Forbidden Thoughts

by Milo Yiannopoulos

  The wind chime played a single desolate note despite the lack of a breeze. As if some curse had been broken, I bolted toward the door, threw it open, and barged into a candlelit vestibule.

  “Welcome, Janeth,” an affable, airy voice greeted me from the shifting darkness beyond.

  I recognized my name, pronounced almost as a sigh, as having been spoken by the one man who had cause not to shun it—my only friend in Iye, in all of Shianmar; perhaps on the whole sphere of Mithgar.

  “Where are you, friend?” I asked, for I knew him only by that term of affection.

  “Here.” My friend’s lank, somewhat stooped form materialized from the shadows to my right. The dry floorboards creaked under his sandal-shod feet, elsewise I would have thought him a figment of my troubled mind.

  I looked about from the candles set on the wax-encrusted windowsill to the carved willow trim on the yellowed plaster walls, to the scuffed floor. My nose detected the ghosts of spices and incense.

  “What business brings you here?” I pondered aloud.

  My friend’s mouth formed a thin smile. “The same that brings you.” He withdrew a key on an iron chain fine as thread from his faded blue coat and turned back toward the darkness. “Come. The Prior is waiting.”

  Moved by fear of abandonment to my fate, I plucked a beeswax candle from the sill and followed. My friend passed through a circular arch and turned left into a darkened hallway. Though my candle shed no light on his path as I walked behind him, my friend sauntered down the corridor as one would stroll through a garden at noon. My quivering light revealed walls defaced with graffiti that defied interpretation.

  Dust motes dancing in a shaft of pale light betrayed the presence of a window in the left wall ahead. My friend continued past the unglazed opening without pause, but I ventured a glance through the window, if only to assure myself that a wide world existed beyond these dark dusty confines.

  In the half-light of a moon partially veiled by scraps of cloud, a broad courtyard stretched between the building’s two wings. Sunk into the bare soil was a cluster of stone-ringed holes too shallow for wells. The grit heaped against their walls bespoke long disuse. Before I could study them further, dark clouds hid the moon and left my poor candle as the sole source of light.

  At length my friend came to a halt. The rattling of metal on metal said that we’d reached a door, which he was unlocking with his small iron key. Rusted hinges soon creaked, and we advanced only a few paces before my friend stopped again and faced left.

  “Shut the door, won’t you?” he said. “We mustn’t be disturbed.”

  Acting on deeply ingrained manners, I turned back to the door we’d entered through and pulled it closed. The latch clicked. Trying the knob, I was somewhat disturbed to find that the door had locked itself behind us.

  Hinges squealed again, and I turned to see that my friend had opened the door in the left wall. We proceeded through and began a descent down a narrow flight of dirty steps. Each stair bowed discouragingly beneath my underfed frame, and I released a breath I hadn’t known I’d held when we set foot on a solid floor of packed soil. My next indrawn breath tasted of vinegar and old bread.

  “This way.” Though he spoke at conversational volume, my friend’s voice retained the quality of a whisper. He led me into a cool chamber so large that the candlelight touched neither walls nor ceiling. The shadows did relinquish the skeletal remains of a winepress—its great overarching timbers riddled with rot.

  We passed between parallel rows of barrels big enough for a man to sit upright in and came to a door of iron-bound planks in a mortarless stone wall. Unlike every other feature I’d seen within the house, this door looked newly made.

  My friend stood at the door and knocked. The cavernous chamber returned no echo. My stomach tied itself in knots as I waited in the silent gloom.

  The door opened inward with hardly a sound. My expectation of a stout, broken-nosed guard was dashed when I instead saw no one standing inside the doorway. Unless my senses deceived me—and the mounting dread vying with my forbidden desperation may well have clouded my eyes—the door had opened on its own.

  Yet the oddity I’d witnessed brought at least one comfort—the room beyond was filled with warm steady light.

  My friend passed through the door and stepped to one side, affording me an unobstructed view of the chamber. A continuous wall of rough stone encircled the room, and a vaulted stone ceiling hung overhead. The orange-yellow light shone from glass orbs the size of a man’s head ensconced atop twisted wrought iron lampstands upon intricately woven rugs. I counted a dozen such lamps—no doubt the products of some Working—positioned along the curve of the wall.

  “Come, Janeth. A gentleman does not lurk in doorways.”

  The invitation, delivered in a mellifluous voice normally reserved for malakhim, was issued by a man seated at an oak table elegantly carved in the Stranosi style yet lacquered after the Shianese fashion. Even from across a room that could have served as a lecture hall or a minor temple, I clearly saw that his fair face retained the glow of youth while projecting the confidence of one in the prime of life. A perfect mane of silver hair fell to the midpoint of his neck.

  My first steps upon the soft carpets were halting, but my stride quickened as I approached the table. The singular man seated behind it closed the cloth-bound codex he’d been reading in the light of a miniature Worked lamp. His robes rustled as he rose to greet me, and I saw that they were cream-colored silk embellished with gold. A short cape colored and shaped like butterfly wings encircled the upper third of his lean body.

  How did you know my name? I nearly asked aloud before my sense of courtesy intervened. Surely my friend, who maintained his vigil beside the door, had made me known to this gentleman who’d rounded the table to stand before me.

  “I am Prior Sed,” the silver-haired man introduced himself, eschewing a solemn bow and extending his open hand like a freeman of the West.

  As I shook the Prior’s smooth, firm hand, my eyes wandered past the table and the folding Midraist scribe’s chair to another door set directly across from the entrance. It, too, was of recent construction and boasted stouter timbers and more iron bands than the door I’d come through.

  “Your presence gladdens us,” said the Prior.

  I hastily returned my full attention to my host, whose hair, I was astonished to see, wasn’t hair at all but thin strands of silver wire growing from his scalp.

  The Prior’s face fell. “Have I given offense in some way?”

  “No—no!” I stammered, scrubbing a hand through my frazzled hair. “It’s just that… I am not entirely certain why I am here. I left the Red Crow down by the wharf perhaps an hour ago. My steps seemed aimless, yet now I feel that each step inexorably led me here.”

  The Prior nodded with the patience of one used to instructing the ignorant. “Take heart. You would not have come to us were you not in great need of our aid.”

  For the first time since I’d come to Iye, a spark of hope kindled in my heart. Perhaps that was why, though I did not know this man from Nessh, I suddenly poured out the contents of my heart to him. I confessed the unbearable wretchedness of my lot and my unquenchable envy of Marthen Lumac.

  “You wish that your station and Lumac’s were reversed?” the Prior asked when I’d finished.

  Hearing another give voice to the deepest longing of my heart emboldened me to abandon decorum.

  “Yes!” I cried, clutching the Prior’s hand in both of my own. “I wish it in every respect. Lumac’s appearance, his wealth, his prestige; his very selfhood—all must be mine, or failing that, death!”

  The Prior smiled, and said what I did not expect. “An unconventional request, but not unreasonable.”

  Momentarily dumbstruck, I stared into the Prior’s hazel eyes and realized for the first time that their irises were oblong, not unlike a goat’s.

  “Can such a thing be done?” I wondered aloud.

  The Prior sli
d his hand from my grasp, returned to the table, and retrieved the bound volume lying upon it. He turned back to me and said, “Our order acknowledges and extols but one absolute—freedom. We take what we will from other cults and philosophies for the ultimate liberation of all.”

  A memory of my own lapsed tradition sounded a warning. “Are you necromancers?”

  The Prior gave a deep, resounding laugh, and my friend by the door joined him. “We are young compared to the disciples of Teth,” said the Prior. “Yet they will never exhaust the object of their inquiry, while we hasten ever closer to realizing our goal.”

  “How?” I asked, not bothering to hide my desperation. “How can I be freed from this torment?”

  “Perhaps you have heard of transessence,” the Prior said. “The Guild claims a monopoly over it, but the Mystery of exchanging the properties of substances has been known to the Gen since time immemorial.”

  My limbs shook. I licked my lips. “Can transessence exchange the qualities of two men? Will you use it to make me all that Lumac is?”

  The Prior drew back slightly as if offended, but compassion filled his face. “Do you think us so cruel as to leave you a prisoner to yourself while we stand by with the key? All are equal here, and none may pass judgment on another. If none can condemn you, then you are free. And if that freedom does not sanction the sovereign choice to define your own being, then it is no freedom at all.”

  Having heard all I needed, I fell to my knees. “Your words are music sweeter than any hymn. Free me, I beg you!”

  “Take care that passion does not become rashness,” said the Prior. “We have not yet discussed the price.”

  My heart sank like a lead ball cast into the sea. “I am but a poor librarian. My meagre stipend is all but spent, and what little remains must feed me for the rest of the month.”

  The Prior raised his hand, signaling silence and reassurance. “When you are Marthen Lumac, then you will have Marthen Lumac’s wealth. But we have no lust for coin. There are other, far rarer goods which entice us.”

  I thought I heard a dolorous groan from beyond the far door. A memory surfaced unbidden of a sow on my uncle’s farm that had died while giving birth, and my hackles rose. But resurgent longing burned away my fear.

  “What must I do?” I asked.

  The Prior bade me rise and presented the book to me. I took its rough hemp cover in my hand and studied the title written in fluid brushstrokes—Elegy for the Locust.

  “Go forth,” the Prior said, “and return, bringing Marthen Lumac with you. Nothing more is yet required.”

  Wiser men would have carefully laid their plans. But my desire was my master, and I hastened at once to Lumac’s house. Insisting that I had obtained a rare tome that our master would wish to see at once got me past the night watchman. I was told to wait in the library while the watchman woke Lumac’s valet, who would in turn wake the master of the house. I agreed but first made a detour to admit my friend through the kitchen door.

  When Lumac, clothed in a red and gold silk dressing gown, strode into the library, my friend immediately subdued him with a cloth drenched in sweet-smelling liquid. I helped to lay Lumac’s statuesque, unconscious body upon the reading table, and my friend made strange signs before laying his hand on the victim’s throat.

  After a moment my friend went to the door, opened it a crack, and spoke to Lumac’s valet in the rich voice of his master. He said that he would be deeply absorbed in reading for an indefinite length of time and gave a stern warning that he was not to be disturbed. Then he dismissed the servant back to bed.

  When I asked, my friend explained—once again in his own airy whisper—that he had borrowed Lumac’s voice via a temporary application of the same transessence that would soon invest all of Lumac’s qualities in me. The Prior also had another Working that would make the transfer permanent.

  After making certain that the valet had gone, we hauled Lumac out of the library and locked the door behind us. Transporting Lumac’s tall, limp form back to the winery was a harrowing adventure in itself. But with the aid of a threadbare cloak snatched from the garden shed, we disguised him as a drinking companion passed out from a night’s revelry.

  The candles at the old manor house had all been extinguished. Still, I retraced my steps along the dark halls, down the narrow stairs, and through the vast cellar with remarkable ease for one who had only made the journey once before. The door to the Prior’s chamber opened of its own accord as my friend and I approached, and we laid Lumac on the table.

  The Prior offered me his own chair, and as I sat catching my breath I noticed a new personage in the room. This unknown figure stood against the wall to my right, dressed in a black wool doublet and breeches with a matching cloak over all. The deep hood concealed his face.

  Before I could ask about the stranger’s identity, the Prior announced his intention to begin. Eager to obtain the object of my longing at last, I readily agreed.

  The process proved amazingly simple. I sat beside the table where Lumac lay as the Prior performed esoteric motions of his hands and arms synchronized with his breathing. He would consummate each cycle by laying one hand on Lumac and the other on me.

  At first I felt nothing, and I admit to having harbored growing doubts. But after one touch of the Prior’s hand, I felt aches in my muscles and bones, and my clothing became suddenly tight. A while later I risked a look at my hands and saw their former pallor replaced with a warm bronze tan.

  Partway through the process Lumac began to stir, but my friend had already bound him in thick manacles and leg irons. The man on the table kept issuing grunts and groans like one waking from fitful sleep until the Prior finally lowered his hands and stepped around to face me.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to where Lumac lay.

  I did look, and I saw to my horror and delight that it was I who lay in chains upon the table.

  No, I thought, not I. There lies the wretch Janeth Wainlass. That ill-omened name is no longer bound to me!

  To banish all doubt, the Prior drew an octagonal hand mirror from his robe and turned its bright surface toward me. The firm jaw, flinty eyes, and golden hair reflected back at me gave a name to the transcendent joy fountaining up in my soul.

  “I am Marthen Lumac,” I said in a voice like a deep, expertly played woodwind.

  “You possess all of his physical qualities,” the Prior said. “Only one thing is still lacking.”

  The prior turned to the cloaked figure standing against the wall. “Flez, we are ready.”

  Flez advanced from his place at the wall to stand before the Prior, who guided him to the end of the table where Lumac’s—no, Janeth’s, head tossed restlessly. Looking over my shoulder, I saw why Flez had needed a guiding hand when he drew back his hood to reveal cauterized indentations in place of eyes. Wispy hair the color of dirty snow framed a marred face that I recognized as inhuman.

  “You are a Gen!” I exclaimed in my new pleasing baritone. “How do you walk free in a town controlled by the Guild?”

  The Gen ignored me and pressed his gloved hands to Janeth’s temples. My old self’s beady eyes popped open, and his groans became shrieks that my friend muzzled with his cloth.

  My umbrage must have shown, because the Prior said, “Flez cannot answer you. He is a veteran of Annon, and the Guild were not gentle with their prisoners. His eyes were not all they took from him.”

  Revulsion coursed through me. “That is monstrous! Can you not make him whole?”

  “The Guild laid Workings on him to prevent it,” said the Prior. “We work tirelessly for the day when our transessence surpasses the Brotherhood’s. Until then, Flez is pleased to lend us his unique abilities.”

  At these words, the Gen released Janeth’s head and stepped behind my chair. His spidery fingers sought my temples, sending a chill down my spine.

  “What is he about?” I demanded.

  “You have Marthen Lumac’s body,” the Prior explained, “but you
lack his mind. A man’s thoughts and memories are integral to making him who he is.”

  My outrage abated. “This Gen can bestow such intangible gifts?”

  “Indeed,” the Prior said. “Flez wields a power—rare among even his exalted kind—arising not from prana, but from the will and the soul. With it he shall impart to you the contents of Lumac’s mind, and your transformation will be total.”

  I sat back in the chair and tried to relax, but anticipation and anxiety churned the waters of my mind. Into those choppy depths the Gen soon poured a torrent of memories, notions, and impressions. In a moment, the lived experience of another lifetime mingled with that of my life as Janeth. My potent new voice rose in a scream.

  The greatest surprise was learning that Lumac—that I—had not been invulnerable. The new memories brought new fears, insecurities, and vices. Lumac’s confusion about and sporadic resentment toward women took me aback. There were a hundred trivialities that he thought to be of monumental importance, and a few secret lusts that repulsed me.

  Less surprising was Lumac’s disposition toward Janeth. As was the case with his other servants, he’d hardly thought of his librarian at all. But the high regard in which he’d held Janeth’s scholarly expertise on the rare occasions when he had thought of him confounded me.

  No matter. All of that was in the past. I swelled with pride to think that I would be a better Marthen Lumac than the name’s former holder had ever aspired to be.

  I stood and voiced my gratitude as my friend dragged the feebly struggling Janeth toward the far door. A mournful whine emanated through the sturdy wood, but I had already gone before the door was opened.

  The splendor of the next several days exceeded my grandest dreams and passed just as quickly. Invigorated by my second chance at life, I grasped Lumac’s with both hands. I dared what he had not, took the risks he’d avoided; met every challenge.

  As days became weeks and then months, I slowly became aware of a nagging discontent that grew by the hour. The delicacies of Lumac’s table lost their savor. Political jousts with the guildsmen became dull routine. I woke in cold sweats on more nights than not.