by kubasik
Without a moment's hesitation, I cut at the left, vertical rope of me ladder; slicing it through. The ladder collapsed, so that for the last thirty feet of it—from my cut to the bottom the two vertical ropes hung together and the rope rungs hung doubled up between them.
"J'role!" Neden cried out, clinging desperately to the ropes, twirling slightly now. I shouted back for him to just hang on.
As I was distant from Neden now, soldiers armed with crossbows appeared at the airship's rail and began firing. The bolts rushed by me, one or two clipping my arm or thigh. Meanwhile, I began working my way down the ladder, slicing each rung as I passed it. Soon the left side of the ladder was drooping past me, reaching down to Neden.
A bolt caught me full in the thigh, and I cried out in agony. Blood rushed up from the wound, soaking through the cloth of my trousers, spreading out with frightening speed.
For fear of causing further damage, I let the bolt remain, hoping to take it out when I was safe. I continued down the ladder, cutting the rungs, until I reached Neden. I dropped the sword. "On my back," I gasped. "Your leg!" he cried out. "ON!" I shouted.
He crawled up, his weight worse now for the crossbow bolt, which made all my flesh feel as if it had been scraped off with dry bones, leaving my nerves directly exposed to every touch. But there was little time to contemplate pain. Mordom finally grasped my plan and shouted, "Raise the ship! Raise the ship!"
But too late. The ladder, now split in half, reached down an extra thirty feet, dangling as a single rope rather than as a ladder. I gripped the rope with my hands, and began moving quickly down it. After twenty feet we reached the treetops. The airship, though, was already beginning to rise. I moved down faster, and we plunged beneath the tops of the trees, dragged through their leaves by the forward movement of the airship. Only a few feet of rope remained.
I turned to face the onrushing leaves and branches that slapped against us, looking for a branch sturdy enough to support us. That's when I felt my muscles freeze up once more.
We were rising. "Jump!" I wheezed through my paralyzed lips. I said it over and over again.
"But ... !"
"JUMP!"
I saw his small hand reach out for the branches in front of us. Twice he tried to grab a large, sturdy branch, and twice he failed. On the third try I saw his hand make contact, and suddenly his weight was off my back. .
The airship continued to rise. Above, sailors dragged the rope ladder up, hand over hand, until I was brought over the airship's rail and onto the deck.
13
You'll recall that Mordom, since I'd last seen him, had not only risen from the dead, but had sewn his eyelids shut with thick purple thread. These terrible stitches held my attention as the magician grabbed my throat with his eyeless hand and slammed my head against the rail of the airship. "I do remember you now," he said with great spite. "You're the Meddler Boy. Had a Horror in your head, if I'm not mistaken." His one eye, green and set into the palm of his left hand, stared down at me, blinking with rage. "The Horror's gone now, it seems. But I think I can take care of that. You must miss having something slithering around in you."
I did not. His words brought me close to tears. Paralyzed and in the hands of my old nemesis, who was threatening to manipulate my mind with his strange affinity with Horrors, it seemed that no time had passed since last we met. I thought of my near murder of Neden only minutes before. Perhaps no time had passed.
A soldier beside Mordom, a troll with milk white canines that protruded from behind his lips, said, "Sir, should we ..."
Without turning the magician snapped, "Yes! Bring the ship down. Find him"
It was my hope that Neden would soon reach the bottom of the tree and make his way into hiding, as he had already managed to do when first we met. Then I realized I did not know if he actually had gotten hold of the branch. And even if he had, whether he could climb down. A thief adept could manage it with ease. But a young dwarf? Was he now trapped in the tree? Had he already fallen?
Had my wish for his death come true after all?
"Take him downstairs," Mordom intoned, a trickle of glee slipping into his raspy voice.
The ship spent some time hovering over the spot where Neden had vanished, but he could not be found. We then sailed to a clearing where the ship could land without the risk of its riggings getting tangled in the thick branches. From there, a search party was sent out for the boy. Also, another magician created a pair of wings for one of the soldiers so he could fly back to my house and lead the mercenaries and soldiers back to the ship to join in the hunt.
I learned none of this directly, but from shouts that spilled over the upper deck or from orders that echoed down the corridors. It was my fate to be tied to a table in a dark room buried in the heart of the ship. Mordom huddled over me, a hungry man set before a feast, unable to decide what to eat first. His hand with the green eye, held two feet from me, examined me carefully. On his face, a smile. It was the first time I'd ever seen him smile—really smile, the way other people do when happy. The only illumination came from a few glowing crystals set into the wall, which produced something like light, but something different from it as well. It seemed to skim over the surface of objects in the room, rather than fill the room, so that we all—Mordom, myself, two soldiers—seemed to radiate a kind of bluish glow. Mordom noticed my examination of the light and said, in a tone more generous than I would have thought him capable, "For my pets. It's closer to the environment they came from."
My mind actually puzzled over that for a moment, despite all my previous encounters with the man. Then I thought simply: the Horrors. They came from another plane of existence to our world hundreds of years ago. They had to have come from someplace, and undoubtedly it wasn't like our own world.
"We can do this the easy way or the hard way," he said. "What do you know of the conspiracy?"
Knowing nothing of the conspiracy—the conspiracy or any conspiracy—I paused, open my mouth, unsure of how to answer.
"The hard way, then," he said, and turned from me, humming. I looked to the guards for some indication of what was about to happen. Both had already fixed their gazes on the ceiling.
"I don't know anything about any conspiracy. Listen, we're both old men now. Why don't you just let me go? The boy's gone. He stumbled into my life, and now he's stumbled out.
We'll just go our separate ways."
He was out of sight now, standing several feet from the head of the table. He continued to hum, and I heard the sound of glass clinking, as if he were moving jars around. He said,
"Ah," and began walking back.
Stalling, I said, "How is it you live? You did die in Parlainth, did you not?"
"Oh, yes," he said casually, more intrigued with what he held in the jar. I could not make out what his hand stared at. It seemed to be a shadow moving within the confines of the jar.
"Who raised you?" I asked. I wanted to say, "Who in their right mind would allow you to draw breath again?" But I was a prisoner of a magician with an affinity for Horrors, and the better tactic seemed to be to remove the verbal bile if possible.
He set the jar on a small table beside the one to which I was strapped, and rummaged about in a small box of metal tools. "A group of Therans who investigated the city. They found me about twenty five years ago."
"Therans have been to Parlainth?" I said with complete surprise.
"It was our city, Meddler Boy. I don't suppose you have any objections to our returning home?"
I did for the city was claimed by the people of Barsaive now, an urban wilderness rich in magical treasures and ancient secrets. But I said, "Na. I just didn't know."
"We're not much welcome in Barsaive." He plucked a dangerous looking item from the box, a stick about six inches long and with a glittering hook on one end. "We often have to travel secretly. Of course, I'm certain you know of many of the places we've wanted to visit. And now I'm going to find out which of those you do." He stretched both
his eye hand and eyeless hand down toward my head, near my right ear.
"I really don't know anything, Mordom. I really don't. I've been hunted myself for the last thirty years by King Varulus. I haven't been much involved in politics."
He stood up, pulling his hands away from me, and I breathed with relief. "J'role?" he asked, intensely curious. "The J’role. Prom the children's game? I've heard of the insane clown, of course. Everyone has. But that clown is you? How does it go ...?" Then he recited the infamous children's rhyme I'd inspired:
"Who are you?"
"J'role, mad old clown;
I've always been so
Since my first sound.
Father and Mother.
Crazy before me,
Juggle a razor!
Slice! Now you can't see!"
He said, "Quite delightful, I think. Are you really the source of that?" He waited for a reply, truly intrigued, and to stall, I nodded. He smiled that genuine smile of his again. "I wouldn't have thought the rhyme to be based on a real person. More a gathering of vague fears, formed and shaped by a need to pluck fear from the soul and shove it out of oneself, into an imaginary being. Certainly I never could have imagined the Meddler Boy would have grown up to be Barsaive's personal Horror of childhood." His eye stared at me a while, and he remained silent.
Now I was curious. "Why couldn't you imagine it?" I had always imagined myself miserable, and since the murder of my father, more than a little dangerous. It seemed almost fated that I grow up to be an inspirer of fear for children. I thought of all the years I'd traveled as a clown. How much of it had been to try so desperately to win the love of children, a love I thought I could never have?
He laughed. "You're a bit of a do gooder, you know. I would have expected the mutilator of children to be more obviously a monster." The eye hand hovered close to my face now, hungry for any flicker of uncomfortableness across my flesh. "So tell me. How many children have you killed?"
In my thoughts: the murder of my father, the mutilation of the faces of my sons. On my face: nothing. A mask. I said, "None."
The hand remained close, prying for any flicker of discomfort. "None?" he asked coyly.
"None," I said firmly. The bond on my ankles and wrists strained me for the first time and I wanted to rush from the room. I realized that I'd always wanted someone to worm the truth of my horrible deeds out of me, but I wanted it to be someone worthy of moral prostration Mordom certainly didn't meet the requirements; he would lap up my actions like a happy dog at its gruel. For some reason the thought of him torturing me hadn't been horrible—almost expected, really. But I suddenly realized he would use his monsters to draw from me secrets I'd kept tight to my thoughts for decades. That I did not want to happen.
The thought of having to repeat it all pained me. Wearied me. I would rather have died than be held at the command of Mordom, tortured by some foul creature, spitting out all the crimes of my life. But it was not an immediate concern. Shouts came down the corridor.
Neden had been found.
14
He was not well, as Mordom took pains to explain to me on several occasions, as if it were my fault. All I learned of Neden was that he had fallen from the tree when he tried to climb down from it. For the next several days, as the airship sailed south toward the Badlands, no one paid me any attention. The wound from the crossbow bolt remained untended, and a hot pain grew in my flesh as it festered. No one fed me, and hunger, fitful with misdirected revenge, ate at me as I lay strapped to the table. I slipped more and more into delirium, unable on occasion to remember where I was or why I was there. I tried, in the few lucid moments, to undo the straps that bound my wrists and ankles. But each was enchanted, and they changed as I tried to study their nature, so that any progress I made was lost before I could apply it. My thief abilities were useless, and I realized that for the first time in my life I might truly be trapped.
On occasion images of your mother, or you or Torran, came to me, and I apologized profusely. I spoke to phantoms of my imagination, knowing full well my words were not directed to any of you. I do not think I would truly have been capable of apologizing to you at all.
It was with surprise that I regained consciousness one day to discover that Mordom had slipped a Horror into my skull. I do not know to what end he did this— experiment, torture for information, maliciousness (I think all three)—but the effect was clear enough.
It was not in the same way the Horror had lived in my thoughts years earlier, with its body in one place and its mind invading mine. No, Mordom had cracked my skull open and slipped something terrible inside. Blood trickled down my neck from the wound, and a disturbing tickling cut along my flesh at the point of the entry. Although aware of all this, and of being in a dark room with shadowy figures standing around me, I also slipped into the past. Memories as clear as reality smashed into my senses. I could feel the bed of my youth at my back. Smell the trapped air of the kaer where I had grown up. Saw my mother, alive and young, standing next to me. The touch of her fingertips performing the ritual to place the Horror in my thoughts. I'd remembered the moments so many times over my lifetime, but never with such clarity and reality.
Yet something new was added to the experience. Saying exactly what it was is difficult.
My thoughts— they doubled up upon themselves. Mordom, I think, drew my thinking to the forefront of my brain, so he could pick through it, using the small creature he'd placed in my head to stir up my thoughts. It wasn't just memories he was after—the tactile sensations of years past—he wanted the thoughts, the logic, of despair.
For the first time in my life I understood the thinking that had taken place when I was just a boy. My mother's touch, her betrayal, flowed from her fingertips across my skin, transforming me, as if my soft flesh became the chitinous shell that bugs wear on their backs. Because, you see, I knew she was doing something terrible to me, but I couldn't imagine that she, my mother, would do something bad without a very good reason. All kinds of thoughts slipped through my head to help account for the inexplicable actions taking place. Key among these was the fact that I must have done something horribly wrong, that I deserved to have a monster placed in me. That, in fact, I was monstrous myself. Capable of committing terrible evil. I was horrible; a Horror.
As I lay strapped down under Mordom's examination, I felt a part of myself floating away from my body examining myself from a distance, fascinated. My mother's touch, I saw clearly, was like the first star in the sky at twilight. One single point of burning light.
But with time, as my life passed, the sky filled with stars. They dotted the sky, forming constellations of pain. Looking to the sky, I could remember how the Universe worked. A set of rules found by studying the stars, the rule of pain. Everything, it seemed, flowed from that moment. A moment that no little boy should have lived through. A moment that was, far from being a rational point from which to begin a life, an aberration. An aberration! How much work I had applied to the task of trying to give sense to my mother's actions. A lifetime spent defending a monstrous construction of constellations.
More than the constellation—a fortress of stars—burning hot and brilliant. Endless corridors of white light and massive ramparts and high towers. A chill coursed through my flesh. I imagined myself walking through the corridors of such a castle, trapped there all of my life, a prisoner within my own thoughts.
J'role, the legendary clown thief, trapped in the only prison that could contain him—
His own mind.
"Fascinating," Mordom sighed, and it was little comfort that in that moment he sounded just like the Horror that had inhabited my thoughts in my youth, lapping up my misery with relish.
The images of the star castle, the memories of my mother, left me. I snapped back into the moment. Without warning a pain such as I had never felt crashed into my head, just behind my right ear. I screamed, my throat becoming instantly hoarse. I could not stop screaming. I thrashed madly against the bon
ds that held me tight. The wound in my skull demanded to be tended, staunched, scratched. I became frantic with the desire to be free.
From the bonds, of course. But also, at the age of sixty, I saw my entire life as imprisonment. As I rocked wildly back and forth on the table, I rocked to be free of all my bonds. "Ignore him," Mordom shouted to the guards as they stepped toward me. The magician laughed, stared down at me, pleased.
A baby appeared on my chest. An infant. Eight months old, no more. I stopped screaming just long enough to acknowledge this new element in the bizarre tableau. A sharp intake of air on my part. It stared down at me, serious. The pain caught me up again, and I began screaming once more, but glanced at Mordom to see if he was aware of the baby sitting placidly on top of me. The magician acknowledged nothing. I could not be certain, however, if this might be merely a ruse. Had he somehow created the image of a baby to confuse me, and now was going to mock my sanity by pretending it was not there? It seemed a tactic too subtle for him, yet there might still be wells of malicious strategy waiting to be tapped.