The Man Without Hands

by Eric Malikyte

  Tanner was reluctant, but he nodded. The mayor wasn’t bad, he’d keep his secret, wouldn’t he? “A boy taught me.”

  “And?” The mayor seemed eager, excited. “What did he look like?”

  “He looks like me, a little older, taller, but he has blue hair, and his skin’s dark, almost red or orange...but it shimmers like metal when the light hits it.”

  “Where did he come from?”

  Tanner tried to think. “The forest.”

  “Which direction?” The mayor’s smile faded. “Did he speak of where he lived?”

  Tanner shook his head. “He came from the mountains, I think.”

  The mayor was scratching his hairless chin, a puzzled look on his face. “That can’t be, we’ve searched the mountains clean...”

  “Is he a bad boy, Mayor?”

  For a moment the mayor seemed stunned, as if he’d been caught thinking aloud. “Tell me, boy, how often does he come?”

  Tanner stared at the wooden ceiling, trying to think. “Every seventh day of the long day or night, before the first moon rises.”

  “Of course he does.” The mayor clasped his hands together, wringing them together tightly. “What is your name, boy?”

  “Tanner, Sir.”

  “Tanner, do you know why I’m asking these questions?”

  He shook his head again.

  “The boy who taught you these letters and words, he’s not a boy at all, but a devil, and an enemy to the goddess Nel’rion.”

  Tanner’s gut sank. “A devil?”

  The mayor nodded. “Surely your parents have taught you of devils?”

  Tanner nodded, his heartbeat quickening.

  “Tell me,” the mayor said.

  “The devils serve the god of the north, Elokor. They are his secret weapon against Nel’rion in the never-ending war for our souls.”

  “Yes, exactly.” The mayor smiled, taking a seat next to him. “My child, these devils are dangerous. They disguise themselves to look like us, and lure helpless children away into the forests, where they eat them raw and consume their souls. We’ve hunted them near to extinction, but sadly, a few still serve Elokor.”

  Tanner was confused...if Sage was some kind of devil, then why would he bother teaching him all of these words and letters? Why wouldn’t he have just eaten him on the spot?

  He could still remember the first time he’d seen the boy. He’d been playing in the forest, despite what his father said about never leaving the town’s walls. His heart had been in his throat, tears welling up. He had been lost. And was certain that his father was going to whip him for being gone so long.

  That’s when he noticed the boy sitting up in the tree he’d been crying under.

  At first, Tanner had thought he’d been a bandit, and had gotten up to run away...but something had made him stop and turn around.

  The boy had been waving at him. He’d been smiling.

  They’d sat there trying to communicate for what seemed like hours, but strangely, their languages were completely different. Eventually, Sage had figured out that Tanner was lost and helped him find his way back to the main road to Eldulor.

  They’d been friends ever since.

  “You must inform me when he returns.” The mayor put his hands on Tanner’s back, and for a moment, he felt as though the mayor was poking him with three sharp knives, but when the old man removed his hand, he saw that it was only his imagination. “If you do, I’ll be sure to give you a great reward.”

  Tanner nodded, half-excited. And half-ashamed for having given his friend’s secret away...

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CORY

  Compared to Cory’s rusty tan pickup, the truck Kurt was driving across the infinite flatness of Illinois was almost too quiet. Traveling along the highway with the old Masku—whom he’d come to know as Sal Anderson—Kurt almost found himself enjoying the drive.

  Sal was a husk, sweating, shivering, and covering his arms in the passenger seat as if he had a fever. The man’s arms bore crimson marks that looked to be puncture wounds of some kind. From what he’d seen on the television, they were likely from some sort of drug. He’d seen plenty of needles in the warren of a dwelling that Sal called home.

  “Tell me something, Sal,” Kurt said after a time.

  “I don’t want any kind of conversation,” Sal said, watching the mile markers on the highway fly past one by one.

  They’d been quiet since leaving Sal’s home, and the silence, along with that flat horizon, was starting to drive Kurt crazy.

  “Oh, come now. You can’t truly mean to stay silent for the entirety of our trip?”

  “What the hell do you want me to say?” Sal shook his head. “Thanks for kidnapping me?”

  “It’s a start.” Kurt chuckled, and when he did, he realized that he sounded half-mad. “No, I wanted to know what your history with this cult is.”

  “Doctor.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m a professor.” Sal grew quiet. “Or, at least, I was. You want to address me, use my goddamned honorific.”

  “Your professions on this world are not unlike the Masku of my world. Although I’m not really familiar with this term, doctor, or professor. What is it that you professed?”

  “Man, you weren’t lying, were you? You aren’t human.”

  “I suppose appearances aren’t enough to convince you?”

  “Been seeing stranger shit than your face for months. I couldn’t be sure if I was having a bad trip.”

  “You picked up your drug habit after you tried to escape the cult, did you not?”

  Sal nodded. His tired, bag-ridden eyes regarded him with a weary leer. “It’s the only thing that stops the dreams from coming. And you didn’t let me take any with us.”

  “That poison will likely kill you, and I may have use of you. I did you a favor.”

  “Call it whatever kind of kindness you want, but if you’d had my nightmares, you’d be hard-pressed to find a way to stop them.”

  “Which nightmares, the ones where the crimson eye stares down on you from the center of a spinning storm, black hands reaching down through their mists, searching, pleading for help that will never come? Or, perhaps the ones where cities die and the being you refer to as the Spider rises from an otherworldly gate?”

  Sal fell silent, held himself tight and closed his eyes.

  “I see I’ve struck a nerve,” Kurt said. “I’ve had the dreams for nearly twenty processions. It tells me what needs to be done through them. I don’t know what that converts to in your world, but in mine it’s a long fucking time.”

  “Why do you listen?” His eyes were incredulous.

  “It’s part of our bargain.”

  “You bargained with that thing?”

  “I did.”

  “What did it promise you?”

  Kurt’s transparent hands, the ones only he could see, gripped the steering wheel almost too tight; a raging fire within threatened to rupture forth and consume everything around him. He stifled his anger, quieting his Sulen.

  The feeling ebbed.

  “That bad, huh?” Sal said. “If I had to wager a guess, I’d say you lost something, or someone. That’s what your bargain was. It’s written all over your face.”

  “Yes, someone,” Kurt said.

  “You want my advice?”

  “No.”

  “Drop it. Don’t do what you seem so damned driven to do. Whoever it’s promised you, they won’t be coming back whole.”

  “You know nothing, Masku.” Kurt bared his teeth. “Have you ever loved something so fiercely that you would sacrifice your own flesh and blood to see it returned to you?”

  “I have.”

  “Not like I have, I can assure you that much.”

  The chatter stopped there. The land was so flat it was almost disturbing. Nothing but endless plains of yellow and green patches of grass. There was a darkness hanging on the horizon, even when the sun blazed bright above them. Mor
e than a few times he thought his imagination was tracing an outline of the snowcapped mountain peaks of Paronis there, and there were moments where he thought he could actually see them.

  It made him think of his son.

  How much time had passed since he’d been forced to leave Yce Ralakar? Months? Processions? Years, as these Masku regarded the passage of time around their alien star? The tomes in Yce Ralakar had mentioned the presence of other worlds but a few times, and it had been hinted that travel to these realms was possible, but at great cost. He feared that cost was time.

  Part of him knew that he would know soon enough, that all of this was playing out as Oreseth had planned it. Yet another part of him didn’t like being treated like a glorified pawn. He could only guess at what this being wanted, but he knew that part of it involved his own world as much as it involved this Earth.

  He tried not to think about the day that he was exiled. Failed.

  He’d been rotting in a cell for so long he’d forgotten what Zhelon’s light looked like. His coup had failed, most of his men and—he couldn’t say her name, not even in his mind—the mother of his child, cut down by the commander of the Valier.

  “Kiel.” His teeth gnashed together as he said the name slowly, as though he were uttering a savage curse upon the Earth.

  Sal was looking at him with his bright blue eyes, eyes that reminded him of his own. They both looked like people that had seen things that could not be unseen.

  “What is it, Masku?” Kurt said.

  “That another one of your strange words?” Sal asked. “Keel, or Keal?”

  “It’s a name.”

  “Sounded like a swear word to me.”

  “A curse.”

  “Yeah, that too.”

  The mile markers kept coming, one after another. Kurt’s grip on the wheel left a permanent indentation in the rubber. He didn’t know his own strength.

  “The less I talk about him, the better off we are,” he said after a while.

  “If you say so.” Sal’s eyes wandered across the flat horizon, tracing over the occasional farm silo or barn. “Then tell me about that other word you like to use. Sue-len.”

  “There’s no direct translation in your English,” Kurt said. “But it’s the source of every Sulekiel’s power, and every Shar’s.”

  “Do I have Sue-len?”

  “Sulen.”

  “Whatever.”

  “No.” He paused, then shook his head. “I don’t know. As far as I know, Masku are incapable of summoning it.”

  “Summoning? Like magic or something?”

  “I read plenty about your world’s definition of magic, and no, that’s not it. We do not conjure fire or lightning out of thin air by chanting silly rhymes. It’s deeper, at the core of me. I reach deep inside, through my center, and I draw out my inner fire as if it is all that is or will ever be.

  “When we are young, we are taught the basics of control so that we do not kill ourselves from channeling more than our bodies are capable of handling. We learn techniques that force us to hold onto an image in our minds, then bring it to life as raw, elemental force. Fire, or light, is easiest, because that’s one of the first things that we see. It took me seven second moons to bring my fire to life for the first time.”

  Sal’s bushy eyebrows were furrowed, his face strained. “Like the theory of the holographic universe.”

  “What is that?”

  “My background is in archeology, so you’ll have to excuse me if I butcher the theory, but to my understanding it’s the idea that the universe isn’t physical in the way we think of it, that it’s actually a projection of our minds or something. If that’s true, maybe this Sue-len that you do is simply...editing the projection?”

  Kurt’s eyes opened wide when the implications of what Sal said finally became clear in his mind.

  Could it be? he thought. That it’s not that we bring forth our inner fire, our inner lightning, but instead we manipulate the universe—reality itself—with the very force of our will?

  “Maybe that’s wrong,” Sal said, mad laughter leaking from his lips. “Maybe it’s that the universe, us, everything, is a projection of something bigger, like the Spider.”

  “There are three.”

  “What?”

  “The thing you call the Spider is one of three. There is another that our people have fought against for many processions. The Shar are its legion, its servants, and they will not stop hunting us until we’re all dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we revolted against their master ages ago.”

  “And yet you serve the Spider?”

  “I made a bargain with the thing, yes. But that does not mean that I serve it.”

  “You said he’s your master.”

  “For the moment.”

  “Whatever helps you sleep at night, man. But, if you ask me, I think you’re in denial. You act tough, you threaten others that are weaker than you to get what you want, and sure, you’re tough as steel, but...”

  Sal froze for a second when he caught the irritated look on Kurt’s face. “But, what?”

  “Nothing...”

  “Tell me.”

  Sal swallowed his own saliva; sweat beaded over his brow as he nodded. “But...I think you’re still just as scared as I am of that thing.”

  Kurt turned to face the road and grew quiet.

  Sal wouldn’t stop staring at him.

  “What!” Kurt said.

  “You’re not gonna...like...fry me or something for that?”

  Kurt pulled off the main road, kicking up a cloud of dust around the truck and rattling Sal around in his seat. He wanted to do far worse to him. But, he needed him.

  “We’re here,” Sal said, sounding far more fearful of that realization than of anything Kurt could do to him.

  To the old Masku’s credit, he didn’t know any better.

  Soon, they were riding a dirt path that led to a large warehouse with a rusted roof. The afternoon sun cast the building’s shadow long across the pale yellow grass that ran parallel to the river.

  “I can’t see it,” Sal said. “But I know it’s there. I’ll never get used to that.”

  “Your minds are weak, Masku. That’s why you do not see it.”

  “I’ll wait here.”

  “No.” Kurt opened the door and stepped out into the warm Illinois afternoon. “You’re coming with me so I don’t lose track of you.”

  “Shit, man, it’s not like there’s anywhere to run, we’re in the middle of goddamn nowhere!”

  Kurt’s legs felt like rubber after such a long drive, but he quickly found his step. Sal trailed behind him, stopping only to piss briefly.

  There was a large version of the spider symbol crudely painted on the side of the warehouse in bold crimson paint.

  “Are you going to knock?” Sal asked as they both stopped before the large wooden slabs that passed for doors to that place.

  Kurt shrugged, and knocked three times on the door with his blue fist. He hadn’t dropped his mental projection all day, and he wasn’t about to now. Something told him not to, and he wasn’t sure why that was.

  The door opened with a groan, revealing a rather normal-looking woman with dark auburn hair and brown skin who’d come to greet them. She wore a crimson robe that reminded him of the ones the Elders of Yce Ralakar wore.

  “Greetings, stranger,” she said, bowing to Kurt. “We’ve been awaiting your arrival for some time.”

  “That’s not creepy at all, Delilah,” Sal said. “If that’s even your real name.”

  “And thank you for bringing brother Sal back to us.” The woman known as Delilah gave Sal a hungry look.

  “Are you going to invite us in?” Kurt asked. “Or are you content to stand there staring at him as if he’s your next meal?”

  She waved him on into the darkened warehouse. “My apologies, stranger. Come right this way.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “What
would you have me call you, str—sir?”

  “Kurt will be fine. You’ll just butcher my real name.”

  “You might be surprised. Kurt.”

  Delilah led them into a dark room. He felt the energy of the room’s occupants stirring around them—something that was more reflex than planned strategy. Masku had much weaker energy than the Sulen of a Sulekiel, but it was still possible to detect them.

  Theirs felt...different. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  A loud booming sound rang throughout the building.

  The first gunshot ricocheted off his barrier—another thing that was more instinct than technique. The bullet fell to the wooden floor, smoking.

  “Explain yourselves,” Kurt said, his aura raging to life with his anger.

  The lights snapped on with loud plinking sounds, revealing three men and one woman on top of a rusted catwalk above their position. One of the men held a handgun, a mad smile running deep into his youthful face.

  “Forgive me, stranger,” said a large man with a burn mark running down the left side of his face that made his eye squint awkwardly. “I needed to be sure you were who you said you were.”

  “What else would you like to see? I can burn this place to the ground, or vaporize all of you, if you’d like to test me further.”

  The burned man raised his hands in submission. “No, no, I’m quite convinced now.”

  “How convenient. I suppose I won’t kill you all then.” Kurt smiled. The burned man did not return it.

  Tension filled the room, exacerbated by the low hum of florescent bulbs.

  “My name is Alec,” the burned man said. “I’m in charge here.”

  “I’m sure you think you are.”

  The man tensed up, clenching his fists. His—what would they call themselves? Acolytes, cultists, servants?—aimed their weapons back at Kurt.

  “You seem nervous,” Kurt said.

  “I—”

  “Apologize?” Kurt stepped toward the large man. He smelled of candle wax and sex. “Is that the only word you people know? I was told—no, commanded to come here in order to find answers. Do tell me that I haven’t wasted my and my associate’s time in doing so.”