by T. A. Pratt
I stopped the motorcycle, and Squat paused beside me.
“Uh, Marla?” he said. “I’m getting a Lord of the Flies feeling here. Or maybe Children of the Corn, minus the corn.”
“Nicolette.” I reached back and tugged her drop cloth off. She didn’t need to be able to see in order to sense things, but I figured she deserved to get a look at what we were facing. “Can you tell if they’re really kids? They’re not, I don’t know – demons, or whatever, in kid form?”
“I don’t consider children human,” she said. “Not technically. But... I’m not sensing anything out of the ordinary, except for a big central focus of power in city hall. The kids are just kids. Except they look like they’re preparing to re-enact some kind of violent peasant uprising.”
“Shit. Squat, don’t hurt them. Let’s just ditch the bikes and run through the park and try to get into city hall. Deal?”
“Deal,” he said.
I reached back and unhooked Nicolette’s cage. I really wanted my saddlebags – they were full of goodies – but I could get by the with the dagger and hatchet and a few treats I’d squirreled away in my pockets. We put our kickstands down and climbed off the bikes – and the kids seemed to take that as their signal to launch. No one gave them an order. There were no lurking adults, no gym teachers blowing whistles, no guidance at all – they just surged, a wave of humanity that topped out at about four feet high, barreling off the school lawn and down the road toward us.
Squat and I made a run for it. I’m in pretty good shape, and Squat was no slouch, either. But kids... those little bastards are fast, and they hunted us like a wolf pack, splitting up to flank and encircle us. We made it about halfway across the park before they reached us. At first it was just little fingers plucking at my pant legs, or ineffectually hitting me in the shins with rulers, but there was a definite cumulative effect. And since I wasn’t willing to straight up murder a bunch of children – I was pretty sure that was contraindicated by my attempts to be a better person – there wasn’t much I could do besides shove them away. I saw Squat disappear under a wave of children. They were literally climbing him, the ones with ropes and nets trying to bind him, and I was afraid he’d freak out and snap and start tearing their arms off, but he didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t a total monster after all.
I rolled and dodged and shook and dove, trying to hold on to Nicolette and get away, but eventually one of the kids tripped me up, forcing me to take a knee, and then they were just on me, a wave of them hitting me in the back and driving me down.
Then the big kid with a rock saw his chance, and hit me on the head, and I was done.
But not dead yet. That came later. After I met the Eater.
•
I woke up in chains, which is never fun unless you’ve negotiated it with your lover first, and even then I usually prefer to be the one holding the keys instead. My shoulders were screaming from holding up my weight, and when I tried to put my feet down, I could only touch the floor with the toes of my bare feet – enough to take some of the pressure off my arms and keep me from dislocating my shoulders, but only barely. I lifted my head – which hurt like I’d just been hit with a rock, aptly enough – and took in my surroundings.
They were not very comforting.
I was strung up in a spiderweb of chains, bound at ankles and wrists, arms and legs at full extension, with a few chains looped around my waist and in an X across my chest for good measure. At least I wasn’t naked or dressed in a slave Leia outfit. I seemed to be in some sort of ballroom (or throne room), presumably in city hall – my chains were attached to stone columns, and the floor was buffed marble, and the ceilings were high and vaulted. There was nothing in front of me except an empty chair, but it was a hell of a chair: clearly handmade, of polished dark wood, and the back was made in the shape of that Y-branching symbol I’d seen on the sort-of-church roof.
People were standing around just on the edge of my peripheral vision, where I couldn’t quite see them clearly no matter how much I turned my bashed-up head. The place was silent except for the whisper of cloth as the barely-glimpsed people moved.
“Nice town you’ve got here,” I said, going for a tone of cocky confidence, and was thus disappointed when my voice emerged as a broken croak. I soldiered on, though. “Not too welcoming to outsiders, obviously, but clean streets and neat lawns count for plenty.”
Squat walked out of my peripheral vision, holding Nicolette’s cage in his hand, but her head wasn’t in it. “Marla, this place is amazing.” He spread his arms wide and spun around like a little kid twirling in a field. “My whole life I’ve been so confused, especially since the curse and everything, but even before that, really. But now, here, in the kingdom of the Eater, it’s all so clear, there’s one true path laid out before me –”
I didn’t bother arguing with him. When a friend has been mind-controlled there’s not usually a lot of point in saying, “You’ve been mind-controlled! Look deep inside yourself and see the truth!” Exceptionally strong-willed people can resist such compulsions, sometimes – but the Eater was apparently powerful enough to take over a whole town full of people, so I would imagine he could tear through most wills like tissue paper. Which made me wonder why I hadn’t been turned into a mind-slave. Probably more wonderful side effects of goddesshood. Not that having a free mind was a lot of good when my body was bound this way.
“There’s a saying,” I said, talking over Squat’s joyful babblings. “Something like: I want to talk to the organ grinder, not to the monkey. No offense, Squat. But where’s the guy holding your leash?”
“You bewilder me, Marla Mason.” An immensely tall and broad figure wearing a brown robe with a hood glided into my field of vision. Squat shut up and walked away, leaving me alone with the new guy. He looked like he should be singing the bass part in a Gregorian chants choir.
“You’re the Eater? What’s with the Friar Tuck get-up? I was expecting, I don’t know, a stained apron and a barbecue fork.”
“Some call me the Eater. I encourage that nomenclature among those who help keep me... supplied... because it makes for an intimidating persona, and inspires obedience even in those I do not take into my service. Most of my procurers think me a cannibal, but they misunderstand my nature.” He stood before me, hands tucked away in his sleeves, face in shadow. The voice sounded human, but he could have been anything under those robes – snake monster, three were-rats standing on each other’s shoulders, sentient cancer, whatever.
“Oh yeah? You’re not a cannibal because you’re not a human, is that it?”
He ignored me. “You disrupted those supply chains, you know. Killing Sarlat was rude of you. He was a very reliable business associate, despite his dramatic trappings. I would take vengeance for that alone, purely as a practical consideration – no one can slay my allies with impunity. But I have more personal reasons to want you punished. The so-called beast of Sunlight Shores was an old friend – we came to this continent together. He was foolish in those days, too hungry to exercise caution, and as a result he was imprisoned for centuries. I’d hoped it would be a learning experience for him.”
“You knew he was imprisoned in a hole and you just left him there? Wow, you’re the best friend ever.”
Still nothing. I wasn’t getting a rise out of him. But it was early yet. “You killed the ebast. That is impressive, in a way. But I am not so easily slain. My protections are vast. Understand, though, that I don’t actually want to kill you. I would rather have you serve me. And yet... you are strangely intransigent. My devotees call me the Guide, or the Way, or the Path, or the Opener. But you... you seem resistant to my guidance.”
“I’ve never been good at group activities,” I said. “I sucked at intramural soccer, too. I see you’ve recruited my buddy Squat to your team. That’s too bad. But what about Nicolette?”
“That severed head you traveled with? I have put it aside to study more closely. I have never seen death defied in precisely that
way before. It’s very curious.”
“I hope you have more fun with her than I usually do. So what’s the deal here? Psychic domination? Brain parasites? How do you do it?”
“You persist in misunderstanding my nature. I do not control these people. I simply show them their ideal path, and they choose, willingly, to follow it – having been shown truth and perfection, they can do nothing else, for perfection contains its own compulsion.” He turned and gestured toward the throne. I saw his hand for a moment, and it looked human, though the skin was unhealthy-looking, the color of dirty dishwater. “Do you see my sigil? At the top, there are many paths, all divergent, and they gradually come together, as tributaries flow to a single river, and in time they become the true path: my path. I am gifted at looking into the future, you see, Marla Mason, into seeing what might happen.... but you confound me. I begin to peer into your probabilities, and at first all is blurs and shadows, as if anything could happen, which is patently nonsense – and after a few weeks, I see nothing at all, as if you’ve vanished. I have seen this before, of course: that is the future of one who is almost certainly going to die. And yet this darkness is absolute, as if you must die, as if there are no other possibilities open to you, no matter what – I have seldom encountered such a thing in someone who is not obviously terminally ill. But that is not the strangest thing. The strangest thing is, that if I peer a bit farther – you appear again, still shrouded, but present. And then you vanish again. And appear again. I confess, I have never anything like it.”
“What the fuck do you eat?” I said, but I was half thinking out loud, because I already had a decent idea. Any decent sorcerer could see the future – hell, I could look through my wedding ring and do that. Mostly ‘the future’ just looks like a kaleidoscope in a blender, though, because the future isn’t fixed – all you can ever see are possibilities, and it takes a lot of practice or natural skill to discern the likely futures from the whole whirling mass of possibilities. Every life is full of a finite-but-vast number of possible choices, which can lead to wildly divergent worlds. This guy, apparently, could look ahead more clearly than most, and see futures out to an almost unfathomable distance... but his power didn’t work on me, because I would vanish from Earth every month and go to the underworld and cease to be human for a while, only to return later. My future was full of possibilities, too, of course, but it was rare in that it was also full of some rock-hard certainties.
“What I eat is none of your concern –”
“You eat their futures, don’t you?” I said, gazing into the darkness in his hood. I saw him flinch, slightly, but definitely. “Or, I guess, just most of their futures. You eat all their choices, subtracting all the decisions they might make, narrowing their possibilities to a single line and forcing them onto one path: where they’re devoted to you, cultists and willing slaves. You feed on all that potential energy. But there must be some victims who won’t serve you in any possible future – what do you do with those?”
“You... I am impressed.”
“I’m good at intuitive leaps,” I said, but in truth, I wasn’t sure how I’d locked onto the idea so quickly, and with such certainty. There were all sorts of things happening deep in my mind, way below the level of consciousness, and this revelation felt like a bubble rising up from those goddess-haunted depths. “Answer me. What do you do with the ones who won’t be your slaves?”
“They are not slaves, they are happy – but I may as well answer you. What harm can it do? Those who would never become my devotees, in any possible universe, I simply send back out into the world, to live the one possible life left to them in peace. I always choose to leave them a pleasant life, one without undue stress –”
“Except they aren’t really people anymore,” I said. “They’re totally deterministic automatons. They’re philosophical zombies – they look human, they act human, but there’s nothing inside them. They don’t have any choices left, they can only do... whatever it is you decided they could do.”
“They believe themselves to be perfectly real,” the Eater said. “They still think they make choices. If they don’t mind, why should you?”
“Them not minding when you steal their possibilities? That’s even more fucked up. What do you do with the energy you get? Consuming those possible futures... you’re getting into some multiverse-level shit, there, shutting down branching timelines before they’re born, harvesting all that potential energy – what do you do with it all?”
“I made this town. This society. I keep it perfectly maintained. The weather is ideal, the people are ideal, everything is ideal – it is the one perfect place in the world.”
“You’re a selfless cult leader-slash-dictator, that’s for sure. But come on. All that power? What else is it for?”
He pushed his hood back. His head looked like a rotting melon, almost entirely bald, apart from stray tufts of gray hair poking up here and there. His ears were gone entirely, his nose was like a squashed zucchini, his eyes two rat turds stuck in a wad of dough. But as I watched, he raised his hands, and his face gradually transformed. It was a bit like watching a skyscraper demolition in reverse. His skin tightened up, his eyes widened, his ears grew back, and his hair came in, thick and lustrous. Within moments, he had the sort of unremarkable face you’d never glance at twice. “I am four thousand years old,” he said. “Don’t I look good for my age?”
“I’ve seen prettier things stuck on the heel of my boot,” I said. “You have to do that level of plastic surgery every day? Every five minutes? I know it gets harder and harder to maintain your looks as you get older.” He didn’t respond. “So, you steal futures in exchange for crass immortality, great. I’ve got nothing against assholes living forever, but when you start to mess with people, that’s when I get –”
“Your friend, Squat,” the Eater said. “I took away his futures, all but one: one in which he serves me, loyally, of course. But also one in which he does something else. It is inevitable. No pleading can change it, no bribery, no sudden violence: I close my eyes, and I see the action performed, shining and golden, the one true path. It might as well have happened already.”
Hellfire. Earthquake. I tried my best, I really did, but whatever trick of the mind allowed me to bring down unearthly quantities of violence on a whim wasn’t working today.
“I look forward to seeing what mysteries lurk inside your brain,” he said.
“And I look forward to seeing your brain spattered on the –”
That’s when Squat ran at me and twisted my head literally all the way around, my neck snapping with a sound like a branch breaking under a weight of ice. Apart from a moment of blurred motion, it was instant darkness. Again.
SLABS
I woke up in the morgue, presumably at the Moros hospital, on a cold metal autopsy table. I was naked, but covered with a sheet, so that was something. My head was on straight as far as I could tell, and I felt as refreshed as if I’d just had a good night’s sleep.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Death said. “You were very nearly sleepyheadless.” He was laying on his side on the table on the other side of the room, propped up on one elbow, dressed in an immaculate suit, with a lazy smile on his face. But I wasn’t fooled. I could tell by the tap-tap-tap of his many rings against the metal surface of the table that he was anxious or annoyed about something.
I sat up, letting the sheet fall to my waist, and glanced around the room. I’ve been in a few morgues in my day, and this was definitely one of them: lots of closed white cabinets, a wall of square doors for body storage, bottles, scales, and assorted scary-looking tools. This room also featured a doctor in a lab coat slumped (but breathing) in the corner. “Why the divine intervention?” I said. My throat wasn’t even raw. “Are you going to show up every time someone kills me? Don’t you to have better things to do?”
“I was perfectly content to let your natural immortality take care of itself, darling, but this person was going to take out your br
ain, cut it up, and take a close look at the slices.” He gestured toward the doctor. “Your body is capable of growing you a new heart and liver and kidneys, all new and even better than your old ones, and I have every reason to believe you’d grow a new brain, too – but I don’t think you’d like that. A new brain wouldn’t have all the old wrinkles and folds and neural connections, so in a very real sense it wouldn’t be you, despite being made of your own genetic material. While I could have let your old brain be removed without violating the letter of our agreement, I thought allowing your mortal body to be reduced to the intellectual level of a newborn would be a violation of our bargain’s spirit. You get to be mortal for half the year, and I’m interpreting ‘you’ to mean something more than ‘someone with Marla Mason’s DNA.”’
I whistled. “I hadn’t thought about that. I took an axe to the brain, and I was okay afterward, I was still me – but that was the original organ.”
“The difference between a repair and a replacement, yes,” Death said.
“Still, you didn’t have to come yourself. Don’t we have underlings to do this sort of thing?”
“I’m plenipotentiary and omnipresent, love. You and I can be our own underlings. This form you see here before you... think of it as a finger poking through a knothole. Just a piece of me, not the thing entire.”