Snare of the Blood Flower: A novella from A Poisoned Land

by Craig P Roberts

  With a slash downwards he clipped the daughter’s lower leg, causing her to stumble and shriek like an animal. The rat readied his spear and thrust high. Cauly spun to the side, feeling the blade graze his cheek. He counterattacked with his sword—and was blocked. They exchanged blows—Cauly’s sword occasionally cutting into the spear’s shaft and getting stuck. He’d haul it free and hack at the rat again.

  Anger was building inside him as he saw Wallace free himself from the whip and run for the narrowing gap in the doors. But they slammed to a close right in front of his face.

  As Cauly continued to fight the rat, in the background he saw his little brother desperately clawing at the crack that ran down the middle between the doors to Grietum’s Hive. To Cauly’s left, the woman had begun to stir. She slapped her bleeding calf with an angry grunt then picked up her spear.

  With a flick of his foot, Cauly kicked sand up into the rat’s face but this one didn’t flinch. A thrust of the rat’s spear came dangerously close to Cauly’s stomach but he managed to grab the weapon’s shaft. He used the momentum to drag the rat forwards then sliced downwards at the back of the man’s neck.

  There was no time to look at the result; Grietum’s daughter was attacking. She held the spear horizontal in both hands out in front of her and ran at Cauly yelling out a primal battle cry. Cauly thrust the sword at her but she blocked the blade with her shaft, knocking the weapon from his hands. With a jolt he was on the ground, neck aching, head spinning, Grietum’s daughter on top, and the shaft of her staff bearing down on his throat—bruising and choking him. His first thought was, air! Soon his only thought was, air!

  He pushed up against the wood, easing the pressure ever so slightly—enough for him to gasp, “Brother, please!”

  “He will not help you!” the woman snarled at him as he began to see stars. “You’re the cunt that killed my sister.”

  Cauly didn’t understand what she was saying. All he wanted was air. “Wallace, help me!” he begged again with his last breath.

  My last image is going to be this woman’s mad face, he thought, staring at her blue freckles, and angry popping veins. Cauly felt his body numb and was aware that a kind of peace came over him.

  Then, a flash of metal.

  A sharp blade pointing right at his face.

  A rush of air in his chest.

  Relief.

  And warm blood dripped onto his face.

  The woman’s mouth was wide open; she had a long metal tongue…No! It was a blade. She fell to the side.

  Standing over Cauly was his little brother, shaking, staring at the blood-soaked sword that he held in his hand.

  He saved me.

  The Rat Known as Nate

  The blood of Grietum’s dying daughter, named Yumi, ran down the blade towards the handle that he grasped. Nate threw the sword to the sand before the horrible blood of one of his ‘family’ touched his skin. I can’t go back. Fuck! I’m out now. I’ll go cold. Mother Grietum will never take me back, the rat panicked, rubbing his fingers through his hair.

  “Thank you,” he heard the murderer utter from the ground. “I knew you were still in there somewhere. Now we have to get out of here.”

  “No!” Nate shouted and dove down onto the murderer, grabbing him by the collar. “This is your fault, cunt! You made me do it. You made me kill Yumi!”

  “She was going to kill me, Wallace. You saved me.”

  “Don’t call me that! I’m Nate!” he barked. “Nate is my name.”

  “No, it’s not. You’re my little brother and your name is Wallace Ryder! You were born in Arland and we moved to the Ten Kingdoms. You love to count coin and you write everything in your logbook.”

  Nate ignored the murderer’s words. She’ll forgive me, he thought, and ran towards the metal doors to the safe warm place where he always received his gift. I’ll beg her for forgiveness. I’ll blame it on the murderer. The doors were nearly in reach—

  Crack!

  —Nate hit the sand. His legs were caught in the murderer’s whip again. The sand moved underneath him. Nate was getting dragged away from his home—torn away from Mother Grietum. He flipped over and clawed at the coil of leather wrapped around his legs.

  The murderer walked towards him. “No, please!” the rat known as Nate begged, holding his hands up to protect himself, surprised when no attack came. Nate peered between his arms, looking up at the murderer.

  A dust sack! The murderer was holding the leather pouch that contained the gift. “Where did you get that?” Nate asked.

  “She had some on her,” the murderer said, pointing to Yumi’s dead body.

  “Give it to me!”

  “Who are you?” the murderer demanded to know.

  “Nate!”

  The murderer dipped his finger into the pouch and held some of the dust to Nate’s face. He tried to snatch at it, but his gift was pulled away.

  “Who are you?” the murderer asked again.

  Give him what he wants…

  “Wallace Ryder!” the rat known as Nate shouted. Immediately the wonderful finger was under his nostril and he sniffed the gift and felt ‘it’ take his mind, then his body. Groaning made ‘it’ better. It made ‘it’ vibrate through him. He never knew what ‘it’ was but ‘it’ was the best thing in the Known World.

  When Nate opened his eyes after his high, he couldn’t move his arms or legs. The murderer had tied him up tightly, ankles together and wrists bound behind his back, and he was propped up against a rock.

  His captor sat on a large flat stone on the opposite side of a small campfire, chewing on a crispy smullock. The little lizards used to scamper into the hive if the doors were ever opened in the heat of the midday sun and it was Nate’s job to chase the wretched creatures back out into the desert.

  “Do you want some?” the murderer asked, offering the charred remains of the cooked smullock.

  “I want nothing from you,” Nate told him.

  “I’ll just tip this sack of blood flower dust out over the edge here then, will I?”

  “No!” the rat known as Nate shouted, suddenly realizing they were still in the rocky hills of the Last Mountains. “Where are you taking me?!”

  “I’ve already told you. I’m taking you home, Wallace.”

  “Not Wallace!” Nate muttered. “Nate!”

  “Oh that’s a shame. This bag of dust is just for my little brother, Wallace Ryder. If you see him, let me know. Short little guy, always wears a suit, sarcastic little—”

  “I’m Wallace Ryder!” Nate blurted, playing along with his brother’s little game…the murderer’s little game. When did you become so smart? Nate wondered, remembering how the murderer used to be slow and stupid.

  The murderer dipped his finger into the sack and held a sniff of the dust towards Nate’s nose. But then he pulled it away, asking, “And who am I then, if you are Wallace Ryder?”

  Nate the rat hesitated. Then the tiny glistening specs of the dust sparkled in the rising sunlight. “You’re my brother, Cauly Ryder.”

  “Correct,” the murderer said, giving him the gift. Seconds after the wonderful sniff, ‘it’ took over Nate’s body and mind, rubbing him all over, playing with every part of him, letting him sleep on a fluffy bed of cloud. Nothing else mattered but ‘it’.

  When he opened his eyes next he was still bound but this time a warm tent surrounded him and the murderer. Only a little candle lit the shaking, gusting cocoon around them. “Don’t worry; it’s just a small sandstorm. It’ll pass in an hour or so,” the murderer said, looking around, adding, “I hope.”

  Nate’s mind was in that moment of clarity: the time just before the drive for more blood flower dust became an overriding obsession. His mind flashed back to the sight of the dripping blood running down the blade he had thrust into the back of Yumi’s head, then back further to moments before to the horrible grinding sound of the blade getting jammed between her skull and neck bones. Then his mind took him to a memory that had
never happened—to him returning to the hive and explaining to Grietum what had occurred. In his head he heard Mother Grietum cast him out into the desert to go cold for as long as he lived.

  It was this cunt’s fault, Nate thought, staring at the murderer, biting his fingernails.

  “You made me kill her! And you killed my friends! You murdered my brother rats!” Nate snapped.

  “I didn’t make you kill her. You chose to kill her. You did it to save me…your actual brother. The one you grew up with. The one that you spent every day with…your whole life up until we ended up in that shithole!”

  “I told you not to come back for me!” Nate let slip.

  “Oh, so you are Wallace Ryder?” the murderer said, still trying to pretend to be smart. “The same Wallace Ryder that opened the doors for me all that time ago?”

  He was that Wallace Ryder. He knew he was but when he was Nate and when he remained loyal to Mother Grietum, he knew that he would receive the gift. But now the murderer has the gift. Nate played along, feeling a slight urge for the dust coming. “I am Wallace Ryder and you are my brother, Cauly Ryder.”

  Sniff.

  Wallace opened his eyes and the sandstorm had calmed. Sunlight filtered through the skin of the tent. He looked at his sleeping brother, Cauly, who had rescued him from the prison that he had thought of as home for countless moon-turns, and felt a lump in his throat. Then, Nate saw the sack of blood flower dust. And the rat was back.

  Wallace Ryder breathed deeply, trying to push the rat back down inside him—pushing Nate away from his mind. Before he was so far gone that the old Wallace would disappear, he managed to call out: “Cauly!”

  His big brother woke with a start, his hand instantly grabbing the sack of blood flower dust as if it was going to be snatched at any moment. “What is it?”

  “Cauly, it’s me. It’s Wallace.”

  Cauly looked back at him the way he used to. Wallace hadn’t seen that look since they left their home all that long time ago.

  “You have to listen to me,” he warned his big brother. “I think for this to work…for me to be free of the dust…it’s going to have to leave me. My body needs to be free of it.”

  “What do you mean?” Cauly asked, confused, sounding more like the slow-witted big brother Wallace used to know.

  “You need to starve me of it. And after this moment you have to ignore me. No matter how much I beg or curse or tell you lies you need to withhold the dust from me.”

  “Okay, I’ll do that. And then I’ll have you back? It’ll be like before?”

  “Yes…I think so anyway. I want to be free of it.”

  “I want you free of it too. It was like you were a different person.”

  Part of his alter ego Nate sneaked in, suggesting, “But we should keep the dust just in case. If there comes a point when it looks like I might die, then—”

  “—I won’t let you die,” Cauly said, firmly.

  “I trust you,” said Wallace, then Nate the rat added, “So give me one last sniff and then—”

  “No!” Cauly said, decisively, snatching the bag away like a fucking cunt.

  Nate forced a smile. “Good! That was just a test,” he lied, his smile quickly fading.

  For Wallace…and Nate the rat…the next few days and nights were a sweaty blur. The murdering cunt kept the blood flower dust from him. He made him sweat. Forced him to go cold. The same cunt that had made him kill Yumi and who had killed his brother rats.

  “We’re home,” the murdering cunt said, giving Nate a bit of slack on the whip that bound his hands and had dragged him across the sands.

  Nate the rat looked into the distance and saw a little mud dwelling. This wasn’t his home. This was somebody called Wallace Ryder’s home.

  The murderer pulled on the whip and Nate was forced to follow. When they were standing outside the home of the Ryder brothers, the murderer bent forward to lift the shutters. A familiar metal-rattling sound filled Wallace’s head. The sound reminded him of waking up to a new day of opportunity, of business, of making coin and meeting people. They stepped inside and as the shutters were closed it was the sound of safety, satisfaction and the hope of a prosperous day tomorrow.

  His big brother walked him to the bedroom. He quickly uncoiled the whip from around Wallace’s wrists and then slipped out into the kitchen and locked the door.

  “Cauly, it’s me,” Wallace shouted while Nate was out of his head.

  “You’re home now,” Cauly called back through the door. “And soon you’ll be your old self again.”

  The younger Ryder brother was now alone, locked in the bedchamber. After the initial rush of being home in familiar surroundings, Wallace could feel the rat known as Nate sneaking back up on him. It was as if a disheveled image of himself was leering over his shoulder. “You can never go back,” Nate whispered in Wallace’s ear.

  “I already am back,” Wallace replied silently.

  “Mother Grietum will be worried about you,” Nate continued, now apparently sitting on the bed next to Wallace. “She knows that you didn’t mean to kill Yumi. It was that murderous cunt on the other side of that door who did it. Just like you didn’t kill Lolita either.”

  “She never cared about me. And I killed those girls. But I had to,” Wallace said, trying to convince himself. “If I didn’t, they would have killed Cauly.” The image of blood on the shining blade filled Wallace’s head again.

  The same picture was with him as he drifted into a disturbed sleep with Nate jabbing him in the ribs every time he felt his eyes closing. The rat would laugh right in his ear, his cackle deafening him. His thin drawn oddly colored face, dancing manically through his dreams.

  The morning came and Wallace was gone. It was just Nate that was here now, and the drive for the blood flower dust was all consuming.

  That fucking cunt took it away from me! He keeps me trapped in this fucking room! “Cunt,” Nate snapped. “Cunt! Cunt!” he snarled, snapping his teeth. The rat known as Nate opened and closed his jaws from joint-popping-wide to teeth-shattering-closed in frustrated jerks. “Cunt!”

  Then for a moment, Wallace Ryder came to the surface. “Cauly,” he called. “Brother, I’m sorry. You saved me—”

  “You didn’t need saving,” Nate interrupted. “You were happy. You were happy to serve Mother Grietum and receive your gift. Wallace Ryder is dead. Nothing can bring him back now.”

  Nate’s words echoed in his head throughout that day and long into the night.

  Cauly

  His brother had been calm for a few days now. When Cauly slid the plate with his brother’s meal into the locked room, it wasn’t immediately thrown back at the door. Instead it had been half eaten and he didn’t receive a slap of insults as he quickly closed the door, before Wallace could rush at him in an attempt to escape. In fact, there were no more escape attempts either.

  The conversations Wallace had with himself had stopped. Cauly would sit for hours listening to his little brother arguing as if there were two people in the room with him. Wallace’s voice would shift from scared and upset to an angry spiteful rasp. Cauly had been called many different things: big brother, murderer, his actual name and cunt…mainly cunt.

  But now everything was calm, like the silence after a sandstorm that had raged all night.

  As he sat on his bedroll in his makeshift bedroom that he had set up in the kitchen, Cauly heard his little brother call from his bedchamber prison. “Cauly, I’ve not said thank you to you yet.” This was Wallace talking again, not the twisted desperate rat from Grietum’s Hive.

  Cauly moved to sit on the floor, his back to the bedchamber door. “I would have been a shit brother if I hadn’t come back for you.”

  “Yup, you would have,” Wallace said, his faint chuckle vibrating through the door. “But I wasn’t saying thanks for coming back for me.”

  Cauly felt his brother shift position and the door creak as he leaned back against it on the other side from him.

>   Wallace spoke again: “I was thanking you for not giving up on me.” His little brother sniffed.

  All Cauly could think to say in response was, “We’re the Ryder brothers.”

  Wallace started laughing and Cauly was sure it turned into a blubbering cry. “Yup. The Ryder brothers.”

  They sat, leaning on opposite sides of the door for what must have been an hour—silent. Then the familiar sound of his brother’s jovial, rambling, businesslike voice came chiming through the wood. “How many women did you fuck in here while I was gone? It stinks of—”

  Cauly interrupted him with a laugh and a heavy punch on the door. He heard his little brother’s head crack back against the hard wood.

  “And I hope you got them to pay in full!” Wallace added.

  Cauly stood to open the door. He twisted the handle and creaked it open, standing closer to his little brother now than he had done ever since he’d dragged away that wretched creature Wallace had become when he’d lived at Grietum’s Hive. They stood and stared at each other for a moment, with no words, until Cauly said, “I let one of them have it for free once.”

  A grin grew across Wallace Ryder’s face. “You fucking bastard,” he said, rushing towards Cauly and throwing his arms around him.

  Cauly, in turn, slowly wrapped his arms around his little brother then squeezed tight. I’m not alone anymore, he thought as he felt Wallace shaking and shuddering, the sobs muffled against his chest.

  * * *

  In some ways, they were back to their old routine. Wallace would arrange a customer, Cauly would get to work and then Wallace would handle the money. But things were different. Wallace was different. Something was missing from him.

  Cauly had just finished fucking a new customer who had traveled from a village called Sal’Merel. She was quick to stir after Cauly had shot his seed inside her and was reaching for her coin before Wallace had even asked for it.