Morwen began to mash the flowers and roots with a mortar and pestle while Szat belched in her ear and produced a third chicken leg from nowhere. She added a dash of alcohol to the black paste to dilute it.
Szat leapt from Morwen’s shoulder onto the table, grabbed the mortar, and downed the lot.
Morwen growled in frustration and banged her fist on the table. “That’s all I had.” Szat grinned back at her. “Now what am I supposed to do? They’ll be up all night.”
A sudden thought occurred to her. She glanced up at a jar full of pale red leaves with black dots in the centre. Why didn’t she think of that before? The best solution for all concerned.
“Ah!” said Szat noticing what Morwen stared at, “Killer’s eye, that’s my girl. We could finish up here then go and visit the kitchens and see what cook has ready.” Killer’s eye—one leaf and the heart never beats again.
“A pleasant death, much better than all the suffering the poor things are going through right now. It would be inhumane not to do it.” Morwen poured a handful of leaves into a fresh mortar and began to mash them up. The pulp gave off a sweet, dusty scent like raspberries as it gradually turned into a light pink paste. How could anything that smelled so wonderful and looked so pretty be wrong? “Feel free to help yourself,” Morwen said.
“No thank you,” Szat replied.
Morwen spooned the last of the mixture into the old man’s mouth. He swallowed with an exaggerated gulp. “This will give me sweet dreams?” he asked.
“No, it will kill you,” The man’s eyes widened in terror and then glassed over.
Morwen sat on the window ledge, a contented smile on her face, and listened to the endless crashing of the waves far below, the mournful howl of the wind, and Szat snoring on her shoulder. Through the swirling mists and sea spray, she could make out the distant cliffs of an island. Since she was a child she’d dreamed about sailing there, making herself its queen. It may as well have been the moon—no one sailed the black sea.
Goron sculled the tankard. The beer streamed off his chin in two rivulets and onto his naked and muscular chest. His mat of chest hair turned into dewy, golden grass. A woman, who was not Anwen, his betrothed, dried it with long strokes of her tongue and growled appreciatively as if Goron’s chest hair had been the missing ingredient the beer needed. What her tongue missed, her naked breasts didn’t. Her work done, Jasin released an unladylike belch, flopped onto her back on the wooden bench, and stared up at a thistles’ nest in the rafters.
“Another drink for your captain,” Goron roared. He waved the empty tankard at his seventeen guards, all that remained of his force after over one hundred perished from black rot. From the other side of the great hall they waved their own tankards back enthusiastically, misinterpreting the gesture. Goron tried yelling some more but that only excited them further. He knew better than to ask Jasin, and he lurched to his feet with a heavy sigh. The floor moved beneath his feet, and he found himself following it, in a roundabout way, to the beer keg.
He didn’t mean to be this drunk, none of them did. It was a blatant dereliction of duty. Half of them should be on watch but assigning nine guards to patrol the vast fortress of Wichsault was pointless. The minimum needed to man the gates and walk the ramparts was twenty. His instincts were right when he thought about it, best to spend the last of their days drunk until the enemy breached the castle, or the black rot claimed them. But his sense of duty was deeply ingrained, and Goron knew he couldn’t defy it for long. Tomorrow they would be manning their posts, but tonight they would be swilling ale and chasing women.
Oda, a huge woman who had to pass through most doors sideways, bellowed. She liked to play rough when she got drunk, and Goron was her favourite plaything. She stamped her foot and charged, the bellow still in her throat. Goron tensed his belly for the attack and, at the last moment, staggered to his left leaving nothing but the wall to stop his assailant. Oda’s head was tough, but the wall, despite its coating of the black mould-like substance, was tougher. Oda’s head exploded like a roasted pumpkin, and its contents slithered down the wall into a gruesome pile on the floor.
Goron shrugged at the mess and continued his journey to the keg. He filled up his tankard, drained it, and poured another. The other guards sensed things were about to step up a notch and jostled around the barrel to fill their own tankards. “Time for some dares, boys.” Jasin, quite obviously, wasn’t a boy—her tits were still out—but she let out a resounding cheer with the others.
What do you dare when there’s only one woman in the room, and you fancy her, and don’t want everyone else getting their mitts on her?
Goron caught sight of the tabard of Gilac, the first Justiciar of Wichsault, dancing like a kite in the north wind blown in from the black sea that found a thousand ways to make life in the castle miserable. “I dare you, Torbin, to eat Gilac’s rags.” It was a blatantly disrespectful act that, at any other time, would get him whipped, but there was no one left to do the whipping.
Torbin, an enormously fat man who couldn’t do up his regulation belt and was forced to sling his sword and scabbard over his shoulder, looked up at the wavering piece of material and grinned. “Aye, always thought it looked delicious.”
Goron didn’t think so. It was
