INTERLUDE 9B: A FIEND REVEALED
“In an infinite plenitude, each combination of events must play itself out an infinite number of times. It is a basic tenet of sorcerous calculation that some infinities can be larger than others. If chosen at random, one would be far likelier to encounter a Mund ruled by Lady Sentelemeth with a given-name slightly different to Twivona than, say, a Mund with a ghost for a First Lady. Yet in many more of those worlds there will be no Mund at all; and in others, perhaps, no world. For we know not all the various permutations, all the probable possibilities, all the improbable necessities. Or perhaps realms ruled by ghosts are indeed far likelier than I have the imagination to conceive. No, I will not say do not laugh – but I do not speak in jest! All that can be said for sure is this: if there is an infinite plenitude, even the least-likely course of events will occur and reoccur for time unending. Those bound to such a world may not even find it strange. Nay! they would not. Say not ‘may’! Worlds wherein hawks have no feathers. Worlds wherein each of us in this room is slightly older or younger, with histories that differ by so little as a single hair on our heads, or where we indeed have two heads apiece. Wherein the planes are curtailed by divine mandate and magic is lost to we ‘mere mortals’, forever out of reach.”
– from Mistress Arithos’s Lectures to the Adept Assembly
How it’d started, Jakur wasn’t a hundred percent sure. Was it the booze? The heat? The sense of ever-increasing panic as the days ticked by on the calendar, leaving the city waiting, waiting for the end to come?
How quickly he and Fay fell for one another?
All of it had played a role, he suspected. He’d just been a normal shift manager four weeks ago. Gods, had it only been four weeks! So much had changed. His highest high had been throwing his wages away in the pub; he’d spent every waking hour not put into Hilltown’s forges into wooing the various barmaids at the Turtle’s Shell. The tavern had been a second home to him since the day of his fifteenth birthday, with his uncle behind the bar… So many memories. He’d practically grown up in that run-down, beer-soaked collection of rooms.
How sad it seemed, looking back now. He was a different man, but why had it taken him till his fifties? What had his paltry existence been worth, even to him? Anyone could do his job – a zombie could’ve been ensorcelled to do his job, if only his staff could’ve been persuaded to take its mumblings seriously. And the Shell didn’t need his patronage. If anything, the delightful wenches were probably glad to see the back of him. He’d been a serial harasser. A complete waste of space.
It was okay. He’d found a new source of satisfaction. A place he’d never feel disposable ever again.
There were some feelings you could just put aside, leave out the back door of your mind for the rats to eat. There were the feelings you could put aside for a bit – for a year or a month, a day or an hour – before you just had to pull them back inside the walls of your mind, consider them a second time, or a second-thousandth. Then there were the feelings you couldn’t control. They stripped the walls and repainted them, and, when the internal space was found lacking, knocked them down and rebuilt them brick by brick until the layout of the whole house was different.
This had been one of the latter sort. A feeling that replaced all the former doubts and insecurities, wiping them away to a point of tranquil acceptance.
A belief.
“Everseer is the truth we know,” he murmured, looking out over the assemblage. “Everseer is the punishment we deserve. She is the one, the almighty, and we bow before her knife like the calf before the altar.”
In the silence, they heard.
“Everseer, we bow before you,” came the hushed chorus from the crowd.
Forty-eight, he’d counted. It was hard to believe that there were almost fifty of them now, and the congregation only grew week on week. Soon this abandoned house would be too cramped to suit their needs, for all its generous proportions. They’d need to find a real hall to meet in. And they’d need to bring more candles…
More candles!
The high priest of the Church of Everseer smiled. The little things the mind seized on.
“You bring us the truth, when all they bring is lies.” Jakur was still speaking quietly, but the crowd drank in his face, his voice. “The truth about the dragons. The truth about destiny. About death. Your blade is our promise.”
“Everseer, we promise,” they replied.
It felt good – better than just good. He couldn’t deny it: there was a certain ecstasy to it. An exhilaration not to be found even in the solace of a lover’s arms. That was just the adoration of one. This was a different kind of give and take, something he’d never anticipated. He’d been no one. Now he got to see it, all those eyes, fixated upon him. He turned slowly with the rhythm of his words and spread his arms as if to embrace them. They responded physically, some of them taking an unconscious half-step towards him as he gestured.
It felt even better at this point of the meeting. He’d gotten the difficult bit out of the way, the little speech his new girlfriend had rewritten for him. Memorising stuff was difficult, but it was starting to flow better now. He’d get more used to it. He was the high priest, after all.
The crowd certainly didn’t seem to mind the religious tone of Fay’s words. Maybe he’d add a third bit next time.
“We will continue our good work.” He spoke more loudly, fervently now. “In your name, we will sow disorder! We will encourage those who stay to leave in every way we can. We are your sacrificial lambs. For every one of us whose head you take, fifty more will be gone from here before you draw your knife!”
“Yes!” they cried.
“But how will you achieve it?” Jakur suddenly adopted a paternal frown, raised a finger of admonishment on his right hand. “This week, I broke the Freethinker’s forge! Seventy-seven men and dwarves out of work! How many will stay and how many will go? You! What have you done for Everseer?”
He pointed the finger directly at Edmin, a short, white-skinned man he knew to be one of his most-devout followers.
“I smashed the shop-fronts on Brownway!” Edmin cried. “They don’t know what hit ‘em!”
Jakur gestured at a hooded, haggard crone in the middle of the group, someone he’d seen twice before.
“You! What have you done?”
Let’s test them.
“I smeared drop on the doors of two lords!” she cackled.
Jakur smiled.
He pointed to Fay in the front row. She looked so beautiful tonight, in a scarf of purple velvet. Her grey-blond hair was down, her smooth skin gleaming.
“And you?” he cried.
“I poisoned the well on Porkie Square. It took them ten hours to find out what’d happened, and by then six were already dead.” She was good at this routine; she almost seemed to enjoy her moment in the spotlight, for all her prior protests. “One family left the next morning. One more’s going soon.”
The mood of the crowd wavered on the razor’s edge with that. The newest members were paling – all but the skinny, thin-lipped young thing at Fay’s elbow. Her eyes were gleaming with adoration at Jakur’s girlfriend, for all that they stared out of sunken sockets.
‘Girlfriend.’ He’d have to come up with a better way of thinking about their relationship. It felt like an affront to the gods, when both of them had more grey in their hair than anything else. Yet, there was the girlish thing about her that’d attracted him to her in the first place. He hadn’t felt the swell of genuine attraction in a long time, until he met her. They weren’t really lovers yet, so he couldn’t think of her in those terms. Partner? It seemed equally strange, for such a new bond, whatever the strength of its hold over him.
Like all things, it would soon come to an End. Abrupt, and painful, and necessary. He knew this now, understood it as no other might.
“Peace be with the dead,” Jakur intoned, “as it shall be with us, brothers and sisters. We will know peace, in the end. Our souls will be satisfied. We’ll sit at the side of Everseer, in Celestium, forevermore, and know we’ve done right.”
That sounded religious, but it was simply the way he felt. He’d promised himself he’d always speak the truth, when he was up here like this, standing on the slightly-elevated hearth stones before the abandoned fireplace at the front of the room, the sea of enraptured faces glued to his words. He felt Everseer’s purpose, right down deep in the marrow of his bones. Thinking about it – the End, the End of All Things – it made his legs turn to jelly, made him smile like a baby.
It was the quiet, metallic voice from behind him that caught him off-guard. No one was supposed to be behind him, but that wasn’t the most shocking thing.
“Zi dwes grel, kasena o Mekesta.”
Jakur whipped about and stared in stupefaction along with the others as the speaker stepped forth from the shadows in the corner of the room. It seemed almost to carry the darkness with it, so black was its complexion.
The intruder was akin to the weapon-formed demons, creatures he’d seen in an Incursion once, the ones with the awful clock-like faces – though its anatomy was far less crude than theirs had been. He would’ve almost thought it humanoid, if not for its seven-foot height and commensurate broadness. The obsidian sword-blades, axe-heads and knives making up its naked, pitch-black body had been fitted together almost seamlessly like the ancient walls in Oldtown, lending it the appearance of true, fleshly life even as it moved. The hair-thin lines between its sheets of metallic skin were the only real way Jakur could track it with his eyes; the sheen of its incandescent orange interior seeped through as a dull glow tracing every serrated edge, every jagged hook.
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It was only ten feet from him. His instinct was to shuffle back, put some distance between himself and the thing… but at the same time he felt compelled to stand his ground.
Instinct fought and lost. The soles of his feet were fixed in place. Muscles refused to stir at terror’s behest.
A few near the rear screamed, somehow shattering the demon’s aura of paralysis and breaking away from the frozen crowd toward the external door at the back of the room, their boots thumping the bare boards of the floor.
Yells of desperation became frustration, despair, when they found the door locked, the bolts designed to protect them from discovery now the tools of their imprisonment, the metal bars no less paralysed than the majority of the room’s occupants.
He understood that this was a native of hell, a visitor from the darkest imaginable depths; yet Jakur couldn’t deny his fascination. He was still staring, trying to perceive the exact physical nature of this thing slowly approaching, trying to understand…
Why here? Why now? What did it say about Mekesta?
It held out its hand, a cluster of daggers and long, crooked pins; and yet the fingertips and palm seemed like they should almost be smooth to the touch.
It slowly extended one of those fingers, pointing, and for a heart-stopping moment Jakur almost thought it was pointing at him –
“Everseer,” he breathed.
The angular finger settled and, somehow, the knowledge that he wasn’t its target released his limbs from the spell. He shuddered out of the way, managing to stumble an inch or two to his left, and the entity’s arm never wavered.
Behind him, a female voice choked forth a string of vile noises.
He ripped his eyes away to follow the line of its finger… only to see Fay’s mouth opening and closing on the strange words, the hollow sounds that could only be the markers of a dark language.
“Zi zlond dwa zi’so ru ikasene o Mekesta, kasena o Yane.”
Yane…
She was staring back at this manifestation of Infernum without flinching; if anything, she seemed to have drawn herself up taller.
Laughter of a kind bubbled forth from the beast’s indiscernible lips, a clicking sound like the rustling of a swarm of beetles –
And then with a horrific whoosh it lunged right past Jakur, crashing into the midst of the crowd, bowling aside the high priest’s followers like pieces on a game board.
Half the candles in the area were extinguished instantly.
There in the centre of the room it halted again, looming in its deepened darkness, bathed in the screams of its audience. The creature had covered at least twenty feet of distance within an eyeblink, and it stood now well beyond the space Fay had previously occupied.
Fay!
The suddenness of the motion was horrifying enough – the casual way it stopped was worse.
Jakur swayed for a moment, glued to the spot, watching in fascination as arcs of blood trailed visibly through the candlelit air, tracing the bodies of those who’d been tossed about the room.
Are they – dead –
Fay…?
The fiend had struck so many of his admirers in a single movement, he had no way to pick his girlfriend from them.
“Stop,” came Fay’s voice from behind him, augmented horribly in both volume and sheer authority.
Yes, they’d somehow traded places. He looked back towards the corner and she was there.
B-b-but… how…
Everything about her had been transformed. What the fiend had done to her – Jakur couldn’t say. The shadows made it difficult to tell exactly how she’d changed, but she was taller.
Much taller.
She seemed to extend up the wall and across the ceiling, her whole physical form distorted, as if he were peering at her through the bottom of a glass pint-jar.
The high priest gasped, and took a step towards her involuntarily, raising his hand in a gesture devoid of anything but sentiment; but then she spoke again, and the words brought him shuddering once more to a halt.
He didn’t matter. Only two of them in the room mattered, now. Everyone else in here was just an extra in a play.
He was one of the meaningless ones once more.
“Still your blades, servant of the Son of Despair. I have a better offer for you than blood. These people are more useful alive than dead, at least for now.”
It gave no immediately reply. The darkness of the tall figure was belied by the molten lines, and Jakur noted the small gesture as at last it seemed to shrug in response.
“I must take those who attempted to flee,” it said, still quiet, the metal sheen of its voice giving the impression of a razor-blade tongue flicking against needle-like teeth. The radiance of the creature’s burning innards leaked from its lipless mouth, but the glow was too incandescent for even Jakur, well-used to the brightness of hot forges, to make out its fangs. “I must.”
He didn’t want to see its teeth – certainly didn’t want to feel them, slicing effortlessly through his body – and yet, there it was: the fascination…
“Very well.” The tremendous Fay-shadow seemed to sigh. “No more than seven.”
The pact was quietly sealed:
“My gratitude.”
The servant of Yane prowled towards the back of the room, fearful cultists melting out of its path – those at the rear wall beat against the bricks with their fists, but it was futile. The demon set about its work, to the accompaniment of a series of raw, ripping sounds, like whole sheets of cloth being torn in two. The creature was brutally efficient. Bodies were scattered around in the wake of its metal tornado – presumably seven of them, although it was impossible for anyone save perhaps Fay to tell.
At one point Jakur thought he saw it pause in its malevolent haste just for a moment: there were a dozen limbs unfolding and snapping into place, swords and bitter-edged axes, all hidden away inside each of the two arms hanging from its shoulders. The plethora of weaponry was as swiftly unsheathed as it seemed to be sheathed once more, leaving the high priest of Everseer floundering, wondering whether what he thought he’d seen was real.
He turned away from the savagery.
“So this is your true face,” he said softly, hoarsely.
He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The distended shadow of Fay, all that remained of her, reached down to him. Her fingers, her sleeve, formed from pure absence – they stretched out, taking shape in spite of the bitter candlelight.
It should’ve been impossible – it was impossible – but he had to believe what he was seeing. It was happening.
“I would’ve told you, Jakur,” came the shadow’s husky voice, remnants of Fay’s accent still there in the distorted sound. “But I’m all about secrets.”
She stepped fully into the light, and her dress was a gown, a flickering column of black flame, atop which her face appeared like a flat grey orb, hardly touched by the candles’ warm hues. Her hair rose up, spreading across the ceiling, a nest of dark vipers climbing into the air in salutation of the midnight hour.
Jakur shuddered to his knees in absolute, heart-clenching dread.
What have I done?
If he’d known – if there’d been some way to tell Fay was this divine creature, this holiest of unholy things – if he’d been able to pay the proper respect before…
“G-give,” he stammered, “give me another chance – please! I promise… I promise I won’t fail you again.”
“On the contrary – look. See what you have wrought.”
He was on the hard, bare stones of the long-cold hearth, but he hardly felt the pain as he twisted, scraping his the skin of his knees in order to peer back over his shoulder.
The crowd – all of them that remained…
All of them were kneeling along with him. Tears were in the eyes of some, twinkling in the candlelight, but on the faces of a few he could spot the same breathlessness, the same exhilaration as he was feeling.
Maybe he was important after all. Maybe they all could be. If the gods themselves deigned to send their chosen ones…
The black demon of Yane stalked back to the centre near the front, where it folded its tremendous arms across its naked chest, joining the mortals in staring up at the ceiling where Fay’s face seemed to float.
“No, you’ve done nothing wrong, Jakur. It’s this interloper who’s disturbed the peace of our gentle gathering. An action which will require its own form of punishment.”
“I came sensing slaughter, daughter of Mekesta,” Yane’s fiend said respectfully, a murmur of soft scrapes.
We summoned it, Jakur realised, set to swooning again with the sheer glory of such a concept. We summoned it, with our will to die…
They were like swimmers out in the dark stretches of the open ocean, deliberately slicing themselves, setting their blood to course in the waters, calling the sharks to ascend and rid them all of this miserable, thankless existence. Was it any great surprise that the sharks came first to them, directly, ignoring at least for now the flailing legs of those content to just go on existing…
“Slaughter?”
For all that Jakur automatically intuited the meaning of the demon’s words, they seemed to trouble Fay.
“Then I must expose the other interloper in our midst. Rheva –Buttercup, whatever you prefer today – I’m sorry, but Mother-Chaos has always been with you in one form or another. I’d hoped to expose you to our way of life, hoped to persuade you of our goals… but I can’t have you disrupting tonight’s meeting. Whatever secrets you keep, the Mother turns into cobbles, lays them before my feet. Stand up, traitor.”
The skinny girl with blotchy skin who’d been right at Fay’s side during the meeting, looking every inch the sycophant the whole while…
She slowly rocked back from her knees onto her heels and then, bit by bit, she stretched up, uncoiling into a standing position, tension in every aspect of her posture.
Ah, yes. Now that he was getting a better look at it – the smile on her face wasn’t quite the same as the others’. It had the nauseated aspect of the drunk’s smile when he got caught behind the bar, the demented grin of a kid found with his hand in the biscuit-tin. A smile of pacification, brought low by the gritted teeth, the clear knowledge shining in her eyes…
She knows she is going to be punished now.
“I’m not really sure about all that,” the girl said slowly, her voice thick with bottled-up terror. “The Blade-Lord ain’t the only god who can kill – Kultemeren ain’t the only one who can tell the truth – and Mother-Chaos… Mother-Chaos can’t be the only liar, can she?”
“Your point, little one?” came Fay’s gloating response, even as the servant of Yane flickered a few feet closer to the scrawny girl.
The girl’s face cracked, a desperate baah of laughter bursting from her lips, and then all of a sudden she sang: “Buuuuutt! Buuuuutt! Buttercuuuuup!”
“Nyahahaahaaaaa,” came the involuntary sound from Jakur’s right.
He spun, searching incredulously for the other one who’d started laughing –
Jakur spotted the haggard crone pushing off her hood… No, not just her hood. Some kind of leathery mask came loose too in her hands and suddenly the bent old woman was straightening; it was another girl, more a youngster even than the first. Her hair was raven as she shook it loose of a wig hidden inside the cowl, her skin red-brown, beautiful in the candlelight.
And she was gasping for breath, wracked with giggles.
“You just had to – had to bl-blow it,” she croaked.
“Kill them! Kill all of them!” Fay screamed like a hurricane.
“Kani!” the laughing girl sobbed, even as the servant of Yane extended its arms, answering the daughter of Mekesta’s command with its own black-metal tornado. “Now, Kani!”
It sprang towards the first intruder –
Only to fall into a net of unblemished white light.
The whole house shook as though the earth itself had shifted its foundations, and with a single rending screech the ceiling came off the room, the upper storeys seemingly cut away from the building as if a great invisible sword had sliced horizontally between the floors, flinging it free.
Jakur looked up into the midnight sky, his skin lapped by the warm breeze. A shelf of silver shone there over the house, an arc like a bridge of pure moonlight, upon which a group of robe-clad figures stood fearlessly.
Then Jakur shut his eyes, praying only to know no more.
Utenya. Emptiness. Claim me! Take me nowhere.
He’d failed. He’d failed her.
When the whirlwind of swords and agony passed over him, at first he thought he got his wish – but then he fell, inside the emptiness, and it was nothing, nothing like he’d expected.
Nothing like nothingness.
And there was no going back.
No End.
Ever.