Vesha Bittertongue (or so the ungrateful called her) made her home in an old flint mine, too remote for casual visitors. Far enough, indeed, that visitors tended to disappear if they got casual about little things like gratitude. No matter what they wanted—love, strength, comfort, safety—they ignored her warnings that magic tended to betray. They always came back whining, and that never ended well. So when she woke to someone hammering at her door, high overhead, Vesha strongly considered a preemptive curse. Just to get it over with.
The noise pounded down through the levels of the old mine. At last she slid out from her bed’s comfortable furs. Anyone who came calling had probably shunned her a time or twenty, so when she climbed the log-ladder through the layers of her home, up to the conical timber roof that sealed the mine, at least half her intention was to end a bloodline or spit in a face.
By the time she reached the top, she grudgingly admitted that the knocker might need actual help. Might even be a stranger, because these days, who around here would risk asking?
“Enough!” Vesha shouted as she fought the oaken latch. The visitor was pounding on the slanted door now. Rainwater sloshed through the cracks and splattered on the top level of her home: a half-log floor that used to be a workspace for knapping. She’d swept it a thousand times with a twig besom, but on bad days she still caught her toe on the odd fleck of flint. An unwelcoming place, perfect for company.
She kept supplies up here—ropes, curing hides, bundled withies, raw clay, and firewood with the bark side up—things immune to the occasional drip through the conical roof. The drip became a deluge as she cracked open the door to the slate-gray sky. A serious rainstorm was hammering at the Great Rib Hills.
The stranger backed off a step. “Please,” he shouted through the wind—it was a youngish man, burned and bloody, hands stuffed in his armpits. “Shelter, please, grandmother.”
“No grandson of mine.” Vesha squinted past him. Down the valley, up the other side, a small bright fire guttered in the rain. It defied the storm, burned despite the wind.
And slowly—very slowly—that fire was coming this way.
Genuine interest flickered to life.
“What burned you, boy?”
He went to speak, hesitated, looked back at the distant fire. And Vesha found herself grinning.
Whatever that oncoming threat turned out to be, it involved a magic she’d never seen. Fire that defied the rain? Massively useful. Perhaps even something she could trade with—barter decent food from villages that had little use anymore for the witch in the hills. (Oh, they’d found her useful enough when they wanted their love-charms, but now enchanted loves had turned to loveless marriages, and who to blame but the witch? How could that nonsense be the magic’s fault at all?)
Vesha backed down the ladder—a slanted log with divots chopped out for steps—and the stranger followed. The door slammed shut above them.
Vesha struck flint against pyrite until the wick of her clay lamp caught fire. The stranger flinched. Up close, he smelled of sweet char and rank travel clothes.
“What’s coming?” Vesha asked. “It’s chasing you?”
The stranger’s mouth worked, smacked like he was thirsty. Like he hadn’t paused to drink rainwater from a leaf or a creek or the hollow of a rock. Like he couldn’t slow down. His feet, she realized, were bloody: shoes worn clear through.
“Do you have a little drink to share, grandmother?” he said. “Sour-honey or berry wine?”
“For the pain? I can get that, I suppose.” Vesha crossed the split-log floor and held the lamp high, scrutinizing his wounds as he shied away from the flame. The blood came from the kind of injuries you’d take if you ran through the hills in a storm, ran in terror. The burns, though… “Those look like impacts,” she said to herself. “As if someone did their level best to beat my new guest to death with a torch.”
A torch that burned in a rainstorm.
“It’s Old Man Ogun,” the stranger whispered, as if to impart his fear.
“I don’t know that name, and I know every serious magician in the Great Ribs.”
The stranger shook his head, and cringed as the motion stretched a burn all down his neck. When words escaped him—or maybe he held back—Vesha climbed the ladder again to peek out the door.
The oncoming fire had a staggered rhythm, like a torch carried by a man with a limp. Old Man Ogun, visible only as that torch in the gloom, had reached the bottom of the valley.
A pleasant undercurrent of fear sparked life into her, slashed away the boredom. This was a real puzzle: how to control something implacable, and how to use it once she’d snared it. “I think you’d better tell me why he’s chasing you,” she called down.
“Nothing, I didn’t do anything. We were…I found him all grown over with vines, staring at a skeleton. He’s not rotted. Withered, sure. All those years waiting for the next person to hunt. First one he saw—” The words rolled out of the stranger’s mouth like a landslide. “—she died fast, very fast. He just…” The stranger made a gesture like stabbing with a spear or, presumably, a torch. “And then he looked at me and didn’t look away. His eyes are all sunken in, brown where the white should be, like he got bog-drowned or boiled in a tar pit. I don’t…do you have anything to drink, grandmother? When he gets me, I don’t want to feel it.”
By now Vesha was back on the floor with the stranger, weighing and sifting his babble like gold dust in a riverbed. “Let’s leave aside that you brought trouble to my door,” she said firmly. “You’re my guest, it seems. I can’t promise you’ll live, but yes: I can at least get you drunk and do something for those burns while you tell me what you know. Quickly.”
She’d set big clay jars of honey and water brewing last summer, and what was left was strong. The stranger—his name was Gare—slurped gratefully from a cup as Vesha smeared on a burn ointment of honey, marigold, and a mash of dried buckthorn berries. She kept the ointment mixed and ready: truth be told, she burned herself often these days, clumsy with age.
When she finished, she went up to check on Old Man Ogun’s progress. The distant figure appeared to be struggling with the thornbushes along the lower hillside, the same thorns that had ruined Gare’s feet. That fire, that swinging torch, ignited the bushes but couldn’t keep them lit for long in the rain.
Ogun didn’t appear to tire. That torch bashed into obstacle after obstacle in a way that Vesha admired. She wondered whether the dead felt fatigue or pain, or whether Ogun’s rage just burned it all away. She wondered what it would be like to pick up that torch, and what it would make of her.
“If you know his name,” she said over her shoulder as she climbed down from the door, “you know his story, yes? Why was he in that cave?”
“Not just one story,” said Gare thickly, slurping sour-honey and coughing on the dregs. “Someone stole his fire, or maybe his daughter. Someone burned him.”
“And you? What brought you there?” Vesha headed down the ladder to the next level, where she kept her cookfire. In younger days she’d tunneled a clay-lined chimney up to the surface and capped it with rocks in such a way that the wind sucked smoke right out.
In here, the second level down, she kept herbs, mushrooms, ochre paints, necklaces of teeth and gut, knots of hair, and her best flint knives. If Gare saw this place—deep-carved support beams, bowls that sloshed of their own accord—he might think her more frightening than the corpse.
“And you?” she called up again when Gare didn’t answer. “Why’d you go to that cave, boy?”
“He’ll be here soon.”
She poked her head up through the ladder’s aperture. “Yes, I’m aware. Who were you with?”
Gare blinked. The clay cup broke in his hands, spilling sour-honey all down his scorched clothes.
“You said ‘we.’”
“I didn’t. I swear, no.”
Vesha snorted and went back down. If not for the cobwebs of conscience, she’d be tempted to stake Gare to the ground and watch what happened. It could be he’d lost a friend in that cave, or perhaps he’d followed the stories in hopes of turning Old Man Ogun loose on someone he couldn’t kill himself. And those possibilities covered a lot of craven and desperate ground. Maybe he was contemptible. Maybe he just had no foresight. Or maybe he’d seen his death coming all along, and considered it an acceptable price for—
For what? Getting rid of someone he hated? Leading Ogun away from someone he loved? Or anything in between, and either way, Gare wasn’t talking anymore. Vesha only had herself to blame there: the sour-honey had calmed his heart, the poultice had soothed his burns, and a snore trickled down from the upper level. Driving him out was no longer an option she could live with.
Wood groaned up there and Vesha’s heart clenched. Sparks sizzled down through the gaps with the raindrops. And again she found herself smiling, a tight rictus grin, because enduring fire like that could buy respect as easily as it could buy food.
The story, when it came out drunkenly—
Thud. Thud. Thud went the heavy torch on the door, a shower of sparks every time.
—put a snarl in Vesha’s throat and almost put a knife in Gare’s heart. His was a village (down on the other side of the highest Ribs) where only the oldest inherited, and only the son.
You could see the conflict coming as far as the horizon, and to make it worse, his father—king of a forest you could cross in a lazy afternoon—wasn’t dead yet. The murder was preemptive.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Go hunting mushrooms in the right cave, send your brother down the slope to the collapsed chamber where a dead man stood overgrown, staring at a broken skeleton. Watch as the dead man turns, as fire blossoms around his dusty torch, as that torch rips off the top of your brother’s head.
And just as your strange little murder-plot turns to gods what have I done, the dead man meets your eyes and starts limping up the slope.
The story came out like vomit. Hopefully there wasn’t much more vomitousness to come. Gare, after all, wasn’t that drunk. He just needed to spill his guts.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Naturally, Vesha had a back way out: a deep old natural tunnel, crawling-high, that led into a nearby gorge. She left Gare tied up, lest he interfere with the lower levels of her house or, overcome by self-loathing, open the door for Old Man Ogun.
The house, the old mine, had three levels: Vesha slept at the bottom, cooked and worked in the middle, and kept stores and strange guests at the top. The tunnel connected to the bottom level, convenient should disaster strike. If raiders wanted her paltry supplies, if a vengeful husband came calling for his wife’s secrets, or if begged-for magic generated—perish the thought—consequences. Outwitting angry men with clubs was almost a sport at this point.
Sport notwithstanding, the tunnel always put a knot in Vesha’s throat and another around her heart.
She carried a clay lamp of fish-oil as she crawled along on her knees and one hand. The darkness down there blended night with underground: she couldn’t see the end, not until she’d gone quite a way and worn holes in her woven skirt. How long had it been since she came through here? Had she weighed quite this much? Had her knees hurt like this? And what in every god’s name was scuttling between her fingers?
She squeezed through the tunnel’s last contortions and came out under a shelf of rock. The nearest slope had plenty of cover between here and home: the same heavy thornbushes that had frustrated Ogun farther down toward the bottom of the valley.
Huddling in the thorns, lamp doused, she watched the dead man work.
The rain had slacked off, but the low, conical timbers of her roof—the cap of the old flint mine—were sodden. Ogun bashed at them without a pause to rest or reconsider. She could hear it all the way down here in the gorge: Thud. Thud. Thud.
The unnaturally durable torch burned on. It sizzled with every strike, and puffs of steam rose with darker smoke. The torch’s head, crashing up and down, rippled with a bright clear flame.
This would be a damp night, and the door was sturdy. But if tomorrow turned dry…
Vesha carried odds and ends in the folds of her clothes, among them a seeing-stone: a clear smooth lump of quartz. She grunted an incantation older than villages, almost older than speech, and brought the stone to her eye.
The quartz, used with respect, gave her a blurry look at tomorrow. Not people, of course—people moved around too much, would do too many things tomorrow—but the weather, certainly. Through the quartz, she glimpsed sunlight streaming down the Great Rib Hills.
A bright day, then. A warm day, and the timbers would dry, and Ogun could burn his way in at last. That gave her the night and the early morning to find a solution.
Ogun, she realized, was clearly visible in the quartz: she saw a certain future where he stood in that exact spot, bashing at the door, no matter what she did between now and then. Sparks burst up. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Even now he looked in her direction, an emaciated half-face in the gloom, drew a shuddering breath as if scenting her magic—and kept on bashing. This was no hunter of opportunity. Ogun was implacable. He’d chase his prey to death, then hunt whoever was next, even if he had to wait a very long time for someone to catch his eye.
That implied possibilities about trapping him—but where? In the mine? In the tunnel? He’d keep coming no matter what: any trap was temporary. Buy time and she might figure out how to turn his magic to her ends. Failing that, figure out how to scrape him off, how to run, if Gare was dead by then. And Gare really could die any number of ways within the next day or so, making Vesha the next obvious target.
Thud. Thud. THUNK.
All those interesting puzzles and what-ifs, all that bleak enjoyment, rattled out their last breath as—a stone’s throw away—the door crunched and sagged. Old Man Ogun kept up his rhythmic impact, the sparks flew, but now the sound was different, as if he was beating a man’s broken ribs without remorse. Vesha blinked furiously, found unexpected tears prickling up, and hunched lower under cover of the thorns. She grunted the ancient spell again and looked through the quartz and yes: tomorrow was still sunny, and Old Man Ogun still stood over the smoking door of the safest home she’d ever had.
But there could be multiple meanings to his certain presence tomorrow, she told herself desperately. Maybe he wasn’t smashing away—maybe he was standing there, would be standing there, because Gare was dead and Ogun hadn’t yet seen someone else to hunt.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Could she send Gare out the tunnel, drive him down there if necessary? Would Ogun sense his presence and follow him over the ground? Though Vesha had the stone-talking skill to shave days off the laborious process of grinding a good axe-head, there was a vast difference between tool-making and calling down a precise cave-in to trap the dead man. And the ploy was unlikely to work, wasn’t it, because in that unusually clear future she saw in the quartz, Ogun stood over the door no matter what.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Gods, he was an ugly one. Between starlight now and the blurry but sunlit image in the quartz pressed to Vesha’s eye, she saw that Ogun was a mass of scars. Like the young man below, like any number of previous victims, he’d commanded himself forward. Rockfalls, sharp crags, talon thorns. He’d ripped himself up. He would never heal.
For the first time, Vesha made herself ponder the unthinkable: she could simply leave. She’d miss her home, of course. She’d bury Gare’s death and her own cowardice in the quiet plot of land below her heart, where all her great crimes slept. She’d abandon, to Ogun’s negligible mercy, whatever poor fool came up here next. She’d even feel bad about it, dream of this moment and weep. But she’d be alive.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Right and wrong and…something else. There had to be a third way.
Magic had defined her life, but hers was a scavenger’s magic, scraps of lore and experiment and weaponized pettiness. She’d clawed out her reputation as a witch and stoked it brighter than it should be, a risky play for respect. Truth be told—as she crawled back up the tunnel—none of her magic gave her easy options tonight.
On the plus side, Ogun hadn’t cared when Vesha did the seeing-stone spell. Noticed, felt it, but not cared. That meant she had room to experiment all night. He’d still be standing there when daylight came, no matter what.
Breathing room.
Soaked with tunnel-damp and sweat, knees screaming, Vesha hauled herself into the lowest level of her home, a comfortable space of timbers and rock. This was the old mining floor: cool in the summer, survivable in winter, and usually safe below layers of split logs. She wondered whether Ogun had enough mind left to make his way down her log-ladders one portentous step at a time, or whether he’d just tumble in his implacable way. That thought earned a bleak chuckle as she flopped on her bed to rest for a moment. The bed, layers of fur over thatch over springy boughs, was the most comfortable one of her life. Abandoning it would hurt.
“You alive up there?” she called, and of course Gare was, or Ogun would have stopped trying to smash the door. But Gare didn’t answer. She cursed him roundly as she heaved herself off the bed and up a level.
He shuffled around, still tied at the wrists, and his head peeked through the ladder’s aperture. “What have I done,” he snuffled, dripping ropes of drunken snot. “What have I done, what have I done.”
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
She flinched as Gare’s slobbery weeping spattered on the floor from the level above. “Shush, boy. He won’t get in tonight, I know that much for sure—”
She choked on the words as Gare slipped over the edge and tumbled headfirst, hands still bound. His head and shoulders crumpled oddly—crackthump, THUMP—and he flopped across her kitchen floor like he’d been deboned. His bloody feet smashed stockpiles she’d spent years gathering. Dried things flew everywhere.
Far overhead, Old Man Ogun stopped hammering at the door.
Once she stopped cursing, Vesha dragged Gare down a level and into one of the short mining tunnels. She scratched a curling sign in a nearby rock, softer than flint; the mine’s good flint was long gone. The twisted symbol spoke of interruption, but also entombment. It hummed with purpose.
She took lukewarm blood from the corpse, mixed it with ochre, and rubbed the paint into the carving. The short tunnel trembled and collapsed, easier than she’d thought it would.
A rush of gritty air drove her back into her living space and cast her, coughing, on her bed. A normal person, she figured, would find it ghoulish to live so close to a buried corpse. But that was the old way, wasn’t it. Folks had lived and died in caves since the deepest of the deep time. A very long time ago, she’d raised children on the floor that covered their grandparents.
All of that was gone, of course. Old scars. Those who lived wanted nothing to do with their witch of a mother, and never had.
For many reasons, she couldn’t sleep. When dim daylight glowed at the far end of the escape tunnel, she sighed and slouched off the bed again. Her good woven dress would need hours of patching and a thorough wash. She traded it for a tough, sleeveless, knee-length garment of sewn leather, something she could work in, and run if needed. The change of clothes cleared her mind.
Gare’s death gave her much more time, but it also locked her in unless she wanted to take that brutal tunnel in and out forever, or abandon the house entirely. Open the door just once, and she’d be face to face with Old Man Ogun, and become his new target. He’d bash her skull in before she could get back down the ladder. Make the wrong move and she’d have a dead man clomping after her for eternity, wreaking havoc everywhere she went. Stalking her without rest until she collapsed. A fire kindled in her gut. Her magic might not be much help at the moment—please drink this brew, Mister Ogun, I promise you can trust it—but she remained a witch. One who bent the world for her own benefit.
And looking at the problem that way…well, that gave her ideas.
Back through the tunnel again on bloody hands and knees, pushing a bundle ahead of her in the dark. Back into the gorge, and up the thorny slope for a view by daylight. And there he was, staring at the brutalized door, torch held tirelessly high. Ogun had been a skinny man in life, a lean old loner. Violence before and after death had done him and his leather clothes no favors: Vesha could hardly see where torn skin left off and torn leather began.
Wetting her lips nervously, she unwrapped the bundle: a big half-cured deerskin, a rope, and a pot of fish-oil.
First she draped the deerskin on the thornbushes, a dubious visual shelter. Then, once neither she nor Ogun could see each other, she put the quartz to her eye and grunted the ancient spell.
She looked up the hillside and the high slopes of the Great Ribs. The vision showed evening and night, gloom. Smoke blurred in and out: the potential for Ogun to burn her home, or maybe for her home to burn with him inside it. She didn’t dare look at him around the deerskin.
He’d be looking her way right now. Would he go back to looking at the door?
With immense care, she draped the rope over her shoulders and pulled the deerskin off the thorns. She held it high, a curtain between them, and paused. No sound, no thumping tread.
Keeping the deerskin up, she sidled along the slope to a gap in the thornbushes. And now, commanding her heart to get a grip, she glanced around the edge of the deerskin.
Ogun was staring at the place where she’d used the seeing-stone but, just now, he turned back to face the door. A stillness settled over him. She could well imagine him as Gare had described him, overgrown and staring at the body of his last victim as he waited for the next to show up.
So far, so good. Heart hammering, Vesha picked her way through the bushes with the deerskin held high. She was coming at his back, and if he heard, he might or might not care to turn around. So she went silently. She knew this slope down to the pebble.
If she failed, she could retreat into the gorge and try to trap him in the tunnel, maybe even—maybe—let him burn the house around himself, entomb him in the old mine. There were options. She clung to that: for a witch, there were always options. Had to be.
What she needed to do required five precise actions, fast. Not complicated ones, but gods, that was a lot of things to go wrong.
The chimney was a narrow clay shaft, little wider than her forearm was long, loosely capped with flat rocks in a way that let the wind draw the smoke out. Moving those rocks would be a risk as great as anything she’d done so far. One good heave at the central rock, in younger days, would have given her the space to access the chimney.
Up close, Ogun stank of the cave, rotten meat, bad leather, and the charred flesh and hair caught in his torch. Vesha shifted closer with the deerskin curtain held high, willing her body to stay calm. It was like the difference between walking a straight line on the ground and walking a single-log bridge: same course, but you had to fight your instincts.
Her heart broke into a stampede. She kept the tremor from her hands by force of will. Standing behind him now, she laid down the deerskin and very, very carefully placed a knotted loop of rope around Ogun’s neck.
A heave—gods, her knees—took the flat rocks off the chimney aperture. Ogun’s head turned her way with an audible creak. His sunken, sagging eyes blazed with fury and innate fire, and he bared his broken teeth as he met her gaze. A smile, maybe, of gratitude that she’d given him purpose.
As he lurched her way, heedless of the rope around his neck, she smashed the pot of fish-oil against the inside of the chimney.
And jumped down. Head-first.
That, in the end, was what made her a witch: the world could be controlled, and she was part of the world. She controlled herself, belonged to herself, and when the moment demanded she could make herself do unthinkable things. Being a witch meant audacity.
Her legs curled involuntarily, crunching her poor knees against soot-caked clay. Her shoulders jammed, and blood rushed to her face with a thick, heavy force. As she twisted frantically, bringing the rope with her, the first sparks hissed against her feet and down her legs.
One shoulder found the oil slick and she fell a little farther with an unwholesome jolt all up her spine. The space down there was dark except for a few small embers, and flickering light in scattered oil.
The fish-oil smoldered, both above and below her. She needed the lubricant, but this was the biggest gamble of all. Thick, oily smoke trapped itself around her head and shoulders as she fought her way down toward those tiny embers.
Gods, she’d cook herself alive down here.
The rope was slack and bunched around her legs. Maybe Ogun was following her down the chimney; maybe the noose had slipped off his neck. It wasn’t as if Vesha could look back to check.
Jagged impact seared along the ball of her left foot. She tightened up in a face-down ball and sucked in an agonizing lungful of oily smoke.
A final contortion slammed her palms into the half-dead firepit. She hissed and grabbed the clay mouth of the oven to drag herself free and slam onto the floor of the second level. That was agony upon agony. Light already glowed in the chimney.
When she pulled herself upright, Ogun’s torch lurched down to sizzle right above her face.
Thick sparks lit the fish-oil in her hair and bit at her cheeks. Just beyond the torch, the dead man, horribly scarred, wriggled down toward her like an eel. The oil in the chimney was burning in earnest now. It didn’t bother him. Didn’t catch. No pyre for this strange god of fire, no indeed. A grave, though…
She’d scraped herself bloody any number of places. It was the work of a moment to draw a sign on the mouth of the oven, the same coiling burial symbol she’d used to entomb Gare.
With a crackle and a whoosh, the chimney tunnel collapsed in on itself.
Years of soot and earth and clay shards rushed down into the firepit. The whole wall shivered.
The torch-head protruded from the mess, jutting straight down into the ruined fireplace, quivering with the rage of the trapped man who held it firm. Just looking at the torch caked in burnt gore, Vesha knew that no hammer or leverage would pull it down from Ogun’s grip. It was a part of him, impossible to steal, inseparable.
She tried anyway, of course. Gave it a yank just on general principle.
When she finally cracked open her broken door and looked down the chimney, she saw Old Man Ogun’s emaciated feet wiggling furiously in the gloom. She drew the sign once more to be sure—the magic easy and eager this time—and the whole chimney collapsed into the earth.
She needed another chimney, on the other side of the second level this time around, and that would be a long project. These days, for now, she ate cold food in her suddenly-much-warmer home. She mended her clothes and sorted her precious herbs by the light of the fuelless torch that jutted down into the old fireplace from the shivering wall. Endless smoke trickled up along the ladders, up through the open door.
Every night, cozy and warm, when she looked through the quartz with a grin, the torch burned on tomorrow.
Jonathan Olfert’s paleofiction and SFF stories have backstabbed and skulked their way into Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Dark Recesses Press, Lightspeed, Radon Journal, and other fine establishments. Jon and his family live and work near Halifax.
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