by T. A. Pratt
“There is that. It’s given me hope, actually.”
“Any idea how Sarlat might be paying the Eater for all this good advice?”
Orias shrugged. “He never mentioned the details of their arrangement. But Sarlat excels at smuggling, human and otherwise. Perhaps he’s helping the Eater transport something? Or perhaps the Eater’s name is literal – maybe Sarlat supplied him with whatever, or whomever, it is he likes to eat.”
“Anthropophagous take-out? That’s a lovely thought.” I’d hoped for more useful intel, but that was okay. If things worked out the way I planned, Sarlat would be eager to answer any questions I asked him, pretty soon.
When the circle was done, and the room thrummed with the dark power of compulsion, I said – truthfully – that I would use the blood and hair of Orias only to create an illusion, not to harm her, on pain of painful death.
With that pledge made, the magic fled, and I was free to lie my ass off again. “After I give Sarlat your head – or the head he thinks is yours – I’m going to lead his people against your camp. If you’ll allow me to make a few suggestions about the most effective way to set up an ambush, you should be able to kill his goon squad with grace and efficiency...”
GETTING AHEAD
So after I killed them all, I got on my motorcycle and roared toward Texas singing “Another Traveling Song” by Bright Eyes, just loud enough to annoy Nicolette –
All right, I won’t do that to you. For one thing, I know you like the bloody stuff. For another, it’s not accurate to say I killed them all. Besides, the way I worked it out was pretty sweet, and I want you to admire me, Future Me.
My undisclosed location was several hundred yards down a sharply-sloped shaft in some old copper mine not far from what remained of Tolerance. (I don’t actually know if it was a copper mine, but it was some kind of mine, and copper sounds plausible, right?) Somehow I’m more and more comfortable in caverns and dark places lately – imagine that. I was down there in the deep black, so dark even my night-eyes weren’t any help, because that’s a spell that sucks up every stray photon of light and puts it to use, only there was no light in the mine in the dark. I conjured a little red flower of light and stuck it on top of Nicolette’s birdcage so I wouldn’t go totally crazy and lose track of where I ended and the darkness began. Mostly I was in a trance, looking through the photographs I’d scattered around town, seeing a couple dozen viewpoints at once, so when I pulled all the way back into my own head, the darkness was kind of a shock all over again.
Nicolette was sticking out her tongue at me and generally making hideous faces, but I just smiled at her. “You’re going to hate this next part,” I said.
I could’ve used a minion just then – it made me wish I’d had Pelly send a couple of death cultists out to meet me. Not that putting their lives in danger in the course of running my errands was really fair, but wouldn’t dying in the service of their goddess give them a thrill?
I am so not cut out for the responsibilities of divinity.
With a bit more time, I could have banged together a remote-controlled rock golem or maybe even summoned up a temporary tulpa, but this plan required some pretty close timing, so I took up arms myself and told Nicolette, “I’m going out for a few minutes. I’ll be back, and then, guess what? You’re getting a makeover! It’ll be just like a slumber party.” I walked out of the shaft, axe in one hand and dagger in the other, so I didn’t quite hear Nicolette’s no-doubt-witty rejoinder, apart from something about killing me in my sleep.
I crept out into the darkness, shrouded in spells of bent light and misdirected vision, pausing occasionally to look through the eyes of my scattered photographs for signs of ambush. In twenty minutes I traveled a slow half-mile until I reached a heap of rocks overlooking the drop site.
Orias didn’t come to me herself, of course. She sent one of her minions, a petite woman with a squirming fringe of jellyfish tentacles where her mouth should have been. She set down a metal thermos on top of the broken horse trough I’d designated as the drop. She paused, so I shouted, “Get lost!” and she scurried away into the night. After waiting a suitable interval, I slid down the slope, snatched up the canister, and headed back to my undisclosed location, using a roundabout route to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I didn’t think Orias would double-cross me, since there was no upside in it for her at this point – if I succeeded in killing Sarlat for her, she might turn on me, of course, but she wouldn’t try to kill me when there was a chance I might get rid of her worst enemy.
Once I was back inside the mine shaft, I opened the canister and examined the contents. A few strands of hair, complete with skin tags torn from her scalp, and even a drop of blood wetting a tissue. Good enough.
“What are you doing?” Nicolette demanded as I set up a mortar and pestle on a flat rock and started grinding together a few ingredients – butterfly wings, snake scales, the limbs of stick insects, all pretty standard components in illusory spells, part of my basic enchanting kit – along with the bits of Orias’s body I’d acquired.
I lifted the cage off Nicolette’s head and held the mortar up to her mouth. “Here, spit in this.”
Nicolette tried to spit on my hand instead, but I was ready for that, so I got a little of her saliva in the mixture, as needed. A little water from my canteen sufficed to make the mess into a mushy paste, and I said the right words (which, really, could have been any words, as long as they acted to focus my will), then dabbed the mixture onto Nicolette’s forehead, cheeks, chin, and the tip of her nose.
“I hope whoever you’re trying to make me look like doesn’t have a body, or this isn’t going to be too convincing.”
“It’s okay. All you have to do is play dead. I promised Sarlat I’d bring him the head of his enemy. That’s going to be you.”
“Play dead?” Nicolette crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue.
“Maybe a little more subtle than that. Not that I’m entirely counting on your acting skills.” I watched as the illusion shimmered into place – at first it was like looking at Nicolette through a sheen of greasy water, but after a few moments the structure of her face changed, and the severed head of Orias was looking at me – high cheekbones, pouty lips, dark eyes rendered glazed and staring, hair a little less stylish than before.
I nodded. “Looks good. You can blink if you want, and even lick your lips or wiggle your nose or waggle your eyebrows – the illusion is tailored to look all dead and staring-eyed and slack-jawed, but he’ll hear you if you talk, so keep your swear-hole shut, all right?”
The face was blank and expressionless, of course, but there was plenty of scorn in her voice. “You bitch. I can’t believe you’re delivering me into the hands of the enemy. Bad enough I have to be your bloodhound – now I have to be some asshole’s trophy?”
“Please. I’ll be risking my life, committing mayhem and treachery, and all you have to do is sit on a shelf and listen to Sarlat rant about how he’s vanquished you at last. Worst case, he’ll use you to reenact that scene with the skull from Hamlet. Keep your ears open, though, especially if he says anything about someone or something called the Eater. I think there might be a bigger monster for us to hunt once this is all done.”
“I am your obedient servant,” Nicolette said.
“Good. Hold tight for a minute.” I went back to the comfiest spot in the mine to sit down – hardly any rocks digging into my ass at all – and dropped into a trance of telepresence. I shimmered into Sarlat’s jail cell office.
“You ready yet?” I looked around at the candles and chalked lines and the circle of salt. This set-up was a bit more involved than the binding circle I’d used with Orias, because that had been a simple “I promise” situation. This was a complex bargain with conditions that needed to be binding on both sides, so the magic was more complex.
“Just step into the circle there.” Sarlat flapped a hand toward the east end of the cell without looking up from the rune he was drawing
on the wall. I was a bit surprised to see him doing his own paperwork, as it were, but his work looked deft and accurate enough. I didn’t see any traps or tricks in the set-up, not that he could do much to me through my illusory body anyway. He could theoretically try and trace the illusion back to my actual location, but the general magical haze over Tolerance and the dozens of charmed photographs I’d scattered through town would make it practically impossible.
This binding circle was actually shaped more like an infinity symbol, two ovals that joined in the twisted middle. I stepped into my circle and felt/heard the hum of binding start up, but at a low idle. “You’ve got pretty good penmanship for a ravenous beast,” I said.
“I am a monster of many talents.” He dropped the chalk and stepped into his oval, and the compulsion took hold more firmly. “Now we make promises to one another.”
“Okay. I swear to do everything in my power to kill Orias.” Lying wasn’t allowed in that circle, but that was okay: I wasn’t lying. There was the click of something locking into place, so loud it almost made me flinch, though the sound was only in my head.
Sarlat nodded. “After you kill Orias, I swear I will not harm you, or cause you to be harmed. I will, further, offer you three favors, if I can fulfill them without harm to myself.”
“So our bargain is made,” I said, “on pain of painful death.”
He repeated the words, and then scuffed out the circle of salt, and the low buzz of binding magic vanished.
I got the murder-itch immediately. There are a couple of different kinds of binding circles: restrictive ones, and prescriptive ones. With Orias, we’d used a restrictive circle, which meant there would be consequences only if I performed a certain act – namely, if I tried to use the witch’s blood and hair for anything but the promised illusion, I would be subjected to untold torments. That was a magic that limited my behavior.
The deal I’d just made with Sarlat was prescriptive, though: it was a promise to perform a certain act, namely, doing my best to murder Orias. Until I did that, I would feel goaded – there would be a pressure in my head, a tingle in my bones, a need somewhere between a starving man’s hunger and a junkie’s urge to fix: the murder-itch. Prescriptive bindings are nasty. The pressure builds and builds the longer you go without fulfilling the requirements, and if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do in relatively short order, madness is inevitable. (Well, in most cases. I’d once wriggled out of a prescriptive binding, namely a promise to bloodily avenge the death of an old friend, but getting out of it had required the intervention of godlike entities to cancel the compulsion, which had mostly taken the form of my dead friend’s voice screaming at me in my mind.) I’d left myself a little wriggle room by promising only to do my best to kill Orias, allowing for honorable failure – but the binding was rooted partly in my perceptions, so I couldn’t fool the magic. If I didn’t think I was doing my best to kill her, the binding would know I was cheating, and I’d suffer.
Which meant it was time to get the whole bloody climax thing started. “I’ll be back with Orias’s head shortly. I’ll try to be subtle so I don’t stir up her camp or put her people on guard, but no promises. Either way, once she’s dead, you should be able to launch a full assault against her. You’re willing to give me a strike force to take out her more dangerous lieutenants, the spore-lord and so on?”
“Some of my best and darkest will be at your disposal. Assuming you make it back with her head in your hands.” He shook his head. “Orias isn’t as tough as I am, but I’m not convinced you’re as tough as her.”
“I did kill Elsie Jarrow.”
He sat on a stool and took a long sip of water, then shrugged. “Maybe you did. I didn’t have time to confirm that story. But Jarrow was crazy, by all accounts, and not too concerned about self-preservation. Orias only cares about Orias.” There was a doleful tone to that last line that hinted at a deep history between them, and I was briefly interested, but I had things to do, so I just winked out of sight.
•
I strolled in from the outskirts of town, and Sarlat’s baddies murmured as they looked at the dusty old sack swinging in my hand. “Move aside,” I said, and the hairy, scaled, chitinous, over-muscled men and beasts and man-beasts shuffled out of the way, making a path to the collapsing remnants of the jail. I had dagger and axe both in my coat, and I was ready to drop the sack and fight if it seemed prudent, but Sarlat’s boys – they were nearly all boys – stayed in line.
This was a delicate point. I had to make it look like I’d fulfilled our agreement, but it was tricky, because Sarlat hadn’t actually been bound against harming me yet, since Orias was actually still alive. His binding was purely restrictive – after I killed Orias, he couldn’t harm me, or deny me three reasonable favors, without suffering a painful death – so there would be no buzz of compulsion to tell him whether or not I’d held up my end of the bargain – only consequences if he tried to break the deal. In theory, Sarlat could test whether or not the head really belonged to Orias just by just trying to kill me: if the binding let him murder me, that meant the head was a fake. I didn’t expect him to do something that clever, but it was a worry.
I shouldn’t have worried. Sarlat was obviously used to getting his way, and to people doing his bidding. Shit like that can make you complacent. (Believe me, I know.) I stepped into the remains of the jail, and Sarlat rose from his stool with a grunt. “You’re dustier in person.” He nodded toward the sack. “Is that for me?”
I tossed the bag toward him, and he caught it deftly. He peered inside, chuckled, and lifted out Nicolette’s head – which looked like the freshly-severed head of Orias, complete with dripping blood. Blood that would match Orias if he did a DNA test or magical divination. That was the advantage of getting her genetic material for the spell; a really convincing illusion.
Sarlat held the head before him, palms pressed against her cheeks, gazing into the apparently lifeless eyes. The illusory blood dripped from the stump and spattered on the floor and his boots. “Oh, you beautiful bitch,” he said. “I put you on a pedestal, you said? Now I’ll put you on my mantelpiece.”
Mr. Loup-garou didn’t do any kind of magic to test the head’s identity, as far as I could tell. Oh well. I was still glad I’d taken the necessary steps to create a nearly impenetrable illusion. Just because your adversary is an idiot is no reason to be sloppy.
“So we’re good?” I said. “Ready to move against Orias’s camp?”
“They don’t suspect anything?” Sarlat said. “You got in and out undetected?”
“I’m basically a ghost, Sarlat. If ghosts had big knives. No one noticed me, but they’ll notice their boss’s headless corpse stuffed in a hole in the ground sooner or later, so we should move now, before they go on alert.”
He made a “shoo-shoo-go-away” motion. “Fine. Your squad is waiting for you outside. Tell them you’re ready, and the general assault will launch. Go, kill her whole camp, I don’t care. I’ve got the only one that really matters here.” Sarlat never once stopped staring into the head’s eyes. I wondered what kind of faces Nicolette was secretly making at him.
“Off to war, then,” I said, and it was true, though the only side I was fighting for was my own.
KNOWING SQUAT
I looked for the biggest swaggering asshole in the general area and walked up to him. He stood about eight feet tall and had a sixteen-point antlered helmet and a necklace of animal fangs and baby teeth. “Hey,” I said. “I’m suppose to lead a team in this attack.”
“Then you should be talking to me,” said a voice at my elbow. “I’m Squat.”
I looked down into the froglike face of a non-human – I’d never seen anything like him before, but the world is full of mysteries. “You certainly are,” I said. Squat had skin the color of rotten crabapples and the bumpy texture of a diseased tongue, and his overall shape was that of a brachydactylic thumb standing four feet high, the whole wrapped in white bandages seeping with flui
ds in surprising and unexpected colors. “You’re the big bad killing machine I’m leading into battle?”
“More of a small bad killing machine,” Squat said, and gave me what I assumed was a smile, though the mouth was on sideways and instead of teeth there were rows of tiny wriggling pseudopods in there, tipped by oozing bulbs. He had arms like a stevedore, or more like if there was a superhero called Captain Stevedore, with biceps on his biceps. He saw me noticing and flexed. “I can lift a Humvee over my head, and every morning my shit is full of the bones of my enemies.”
“That’s the greatest OK Cupid profile I’ve ever read,” I said. “You’re hired. Where’s the rest of the team?”
I was introduced to antler guy, and some kind of potion-addled man-beast who reeked of earthy musk and had boar tusks, and a roughly humanoid creature made of globular, tar-like shadow, and a demon wearing the body of a mountain lion grotesquely altered into a bipedal form, with spines pushing up through the pelt. “Okay,” I said. “You look like a pretty formidable lot. We’re going to circle around back and penetrate the enemy’s defenses, the same way I crept in when I took out Orias. Only this time, we’re going to blitz her lieutenants. Got it?”
For a motley bunch of malcontents addicted to alien drugs, they were fairly well-organized when it came to mayhem, and they fell in behind me as I slipped off into the desert brush. Squat walked alongside me, his short, bandy legs keeping pace remarkably well.
“I don’t know what the fuck most of those guys are,” I whispered to him, “but I especially don’t know what the fuck you are.”
“You mean my species?”
“If that’s not too personal a question, yeah.”
“Cursed human,” Squat said. “I wasn’t always this ugly. I used to be just ordinary ugly. But I got cursed to become repulsive to anyone who cared about me. At first it was just my skin color changing, and the bumps, which was enough to pretty much knock me out of willing human company. But I fell in with a different crowd, one with greater... tolerances... for physical variation, so the curse made me even uglier, to repulse the new friends and lovers I made. Sometimes it’s pretty specific – my last girlfriend was a sort of swamp-monster, and this fucked-up sideways mouth and the venomous cilia are physical attributes shared by some ancestral prehistoric cryptozoological predator of her people. She could put up with a lot, but not with fucking someone who looked like the thing that ate her brother-father. And the effects of the curse are cumulative, so the ugly just piles up.” He sighed.