by Logan Jacobs
“I’m not bringing him back,” Vera exclaimed incredulously. “Is that what you thought?”
“Oh, how foolish of me, can’t imagine where I got that idea.” I looked pointedly at the scaly colossus that had finally managed to right itself. It seemed to have control of all its limbs again now that Vera’s spell had taken full effect, but its horned and crested head drooped down limply to its chest, so evidently the neck that I had broken using its own collar had not been repaired.
“Neither can I,” Vera said seriously. “That’s not possible. I am merely commandeering the body.”
“What exactly do you mean to do with it?” I asked.
“Take it for a ride,” Vera replied.
“You could have just asked me, you know,” Theo said.
“Can you jump these walls?” Vera asked him, rhetorically. No horse could.
“Oh hell,” I said as I realized what she had in mind. I looked over to the canopied spectators’ box where Gorander appeared to be conferring with his attendant demons.
“If he releases any more monsters, just outrun them, and we’ll come back for you as soon as we can,” Vera instructed Theo.
“Oh hell,” Theo said.
“All right, let’s giddy up then,” I sighed.
Vera and I approached the armored beast. As we did, it knelt for us. So I guess she really was controlling it somehow. I couldn’t imagine how much magical energy that must have required from her. It surely wasn’t sustainable for long. But that was just fine. We only had one task to get done.
Vera climbed up in front of me, onto the creature’s shoulders, and gripped the spines along its back to hold herself in place. I did the same from behind her. Since the creature’s head drooped below us, we had a completely unobstructed view of what lay ahead. Which was the canopied box, across the arena from us.
“Ready?” Vera asked me.
“Hell yes,” I replied, because what else was I going to say?
The dead monster charged. As it sped up and reached a full-fledged gallop, I felt as though I were riding upon the back of an earthquake. The raw power was exhilarating. The cadence of its feet striking the ground punched through our bodies like a drumbeat. We approached the wall below the canopy where Gorander was waiting, at such a breakneck speed that there was no longer any choice of stopping. With seconds left before impact, I recognized that we weren’t going to make it. There was no way in hell that any creature, even some kind of nightmare sorcery-fueled one, could clear the height of the stone wall that was, after all, built precisely to keep its kind down in the pit, separated from the spectators. This wasn’t how I had ever pictured my death, but at least it wouldn’t be a dull one.
Then, at the last possible second, the monster made its leap. I was flying. I was weightless. My mind sort of disengaged from the situation for a moment. The impossibly tall stone wall in front of us-- the scaled and spiny, heroically athletic corpse beneath us-- Vera with her raven tresses whipping out into the air, and her limbs flung out as if she were floating, as if she were an angel or a ghost-- all of these things seemed like separate facts in their own right, separate miracles, each deserving of my lingering appreciation. Time slowed as I dreamily contemplated them, without really considering the relationship between them.
Then, the monster landed its jump, which brought it crashing down squarely in the middle of the sorcerer’s canopied box, and jolted me back to earth, so to speak.
Several of the demons were immediately crushed beneath its bulk. The monster, under Vera’s guidance, deliberately proceeded to trample over others, which smeared black pools of maggots across the floor.
I could see that Gorander, however, was running to exit the box, with his attendants closing ranks behind him. I guess he hadn’t expected us to make the jump either. And before that, he probably hadn’t expected us to resurrect his horned monster. And before that, he probably hadn’t expected us to survive its attack and kill it instead. Now, I guess, he felt about the same way I had in the maze which was that he wanted to put a safe distance between us and reconsider his options.
But that wasn’t a chance he had given me, and it wasn’t a chance I was about to give him.
I flung myself off the monster’s armored back in a somersault, landed in a crouch before the pair of robed demons guarding Gorander’s back, sprang up and executed a half spin that dragged my sword through both of their bellies. Black insects started to crawl from the resulting slits as I shoved my way through them, and then I plunged my sword up to the hilt between Gorander’s shoulder blades.
“So glad you could make it in person,” I said as I relished the resistance of solid flesh that my sword met with. “I was half afraid you’d be a mere illusion. That would have been the cleverer move, don’t you reckon? But I suppose illusion is more Vera’s specialty than yours. You mustn’t blame yourself for falling victim to her charms. Far wiser men than you have done the same, and will do the same when your corpse lies rotting.”
I released my grip on the hilt and let Gorander fall to his knees. I walked around to look him in the face. He clutched weakly at the silver blade protruding from his chest. His face was dreadfully contorted, whether in fear or pain I wasn’t sure. I guess he didn’t have a magic spell to heal a mortal wound. He opened his mouth and blood dribbled down his chin as he croaked out a word. “… Mausoleum.”
“What was that?” I asked curiously.
“Maus… lee… ” the sorcerer’s mouth worked frantically, but no more sound came out. Then his features went slack, and he toppled over, dead, in a graceless pile of gold and purple.
“Mausoleum,” Vera explained as she walked up to join me. “He wants to be buried in the mausoleum that he built for himself. Very grand affair. Lots of marble, gold, ornate carvings, you know. A mausoleum fit for an emperor. But there won’t be many historically momentous deeds to record on the blank plaque that he incorporated for that purpose.”
“That was his last request?” I asked with a bit of amusement. “To have his narcissistic choice of burial place?”
“Sure was.”
“Well, I don’t see the harm in it,” I said. “I guess I’d rather have him tucked away cozily in his pretty little mausoleum than just about anywhere else in this world.”
I turned to see the colossal reptilian corpse that Vera had abandoned, not just by dismounting, but by ceasing the spell that had temporarily restored movement to its limbs. It lay surrounded by the wreckage of Gorander’s spectator box. The corpses of several of the grub-like, spindly toothed demons were strewn around it. However, I also saw some red-cloaked figures still upright. And they were not mourning their dead master, nor their dead fellows, nor were they descending upon Vera and me for vengeance. Instead, they were simply floating away, across the benches, with the apparent intention of leaving the arena altogether. They moved slowly, calmly, and without any appearance of fear, so although technically they were fleeing, they didn’t really look like it.
“Where are they going?” I asked Vera.
“Who knows?” she replied indifferently. “They won’t trouble these parts anymore. None of this was their idea, you know. Gorander summoned them. He didn’t create them, and they weren’t inherently loyal to him. Just bound to him by sorcery. But now that he is dead, they have no further stake in the mortal realm.”
I nodded. That was good news. “Well then, I guess we’d better go help Theo out of that pit.”
Once we had, we both mounted up on his back, and he carried us out of the sorcerer’s palace. The view from outside was quite different from what it had been like when we entered. A significant part of the hedge maze had burned down. Other parts had simply vanished as if they had never been there at all, which I inferred that they never really had. It was the same with the palace itself. It had far fewer turrets and domes. Many of those that remained were stubbier or spindlier than they had appeared to the eye before. There were large gaps in the palace’s construction. In some places there w
as still wooden scaffolding. In some places there were wooden or brick walls where there had formerly appeared to be ones of the finest marble. It was still a massive and impressive work of architecture, to be sure. But a flawed and extensively incomplete one.
“So the palace was a lie,” I remarked to Vera. One that she’d helped to sustain.
“Not a lie,” she corrected me. “A dream. Made visible.”
Well, that was fair enough. I didn’t necessarily blame Gorander for all the things he’d wanted. But I sure as hell did blame him for the ways he’d tried to get them.
Then I noticed that there were people milling about the ruins of the partial palace. They looked extremely lost and bewildered. One of the nearest, a woman dressed as a maid, approached and stared up at us.
“You… look familiar,” she whispered finally to Vera. A puzzled frown furrowed her brow. She wasn’t being sarcastic or coy. She really didn’t quite remember how she recognized Vera, who had been the lady of the palace where she had been enslaved for the past half a year. I guessed it was probably for the better if these poor townspeople’s recent memories stayed hazy. That would make it easier for them to return to their previous untroubled lives. More or less, anyway. It wouldn’t be exactly the same around here, now that the village of Fairhollow seemed to have been razed to the ground, and replaced by an extravagant half-finished palace and a potencium mine.
“Do I?” Vera asked nonchalantly as she tossed back her long black hair.
“But I don’t recognize you, sir,” the young woman said as she turned her bewildered blue eyes to me.
“You ought to,” Vera said sternly.
By this point, more of the recently liberated former townsfolk of Fairhollow were starting to gather around us in a crowd. They all seemed quite dazed and unsure of themselves. But I guess they instinctively gravitated toward the two of us, either simply because the fact that we were atop a large black horse made us particularly visible, or because maybe they, like the first young woman, at least dimly recognized Vera, one half of their pair of tormentors. Or maybe just because the pair of us weren’t half bad to look at.
“Why?” the young woman asked curiously.
“Because he is your savior,” Vera replied simply.
“Savior from what exactly?” the woman asked. “Heavens, I don’t know what’s wrong with me… I can’t seem to remember… I don’t know how I ended up here, I don’t recognize this place at all. I don’t think I belong here. The last thing I remember, I was going to the milliner… I wanted a new ribbon for my hat, that’s all… a pretty purple one.”
“He rescued you from enslavement,” Vera answered. “All of you.”
There was a lot of murmuring among the crowd. They didn’t so much seem to affirm her words as a known truth, as accept them as a plausible theory.
“I remember darkness, and digging,” one man offered. “I was so sore and so tired all the time. I don’t know what I was digging for. I just know that I wasn’t allowed to stop.”
Others who had presumably been employed in Gorander’s potencium mine at some point chimed in to voice similar recollections.
“But why can’t we remember any of it clearly?” a boy of about ten whimpered. “Why were we doing these things, if we didn’t even understand them? Who would do something like this to us?”
“An evil sorcerer called Gorander,” Vera replied. I guess she had decided to just tell them the truth, while of course conveniently omitting her own role in it. “He enslaved you all for his own purposes. Do you see this palace? Do you see the mine over there? He created all of this, and he used you all to keep it running. You used to live in a pretty, peaceful town called Fairhollow. Do you remember it? Probably not yet, but you will, soon enough. Well, you are free now. Free to return to your lives. Free to build new lives even better than your former ones. You can take the scraps of this palace and make yourselves new houses. Or you could try to complete the palace and live inside of it. And you will find treasure inside of it too.”
“All I remember are the demons with white faces, and long teeth,” a young woman whispered, a different one than the girl who had first approached us. “I knew that if I made a mistake, they would eat me. I do not remember what my job was. I only know that I had to do it perfectly… ”
Other townsfolk remarked on their own impressions of the demons, and discussing it seemed to reassure them in a way, because it proved that the horrors they vaguely remembered had been witnessed by others, had been real.
“Well, that is all behind you now,” Vera announced with an impatient wave of her hand. I guess she had no intention of staying here and trying to run the ruins of Gorander’s empire that had never been, but she also didn’t seem particularly repentant about having participated in his scheme to begin with. She simply intended to move on from the whole episode, as freely as a tumbleweed, and expected the townsfolk to do the same. “You are free men and women now. Thanks to this man.”
“Who are you?” a woman asked me.
“Halston Hale,” I answered, with a tip of my hat. “The greatest mercenary the West has ever known.”
“If it’s really true… that you saved us… ” a man began hesitantly, “how can we ever repay you, sir?”
At hearing those magical words, a broad grin spread across my face.
“Don’t you worry,” I replied. “I’ll write you up an itemized bill for my services.”
Epilogue
The warmth and brightness of the sunlight on my face gradually woke me. I yawned and stretched. I looked out the open window directly across from the bed and saw the town of Bluegarden spread out before me like a dusty, twinkling mirage. I could even see some of their namesake cacti, all still barren of their unusually vibrant flowers. Theo had single handedly taken the blue out of Bluegarden. Fortunately, I don’t think they realized who the culprit was and hadn’t raised any objection when the three of us had ridden back into town and rented a room at the inn for the night.
I turned my head to look over at Vera lying beside me. I couldn’t see her face at the moment, actually, because half of it was mashed into the pillow and her wild mass of black hair covered the other half. But I knew from experience that she tended to grimace and gnash her teeth and twitch her eyelids in her sleep, not to mention thrash her limbs around. She was an extremely restless sleeper. I didn’t know whether it was her past crimes that haunted her dreams, or all the even more ambitious ones that she hadn’t yet managed to execute, but I suspected it was the latter.
The half-Savajun sorceress’ beautiful, enigmatic face was the only part of her that I couldn’t see at the moment, though. She had kicked off the covers and her naked body was splayed out unselfconsciously, her ribs rising and falling with her gentle breaths. Every luscious golden brown inch of it was worthy of study. And not just visual study, but physical exploration. From what I could tell, her body hadn’t changed a single bit since the last time I had enjoyed it several years ago. That probably had somewhat to do with self-disciplined habits of exercise and diet, and somewhat to do with sorcery. But either way, the familiarity of its curvaceous contours hadn’t made it any less thrilling than the first time Vera ever gave herself to me.
My most recent list of grievances against the scheming and manipulative sorceress hadn’t spoiled the experience either. I had taken her pretty roughly to begin with, partly out of the physical desperation that had been building up in me ever since I laid eyes on her in that throne room seated beside Gorander, and partly to remind her that, no matter how powerful in magic she grew, I was still the one in charge. And then, later on throughout the night, when I fucked her again and again, sometimes I’d find myself grabbing her so hard or hammering into her so forcefully that I realized I was probably at least a little bit expressing my rage at her sense of entitlement to my life. Her delusion of owning me. But, of course, she considered those kinds of reactions to be more of a reward than a punishment, so it wasn’t a power play that I could ever exac
tly win, regardless of my physical dominance.
There was one way, and one way only, that I could truly assert my power over Vera, and no matter what, I was never, ever going to let her know how much it cost me each time.
I carefully slid out from the sweat-soaked bed, hunted down my clothes from where they were strewn across the floor, and quietly put them on. I buckled my belt. I shook each of my boots to check for scorpions and pulled on the right one, and then the left one. I tugged my hat down to perch at the exact right angle on my brow.
“You’re leaving me already?” Vera’s voice floated over from the bed just as I performed that last gesture. The timing was so exact that I knew immediately she had been watching me get dressed the entire time.
“You’re an intelligent woman, I’m sure you can draw your own conclusions,” I replied.
“Very well,” she said as she sat up in bed, cocked her head, and gazed at me steadily with an unreadable expression. It was hard not to notice how full and pert her breasts were, and the way her cross-legged position split her pussy open. But I’d already indulged in her charms as much as was good for me. Anything more would be letting her win. “Go on then, keep wearing out that poor beast’s hooves tromping through the dust from one godforsaken outpost to the next. It doesn’t really matter how far you go, or what you do along the way. Because you and I are destined for each other. You can never escape me, Hal. Don’t you understand that by now?”
“Well, I can sure as hell try,” I shrugged.
“Will you never forgive me?”
“It’s not a matter of forgiving, Vera,” I said. “It’s not a matter of morality or grudges. That doesn’t mean any more to me than it does to you. But, I’m not enough of a fool to ever forget the things you’ve done and tried to do to me. And I’m not enough of a fool to discount the sky high probability, based on extensive past experience, of you trying the same shit all over again the first chance you get. You don’t respect my wishes, so we can’t be together. Except carnally.”