Religion is the empty sound of drums for those who fail to make their own peace with the world, cackled a voice from the past in his mind, and Marcus put his head in his hands. Thinking in straight lines was becoming difficult. In his entire life so far he had never had a problem thinking through a hangover, but right now he felt caught inside his own mind, his concentration waxing and waning with the spark and fade of memory. It was alien, and unnerving.
Suddenly, he became aware that he was being watched. It wasn’t a creeping feeling; he had just looked up and accidentally met the eyes of someone across the square. Amidst the crowd, a man in long, purplish robes, unremarkable barring his questionable dress sense, was staring right at him. He continued to do so for a few seconds as Marcus looked back, before abruptly spinning on the spot in a whirl of cloth, and disappearing into the swarm of people passing through.
Marcus quickly ran his eyes over the rest of the crowd. No-one else was watching him, so he disregarded it, and turned back to the statue, beneath which a new speaker was just stepping forward. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of purple, and looked around again. Two more people in similar robes had appeared, and were casually making their way through the crowds towards him, their eyes pointed his way with an unsettling intensity.
“Do you see beyond this day, my friends?”
Marcus decided to start walking in the other direction.
“Today we have heard many discussions of the same issue, but so many fail to account for the bigger picture. What of the work that the Viaggiatori do?”
Marcus glanced back over his shoulder; the men in purple had quickened their step. They were still staring right at him. He dived into a thicker group of people, prodding his way clear with the staff, scattering a circle of elder gentlemen dressed in robes and pointed hats.
“Our world lies in precious tandem with another world, and were it not for the careful work of the Viaggiatori, all might be lost at any time. How could they help the wizard? To do so is to doom us all.”
Unfortunately, the length of the staff, an item designed for the use of a seven foot tall unearthly being, surpassed the height of most of the crowd, and was clearly visible bobbing above them as Marcus ran for it. The men in purple robes transferred their gazes to that instead.
“And yet in saving us, they doom us still. But that is what we must face! For the sake of more than just ourselves, we must deny the wizard, stare him down and tell him that he shall not pass!”
The crowd did not seem to be reacting well to this new speaker; boos and jeers were erupting throughout, and their attention was beginning to wane. This suited Marcus, who busily continued to not listen as he battled his way through the dispersing crowd. He briefly considered again throwing away the staff, but it felt comfortable in his hands and might make for a decent weapon should his pursuers manage to catch up, so he kept a firm hold and kept going.
“Are we really more important – wait! Are we really more important than the whole?” The speaker’s voice had taken on an edge of desperation. “Will you stand by to live for a month? A year? Where will it end? Come back!”
With a final heave there came a sudden lessening of pressure, and Marcus found himself clear of the crowd. Unfortunately, coming up the street towards him were three more people in purple robes who instantly adjusted their general direction at the sight of him. Brilliant. Panicking slightly, he looked around for any other direction that he might be able to escape in, and found an alleyway to his left. It twisted and turned awhile before being consumed by shadows, and looked positively murderous, but since it was the only option that lacked purple-robed pursuers, he went for it.
As the hubbub of the crowd faded into the general background murmur of the city, Marcus was left alone, with neither preachers nor pursuers to provide company for his thoughts. And his thoughts were very grim, when they still managed to arrive in straight lines; he was constantly gripped by the feeling that although everything was as it seemed, it was all also something it shouldn’t be. The people he had heard spoke in a familiar accent, but everything they said was foreign. They spoke of wars and death and riots and insurrections and horrible, betentacled gods, and if that was what he was to now be surrounded by then he was far less inclined to look favourably on his explosive escape, especially if he was then going to be chased by well-dressed people with determined expressions.
He paused, briefly considering the implications of what the alternative to escaping would have been, before laughing bitterly and continuing on until the far end of his alleyway twisted into view. Hidden in shadow, he sighed, for two well-dressed, determined-looking people were waiting around at the alley’s mouth, quite visibly waiting for someone to pop out.
Marcus turned around to go back the way he’d come, and saw two of the men from the square making their way towards him from the other direction. Once again bereft of a way out, he tried looking up. There was a window above him, with an invitingly wide-looking window ledge and what looked like loose brickwork, which was immensely promising. It’d be fantastic, really, to just get one’s foot into the most useful available orifice, launch one’s self up, get to roof level and continue in the vein of a dramatic rooftop chase of sorts. The situation spiralled through Marcus’s mind, and he was enthralled with the raw heroic beauty of it, until it faded into fluff and he realised that in his current state of mind, he was far more likely to jump up, miss his handhold, twist his ankle, fall back down, break a couple of bones and then get caught by his pursuers anyway. Weighing his options, he decided to just get caught.
So Marcus stepped out of the shadows, threw down Death’s staff and put his hands up. “Alright,” he wearily addressed the closest of his pursuers, a bulky looking man with long, unkempt blonde hair, who was strolling swiftly and purposefully towards him. “I’ll come quietly.” He was about to add a sarcastic postscript when the man reached him and knocked him out with an elegant, sweeping punch to the side of the head.
3
The idea of a thousand steps had turned out to be much more bearable than the reality of a thousand steps, but Marcus had borne the burden nonetheless, and made it to the summit of this hidden mountain. Now he rested, staring idly out across an ocean of green, an endless forest canopy far below that was beholden only to the gaping embrace of the horizon. Down in the expanse, the highway scythed a path through the forest, but it was far away now, its distant lights a scant reminder of human civilisation. Marcus sat and rested with his back to the crumbling temple, enjoying the view whilst he waited for the balding monk who had greeted him to fetch the temple’s master.
The monk shortly returned with another man, a grave-faced elder with hair and beard like wildfire, long, grey and twisted beyond any recognisable shape. With a booming, cheerful voice quite at odds to his stoic façade, he introduced himself as the temple’s Master, emphatically pronouncing the capital. “A joke,” he beamed confidentially, but elaborated no more on whom the joke might be, or where indeed the humour hid. They crossed the courtyard and took their ease on the steps that led up to the temple door proper, where Marcus attempted to explain why he had come to this place.
“You’re looking for meaning, of course,” the old man chortled. His English was immaculate, his accents curiously familiar. “Everyone who comes up here comes looking for that, as if I had a hidden cache of existential truths stashed on my mountain. Well, sorry to disappoint, young man, but I don’t. I’ll tell you a few choice truths and some wicked stories of things I’ve seen, but I won’t deliver you absolution unless you find it yourself. Pay the postage, as they say.”
Marcus had never heard such a phrase, but here, in this place and time, he was young, and still had hope. So he nodded along, waiting to hear what the old man had to say. At length the elder man spoke, with Marcus murmuring assents when required. They spoke of the many years that had passed since the man had secreted himself on this mountain, in order to meditate on the myriad meanings of life.
“To be honest,” the old man said, “I only came here for a bit of peace and quiet. This place was abandoned, but perfectly serviceable. But people found me as you have, and well, a bit of company’s nice, so I let them stick around. Perhaps that’s your meaning of life right there.”
They spoke of other ways to find meaning, starting with philosophy. “I’ve read a few of your scholars,” the old man confided, “and they have some good ideas, but.. they are all old ideas, now. The subject has become the empty echoes of the thoughts of dead men, and will never go anywhere.”
They spoke at length on the subject of faith. Marcus told of how he had spent the last two years trying to decide whether he had any religious inclinations, and had come up with no answers. “And you wouldn’t have,” the old man said, and laughed. “In some lands there’s real meaning, but in this place, religion.. religion is the empty sound of drums for those who fail to make their own peace with the world. Can’t count on the gods to spell it out for you, not here.”
That has a familiar ring to it, Marcus thought, then and now. In that moment, a part of his memory fell back into its rightful place, and he felt himself awakening.
Surfacing from unconsciousness was much more difficult this time around, but he made it. Constant knock-outs were a poor substitute for true sleep, but that strange sleeping recollection, and the sense of it falling into place, seemed to have done wonders for his state of mind. Though a vague fog still lurked in the recesses, he felt generally much better equipped to deal with the world than he had done for a while. And so he lay where he had woke, peaceful amidst the tangled snarls of a luxurious, oversized four-posted bed that was swathed with astonishingly garish pink curtains and bedclothes. It was all rather unexpected; lost in memory as he had been, there’d been no time to form any expectations for what might follow in the wake of his capture by the well-dressed, determined folk, but given the chance he would never have guessed that he might end up inside a giant marshmallow. Yet here he was: wherever ‘here’ was.
Curious, Marcus made to extract himself from the bed, which proved difficult as every time he moved a blanket another three got in the way. After a few minutes of work, he rolled out of the side of the bed, staggered upright and had a look around. He appeared to be in some rather fancy quarters, with large, well-maintained wardrobes, strategically placed mirrors and other such hallmarks of an extremely exquisite suite. What he couldn’t see, however, were his clothes. They were neither on his body nor anywhere in the room. There was, however, a fluffy dressing gown hung over the back of a chair, and Marcus invited himself into it before opening a door to see where it went.
On the other side he found a living room decorated in an equally distasteful manner, and two people waiting for him. One, he recognised; it was the latest person to have removed him from the world of the conscious. Still in his purple robes, the bulky man somehow looked more at home here than he had in a grimy alleyway, his shaggy locks now seeming elegantly groomed. He looked to have a good few years on Marcus, and was in possession of a certain swagger that was apparent even sitting, apparently deep in thought over the board game he was playing with his companion. He looked up as Marcus approached, and Marcus thought he detected a worrying hint of disdain in this man’s quick appraisal. Marcus suddenly regretted the dressing gown.
“Marcus,” the man said gravely, his voice the guttural growl of a fishmonger leavened by years of education as to how one might speak proper like, “welcome back.”
Marcus opted to respond to this by way of brooding silence.
The second man chuckled. Short, wiry and balding on top, the last few hairs carefully teased over his dome, this man mirrored his companion only in their atrocious dress sense. His gaze was one of careful appraisal, with the hint of cogs constantly turning behind his eyes. “He’s not happy with you, Musk. Perhaps you might be so good as to appease friend Marcus with an apology for the rather uncivilised way in which you and your.. muscle bought him here.”
The taller man spared a glare for his companion before turning back to Marcus. “Yes. Right. Sorry. Issues with the transition, you see. We’ve never really done anything like this before, it went a little awry. The Master sent me and my..” - another glare for his companion - “muscle to bring you in as soon as possible. Whatever means necessary. I judged my method to be most efficient.”
“Well you would, wouldn’t you?” the little man shot.
“Something you want to say, Helm?” the tall man growled. “I ask only as I know you suffer from such crippling shyness when it comes to articulating things you feel like making a point about.”
The short man simply sat back, steepled his fingertips and wiggled his eyebrows. His companion snorted and turned back to Marcus. “Sorry about my.. friend. He suffers from the unfortunate condition of thinking that his brain is too big to be weighed down by such fragile, everyday concerns as common courtesy. How are you doing over here?”
Marcus, who had observed their interchange with practised disinterest from within the fragile folds of his dressing gown, shrugged wearily. “I’m really not sure. I’ve spent the last day – or however long it’s been – being blown up, chased, knocked out, and then on top of all that I had my clothes stolen, and now it’s now and we’re here and I’m still none the wiser as to what the hell is happening around me. I was just happily drinking my life away, and then all this..” he flailed for the right word and failed to find it “..stuff is going on and you two are just talking about transitions and efficiency and having a petty little pink man snarkfest and I’m about to run out of words.” He sank gently down onto a horrendous purple armchair and waved his hands about whilst his brain refuelled. “I don’t know where I am or who you are or what you want from me or if I should be worried about what you might want from me. Can you tell me these things? In words I understand? Do you know anyone who can?”
The little man’s small smile had widened into a sickly grin over the course of Marcus’s rambling, but the bulky man at least had taken on a slightly abashed expression. “Peace, Marcus,” he said, raising a hand like a slab of concrete in the most threatening conciliatory gesture Marcus had ever seen, “we mean you no harm. Admittedly we haven’t done the best of jobs proving that so far, but listen. The reason Helm and I are here right now is because we were told to wait on you to wake, so that you could be bought to the boss as soon as possible, for orientation. We don’t want to keep you in the dark. Apparently,” – and here a certain twisted emphasis in the man’s speech again invoked a dark disdain – “there may be something of some importance that you can help us with.”
Marcus wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that at all. “Where’s my staff?” he asked suspiciously.
The smaller man, who had been taking advantage of his companion’s distraction to sneak a few extra moves in to their board game, turned back to them. “Marcus,” he said, “I know you don’t trust us and have no reason to, so I’m going to have to ask you to take a leap of faith. We’ve bought you somewhere nice and supplied you with a dressing gown which, incidentally, looks very good on you, and we’ve got the remnants of what you were bought in with in the next room over, although to be honest the only thing worth keeping hold of is that odd walking staff of yours. There are plenty of clothes in the wardrobe. Put some on, I’ll send my good buddy here to fetch the staff, then we’ll take you to where you can find out what you want to know. Sound fair?”
Such was the story of how Marcus found himself sitting in a dusty waiting room, dressed in the least horrifically bright clothes he had been able to dig out of the wardrobe, waiting for the severely dressed and severely bored-looking receptionist who was his only companion to let him know when he could pass through the large, ornate wooden doors that he was sat opposite. Death’s staff had been retrieved for him whilst he’d been changing, and now that he had a quiet moment to himself, his escorts having excused themselves upon arrival in the waiting room, he was having a proper look at it.
Marcus sat in shocked silence as a wisp of his fringe floated down past his eyes, pondering the twisted, dirty inevitability of this development. Back on the rooftop, when he’d discovered that he’d accidentally stolen Death’s staff, it hadn’t seemed so bad. Sure, there was the whole ‘aura of unseemly menace’ business, but Marcus had sort of assumed that that came with the territory; his vague memory of his meeting with Death was underlined by a strong sensation of helpless fear. But now it wasn’t a staff, it was a scythe, and that seemed more like something the grim reaper would have a strong interest in recovering. Marcus had been busily attempting to ignore the consequences of his actions, but now they had sprung up and got his attention by almost decapitating him, and he could almost feel the storm clouds gathering.
Thankfully, at that moment the large wooden doors swung open. “The Master will see you now,” the receptionist declared, pointing her pen in the vague direction of the doorway without looking up. Marcus was more than happy to oblige, leaving his dark thoughts swirling in the dust.
Mirrorworld Page 3