The Mirror's Truth: A Novel of Manifest Delusions

by Michael R. Fletcher

  Stehlen eyed the rock strewn earth. It looked like someone had half-buried corpses here as if they were seeds. What did they hope to grow? Every instinct screamed to send Lebendig away. The big woman was no Kleptic. She’d draw attention to Stehlen. I need to hide. I need to be one with the shadows.

  Lighting split the sky and Stehlen saw a lone farmhouse, all that remained standing after whatever carnage happened here.

  “Secure the farmhouse,” Stehlen said. “I’ll look around.” She’ll be safe in there.

  Lebendig drew a sword. “I’m staying with you.”

  Warmth seeped through Stehlen and she flashed a grin of gratitude at her lover. Even though she’s shivering and feels like utter shite she wants to stay by my side. I don’t deserve her. “I’m a Kleptic. No one sees me unless I want them to. I’ll be fine.”

  Lebendig look ready to argue but instead nodded. She gazed longingly at the farmhouse, clearly tempted by the shelter it offered.

  Stehlen dismounted, handing the reins to Lebendig, who hooked them over the pommel of her saddle. “Once we’re warm and dry…” I need to tell you how much I love you. I need to tell you how much it means that you stayed with me even when you didn’t have to. I love you so much it scares me, and I love you so much I won’t let that fear get in the way. “We’ll talk.” I’ll tell you everything. I promise.

  Sword still drawn, Lebendig turned her horse toward the farmhouse. “Be careful,” she said over her shoulder.

  “You too.”

  Stehlen stood in the mud, surrounded by countless thousands of corpses. She watched her lover ride away. She’s my rock, my anchor. In a world riddled with insanity, Lebendig was a pillar of unchanging sanity. Like Bedeck, back before— Back before he killed me, before he abandoned me.

  But was Lebendig truly sane, or was Stehlen simply blind to her lover’s delusions? Prior to their time together, the Swordswoman pursued the title of Greatest Swordsman in the World. What sane person would do that? And if she was sane, could she possibly hope to stand against the deluded who also chased the title? Could she stand against someone like Wichtig who manifested his delusions as reality?

  Or did Lebendig wear her sanity like armour as Bedeckt did, as if it might protect her from an insane world. Did that make them both mad?

  Stehlen cursed and turned away. She scoured the ravaged land with yellow eyes. Crouching, she tugged a scrap of material from the mud. A man shaking a sword at the sky was embroidered upon it; the heraldic badge of Gottlos.

  The war has begun.

  Stehlen crept through the scattered corpses and torn earth. Just like Morgen to war for cleanliness and purity and never see the results of his obsession. Perhaps she’d show him. Maybe she’d drag the little boy-god out into a field like this and rub his pretty little nose in the corruption he caused.

  Sticking Geborene. She had no love for any of the city-states. Each was worthy of her loathing for a different reason. But the Holy Theocracy of Selbsthass? She held a special place in her heart for the mindless fools who willingly sold themselves into such slavery. Religion is a sink-trap for the weak and self-righteous.

  If whoever did this was still here, she’d find them. It was a small act of rebellion, but anything shitting on Morgen’s plans was worth a moment of her time.

  Rain pummelled the mud around her in a wet staccato drumming, drowning all other sound. Stehlen stepped around a hip-high boulder laced with blood and fragments of bone and wriggling worms. Two figures crouched by a meagre fire losing its battle with the downpour. Both wore the robes of Geborene priests. No longer dressed in pristine white, they were sodden and filthy, their hair plastered to their skulls, faces drawn and pale. They looked like they rolled in the mud instead of walking.

  Stehlen caught the glint of mad eyes and realized the two—a man no taller than herself, and a woman—were arguing. With no attempt at secrecy she moved closer to listen.

  “I can’t draw forth his demons, unless I see him,” said the man, picking at a scab on his arm with torn fingernails. “I must lay eyes upon the dark in his soul. Have your damned rocks crush the farm.” Tearing the scab free he popped it in his mouth before picking at another.

  The woman didn’t seem to find this odd. “If the Earth Spirit was willing to crush it,” she said, “it would have. It remains unwilling.” She shrugged bony shoulders. “Perhaps the site has some holy importance of which I am not aware.” The woman’s robes clung to her gaunt body, hollowed from malnutrition. Her face looked like a skull with skin stretched too tight across it, her eyes pinpoints of madness in deep sockets.

  Stehlen had seen this enough times to know what she was looking at: These were Geisteskranken riding the last wave of power before the Pinnacle took them. Of course Morgen sent them here. They were dirty. He’d want them as far away as possible but wouldn’t see the contradiction, the sheer hypocrisy of using their madness for his own purposes. What he hated about them made them useful.

  “There seems to be a lot,” said the short man, sneering, “of which you are unaware.”

  “I’m aware of how much you stink,” said the woman. “Eat snot.”

  “And apparently unaware of your own stench.” The man grinned red teeth as he dug into a nostril with relish.

  The two sat in angry silence, pretending to ignore each other though they shared the same dying fire.

  Stehlen drew a knife and moved closer. She’d open their throats and leave them kicking in the mud.

  The woman flinched at something, glancing into the sky. “Drache will snap soon.”

  “You’re one to speak, Earth-Whore.” But the priest huddled deeper into his robes, squatted lower.

  The priestess grinned like a sunken skull, thin hair pressed against her scalp in greasy strands. “You didn’t have much trouble ripping the demons free of several thousand Gottlos troops.”

  “Go rut a tree.” The man sagged, reaching a hand toward the fire as if he might draw some vestige of warmth from it before it died. “It was easy.” He glanced at the priestess. “Shall I show you?”

  “The earth will crush you like the worm you are.”

  The man shrugged, mad eyes sweeping the black sky above. “She’s going to kill us. I can feel her hate.” He laughed, a racking cough. “She tried to drop a cow on me. If she’d bothered to kill it first, I wouldn’t have heard it coming.”

  The woman searched the sky with sunken eyes and even Stehlen found herself checking to see what might lurk above. She saw nothing.

  Knife ready, Stehlen ghosted closer. Whatever the two Geisteskranken thought flew above was likely a figment of their fragmenting minds. She wasn’t worried. It will die with them.

  “She likes the sound things make when they fall to their death,” said the woman.

  “We should kill her before she kills us.”

  “How?” demanded the priestess. “She hasn’t twisted back to her human shape since we left Selbsthass.”

  Shite, there’s a Therianthrope up there. Apparently one near its own Pinnacle. Shape-shifters spent more and more time as their spirit animal before they cracked.

  “Together we could defeat her,” said the priest, finally digging a nugget of snot from his nose and holding it aloft to show the woman before sucking his finger clean.

  The priestess grimaced. “Really? She hasn’t set foot on the ground in days. You know what that means? It means I can’t touch her. The sky is dead to me.”

  “Well I can kill her—”

  “Good luck with that.”

  Almost within range, Stehlen decided she’d learned all she would from these two bickering fools.

  “Shite,” said the priest. “So what are we going to do about those damned Swordsmen?”

  Stehlen stopped, holding her breath.

  “Go into that farmhouse,” said the priestess, “and exorcise them.”

  He shook his head, lifting filthy hands as if to ward off the woman’s words. “I’m not setting foot into a little farmhouse w
ith the Greatest Swordsman in the World. Exorcisms take time. He’d run me through before I finished.”

  The Greatest… Wichtig was in the farmhouse? Stehlen’s heart kicked in savage fear. I sent Lebendig in there. Alone. She remembered the exhausted sag of Lebendig’s shoulders as she rode away. Wichtig. Lebendig. Who was she more scared for? If the carved toy was to be believed—and Stehlen did believe—Wichtig was badly wounded while Lebendig still recovered from whatever that numen sheltered in the oasis of trees did to her. And the Swordswoman was angry. She wanted to face Wichtig to prove something, either to herself or Stehlen. The Kleptic wasn’t sure.

  But Wichtig is the Greatest Swordsman in the World and Lebendig is…my love.

  Stehlen stood torn, wanting to kill these two priests and wanting to rush to that farmhouse to kill someone and save someone else.

  The ravaged landscape made all too much sense now. These two deranged priests—along with whatever Therianthrope flew hidden in the clouds above—killed thousands of Gottlos troops here. Geborene Geisteskranken at the Pinnacle. She couldn’t leave them alive. They were too dangerous.

  Gods, how long had she been here listening to their insane drivel when she should have been killing them?

  Lebendig will be fine. She had to be.

  Swordsmen. The priest said Swordsmen.

  Kill them fast and go.

  Decision made, Stehlen crept forward. Three heartbeats and these two hearts would never beat again.

  A huge rock, a third of her own height and twice as wide, reared from the mud, blocking Stehlen.

  “You cannot harm the Earth Warden,” said the rock in a voice like a landslide.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Never trust the distrustful. Never love those who cannot return it. Never lend money to one who would not lend it to you.

  What we see in ourselves is what we see in the world.

  —Basamortuan Proverb

  Bedeckt’s nightmares rode and walked in disorganized ranks alongside the axeman’s horse. Great sheets of lightning purpled his vision, left bright streaks and scars of blinding light across the hellish landscape. Far above strange shapes swooped through soot-black clouds.

  This isn’t real.

  Armies of corpses marched at his side, soldiers from a score of wars he hardly remembered.

  I couldn’t have killed all of you.

  With a slash of lightning the sky caught fire, burning as if the clouds held oil instead of rain.

  This isn’t real. It couldn’t be. Reality was broken, savaged by delusion. Somewhere some Geisteskranken riding the ragged Pinnacle toppled into the abyss.

  A hand, small and icy cold, grabbed at Bedeckt’s ruined hand and he snatched it away with a scream of terror.

  Zukunft whimpered, eyes round with fear, riding huddled in a sodden blanket against the torrential downpour. She dropped her hand back to her side, clearly hurt and terrified by his reaction. Was this her doing, was she twisting reality with her delusions? No, she’s a Mirrorist. Not even particularly powerful.

  Downpour? Bedeckt rubbed the forefinger and thumb of his left and together, checking to see if it was indeed oil. One strike of lightning and— No, just water.

  We’re in someone’s hell.

  But whose?

  Bedeckt recognized an old soldier, scarred from countless wars, marching at his side. Bedeckt remembered they’d argued about something but couldn’t remember the man’s name. We were friends.

  “Are you hallucination or albtraum?” Bedeckt asked. “If albtraum, I haven’t gone mad.”

  The soldier glanced up at Bedeckt, a knife protruding from his chest.

  “I remember putting that there,” said Bedeckt, staring at the knife. We argued during a card game. The man accused Bedeckt of cheating, which of course he was.

  “We are your dead,” said the old soldier. “Your hallucinations have stolen us from the Afterdeath, made us real.” He grinned bloody teeth and Bedeckt remembered how much he hated his friend and his easy way with women. “I am dead and I am here.”

  “No,” said Bedeckt “I am sane.”

  “That seems unlikely, given the evidence.”

  Bedeckt rode past a huge and shaggy man, easily over seven feet tall. The monster slogged through the mud, an axe identical to Bedeckt’s buried in his skull.

  That was the Therianthrope bear I killed in Neidrig.

  “There are men I’ve killed who aren’t here,” he said.

  “How can you tell, there’s so many.” The soldier laughed, scratching at the still raw wound where the knife jutted from his belly. “Anyway, those who died in the Afterdeath are gone to whatever comes next.” He glanced at Bedeckt. “Apparently even beyond your reach.”

  “Bedeckt,” said Zukunft, again grabbing his hand and squeezing it until he thought he’d scream from the pain. “You have to stop. You’re making this a hell. These people are dead. Let them be.”

  Bedeckt tried to pull his hand away but he was too weak. “I can’t. This isn’t me. I’m sane.” He looked around, hunting through the thronging dead for some likely culprit. “Someone is doing this to me.”

  “Someone else is pulling the dead from your past?” said Zukunft, and the old soldier laughed, blood spurting from the knife wound.

  “Maybe it’s Morgen,” said Bedeckt, desperate. This isn’t me. “Maybe your sister. Some Geisteskranken is trying to drive me mad.” He attempted to stand in his stirrups but Zukunft held him down. “It won’t work,” he yelled at the dead. “I am sane.”

  Your dead. Your delusions. Your madness.

  No. That’s what they wanted. Someone sought to undermine him, shake his belief in himself. It wouldn’t work. None of this is real. He was still lying on that tavern floor, bleeding out his last, dying from a gut wound. Nothing else made sense. Maybe the Täuschung killed him and he was trapped in their hell.

  He straightened, again scanning the dead.

  “This isn’t right,” he said.

  Zukunft uttered a tittering giggle stained dark with hysteria. She made a show of taking in the nightmare surroundings. “What isn’t?” she asked, still clutching his hand. Their horses rode so close together Bedeckt’s leg rubbed against hers.

  “If this was me hallucinating this, my father would be here.”

  “I am,” said his father. “You pathetic shite.”

  “One more word from you,” said Bedeckt, “and I swear I’ll kill you again.”

  Arsehole, Bedeckt’s horse, nickered and sidestepped something beneath its hooves in dainty, dancing steps. Peering into the mud, Bedeckt saw the remains of a partially buried corpse.

  Just more dead.

  He blinked as another corpse, this one crushed flat as if a great boulder rolled over it, passed beneath. And another. More cadavers slid by, ragged and empty, crushed and broken.

  They rode across a field of dead.

  Too many. And his dead strode at his side, they didn’t lay crushed in the mud.

  “You always were a mad little shite,” said his father.

  Bedeckt fought with his axe, struggling to draw it from where it hung at Arsehole’s side. He didn’t have the strength.

  “I’m already dead, you daft bastard,” said his father, shaking with laughter. “No one escapes their dead.”

  Bedeckt gave up wrestling with the axe and slumped in the saddle, defeated.

  Zukunft squeezed his ruined hand again, the pain cutting through his fog of misery.

  “We ride a carpet of corpses,” she said. “Did you—”

  “I didn’t kill all these,” said Bedeckt, not sure if he was lying. Peering into the muck, he saw the corpses wore the livery of Gottlos. While he had on occasion fought both for and against Gottlos for various would-be usurpers, he definitely had not killed this many. And he had no memory of crushing men flat. “Not my dead,” he said, confused. Whose then? Who hallucinated these half-buried corpses?

  Arsehole picked his way over another body with exaggerated care. T
his one looking like a rabid tiger had been trapped within and torn its way free.

  “These aren’t mine,” repeated Bedeckt.

  “No shite,” said his father. “Brainless tit.”

  Ahead, a disturbance ran through Bedeckt’s dead. A body, bent backward at an impossible angle, cartwheeled by, eyes wide with surprise.

  “What the hells?”

  A monster of mud and stone and wood stumbled out of the dark, knocking Bedeckt’s dead aside with earthen arms, scattering them like toys. A knife, jammed in what should have been its face, caught Bedeckt’s attention. The weapon shone bright, polished and flawless.

  I know that knife. Bedeckt gave it to Stehlen—returned it, really—when they first found each other in the Afterdeath.

  Stehlen is here.

  Suddenly aware he clung to Zukunft’s hand like she might protect him, might save him from suffocating in madness, Bedeckt released her. He drew his axe and lifted it over his head. With a mindless roar he drove Arsehole forward.

  His dead drew steel and followed, issuing screams of their own. Even his father sprinted at his side, roaring through clenched teeth.

  Battle raged around Bedeckt and he lost himself to the fury of carnage, the madness of utter chaos that came with every combat. The very earth rose up against him and he hewed it apart with his axe. The world hated him. He was an abomination, his madness savaging reality.

  This isn’t me. I’m sane.

  Somehow this all had to make sense.

  Bedeckt saw a mob of corpses drag a mud creature with arms like trees to the ground, hacking and tearing it apart. For a moment, he thought his dead would prevail, but the earth creatures weren’t alone. Swarms of demons, wraiths of smoke and horror, swept among the dead, twining about them, clawing with hooked talons. He watched in horror as a demon tackled his dead friend with the knife in his gut and dragged another demonic wraith from within the man’s corpse. His friend came apart as whatever was within burst forth.

  They’re freeing their inner demons. He’d heard of such things, Wahnist Geisteskranken who thought people were infected with vile spirits and who believed they could free them, driving their demons out. But not on this scale. Thousands of phantoms flitted about the hellish scene.