, cattle were put off their feed and grew thin and listless, until their ribs began to show through their sides. Fungi of all manner of malformed shape and size grew large, overwhelming fields of grain, assailing orchards, and even invading the fabled, meticulously tended vegetable gardens of the kingates of Spargel and far Homimmu. Birds ceased their singing, reduced to an occasional subdued croak, while ducks and chickens found no solace in eggs that instead of issuing forth ivory white, emerged from their cloaca ashen of aspect.
A different kind of grayness in the form of hunger began to stalk the land. Comfortably ensconced within the castle of Kyll-Bar-Bennid, the Khaxan Mundurucu received reports from Horde outriders of what their collective spell had wrought, and were mightily pleased. Town after town, city after city, submitted without a fight to their dominion, begging only that a little color be restored to them. The Mundurucu accepted these capitulations with ill grace, and maintained the full force of the malicious incantation. The despair of their newly acquired subjects was too delicious to discard. So they continued to revel in the all-pervasive grayness they had conjured forth, and to commit unspeakable atrocities within the defiled sanctity of the castle.
Kobkale had been right about more than one consequence of the Clan's conquest. Among the inhabitants of the Gowdlands were a few individuals too headstrong to realize the impotence of their position even when confronted by the sweeping power of the Mundurucu. These intractables had holed themselves up within the High Fortress of Malostranka, in the deep forest of Fasna Wyzel, and from there steadfastly refused to submit to the rule of the Totumakk. Considering it a minor matter, the Mundurucu sent a small army under the command of General Feelleq-a-Qua to subdue these obstinate ones. Finding the fortress, which was set on a sheer-sided promontory in the midst of a deep river canyon, too inaccessible to assault directly, Feelleq-a-Qua and his staff proceeded to blockade the only access, a bridge built across the tops of smaller, intervening spires, and settled down to starve out the last resistance to the Horde's rule.
The rodent-faced general was in no hurry to sacrifice any of those under his command. They had plenty of time. With the rest of the Gowdlands subdued there was no fear of being attacked from the rear, and the rich surrounding forest and countryside provided both ample provisions and good sport to the men and creatures under his command. Comfortably bivouacked, they could ravage and burn a village a week without running out of prospects for at least a year. Undoubtedly, the garrison of the fortress would realize the futility of their position long before then, and would request a sullen truce. Feelleq-a-Qua would graciously accept, occupy Malostranka, and then have its surviving occupants slaughtered down to the last infant.
For now, though, he was content to rest, secure in his mastery of the immediate territory, and have his siege engineers lob occasional great stones or balls of gray fire at the fortress. It would not do to allow its delinquent defenders time to relax, or to enjoy a peaceful night's sleep. Idling in the chair that had been set up outside his tent beneath a canopy of gray silk, guards in attendance, he contemplated the siege as he munched contentedly on a bowl of ladyfingers that were not made of cake.
THREE
