Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets

by Alessio Lanterna

  “Excellent idea. How about you tell me about this pool of shit we are both drowning in because of you?”

  “Nobody forced you to accept.”

  “Ah, in fact I’m not complaining. Did you hear me complain about this fucking nightmare by chance? That one where everyone is trying to murder me, eh, what do you think?”

  “This business has dragged on longer than I thought it would. I repeated the dream message every night, but for some reason you didn’t receive the premonition dream until today.”

  “What a coincidence, I haven’t slept for days because I’ve been looking for the bastard who gave me this little present!” I wave the envelope under his beautiful nose.

  “It’s very puerile to stand here arguing about a decision which is alterable, when I have a lot to say to you and not much time, therefore, please listen to me.”

  “It isn’t exactly ‘inalterable’ like you say.”

  “Do you think you’re up to it?”

  Now we’re up close I notice some white hair peeking through his elvish mane. Fine wrinkles. Imperfections in his skin. I must have such a look of dismay on my face that he also takes on a serious look.

  “You also… look only a little younger than Valan… maybe, even older than Nylmeris.” I am fascinated by this discovery.

  “Do I have your attention?”

  I take a seat on the sofa, pick up two pizza crusts from Cohl’s pizza box and get chewing.

  “Start with Inla.”

  “Inla.” A sad smile plays around his mouth. “We met at one of the meetings between our dynasties. Teldemays and Valan are still fighting over ancient feuds, but they both already realised the need to meet in order to face future challenges, the most imminent being Ecatomb. She was a truly radiant beauty, who…”

  “Hey. Hey! Let’s skip the romantic twists and turns of the plot, shall we? Do me a favour.”

  “Fine.” He’s irritated now. Tough shit. “However, I thought she was utterly mad. She ranted and raved about the elders plotting to dominate the world, a world made up of lies that they had been telling since the Apocalypse. In any case, I was focused on completely different matters, so we didn’t get on at all at first.”

  “Had you already a sniff of pussy?”

  “I was happy with my military career. I felt important, because I would have been one of the first to heal that ancient wound between the Lovl’s and the Feltu’s. And then the glory, the honour, and so on.” He pronounces these words with revulsion. “Unlike his daughter, I held my superior in the highest regard, and he in turn was extremely satisfied with my progress. Ironically it was actually Nylmeris who encouraged me to see more of Inla. He thought I could have a positive influence on her, pull her out of her wild world and put her back in line with her rank.”

  His eyes get lost in his memories, they are bright and wet with tears and roam around the half-lit living room.

  “Things went in precisely the opposite direction.” His gaze rests on the missing portrait on the wall of lookalikes. “It was her who woke me up. She was tireless in her pursuit of the truth, she spent many sleepless nights studying the ancient texts about magic, not the prohibited ones. Her aim was not to practise all the schools of magic, that’s impossible, but to check a theory about the immortality of cousins. Her suspicions intensified when she started studying necromancy, and in particular a copy of the Eburn Code.”

  “Suspicions about what exactly? You’re not getting to the point.”

  “You’re right. It is a…”—he sighs sadly—“a terrible disgrace, yes, for our entire family.”

  “Considering that you’re not ashamed about your incestuous orgies, it must be a real bombshell.”

  “You don’t…” He clenches his fists, stretching his leather gloves. “Our culture interprets sex in a different way to yours, that’s all.“

  “Whatever. We were talking about necromancy and the immortality of elves.”

  Going back to the story smoothes his ruffled feathers.

  “Inla believed that the existence of an immortal race was illogical. There are only quantitative differences between all living beings, in other words, what characterises each life is that it comes into bud, it flowers, it fades and it inevitably dies. We don’t seem… natural, do you follow me?”

  “More or less. However, we still haven’t got to the point.”

  “I’m getting there. I don’t know how, but she managed to secure the collaboration of… erm…” He hesitates a moment. “A prominent figure from amongst the cousins.”

  “Who?”

  “It isn’t important. Anyway, she was able to consult an ancient grimoire. The owner kept it despite that the fact in doing so he was going against tradition. It was hidden in a secret corner of his labyrinth of his immense library. A tome of fiendish witchcraft.”

  “Impossible. All written material was destroyed following the Apocalypse due to the fear of demons nesting amongst the words. Your grandfather and the other elders even had frescoes eliminated, and they imposed a century of illiteracy on the world.”

  “So they unanimously claim,” nods Gilder, “but it is untrue.”

  Gilder extracts a cigarette from a pocket in his cape, and offers me one too. I decline his sub-standard brand and light up one of my own.

  “Do you know what Lef Galandoras is?” he asks me after his first drag.

  “Your equivalent of baptism.”

  “Well. Inla found certain similarities with the Pact.”

  “Are you telling me elves are living undead beings?

  “No, not exactly. As I said before, necromancy was not the key to the problem. The fiendish tome was the answer they were seeking. It describes in minute detail a spell for eternal life. Naturally such power comes at a price. A suffocating yoke around the necks of all the other sentients, a tyrannical pillory.”

  “Those fucking bastards…” l let my jaw drop.

  “I was unwilling to accept such a revelation. My dynasty, my whole race, everything I had always accepted as the truth collapsed around me. We had gone from being the defenders of freedom to ruthless oppressors.”

  “What is this… price?” I try to stem his psycho-meanderings and keep him on the subject.

  “I was in Qari, when I chanced upon the final piece of the puzzle.

  The parched dunes seemed to be about to catch fire.

  The clear sky offered no respite from the relentlessly scorching sun.

  The tension between myself and my superior was tangible, even during peaceful meditation. My soul was tormented by doubts and suspicion, and Nylmeris was aware of this almost as much as I was. Silence reigned in the desert, boundless in every direction. I opened my eyes at the unusual rustling sound near me. A sand crab was struggling to climb the red-hot ridge, occasionally stubbornly fighting against tiny yellow landslides, six tiny black eyes greedy for food.

  The Dew of Qari. At dawn, the first rays of daylight spread tiny drops of pure magic on the ground. Like us, the Bedouins use them as a way of surviving the extreme temperatures, a remedy they learned from the little arthropods. The dew evaporates around midday, therefore they are forced to commit a daily race against time to avoid roasting inside their shells.

  The creature approached cautiously, studying me to decide if I was a predator waiting to strike or a harmless oddity. The crab, on the other hand was in a spot, the hourglass almost empty, impatient. Despite its fears, in the end it gave in to urgency, scuttling cautiously into my line of vision. A few more centimetres and it would have lived another day.

  Suddenly the drop disappeared and I was overcome by the certainty that I was responsible. I had devoured it, its sublime taste was distinct in my mouth. The crab looked around in desperation, confused. Having realised that, whatever had happened, its meal had vanished, it embarked on another pointless race into the desert, clinging onto hope.

  I broke my concentration, Nylmeris followed suit. I jumped to my feet, unable to keep silent a moment longer in this
titanic void in the desert, which is practically forced to fill it.

  “Master, tell me the truth.”

  He didn’t get up from his knees in the sand, but he turned to me.

  “It’s just as you and my daughter suspected,” he solemnly answered the question that I hadn’t pronounced yet.

  “How… how much do we take from the world?” I searched for the words with rising horror.

  “Enough,” he said nonchalantly, finally abandoning his resting position.

  “We… our noble bloodline… we are parasites!?”

  “If magic were completely free, order in the world would disappear entirely. The number of sorcerers amongst the inferior races would multiply, with no control or discipline. This is the only way we can preserve our role as guides through the ages.”

  “It’s a vile trick, Master. I cannot believe you would support this.”

  Nylmeris did not second my rage, he chose to softly caress my face instead.

  “You’re too harsh, my apprentice. We simply obtain fair compensation for our work as custodians. It’s what they would want too, if they were capable of rational reasoning. Be indulgent towards a strategy, even when it seems indecorous, which nevertheless is there for a higher good.”

  I roughly brushed his hand away.

  “You have shackled us in the darkness of ignorance all our lives!”

  “We would have told you when you were ready. Once you became an adult, just as it was for all of us, children of the failed Apocalypse.”

  “It is vile!” I exclaim furiously. “It is an arduous task to believe that everything… before they are even born, entire generations denied the power they deserve… You! You indoctrinated us with a completely artificial religion, with the sole purpose of concealing the monstrous truth…”

  “You are mistaken, dear Gilder.” He tried to placate me with his seductive voice. “The core of our faith is as ancient as the world itself. The elders only concealed the devilish enchantment amongst the sacred liturgies. The ritual of sustenance was hidden in the gestures which introduce meditation, the words of power were inserted in the prayers.”

  “Even more evil than the wickedness we are fighting, which I believed to be incomparable, yet I discover has reached new blasphemous heights my own people!” I bellowed in disgust.

  Nylmeris, whom I loved like my own father, realised that our bond was severed. No words could have reconciled me to that abominable hypocrisy.

  “I cannot remain indifferent to all this,” I threatened in a trembling voice, hardly able to contain my bitter salty tears.

  “My soul already bleeds for the betrayal of my daughter. Don’t you punish me as well with this behaviour, I beg of you,” he shook his head sadly, “don’t make me kill you. “

  “Kill me, you say, as though you haven’t just done so with your confession and your complete lack of remorse at behaving like a scheming tyrant... My faith in you has disappeared, along with the point of my whole existence. If you so desire, pardon this vestige of life which stands before you, you claim I am alive, but the opposite is true! Indeed, I beg you myself, do not leave me to melancholy wanderings! Do not let my agony insult the days to come!”

  Nylmeris’ hand hovered on the hilt of the blade, echoing my request. Loyalty to his dark tradition dictated that he should execute me, but he didn’t have the strength to see it through. I waited, fearful of meeting his gaze, until he left, alone, in this way betraying his duty also. Then I waited longer, until the stars came back, for him to emerge from the horizon where he sank to make amends, to tell me that together we would have railed against that underground dictatorship, that astonishing injustice.

  Since then fatuous hope burned brightly in this body, scorned by reason but alive nonetheless. I persisted season after season, but neither the adored master, for me, nor the affectionate father, for Inla, ever returned to that endless desert in Qari.

  Nylmeris took the hate and suffering which afflicted him and infused it into the performance of his duties, degenerating into blind fanaticism. He lingered on the sadistic luxury of massacre until he became a vulgar terrorist at the service of the Federation, in the end the upper echelons relieved him of his duties. My beloved and I felt acute compassion for him, he had been ruthlessly stripped of everything he had ever admired, but we still stubbornly held hope, deaf to all words of wisdom.

  Foolish was the hope that twice provoked an unseemly epilogue.

  Finally last night’s dream starts to make sense. The message contained within it cannot deliver precise information, and the image sent to the recipient remains unknown to the person performing the spell. It combines thoughts and memories from both parties to achieve a general aim, such as, for example, arranging for them to meet. Powerful stuff, even if it is unpredictable.

  “Why didn’t he try and kill you sooner?”

  Gilder clears his throat and comes back to the present.

  “The problem, from their point of view, didn’t exist until she fell pregnant. If two exiled cousins interrupt periodic meditation and start to age, nobody notices. They force you to move house often, so as not to raise suspicion from my own personal experience I have estimated that our lives should last approximately four times the lives of dwarves. I believe that they thought they could keep us hidden and avoid the shame of that vile murder.”

  “Then what?”

  “Naturally, we wouldn’t have subjected the baby to Lef Galandoras so our child, growing up naturally, would have been startling proof of the fraud. But foolish hope tricked Inla into believing that when faced with a sacred miracle, that defenceless bud of existence, her father would have come to his senses. It took years to understand the exact nature of that devilish witchcraft, but in the end she came to the conclusion that it was the reason for the demographic stagnation of our bloodline. By giving up eternal life, the elves could have gone back to being a real race.” A short pause to light yet another cigarette, by now the cardboard is a dump of cigarette butts. She smiled, she was so happy. “’Soon the nightmare will be cast out by the shining dawn’, she used to say to me, all the time. Mesmerised by her own delusions, she was hopelessly convinced that the combination of discovery and pregnancy would have finally shaken the dynasty out of its sterile decadence. I tried to dissuade her, oh how I tried. Impervious to advice, I called it.”

  A flash of lightning, followed by a clap of thunder. The light goes out, leaving the embers all alone in the darkness.

  “The power goes off a lot. When she revealed her unwise plan to me she was almost flying with happiness. She told me that her father, delirious with joy, had asked for her forgiveness, and swore he was filled with remorse. She fantasised about the dawning of a new era, painting vivid strokes like those in her canvases. In the end, her enthusiasm managed to obliterate my resistance, and I let her go. My stupidity is the cross I will have to bear forever. “

  His regret-filled voice fades in sadness.

  “Let’s say that I believe this bizarre story. However, they are right. We don’t have anything concrete. We can’t prove anything,” the silhouette of the stripper is silent as it breaks away from that of the armchair to nervously pace the room, “and seeing as there is no way of bringing Nylmeris to justice, there is nothing else left to do but cancel the magical contract. As long as both parties agree, right?”

  “The contract does not specifically require that he be tried for murder. It’s enough that he is tried for his crimes, even just a fraction of his crimes. From this perspective, Arkham, we are anything but unarmed and defenceless.”

  “How exactly. Let’s hear it?”

  “Before she was killed, as I told you before, Inla managed to complete her studies. In her book she reconstructed the devilish ritual and, by comparing it with Lef Galandoras, she demonstrated its correspondence. She concealed it in my dressing-room, rightfully fearing that my house was no longer safe.”

  “At Cicisbeo, I knew it.” I jump up too, in my excitement. ”Don’t t
ell me now that you don’t have it anymore, or I really will kill you.”

  “It is safe.”

  “Praise be the Father of bastards! Maybe we can pull it off… but before we skip off hand in hand, there’s still one thing. Why did you drag me into it? Why do you need me?”

  “What do you think would happen if we made the truth public? All the world’s populations would unite against my people, it would be genocide. At best, we would be stigmatised for evermore, once we had been stripped of everything.”

  “Right, well, to be frank, it sounds like a reasonable punishment for having stolen the magic for a thousand years. Quite generous, in fact.”

  “Many are unaware of their crime. They do not deserve such humiliation.”

  “I’d like to point out that you haven’t answered my question. Why me?”

  “Your name is heard often amongst the Feltu family. You are skilled, you are familiar with elves. Lastly, your soul is afflicted by deep-rooted corruption, it is begging to be healed in any which way possible. Should I fail in this enterprise, you would be a pretty burden on my conscience.”

  “Fuck you, patron saint of blow jobs.” I flip him the finger.

  “You’ll have to negotiate with Valan on my behalf. I’ll turn myself in with the book once Nylmeris confesses the murder. I’m sure they’ll accept this compromise instead of condemning us all to ruin.”

  I rake my fingers through my hair, speechless.

  “Fucking mother bitch, what a demented idea!”

  “It will work.”

  “The fuck it will!”

  “Tell them they have got one day to decide, and try and get some sleep, so that I can contact you via your dreams. I don’t want to risk calling that number a second time.”

  He turns to leave but I catch hold of his arm.

  “Wait, you’re not thinking about disappearing into the night without telling me where that fucking book is, are you? So if you die, which is probably what will happen, I’ll find myself bending over in front of a queue of your horny relatives? No way.”