Corvus Rex

by J K Ishaya

  "I know now that this was not the case. Death was actually impossible for either of us, and Malorix could undo nothing, but at the time I was an infantile creature who knew very little. I'd felt my new power and let it carry me away. Now I looked around me at the massacre I'd committed. The bodies were not simply slashed, cut, stabbed, or necks broken. They were mangled. Skin torn from this one's back, this one's head twisted off so that it hung on by a ribbon of torn flesh and muscle. A stream of steaming intestines flowed from an open belly. I could not remember doing any of it to that degree. When I looked down, the blood smeared on my body was tenfold to what I'd visualized when I did it, but this crimson bath was all definitely dealt and relished by my hand.

  "Malorix stood on the other side of it. His eyes cast toward the nearest body and he took a shaky breath, tempted to feast, but he looked back up at me with rigid will power. 'You see,' he said, 'the anger and the hunger. You cannot let either control you or you will be lost, and the madness will come for you. You will become— ‘He could not finish saying it, whatever it was.

  "'What?' I asked. 'What will I become?' He didn't answer, and I, at that moment, feared the answer too much to press him for it. I collapsed to my knees and wavered, watched a glistening stream of blood ooze across the ground down slope toward me. My gaze followed it to its source, to the body with a cavity torn up through the belly under the rib cage, and nearby lay the remnants of a half-eaten heart. It was something that went markedly beyond my methods before. As a warrior under my father, I had killed plenty, slit many throats, but nothing like this, and I still craved that heart. I wanted to reach out and snatch it up and gobble the rest of it down with little care that it had picked up pieces of pine needles and dirt. I wanted to lean over, put my lips to the ground and slurp up the river of blood flowing toward me but the indignity of it gripped me, grounded me in reason. It was one thing to kill in defense of kingdom and family, but this I could not justify, not even with my new appetite.

  "With that new tempest of horror-rage-fear-disgust—I do not recall exactly everything I felt in that moment—it all turned back on me with a force of self-loathing. I leaned back, raised my face to the sky and cried out in mourning for the humanity I’d sacrificed.”

  ✽✽✽

  "After I collected myself, and Malorix coaxed me away from the bloody mess, he admitted to me that he had not wanted to do this to me. It had been a last resort, but he lamented that he hadn't told me enough about our condition before he essentially awakened the substance with his blood as a trigger." I get up to pour another cup of tea that begins to grow cold quickly in my hands.

  "This substance you speak of, is it something sleeping within all humans?" Howard asks. He has gone back to taking notes, though at a glance I see that they are more like charts with arrows. Malorix's name points to mine, and Mr. Freysson is written floating out to the side with a large question mark beside it as a place holder for where Kvasir fits into all of this.

  "No. No, it is not, but I will get to that." I return to my seat on the bed after a moment as the memories of that first night resettle into their crevices. "I can say it was part of the reason Malorix chose me. That he recognized it within me, and that's why he'd appeared to me since my early childhood. I know now that our kind are drawn to each other for certain reasons, but he was also protecting me from something, and he would have been content to leave me human had my life not taken the turn it did."

  "So, there are more of your kind out there?" He is somewhat disturbed by this possibility and my demented side bends to play with that just a little.

  "Oh yes, Howard." A smirk crawls on my lips to be replaced with a bitter scowl. "Many." Kvasir looks disapprovingly at me for this admission and I add more soberly, "But they are, you could say, at variance with me."

  "Ah, but you are the monster with a conscience," Howard remarks, pleased again with his cleverness.

  "Am I?"

  Stop playing with him, Yuri, Kvasir sends to me.

  I relent and stare into my tea. I want to get out of here again, take another walk. The night outside, with its quiet foggy shroud, is a comfort, but I'm wary that other yellow cloaks may be near—perhaps now searching for their vanished brother—and I'm concerned that I cannot contain a second encounter from Howard as I did the first.

  "Go on," Howard says.

  "Malorix convinced me to come away from my gruesome handiwork. He took me on a hunt, and I did chase down deer and dine on more raw meat and blood. It did not impart the same satisfaction as that first human heart, but it would do in an emergency. I bathed off the filth in a lake and looked down to watch as my hands reverted to look human again with the claws retracted into plain fingernails and my fangs drew back up into my skull and ordinary canines slipped down into their place. These odd sensations I would grow used to quickly. I washed out the remaining stink from my trousers, and then near dawn we camped in the hills, not far away from the fort where he could scout and listen to the thoughts of Trajan's men and learn how best to avoid them. I built a small fire, more for the atmosphere and comfort of it than anything, I hung my trousers up to dry, and then I learned that we still had to sleep.

  "I lay down and watched the flames as I drifted off. Despite the change, the memories of everything that had affected me as a human remained. There was the strife with Rome, the siege and the fire that had walled me off from my family, Decebal's head on a platter, me caged and helpless, and now this thing that I'd become. Malorix had given me no name for it. Something akin to demon was the best I could muster, which left me feeling purely damned, and the worst thing was that I had chosen it. The difference was, I served no evil deity as would a demon, not that I knew of. My greatest offense was that I had turned my back on Zalmoxis, and that would remain forever. It all culminated within me and collapsed into complete and utter exhaustion.

  "I found myself upon that balcony that looked out upon a black void, and below me stretched those steps. I could see that they ended far below, perhaps within seventy or so, and there was the distant glow that looked like it came from an arched doorway floating out there on nothingness. In Sarmizegetusa, Malorix had called them the Steps of Light Slumber, which sounded so abstract, symbolic more than anything, but for him to have addressed them as he did, they sounded very real, and he was real, after all, so there was more to this. I pondered taking my first descent, but I recalled that he had gone to great lengths to keep me from going down there. So, I stood indecisive and numb on that landing for the duration of my dream and pondered new questions for him.

  "In the early morning hours when I awoke, feeling even stronger in my new state, I found him keeping watch as he had when I lay dying. He stood up slope, head cocked to lift an ear in one direction or another, while within our circle, I once more realized that insects did not chirp or buzz. Birds did not sing, either. I particularly focused on this, to the extent it must have emerged in my thoughts for him to read easily.

  "'We frighten them,' he said without even looking at me. 'They go silent near us, but it works to our advantage to help us hear the more threatening noises. There is a detachment of Trajan's men patrolling down in the valley there.' He pointed. 'Do you hear it?'

  "It made a strange sense, so I sat up and bent an ear to listen. I heard everything. Foot falls, scuffling over dried leaves, heart beats. I heard the whispers of their thoughts as I had those of the patrol I'd massacred. Word had spread of that massacre which looked as if wild animals had done it. This unit was just as afraid, but they were putting on brave faces, keeping their javelins and shields at the ready. 'With focus,' Malorix said, 'you will be able to approach them directly without being seen or heard. You can project into their minds what you want them to see, whether it will appear to be another person, or simply nothing there at all.'

  "'That is how you got me out of the castrum?' I asked. I stood, pulled on my trousers and tied up the waist as I approached the edge of our camp.

  "'It is,' he said. 'We can hide in
plain sight that way.'

  “Oh! I see!” Howard revisits our introduction. “That is how you cast such an illusion when you came to my door.”

  "Yes," I say and Kvasir nods along. "You and your mother both saw ordinary men as we wanted you to. This is a particular concern for Mr. Freysson here, of course." I gesture at the individual in question who sits up demonstrably and cocks his head as if to show off his weird features all over again. "Obviously, with my markings, I must camouflage myself as well, though in the right conditions I can hide much of it under a heavy coat, an up-turned collar, a hat worn with the brim low.”

  "And about your markings?” Howard adds. "You said the tattoos of your culture disappeared after your transformation. Then what are these patterns you carry now?" His head tilts as he tries for a better look without leaning too close to me.

  "These serve an entirely different purpose than cultural identity, Howard. They came later in my development, but as you see, they are more like scarifications. How they were obtained is… complicated."

  The boy's thoughts spin on the whole of our discussion, looking back on random faces he's seen in a crowd, wondering if any of them were like us, lurking around right under humanity's nose in broad daylight.

  "To hide them can be quite a mental effort," I explain, "especially in a marketplace of hundreds. We must be sharp and our perceptions tuned at all times, so the preferred choice is to only walk among humans when necessary and the smaller the crowd the better. That is easiest."

  "But it is growing more necessary," Kvasir adds solemnly. "My people were raised to do it from childhood, and even for us—what is left of us—it grows tiring, the world ever more crowded." He absently pops a key on the typewriter, causing a letter bar to make a pronounced snap on the empty paper in the roller.

  Howard drifts for a moment, feeling a connection to this sentiment. He is not fond of human clamor and chatter, nor even many types of music. Yes, comes murmured in his thoughts. So much noise in the world. He clears his throat and refocuses on Kvasir. "I have wanted to ask of your people."

  "Of course you have," he replies. “Everything will make more sense later." He waves toward me. "Would you continue, Mr. Corvinus?" For the first time since we arrived, he is the uncomfortable one.

  I look at him, nod that I'm aware of this shift in his mood. My story grows closer to the moment when our paths converged, and he has never heard all of it from my perspective. "Malorix further explained this ability to me, how to manipulate the human mind to see what we wanted. I would need a little practice, he said, but it would mostly come naturally. He rose from his post and turned to me. 'We should be moving on.'

  "I asked him where and he suggested the Freelands. I considered that I might look for Vesina there, and the rest of the noble survivors, but again he read my mind and shook his head. 'You should never make contact with them,' he warned me. 'Stay away from anyone connected with your past, Zyraxes.'

  "'That is not hard,' I griped back, 'considering most of them are dead.' The resentment came out in a snarl, and at the front of my thoughts stood my family, embraced in a cocoon of memory that still made my heart ache painfully, especially the image of Bendis' face and all of the trust she had put in me to protect her and our children. New considerations rose in my thoughts about my savior. He had all of this power which he had gifted to me—if you would call it a gift—and yet done nothing when Sarmizegetusa was falling. I imagined we could have used him as a weapon, set him loose amongst the legion to tear it apart as I'd done to that small unit the previous night. Again, he read my thoughts as if I had articulated them out loud.

  “He grew agitated and the growl emerged in his voice. 'I am not yours to command or to use in your mortal fights,’ he said.

  "I wasn't ashamed in the least, given to warped rationalization at that time. 'Get out of my mind,' I argued.

  "'Your mind is a mess,' he retorted. 'As loud as those soldiers down there. Learn to quiet it, shield yourself.' Then he stormed off again as he had when, as I lay dying, I still mustered too many questions for his liking.

  "I would have to shield if I wanted any privacy, and I had no idea how to do so. Clearly, I'd stepped on his toes and raised his ire to picture him loose among the Roman infantry killing indiscriminately, but it remained an entertaining thought to me even while it offended him. I had so much more to learn and no patience to learn it. With all of that fury still within me, my physical wounds may have been healed, my scars gone, but I still carried them in my mind. I decided to take my thoughts and go for a walk, hoping to get a little distance where he could not listen in but always I sensed a tether tying us together."

  "Kind of like a telephone," Howard says wistfully. "I think of the one in my grandfather's house. He always stayed familiar with the latest technology."

  I see the memory of a precocious young Howard clicking the cradle lever up and down on a black candlestick receiver, annoying the operator on the other end. "Yes, you could compare it to that, and my line was off the hook and open where it came to Malorix. No way to hang up, no operator to field calls.”

  "I know you've been reading my mind, Mr. Corvinus. I knew some time ago."

  "Yes," I say, "and I hope you have forgiven me the intrusion." He has actually been too fascinated to concern himself with it in that respect. "And you also realize by now that Mr. Freysson and I tend to have private telepathic discussions, but we can also wall each other off." The last of this comes out more pointed than intended.

  Kvasir only gives a little wry smile as his eyes flick back and forth between us.

  "Uh, yes." Our audience takes note of that look.

  "Human thought is very fluid, Howard. Memories surface randomly upon the strangest prompts. Emotions ebb and flow with those memories, and often it all hurls directly at us, clear as spoken language. One needn't even probe for it. It would be maddening if we did not have ways to shield ourselves.

  "On my forest roam I pondered how to shield my thoughts as Malorix had said, and I made every effort to work on honing my senses. I listened through the trees for more footfalls. I reveled in my new power and height. As the sun rose higher, I found the light growing too bright for my vision, until it almost hazed out everything in a field of white glow. This, I realized, was a vulnerability, so I stuck to the shade and made my way down slope to the deeper forests where the sun's rays penetrated the canopy less. On the lowest point of a mountain pass I found the detachment Malorix had spoken of."

  Chapter Eleven

  "There were approximately two contubernia given that there were sixteen legionnaires and four auxiliaries, who carried additional gear and were filling up the water skins in a stream. I eased closer to them, keeping within the thicker snarl of trees and brambles where I could watch from between split branches. They gossiped about ‘the attack’ the night before—the one for which I was responsible—and speculated on what wild creature could do such a thing. It had probably also gotten that Dacian scum that somehow got away. At least, that was the hope running through their minds. They couldn't possibly link me, wounded as I had been, to those killings. The castrum was locked down and under highest security. Anyone going in or out had to be on assignment, and the emperor was going nowhere until further investigation had put him and his advisors at ease.

  "From my vantage, I observed the smells around me, from the pines and the dusty earth, to the tangy fresh water and on top of it all the men before me and the blood in their veins, the flesh on their bones. The hunger stirred anew, beckoning me.

  "The group moved on, and I, without another thought, followed them, and somewhere within a certain range, I felt as if something came loose. It was that mental tether fastening me to Malorix. I had eased out of its range, or so it seemed, and I suddenly felt peacefully alone in my own head, and with that I determined to follow the contubernia.

  "I would stalk them for a time, pause and allow them to advance some more, and then I would continue. On one such pause, I looked up when I he
ard the grating cough of a raven as it soared overhead, cresting the point of a pine and then banking to come to rest in an opposite tree that jutted out of the rock face. It appeared to be looking down on the unit as if waiting, and not long after a second one drifted in. To my surprise, they continued their raucous calls and weren't quiet around me in the least the way other birds or creatures were, but the legionnaires thought nothing of them.

  “As I watched the birds, I began to feel an amusing rapport, even finding that if I focused my awareness, I could almost pinpoint their intentions, but I understood that they felt no threat from me but something more like an ally. When I moved forward again, so did they, flapping above me and whipping this way and that on the occasional breeze. After some time, an entire unkindness had amassed, coughing and trilling and cawing at each other."

  "Fascinating," Howard observes aloud.

  "Indeed," I say. "I told you how all Dacians knew that ravens follow wolf packs when they are on the hunt. My men and I had, while on patrol, witnessed it once when we saw a pack bring down a large buck in a valley. Before the carcass was barely torn open, large black-feathered shadows were perching nearby or brazenly hopping toward the kill and nipping away a shred of meat and fluttering off. The wolves seemed happy to share, and when they had finished dining and moved on, the ravens still had plenty to clean up. These appeared to view me as no less than one of their wolf counterparts and waited for me to deliver an easy meal. I was happy to accommodate them.

  "The two contubernia met up with another group, and I perked up to recognize a now thirty-first one among them and not simply by the crest upon his head. It was the centurion who had pissed on me when I was in that cage. He had taunted me then, so his voice was familiar and still as hard and cruel when he commanded these sections of his men. I could smell him now, too, because his reek had lingered in my clothing until last night's bath. I knew it immediately from where I crouched downwind. Sweat and piss—they so often smell the same—and I knew his far too well since he'd forced me to wear it.