by C L Walker
“This is smart,” I said to nobody, and to whoever might be listening. “You don’t have all the information, though.”
My tattoos came to life all at once, every rune and sigil, every hieroglyph and ancient song note burning with the power of the god whose death blood had been used to craft them. The light was blinding, even to me, but while I squinted against the magic, the shadow creature screamed and was torn apart.
I was left in the darkness a moment later, the heat on my skin dying quickly and the grounds around me empty but for the sound of night birds fleeing to the sky.
“Your wife will be so pleased to see you when she returns,” Seng said, a sneer in his ethereal voice. “Her lover, and the destroyer of all he surveys.”
“Shut up,” I said as I continued toward the house, stepping past the crater that had born my first trial.
Seng obeyed, for the moment, leaving me to the feel of the blood-tattoos crawling on my skin. They were preparing for the next trial and signaling their excitement.
I couldn’t see what they saw, what manner of magic would be thrown at me next, but I felt the same excitement as my blood rushed through my veins.
Chapter 11
The front door – really two huge doors wide enough to fit a small car – was open as well, letting me know that he was ready for me. Or, rather, that he thought he was.
“Agmundr, the brave warrior,” Seng said as I stepped inside. His voice was formed of the creaking of the hinges on the door as I pushed it all the way open.
“No, ghost,” I replied. My eyes swept the entrance hall for danger, finding nothing but a darkened and empty room. “I am just a slave. Nothing I do here is by my design.”
“Agmundr, ever beset by delusions of his own insignificance.”
Seng was starting to grate on me. He and his kind were always most talkative when I was going into battle, especially against a foe I couldn’t predict. They sought any opportunity to unbalance me, but the most they ever achieved was to annoy me.
“Do you think you will be happy when your woman returns and devours the world? Do you think it will give you the rest you think you want?”
“Leave me alone, spirit.” I closed my eyes and allowed the blood-tattoos to show me the way. They reacted to life and emotion, to sources of danger and pleasure.
The house was empty, filled with magical traps and danger but devoid of life. The tattoos showed me where my quarry was hiding, however.
“They’re in the basement,” Seng said, interpreting the situation without the advantages I had. He had always been a smart god. “Are you ready for the coming bloodshed?”
I was always ready. Or, perhaps, resigned. This was what I was good at, the thing my life had always seemed to lead me toward. From the very beginning and despite my best efforts, violence had always seemed to be my destiny.
A memory appeared fully formed, of an age wiped from history by the whims of the elder-gods. My youth, before the tattoos and the prison, and the endless summoning.
I stood in an arena, my enemies fallen around me. The sun beat down on my shaven head, drying the blood I had marked myself with moments before.
I looked up at the king of this land and his beautiful daughter, sitting in their opulence and waiting for the outcome I had delivered.
“We have a winner,” the castrated announcer called through a horn that amplified his voice for the attendees in the stands to hear. “Agmundr has risen.”
I had fought all the others, the princes and the knights. I had bested men whose birth should have made them kings. Now, with the dust of the arena floor swirling in a surprise wind around my legs, I was on the cusp of becoming a king.
Erindis, the princess we’d all been fighting for, looked down on me from beside her father. We locked eyes and I saw for a moment the pain in her, the uncertainty at what her future would now be. I felt a moment of pity for the young girl and the life she was being forced into.
I reached for the mansion door to steady myself as I tried to focus, squeezing my eyes shut to force the intrusive memory from my mind. It tore away like a shroud ripped from a corpse, leaving me in the dark again, confused and lost.
“What was that?” I said, practically growling at the stillness now surrounding me.
“Your real weakness, Agmundr.” Seng’s voice seemed to have more power, more permanence, as though it no longer needed the random background sounds of the world to exist. It felt like it was actually the dead god’s voice, rather than what he could cobble together to interact with me.
“I…what was that?”
“Your endless store of memories.” Seng was beside me, whatever form he held lost in the shadows. “Your conquests and defeats. Your mind. The one thing without the protection of the blood of your wife.”
That was Fletcher’s plan, then. He knew enough about me to realize that no matter what he threw at me I would prevail, that the blood-tattoos on my skin were etched in the blood of an elder-god and couldn’t be beaten by earthly magic. He knew that he had to go for the one place I had no defense.
My mind was my own, untouched by the binding that entrapped me in my endless servitude. It was the one thing that couldn’t be controlled by the masters who summoned me, and so it was the one thing that stood without protection.
“You are a smart man, Fletcher,” I called into the stillness of the building. “But it won’t stop me.”
I took another step forward and braced for the memory.
Our wedding night. The room was built for ceremony and not comfort, high atop a pyramid with views out over the jungle. A stone table awaited us, less a bed and more a sacrificial alter. A hot wind blew through the space and made me uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as my bride.
Erindis was young, barely a woman, and she looked up at me with fear in her eyes. She’d no doubt been told what to expect on her wedding night but words meant nothing when the moment finally arrived, I knew. I was twice her size and more, and I could understand why she looked so pale as she forced herself to meet my gaze.
I shook the memory away and took another step before I had time to think about what I’d been shown. A new memory appeared, swallowing the real world in an instant.
The old king was dying and his enemies surrounded the capital. He had thought to use me to scare them away, thought that by showing them the berserker he’d handed the reins to they would be too frightened to raise their armies and try to take command.
He’d been wrong, and in the last moments of his life he was allowed to realize it. As his priests and witches went about his final orders he looked on me with naked hatred as potent as that of the daughter he’d given me as a prize.
I took another step and broke the memory, then took another before a new pain could surface and take my mind on a journey. Each advance rocked my consciousness with fresh insults and agonies I’d long locked away. I pushed through them all until I stood at the top of the stairs leading to my master’s enemy. The mansion and the rest of the real world were lost to me, as was the singular focus I needed to continue.
The elder-god Ohm, taking my bride from me and giving her the powers of an elder-god. The reborn Erindis smiting her father’s enemies and restoring her kingdom. The long months spent wooing her again, now that I couldn’t easily own her anymore. The night her siblings came to destroy her for taking a human form and a human husband.
I took the first step down to the basement as the memories moved on to things that didn’t pain me as much, recollections that had little power over me because they were parts of other men’s stories. The destruction of a citadel for the cleric who tricked me and bound me to my new life. The cleric’s death at my hand and the first age spent in the locket that had once rested around Erindis’s neck, now my prison.
Another step, and another, as the memories grew ever easier to ignore and my prey grew ever closer.
The deaths of hundreds, thousands, and my growing apathy to their mayfly concerns. Civilizations fille
d with wonder and beauty, crumbling to dust between beats of my heart.
I stood at the base of the stairs and felt the end of Fletcher’s defenses before me. The blood-tattoos, burned into my skin with the blood of my beloved as she lay dying, somehow showed me that I was almost through the last of the power he had arrayed to defeat me.
One more step and another memory eclipsed the world: gods dying by the thousands, the entire divine order of the old world crushed beneath my boots, lost to the world because a careless man couldn’t understand what he’d asked of me.
Seng stepping between my blade and his wife. Seng falling at my feet, his dying eyes searching for the being he loved above all else, and watching her die as easily as he had.
I was free. My mind was my own. There was nothing but a deep sadness left to stop me, and I had battled far more powerful forces than that to carry out my orders.
In the flickering light of the large basement I found my target cowering with his family, a wife and a grown son. I closed my eyes, squeezed them shut to try and force the last of the old memories back into hiding.
“I’m sorry,” Fletcher said.
“I don’t care,” I replied.
Chapter 12
“It was a good plan,” I said as I moved more into the room. I checked the corners, searching the shadows around the wine racks and old crates for anything else to challenge me. There was nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, uselessly. He was done and he knew it.
“Why are they here?” I asked, nodded toward him and the family hiding behind him.
“I didn’t have time…”
He’d rushed home and to set up his defenses, choosing to fight over sending his loved ones away. It was foolish, but I understood.
“Drop the defenses on the house and they can leave.”
“How will you signal Phil?” Fletcher asked.
“You will call him on your mobile telephone.”
His eyes didn’t leave me as he reached down and smudged a rune etched in the dust at his feet. I felt the power drain from the house as he straightened, like a pool of water escaping a barrel. A tension that had hung in the air since my arrival went with it.
“Call him,” I said. I took up a position between them and the steps leading up to freedom and waited while he fished the contraption from an inner pocket of his suit, his hands shaking almost too hard to press the tiny buttons.
“He says you can come in,” Fletcher said through clenched teeth. He pressed the button to end the call before giving Phil a chance to gloat.
“They should leave now, before he gets here.” I wasn’t sure, but it was possible Phil might ask me to do things to Fletcher’s family. It depended on how drunk with my power he became upon seeing his enemy brought low.
He whispered to them quickly, trying to convince them to leave his side. They didn’t want to, either through fear of the unknown waiting for them upstairs or, perhaps, through a desire to stand with him in the face of his fate. I wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter.
His woman eventually made a move, grabbing the son by the arm and pulling him around the room, and me. I kept my eyes on my target, both to give the others a feeling of safety and because I knew Fletcher was the most dangerous of them.
The son waited until he was at the base of the stairs before making his move. A bullet slammed into my back, perfectly aimed between my shoulder blades. It shattered my spine and kept going, tearing through flesh before stopping in my breastbone. I could feel it spinning there for a moment, as though trying to bore its way out.
My strength evaporated and my knees buckled. I’d felt pain far worse in my long history, but it was sudden and surprising, and I didn’t have time to try and counter it with orders to the blood-tattoos.
They reacted faster than me, solidifying and keeping me upright, spinning me around and sending me toward the source of the attack. I realized that I could no longer feel anything below my heart, but I still had control of my arms and my fists.
I slapped the large revolver from the younger Fletcher’s hand and heard the bones break. He yelped in pain as his mother shrieked in fear. The tattoos fed on the drama and forced me to advance as they began to knit together my flesh and repair my spine.
“Now you must die as well,” I said, lost to the rage that ruled so much of my long life. “Stupid child.”
I reached for him, too slow to actually catch him, preoccupied with the feel of my wound healing, like a million ants crawling through the tunnel blasted in my chest. He stepped away, pushing his mother behind him and toward the stairs. He looked nothing like her, I noticed; she was tall, attractive, with long blonde hair hastily tied up. He looked like his father, shorter, with dark hair already going gray.
I grabbed a handful of his shirt and dragged him closer, moments away from breaking his neck and ending his rebellion. And then Fletcher was between us, his hands on my chest in a futile attempt to push me back, to protect his son and keep me from taking revenge.
I tried to push him away, placing the flat of my hand against his face and pushing until he fell aside, but he was back a moment later. His son looked up at me, defiant in his final moments even as his father desperately scrambled to try and save him.
“Not him,” Fletcher said, practically screeching at me. “Not them. Let them go, please.”
I should have killed the younger man, and probably the woman as well. It was what I’d done before and what I had every right to do, given what had happened. But I didn’t.
I released the son and took a step back. Fletcher remained between me and his child, as though his pitiful strength could hold me at bay. The woman grabbed her son again and tried to drag him up the stairs as the son’s glare bore into me.
I didn’t know why I did it; perhaps the memories were affecting me more than I thought, or perhaps I was getting old. Perhaps my hatred of Phil had given me the strength to fight my own impulses, if only because I thought he might enjoy what I’d planned to do.
“Go,” I said. “Quickly.”
“Thank you,” Fletcher said, his hands still on my chest. “Thank you.”
It didn’t matter, of course. Before his wife could pull the son to safety Phil appeared at the top of the steps, clapping in pleasure at the tableau waiting for him.
“Oh, this is going to be fun,” he said.
Chapter 13
I was already healed, the bullet absorbed by the power of a dead god traced on my skin. I could act under my own power again, and I couldn’t think of what to do.
Phil took the stairs slowly, savoring his victory as he cut off the only escape route.
“You’ve been very bad, Fletcher,” Phil said. The smile on his face was that of a torturer, or a conqueror surveying his new subjects. I’d seen that look on a hundred men’s faces and hated it every time.
“Let them go,” Fletcher said. He finally moved away from me to take his family in his arms, as though he had any way of protecting them from what was coming.
“They are innocent,” I said before Phil could speak. It didn’t matter.
“No, I don’t think so.” Phil came down the steps quickly now, chuckling when he saw the way Fletcher and his family scurried away from him.
“This is unnecessary,” I tried again. I knew it was pointless, that I might actually be spurring him to greater violence by trying to talk him out of it, but I couldn’t think of anything else to try.
“He tried to kill me,” Phil yelled suddenly, his expression changing in an instant to one I knew had been on my own face moments before: blind rage. “He has to pay.”
“He will. I will kill him slowly, for you. I will make his pain seem to last an eternity, if you wish. I will take him to the thousand hells and leave him there to suffer among the insane dead. But his people did nothing to you.”
Phil cocked his head, appraising me once again as something he owned. His smile was back but I could see the anger beneath his façade, and the bloodlust.
“I’m going to get such good use out of you,” he said at last, before turning his eyes to the trio of helpless people awaiting his judgment. “I’m going to make you watch as he tears them apart.”
“Why?” Fletcher said. He pulled away from the others and took up a position between the stairs and those dearest to him. “Why do you hate me? How? Enough to send a hit squad after me. To kill my…” He broke down for a moment, a sob the only sound he could muster, “…my family.”
Phil’s laugh was the bark of a crazed dog. “I don’t hate you, old man. Not at all.”
He stood at the base of the stairs and rubbed his hands together, eager to get started.
“Then why?”
I answered for my master, because I knew exactly who he was. “He’s a sadistic imbecile. Too wrapped up in his delusions of grandeur to realize that he is broken, and the world would be better off without him.”
“You, shut up”, Phil snapped, raising a single finger as though shushing a child. “Take him and throw him to the other side of the room.”
I couldn’t disobey. I had a hand wrapped around Fletcher’s throat before he knew what was happening, and a moment later he was a crumpled heap on the cold stone floor.
“Bring me his pretty wife.” Phil licked his lips and I could see what he was thinking, the dark ideas he was giving in to.
I obeyed, snatching her away from her son, pushing him to the ground so I could drag her, kicking and crying, to the feet of my master.
“Keep the other two back while I’m busy,” he said. He took her slim wrist in his grip, holding her tight enough to grind her bones together.
“Don’t do this,” Fletcher said, but Phil wasn’t interested in listening to him.
The son ran at us and I grabbed his shirt again, lifting him from the ground and throwing him onto his father. For a moment I hoped I’d knocked him unconscious so he wouldn’t have to watch what was happening, but he looked up at me and began disentangling himself from his father immediately.