Mindripper

by Baron Blackwell

  “She was a whore like the rest,” Minos hissed, “squandering the divinity that God had graced her sex. I saved her, saved them all from an eternity of torment! I made them holy.”

  Lulu snarled and said, “By torturing them to death?”

  “Yes,” Minos said softly. “If you were a veteran of the Second Crusade you’d understand, the Hundred Hells are as real as you and I, and so is damnation. Only through suffering may entry into the Thousand Heavens be purchased. I redeemed their souls at the price of my own!”

  ■■■

  The hunchback, Minos, hobbled ahead of Enk, leading him deeper into the misty forest. Enk inhaled through his mouth and tasted rot, sulfur, and death heavy on his tongue. But he was beyond disgust now, beyond heartache—or so he thought, until the wailing began.

  He traced the piercing lamentations to their source. Half shrouded in volcanic plumes, pale infants hung like ethereal lanterns from the surrounding trees, writhing about the glowing nails affixing them to bark. A sea of pale-skinned nightmares that shrieked and shrieked. . . .

  Enk averted his gaze and gripped his thighs. There was a slight twang of pain, but it was a vague sensation, as if his legs were too tormented to register any further pangs.

  Why am I doing this to myself?

  Enk pressed onward, his question unanswered, doubling his pace. The sing-song shrieking waxed, and the whirling ash plumes parted before the Lord-Commander’s hunched figure, revealing a circular clearing, where white flakes fell from a crimson-mooned sky.

  “Here they are!” Minos motioned. “My pretties.”

  Thick and gnarled, roots jutted out of the earth at the clearing’s hub, intertwined about four bundles of twitching flesh. And there she was, the touchstone of Enk’s heart.

  Merka.

  She appeared scintillant trapped behind blacken roots, a ghostly apparition cupped in the many armed hands of horror, eyes wide and unblinking. She would have appeared forever asleep if not for the thrashing and the howl that seemed caught in her throat. Save this she gave no other indication of joining in on her companions’ screaming. She merely peered and peered, all without seeing.

  Moonlight roiled across the azure of her eyes—beauty soaked in terror, and made oh, so more radiant for it. Lilacs sprouted from the knotted bands of her exotic cage, silk-luminous in the midst of blight.

  And through it all Enk stood transfixed, his insides buckling and curling beneath hammer blows that struck everywhere at once. Like a bubble rising to the surface of a stagnant bog, a shudder ran through him, riding the knife’s edge of despair, and he turned to face the Scarlet Apron.

  Minos smiled, teeth blood-sheened. “S-salvation. . .”

  ■■■

  “. . . is a road of thorns and daggers,” the madman said.

  Enk peered down at the blade he held to the Lord-Commander’s throat, watching dark scarlet bloom like red laurels from a slight cut. For a heartbeat, it was all he could see, though he knew the man smiled back at him, daring him to press deeper. The latch of a gasp pricked his ear, the gargle of his own lungs as they struggled to fill with air.

  “I can’t do it. . . .” Enk stumbled back, lowering his blade. He stammered. He gulped.

  Tizkar stopped Enk’s retreat with a hand. “Maybe we should—”

  “No!” Lulu howled. “This ends here, tonight. You heard him! He wants salvation. Well, I say we give it to him.”

  Minos continued smiling as before, his eyes fixed upon Enk the way another might look upon a lover. Something fragmented and fragile broke, and a primordial rage awoke within the young scion. Reason fled before passion. Suddenly, he wanted to hear the man howl!—needed to blot the fiend’s joy from the face of forever.

  Merka!

  Enk thrust his dagger into Minos’ knee. The man bucked, hissing like a tossed snake, overturning his chair.

  Then all was roaring chaos.

  The Lord-Commander crouched beneath the dying fire’s glow.

  Enk and Tizkar and Lulu transformed into peerless tormentors, crashed upon their prey like jackals with knives as fangs. Jets of squirting scarlet. Peals, luminous for the pitch reached.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Eyes like Suns

  Kalum watched a line of horned-beetles, patterned in indigo-and-gold squares, scamper through the sand at his feet. He studied his blurry hands, confused by the claw that tipped each finger. The stirring of things once known, abstractions in the beyond—limned with terrifying meaning.

  Seized by a monstrous terror, he intoned a curse and shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he lifted his gaze, tasted the dry, desert air on a tongue that felt like another’s.

  The sweet smell of rot tugged at his pith. Wild winds cuffed his scaled cheeks. White sands heaved beneath a bright sky. Winged horrors hung like nightmares on bleak horizons.

  No . . . not this place.

  The knowledge of where he was struck him like iron-tipped whips against his great back. He trembled, gripped his large protruding stomach with taloned hands, and turned to gape at the center of the sky.

  A Holy Consort, though only weeping nubs remained of her former wings.

  She hung pinned to the heavens by violet nails, an alien sun trapped above a barren world. Naked but for the black manacles that looped her limbs and throat, she seemed scarcely alive, despite her sparkling skin and the golden light that leaked from her eyes.

  Liquid broiled, then hissed down Kalum’s cheeks. It was as if existence itself crashed upon him, as it always did when he first glimpsed her tortured form.

  He had dreamed this dream before, had walked this barren landscape more times than he could count. Çorak, where the First of the Hundred Hells touched the mundane world through dreams.

  A harrowing squeak.

  A Hellkin peep, slimy with inky blackness, slid across the sand. It paused and looked back at Kalum through scarlet orbs.

  Kalum crouched down and pressed a talon to its side. The daemonic chick squeaked again and lumbered onward, staining the sand with oozing darkness. He started after it, blinking away the last of his hissing tears.

  It led him past towering mounds of ossein that stood as sentinels, staring out through shattered skulls at the endless expanse of ivory sand—the skeleton remains of some ancient battle.

  Years had elapsed since he last walked this path, but he could feel the horror that awaited him, a twisting in his bowels. A sense of looming calamity.

  Howling winds buffeted him anew.

  A sandstorm plumed the horizon, darkened it with roaring particles. And it was toward there where the peep led him, as he knew it would.

  Dancing shapes, made of whirling sand, rose to shadow his steps. Female acrobats with the heads of fanged elephants.

  The storm engulfed him, swallowing him into its seething bosom. And the Holy Consort sang her keening lamentations into the air, haunting notes that pierced Kalum’s breast, wailing infinities that quickened his bulbous loins. A delightful stew of shame and desire.

  Never had he heard anything sweeter. He longed to make her keen louder, longed to cleave her sparkling skin. The light of her eyes pierced the swirling clouds of dust, caressed his scaled back, tempted him—oh, how she tempted him.

  No! Not me. It.

  Kalum shook his great head and narrowed his eyes against the whirling particulates. He longed to do no such thing. Those hungers belonged solely to the abomination—to the Lesser Name inked with starlight into his mortal coil.

  The dancing acrobats joined hands and spun about him in looping circles, twirling ever faster.

  A ghoulish roar pounded the air.

  Linked hands parted.

  Moaning plumes dwindled then dissipated.

  Kalum craned his neck, taking in the titanic dragon that sat bound and chained at the heart of the storm. A Great Name, the Daemonic Potentate of the First of the Hundred Hells. And as terrible as it was, it was merely a way station, a ruin on the way to a far greater ruin.

&
nbsp; The Great Dragon stood, straining against the metallic loops that bound it to the earth, revealing its engorged member. An organ like a barbed battling ram.

  With eyes like yellow vellum freckled with specks of crimson, it drank deeply upon the Holy Consort’s extraterrestrial light.

  Immobilized by knifing fear, Kalum watched ebony scales glitter like melted glass, watched black ejaculate spew and spew. . . .

  “Lament not, my sweet.” The dragon’s voice grated in a way more suited to a thing of iron and stone than one of flesh and bone. It clacked its massive teeth shut in dying ecstasy, battered its monstrous tail against the ground.“Soon. Soon.”

  The earth wobbled and rolled.

  Kalum staggered, dropped next to a boiling muddle of dragon seed that had pooled in a small depression. Squawking and squeaking, the daemonic peep leaped into it and sank out of view.

  “Well that thy debase thyself before me, man-thing, as thine ancestors have before thy.” Spent, it slumped, inducing one last tremble from the earth.“Thine compact holds true.”

  Kalum clenched his jaw. “Why have you summoned me here?”

  “Our Great Lord draws nearer, the Wearer of Nightmares himself.” Purple blood frothed where the beast’s wings had been cleaved from its body. “Thee strength will be needed for the war to come. Flesh of my flesh, sup upon mine seed. Grow mighty so they may better serve me.”

  Kalum wanted to flinch back in horror at the idea, but found himself leaning closer to the bubbling pool, a hunger roaring to life in his pit. The hideous visage of an abomination reflected back at him from the surface of the black—a creature with three horns and lips like white maggots. Beneath the reflection, a thousand pairs of crimson eyes blinked up at him from the depths of the pond. Daemonic peeps.

  Keening, like the weeping of a thousand widows.

  The Holy Consort raised her voice louder, transformed raving lamentations into whispered intonations. “And it is written, before they were two, they were one.”

  Kalum lowered his forked tongue to the dragon’s seed, stopped himself, fought against the cannibalistic desire pressing his head down. The creature he rode longed to make a womb of its mouth, longed to taste the life-giving fluid of the Great Name.

  “Feast, man-thing,” the dragon commanded, blocking out the rest of the Four-winged Consort’s words. “Swallow mine seed.”

  “No!” Kalum trembled, his forked tongue dangling above the dark seed.

  “They gifted their Sight of the Weave to their Chosen, the Arbitrator and the Recorder,” the Four-winged Consort was saying in her sing-song voice. “And they became as men blind to what awaited on the ‘morrow.”

  Little bubbles popped and droplets of ejaculate splashed onto Kalum’s tongue. He growled in his throat, helpless against the instinct driving his head downward.

  “Kalum,” a whisper on the wind of some distant tomorrow.

  ■■■

  Kalum lurched from his bed, and blankets fell from his bare chest. For a wretched moment, confusion reined supreme, kicking baying hooves into his skull. He dug his nails into something impossibly warm—a human limb?—blinked at a grimacing face.

  “Fana,” he whispered.

  “My arm, Lord-Inquisitor,” she said in a near hiss. “Release it.”

  “What are you. . . ?” He swallowed, tasted a hint of wrongness on his tongue and nearly gagged. He tightened his hold on her arm. “Did—”

  A golden pinprick bloomed above Fana’s head, a perfect circle growing into a flat halo, as her eyes transformed into miniature suns. The air buzzed about her, rippling the fabric of her dark tunic.

  Even as Kalum’s hand burned where he touched her, his heart sang with the promise of keening lamentations. For an instant, the gnashing clatter of barbaric fangs was all that could be heard, carried on swells of knifing hunger.

  “You will release—” she began in a voice birthed by a peerless void.

  Kalum wrenched her forward, and for all her divine majesty, the Nun pitched headlong into him. Her face struck his chest, then fell into his lap as the light winked from her eyes and her halo dwindled.

  Fana blinked, not so much at him as at what lay between them—a tower of throbbing flesh. Kalum found himself cupping her chin, a roaring in his head. She met his gaze, her breathing ragged, her lip slightly parted.

  Desire flapped like a wing, again and again, stoking flames. Existence seized him, shuddered.

  He kissed her.

  There was a lull in being itself, a moment where separation became meaningless—where everything became one. Then one became two as the accursed halo returned.

  A monstrous force struck Kalum, lifting him up, tossing him aside like some child’s plaything. His back met the ceiling, and, after a catastrophic glimpse of what awaited below, his chest joined the carpeted floor.

  Breathless, he watched Fana saunter past his gulping form, rearranging her tunic with a carefree air. When she reached the door, she paused, as if noticing him for the first.

  “Get dressed, Lord-Inquisitor,” she said, “unless you mean for the Mindripper to escape us once again.”

  Kalum chuckled, not for joy, but for the pure insanity of what he had done. What had possessed him? A Sophic Nun? A Sophic Nun!

  Yes, it had to be madness.

  The door closed.

  He coughed blood and laughed louder. The shadows cast about the walls wiggled and crawled, chased by flashes of purple light that rose from his dark skin.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Numerical Truths

  Enk raced from eerie brilliance to rippling shade as he passed beneath various branches. Inner thunderclaps swatted his ears, then were taken and repeated in the shrill mating call of scattered cicada. He squeezed his shaking hands and glanced over his shoulder. For an instant, the blood-specked specter of the Lord-Commander’s corpse superseded the view of the man’s starlit abode. A pale face splashed with clots of crimson, beefy arms cinched uselessly beneath a bloated mass. Turquoise eyes stretched about unceasing woe—stillborn shrieks, like princely pearls lodged in a gaping mouth.

  Murderer. I’m a murderer.

  Enk swallowed, not from horror but from its absence—from the pleasure that bloomed in its stead. Air hissed past his clenched teeth. Pretending was no longer an option. Despite all assertions to the contrary, he was no hero. Premeditated murder was the domain of villains!

  The ideal had trailed into putrid vapor.

  I’m not Ilima. . . .

  Enk turned back around, slinging his musket over his shoulder. Something heavy pressed down inside his throat—rage?—gone in an instant, much too fleeting to truly grasp.

  Tizkar and Lulu had outpaced him again, and now stood several steps away, as if paused at an imaginary shore of an imaginary river. Lulu turned to him with a questioning look, her aspect crowded with the evidence of their nocturnal barbarity.

  She motioned, and he came closer, restraining his reflective drive to over contemplate. She grabbed his arm, possessed of a sparkling intensity, an almost visceral reverence that shone in direct opposition to all she had witnessed and done. Two virginal droplets dimpled each cheek, holiness tarred with blood.

  Two and two equaled. . . .

  Enk frowned at her, distracted as much by the spectacle of her appearance as by a growing awareness of simple mathematics. A strong gale struck them, cawing with the resonance of pale infants affixed to bark. Branches bent and swayed before the squall, their budding greenery fluttering like wildfire. Verdant leaves skipped free, tossed from their former homes. One, two. . . .

  He shivered, watching their whirlwind like spirals. There it was again—the number four, twice in as many seconds. Four, the number of spirals. Four, the number of leaves.

  “What?” Lulu asked in a hushed tone.

  Enk closed his mouth, pricked by a sudden recognition. He had been muttering “four” under his breath without realizing it.

  Lulu and Tizkar studied him.

 
“Numerology. . . . I keep. . . .” He licked his lip then shook his head. “Never mind. I-I’m tired.”

  Lulu squeezed his shoulder. “We all are.”

  Tizkar led them forward once more, and Lulu and Enk followed dutifully behind him. Despite his best attempts, Enk’s mind refused to release its newest fixation. Wherever he looked, there it was like a maddening cipher, holding truths his intellect could not pierce. He saw it in the sum of fingers, not counting thumbs, glimpsed it in the metal hooks that tipped the rope he used to scale the wall.

  Four.

  Four! What kind of insanity was this? What kind of significance could that accursed number hold to so pollute his every glimpse of the world? He swayed as his boots touched down on the other side of the wall, roughly pushing aside Tizkar’s helping hand.

  Guilt. It had to be guilt. He collapsed inwardly upon this thought, stilled upon a spasm of relief. Yes, that had to be it. The ideal was not as lost as once thought. There was still hope!

  Lulu stuffed the rope into her dark satchel and paused, cocking her head to the side. Enk frowned, then he heard it to, the neighing of distant horses. A second later, came the clattering of hooves, too many, too far off, and too intermingled to properly count.

  “We need to leave now,” Tizkar hissed, pulling Lulu into a run. Enk darted in their wake, devoid of all sums but the ones that would see them escape. A night of abuse had left his skull near the point of rupture, and it appeared the trauma might be far from over.

  He lost sight of his friends around a bend, rounded it himself, barreled headlong into Tizkar’s stationary form. The blow was disorienting. Only when they landed in a jumble, did Enk see what had stalled Tizkar’s and Lulu’s retreat. A tetrad of Peacebringers, lowering muskets tipped with bayonets.

  Enk stared into the barrels of death, making no attempt to move. He could smell Tizkar’s sweat, the street, even the dregs of dung that clung to their boots. . . .

  His mother’s perfume.

  The reek of rotten peaches.

  The intervening space flashed black before him, a small bar of night attaching to one of the Peacebringers’ silhouettes. He turned to regard its source, blinking as another bar left Lulu’s hand to be replaced by another—no, not bars. Daggers!