by kubasik
Eyes a mix of fear and the resilience of mountains. Something had snapped inside him.
The strange strength of children, underestimated by sentimental adults, had been tapped.
The alarm sounded. He flailed to stay afloat, but did not sink. In one hand, the dagger, stained with green globules.
The long neck of the creature extended from the water, its massive, wide, obscenely impossible mouth peeled back in a parody of a scream. No sound emerged. It just could not close its mouth. It turned. I had no idea how it saw; eyes could not fit anywhere with the mouth taking up so much room. It moved toward the boy.
The torch struck the water, hissed. Steam rose, lit by the last flare of the torch's light.
Darkness, a mother's suffocating embrace, returned.
The threat of annihilation, the fear of it, rocked me. In me woke the passion of conflict.
Was not life a series of jabs and feints? Were we not only alive in struggle? A punch. A stab. Perhaps the rough tumble of sex. If I had found any purpose in living, it was this: Draw blood.
I clamped down on the pain, swam toward the thing, its presence marked by the shout of the boy. "Let me go! Let me go !" The waters ahead slapped and rippled from the struggle of the boy and the creature. It didn't seem to be hurting him, only carrying the lad off toward the bank where the hunters waited. As I approached I heard the sticky penetration of the boy's dagger into the thing's flesh. Again and again he raised it, plunged, and withdrew. He exhaled heavily with each blow. The creature grunted, a high pitched sigh of pain in time with the boy's exhalations, but it seemed to sustain itself against the damage.
My hand touched the thing, caught it on the back. It started, turned awkwardly in the water. The boy shouted in surprise. I realized that the creature had the boy in its mouth.
Cradled him. The creature kicked at me with its hind legs as it tried to keep moving for the bank. "Give me the dagger," I demanded, but the boy did not respond. I reached up with my left arm, the good one; found his face by accident, gripped it tight in my fingers.
I'm sure he thought I was about to crush his cheeks. "Give it now!"
His hand fell down toward me, a soft blur of sound in the darkness. I let go of his face, ran my hand down his arm, found the dagger. "Let go." He did. I flung my right arm, useless and pained, over the creature's back, desperate for a grip of some sort. My shoulder felt as if it might crack, my arm falling off, drifting down to the river's bottom. I managed, despite numbness, to grab the thing’s fur with my fingers. The grip tentative, but good enough for the moment. Like most of my life.
A fierce thrust with the dagger into the thing's belly, a jagged turn, a raking back and forth. The creature cried out. The boy splashed into the water. Shouts from the bank. A new wetness, a different texture from the water, thicker, poured out from the wound, drifted over my skin. The mouth came for me. I drove the dagger up, my arm erect. The mouth engulfed my arm, teeth boring into my flesh. A wave of blackness through my eyes. I pushed the agony away, twisted the dagger, cutting into the roof of the mouth, the tongue. The thing opened its mouth and screamed. I splashed into the water.
Without pause I swam back to it. Droplets of its strange blood rained down on me. A void, the mouth, rushed at me. I rolled in the water. and the mouth splashed up a wave.
Pulling my arm up, I cut blindly for the neck. I found it, flung my right arm over the neck, pulled myself closer. I sawed at the neck with the blade. The neck, the body, splashed. I clung desperately, dragging the edge of the blade deeper and deeper into the thing's neck. It thrashed in the river; a terrible racket of cries and churning water. Then suddenly, with an almost suspicious abruptness, it went limp. Water flowed over it, soothing, as it sank. I held on even stabbed it a few more times, certain it had somehow conceived a trick for me. Some of them thought like name givers. The one in my head when I was a boy certainly did. The thing I rested on, semi-submerged, had behaved like a well trained animal. But it could be more. One, I knew, could never be too careful.
Enemies on all sides. The Universe had created a playpen of despair. All we had to do was let down our guard for a moment to be rendered crippled—physically, emotionally—
once more.
But the Horror sank. Still. Quite dead. I floated away, oddly afraid that being near it would somehow suck me down to the bottom of the river. A perverse magic.
The torches of the hunters still followed, but were now forty to fifty feet upriver. With the creature dead, we would be able to move silently. I floated, the river carrying me, doing all the work. "Boy?" A shivered reply. "Yes?" Something clicked in me now. The danger past, I could feel my natural tendencies returning. I had saved him. He might be of value.
There might be money in it after all. "Stay calm. Here, come here." He drifted toward me, his small arms extended. I caught one of them, gently. Pulled him close. "We'll be all right now. We'll be all right. We just need to get to the other side. Here. See. Here we are."
I encouraged him to be quiet as we caught some roots that trailed into the water and then made our way up the bank. He obliged. In fact, he became peculiarly quiet. A fear stirred in me: Had the creature done something to him? Entered his thoughts? Turned him mute?
"Speak to me," I whispered.
"What?"
"Never mind."
Behind us the hunters had entered the river, swimming carefully, like strange fish with luminous organs, their torches, protruding from their flesh. They had lost sight of us, however, and our silence held. They did not know if we were nearby or already further downstream. We made our way into the jungle, me doubled over with pain, the boy shivering, the night engulfing us.
6
We doubled back to my house. Mordom and the others obviously did not know I lived nearby, and would probably think we had continued downstream. A person seldom looks for something right in front of him. The mind thinks that if something is not handy, it is well hidden, though this is not always the case. My home would serve us well for food and shelter until I found the means of gaining money from his presence.
I fixed him up. Rice and vegetables. Several blankets. A fire.
For myself, I sought a healing potion or two. I ran up and down the stairs, wandering the labyrinthine arrangement of rooms that was my home, tossing back the lids of trunks and yanking open the doors of cabinets gone stuck with years of disuse. I sorted through crystal pendants, magical daggers, silks with patterns of trees that rustled in the wind when moved. I found vials of clear blue glass, stoppered flasks carved from ivory, and tins sealed with layers of wax. I had to pause and consider each one, re-weaving, in my mind, the narrative of how I had come to possess the item. Only then could I remember exactly what the fluid in each container actually did. Even then I could not be certain.
I see them now, these glittering goods, as organs, like stomachs or lungs, found lying about the world. I'd picked them up, thinking that they could do me some good. A spare stomach. A spare lung. Who couldn't use an extra organ when the world constantly chipped away at one's flesh? Anything to stay alive despite all the troubles. Once they were mine, I tried to stuff them into myself, make them part of me. Lonely? Uncertain?
But think! I have a surplus of goods resting inside me. How many lungs? How many hearts? Too many. I'm the envy of any other person. Who wouldn't be jealous of what I've got? I'm really quite fine.
But despite the surfeit of artificial body parts, I never really felt any better. They never fit very well, these baubles. I'd think I was finished each time, and then realize I still felt empty. Time for another intestine. More hearts. Out for more and more And more. The accumulation kept me busy, and at least numbed me to the stirring of disquiet in my soul.
But never was I done. I see now that the fake bits of life cost me too much blood as I shoved them through my flesh and cut myself open again and again.
One after another, holding them up to the light, all beautiful, feeling for a tremor the excitement that had be
en mine when I first possessed the thing, and then wondering where that feeling had gone.
I tracked blood everywhere around the house, and each time I passed the boy he seemed drowsier and drowsier. Firelight lapped gently at his round cheeks. His flesh, seamless.
Finally I found two vials of the healing potion, one taken from an abandoned kaer, the other from a trade caravan I'd helped raid just a few months earlier. They made me dizzy, and I sat down opposite the boy, letting the fire reheat my flesh. Soon I was asleep.
I woke, the night still as a corpse. Coals, red, blinking to shades of black, still burned in the hearth. Without stirring a muscle, I stared at the boy. Very peaceful, he. By dwarf years, not yet an adolescent. Not much older than you and Torran when I'd seen you last.
He rolled over, sighed, his breathing relaxed. Innocent. I want you to know, I felt no desire to hurt him. The same way I felt no desire to hurt either of you. But sometimes it seems that we must hurt people.
Enough equivocating. I'll come to it all soon enough.
I remained awake. Wound and tight like an archer's string. Though my wounds had already become soft and pink, Mordom's return from the dead had called up too many memories for me to feel healthy. Through the final hours before dawn I imagined my life.
The narrative felt terse. My memories came colorless, which, in fact, is how I often perceived the world. A lack of vibrancy. Only in shadows did I truly feel alive.
Haphazard pinpricks of pink cast themselves against the walls as the morning sunlight cut in low through the jungle, and passed through my windows. The boy stirred. Rolled over.
Opened his eyes. Stretched. Realized his surroundings were unfamiliar, panicked, sat up, looked around, stared at me in fear.
"Good morning."
He held his breath, then breathed quickly. "Where am I?"
"My home. Do you remember last night?"
He looked away. Bit his lower lip. A thoughtful boy. He reminded me of someone, but I could not place it. Meeting my gaze, he said, "Yes. You saved me."
I bowed slightly, spread my hands apart. In such circumstances, always appear humble.
This compels the person from whom you want something to make up for your humility with a bigger reward.
He smiled. "Who are you?"
"My name is J'role ..."
Immediately his face betrayed terror.
"Not," I said with a laugh and an overdone wave of my hand, "the infamous clown who mutilates children. An awkward situation, for my name is my name. But more people know of the character from that rhyme than know of me.”
The boy swallowed. Relaxed. "I don't think he really exists, anyway."
"You're a bright lad. Most children can't distinguish stories from life."
"My father taught me you have to know the difference. Both are valuable, he says, but for different purposes. For different reasons."
"What's your name?"
"Neden. Son of Varulus."
The world tilted me backward in time. I closed my eyes. Gripped the arms of my chair. I looked at him once more. "Neden. Son of Varulus. Your father is King Varulus the Third? King of Throal?"
He smiled. Leaned toward me. Pride radiated from him like sunlight. "Yes."
"Your father is King of Throal?"
"Do you know him?"
"We met many, many years ago."
"It's said that my father gave the order to hunt down that clown."
"Is it?"
"I don't believe he did, though."
"You never asked?"
"No." He looked down.
"Why not?"
"I don't think I want to know."
"If he says yes, the clown exists," I said, finishing his thought for him.
"He's probably dead by now."
I thought of Mordom. Of myself. "Probably. Most monsters die eventually."
"He wasn't a monster. The clown. He was a bad man."
"Really?" Revealing nothing, I felt a giddiness course through me. I imagined myself the villain of a turgid melodrama as I let the little tyke tell me about me, my infamous deeds.
I could move up closer, feign interest, interest, interest, then pull out the blade, fulfilling the rhyme's prophesy. No desire within moved me forward. Yet suddenly the idea was born in my head for the first time. What if I attempted to fill the shoes of the legend I'd inadvertently created for myself?
7
His legs, stubby, swung freely as he sat up on the bench where he'd slept. Relaxed now.
The chatter of a child who knows his subject. "The clown was a man who went crazy.
Maybe from a Horror. Maybe from the Theran War. My papa says war can drive people crazy."
"Yes."
"But at the end of the war, he killed his children. He killed them and ran away. His wife told my father what happened, and my father tried to find him. And he ran and ran, and tricked children. He made himself seem nice. But he killed them too. That's what I heard."
"I don't think he killed his sons," I said. "He cut their faces." The boy looked at me, curious. "That's what I heard."
"Why would he do that??'
"Some people ... some people confuse ..."
He waited, a child not indifferent to etiquette and the respect for adults.
"I don't know, exactly."
"He was crazy."
"Yes." What did I think I was doing bringing a child here? Into my life?
"Are you all right?"
I'd obviously revealed too much. My face was not the mask I always wished it was but never turned out to be. Time for cheap tactics. "What happened last night?"
"You mean those men?”
I nodded.
"They attacked my guards. They wanted to capture me. One of them, the man with his eyes ... his eyes sewn shut ... he kept saying, 'Take the boy alive.' My guards all died.
Even Bombim." He looked down.
'Do you know why? Why they wanted you?"
He remained silent a long time, and I thought he hadn't heard me, his memories, stirred up, clouding his senses from the moment at hand. But he finally said, "No. Or maybe. I don't know for sure. My papa, he sent me from Throal. He said I was in danger. Said there was a plot to hurt him and me. Sent us out ... I didn't know where we were going.
Bombim knew. He was my teacher. Anyway. I didn't know. I don't know."
"The people your father was worried about, they probably caught up to you."
"I want to go home."
"I'm sure you do. But that's what you want. You have to decide what you think you should do. If you want me to get you back to Throal, then we'll do that. If you think we should hide you—like your father wanted—then that's what we'll do. You decide."
"You would get me home?"
"Oh, yes."
"It's very far away."
"I know."
"There'd be a reward."
"It wouldn't be for the money."
"Still ..."
"I wouldn't refuse a reward. That would be rude."
"Yes." He laughed.
''What's so funny?"
"You, trying to be clever."
I smiled. "Is it that obvious?"
"You mean, does it show?"
"Yes."
"Yes."
"I'm getting old. The games are harder to play."
Laughter again. Not the malicious laughter that children are so capable of. A delight in life. I liked him. He reminded met of someone I'd once wanted to be.
"Why don't you think about what we should do." I stood, preparing to go upstairs and get some more sleep.
Fear crouched around the edges of his eyes, ready to spring. "What is it?" “I don't ... I don't know what to do. I'm ..."
"Yes?"
All his confidence and good nature shattered. "I'm just a little boy. I don't know what I'm supposed to do."
A memory, but not quite a memory, stirred within me. A sensation, a truth from years past. I couldn't see it quite clearly. It passed. "Well, you have to
make a decision now.
You can't hide behind being a child."
He blinked, stared at me. "I didn't mean."
Something tightened inside of me, my flesh. "It doesn't matter if you meant to or not, Neden. The world is full of danger. You have to accept that, deal with it. You've got to learn how to make decisions on your own."
He stifled something, his face a mask. He nodded. Toughened. A pleasure tickled me, I felt myself a father. Passing on something about pain and life and how it all comes together.
"I ... My father wanted me away from home. Until the danger passed. So I think I should stay away. That's what he wanted."