by Hugo Damas
She screamed her way down.
The Circus Freak unhesitatingly hopped over the edge and climbed down. That didn’t go as well as he had hoped, his hand slipped half-way.
He landed hard on the snow, laughing at his mishap, even in the presence of the groaning archer woman who seemed to have broken a few parts of her body. The Circus Freak ignored her, getting up to run away.
Other guards popped up on the wall, close on his tail. They started shooting a few arrows but he was on the ground and running, there was no chance they would catch him. They would mount up horses and give chase, but that was nothing the Circus Freak hadn’t dealt with in the past. Soon as he reached the forest, he was very confident he wouldn’t be caught, and that was only a mile away.
If someone did catch up to him, he’d just steal the horse and ride away, that would be even better.
The Circus Freak thought back to the king’s room, smiling fondly at the image. A shamed king, a disrespected world-class thief who thought she was so serious in her magician’s costume, top hat and all. He remembered the broken down cabinet and bed, turned over furniture, or how everything was wet and singed and oh yes, the king’s eyebrows were gone. Oh, and the hawk.
The Circus Freak giggled.
He then felt the familiar surge of curiosity, with the diary feeling hot in his hand. He opened the book in mid-run but without a left arm to hold it properly, it flew off his hands. He stopped and scampered back, grabbed hold of it and went back to running.
The Circus Freak would have to read it later.
The rest of the evening was boring. A scout, riding a horse, did end up galloping up to his proximity. After a few minutes of Circus Freak running around trees to try and evade, he finally used one as support to kick the rider off his horse and mount it at the same time.
The horse neighed, and Hugo neighed with it, kicking it into movement.
“Thanks, boss!” The Circus Freak cackled as he moved away, filling the nearby forest with his laughter.
The Circus Freak tried reading the book again, now that he was riding, but the galloping was too strong. He had to wait until the horse was properly tired and well enough near the neighboring city to finally satisfy his curiosity.
The time had finally come, and so the Circus Freak slowed the horse down to a trot, so that he didn’t need to hold the reins, and opened the book. He strained his eyes to read under the moonlight, but that did not prove at all difficult. The moon was very shiny.
I must write.
Decades have passed, and I must tell someone, but if I do, all I have accomplished will wither in smoke. Much as all my enemies have.
So I must write.
I will write more things, I can only assume I will lack the will to burn away this confession. I imagine it will one day be found out, because I want people to know.
Just not my people. With whom I interact. Whom I protect and rule.
…
I am no king.
“Ooooo!” The Circus Freak didn’t yet know what he meant by that, but he overreacted all the same, as if to mock the king.
When I was a boy, the King’s main steward came to me.
My father’s main steward, all believe.
I was a friend of the prince, I was part of a group of commoners who played with the prince, to teach him that people are people, no matter their station. A lesson of the King to his son.
I looked very much like him. At that age, at least.
“Oh boy!” The Circus Freak already saw the whole thing unfold. He read quickly, impatiently and diagonally, gradually deciphering that the prince, the real king’s son, had been poisoned and died. The steward, guilty of being negligent with food tasting, had desperately sought to hide his mistake. Or else he would be executed.
His solution was a replacement.
And so it was that the royal family line was actually very much dead. A commoner now reigned. A commoner. The greatest and most successful advocate for the monarchy in the world, being the unifier of Norwayaka and one of the wisest rulers in the world, or so they said, was not even of royal birth!
The Circus Freak laughed out loud.
What other secrets were stashed in that diary? It was worth the read, he was sure!
The king would know he knew the truth. And forever would the idea of the Circus Freak riding back into his castle haunt the king, haunt his nightmares and make him mad. Stealing the diary, it turned out, was definitely the best thing he could have done to get to the king. To freak him out.
Hugo noticed then that he was riding into the city. “Oh, I’m here.”
He found a house in the city where he forced the couple to take the living room while he spent the whole night reading the diary in their bedroom. The couple turned the guards away for the Circus Freak, the ones that came asking about him. They were too afraid to sell him out.
The diary held a lot of secrets. People the king had assassinated, his father included. Not the king -- the father of the prince he replaced -- he loved that one. He killed his own food. The man was going to reveal the truth, so he had him killed by hiring the Darkness, whatever that is. Darkness kills people now? That was weird.
The king had also poisoned the steward that made him king when that one thought to blackmail him with the truth.
The king’s private negotiations, which had made him famous as a diplomat, actually involved a lot of covert threats. He would kidnap their children and use them for blackmail, or he would unleash a plague upon a city and then offer his help under the condition they bend the knee.
The king was smart. So very very smart, but he was mostly brave and unyielding. Publicly, under people’s eyes, he was ever standing tall. He faced fights head on and exacted justice in an almost ruthless, but never evil, way. The king explained how he showed other faults, recognizable and acceptable faults like stubbornness and a stupid lack of fear, all so that his real faults would never be expected of him. Like being a backstabber and a liar.
Which was what he was.
Oh, everything was written down as having been a necessity. Every confession was surrounded by ravings of justifications, but Circus Freak knew guilt when he saw it. Well, only when he saw it, Hugo had never felt guilt or regret.
Even losing his arm wasn’t something he really regretted. He had wanted to at the time, that’s what mattered. That’s how the Circus Freak thought about it. He always did what he wanted, and then, he just has to remember he did what he wanted. What’s to regret then? If regrets did pop up, then he ignored them. It’s just the silly head being stupid.
Everyone’s stupid once in a while, that’s no reason to go about listening to any of it.
Is it?
It was a nice read. At the end of it, the king was just a leader of men, like any and all leaders of men Circus Freak had met or come to know. He did evil things and called them necessary, and the difference between him and “evil tyrants” was that he won, and so he wrote the stories like he wanted them to be written. He said it himself at the beginning of the diary that he wanted people to know the truth, just not his people.
They would know the context, and they would know it wasn’t about necessity, but about holding on to power.
In the end, the Circus Freak was sure the king would not reveal it. He would destroy the diary, incapable of allowing his legacy and legend to be smeared.
People were silly.
The Circus Freak shoved the book inside the magical pouch around the time the sun began to rise. It would be given to the Shadow Conclave, and he would never see it again, and that was okay. He had grown completely disinterested in it in the time he had read it, even if he was still happy with how he had spent the night.
What would he do now, he wondered? The Circus Freak didn’t feel like going back to the Shadow Conclave, but maybe they would have something else that was really interesting to do.
He could at least check.
The Circus Freak left the house, giving the baggy-eyed old co
uple a slight bow and an evil grin. “Thank you for the hospitality, old ones! I hope to meet again!”
They shivered, obviously not sharing the sentiment.
The Circus Freak went back to find the horse he had left in some barn. He fully expected to find the barn owner there, angry, waiting to see who had used his barn without his permission. That was going to be funny.
“Circus Freak.”
“Well hello,” he said, before he even saw the source of the call.
He met eyes with three sturdy geezers who looked plenty seasoned in their expressions and were clearly from out of town. They were wearing strange armors, two of them brown and the closest one gray. All three looked spent and built from scraps. They had little chimneys on the shoulders and what looked like hydraulic pistons across their limbs. Their chest plates were bulging. It all looked built to compensate for what were likely weak bodies.
“Do we know each other?” Hugo asked.
“You have shown exceptional skill, Circus Freak,” the one in gray said. He had a nice beard, none of it over his lip, but it reached down to his upper chest. It near-matched his armor in color. “But I can tell that you have joined the wrong side. We know enough about you to know that for sure.”
“Do you?” The Circus Freak asked, smiling with interest. “You know which side I should be on?”
“Your own,” the old man said with a knowing nod.
The Circus Freak raised an impressed eyebrow. “Well, I’m glad we cleared that up! Happy to say I’m already there.”
“Not quite there yet,” the would-be wizard said. “Yet, you will be, once you join our efforts.”
“Excuse me?” The Circus Freak closed his eyes and bared his teeth. “Who are you, again?” His voice screeched just the tiniest bit on ‘you,’ to make their bones shiver. He couldn’t tell if it worked, closed eyes and all, but the response didn’t waver enough to indicate that it did.
“We are Led by Anarchy,” the wizard reject announced, meaningfully
“You are? Well, good for you?” The Circus Freak raised an eyebrow, eyes still closed. “What an odd thing to announce. I’m led by fun?”
“What?” The man sounded confused, “no, we’re not…what is he talking about?”
“Bugger me, sir,” one of the others said.
“I think he doesn’t know what LBA stands for, sir. He just heard it as a phrase? We are being led by--”
“Oh, right right.” The tail chin turned back towards him. “You misunderstand, jester, I mean to say we belong to the organization that is called ‘Led By Anarchy.’”
“You called it verb by anarchy?” Hugo asked, chuckling. “That’s gotta get confusing, no?”
“It never has, Hugo, but I gather that when someone is trying to rile us up, it will, yes.”
The Circus Freak smiled and opened his eyes in a twitch of embarrassment. They knew his name and were sort of onto what he was doing. He looked around, noticing people were standing clear, instinctively knowing that a face-off was taking place.
Strangers standing in front of each other, all looking menacing? Time to go back home and get ready to weather the storm that was about to erupt.
“Okay, I guess I’m pretty tired, I’ll skip some o’ the jesting,” Hugo conceded, shrugging. “Why’re your efforts so important to me?”
“We hate the world,” the man said very commonly, taking an educational stance without a hint of emotion to the statement. “Civilization has been set up by men who are good with numbers and little else. They play with the rulers, they play with the rules and the laws of government. It is an established system that is now central to the very construct that is humanity.”
The Circus Freak lifted his hands with a face of disgust. “Lordly lordy lord. What are you doing? Tryin’ to put me to sleep?”
The man sighed. “We told you it’s boring,” said one of the helpers.
“It’s what we believe in, darn it!” He clasped hands. “I don’t expect this buffoon to respect it but you sure will.”
“Yes sir,” they both chorused, not looking forward to it.
“We believe there is no real freedom to the world, lad, and so it should die. Be destroyed. The rise of the Beasts presents the best opportunity to do this,” explained ye olde beardy.
“You’re helping the Beasts?” the Circus Freak’s voice took a high tone, an octave too high so that his surprise could be evident as lack of understanding. “What’d they offer you? East or west of the continent?”
“They offer nothing, they simply destroy and take over. Humanity will fall, and we will do our part,” he stated.
“Wait, so you’re one o’ those mass suicide cults?” The Circus Freak asked.
“What?” Another of the three scoffed. “We aren’t religious, perish the thought.”
“Well neither are those cults,” the Circus Freak japed, “there’s nothing religious about just killing yourself. Dying for something, sure, but you’re just…what? What do you want from me, exactly? You want me to kill myself, is that it?”
“We will survive,” the leader simply said, “but not as humans. We will be free. We expect the Circus Freak would appreciate the idea.”
“Would he?” Hugo closed his eyes again and grinned in amusement.
“You are notoriously free,” the giant beard said, “or you try to be. You care not about factions, ideals, any of the sub-systems put in place to ensure compliance. You fight them all. We take it to mean you are a prime candidate for our organization.”
The Circus Freak frowned, confused. “What kinda anarchist belongs to an organization? I thought the idea was to be on your own.”
“The joker thinks he knows what anarchy is,” one helper said.
“Tell ‘im, boss,” the other helper said.
“We have always done, each of us, as we please. We formed an alliance, not an organization per say. When the Beasts rose, we all agreed that it was a good thing.”
The Circus Freak raised the other eyebrow, eyes still shut. “Everyone? Really?”
“The Mad Genius and the Eye included. They stormed their vessel to offer our assistance, did they not? And we know you aided them in that,” the beard said.
“Sounded like fun, freaking aliens out,” the Circus Freak stated very excitedly. Then, he bowed his head to the side inquisitively. “Do you know how that turned out?”
“We know. We do not blame them for not trusting us -- we are, after all, human. Liars and cheats.”
“Murderers,” the Circus Freak added.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“Cowards!” the Circus Freak added.
“Just human,” he agreed.
“Hypocrites,” the Circus Freak added.
All three paused at that.
“Think he’s takin’ the piss, sir,” one of the helpers said.
“Excuse me?” The leader beard asked.
“Oh? Apologies, I thought we were playing a game.” The Circus Freak grinned. “Listing the traits of someone who’d call himself an anarchist while being in an organization working together on an organized effort!” He laughed to himself, having a hard time containing the ridiculousness. He forced himself to continue. “On an organized effort to help some crazy underground monsters to destroy the world! You know, you go then I go then you until we can’t think of anymore!”
They stood in silence. Stumped.
“Well!” One helper was insulted.
“He was takin’ the piss,” the other agreed, nodding helplessly.
“…I take it you won’t join us, then?” The curtain beard asked.
“So you’ve run out? I got like five more!” The Circus Freak sounded excited.
“Well then, I’m afraid you’re mistaking civility and respect for friendliness, aren’t you? To make matters clear, you are not interested?”
The Circus Freak shrugged. “If there were anything fun to do, of course, I would, but you’re all a bunch o’ stick-in-the-muds! You just wanna kill, you
don’t see the fun in any o’ this.” He opened his arms and spun around in a little dance. “And you dunno what being free means! I don’t know either, by the way,” He yelled, laughing. “I can’t put it into words.”
He stopped in a bow-like pose, much like he would do to the crowd in his circus days. “I just am.”
“I told you,” a familiar voice sounded out from behind him, punctuated by the sound of a pistol cocking into murderous readiness. He turned and opened one of his eyes, catching sight of the girl.
Third time they meet, and that fact didn’t escape her.
“The third time’s the charm, remember that?” she asked, smirking victoriously, but also out of hearts.
“Oooo, I like sayings!” The Circus Freak clapped in a silly manner. “Here’s one for you.”
The Circus Freak heard more noises from his front and landed eyes on all three men. Their armored arms had protruded blades, their gauntlets had produced spikes, and they were standing like those people who punch for sport. Their helmets grew from their collars, taking shape around their faces and hiding them behind cold metallic visages that had big insect-like mouth opening. They split to each side, containing numerous breathing holes.
“Surrender the book, there’s a good lad. We’ll make it quick and painless, we will.” Ancient Beard’s voice was filled with static and resonance.
“Now that’s not nice,” the Circus Freak protested. “Don’t you want to know my saying?”
The Circus Freak felt soft-tissue brushing against his face and immediately ducked out of the way, refusing to be wrapped by the woman’s handkerchief rope. One of the machines thundered forward meanwhile, with steps heavy and fast, and punched at the Circus Freak.
He stepped out of the way and giggled uncontrollably. They were fast for how heavy they looked and sounded, but they were still too slow.
“You put on a suit of razor-blades and steel plating and come after me? What’d you think would happen? A fight?”
The Circus Freak leaped back, knowing there was some attack coming from the Magnificent Magician. He landed, watching as a puff of sparkly smoke expanded where he had been. What effect the smoke had, he didn’t know, and that was a curiosity he was okay with not satisfying.