by D M Wozniak
Cleanthes begins to laugh as he releases his voidstone, clapping slowly like a madman.
“Oh, this is more fun than I’ve had in years. Two great voiders, testing their powers against each other. I see what you did there, Democryos. Very bold. You risked voideath in order to defend yourself from my attack.”
My legs are weak. I am struggling to stand.
“Did I overcome you?” he asks as he stops clapping.
“I warn you,” I say, ignoring his taunt while I kneel down upon the wooden floor. I make sure that Colu is not directly behind me. I don’t trust him—he could sever my head with that machete before I have a chance to stop him. “I still have enough voidance in me to kill every skullman in this room. And when I am done killing them, I will kill you.”
He looks insulted. “Democryos, you are my guest of honor, not my prisoner. And certainly not my victim.”
He begins to walk slowly toward me.
“Master voider, do you know what you’re doing?” Colu asks me under his breath.
“Yes.”
The brilliance of my prior move is that the dynamic membrane moves with Cleanthes without my having to touch my voidstone again. He looks to both sides and up towards the ceiling, noticing this, and opens his mouth with a look of wonderment.
“Very nice work.”
Once he crosses the room, he suddenly stops in place. It is a calculated move. He is standing only a few feet away from me, the membrane mere inches from my face. It hums with a life of its own.
I clutch the gold sides of my stone in readiness, for if my membrane penetrates me, I will be exposed once again to his power. I’ll be forced to kill him before he kills me.
What is the quickest way? A shot through the heart? No. Too slow. Decapitation? Too slow as well. It needs to be instantaneous. Holes at each end of his skull, and enough pressure to blow his brain matter through, creating a clap of thunder in the room.
Such an act would surely take me into voideath.
But he doesn’t take another step towards me.
Instead, he sits cross-legged on the ground, eye-level with me, and unclasps his necklace, holding it by the chain on his side of the membrane.
His hand shakes.
“You were my teacher once,” he says. Past the humming of the membrane, I barely hear him.
Gone is his bravado. Now, his words are the quietest of whispers, the brushing of hilma bulbs in the wind. “Are you willing to be my teacher again?”
Clearly, he doesn’t want anyone else in the room hearing these words, other than me.
He’s so close to me now that I finally understand his miserable condition. His eyes are yellow, the skin of his hands almost transparent, riddled with sinuous veins. The collarbones of his neck protrude. His teeth are grayish-green.
A rush of feelings course through me. Sympathy, rage, but mostly suspicion. I narrow my eyes, fearing a trap. “What do you wish to learn from me?”
“I want you to teach me to remember,” he says, his voice softly breaking.
“Remember what?”
“How to use voidance.”
When his lips begin to quiver and his yellow eyes become glassy with tears, I know that there is no trap. Madness, perhaps. Tragedy, for certain.
I open my mouth, but no words come out.
Impossibly, Cleanthes has lost the ability to use a voidstone.
I’ve never heard of this happening. The gift is constant, from birth to death. But there is no way the man in front of me is lying. He’s been lying to everyone else, but not to me. Not here. Not now.
I suddenly understand. Everything in this room has been a show, but the audience was not me. It was the other skullmen in the room—the soldiers he commands with a phantom fist. And now, the show has just ended.
He extends his shaking hand through the dynamic membrane and drops his voidstone into my lap. Then he grasps my hand in his.
“Please, master voider. Teach me to remember.”
Gravestones and Moonspit
“I would give anything to feel what you’re feeling now.”
I don’t open my eyes to respond to his ludicrous statement. He’s been carrying on this way for a while now, and I’m too tired from being in the void—both the dynamic membrane I had to create earlier, as well as the healing I did to myself in front of the foyer mirror.
I cannot believe that I exerted myself so unnecessarily. All this time, he was as powerless as a child.
“The coldness,” Cleanthes continues next to me. “The numbness in the fingertips. Is that what you feel?”
“Yes,” I mumble, as I take a deep breath and slink further into the teak bench.
We’re outside in the garden. There are many benches like the one we’re sitting on. Most are in the shade of lemon trees, but I purposely picked this one. It’s been in the sun the entire day, and the heated wood radiates into my body.
“When you take hilma, you get warmer, not colder. That’s why I guess I miss the cold. You would think that wouldn’t be something a voider would miss. But I miss it. Crazy, right?”
The way Cleanthes carries on about trivial things makes me wonder if he is nervous. He knows that serious matters lie ahead. Like the disappearance of his gift, and his addiction.
More laughter from the nearby pool erupts, and I squint my eyes. Past a hedgerow of yews being trimmed by an old man in a straw hat, I see Chimeline on the patio, talking to the other women with a smile upon her face. I can’t hear their conversation, but it’s obvious that they’re joking about something.
Many of the women have clothed themselves with white towels around their tan torsos, and Chimeline has followed suit. A maidservant in formal attire inspects Chimeline’s ripped, lace dress in her hands. She nods, and then walks away with it.
“Tell me what happened in Joscaio,” I say, closing my eyes again.
This shuts him up for a moment.
“It was a disaster from the very beginning,” he eventually says. “Joscaio is only a half-day’s walk from here. When I arrived there, people were taken almost every night by the skullmen at this plantation. They lived in fear, and looked to me as their savior.”
I sit up straighter and reopen my eyes.
“There was already a rogue plantation here?” I indicate with a down-pointed finger, “when you arrived at Joscaio?”
He nods and I shake my head in confusion.
“Cleanthes, this plantation is off Xi Bay Road. It’s impossible not to miss.”
He flashes a green smile. “Good for business.”
“That’s the thing. This place surely was a royal plantation at one time. It was His Majesty’s property.”
He motions to the mansion. “You’re correct. There are old records signed by the king’s delegate. Production numbers. Transactions to some of the hospitals the university set up. Very thorough bookkeeping.”
“So what happened? How did it get into rogue hands?”
He purses his lips. “I don’t know. Maybe the kingdom abandoned it due to the war effort?”
I don’t answer.
“Soldiers pass by weekly. They never give me any trouble. They’re some of my best customers, actually.”
I clear both my throat and my mind. “So, they were taking people when you arrived?”
“Yeah. The skullmen scouted the village during the day, then came back at night. They knew the exact people they were looking for. The exact huts. They only took the healthy adults. Both women and men. They left the older ones and the children behind.”
I shake my head.
“The skullmen put them to work,” he points to the fields in the distance, past the pool. “Well, most of them, that is.”
“Most of them?”
“He kept some of the women here. You see those girls by the pool?”
I stay silent.
“The strong men became skullmen. The others, they worked the fields.”
“And none tried to escape?”
He crac
ks his knuckles. “Most people had family back in Joscaio. A son or daughter. Father or mother. Brother or sister.”
“You mean he threatened them.”
He nods as he continues to fidget, nervously tapping his hand against his knee. “When I arrived, this is what I had to deal with. This is the mess you threw me into.”
“I had no idea.”
“The citadel is far from here. How could you?”
I sigh, wondering if he’s being truthful or providing me veiled sarcasm.
I turn my body on the bench to face him as I try to read his body language. But the moment I do, I forget my intent and instead am overcome with pity.
In the harsh light of day, he looks worse than before. Beneath his red-orange paint, which is dry and flaking, I can tell that his cheeks go inward. I have the feeling that even if a skull weren’t painted on his face, he would still look like a skeleton. His yellow eyes fixate at nothing in the distance, and he whispers something to himself, his entire body softly rocking back and forth.
“You asked me to help you,” I say.
With these words, his whispers cease and his bony hand claws at my arm. “Will you? Will you teach me, as you once did?”
I take a deep breath, as I struggle to formulate a strategy. This is Cleanthes, one of my best students. I remember when he came to the university as a young, lanky teen. A bright spark of idealism and talent. I honed him into the best of voiders. I nurtured his gift, challenged him with tests to the point of tears, made him grow from a boy into a man.
And then I sent him to Joscaio.
I cannot help but feel somewhat responsible for his predicament. He's right, at least in this regard. I threw him to the wolves.
But on the other hand, I cannot endorse the operation of this illegal plantation. Nor leaving a voider in charge of it.
"Before I help you, I need to understand what you are doing here.”
“Ask me anything.”
“Let’s start with how you became the new redskull.”
His body goes completely still for a brief moment, before the fidgeting returns.
“It was easy,” he shrugs. “I dyed my hair black and pretended to be a man on their list.”
“What do you mean?”
“This guy in Joscaio. They came for him one night, but he was passed out drunk in the middle of the road, so they missed him the first time around. The next night, he and I switched places. I slept in his hut until they came for him. When they took me, I waited until I was brought to the redskull, then I used my voidstone.”
I raise my eyebrow. “You killed him?”
“I had to protect my people.”
I nod.
“It didn’t end with him. I had to dispose of some of the skullmen too. Nobody from Joscaio, of course. When they realized how much power I had, they quickly fell in line. Before I knew it, I went from being an intruder to becoming their leader.”
I clear my throat. “I see.”
“All of these people,” he waves his hand around at the pool in the distance. “They are my family. And despite what you may think, I have given them a much better life here than what they had before.”
My eyes narrow, wondering if this is perception or reality. Based on his body language, he obviously believes it. The question is, do the rest of his people believe it?
“Can you expound on that?”
He leans forward on the bench. “Are you strong enough to walk?”
I ponder his question, and then nod. My strength is returning.
“Then come,” he adds, extending a shaking hand covered in sweat, which I take. “I will show you.”
I follow him down a narrow, sandy path, through a garden full of low lemon trees and arborvitae. A ways in the distance, I see the same white barn from when we arrived, where I presume our horses are being kept.
The path curves around the corner of the mansion and goes through tall grasses and blue flowers, which are not hilma. There are more older men here, silently pruning trees and bushes. Butterflies dance in the late afternoon air, and we enter through a stone archway into perfect shade of the millionescents. It’s a formal design—dozens of them planted in perfect succession. They form a square about fifty yards in size, four walls of glittering gold higher than the First Ring of the citadel.
It feels as though I am entering a massive room with a ceiling painted as the sky.
I take my attention off of the dizzying heights and surrounding wall of trees, and instead look at what’s enclosed within this private place.
Headstones.
We’re walking through a graveyard.
In the distant corner I see the effulgent kneel down upon the mossy ground. A gray, hooded form that, had I not known any better, I would have assumed a statue.
“These unmarked ones predate me,” Cleanthes says quietly. “The former redskull never bothered to mark them. I’m actually surprised that he even buried these people at all. He was an evil man.”
We slowly walk past two rows of dirt mounds, five on each side of the center path. Twenty bodies altogether. And all the while, I am focused on his comment: He was an evil man.
Doesn’t Cleanthes realize that he is the new redskull? Somehow, he has compartmentalized what has happened. Justified to himself that he can take an evil man’s place without himself turning evil.
At the third row of mounds, the headstones begin.
“There’s a pile of fieldstone stacked in the barn,” Cleanthes says, and he continues to walk slowly ahead of me down the center path. “I used to work on the headstones myself, back when I could see the void.”
I look at the mounds of moss-covered dirt next to me, names on each one of their markers, in perfect lettering.
One of them simply says “Redskull.”
“You buried these people? And marked their graves?”
“Yes.”
“That was decent of you,” I say.
He ignores my compliment, and points with a shaking hand. “This group right here, these were the skullmen I told you about,” he adds quietly. “The ones I had to kill.”
In the distance, I see the effulgent lower his hood.
“I don’t judge you for that,” I say. “I was forced to defend myself against three of your skullmen. On the road, just before coming here. They were going to harm my companion.”
He looks up at me with a surprising lack of emotion. “The ones with Colu?” he asks.
I nod.
“None of them were from Joscaio. They were probably traitors.”
“Traitors?”
He ignores me, instead passing up another ten graves or so until we reach a new section which is very close to where the effulgent is kneeling. These are more recent. The stones are a different shade of blue-gray.
“Here are my people. Most of these came from Joscaio.”
I count the mounds in front of us. Three rows, five on each side of the center path. A total of twenty-seven.
“There’s a lot of dead here, Cleanthes,” I utter.
He nods once. “I know. It’s more than I anticipated.”
I look sideways at him as he exhales and shakes both of his arms loosely at his sides, looking up into the square patch of sky far above. And for the first time, I seriously wonder if he is entirely sane.
“Many are skullmen,” he says.
“Why did they die?”
“Prainise,” he only says as he looks back down, his gray-green teeth closed together.
“Colu mentioned that place. He said it was dangerous.”
“There’s another field there. They mostly stay away, but I know that a few traitors remain within my family. Weeds that I have not yet pulled. I can never let my guard down.”
“You keep mentioning traitors.”
He walks to the foot of one grave, and looks solemnly down to a headstone that simply reads Terstine.
“Not all of them are men. They sent an assassin from Scorpiontail, to poison me,” he says quietly.
“It didn’t work.”
He looks at me with eyes that are almost the color of the millionescent trees beyond. “So, you see, it’s not my fault.”
I point to the next row, where the effulgent is praying. “Were these natural deaths?”
He slowly rolls his head in a circle. “Those were thieves.”
“Thieves,” I repeat levelly.
“Some of the workers in my fields try to partake in the pipe. Smuggle bulbs in their clothing and cook it on their own. I have to put a stop to it.”
He stops talking suddenly, and then looks up into the square of blue sky again. “I’m not an evil person.”
“I never said that you were,” I say.
“You don’t have to, master voider. I see the way you look at me with your white eyes. So white they’re purer than new-fallen snow. The way you’re looking at all of my dead, as if I killed them.”
But you did kill them.
He flexes his fists at his sides.
“They broke the rules!” he shouts. “And the rules are meant to protect the student body. Isn’t that always what you said?”
I blink my eyes, struggling to understand why Cleanthes is bringing up my teaching methods from the past. Even the effulgent raises his head, confusion upon his shadowed face.
“Yes, but I never killed my students if they broke the rules,” I say after a pause. “I only expelled them.”
“To a voider, there’s no difference. Many days, I think I’d rather be dead.”
He eventually takes another few steps, moving very slowly, turning his head in each direction as if he’s reading the individual names on the stone markers. I see his lips moving as he whispers to himself.
That’s when I realize that the writing on the stones progressively get worse in quality.
The second row’s headstones are similar to the first. Clean cuts, perfect letters, straight lines and graceful curves.
But then, grave by grave, the inscriptions begin to become unreadable. Almost like a child’s handwriting.