It had just entered the well shaft and knew its prey was above it. It continually checked the scent it followed with the scent on the clothing tied to its neck. Jonathon probed deeper and found the beast to be very intelligent, it was no mere predator at all, but it was driven by the primal desires - fear and hunger, its intellect was paralysed and bound, primal instincts drove it.
It feared the pain of punishment if it failed. It hungered because the meals it was fed, at times other than when it captured its prey were vastly inadequate. It was kept in a state of virtual starvation that always gave its instincts for self preservation supremacy over the moral codes it did possessed deep within its mind. Codes from another time and place.
There was something strange about the Turkanschoner's mind; much was missing or hidden. It had few memories and its primitive instincts were followed uneasily, an underlying tension existed in its psyche. Jonathon realised that its mind had been altered, conditioned. And now, as it neared the capture of its prey, it faced an almighty dilemma. It needed to feed so badly, but knew that to act in a way other than it had been conditioned meant punishment and not eating meant pain of hunger and starvation.
Now Jonathon heard its thoughts, it yearned for its master to give it the kill scent. But its master, its Tallman handler, was not here. Jonathon pondered a while. He delved into the creature's thoughts again in an attempt to unravel its confused mind and realised that it genuinely thought that its master was here with it. Jonathon spoke to the beast, his words drifted gently into the beasts head.
“Who is your master? Where is he? "
The Turkanschoner stopped its ascent of the well shaft abruptly when the strange voice rang out softly in its head. A wave of fear ran briefly through its mind, and then it answered.
“Him up with it" came a nonsensical reply.
"How can he be up?" Jonathon continued his query and the beast attempted to explain.
“Turk obeys master always or pain comes. Here is scent prey. Here is master who is not prey. Me always have master. Always with me. Master commands, no master, no food - no Turk, so prey here yes - other must be master
- yes?" it seemed to ask for a confirmation of its simple
logical deduction from Jonathon.
Jonathon quickly realised that the Turkanschoner thought that he Jonathon, the ‘other’ scent, was its master. Jonathon, it seemed had been adopted in the absence of its handler in order that it might capture its prey and be able to feed within the behavioural confines of its programming.
He decided to try and command it.
“Turkanschoner, I am your master, you must go back to the Towers now." he ventured naively.
“Cannot!" came the immediate reply. “Must eat or Turk dies, always eat now, never not eat now." it replied.
Did the Turkanschoner always eat its victim, Jonathon thought. Surely there were times when the pursued needed to be taken alive, what then?
Jonathon probed Turk's mind and amongst the gory memory scenes of it feasting, were other times when its prey survived. On these rare occasions the beast was rewarded with a meal that satisfied its hunger. He wondered whether the Turkanschoner's conditioning would hold if it were not fed now. He feared it would not. The creature had completed the hunting of the prey and waited to be fed; how long would it wait until its instinct for self-preservation broke the bonds of conditioning and took the food it needed in the form of Rislo's flesh? But perhaps, just perhaps, Jonathon realised, there was a slim chance.
He opened his eyes and was startled by what he saw. The Turkanschoner was there with him, its damp nostrils flaring close to his face, its crudely stitched up eye-lids bulging as its eye balls moved rapidly beneath them. The large, but emaciated beast's arms and legs were braced astride Jonathon as it held onto the side of the well shaft. Jonathon stood, back to the wall on a narrow ledge, staring directly into the Turkanschoner's horrific visage.
Its protruding hound-like jaws sported huge oversize incisors that dripped with saliva, a long pink tongue lolled to one side over loose brown and yellow dappled lips. Here were the perfect carnivorous jaws of the ultimate in killing machines but, as Jonathon studied the beast further, he saw that all was not what it seemed.
The razor sharp, serrated cutting side teeth showed file marks where someone had modified the original herbivorous molars into the terrible saw blades it now possessed. Its gigantic dagger-like incisors were completely artificial, as were its extended jaws. The teeth were crudely crafted from steel and riveted into place on a metal jaw that was screwed into the original one. Rivet and screw heads were clearly visible. This poor creature was no more a natural carnivore than Jonathon or Rislo were he deduced, it had been physically adapted and mentally conditioned by the Tallmen into a retributive weapon. The method of conditioning had left its physical marks too. The creatures skull was criss-crossed with vivid white scars which had destroyed the hair follicles in places and forced the rest of the Turkanschoner's hair to grow in great, grey tufts and ragged tails which cascaded down its high fore head and long elegant neck.
Its ears had been savagely removed, torn messily from its head and the apertures plugged with wax. Its senses had been reduced to those of touch, taste and smell. Jonathon guessed that the creature, which he now knew had once been more than a beast, had originally had a good sense of smell, and the Tallmen had worked to accentuate this by depriving it of sight and hearing.
But Jonathon saw more than any other person could. He had seen both its face and brushed soul with his psychic probing; both were tortured landscapes of pain and suffering. The Turkanschoner moved its right hand down and touched Jonathon's face lightly, a long taloned finger stroked his jaw. In its mind it echoed Jonathon's unique observation, knowing that he would hear it.
“Pain, my life forever pain."
The Turkanschoner's lolling tongue disappeared into its mouth. Sound gurgled in the back of its throat and, to Jonathon's surprise, words escaped in deep, guttural tones.
“Command to kill. Turk hungers. Must eat now!" it pleaded with Jonathon. When Jonathon did not respond, it asked again. This time Jonathon felt its conditioning to follow order coming under severe pressure. “So hungry, must feed soon, hungreeeee!”
Jonathon re-established his telepathic link and spoke to Turkanschoner.
“No killing today Turk, I command you not to kill."
The beast visibly flinched, baring his lips angrily and revealing more, but smaller artificial incisors attached to his artificial jaws between these two principal weapons.
“Then you feed me! You command, you feed, you master - I find Tallman runner - YOU FEED NOW...or I kill, can't help. FEED GOOD NOW!" the beast screamed indignantly at his new master's injustice.
Jonathon's mind raced, he had no food. Then he remembered Rislo's pack. Had he packed food? He was, after all, prepared for a long expedition. He shouted up to the giant who had hidden in an alcove, created in a section of collapsed well shaft wall just above him. Rislo's silhouetted head peered anxiously down at him and the stationaryTurkanschoner.
Rislo gasped out loud.
“Have you packed any food?" Jonathon called up to him.
The Tallman stared blankly at the Turkanschoner whose mouth was dribbling with saliva. One way or another the beast would soon feed.
“Rislo! Food! All it needs to stop it now is to be fed! " The Turkanschoner raised its head towards Rislo and saliva seemed to boil back out of its jaws. Its nostrils flared. It moaned. Rislo disappeared briefly and reappeared with a bundle of large black sausages which he tentatively lowered down to the Turkanschoner. The beast snatched his prize from Rislo and lowered his face to Jonathon.
“Pain, so much pain, master helps good." it groaned “Me kennel now? " it asked innocently. “Help master again?” The beast's 'master' sighed with relief and closed his eyes. “Yes, go now" Jonathon said mentally to the contented hunting machine. When he opened his eyes, the beast had gone. Jonathon was massively tired, drained of me
ntal and spiritual energy. The Turkanschoner's abyssal soul had drained him of it. He climbed up to the alcove where Rislo crouched and slid along side him. The giant looked at him wearily.
“I thought I was going to die, I was convinced, I was falling apart. Has it really gone?" he whispered, in case it had not. Jonathon smiled weakly.
“Yes, its gone, you're safe now" he reassured the giant, then closed his eyes and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Chapter Twelve
After pursuing its prey to a satisfactory conclusion, the Turkanschoner did as was expected of him, he began an obedient journey back to his kennel in the city of the Tallmen. He did particularly like the idea, but his conditioning carried him back as far as the Tallmen Crypts before he sensed something strange and stopped in his tracks.
He was a beast trained for the hunt and his latest task had been an unusual one, he thought to himself and that free reflection in itself, he realised, was what made this return journey different as well. It was not that unusual to be rewarded with food rather than be allowed to dine on his captured prey - but to remain alone and off his steel chain was. His restricted, yet intelligent brain, puzzled over his present situation. The master had not returned with him, a new and different master who was not a Tallman and did not speak with a whip. Who spoke with words inside his head instead of pain?
The Turkanschoner felt the tapestry of scars which where woven across his skull, he liked this new master. He liked the freedom he had given him. He liked him more the than Tallmen who gave him his life of pain. He hoped he would call him again with the words inside his head because he, the Turkanschoner, would readily respond.
There was still a mental link between the Turkanschoner and Jonathon, even though there was no telepathic contact between them at the moment. The beast's deprived senses had also resulted in the heightening of his latent psychic abilities, a small strengthening of them which resulted in the Turkanschoner being able to retain a mental link with his new master despite Jonathon breaking his connection.
Even the beast was not fully aware of this bond, since it was at a subconscious level, yet part of him clung on to it like a lifeline, that part being the soul or spirit that was submerged below the Tallmens’ conditioning. It was something which would drive the Turkanschoner after Jonathon because the brief spiritual and psychic contact which had been made between the two had already begun to unravel the Turkanschoner's conditioning and eventually, would enable the being chained inside the killing machine to resurface.
Even now the beast intuitively knew that the new master must not be lost. It just knew that the master was a better alternative than the Tallmen and it deduced that returning to the Towers was not a good idea or even a necessary one any more. The unravelling of the Tallmens’ conditioning had begun.
In the meantime Turk roamed the Tallmens’ Tombs around him. The smells of long dead Tallmen intrigued him. He pushed open the nearest door and lurched in, his nostrils flaring to examine the odours around him. A death scent was here, but a different scent than that given off when he had killed his prey in the past.
The Turkanschoner entered a tomb and leapt on to the bed of the dead and ancient Tallman who lay here. He examined the dusty bones as the large, sightless skull regarded him impassively. He scratched the dome of white bone with his razor sharp talons and listened to the bone scream and then felt the mass of thick scar tissue of his own scalp.
In his mind something snapped, anger flooded through him, dim memories slipped through the net of conditioning, memories of his real past; dim, distant memories of a free and past life. War and destruction! Capture! Torture! The pain, so much pain! A new life of pain and nothing else! They did it, the Tallmen.
Anger swelled inside of him and his muscles twitched, filling with blood, fuel for the venting his anger. He tore the mocking skull and its frozen, arrogant smile from the neck vertebrae and hammered it against the wall repeatedly until it disintegrated. The Turkanschoner then turned his attention to the skeleton and proceeded to break each bone with a
great satisfaction.
His anger was slowly diffused. He laughed a hollow, satisfied laugh which amused him. His own laughter had been an alien experience to him in the hands of the Tallmen, yet he had heard their cruel laughter on every occasion they had replaced the sealing wax in his ears. He thrust a talon into his ear and levered the hardened wax out and suddenly cringed expecting pain to follow. But then he realised that he was alone now, there was no one here to punish him.
He laughed again and the noise of these
long absent hollow vowels came echoing back from the walls of the crypts. The sound was so different from the noises that came to him through the bones of his skull – so much more vital. He unplugged his other ear and listened to the long lost world of sound in stereo. Suddenly he began to realise the true nature of his existence as a being that was part of a world, rather than being a closed world to himself, alone with only his thoughts and his feelings. He existed, he was! His spirit soared with this strange revelation. He was! And he could be more again! There was another sense which he was deprived of too, his sight. He knew that his eyes still functioned, the Tallmen had never blinded him.
The difference between light and dark had always registered through his eye lids, but he had never needed this information, why should he? He was a beast who could smell the time of day. But there had been brief moments when the stitches which had held his eyelids together had broken, giving him a tantalising glimpse into the world of shape and colour.
The Tallmen had never blinded the Turkanschoner permanently because they had used his sight as a channel through which to condition him and re-condition when the time arose. With the use of hypnotic lights and patterns, the past was buried and the mental entity that was the Turkanschoner was sewn into his mind. He was conditioned with images of torn and motionless corpses This was death. This was his task. He was a Dealer of Death, their detterent for traitors.
The Turkanschoner gently pulled at the stitches in his eyelids. It hurt fearfully, but the pain did not deter him. Blood dribbled down his cheeks and onto his snout. His nostrils flared in recognition. The pain was intense, but nothing to a beast who had inhabited a world of pain.
One by one the stitches were removed from his sore and bleeding lids. He howled when his talons accidentally poked into his eyeballs, blood and tears streamed down his cheeks, yet he persevered because the reward would make it worth it. Finally all the stitches had been removed and his eyes were fully open, but he could see nothing. He hammered on the floor in a fury, the pleasure of sight had been taken away from him. They had blinded him!
He leapt to his feet and began to tear the room apart. The infuriated beast began to hurl all that his claws fell upon against the walls and floor of the sunless crypt, revelling in the glorious cacophony of breaking glass, a symphony of smashing pottery, the crunching of bones, ringing metal and splintering wood.
He laughed when he picked up a new and heavy object. He would destroy this too, what sort of noise would it make he wondered? The new object was strangely familiar in his hands, recognised at a different level of being, an unconscious level. At one end he felt a leather pommel and above it a cross piece that prevented the object from sliding down and out of his hand. Gripping it tightly, the Turkanschoner hammered the object into the wall. It did not break, but the ceremonial sword sent a shower of golden sparks flying into the air. The room flashed into light for an instant and the Turkanschoner was suddenly paralysed.
He blinked in the darkness. He struck the blade against the wall again and the steel and stone surfaces combined to repeat the feat and sent sparks flying onto the clothing strewn across the floor. A small flame was born, it flickered unsteadily, unstable, as yet not fully established amongst the dust and mouldy fibres. New impressions entered the Turkanschoner's brain.
Now he understood why he could not see before and laughed a laughter which was manic and hysterical ironically reverber
ating in the tunnels around the tombs of the Tallmen and drowning out even the hum of the engines above, as the Turkanschoner was born again amongst the resting places of his dead masters.
The small fire was growing amongst the shredded rags of a funeral shroud in the centre of the room. The Turkanschoner examined the flame. It seemed to him to be alive, it was eating the cloth and turning it into thousands of floating ash particles. He experimented cautiously with other materials when the flame seemed to be dying. It could not eat bone or glass, but wood and leather were consumed steadily and made the flame stable.
The fire grew larger and hotter as he added more consumable material. He learned how to control the size of the fire by rationing its fuel. The bright flames fascinated him. He watched for hours, seeing shapes in the flame, faces even, some familiar, some grotesque and frightening. Lost memories were stimulated and flickered into his consciousness. A city was burning! He wondered if the fire would attempt to eat him and he thrust his hand into the flame, withdrawing it with a yelp as his flesh blistered.
Memories clawed their way back. The Tallmen came and cities burned. He was angry at the fire. He had given it life and now it repaid him with pain. The Tallmen were in the city, flames reflected in their mirror armour as they came and they killed.
He howled at the flames in derision, but they just crackled back at him in mockery. He grinned a hellish grin. Very well, he thought, he would let the flames starve. The Turkanschoner's attention drifted from the ungrateful fire and he began to study the broken articles around the room. All the dead Tallman's possessions had been laid with him in the tomb and most of the breakable items had been broken.
The Chronicles of Jonathon Postlethwaite: The Seed of Corruption Page 11