The Dusty Dead's Revenge Page 7

  Chapter 7 – A Master of Shadow...

  Thaddeus Turner remained shrouded by his inner sanctum's thick shadows. Though only a cavity remained to mark where a nose had once been on the ruins of his face, Thaddeus's powers made his sense of smell keen. Harlington's posse lit their fires on the outskirts of the Turner ranch. Maggie and her brothers saw only a slight glow when they peeked between the boards that covered their windows, but the remains of Thaddeus's nose wrinkled for the smell of the distant smoke. Thaddeus recognized that the fires had been started so that the wind would carry the flames to the Turner cabin. The smoke would soon enough thicken. The fires would grow hotter.

  Thaddeus knew Harlington's men waited behind that fire, ready with rifles and pistols to shoot any of the surviving Turner brothers who might run from the cabin to combat the flames. Thaddeus knew Harlington's men would wait behind the flames and make sure the fires devoured the Turner cabin and all within it should none of the living Turners come out to fight their blaze.

  Thaddeus thought of such ignorant arrogance and snorted. Did those men believe that he had not suffered sieges more terrible during his many years as a bone-shaker? Those flames outside inspired no fear in Thaddeus Turner. Randolph Harlington and his men were fools to think smoke and flame sufficient weapons to wield against a bone-shaker the likes of himself.

  Such simple people had no understanding of the forces they tempted.

  Maggie had only given them a taste of a bone-shaker's power.

  The shadows of his sanctum calmed and focused Thaddeus Turner's thoughts. The shadows centered him and soothed the disappointment that had threatened to choke him since Maggie described to him the patterns she had traced in the dust. He had no more time with which to earn the Lakota's trust, no more time to try to convince them he was a pariah among the white man, a scorned man who, truly, shared none of the white man's zeal for land. He had no more time to convince the Lakota that he sought a different kind of power by collecting the shards of their language they held most secret.

  So Thaddeus sat in his sanctum's darkness and collected his thoughts while the shadows comforted him like a favored cloak. The Lakota would never trust him now, and Dry Acre cursed his kin. Powerful bone-shakers knew no home. Thaddeus Turner would never be a part of any community or tribe.

  Once again, Thaddeus Turner would have to wonder if he might have missed the secret, lost glyph needed to reconstruct the language shared between the dead.

  The shadows helped Thaddeus to accept it. Swallowing his loss, Thaddeus rapped on his sanctum's door.

  “Father?”

  Maggie answered immediately. Had she again been slumped on the other side of his sanctum's door? Thaddeus sighed. His daughter did not know her terrible origins. Maggie did not know the depth of her latent power. Thaddeus kept a foul secret from her. Had those lines that Maggie traced into the dust been a cost of his secrecy?

  “Bring me my lamp, child.”

  The thick door that separated Thaddeus's inner sanctum from the great room did not hide Maggie's gasp.

  “Can't we just escape in the dark, father?”

  Thaddeus growled. “Have you so quickly lost your taste for revenge? Do you think they would simply let us leave? After what you've taken from them? After you summoned such a blight upon their beasts?”

  Maggie remained silent, and Thaddeus knew his daughter understood it was too late to flee into the night.

  “What of the other brothers?” Maggie whispered. “Do we leave them behind?”

  Thaddeus hissed. “We leave no one behind, girl! You've taken a taste of it with your tracings. You might as well get your hands dirty now by helping your brothers exhume the dead. You're going to have to be well acquainted with the grave from this day forward. Now go and fetch my lamp. Your brothers will understand what needs to be done when they see you bring that lamp to my door. Bring me that lamp and then your hands can operate a shovel as well as any of your living brothers.”

  Thaddeus counted Maggie's footfalls that creaked beneath his sanctum's thick door. He watched as the scant light which seeped beneath his doorway went black as Maggie extinguished the great room's candles and lanterns so that the shadows ruled unchallenged through the cabin.

  “Good girl, Maggie!” Thaddeus's hands trembled as he unbolted his sanctum's door and grasped the latch. “Just hold that lantern inside long enough for me to grab hold of it. My eyes see wonders in such darkness.”

  Thaddeus stretched his hand through the dark and smiled as he felt his lamp's cool surface. Maggie did well to hold the lamp steadily as she reached into his chamber. Maggie had taken her first steps as a bone-shaker, and she could no longer fear her father's tools. Thaddeus took the lamp and withdrew it into shadow as Maggie again closed his sanctum's door.

  Thaddeus sensed Maggie lingering on the other side. “Now leave me be and help your brothers dig. They will know what to do.”

  Thaddeus's eyes had adjusted many years ago to the thick darkness that lingered wherever he established a sanctum. He saw clearly where others saw only black. His fingers quickly located the fragile mechanisms operating his lamp. His fingers twisted a knob and raised the wick. With a soft hiss of stirring wind, shadows gathered in the lamp's choker. Thaddeus snapped his fingers, and a blue flame, a specter of a pale light that danced without a breeze, burned at his summons.

  Each bone-shaker possessed a unique charm, a token or talisman that helped to focus and amplify the conjurer's power: the jaw of a man drawn and quartered for treason, the fingers of a gravedigger, a scrimshaw dagger stained by a harpooner's blood, pouches filled with a mixture of entrails and dirt gathered from terrible battlegrounds. An endless variety of talismans existed from which a bone-shaker might choose. Bone-shakers did not know where or when they might find their charm, but competent bone-shakers were so drawn to their talismans that they instantly recognized whenever one might come into their possession.

  A paraffin lamp served as Thaddeus's talisman. An intricate mosaic of stained glass depicted Persephone’s abduction and resurrection upon the lamp's glass. Small, embossed pomegranates adorned the copper ring joining the lamp to the lantern's white base of bone, from which extended the blue specter of a flame that danced in the windless sanctum. The lamp never required fuel. Its wick needed no match. The lamp would fail to offer any illumination, would be only a useless trinket, to anyone other than Thaddeus Turner. To that bone-shaker, however, the lantern illuminated his power.

  That power demanded payment. Affliction scarred Thaddeus's body. His arms had lengthened, and their unnatural growth twisted upon the wrists and elbows so that Thaddeus's clumsy movements summoned much pain. His legs shriveled though his arms grew so long, forcing his feet to twist outward so that the bone-shaker lost the luxury of mobility, forcing Thaddeus to pull himself across the floor with the swollen knuckles of his oversized hands. His shoulders narrowed and struggled to support the weight of the swollen head that languished upon a thin neck. Thaddeus's body contorted into a knot of joints and cartilage that sentenced the bone-shaker into an eternal slouch.

  The magics also took a terrible toll upon the bone-shaker's face. Flesh swelled into a tangle of bulbs and knots that pulled at the eyes and mouth until those features pained for their crooked positioning. Calcified growths sprouted upon the eyelids and obstructed the bone-shaker's vision. An irritated and scabbed cavity alone marked the location of his lost nose. Though the face lacked underlying fat, folds of skin fell to hide the line of a chin. The powers pulled upon Thaddeus's forehead until the skull morphed into a strange, conical shape of terrifying deformity. Remains of ears were knitted into the side of the head, and tumors crowded the hearing canals so that the bone-shaker's hearing dwindled.

  But unlike Maggie, Thaddues Turner had been afforded a choice. He had possessed the freedom to claim such a terrible aspect according to his will. A new power accompanied each new affliction or deformity. A new secret revealed itself whenever Thaddeus offered an ounce of his
flesh. His power demanded Thaddeus take such a twisted shape, but that ancient power gave Thaddeus Turner a mastery of shadow.

  Thus Thaddeus remained shrouded by darkness. He seldom left whatever dark, inner sanctum he could establish in his nomadic movements. The darkness hid his deformity. The darkness soothed the pains that came with such a twisted and contorted body of bones and muscle. He lived only in the dark places of the earth. His rooms never possessed windows. Thaddeus considered unlit cellars luxurious. Bone-shakers as powerful as Thaddeus Turner realized how difficult it was to collect and keep the shadows needed to soothe their hurts.

  Still, a bone-shaker needed to research and study. Thaddeus needed to decipher ancient runes and glyphs if he hoped to learn the language shared between the dead.

  Thaddeus's lamp provided an illumination that did not sting the bone-shaker's eyes. Its illumination did not irritate the conjurer's sensitive skin, nor inhibit any of the surrounding shadows' comforting touch. Thaddeus placed his glowing talisman upon his sanctum's small desk as his eyes reflected the lamp's spectral blue flame. His sanctum held no bookcase teeming with molding parchments bound in tomes of leather or skin. His sanctum possessed no crystal balls.

  Thaddeus withdraw a bundle of papers out from beneath the soiled, flat pillow of his room's simple cot. The stack consisted of whatever parchment Thaddeus could find: the backs of vellum maps, shreds of newspaper, the margins of pages ripped from books of Sunday hymnals pious missionaries offered to the Turner brothers. Thaddeus covered the clean spaces of each shred of paper with sketches. Each piece of scavenged paper held the sketch of a glyph or rune drawn during a nomadic lifetime spent searching for the dead's forgotten tongue. Each piece of paper was a block Thaddeus hoped to one day assemble together into the grave's lost alphabet. Though Thaddeus could not yet speak or translate the dead's tongue, he had learned how to recognize slivers of meaning in the runes he had as thus collected. His mind marveled to consider the possible combinations still waiting to be discovered. Thaddeus knew more such combinations that any bone-shaker he knew, and the powers harvested from such combinations were terrible and great.

  The blue flame of Thaddeus's lamp cast a strange pallor upon the runes the bone-shaker's quivering fingers arranged upon the desk. Thaddeus paid close attention to that glow as he placed each sketch into a position alongside the other, looking closely for a change in the way in which his lamp's flame danced, or for a strange shadow upon the rune that cast itself in directions contrary to the way the surrounding darkness fell. Thaddeus could still only mimic the lost language of the dead he was forced to imagine. Still, the runes betrayed glimpses of power – a strange glow, a warmth to the touch, a shriveling of the paper – when positioned next to one another. Thaddeus's hands worked in his inner sanctum as he pulled power into his private room's shadows.

  It took Thaddeus much of the night while the flames set by Harlington's men crept closer to his cabin. The smoke grew thick and irritated Thaddeus's sense of smell, but the lamp's blue maintained the purity of the bone-shaker's shadows no matter how close the enemy's fire came to the Turner cabin.

  A long string of runes rested upon Thaddeus's desk late into the night. Thaddeus nodded as he watched the lines of his sketches throb in a soft, blue light his sensitive eyes noticed in his sanctum's dark. The runes pulsated in a soundless rhythm shared with the lantern's dancing flame. The bone-shaker's science was not an exact one. So much remained lost in the translation. But Thaddeus had faith in his lantern's illumination. He believed the pulsating runes promised his purpose would be realized well enough. He might not yet be able to direct the power as finely as he might wish, but Thaddeus could feel the forces begin to flow through the shadows as the intent, if not the precise meaning, was realized beneath the dust.

  Though he could not yet communicate in their tongue, Thaddeus Turner felt confident the dead would rise at his summons.

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