Mindripper

by Baron Blackwell

  “Shut up!” A deep breath. “What’s your name, soldier?”

  “R-Ragon, sir.” His eyes darted to his companion, desperate for rescue, but none was forthcoming. The other soldier avoided his comrade’s gaze.

  Kalum invaded Ragon’s personal space, placed a hand on the man’s shoulder, squeezed. Ragon winced, his eyes watering.

  “Come find me when your shift ends,” Kalum told him.

  “Yes . . . sir.”

  Kalum relaxed his grip on Ragon’s shoulder, recoiling inside at the depth of his sudden ire. He gathered his wits and walked into the tent.

  Naked lamplight. Barbed incense. He inhaled, savored the whiff of exotic spices tickling his nostrils.

  Kalum could scarce hear his own steps, so thick were the rugs that matted the tent floor. The noise was slight, small, like the twitch of a butterfly’s wing. He walked around and between stacks of opened books. On and on they went, left on top of chests and unoccupied chairs, tossed and discarded haphazardly. Were it not for the fact the oil lamps were encased in gold-rimmed glass, he would have worried about the possibility of everything being consumed by fire.

  Worship Osei was the first one to notice his presence. Huddled with Fana beside a table draped with innumerable maps, she lifted her cataract eyes to gaze at him. Her ancient face was rutted with countless wrinkles, yet despite their number, her unyielding light remained undimmed.

  “Kind of you to join us, Kalum,” Osei said, knocking her wooden staff against the table.

  “Forgive—” he began.

  “Enough of that and get over here.”

  Fana’s eyes twinkled with what might have been amusement, but he was not sure. It was impossible to read her clearly, her depths remained hidden beneath something remote.

  “Now, Kalum.” Worship Osei clicked her tongue.

  Kalum took no umbrage at her tone, yet neither did he hurry to her side. They were more than supplicant and master, he and the Worship. She had saved his life when all hope was lost, and for that he made certain allowances, but even those only went so far.

  “I take it the Possibility Trance was successful,” he said, polishing his nails against his golden buttons.

  “Some things never change, do they?” Osei shook her head and chuckled. The bags under her eyes suddenly seemed deeper and darker. She fumbled after a nearby glass of water with a trembling hand.

  Kalum found himself by her side before he knew it, steadying her hand as she lifted the glass to her mouth. Vertigo clipped his stomach. Though the entire world may betray you, I will always remain true. The remembered words rang in his head.

  “Bah.” Osei smacked his hand away, her thirst fully quenched. “Enough of your babying, boy! I’m not dead yet.”

  Kalum placed the empty glass back on the table and refilled it.

  “You’ll outlive us all yet, your Worship,” Fana said softly.

  Osei graced Fana with a slant-eyed stare. “If I didn’t know better, Sister Fana, I would think you were having a little fun at my expense.”

  “I wouldn’t even know how to begin to do such a thing, your Worship.”

  Kalum caught his laughter before it escaped his mouth and turned it into an overloud cough. He eyed Fana, surprised. Even after so many days, he still found himself confounded by her manner. Were all Sophic Nun so. . . ?

  “If you children are done mooning over each other, we have work to do,” Osei said, her voice laden with mock ire.

  Kalum stiffened, as if struck.

  But Fana merely tilted her head slightly.

  “Great,” Osei said, focusing on Kalum. “Yes, the Possibility Trance was a success. I have a location.”

  Kalum’s innards knotted. “Where?”

  “Dilgan.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  He-Who-Cuts

  Heedless of all but his inner turmoil, Enk treaded through the night.

  There was no going back, not now. Home was forever forbidden, a place of grotesque crimes, of unholy delights. The memory of Mother’s screams mixed with visions of her virginal guise drenched in her lover’s blight.

  Vertigo knifed, and Enk clenched his teeth against rising bile. Even after so many hours, there was something intoxicating as well as horrifying about this image. The remembered terror in her eyes reformed the agony of his constricted lungs, transformed pain into masochistic bliss. This was exactly what she deserved! All those years of torment had been re-payed in kind.

  God, forgive me! What have I done?

  Enk navigated the gloom in between street lamps, wandered a barren roadway as tears spiraled from his eyes. Like an old whore the city welcomed him, wrapped its cancerous thighs about his torso, held him flaccid within its ruinous womb. And he payed for the pleasure, payed with the only coin it would except: his sorrow.

  Two shadowy figures began to pursue him, trailing his fumbling steps into a back alleyway. Glad for the distraction, he listened to the shifting buzz of their footfalls. He could almost feel the depravity of their stares at his back. These were men with the worse of possible intentions. Jackals on the prowl.

  Enk gasped, snorted.

  Well, let them stalk him if they dared.

  He was not prey.

  He was the one who hunted.

  The-One-Who-Cuts!

  “What you doing out so late, sweetling?”

  A man banishing a dagger abruptly appeared at the other end of the alleyway, blocking any avenue of escape. Emaciated and square shouldered, he scratched at a dried scalp matted with a patchwork of brown hair and grinned with dark teeth that had been filed into knife-like points.

  Enk stopped. He had assumed the two fools behind him were the only ones giving chase, but now he saw the true cleverness of their scheme. These thieves were old hands, and this, it seemed, was a far older game.

  “Did Shaitan capture your tongue, sweetling?” the brown-haired man asked, running a thumb along the length of his blade.

  Enk glanced over his shoulder. The two figures behind him appeared no more hale then the first. They gripped starlit instruments of butchery in bony hands, smiled with mouths filled with black and missing teeth, and something twisted gleamed beneath their gaunt faces. Something that clamored to be fed.

  They were the lowest of the low.

  Bottom feeders.

  Enk choked back another wry snort, laid a bare cheek against the cool stone of a pockmarked wall, and closed his eyes. He could scarce keep himself from drooping to the ground, so immense was his weariness. As fleet as ravens, discarded passions reared their gnarled beaks, and a file of scattered memories returned, flashing behind closed eyelids like sunlight across screens.

  Pink petals opening. . . .

  Shrieking warmth enclosing. A disassociated clump of sensations, human and inhuman, felt through an engorged organ. Moaning, groaning, screaming, oh, so sweet screaming. . . .

  What do you see? a whisper that rose from pitched chaos.

  “I see . . . sin—” Enk began.

  A kind of breathless horror struck him and he slid to his knees, the denial dying in his soul. It did not matter that it was another’s body! He had bent the arrow of his line back onto itself, had twisted genealogy into an unholy circle. Sons did not lay with mothers, sons did not. . . .

  “He’s drunk,” one of the man behind Enk said in a wheezing voice.

  Laughter, a raving cacophony of it.

  “Perfect, less work that way,” the brown-haired thief said, his voice crackling with glee.

  Enk gasped feebly, weathering the arcane echo of self-revaluation. He was no different than her! The chorus of footsteps crept closer.

  “H-he looks like a little g-girl, doesn’t h-he, Kifle?” the third man asked, his speech slurred by what might have been drunkenness. “Y-you think if I stick h-him with my cock he’ll squeal l-like one?”

  Enk opened his eyes and watched the thieves approach, oblivious to his scrutiny. It would be an easy thing to end it all here and throw himself upon th
eir knives. A crazed idea perhaps, but it held a certain appeal. He blinked salted water from his eyes and groaned.

  “You know what, he does, doesn’t he?” Kifle, the brown-haired thief, grinned wider, displaying his shark teeth in all there vile glory. “But I guess there’s only one way to find out for sure.”

  I deserved to die.

  Enk’s nails clawed at the wall. I do . . . but not yet. He bit his lip until blood oozed. Not while Merka’s killer still roams free. He owed her that much.

  Debts are paid in full and cruelties with interest.

  A hand reached for him.

  An Eerie Portal opened and Esoteric Light welled and spouted.

  “Stop,” a murmur braided with cabalistic mysteries.

  Enk watched his command take effect, watched the obscene bottom feeders lurch to stillness before him, eyes shining like moon touched shards. Odors swelled and blossomed. The bitter stink of unwashed bodies, the reek of sewer-like maws. He gagged.

  “Step back!” he shouted.

  And the thieves stumbled back, obeying without hesitation.

  “Kifle, what the fuck is—” the man with the wheezing voice began.

  “Quiet!” Enk rose to his feet, his insides awash with geometric waves of caged light. “You’ll not speak unless I bid it.”

  As hounds on red meat, terror gnawed at the would be robbers. Limbs convulsed and trembled. Sweat soaked brows, and mouths gave birth to soundless shrieks.

  “Do you know what I am?” Enk asked in a tone too calm for what churned inside. “The-One-Who-Cuts. I’m The-One-Who-Cuts.”

  Wheezing silence.

  Enk ground his teeth. “And do you know what you are? You’re bags of blood and piss and shit. Less than prey. I could end you all now with no more than a finger. Do you believe? No. . . ? Well, let me show you.”

  Whimpering like the cries of a drowning bat.

  A joyless laugh. “Dance.”

  The thieves came together and whirled in a flurry of stomping and lurching limbs, toiling arrhythmically upon ancient foundations. Faces, sunken and slicked, pinched into guises that mirrored Enk’s inner anguish and lunacy.

  “Kiss.” Enk pointed at the two thieves who had stalked him, and finger bones knotted within his skull as the last syllable was spoken.

  The gaunt-faced men began embracing each other, so frantically that their knives parted cloth and flesh. Scarlet ran and welled, spouted from thin lines and deep points. Eyes wide, Kifle spun beside his entwined comrades. Hips swaying, arms flailing.

  Enk smiled a cruel smile. He saw them for what they were and would always be. He saw! Broken creatures, all of them, built with a fundamental flaw that made their souls empty sacks for his granary, ready and willing to be filled with purpose and meaning. He had but to cut to hollow them of all what came before him.

  “Now, do you believe?” he asked. “Speak, Kifle.”

  “Yes, my Lord,” the man wailed, still whirling, still dancing. “I-I believe!”

  Enk placed his finger to his neck, and Kifle raised his dagger to his own throat, his jagged teeth glistening with strings of saliva as he spun.

  “Speak in your brothers stead,” Enk told the thief. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you all.”

  “Mercy, my Lord.” Kifle gulped air in, swallowing with each inhale. “Forgive us. We didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

  “What didn’t you know?”

  “Please—”

  “Stop dancing.”

  Kifle halted, facing his victim turned tormentor.

  “I murdered a man today,” End said without heat. “A lawman. A captain in Dilgan’s Peacebringers. He bent my mother over at the dinner table, fucked her in front of me. So I slit his throat. Does that make me evil?”

  “No-no. You did right, my Lord,” Kifle said, his eyes shifting to regard his comrades bloody congress. “I would have done the same.”

  “Perhaps you’re right, but. . . .” Enk lightly slid his finger across his neck. “But the thing is, I liked it. I liked the way his life fluids frothed from his wound, the way his lifeless limbs twitched on top of the whore. The way she screamed.”

  Kifle trembled, but unlike the rest of him, his knife hand was preternaturally steady. Crimson seeped from the slight gash across his throat.

  “There’s something profoundly beautiful in the act of destruction,” Enk said. “Don’t you agree?”

  “I have three little ones. Three girls—”

  Enk pressed his finger deeper into his throat. Kifle fell silent, and the song of lips and tongues locked in a passionate waltz echoed eerily.

  “Murder feels good, righteous even,” Enk said, thumbing the pommel of his sword with his free hand. “No one ever talks about that part. Nothing stirs our blood more than smiting our enemies, nothing fills our souls with wonder like righting some imaginary scale. It’s almost like we were made for war.”

  “Amber is my favorite,” Kifle whispered, as if terrified of his own voice. “She’s nine . . . She’s—”

  Enk frowned, peered beneath the cloth of flesh. A lie. This fool had no living daughters, he merely thought to use some perceived weakness to gain escape from the lion’s maw. “You dare lie to me!”

  “No. No.” A homogeneous band of droplets hung pinned along a row of eyelashes, luminous for the abuse experienced, un-unique for those proportions flung about a mouth gaping with the black immensity of manifested dread. “Mercy. God, not like this.”

  Enk snarled. Lungs throbbed like hammers. This insect deserved no pity, not only for his lies but for all the lives he had snuffed out of existence. Enk could see them all, all those Kifle had murdered, shrieking faces like globs of quicksilver writhing beneath the surface of something once opaque, now clear.

  The dagger dug deeper into human muck, inexorably linked to an inhuman finger. And as thin as silver needles, red streams ran down Kifle’s throat, sparking like light from daemonic beacons, sketching tensed and knotted muscles.

  “Amber!” Kifle howled.

  An inner spectacle of convulsing fire, hazy slivers of Kifle’s illuminated past.

  Amber, an often imagined face, but never seen.

  A mother killed during childbirth.

  Amber, a daughter named after an unknown progenitor.

  A source of boundless joy, now a wellspring of endless torment.

  Blue lips. A white face. Lifeless eyes.

  Amber . . . Amber . . . Amber!

  An unlit furnace stuffed with half burnt rags.

  A young child clasped in the arms of her breathless mother, discovered after a night of—Horror! Agony! Horror!

  Trapped within gullies of perceived history, Enk loosed a cry that could not be heard, then broke eye contact with the fiend. He inhaled sharply. He dared not gaze upon Kifle for too long for fear of what he might glimpse next.

  “You murdered your own daughter,” Enk said in an aching voice. “You abandoned her on one of the coldest winter nights in recent memory! And for what? For pleasure? For a night of drinking and whoring with so-called friends. You left her to freeze! Her and her mother both. And you knew! You knew they needed more coal.”

  A wail of denial, hopeless for its piercing singularity.

  “Your wife begged you to buy more. She literally got on her fucking knees. What kind of man are you?”

  “I’m what Dilgan has made me!” Kifle yelled, his eyes wild with defiance and hurt. “A Cutter! I’m—God, forgive me.” A weeping gasp. “I’m a knife carrying member of the Dark Fang, yet . . . . yet scripture says even the likes of me are worthy of mercy. I’ll change, I swear it! From this day onward, I’ll do only good deeds. I’ll—”

  “Do you deserve mercy?”

  “No,” Kifle said, surprised.

  “I agree. You’re a worm. No, less than a worm. If the Hundred Hells exists, it was built to hold your sort of filth. How does it go again? Oh, yes, ‘With thine own tongue I judge thee.’ Now, fucking die.”

  “NO!” Wet eyes cl
anked shut.

  Enk’s finger shook—the one he held to his throat—but it refused to press any deeper no matter how hard he tried. Kifle deserved death, every part of Enk’s soul screamed. The memory of the young girl’s frozen face shrieked it! Yet he could not. He was held captive by something only he could see.

  An image, oh, so terrifying for the paths brightened as well as the ones darkened. Ilima hanging above, cloaked in a tempest, framed in lightning, a kite clasped in his hand.

  There was another way, one without murder or mayhem.

  Enk dropped his finger from his neck.

  Kifle traded hollow pleading for stupefied wonder and gawked down at the dagger clattering against the ground.

  Enk encompassed the thieves in his animated will and spoke:

  “From this day forward, violence is denied you. You will not harm another citizen of the Empire, not even in self-defense. You will spend the rest of your lives righting the wrongs you’ve done. Feed the needy, shelter the dispossessed, comfort the sick. And never speak of tonight, n-not even when alone. Now . . . go!”

  Fiery lattices frayed the edges of an inhuman mind.

  The world tilted, ribbed in ribbons of yellow then blue.

  Enk crumbled against the wall, slid to the ground, coughing and groaning, the distorted song of the spinning night his only entertainment.

  As swift as jungle cats, the thieves fled into the lurching bright.

  Enk wailed silently into his hands, afflicted. It was more than the waning flames disgorging onto his brain; it was all the previous events. The memories of his failures made corporeal. No matter how he tried, he always fell short. Always!

  Dilgan intruded upon heartbreak in the form of leather boots scuffing cobblestones as they approached the alleyway.

  Enk growled into his palms. “Go away.”

  Ethereal granules of luminescence rebounded from the targeted sack, spilled from the rim of something filled with a purpose and meaning all of its own. Pinched by the significance of what had occurred, Enk lifted his head, hissing from the return of the golden lattices.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Darkling Sky

  Enk leaned forward, rested his palms on his knees and did his best to blink away welling nausea. He peered through the darkness, gawked at the dark figure, approaching with a head held in such a manner that the dark wig that sat upon it seemed leafed in purple flowers. For whatever reason, his power had proved useless against this stranger, and he barely had the wherewithal to fathom the how of it, so nagging was the fire broiling his skull.