Ch: 269 Somebody That I Used To Know
Having the only magic bath in town was a potent draw; Shai had summoned her home to the mountainside and hadn’t put it back at the orphanage yet… Things were busy and nobody had time. That steamy, bubbling lure put Gary in the enviable position of being able to, yet again… scold a naked duke in his bathtub.
“So you knew that there’s a whole town of slavers out there and you didn't…” He sighed at the duke and duchess and shook his head.
Having Tawny, Liam and the girls in the bath, over in their own corner huddled together, really helped with Leopold’s natural resistance to being interrogated by a common orphan.
“We’ll get to them soon. Let’s talk about your homegrown slavers. The first one to come try and steal me was your ‘ducal tax collector’. Remember the undead pile of hands that wanted to squeeze my sweet ass?” Gary demanded firmly. “What’s the story with your brown robed abominations; where are your taxmen hiding and where do they come from?”
“It’s come to my attention that no one really knows… don’t look at me like that! The whole guild vanished from all the duchies a few weeks ago.” The duke grumbled sourly. “It feels like my head’s stuffed with wool whenever I think about it!”
“That’s your Animus responding to some noxious little compulsion and distraction spells that have been hiding in your soul since you were Contracted… Now they are getting cleaned out, gradually.” Gary leaned back and smiled like the cat who got the cream.
“Tawny has been telling you guys to try moonbathing for a few weeks now… give it a try. I bet it’ll speed up the process.”
“Gods, another new thing. Adam won’t shut up about your Adventure Wagons, my wife is mad for chocolate and Jennah…” He shook his head in helpless wonder.
“I need you to slow down. It’s too much too fast, boy. A third of my vassal lords are desperate and ready to try anything to ‘get back to the old ways’.”
“Can’t stop, won’t slow down. If anything, I need to put the screws to you guys harder. Liam’s coming up for indenture in autumn and that’s when your council needs to decide what they’re going to do. Will they disregard their own laws? I bet they will if they think they can get away with it.” His smirk of angry frustration mixed with ‘I told you so’ and ‘dare ya to deny it’ were almost more than the duke could stand.
“What do you want from me then? I can’t upend the social order on a whim. I’m just one duke.” He snapped.
“I want this ‘Port Burndown’ place finished. I want it done right, too. Get some beastfolk tribes involved, get Grace, Abed and Julius involved… whatever. That’s two slaver raids on your hometown in a few months. Why am I the one who’s pissed off?”
He grinned, with a hungry and feral glint of madness in his eyes. The lad seemed almost an animal, a dangerous predator lurking in the steam.
“They were gonna use Liam and the girls in some really awful ways, Leo. Tawny could easily have been with him and been taken too.”
“I read the reports…” He answered with a frosty demeanor. “An action like that takes planning, resources, personnel and transport. Getting a strike force in position, without tipping them off is difficult, just as gathering such a force without word filtering out is almost impossible.” He sighed wistfully. “I’d love to put paid to them, but I don’t have the people or the transport.”
“What kind of transport? I have a boat… My sister might be interested in helping too.” He leaned forward eagerly. “I have a few thoughts…”
“Order has been chomping at the bit for a while now. These two attacks have my local cult in a lather.” Leo mumbled. “I’ll start working on a plan… but I need you back at work. Julius needs his bottled corpses cleaned out. That mess is becoming a drain.”
“Deal… I empty Jules’ liquor cabinet, then we will discuss more jobs. I’m serious about the slavers, Leo. You can send us out of town and keep us moving, but those guys are not just grabbing random people. They had Liam’s name, a description, a drawing, even info on his habits, just like my attackers.”
“Fair point lad. Now shut up. I’m trying to bathe.” The duke grinned at him, displaying a cheap copy of Tawny’s dimples. They just didn't have the same impact from a craggy, early middle aged duke’s face.
“I’m not letting this go, Leo.” Gary complained.
“Well, if I had eight score spare warriors and a ship to sail them on…” He complained right back. “I deal in horses and lancers, infantry and skirmishers.” He shook his head. “Any ducal naval vessel heading south would send them scurrying, especially mine or those of my vassals.”
“I’m gonna have a little faith in you, I’ll take you at your word.” He paused to enjoy the soft sound of a whippoorwill warming up for her evening performance. “If I smell politics, I pull the plug on the job.”
“Your scheme is mad, audacious and completely impossible… You can’t change centuries of tradition with a whim and a court case. Not without my help and the other nobles, little brother.” Duke Belen said softly.
“We need each other, Gary. Work with me and we can accomplish our goals together…”
“I won’t be owned by you, neither will my kids, nor Becky. The harder you work to try and enslave people, the less we are going to get along. If you want me on your team, zero slavery has to be the goal, no half measures.”
“We don’t have slaves…” He grumbled. “It’s indenture…”
“Duchess Sheng bought Orlando… She could sell him if she wanted, now that he’s more valuable. She could sell all her people and pick up a tidy profit… ‘Cause she bought them on the cheap! She buys discount people, because they are wounded or maimed… don’t you see how wrong that is, on like… all the levels?”
“You really know how to ruin a bath…”
#
“I Killed people, Maple. They were horrible people, I won’t pretend to grieve for them…” Liam muttered in the garden, under a rose arbor, beside a small maple.
“I have little understanding of what you are going through, my boy… Perhaps lady Thirp and lord Marduk would be more helpful. We see life and death very differently than you do.” She whispered softly to the young druid in her arms. “Your friends are also feeling these emotions, in much more mortal ways than I… Yet you came to me.”
“They have their own… I don’t…” He hugged her rock maple body closer in frustration. “I’m Contracted to War, yet I hate what I did… Monsters and dangerous beasts don’t upset me this way. Even the undead and outsiders we’ve faced didn’t feel so… wrong.” He gasped.
“I’ve taken men’s lives, I can never change that…”
“I think that you are looking for absolution from me; I have none to give. I will say this… Your bond to War is taking the place that was to have been Dana the Healer’s. That conflict is slowly ripping your soul, distending it into shapes it was not meant to take.” She murmured softly. “They will understand.”
“Will they?” His voice was soft and pleading, barely a gasp. “Gary is a bloodthirsty savage, I’ve seen it in his eyes. Becky, she’s… so like him it’s scary.”
“Neither of those two is so cavalier about killing as you think… Becky wept in my arms last night, as you do now. Gary struggles with what he has done more than you know… though he does have a certain flair for… endings.” She sighed with the whisper of windblown leaves and rocked him for a while.
“What is this varnish…? Tears and snot just wipe right off… So durable. ” She muttered as she slipped back into her tree, after leaving her puppet body in the closet, dangling beside Solange and Plumeria.
#
Evening found Gary In the back garden, inside a ‘Circle of Fifths’ with one of his inscribed flower pots in the center. He strolled around the small droopy vine with cheeky little five petaled peach flowers and a number of tightly coiled thorny knots.
“Hryluth, the Cockleburr is my name, mortal.” It answered sullenly. “My task was to summon Calyxunat the all seeing and all devouring, to defile and consume the mortals in this valley.”
“I’ll be having a chat with him too, don’t you worry… now about your fate…” He circled the woebegone plant considering it. “You’re sentient, so I’m reluctant to just mulch your ass into compost… Give me a reason to not shred you into the green waste bin.”
“I was instructed to perform the summoning and given the mortal tools to perform my tasks by the cult that summoned me to this plane. If I don’t comply, they will simply banish me by breaking my hidden ritual summoning rite. Either way, I’ve lost. Destroy this shell as you wish… but I will wait until the chance to return comes… and when I do…”
“This is where you promise to hunt down my descendants, blah, blah, blah…” He cut the herb off with a snarl. “I love explaining to you shits that you’re just like everybody else now. Play mortal games, win mortal prizes, dickweed. When you cunts fuck with this mortal, he fucks back... and I’ve taken your immortal cherry.”
The plant rustled up to protest how that was ‘impossible and to promise more vengeance. “Nope. A set of garden snips or a hungry bunny can end you, same as any mortal plant now.” He smiled gleefully at the potted plant and sighed.
“End, I said, not banish or displace. You will die and be reborn, as a mortal herb.”
The vine wilted even more, sagging over the edge of the enchanted pot. “I suspected… I was unable to slip the ties keeping me in this realm, while in your hellish tin can. Now this witchcraft suggests that you know more than you should…”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“That kind of thinking is why you are in a pot in my herb garden now. Your assumptions of superiority and disregard for mortal life is what brought you into my hands. This could be a growth experience for you.” He smiled thinly. “But I suspect you will need to live and die as a mortal a few times before the message starts to sink in.”
“What does that mean…? Are you mad?” The plant demanded weakly.
“Yes, quite mad. What I mean is, when you die in this form… your current scraggly weedy vine, you will pass on into the Devourer of Souls, where you will be cleansed and sent out to be reborn… somewhere or somewhen. You will be cast into the vast swirling engine of creation and entropy, like all of us; to live and die endlessly, born anew and remembering nothing of this life, or any other.”
“Impossible, that would make me a…” He stopped there, stricken with horror. “What have you done? This abomination cannot be…”
“Wow, it hits different, when you realize you have chlorophyll in the game now, right? One life to live or lose, one shot. No more seed casting do overs. Like me, you can’t reproduce… you shoot blanks, buddy. Like all mortals, you can’t body jump, that’s not in the mortal toolkit on this plane.” The boy pulled a stool and a guitar from his storage gift, smiling placidly all the while.
“The weakness you feel is the severance of your connection to the outside.” He muttered as he fooled around with his guitar, lifting idle music through the clearing in the dark backwoods of his garden.
“When the time comes for you to experience death, I hope someone will be there for you and it’s a gentle passing… But again, I think not.” He sighed, as ‘Flor De Luna’ sounded among the trees and berry brambles.
“It seems most likely I’ll be mulching you when we’re done. Convince me to plant you somewhere instead.”
“I can tell you things, other places I’ve done this work, I can reveal secrets, names of outsiders and the ways to call them! I can give you power!” He whispered eagerly. “I have many secrets; many demons you can bend to your call, raining destruction down on your…” He stopped his whispered entreaties with a flowery huff. “Why are you laughing? I’m offering you real power!”
“Bitch, If I wanted to become the lord and master of a blasted wasteland, I have way better options than your weak ass.” He snorted at the potted plant in disdain. “Where do I find your cult?”
“I never knew… I was summoned as a seed and planted somewhere else. I never learned where my summoning site was, nor who brought me here. Just a series of mortal cultists who contact me for tasks and perish in the process of completing them.” He murmured dejectedly. “They alway know where I am.”
“I’d feel bad, if I hadn’t busted you trying to summon a vampiric dick and balls demon into my shiny new hometown. Bad fucking form!” He glared at his prisoner and sneered. “Your flowers, pollen and latex are interesting… Maybe I’ll keep you in the shade, snipped back into a shrub. I could harvest your products so aggressively that you barely survive, like a zombie houseplant.”
He smiled smugly, when the vine wilted in horror and fear. “That’s what every person you sent to a horrid doom felt, as your demons closed in.” He made a pair of bronze garden snips appear in his hands. “I won’t torture you. But you can’t be allowed to do any more damage.”
The bag of vegetable shreds he dumped into the pool vanished with a soft sigh as they evaporated.
Back in his circle he took the flowerpot away and replaced it with a short stub of eyestalk, with a withered, leathery eye peering from the dried, jerky-like mass of desiccated tissues. Somehow the eye remained alive and disgustingly active, peering all around in interest.
“Calyxunat.” The boy snapped aloud. He spoke it three times, louder each time, until the third recitation echoed back from the hills. The eye rose from the table in the magical ring, floating above the table it had been resting on, about four feet up. Slowly, a hazy form appeared, round bodied and sprouting a small forest of eyestalks from the top of its spherical core. The mass was dominated by a single glaring, cephalopod eye and a jagged toothed maw.
“Oh, a beholder… Nice.” He mumbled with satisfaction. “Ok Peepers, this is the game. Your ass is in my power, only partially summoned into this realm by my arts and magic, with your own immortal flesh.” He told the vaporous being. “Pretty dumb, letting them have a piece of you…” The spectral form’s mouth moved silently, as its eye stalks waved in frantic appeal.
“Well you got caught buddy. Answer my questions and maybe I’ll kick you out of this world and destroy this relic… give me trouble and I’ll wreck you.” He barked in a matter of fact tone. “Now where’s your boss?”
“...subject rambled on about dire magics and curses… hunting down his captor’s bloodline…” Gary mumbled to himself as he took notes from his stool inside the circle. “That’s all the usual preamble. Now I will ask you again. Where is your boss? Third time’s the charm…”
Three times he asked, three times he was refused… emphatically. Gary ran out of patience with the eyeball entity quickly, the being was truly stupid and super aggressive… glorious streams of light sprayed from his many eyes, as he desperately tried to incinerate his captor and everything else in view with his eyebeams. “Dude! You ain't even fully in this world! Those beams and rays do nothing here… fucking dipshit.”
Calyxunat went shrieking into the void, promising all the usual… Gary dusted off his hands and smiled with satisfaction. “Now I gotta get my hands on that freaky, long pube. The genital demon has got to go!” He mumbled.
“No, boy… that’s enough.” A soft voice whispered from the shadows, as Morrigan the Matron stepped from the shrubberies. “You’ve been far busier than I thought you would be… the void is in an absolute tizzy. So many eternal lights, winking out one after another.”
“Someone’s getting nervous?” He asked with a grin.
“Noone involved with this world’s troubles. There are other entities in the void, vast, unguessable beings with inscrutable motivations… They are watching this world and worrying. The forces of the cosmos do not typically worry over mortals, nor even mortal realms, when they bloom and fade.” She whispered, stepping farther into the garden clearing. “Even the oldest and greatest death gods and immortals could never do what we have done… together.” She sounded pleased, excited, perhaps even titillated by the prospect.
“So the immortal community is upset, I get it… what does that have to do with my work?” He asked firmly, glaring at the ancient, immortal being.
“When I gifted you with my touch, your soul responded with this unique ability, this infectious mortality of yours. I assumed you would use it once and never attempt it again…” She muttered in corvid displeasure. “Somehow, you have developed a taste for this blasphemy.”
“You thought I wouldn’t use it? That I’d be horrified by bringing death to someone undying? You really should have gotten to know me first, babe. I don’t believe in the death penalty… but for the immortal dirtbags shitting on my plane, it’s the answer I have.” He grumbled at her. “These assholes get off on tormenting and wreaking havoc on mortals, because they’re bored and think we’re lesser beings… Fuck ‘em. I think of it the same as putting down a rabid beast.”
“You are lesser, mortal… you should remember that… You will have a sharp reminder of that fact soon, I think.” She answered with a smile.
“Bullshit! You and I both know that mortal existence is its own form of immortality… But without the creaking weight of eons dragging us down into insanity.” He snarled at her.
“Time can weigh heavily, boy. As you have found. But that is an immortal’s burden to bear. Now the time comes for me to take back this gift… I cannot let a mortal wander about with the power to slay the eternal ones, now can I?” She cooed warmly, in Maiden’s guise.
“So now you pull the plug on me and I have to find a new Contract?” He asked warily.
“Yes, essentially. I withdraw from our Contract, unseal my gift from your soul and you go on about your way… essentially unharmed.” She murmured.
“Uh huh, ‘Essentially unharmed’ is a little worrying, Morrie.” He smiled as she winced at her pet name; she hated being called Morrie.
“Once my gift unwinds from your soul, whatever happens next is up to you…” She grumbled, as the Crone.
“Which is a sneaky way of not telling me the truth, Morrie… Come closer, you’re usually so grabby.” He cooed to her, sounding more like a threat than an invitation. “Or are you worried that your creation might turn on its creator?”
“That is exactly it, Fool! I thought you were a gentle soul, filled with music and light, with just enough darkness to work my will. You just finished destroying two immortals, now you are already hungry for more!” She cawed in frustration at her unruly mortal tool.
“Any sane being would be so horrified by the abominable, wholly obscene nature of this power, that they would cast my Contract off! I was certain you would do so… and craft your own ending to your own story, in a tragic and comic way.”
“That’s part of my problem with you. The gift you gave me was poisoned from the start, burning me out from the inside.” Gary fired back hotly. “Ragy took your promise that he would die eventually, at face value… He wants his rest, he wants peace, but he’s still me. He’s in love with Shai, loves my kids and loves living. He’s even learning to control his anger and regulate his feelings…”
“You know… you have known for a while… I see it in your eyes.” She whispered hungrily. “My gift is death, when I pull my touch from your soul, you will unravel into the void and continue on to your soul’s next destination… after stopping by to play with me for a while.” Her hungry, predatory smile gave him chills, as she licked her lips.
“Uh, huh, poor ol Gary’s just gonna fall over dead in his garden. His family will be sad, but life goes on…” He muttered sourly. “I’m not dying Morrie, not tonight. My work’s not done.”
“Mortals don’t get to make that decision. When the thread of a life is snipped, nothing can keep it whole.” She whispered, trying to soothe him with her warm, grandmotherly voice.
“So come closer and take your gift back…” He offered with a cold smile.
“I only appeared as a courtesy, boy. You could have just fallen down dead on the lawn by my will, at any time.” She sighed. “I need not risk your touch, or my own blessing.”
She snapped the Maiden’s black taloned fingers and he got slammed by a sense of something lost. Something breaking within him gripped his heart, tearing at him with stabbing agony. He fell to the grass, twitching and moaning, heaving with great shuddering breaths.
“Yeah, that fucking sucks…” He gasped, a moment later; while struggling back to his feet. “We’re done, now begone, raven. My debts to you are paid in full.”
“How?” She whispered from a high branch, in her raven form. “You are to be MINE!” She shrieked into the sky.
“The part of me that’s undead isn’t as stupid as you think he is. Neither am I.” He gasped as he sat back on his stool. “And he’s also really angry about being lied to.”
“I promised he would die when the Contract completed!” She cawed angrily. “His fate is death! As is yours! Beast has seen it, I have seen it! Your life’s thread ends here!”
“Yeah, yeah… I get it. You thought I’d let you back into the world, kick up some drama to entertain you, then just peacefully die. That would be pretty convenient, then you guys could take a few centuries or millennia screwing around and ‘solve’ the problem… eventually.” He grumbled. “How many of us suffer and die in the meantime, how many bloodthirsty, power mad outsiders will you allow to rampage across the land?”
“We are your gods, mortal Fool!” She cawed and screeched from a treetop.
“This is a mortal issue. We are fixing it, not the gods, spirits or great fae… Mortals.” He picked up his stool and gathered in his magical string and trinket fence, ending the ritual with a soft, magical sigh.
“You can’t exist like that… your soul will blow away into cosmic dust and won’t reform for an age of eons!” She squawked, circling above him on the wing.
“Watch me, Morrie. I could slam the door in your face, but I’m not done with you yet, besides, I have a new Contract already lining up. Just gotta do a little more work on my buddy Liam.” He chortled weakly at the circling raven.
“I still smell it on you… my gift, my blessing… how?” She demanded.
“I’ve been studying my gifts since I made iron rank… trying to figure out exactly how they work and how to cultivate and expand them… Yours was difficult to wrangle, with all the hungry, grasping, greedy tendrils.” He answered smugly.
“Like you, it’s demanding, arrogant and entitled, it took a lot of work to train it. Now it’s mine and it obeys me. Hopefully, the next being I’m going to Contract there will be much easier to deal with.”
“How?!” She cawed into the evening sky, circling higher, farther out of his reach.
“I’ve already infected you Morrie, not with mortality, but with me… tiny traces of my touch, on your soul. Just like you guys left your fingie prints on mine. We have a bond, however tenuous and faint.” He began strumming and whistling an instrumental ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’.
“No, boy, you aren’t going to rope me into one of your musical numbers!” She screeched into the sky, flying higher. The music followed as he lifted his voice. Somehow it followed her as she flew away as well, ringing in her ears.
You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness…
Like resignation to the end, always the end.
So when we found that we could not make sense,
Well, you said that we would still be friends…
But I'll admit that I was glad it was over.
But you didn't have to cut me off!
Make out like it never happened and that we were nothing!
#
Gary staggered back inside, weak and pale, but moving under his own power. “Hey guys… I need a nap.” He mumbled, before vanishing into the grotto alone. Shai tried to follow, but he stalled her with a smile and a sad shake of his head, before he disappeared.
“Should he be alone?” Kermal asked. “He looked ragged… what was he doing out there?”
“Justice.” Wilf said in the voice of a solemn judge, passing sentence. “He was administering justice.” His words echoed in the room, stirring the strings and skins of the instruments into a whispered chorus.
“Ok, that’s not even a little worrying.” Duke Leopold grumbled into his tea, with the new barmaid perched on his lap.
“He requested that I release the evidence from Mykonos the shepherd’s cave misadventure to him… why would he want that long, weird, curly hair?”
“Papa, please don’t give my friend that demonic pubic hair… At least, not for a while; I worry he’s over extending himself.” Tawny muttered softly to her parents. “Mother! Get your hands where I can see them this instant! There are children present!”
Celeste the barmaid withdrew her hands from inside Duke Leopold’s shirt, where she had been subtly playing with his nipples and nibbling his ear.
“Shush, Trelawny! They only noticed because you said something!” Her mother sulked like a petulant child, caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
“You know we aren’t really babies…” Amy complained from her seat on the piano bench, beside Tawny. “We ‘member stuff…” She stifled a huge yawn and smiled. “We skipped naptime, Come on Wilf, Rio…” She led her little brothers off to the grotto, followed by Shai.
“Tis other duties call me away, friends…” She ducked through the hanging vines and flowers, in pursuit of her mate and their kids. Becky followed shortly after, waving to the friends and family scattered around the common room.
“Tis fine tae all be at home…” Shai murmured softly, once in the pool with her little brood.
#