by Elliot Burns
It was a roll of yellow parchment, thicker than normal paper and almost like cloth. It was fastened in the centre by a black wax seal. Jack broke it and unravelled the parchment, coughing at the scent of books and dust that it gave off. As he traced his gaze down it, he began to wish he hadn’t been able to understand it after all.
“What is it?” asked Elena.
He read the parchment again and then closed it. He stuffed it in his pocket. “This isn’t good,” he said.
They walked back to the castle. This time, Jack didn’t want to run on ahead. The urge to rush around had left him completely. Instead, he walked by Elena’s side and dwelled on what the note had said.
~
Back in the castle, Jack, Elena and Mav sat around a marble oval table in the meeting room. Bluntfang lounged by the hearth, which Mav had lit using alchemical sparks. The surface of the table was covered with a range of weird snacks. There were berries that were different colors on each side. One half tasted sweet, and the other tasted sour. A roasted bird of some kind sat on a plate. Mav had carved it through the middle to reveal its rare-cooked insides. The outside was a dark brown and glazed with jam made from the sweet-sour berries. Sticks of dark brown vegetables sat in a jar, and next to them was a bowl of clear-looking dip. The dip didn’t seem appetizing, but when Jack tried some, he was won over. At first it tasted sweet, but as it rolled over his taste buds, it became hot and spicy.
“You made all this?” Jack said, feeling the heat of the spice burning his tongue.
Mav nodded. “Mother always said I had a chef’s hands. Nice and dexterous. Course, after the army I decided nimble fingers were more use to a thief than a cook, but it’s become something of a hobby.”
Mav looked rough. He had let his beard grow out over the last few days. Even though it was brown around his mouth, his cheeks were salt and pepper. His short hair was well overdue a visit from a razor. The rough effect added to Jack’s feeling that when he looked at Mav’s sharp blue eyes, years of experience stared back at him. Mav had the gaze of a man who had seen things, some of which he had to hide away because they were too horrible to think about.
Elena drummed her long fingertips on the table. She was normally so reserved, but ever since Jack had read the scroll, her agitation had shown. He’d wanted to wait until they saw Mav before he told her what the parchment said.
“Settle down a bit,” said Mav. “The world isn’t ending.”
Elena stopped drumming on the table. She interlaced her fingers and put her hands on the table.
“Come on lad. Clue us in a little,” said Mav.
Jack spread the parchment out on the table, but it had been rolled up so long that it didn’t want to lay flat. It curled at the edges, so he weighed down the top corners with cups. “It’s from the High Tacher,” he said. “It says that my uncle left a debt behind to the tachers, and that since I’m the new lord of these parts – I added the ‘these here parts,’ not the tacher- then the debt passes to me.”
“Fat-arsed tight-fists,” said Mav.
“It’s flek owed for services rendered,” said Elena. “We aren’t thieves.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Lord Halberd’s, of course. I’m just pointing out that this isn’t robbery.”
“It might as well be,” said Jack. “They say I owe them twelve thousand flek for the tacher who assisted my uncle. Wait a minute; if the game resets after someone enters, then why has my uncle’s debt transferred over to me?”
“Royaume was programmed to be a continuous world,” said Elena. “Even after a game ends, certain conditions carry over into the next. In this way, every gaming experience is different, and each player faces troubles brought about by the player before him.”
It was a great game mechanic, Jack decided. It would certainly have made things interesting, if this was just a game. Given that he was playing this to escape, he was pretty annoyed at Alfie and Henry’s ingenuity.
“How am I supposed to come up with twelve-thousand flek?” he asked.
Mav whistled. “Twelve-thousand flek is quite a sum. How much do you have right now?”
“A hundred and thirty-four,” Jack sighed.
“And when do they want it?”
“Within a year.”
Mav stood up from his seat. “A year? That’s ridiculous! Who do they think you are, the Lord of Flekdom, where flek grows in the soil?”
“Technically,” said Elena, “flek does come from the soil.”
“We need to find a way to deal with this. I won’t have enough flek to pay them anytime in the next millennium, that’s for damn sure,” said Jack.
Mav settled back down into his seat. He grabbed a handful of berries and popped them in his mouth, then winced when the sour flavors hit in full force. “Don’t pay them,” he said, in-between chews. “The tachers are bookworms, and they won’t be able to force the flek out of you.”
Elena was back to drumming on the edge of the marble. “You do not want to make enemies of the tachers, Lord.”
“What happens if I don’t pay them?”
“It isn’t pleasant.”
“Like I said, I want you to deal me a straight deck from now on. Don’t hold anything back.”
“The tachers deal with debts in a peculiar way,” said Elena. “We – they – have mages who will strip away layer upon layer of your memory with painstaking slowness. One memory, one day at a time. Since you are not giving them consent, the process is agony, I am told.”
Jack grimaced. “I better find my wallet.”
“Not only that,” continued Elena. “After a while, you start to notice the effects. Little holes in your memory where names begin to elude you, and you forget the faces of your family. Days disappear from your memory and leave a void. They keep going and going until they feel like you have repaid your debt. If your flek arrears are large enough, they strip all of your memories away until you are just a shell.”
“Back home they just hassle you while you’re at work,” said Jack, thinking of the hundreds of calls he’d taken from debt companies thanks to his mum’s spending.
“Never cross a tacher who you owe money to,” said Elena.
“All of this just for some flek?” he said, grimacing at the idea of someone stealing memories from his mind. “It seems a little harsh.”
“Not just some flek,” said Mav. “A man could live well on twelve thousand.”
“And they’d dare to do their memory-stripping-thing to a lord?” asked Jack.
Elena nodded. “Messages have to be sent. Otherwise, a lord might think he can get away without paying for the services of his tacher. The effects would ripple, and tachers would lose their influence all over the land. The tacher message is this: everyone pays.”
“You really are a nice bunch,” said Mav.
Jack rolled up the parchment and shoved it in his pocket as if removing it from view would erase the message. “We need to find a way of getting some flek, fast,” he said. “Does the high tacher take debit card?”
Chapter Ten
On the night after his meeting with the tachers, Elena asked Jack to come to her bedroom. This was unusual, and he couldn’t help wondering what she wanted. When he knocked on her door and went in, he saw that the place was a mess. Books took up every available inch of space, almost as if they were breeding in there. An oak bookcase stood guard in front of the window, so no fresh air could sneak in. The aroma of an antique book shop emanated from each corner of the room.
The mess of books seemed to form a spiral on the floor, starting at the outer edges and swirling toward the bed in order of importance. The ones still on the bookcases were untouched, the books at the edges of the room had been opened but barely read, and the closer they got to her bed, the more crumpled the pages were. On her bedsheets were five books with titles such as ‘The Art of the Mind’, and ‘Thoughts on Mind Piercing.’ These had been read, re-read, and important passages marked with the placement of bright red feathers.
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Above Elena’s bed, there was a watercolor painting. The colors were smudged and mixed, probably on purpose, and Jack struggled to work out what it represented. To him, it looked like a man holding an umbrella, with a storm cloud overhead.
“Sorry, I’m a little bit messy,” Elena said. “I have done lots of reading but no tidying over the last few days.”
“Your room, your rules,” said Jack.
There were two chairs in her room. Elena must have brought one up from somewhere, and she’d cleared just enough floor space so that the chairs faced each other. She settled into one, Jack into the other.
“Thanks for the adventure books you loaned me, by the way,” he said. “With no TV, things get a little dull around here at night.”
“I know we should be reading things that are more…useful…, but I like to escape sometimes, and I thought you might like it too,” said Elena. “Plus, I have a thing about swords and armor.”
“We all do, and boy, do we need it. The escape, I mean, not the sword fetish. Why did you want to see me, Elena?”
“It is time to start your regime, Jack. We need to get your mind into shape. The problems you had in the Emperium chair with the voice you heard, and our troubles with the portal made me think that we need to get you ready.”
Elena began to pace to and fro. It was something she did often when she got lost in an explanation, but the books covering most of the floor didn’t offer much pacing room. Each movement she made swept the hem of her nightgown.
She started at him intensely. Jack had never seen such a serious look on her face. Whatever she was about to tell him, it was important. “I have to warn you,” she said. “What I am about to teach you is deadly serious. This can-”
As she spoke, she gestured with her right hand, swinging it out. When she did this, she knocked over a goblet of wine, sending it flying. Red wine spilled out everywhere, covering the carpet, her books, and Elena herself. She coughed, then gathered herself. “As I was saying. This will be dangerous. I’m going to teach you a skill, but we have to be careful.”
“Consider me warned,” said Jack.
“If you are to use your building room for extended periods, then you must protect yourself from others. Some who possess Emperium chairs are strong enough to cast wide mental nets, like mental…fishermen…and will use those to gather the thoughts of others.”
“How, though?”
“Using the chair puts your thoughts in tune with the land around you. Some people learn to amplify the distance their thoughts can travel, eventually wandering Royaume as ethereal spectators.”
“And you’re going to teach me to keep my guard up against them?”
“I do not proclaim to be any expert.”
“I’ll take whatever help I can get,” said Jack.
“This could hurt you, Jack. All the texts say so. It would have been advisable to have a healing mage with us, but obviously, that is not possible.”
“I can handle it. I’m sure you’ll be a great teacher, and I need to protect myself against these people.”
“You certainly do,” said Elena. “And the High Tacher is such a person. Though I cannot imagine him having much interest in what you do with your kingdom. I believe he just likes to watch the strategies of those who have Emperium chairs unfold. For him, it is like reading a book.”
“It’s Lord Veik who I’m worried about.”
“Rightly so. Better not to dwell on him, though.”
“What do we need to do?” asked Jack.
“To begin with, potions of mind-defence can be obtained, though I do not trust the alchemists who make them. Since the ingredients are rare, they cost more flek than they are worth. Their effects weaken over time, so that where a potion once protected your thoughts for an hour, soon it would take a several potions to get the same effect. We require a flek-effective, long-term solution.”
“Then what are we going to do?”
“Do you trust me, Lord?”
“I’m willing to do whatever it is,” he answered.
Elena extinguished two candles that had been burning on a table near her bed, leaving just the flicker of one solitary candle as the only source of light. The room took on the gloominess of a psychic’s parlor, and Jack almost expected Elena to demand that he crossed her palm with silver before she began. She dragged a mahogany drum table from the corner of the room so that it was between her and Jack.
As he watched from his chair, Elena stood in front of a bookcase on the east wall and traced her finger from shelf to shelf until she found the book she wanted. It was a hefty tome, four times the size of the others on the shelf. The gloom was too thick for Jack to read its title, but it didn’t seem to matter since no sooner had Elena pulled it from the row, then she tossed it onto the floor. She reached into the new space on the bookshelf and grabbed a misshapen bundle of cloth.
She spread the cloth out on the table in front of Jack. The material had once been white, but the black marks that stained it suggested it had been burned at various times. The contents inside were strange; there was a bundle of herbs wrapped in twine, a corked glass vial with blue liquid inside, a smaller vial with a thick red glop, and a small, tattered book that looked older than Castle Halberd itself. Next to these items was a small leather pouch tied at the top with string.
“I’m starting to get a little weirded out,” said Jack. “Is this some kind of ritual?”
He reached out to touch the book. Elena’s palm sprang out like a funnel spider protecting its nest and slapped his knuckles. Jack drew his hand back and shot her a dirty look.
“You have to listen to everything I say while we do this, Lord. Outside of my room, you are the boss of Castle Halberd. For the next hour, I must insist that you take orders from me.”
“Fine, but you better let me know what we’re doing,” he grumbled.
“Certainly… in time.”
Elena unwound the twine from the herbs. They seemed to be different kinds bound together, though Jack didn’t recognize them. Mav would have known, no doubt. They were so dry that they looked like they’d turn to dust at the slightest touch, yet they held firm as she handled them. She carried them over to the candle across the room, lit one side of the herbs, and then set them in a glass vase.
In the few seconds it took her to settle back into her seat, the room had already filled with the bitter-sweet pinch of burning herbs. Jack took a deep breath, and he felt his lungs fill with the herby air. He started to feel light headed. Suddenly, a laugh escaped his lips. He hadn’t meant to laugh, and there was nothing here he found funny, but he hadn’t been able to stop it. He laughed again, this time harder.
“The laughing will pass,” said Elena. She closed her lips tightly, but Jack could see that she was struggling to hold in a laugh of her own. Her face turned red. Suddenly, a loud chortle escaped her lips. Before long they were both laughing. Jack heaved with hilarity so much that he couldn’t breathe. Then, as suddenly as it had started, his laughing fit stopped.
“What now?” asked Jack.
“Now, it begins. Does anything look different to you, lord?”
He looked around. The room looked just as it had done before; it was a giant, empty white space. Nothing had changed at all.
Hang on. Had Elena’s bedroom always been like this? So white? So empty? He felt a thought tugging at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t quite reach it. Something had changed, but he couldn’t work out what. It was as though some strange force was reassembling his thoughts and re-shaping his reality. He looked around him, and he shrugged. “When are you going to try and get inside my mind?”
“I am already in it. Look where we are, Jack. This isn’t, my bedroom.”
Now that she said it, everything clicked into place. Elena’s room had been dark and messy. It had been full of books. This vast, empty space wasn’t her room at all. And with the realization that whatever herbs Elena had lit had warped his sense of reality, he felt a sharp pain unlike any
thing he’d ever experienced before. He clutched the sides of his head as if squeezing his skull could make the pain stop.
“Deep breaths,” said Elena. “Take your fill of them.”
The pain began to subside, but he got the sensation that it had left something behind. He felt a shadow lurking in his mind. It wasn’t moving, but standing still under the cover of darkness in his brain, as if it didn’t want him to know where it was. It was a blot on his consciousness, a looming figure that watched him.
“Think of this like combat,” said Elena.
Her voice seemed to echo in his ears, and he realized she wasn’t speaking aloud to him, but was talking directly to his mind.
“Soon, I will attack you mind. Try to anticipate my blows,” she said, “and parry them. Don’t worry about striking back yet.”