11 KiB
Gideon started swearing again.
"Fuck!"
The blood in on her forehead was starting to drip along her eyebrow, tickling as is grew ready to flow along the bridge of her nose and right into her eye. She tried to use her right arm, without dropping her enormous sword, to wipe the it off of her forehead before it dripped into her eyes. But the shredded sleeves of her cultist robes were already soaked through and the gesture only smeared sanguineous sludge over her nose and mouth.
"Fuck. FUCK!" Gideon swore. In frustration she started to use the back of her other, less slimy hand, to do the job, forgetting about the razor sharp obsidian knuckle knives strapped to her left wrist. She stopped herself only a pube's breadth away from gouging the last pair of functioning eyeballs out of her skull. She still needed those.
"Did I say fuck yet? Because seriously, fuck this ... Oh FUCK NO!"
Moving her left hand had made her lose her grip on the princess's body. It slipped out from under her arm and fell back further into the pit, dislodging other precariously piled corpses and threatening to start a charnel avalanche which would bury Gideon in fresh human remains.
"OMG Gideon what are you doing!? You let it go! I swear on the eternal rotting goddess, if you don't bring my body back in one piece I'll personally feed your fingers to the ommigrindr. I'm not bluffing!"
The dead princess was bluffing, but calling her bluff would be nearly as painful as the actual omnigrindr, so Gideon said nothing. Instead, she craned her neck to keep her still-functioning eyeballs glued to the desiccated royal corpse as it continued to slide deeper into the pit, closer to the aperture. Aiming from memory, she then swung her great sword backwards, tossing it up and out of the pit. With normal luck it should land in something soft, (hopefully a priest), and stay put. With Gideon's luck it would definitely spin in three perfect circles before plunging straight back down through her skull. At least that would shut the princess up.
"OMG Gideon, what are you doing? That was your sword!" the once and former princess pronounced helpfully.
"It's okay your highness. I'm sure you'll buy me a new one as soon as we bring you back, right?"
"OMG Gideon what are you thinking? I can't... we can't afford... there is absolutely no... Oh... Ha. Ha."
Death, (or death 2.0 as it might be), must have improved the princess's powers of perception because it was typically the next day before she detected sarcasm, if ever.
"OMG Gideon what are you doing!? Ahh! Look! It's going to fall in. Get it! Why aren't you looking!? Get it! Save me!"
No matter how many times she had haunted Gideon, the princess couldn't, or couldn't be bothered more like, manage to understand the basics of parasitic possession. She never absorbed hat she could only ever see exactly what Gideon was seeing with her own, adequately functioning, eyeballs no more no less. Right now what Gideon was seeing was this: the precious corpse was starting to come unwound, its linen strips unravelling as it slipped and rolled over fresher, more moist(ick), human remains on its way toward the aperture at the bottom of the huge conical pit that Gideon had descended on a rescue mission for the terminally damned. The aperture was a narrow choke point exactly like the throat of an hourglass. But instead of sand measuring minutes, the gently used, previously owned, second hand flesh-houses of humans measured eternity as they periodically tumbled into a stinking scarab-infested cavern below.
The bodies came from all over. Most were offered by devout descendants of lately devout worshippers of Derketo, the queen of death, fertility, and rancid body fluids apparently. The Emperor Undying sent a steady supply of 'retired' slaves from the arena or the mines. The army contributed a regular, though surprisingly modest---all things considered, share. But not all deceased homo-sapiens were appropriate offerings to the pit. For example the mummified corpse of the unholy princess of misery was a completely inappropriate offering---as the princess herself had been quick to point out. The bureaucratic error that had led to the present scenario was one of such gravity that mere death (even if preceded by unspeakable torture) would not have been sufficient punishment. However justice is blind, stupid and utterly corruptible; the very office that originated this unforgivable sin had managed to arrange things so that it became entirely Gideon's problem. The ghastly princess herself seemed to lose all interest incriminating the actual guilty party upon realizing she had obtained the opportunity to nag and torment Gideon, albeit briefly if the swordswoman was not successful.
Gideon blinked. Sand scratched the inside of her eyelids. She wished devoutly that the princess could feel that too. Holding her breath and moving slowly she gingerly bent her knees and reached down to take hold of the end of the princess's linen wrappings which extended like a long fuse toward the regal stiff which was still unravelling slowly.
Gideon swore again.
"You fucking better have something on under those bandages, your dehydrated highness. If I have to see your sun-dried titties or your fossilized fanny I'll rip each of my eyes out and throw them in the pit after you."
"OMG Gideon what are you talking about! I'm ravishing and you know it. You should be so lucky."
This was not the first time the princess revealed that despite seeing through Gideon's completely operational eyeballs, her vision was gravely flawed. And who the hell says 'ravishing' anyways? By the goddess's gritty cooch, the princess was hello old!
Gideon, still holding her breath, gently tugged at the cloth, the body started to roll faster. She gave a tremendous pull, hoping to snap the regal corpus back up towards her like a yo-yo. The force of it did flick the morsel of dried princess meat into the air for just a second ... before it tumbled neatly through the aperture into the void below.
The immortal soul of the dead princess screamed like a summer solstice sacrifice victim from out of the depths of Gideon's skull. Gideon hadn't thought her head had such impressive acoustics but the spirit of the princess of misery's miserable shriek was reverberating through her brain like an amphitheatre. The linen wrap in her hand went momentarily slack as the body tumbled through space but then snapped taught with a sickening crack. Surely, the princess's body should have crumbled into dust at that shock. But no, the conscientious embalmers of yesteryear must have done a good job of converting the petulant bitch's remains into some sturdy taxidermy because it merely flexed slightly and held together. The same clever embalmer, bless her spleen, must also have had the fortuitous foresight to tie the shroud tightly around something, probably a dainty little neck, as insurance against exactly today's turn of events.
Gideon held firmly to the thin linen ribbon and could feel the body begin to swing at the other end. It was light at least. It hadn't caused her to lose her footing only a few yards away from the gaping hole. Slipping now would mean falling, with the corpse, into a vast cavern. With good luck, she'd break her neck. With Gideon's luck she'd definitely break her back but stay conscious as the scarabs ate out her functional eyeballs, tongue, and tonsils before using her warm body to incubate scarab eggs. Eventually they'd get around to eating the princess's chewy cadaver too but no doubt they save if for last so Gideon would have some shrill complaining company during her last hateful days of life. Though, come to think of it, the princessly poltergeist was strangely quiet right now. Gideon decided not to think about what that might mean and dutifully started winding her catch back in.
Angling for the dead like this had to be done slowly; to avoid slipping; for reasons that are now plainly established. So Gideon had time to think. That was unfortunate because this is what she thought:
They're going to kill me.
Inexplicably this hurt Gideon's feelings. Eighteen years of abuse, contempt, scorn and downright shitty treatment was bad, sure. Even years of completely unsubtle and unrelenting hints that she should kill herself, rude of course. But never before now had it occurred to her that collectively, or individually, the vile cult in service to Derketo, the fetid and divine bitch of fecundity and decay was embarked upon relentless program whose destination was Gideon's own annihilation. They would not kill her ceremonially, the way they killed thousands every year for their gross goddess's glory. They would not kill her judicially as punishment for her legitimately blasphemous sins against their bullshit theological code. They would not even do her the courtesy of hiring even a fourth-rate guild member to stab her in the back (as if, lol) or poison her (not that the cult kitchen wasn't coming pretty close on daily basis). No, the slimy low-life clergy of the half-baked cult of Death was going to murder Gideon through pure bureaucracatic apathy. They would collectively, but apparently without any organized design, asign and re-assign Gideon to a series of posts, offices and obligations which would inevitably and unstoppably lead to her death. Her current assignment was case and point. Even now, in this moment of relative stability, having killed seven revenant guardians and arrested her charge's plunge into the abyss without joining her, Gideon's prospects of surviving this errand were hovering at about 37 percent. If she fell now she would die. If she failed (to retrieve the precious royal mummy) but lived, she would be sent on a worse quest immediately. If she succeeded, she would also be sent on a worse quest almost immediately.
"Well fuck me" Gideon said somberly, breaking her 47 second non-swearing steak. By chance she happened to be holding the deceased princess right up to face level as she spoke. The thing had, as her worst fears predicted, come competely unraveled so Gideon found herself staring into two dry sockets where centuries ago, a princess's pretty eyeballs once functioned, fully. Also in accordance with her worst fears, the naked corpse, stripped of bandages revealed nothing remained to preserve her modesty. Thankfully time had transformed the Princess of Misery's mammaries and pudenda into pure, un-suggestive abstractions thus protecting Gideon's innocent eyes from fatal psychological trauma. Wrinkling her nose she continued the one-sided conversation.
"I'm starting to feel seriously unappreciated around here." she confided to the rude, nude, but sweetly silent morsel of princessly pemmican. "But fine, I take the hint. I'm out of here." And so, then and there, she decided to escape.