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Shaw gazed at his own reflection, his visage distorted by the ripples in the basin’s dark waters. He couldn’t escape the wretched image that stared back at him: dark rings under hollow eyes, placed upon a sickly pale face. Only his fiery red hair held any sign of life. Shaw bashed his face into the waters. It was freezing cold. He held himself down as his body revolted, only to emerge gasping, spitting, and coughing. Then he did it all again. It was a painful ritual. A strange method to rid himself of sleepiness. Shaw punished himself like a devout lusting after another man’s wife. His tiredness was a sin to him, a weakness that had to be purged. He couldn’t sleep, for sleep meant nightmares. They were a poison.
For days not a word had been uttered to his decay. None had raised a question for why he screamed at night. They all knew that a man’s mind can break between the castle’s walls. Shaw wouldn’t be the first. There had been others. Some walking out into the storm never to return. They called it walking the white path. A path with no return.
Shaw stumbled back to his bedside and slid down against it. The thought of sleep allured him, the need pulling his strings. He threw back his head and laughed, feeling tears swell in his eyes.
‘Isn’t this a sorry sight,’ Judge said, and Shaw knew it for a fickle of his imagination. The man was long dead. He was alone in his chamber with a fading candle for company and shadows that splayed the walls, dancing to the dying light. ‘You were a name renowned. A fucking legend among my men. You were a demon shackled to mortal flesh, and I wished I could have set you free. Now you are a weeping mess.’ Shaw heard him chuckle.
‘Things change,’ he said to himself.
‘You should not have put your faith in that fellow whose name you try to erase. He took you down with his sinking ship. If he only had known his way around a court as he had known a sword or an axe. But alas you are here. He a commander, and you rotting from the inside. Where’s the fire, Shaw? The hatred that fuelled the flames. I didn’t teach you Judge’s ways for nought. Don’t run from your nightmares, cut out their black hearts!’
To kill a dream, Shaw thought. To neutralize a poison. He rose to his feet and spied out the slit in the wall that was his window. A tower rose in the dark, decrepit, and old; atop a flame flickered. And he remembered something Aike had used. A cure.
‘A click of madness,’ Judge said. ‘To set things right.’
*
In the swallowing blackness of the tower, Shaw thought about a passage that his father preached to those few who attended. The price of salvation is a constant struggle. An ascent that cautions a great fall; a misstep will plunge you back into darkness.
His legs were heavy, dragged down by an invisible weight as he forced them up the steps. He gazed up the set of stairs that spiralled into a mouth of darkness. It appeared endless, if not for a frail radiance of flickering light graced the stones high above.
Not far now.
He stumbled; his salvation ripped away from his sight, tumbling down a few flights of stairs before catching himself against the rough stone walls.
Pain hammered through his body, pulsing in a frightened frenzy. Shaw cursed the stairs, cursed the tower. He lay his head back against the wall, feeling sweat crawl down his forehead. His ragged breath rang loud here, all alone in the tower.
‘Why the struggle, Shaw? Salvation can be found in death. A quick fall, a quick end. The pain will be brief,’ John said. Shaw thought that he could see him, his dark shape sitting on the edge of the stairs. ‘Join me.’
‘You are not here,’ Shaw mumbled.
‘What is it that you fear, Shaw?’
Shaw dragged himself against the wall. His mind was a stranger; a conjurer that tricked him with illusions. John was dead. Judge was dead. But that didn’t seem to stop them from speaking.
Shaw glanced towards the light and continued to struggle in his ascent. Giving a darting eye behind him, he saw that John was gone.
‘You’re going mad, Shaw, rotting from the inside,’ Judge said.
‘Everything will be gone when I speak with the madman. Even you.’ I’m speaking to myself; I’m beyond mad.
‘I see. I remember a shaman who promised me that his trinkets would shield me against weapons made by mortal hands.’ Judge gave a dry chuckle. ‘An arrow pierced my shoulder not long after. I saved it after they had pried it out and gouged out the fucker’s eyes with it.’
‘That Shaman was a liar.’
‘I wonder if this one is any better?’
Shaw said nothing.
The madman had come long before Shaw, at a time when men still called him Ravic. He had been a respected scholar and alchemist, a man who belonged with dukes and kings, not with violent men residing at the far fringes of the North. He never said why he came, and tales grew in the absent of facts. Brothers said he had dabbled in black magic and so drew the wrath of the academy, banishing him. Another story spoke of murder, another of lust, one of power, one of greed. The tales about him could fill a long night with a few cups of ale.
Ravic was a reclusive man, keeping to himself, locked away in his tower. Few saw him and slowly stories spread of his madness. He traded occult books from wandering merchants for ointments and other strange things. He had been heard chanting in the night, screaming and raving.
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And what happened to his ravens? They have been silent.
Atop of the tower Shaw was greeted by a door closed and silent, enforced by iron and runes carved into the wood. Shaw pounded on the door and waited. Hung near the door, a single candle burned a slow death. Locks snapped behind the heavy frame, chains clattered, and with a sigh, it opened. Inside, Shaw saw the madman shuffling across the chamber, his back turned as if he had forgotten that Shaw was there.
Inside fumes spewed out from strange contraptions, flask, and tubes. Hundreds of candles lined the circular room, melting wax pouring down between the crevasses and cracks in the floor. They produced a thin veil of smoke that shrouded the chamber. Shaw could feel his eyes water and sting, his throat burned as if fire clung to its edges. The whole placed reeked of pewter, subdued by the scent of citrus.
How can a man live like this? It requires more than madness.
Worse were the books and parchment sprawled over the floor, shadowing pentagrams etched into the worn wood.
‘A dealer in the black arts,’ Judge said. ‘Fascinating man.’
Above, Shaw saw seven ravens strung up from the beams that crisscrossed the ceiling. They were dead, dry blood stained across their throats.
‘Fuck,’ he mumbled.
‘You can’t trust those creatures. They see too much. Hear too much,’ the Madman said, his face was sickly, skin drawn tight over the bones, weathered, and scarred by rashes. ‘I like them dead. They don’t speak then. They can’t tell anyone anything.’ He grinned, but when he laid his eyes on Shaw, they grew wide.
‘You are not him!’
‘Who were you expecting?’ Shaw said.
‘What do you want? Who are you!’ The Madman hissed, refusing Shaw’s question.
‘I’m here for a simple request,’ Shaw said, stepping past the aged scholar. ‘Think me as a patron of your…arts.’ Shaw seated himself in one of the two cushioned chairs inhabiting the tower.
The Madman stared at Shaw, licking his gums. ‘What sort of a request?’
‘Do you know Aike?’
‘The brute?’ The Madman said, his right eye twitched. ‘Aye, he was here. Clamouring about nightmares. I gave him what I had. For years he pestered me about one concoction after the other. Then he stopped.’
‘So, I have heard.’
‘I found it fascinating, the way he said it — that he had to remember.’
‘Do you still know the recipe that you made for him?’
The Madman’s fevered eyes stared at Shaw. ‘You don’t want to remember?’
‘I want to sleep.’
‘Violence,’ the Madman said in husky tone and cracked a broken smile. ‘It has an allure in its simplicity. The ease of which one can obtain what one desires.’ He shuffled over to a black leather tome and cracked it open.
‘Pages of antiquity riddled with its mark, of conquerors and kings. What makes empires rise and fall, but the bloodied sword? Yet it has its price. The deed depraves the soul.’ He slammed the book shut; dust blew into the air. ‘Nightmares are a mere symptom of a fragile spirit. What is it that you can’t forget?’
‘None of you concern,’ Shaw said.
‘If that is your wish,’ the madman said. ‘But our souls were not created to survive the strain of this… depravity. When the arrogant man opened the doors which never can be shut again, he cursed the world to mortality and decadence. Our paradise was lost. Our flesh and souls doomed to —’
‘I hear you, Ravic,’ Shaw growled. ‘But I didn’t come for your philosophising.’
‘I’m helping you. You should heed my words.’
‘Help? Help! You are wasting time!’
‘Waste? Have you seen yourself? The life you have made for yourself. See the path your taken and then speak about—’
Shaw rose from the chair and grabbed the madman by the collar of his robe. ‘I asked for a cure. A simple request, but all I get is fancy words and metaphors concealing hollow nonsense,’ he said with a mocking snarl. He lifted the dagger towards the madman’s right eye. ‘Do you fear death, Ravic?’
The madman became like a frightened animal, clawing and struggling to break free from Shaw’s iron grip.
‘Your death wouldn’t deprave my soul.’
It would bring you relief, Judge whispered. Drive the dagger through his eye.
But Shaw didn’t listen to the voice in his head.
He threw the madman on the ground and the scholar crawled into a foetal position, spitting and laughing. Maybe it had been a waste coming here, the man was beyond mad with his rambles and outburst. He could have left, found his solace in drink until his mind blackened. But Shaw was a desperate man.
‘What do you want?’ Shaw said. ‘What is your price?’
‘Price?’ The Madman snivelled. ‘There is no price. I have seen what ills you, and I have the cure for that.’
He crawled back to his feet and hobbled to a cabin filled with tiny black bottles, labelled with strange sounding names. Shaw saw the Madman scavenge through the bottles, murmuring to himself as he picked up one, then another, reading their names and giving an irritated snort before putting it back, until he found the one he wanted.
He poured a cup of wine before adding the contents of the bottle. ‘Drink this and you shall dream never more.’
Shaw snatched the cup from the Madman’s fragile hand and gulped half of it down, some spilling and running down his chin.
At first, he felt nothing. He could have been given warm milk and he would have felt a greater difference.
‘You jest?’ Shaw said with a low growl.
The Madman fidgeted with his fingers. ‘No. What did you expect?’ The words rattled from his teeth.
‘More,’ Shaw said then he felt a tingle on the tip of his tongue. He felt warm. He wanted to throw up. ‘What did you do?’
‘I’m ending this madness. Yes, I break the cycle, break it! Break it before the cycle breaks the world. Before it breaks the world!’ The Madman laughed and danced.
Shaw could feel his legs start to numb, to give way. Poisoned, he thought. Bloody poisoned. He threw the last contents of the cup in the Madman’s face, some pouring down his open, laughing mouth. Shaw grinned, then felt the invisible hands closing around his throat. Felt them squeeze as he watched the Madman panic.
The poison cut Shaw’s breath.
The Madman in his panic threw himself at the cabinet, scavenging for what Shaw hoped was an antidote.
He found it.
The price of salvation is a constant struggle.
Shaw threw himself at the Madman, locked his hands around his throat and put all his weight on him with the little strength he had. The Madman thrashed under him, scratching his chest, his body spasming beneath the pressure of his grip.
Rasped, breathless laughter, bubbled out from the Madman’s rotten lips when the colour of his face turned a horrid purple. Then his body became slack.
Shaw snapped the antidote from the Madman’s cold dead hands, drank, rolled over, and threw up. He heaved up everything he had until he thought he would spew out his own intestines.
In his struggle he heard the croak of a raven. Saw it seated in the open window, its soulless eyes waiting to seize the moment he died.
But he didn’t.