The Screaming Skull

by Rick Ferguson

  It all happened over forty years ago. Memory is water; it ebbs and flows, flooding your brain with emotions long submerged, sweeping you along its currents, until its branches evaporate, and what was once as vivid as a thunderstorm becomes as barren as a drought-parched stream bed. It was long ago; thanks to the Astral Telescope, it is also now. Time is my bitch.

  For all his faults, Jaspin was an able philosopher; I often wondered how he seemed to know so much, given his humble origins as the son of shopkeepers in Hardcastle. He once described time to me as akin to the grooves on a record album—and once he explained to me what a record album was, I kind of got it. Like the grooves on a record, all time exists at once: From the distant past to the far future, the path of time is already recorded. Looking down on the record, you can see the entire stream of time in whole. Most of us, however, experience time as the needle: bouncing along the peaks and valleys of the groove, moving ever forward, with the future stretched out before us as the past recedes behind.

  Time travel merely allows you to pick up the needle and drop it on another part of the record. For the most part, you don’t have to worry about negating your own existence by going back in time and killing your grandfather, because your birth and his death are happening at the same instant. Concepts such as past, present and future are meaningless—human conceits necessary for us to process the universe, nothing more. Everything that has ever happened, or ever will happen, is happening now.

  “Stare at the night sky,” said Jaspin, as we sat smoking pipes on the back porch of the Suds ‘N Shade. He thrust the stem of his pipe up at the starry canopy over Redhauke. Around us the city lay dreaming, oblivious to the dance of creation whirling over their heads—the dance that begins in the First Universe, where the Machine Elves perform their merry jig. “You’re staring into the past. That star, the bright blue one, is a dozen light-years away. That means its light left the star a dozen years ago. You’re seeing it as it looked then. And yet, there it is, right in front of you. The past exists now—you can see it. If your arms were long enough, you could touch it.”

  “That’s the Eternalist view,” said Melinda. “What about entropy? What about the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Doesn’t that prove the arrow of time is real?”

  “If your understanding is limited to a single universe, then perhaps,” said Jaspin. “But all you’re saying is that entropy occupies a specific region of spacetime, which we perceive as ‘the future.’ Entropy exists simultaneously with non-entropy. If you know the way, you can journey through entropy in reverse.”

  “And don’t forget about probability,” said Redulfo. “According to quantum theory, only the act of observing something makes it real. You can say that all time exists all at once, but it’s equally true to say that it doesn’t exist at all—at least, not until we observe it. Until then, everything is probability.”

  “If only the act of observing something makes it real,” I said, already sensing the headache that inevitably followed one of these conversations, “What happens if there’s no observer?”

  “Now you’re getting to it,” said Redulfo. “If there were no life in the Multiverse, would the Multiverse exist? I say no. If anything outside our sphere of observation exists only as probability, then that goes for time as well. The past is no more or less probable than the future, and the present is whatever we observe. If there is no observer, then there is no reality.”

  “But observation at what level?” I asked. “Must it be an intelligent observer? A dog can figure things out well enough. Can a plant observe the universe? Can an amoeba?”

  “Maybe nothing exists outside the life of the mind,” said Amabored, his eyes red from pipeweed smoke. “Maybe mind is all that exists.”

  “Or maybe the Multiverse itself exists only in the mind of El,” said Redulfo, “and we’re nothing more than his fleeting thoughts.”

  “Then El is the only thing that exists,” said Lithaine. “It kind of lets you off the hook, doesn’t it?”

  “There is more than just El,” said Jaspin. “There is another.”

  Honestly, it could go on like this for hours. Suffice it to say that when you mess around with time, you run the risk of encountering paradoxes within conundrums wrapped around ironies. It can turn your brain into tapioca if you think about it too hard. That’s where Redulfo’s determinism served him well—nothing unexpected could happen to him, because he knew that he was meant to experience it.

  So, we may forgive the wizard his lack of surprise when this next thing happened. As he strode down the hallway deeper into the Blue Falcon, Redulfo heard the distant, ethereal echoes of music heralding the presence of strong enchantments. Somewhere close by, a store of magical items lay hidden behind a door or wall. Behind him, he heard the ringing clang of Malcolm’s sword as it cleaved through imp armor, muscle and bone.

  A few more twists and turns took him past bedrooms, studies, alcoves and staircases. The music swelled. The magic was close by. Redulfo scanned a blank wall in front of him, searching for some sign of the secret door he knew must be there. Somewhere behind that wall lay a wizard’s study. Or so he may have been thinking. What the hell do I know? I’m just an observer.

  That is, until I’m a participant. At that moment, a hidden panel in the wall slid open, and I stepped out of the Red Library—Jaspin’s secret magical treasure-trove within the Blue Falcon. Only it wasn’t the Me simultaneously donning the Screaming Skull, far below in the bowels of the great inn. It was the Me of nine years later—the Me on my way to kill Redulfo in his future incarnation as a black dragon. It was Future-Me.

  “Get in here,” I said to Redulfo, and pulled him inside.

  16

  So, here’s how that happened.

  Fast-forward nine years, to the Valley of Sorcerers. The wind raged cold out of the Shadow Mountains, careening through the valley in great eddies and swirls, sighing through the tall mountain pines, moaning through the high grass, flowing into the crevices of our armor, where its icy fingers sought our bones. We stood huddled together at the edge of the Wilderness of Mirrors, pondering our next move.

  The Wilderness of Mirrors was Gygax’s and Rigby’s most diabolical defense mechanism. Before us stretched the vast forest of mirrors, which marched in serried ranks from the lip of the valley down toward the Workshop of Telescopes, towering at its center. There were tall mirrors and short mirrors; round mirrors and square ones; mirrors of silvered glass and polished metals; mirrors with frames of wood, brass, gold, or marble. Because of the mirrors, no army had ever successfully assaulted the wizards’ fortress. You’d think that a force of foot-soldiers could simply march into the valley, smashing mirrors as they went—and you’d be wrong. There was but a single path through those mirrors, a path that required trespassers to step through each correct mirror in sequence. Failure to follow that path led to one’s instant incineration. We knew this only because Jo Ki-Rin had told us; otherwise we’d have all died again that very day, and he wasn’t much in the mood to resurrect us again.

  Beyond the mirrors, Redulfo lay in wait. The wind had blown the mist away from the valley floor, revealing the Workshop in all its baroque glory: a castle of jagged spires and glowering domes, garishly colored, like a fading casino lurking in the forgotten nether regions of Las Vegas. The castle stood on the face of a massive sidereal timepiece: a clock one mile in diameter, with gargantuan gears buried in the earth that rotated the face in time with the Woerth’s rotation. Even now, from a good distance, we felt the low grumbling of the ground beneath our feet as the great clockworks turned below. As we stood there, fruitlessly trying to keep our pipes lit while we wasted time, the castle itself made a quarter-turn around the valley.

  We didn’t know what else to do but keep watching. If we walked through the wrong mirror, then we were dead meat. The Ki-Rin had told us that much. Why he didn’t just give us a map showing the correct path is beyond me. Sometimes I think that fucker wanted us to fail.

  “He said w
e’d know the right mirror when we saw it,” said Lithaine.

  “There must be over five thousand mirrors in this valley,” said Amabored.

  “Why don’t we just sit on our asses and wait for Redulfo to come out?” I asked. “He can’t stay in there forever.”

  “You forget who you’re talking about,” said Malcolm.

  “You’re right,” said Amabored. “He’ll stay in there until we all starve if he thinks we’re supposed to come in after him.”

  He wasn’t waiting for us to come in, however, because out he came. From one of the castle’s many retractable domes, a dark, slender beast rose into the sky, its ragged bat-wings beating the wind with slow oarsmen’s strokes. The beast soared high, turning in tight spirals, until it was just a black dot against the blue sky.

  “Goddamned showoff,” Amabored grumbled.

  The beast banked hard left and rocketed toward us. We unsheathed our weapons. We had all taken the Antidote potions designed to protect us from the dragon’s acid cloud, but that was cold comfort; Redulfo could kill the lot of us with tooth, tail, or claw.

  He didn’t attack. A few pirouettes later, he landed with a flourish before us amidst a great cloud of dust that the wind quickly took away. His body, as big as an elephant’s, was armored in thick obsidian scales. His neck, as slender as a serpent’s, was outstretched, so that he towered five chains above us. Atop the neck perched the dragon’s head, elongated and narrow, with rows of razored fangs and two green eyes glowing like emeralds in firelight.

  “Hey, welcome,” said the dragon. The voice was graveled, layered in echoes, but unmistakably Redulfo’s. “It’s great to see you guys again.”

  Was it Redulfo, really? We couldn’t be sure. The poor bastard had his brain replaced by the Bad Brain in the Temple of Pain Eternal, lurking on an island in the middle of the Sunless Sea. After we killed him, the Crimson Hand kept the Brain alive—presumably with Redulfo’s soul, neural patterns, or ghost along for the ride—by inserting it into the skull of this big fucking lizard. What was left of Redulfo, exactly? Nothing but his neuroses.

  “It’s great to be seen,” said Amabored. “You know why we’re here?”

  “I do,” said the dragon. “You can’t have it.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Save us all a lot of trouble.”

  “Because I’m using it.”

  “Really, my good würm, what sort of life is it?” asked Malcolm. “Is life as a reptile really so grand? Head full of Hellfire magic, no friends, and only a burning sense of resentment to keep one warm at night. I should rather welcome a clean death.”

  “It’s ironic, me being back in this place,” Redulfo said, black vapor spewing from his nostrils. “The Workshop is the greatest observatory on Woerth. Through its telescopes, one can peer into thousands of worlds. And yet, thanks to the Brain, I don’t need them. I see everywhere and everything. I can see all the way to the End—where She lives. Where She waits.”

  “Who, your mom?” asked Lithaine.

  “What you encountered before was just her avatar,” Redulfo said. “She can’t exist in our universe; she can only consume it. Eventually, you’ll see her, because you’ll need the Orbs. But you won’t return from that encounter, I’m afraid.”

  At the mention of the Violet Queen, Lithaine blanched. Redulfo knew what buttons to push. He wasn’t as merciless about it as Amabored, but he was subtler.

  “That big-ass spider?” I asked. “She works for you?”

  “It’s the other way around,” said the dragon. “She meant to lure the Celestial from Starfall, because it’s the only weapon you had that could have killed me. Believe me, I would rather she hadn’t done it.”

  “Try us anyway,” said Amabored. “We’re here to party, not chit-chat.”

  “I want to show you something first,” said Redulfo. “Call it a demonstration.”

  The dragon launched his great bulk into the air, his wings thundering and snapping like the sails of a great trireme. We hit the dirt. Redulfo flew back toward the Workshop, still turning slowly atop its vast clockworks pedestal. The castle’s portcullis clanked upward, and a column of pikemen marched forth—a mixed force of hobgoblins and trolls, by the looks of them. As their drummers beat a tattoo, the pikemen spread out into tight, regimented lines across the great timepiece, while Redulfo circled above. After this short march, the army stood at attention, shoulder to shoulder, polearms held high. For a Chaos army, it was a decent display of discipline. What was in it for them, I often wondered? What made your average hobgoblin want to leave hearth and home to kill and die at the command of some would-be dark lord? Don’t they want to stay home and fuck and eat and watch television like the rest of us? I’ve never bothered to ask one, because it’s a lot more fun to cut off their heads. Don’t the more reflective among them sometimes question the meaning of it all?

  Redulfo flew one final circle above his army, banked sharply, and then swooped down. His shadow fell upon the soldiers. The dragon shrieked, and a bilious black acid cloud issued from deep within his throat to fall upon his army. They didn’t break ranks until the first of them started screaming: their armor and helms melting like wax, flesh running like heavy cream, bones shrinking into charred twigs. Those who didn’t die immediately dropped their pikes and scrambled for the safety of the castle.

  Redulfo rode them down and spewed acid on them, burning them alive where they ran. Their screams echoed off the mountain walls. On any other day, the sight of so many hobgoblins and trolls dying in agony would have had us dancing a jig. Why would the dragon destroy his own army? The sheer dumb-fuckery of it astounded us.

  “Is he trying to make a point?” Amabored asked.

  “One almost feels sorry for the poor blighters,” said Malcolm.

  “Almost,” I said.

  After Redulfo had turned most of his army into smoking goo, he chased down the stragglers and broke their backs in his jaws. Within ten minutes, five thousand burning, broken corpses lay strewn in obscene piles across the clock face.

  The dragon flew back to us, landed smartly, and craned his serpent’s neck on high. He regarded us with a gaze of cold appraisal.

  “You may wonder if I’m trying to make a point,” Redulfo said. “I spent six months building that army for the Hand; I was to lead it forth and lay waste to the Baronies, Arrendell, Kilcastle, and every kingdom that borders the Shadow Mountains. But my knowledge of the full scope of the Violet Queen’s game tells me that this war is nothing more than a game of chess played on the deck of a sinking ship. It’s all pointless, you see. That army was pointless. Their lives were pointless; they were meant to die. Koschei’s war of conquest is pointless; it always has been. Your quest is pointless, and always has been. That’s my point. And it, too, is pointless.”

  “Are we going to tangle?” asked Lithaine. “Or are you going to keep running your mouth?”

  The dragon waved a languid claw. A low rumble sprang up beneath our feet, and every single mirror in the valley vanished beneath the ground as if yanked down by subterranean hands—every mirror, save one. It stood alone now, a few dozen yards distant: a simple glass rectangle in a blue wooden frame, unadorned but for a carving on top.

  “As I said, you currently have no weapon that can kill me,” Redulfo continued. “But kill me you must, or your quest will fail, pointless though it is, and this universe will die. It will die anyway, but you may at least save it from the Queen’s gullet. I once said that your chance of success increases only when your choices are constrained—and your choices, my friends and bosom companions, have been reduced to one.”

  “Look, we don’t miss your goddamned lectures one bit,” Amabored said, “Give us the short version.”

  “For countless centuries, I’ve believed that free will in this universe is most definitely an illusion—for this universe, unlike all others, is removed from the laws of probability. Causality is a function of spacetime branching like lightning to form the Multiverse, but this universe cann
ot bear offspring,” said the dragon. “So, if our every action has been preordained since this universe began, and you’re meant to kill me, then there’s no action I can take that will alter my fate. Conversely, if you’re meant to fail, then you can take no action that will succeed.”

  “Your trash talk needs some work,” I said.

  “But now—and here I confess to feeling a certain excitement that I haven’t felt in at least five thousand years—I’ve come to believe that the opposite is true, and that ours is the only universe in which free will is more than an illusion. We may, in fact, be able to alter the fate of this universe by a simple purposeful act. I plan to test this hypothesis.”

  “How so, lizard?” asked Lithaine.

  “By granting you the means to kill me. As my possession of the Bad Brain renders suicide impossible, success would mean that we are, all of us, truly free agents in this universe.”

  “So, you want us to go through that mirror and retrieve a weapon to take you out?” Amabored said. “How do we know it isn’t a trap?”

  “As I could kill you where you stand, I don’t need a trap to do it.” The dragon motioned to the mirror. “Step through that mirror, and you’ll find an old friend—one who can help you kill me. You’ll need to bring him back here. You’ll also need to retrieve a particular weapon, the nature of which I’ll reveal to you shortly. Do these things, and you’ll have your battle. If you kill me because I chose to arm you, then I will have purposefully orchestrated my own death, despite the Bad Brain preventing me from doing so—and I’ll have proven my hypothesis that free will does exist in this universe. That knowledge itself would be worth dying for.”

  The dragon motioned us to follow. We walked behind him as he slithered toward the lone remaining mirror, his black wings folded across his sinuous spine. Later, when we had time to reflect on the dragon’s words, we understood that he hadn’t been conning us; this whole episode was indeed Redulfo’s way of killing himself. He despised what he had become: twice-dead, reborn a monster, with the brain of an evil demigod lodged in his skull. Surely, he preferred death to such an existence. The Bad Brain wouldn’t allow him to off himself, however; the Hand wanted to collect the Phylaxes before we did, and the Brain wanted them to succeed where we failed. To ensure the ultimate success of the Quest by killing himself, Redulfo needed to outwit the brain he now shared with Koschei.