by Will Madden
Though no sore or bruise compared to the blistering itchy skin issue he had developed overnight. The salves and unguents from the medicine chest didn’t seem to help.
“Looks like you were the ‘Victor’ again last night, sir!”
Victor resisted the impulse to cover up. This was his house, and he’d scratch himself whenever or wherever he saw fit. He just wished Mori would announce himself before he entered a room. Or wear a bell.
Victor threw the copy of the Spyhole on the desk casually as if his fingernails had not just been administering some brutal self-satisfaction to his inner thigh. He tapped a finger on one of the headlines.
“Can you believe some people think we staged all the battles yesterday as a popular entertainment?”
“I keep forgetting your species considers it fun to show each other the insides of your skulls.” The butler’s smile was full of inexplicable warmth. “But everyone says it was a pretty good show, Master Victor.”
Mori set a small jar of ointment on the desk in front of him. Probably a concoction of jungle horrors, but his track record with exotic medical treatments suggested it would neutralize whatever was irritating his skin.
Victor opened the editorial section to the “Ask a Dodo Anything” feature.
“It seems some voices around town are salty about how the manor houses up in Prismton got their own private viewing.”
“Now, Master Victor. The very same people would be complaining if you’d driven the Bratmobile into low-income housing.”
Victor took a sniff of what was inside the jar. Like death itself had died of ass rot. In a hot damp place.
“Bratmobile? Is that really what they’re calling it.”
“It is a rather wienery-looking vehicle, sir.”
Victor shrugged. No man with the freedom to do so would own fewer than one wiener-shaped automobile, he thought.
“Still,” he said, “That crash wouldn’t have happened if civilians didn’t own anti-horse ballistas.”
“The injustice here, people would say, is that ordinary hard-working Dodovilleans didn’t get a chance to field test their anti-horse ballistas. They pay taxes too, you know.”
Whatever was in this stench pot felt pretty good on his skin, actually.
“No one who lives on a street with neighbors needs a computer-targeted spear chucker!”
“The Cumin estate has two, for the record,” said Mori
“Why? The only horses around here are mother’s Lusitanos. Throw them out.” He slathered the ointment everywhere it itched, i.e. everywhere. “The ballistas, not the horses, of course.”
“Digital targeting is tricky, Master Victor. Sometimes it saves time to study how others have solved the problem instead of reinventing the wheel.”
“Throw them out or you’re fired. Also, I’ve already forgotten about this.”
“Very good, sir.”
“By the way, Mori: that weird lasso stick you built me? It really came through.”
“Of course it did, sir. My people designed it for master warriors at the dawn of history.”
“If skiapods are averse to self-defense, how’d they become such geniuses at weaponry?”
Mori shrugged. “You might as well ask an Olympic champion swimmer how they got so good at walking. Some things are just easy.”
Like wanting to murder skiapods, Victor thought.
“So, I have another question.”
“Shoot, sir.”
“How come you never told me you acquired my body armor form an enormous talking spider?”
Mori smiled sadly with all the wisdom of however the hell many years old Mori was. “To me, Lady Ariadne is just a person, sir. You forget, over my long life, I’ve dwelt in shadows with all sorts of sapient beings whom the human world thinks of as monsters. But we’ve lived on earth longer than you have—and if I can be frank, some of us will be here after you’re gone. And that has earned us, if nothing else, the right to consider ourselves people, with or without the human world’s permission.”
Victor was pensive. “I see your point. I also saw a man vomit up his own skull.”
Mori nodded. “I recommend remaining on Lady Ariadne’s good side.”
“I don’t even know how to describe it. The eyes remained in their sockets, but the sockets themselves came out his mouth.”
“Spiders’ ways are not our ways.”
“I have another question. If you knew Ariadne could crush any band of marauding thieves, why did you send me there?”
“I wanted you to see, sir. As the defender of Dodoville, I wanted you to know where your power comes from. I wanted you to treat that with the proper awe and respect. Remember, sir, you have taken an awesome responsibility upon yourself, and it will be best to remember you are this city’s servant, not its master. Remember it for your own sake, as much as others’.”
“Those are wise words, Mori,” said Victor, not understanding at all.
“Also, I figured you’d have a lot of fun.” Mori smiled.
“Spiders are awesome,” said Victor. “I always knew that, but I had no idea.”
He watched Mori pretend to dust the console to the observatory’s mammoth sound telescope. Really, he was inputting instructions for Ladybird to gather intel for the Violet Storm’s next mission.
Which reminded him.
“I don’t understand it, Mori. Since my mother’s death, I’ve been developing the perfect vigilante persona, the perfect symbol of righteous vengeance. The Violet Storm. Listen how the words roll off the tongue. You even hear a pleasant crash of thunder in the silence that follows.”
“That’s the coffeemaker.”
“And the color! It’s the same otherworldly shade as Mt. Myrtle’s fulminations. Not onion. More like an ube, if anything.”
“You really don’t want to be called The Purple Yam. May I make a recommendation, Master Victor? When people love you, accept the love they give. Do not try to force it into a shape it is not. If they see a lion, be a lion. If they see a storm, be a storm.”
“But they see a vegetable, Mori!”
“Remember, sir, that onion is the emblem of us all. Every person, be they human, skiapod, sapient spider, or giant magma slug that awakens once every thousand years—”
“Wait, what?”
“—each has one thing in common. They all cry.”
Oh, that was the coffeemaker.
“Not me, Mori. I don’t cry. Not since the day my mother succumbed to that atomic virus.”
“Even you, sir. The path you have chosen is long and dark. I cannot tell you where it will lead, only that you will find tears at the end of it.”
“Is that some weird skiapod power? Knowing the future.”
“Just the power of growing old. I have seen a lot of suffering in my time. Enough to know I shall see a lot more.”
Victor nodded. If he lived long enough, one day he too could look forward to casting gloomy clouds over everybody’s life.
“What have you got in your hand?” he asked.
Mori brought forth the envelope he’d been hiding behind his back. “It is a summons, sir.”
“Summons? Didn’t we already pay off the police this quarter?”
“From the solarium, sir.”
Davy Castle’s east tower. Victor swallowed down a groan as he opened the letter. “Written in his own blood again, I notice.”
“Your father is nothing if not practical.”
The words “SEE ME” had been smeared on the page with a thumb.
“Todd always confounded the pragmatic with the melodramatic.”
“In either case, sir, I wouldn’t leave him waiting too long.”
Victor took the east elevator up to the solarium. He managed to control his breathing but barely felt the car start or stop on its slow rise up the tower.
The button light went dark, signaling his arrival. The doors opened under a cavernous enclosure.
The walls were tetrahedral glass topped with a pyramid,
like the apex of an obelisk.
In the early ‘90s, when prosperity had paid a visit to Dodoville, when science stood at the helm of state and art flowered in the loam of research and learning, this chamber had been the ecstatic center of the city. During the day, the sun poured through the glass panels onto into a garden of prismatic flowers that exploded into color to mark the hours. At night, the solarium hosted grand balls with live orchestras, while vast and vibrant mountain starscapes hung above like a chandelier. And in the center of the room, atop its earthen pedestal, a live oak, strong and verdant, had stood as if the anchor between earth and sky.
The tree was dead now, a dark splintering husk that spread its branches like vulture’s wings. Dark curtains shrouded the rise of the pyramid as if a dragon had devoured the light of heaven to the last spark. You could still see the mountains in the distance, but the view outside came no longer through the glass but from an array of flatscreen monitors. They displayed the countryside not in its current mid-morning splendor but at murky dusk with Mt. Myrtle fulminating irritably in the distance. Carotene tendrils which lashed out into the night offered the only splashes of color over the black-and-white terrain.
The scenery harbingered the end, an apocalypse which for Todd Cumin already lay in the past.
Victor’s shoes echoed across marble tiles to where his father sat in his wheelchair. Not even before the sky joust did his muscles clench with trepidation as they did now. He felt as if he were entering not the presence of the man who sired him but his temple, built in memory of a legendary era that had never quite existed.
His father had seldom left here since the incident, now ten years in the past.
Victor followed a path that ventured through the garden of glass flowers and stopped before the henge of control panels and monitors that kept his father’s body alive. The largest machine was performing its bizarre dialysis on him, drawing purplish-black fluid from his veins into transfusion tubes. After passing through a centrifuge, the toxin produced in Todd’s marrow was expelled as a fine dark powder. It fell, grain-by-grain, into a gold container, the miracle substance his body produced at an astounding rate.
The dying emperor in perverse symbiosis with his dying empire.
Todd Cumin had today’s Spyhole across his lap. The ceases were not sharp. It had been pored over with attention and rage.
The sick man coughed wetly into a handkerchief, pulling away a splotch of dark sputum. Victor stood and waited, his aid or greeting neither expected nor desired. Todd had surely recognized his step, distinct from either the nurse’s tread or Mori’ fleshy leaps. But he couldn’t shake the feeling this whole tower was a crippled golem alive with his father’s consciousness, the frail body before him merely the tattered written word that gave it animation.
For a long moment, he listened to the older Cumin’s machine-aided breath. It seemed to emerge out of another dimension, another reality.
See me, the summons had read. As if the demand had been to witness the twisted shell he’d become. See the ghost haunting the east tower (by whatever rationale still called a solarium), the ghost who also haunted the Spyhole, whose pages Todd now went out into the world as a part of, just as the Spyhole had long been part of Todd.
“Citroen von Chesterdrawer is a genius,” croaked the shattered voice. “Make sure nobody ever finds out, or they’ll install him as chief of one of the capital city rags before we can make a counteroffer.”
The feature photo on the front page showed Victor’s alter ego unhorsing Sir Heckley midair. The knight’s jawline remained in focus as the blow carried him backward, open-armed over the rear of his mount. Not definitive as Ali standing over Liston, but a nice capture. In vivid violet and gold.
“With stories like this one,” Victor said, “even the U Dodo daily could sell out its morning edition.”
“Cumin Media is your birthright,” crackled Todd’s voice. “Its fate will be your legacy. Not this circus show you put on last night.”
Victor raised his eyebrows. “You think that was me?”
“Who else would be jumping a motorcycle in my late wife’s slippers?”
That Todd knew the identity of the Violet Storm should have come as no surprise. Nonetheless, Victor felt suddenly off-balance.
“Rochelle’s fashion choices still have a lot of fans,” he observed. “It could be anyone.”
“Those were her personal bedroom attire.”
Victor watched years-old footage of the volcano fling a ball of molten rock into the sky. “What can I say. Fans.”
Todd’s pounded the armrest of his chair. “You may not disgrace the Horsefolk! They are Dodoville’s history—its noble, most ancient tradition. When visitors come here, they want to hear how before the age of industry, people here drank the blood of mares and defied the Catholic priests. How Dodovilleans are descended from the chivalrous knights of Europe and heirs to the Round Table.”
“In other words,” said Victor, “they want to laugh at the delusions of uneducated locals.”
“Let them.”
“Those Horsefolk were barbarians in every sense. Lawless, illiterate brutes. The ones that cling to that legacy today are no better. Why are we honoring them? All it gets us is a fiasco like yesterday’s.”
Todd’s corrupted blood had stained his lips and jaw so black, he had given up trying to remove it.
“And what a profitable fiasco if you hadn’t interfered! Selling these fables to foreigners is what wealth this city has. It gives strength to the Consortium, which maintains order. Which prevents the city from disintegrating into the chaos of yet another gang war. Or have you forgotten how our family fared in the last one?”
Victor reflected first on the laboratory-designed disease that had killed Rochelle, then on the strange affliction that would one day claim Todd. Few people on earth could afford to die such exotic deaths as his parents—the price tag of their assassinations was simply too high! This exclusivity formed a bond between Todd and his late wife even now.
“Of course I remember,” said Victor.
“The Consortium is the peace your mother and I worked for. That your mother died for. If you challenge its authority in this city, either in the newspaper or . . . in your leotards, not only will you be defeated, but you will destroy everything she and I have worked for.”
Victor stepped in front of his father, blocking his view of Mt. Myrtle fulminating on the screen. The old man’s eyes tried to find a path to the images behind him.
“Look at me, Todd. It was the Consortium who did this to you. Who sabotaged your printing press, who poisoned your marrow so you’d cough up and bleed your own company ink.”
The old man shook his head, casting his glance down and away.
“That’s a convenient thing to believe, son. It also happens not to be true.”
“Face the facts. It could have been no one else. You choose to believe what you want to believe!”
The old man’s eyes now focused on nothing, as if having willed themselves to blindness.
“Me, is it? I’m the one who believes in fairy tales, am I? Yet you are about to tell me how your mother would have supported this insane vigilantism of yours. The way you disgrace all of us, the prestige of our entire industry!”
Victor believed Todd had always been trying to drive a wedge between his wife and son while she was alive—out of fear the two would turn against him together. It was an exquisite agony that his father still attempted to do this now, twenty years after her death.
“Unlike you,” Victor said, “Rochelle always adapted to the times. She seized new opportunities, and she cut away the dead weight of the past. That’s what I’m doing.”
“You are tearing this city apart. Tearing Cumin Media apart!”
Inky blood dribbled from his lip as he cried out.
Victor leaned on the arms of his father’s wheelchair, trying to meet his evading eyes. “The Consortium sells relics from an age we have already turned our backs on. It is lite
rally the past. This city needs a path with a future!”
“There is no future anymore,” Todd grumbled.
“No,” Victor said sadly. “Not for you, there isn’t.”
“Not for anyone.” Todd’s voice was more forceful now. “Not in Dodoville. History has passed us over. That is what you refuse to accept!”
The classic Dodoville defeatism, unshakable here since the fourteenth century.
“That’s a lie. If you opened those windows, if you looked at today’s living city instead of fixating on this memory of the past, you’d see it. Dodoville is ready to lead the world into the future instead of following so many centuries behind. But it needs our help first to set it free. It needs the Violet Storm.”
Todd wriggled his fragile shoulders in mockery. He tried to laugh, but the effort exhausted him. Raising only a bubble of blood, his humor turned to rage.
“Dodoville doesn’t change,” he said. “The volcano stays irritable and angry, and we remain at the precipice of annihilation. It makes us impulsive, full of secret fears and consumed by ancient anger. Rochelle couldn’t see this because she was a foreigner. And you. You can’t see it because you’re an idiot.”
Victor leaned close enough to whisper in his father’s ear. The skin was paper-thin and riddled with black veins.
“The difference between you and me is, I’m out there. And you’re in here watching old video on loop.”
Todd’s body shuddered as he clenched a hand into a fist. “I have put my blood in the Spyhole! My blood will not betray me!”
“You don’t have blood anymore. You’re just a dirty old inkpot.”
“And you! What are you?” For the first time, Todd looked at him fully. “The angels who guard the tombs of our ancestors weep . . . for shame!”
The Violet Storm priding himself in his unrelenting calm. If only Victor could hold on to that sangfroid now.
“Enjoy the rest of your life,” he said softly. “Such that is it.”
Victor turned to walk out. Once again his footsteps echoed on the marble tile.
“Hey, Acting President of Cumin Media. Do you know why every reporter at every news outlet in the city calls you the Purple Onion? Because if they don’t, they know they’ll never work here again!”