Corvus Rex

by J K Ishaya

  “When I was finished, and the water saturated in my cast-off gore, the pool appeared to drain on its own. The woman and her companions returned with towels and a robe. I was given a shave on my neck and my beard snipped and shaped neatly back into some kind of edge and angle, and then I was brought clothing. Like Malorix’s and my host’s, the styles were nothing I had ever been familiar with. I was given a white, billowing shirt with long sleeves. Leggings and tall boots that came to my knees. A sort of layered jerkin with multiple metal clasps went over the shirt and was belted at the waist. It all felt restrictive and strange compared to the loose tunics and sandals I was used to, and then I was shown my image in a mirror. In the world I came from, mirrors were polished silver surfaces that were still quite blurry and sometimes a little warped, nothing as clear as this.”

  “I gather then,” Howard says, “that technology in the Dreamlands was far greater than it was in your time. The city, the lifts, the ships, and even the mirror.”

  “It often surpasses the technology of this time as well,” I say. “And yet turn a corner and you will find the most primitive of living arrangements, or whole communities of the superstitious. You could say it is, in many ways, a timeless reflection of the waking world, everything has a juxtaposition with something else: beauty and darkness, happiness and despair, wealth and poverty, past and present, predator and prey. It is all there.”

  Kvasir clears his throat, reminding me of the time, and I nod with a quiet smile.

  “Ah, but I digress on those details. I will sum it all up into more amazement at everything I saw from the mirror to the tower I dwelt in, and that amazement would be constantly fueled as the days progressed. It kept me docile, and Nyarlathotep knew that.

  “In that mirror, I gazed at a stranger. There were no tattoos, no falx, nothing of my old self save my neatly trimmed beard and hair, all clean and presentable in these foreign clothes. I liked the look of this new me. This Zyraxes did not remind me of what I had lost. The monster was hidden away as well, at least until I became hungry again.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Come morning I slept again, as I had on the ship. That would become my routine, to sleep during the day and be awake at night. My vision simply could not take extreme sunlight though dusk and early dawn were not much of a problem, nor a moonlit sky filled with that marvelous aurora. I was shown to a sumptuous chamber with a large, far different from the raised platform of wolf furs that I was accustomed to sleeping on with Bendis lying against me. Nyarlathotep showered avarice on me for those first few days that we stayed in Dylath-Leen. I rose at night and the servant girls would melt out of the shadows again to attend me. As they dressed me in the new clothes, I would stare for long minutes into the mirror, still fascinated by my face presented to me with such clarity as I’d never seen before from the shape of my eyes and their blue color to my longish nose and square shoulders no longer slightly tilted from a curvature. The clothing began to feel better, less restrictive as I grew used to it, and the silken sleeves soft and whispery on my skin.

  “Nyarlathotep clearly preferred the darkest of hours as well and I noted his tendency to keep mostly to the shadows of a room, but he also did not sleep at all. I never saw him remotely doze in one of the plush chairs in the shared living space. Once I was awake and about, we would leave the tower to climb into the carriage and wander the city from its port and lighthouse to the deepest, inner crevices below the tallest basalt towers and bridges where I witnessed all means of life and met human shop keepers selling rich fragrances and foods. I sampled roasted meats and pastries, drank flavorful wine and beers. I met fishermen and merchants coming in from the seas and then I often heard more about the black ships. I learned that these ships carried loads of rare rubies mined somewhere far away and were exchanged for a certain breed of slave from a place called Parg that was on the other side of the river’s mouth from Dylath-Leen’s ports. Nyarlathotep placed one such gem in my hand to show me its luster and blood-red depths that were hypnotic. I wondered if it were related to the gem I had heard about in my prison back on Earth, but it was a thought so brief and vague. He let me keep the ruby, so I placed it in a pouch to hang from my belt along with a few coins that came into my possession.

  “And then, when I began to grow hungry for the unorthodox sustenance that I now required, he took me hunting. I dressed down that night in simpler clothes that were dark and would show little gore provided I did not loose myself in the kill and all but bathe in it. We went down to the waterfront and there wandered the creaking wharfs and shanties where I touched one unsavory mind after another looking for just the right one deserving of my variety of execution. After having killed those two contubernia so indiscriminately, and my vengeance on Bielis leading to my entrapment, I had decided to adopt some kind of code. I wanted to pick only the deserving, and that meant taking more time to make a choice.

  “Nyarlathotep was nothing short of impatient with this notion. ‘Let yourself go,’ he insisted. ‘They are all deserving. Every last one of them.’

  “I refused to be less than discriminating. I may have felt that Bielis and most of the Romans I had slaughtered in some way deserved it, but I did not know these people. Yet, to my disappointment, I found tarnish on almost all of them. I also found that I could not read the uncanny men who crewed the black ships. Oh, clearly as slave traders they were vile in their own way, but either they were shielded from mind reading or their psyches operated in such a way that I could not comprehend. Whatever the case, my attempts were met with what I would almost call a static of whispers in their bizarre foreign language, and no fleeting mental images floated to the surface with it that I might draw some interpretation. I kept to sifting through the common, human folk. My companion smirked knowingly as he watched me struggle to make a choice, all while my cravings grew stronger, causing my mind to cloud from headaches and the yawning cavity of my middle screamed. My basest instincts fought to take over until I finally discovered a man whose memories involved horrific crimes against a young woman in Ulthar with no weight of remorse in his entire being. He was a Dreamer and fully aware of his abilities, using them to delve into this world to play out the cruelest desires that he dared not entertain in the waking world.

  “I stalked him, drove him mad with fear, as he had his victim, and then rendered him unconscious and absconded with his body to a murky alley where I drank his blood and ate his heart and liver while Nyarlathotep watched gleefully from not far away. Then I dumped his corpse, laden with venom, in the bay. The satisfaction ran as deep as when I had torn into Bielis, and I put it together that to strike fear into my victims imparted a more delectable dining experience, leaving me almost bloated and flush. As I came back to my senses, this realization somewhat alarmed me, but that was soon overridden as Nyarlathotep whisked me back to the apartment to clean up. He chattered incessantly along the way and brought up a matter to haunt my nerves for the rest of the night.

  “‘As I said, you needn’t have been so selective, but that was excellent, and well deserved for that miscreant. Now that you have killed his alternate body, he will likely go mad from his inability to dream and turn to treachery in the waking world to indulge his own heinous appetite. How glorious!’

  “I suddenly felt cold and perturbed at this idea. In my craven state, I had not considered the nature of the Dreamer body versus the awake one and how I was killing one but not the other, thus marooning my victim, dreamless and growing ever more insane from it, on the earth plane. Meanwhile, Nyarlathotep reminded me not to worry, that I could look forward to hunting the devil down a second time on earth when we returned. And was that not, in itself, a thing of much hilarity? he asked, but I did not laugh. Then on and on he went about the multitude of amazing things he had yet to show me.

  “The next night we boarded the Phantasm again and cast off. During our stay in Dylath-Leen, I’d forgotten the bizarre reek of that ship, and I spent a great deal of the launch holding my breath and waiting f
or the winds to pick up along with the rhythm of the oars.”

  “I find it a wonder how Nyarlathotep could be so offended by your stench and not that of the ship,” Howard throws in with a mild chuckle.

  “Yes, there is no lack of irony there,” I say and smile to myself. “I watched the basalt city, dark towers outlined by streaks of moonlight, diminish in the distance until we were out on the sparkling sea. Above, the vault of heaven twinkled with the pulsing stars and shimmer of auroras and within the same area of space as before, I encountered that black distortion where there were no stars at all. I relaxed back on the steps to the aft castle and stared long and intensely into this anomaly, focusing to hear the cosmic dirge that framed it. The ambient sounds of the crew clopping around me in their foreign shoes faded and my vision telescoped deeper into the black where I swore something there moved. Just a subtle shift, and my wandering thoughts suddenly came around to the idea that I was not looking at simply a hole in space but some kind of nest.”

  Howard shivers at that word and all that it can mean, his thoughts already scurrying for hypotheses as the sleuth-hound in him cannot resist. “So there are entities that can live in space? Actual space. I knew it.” He proceeds to get ahead of himself. “Every astronomical study I’ve read has concluded that outer space is a vacuum in which nothing can live, though there are nebulae of noxious gasses, of course. Somehow, I’ve always sensed a dynamic universe that reaches far beyond human limits and comprehension and begs the question that just because we cannot live in a vacuum, why can’t something else? Olbers’ paradox suggests an expanding universe, explaining the blackness between stars as opposed to a static one in which their light would overlap. Why wouldn’t there be other things living within those spaces as well?”

  “You are very close to a cold hard truth, Howard, but I am talking about the space that surrounds the Dreamlands and all of their far reaches,” I say. “It mirrors the space of this world, and there are things existing in it that no man would ever wish to encounter. There is a layer of veils between the two, keeping the earth realm somewhat safe, but were any of those veils to be torn.” The suggestion is enough.

  Kvasir nods along with that and helps himself to another cup of tea that has gone tepid. He’s too damned close, actually.

  “I see.” Howard shivers again. “How fragile are these veils?”

  “Very,” I say dryly. “The thing that drew my attention felt familiar, though I could not define it at that moment. Something was definitely there, burrowed in. My focus on it was finally interrupted when one of the crew clopped up the steps next to my head with obnoxious intention and I started with a gasp. I sat up, hearing several of them them chuckle gruffly at my expense, and then I looked down the line of the railing and found Nyarlathotep standing there. His body was faced out to sea, but his head was turned sharply to watch me. He gave that knowing smile that I was growing all too accustomed with, only in this one there was some gleam of additional satisfaction. The oily darkness seemed to rim his eyes more thickly for a moment and then recede again. I pushed myself up from the steps and wandered to the opposite railing, just to get him out of my sight, and I looked out upon the sparkling waves and watched creatures of a more pelagic nature move below the surface of the water. Smaller, silvery fish darted up into the moonlight and down again. Whale-like creatures breeched in the distance, and then something of a freakish form, longer and more snake-like, appeared to brush against the hull where it met the water before it disappeared into the depths.

  “Over the next few nights, I made the waves my primary source of entertainment and refused to look at the unsettling sky and that burrow between the stars. It was something of a comfort, but I sensed another shift coming, especially when Nyarlathotep would move closer and lurk around me, clearly pondering something. It was also one thing to see him smirking, the look of scheming etched in every line on his face. That became so commonplace, I began to barely notice it.

  “It was when he stopped smiling and his face became an unreadable mask that I should have paid more attention.”

  ✽✽✽

  “The boat shot through the water at the fastest clip than I had ever experienced in sea travel. The oars moved swiftly and tirelessly and still I never caught any glimpse of whom or what manned them. I was only allowed to roam the deck, castles, and main cabin where I slept while Nyarlathotep wrote cryptic things in logographic characters, always in complete darkness, never needing so much as a candle. Such limited territory suited me fine, at first, since I preferred to stay on deck, appreciating the open sky at night, and the ship’s noxious smell was more tamed with the rush of fresh air. To my initial astonishment, the servant women appeared whenever needed, to hand Nyarlathotep a cup of wine or to oversee my dressing each night. They had not, to my knowledge, boarded the boat along with us, yet here they were, manifesting in and out of the shadows just as in the apartment, and that further lent to my hypothesis that they were an extension of their master. At least two of them tended to follow me around, not always at a close distance but I was aware of their eyes on me, their mirrored pupils dilated in thorough observation.

  “On the fifth night, I heard a shout go out over the crew and saw the turbaned men pointing into the distance and I looked to see a mountainous island looming against the starry horizon. On the northern coast, the lights of a city twinkled with a mix of towers and terraces that appeared to climb the mountain’s side. At its base, we were routed by twin light houses into the bay and there settled in. The timing was perfect for I had begun to hunger again.”

  “So you must feed roughly every five days?” Howard asks. His curiosity about my diet has been churning, building its own questions that he’s kept pushed aside.

  “Back then, that was the longest I could go, if I avoided some injury or other that required regeneration, though the slightest scent of blood could drive me at any time. Eighteen hundred years later I’ve grown disciplined to wait ever longer, up to a month if necessary.”

  “A great improvement,” Kvasir says dryly. “Considering the age we exist in now.”

  “Especially considering it,” I emphasize.

  “What do you mean?” Howard’s eyes dart to him and then back to me.

  “I am, essentially, committing repeated murder, so a month gives me the luxury of time to plan my hunts and disposal. Human authorities have grown so much more technically savvy in their investigations than they were back then.” I neglect to tell him that I occasionally nibble, as I did earlier this night on the yellow cloak’s heart.

  “But you are able to psychically cover your steps,” he reminds me pointedly.

  “Oh yes, thank you, Howard, I’d almost forgotten.” My sarcasm remains lost on him.

  “Like when you project the illusion of being human. Does that not aid your hunt, too?”

  “Of course it can, but we have told you how exhausting that has become.” I briefly recall a night in London not long ago when I found myself awkwardly cloaking both myself and my prey from the eyes of a young constable who had come to investigate a noise. In his wake, a small crowd gathered, until I was cornered and projecting an illusion of camouflage into every mind around me, coiling with deepening agitation for their curiosity to tamp down and them to disperse.

  “We have watched populations rise,” Kvasir adds, “and rarely do they decline much at all any more, even in events of disease and natural disaster. The balance on this earth is shifting quickly and steadily.”

  Howard nods and delves deeper into this subject than the last time it came up. “Yes, I was thinking about that before. Why, even the niggers are breeding beyond all control and the Italians have been invading Providence in great numbers. Foreigners in general, really, and they are not the most intelligent.” I see, among his thoughts, a Nordic boy whom he knew as a child, a potential friend, until the boy’s lack of interest in the same things ruled him ignorant and boring in Howard’s eyes.

  I look at Kvasir and raise a brow, m
y jaw tightening as suddenly recalling my experiences on the Phantasm are gone, replaced by a warm flush through my cheeks. I’m taken with the urge to unveil the little secret I’ve been hiding since our walk, to show Howard the dried blood on my clothes and frighten the hell out of our new student. It is so tempting that for an instant the illusion almost does fall away.

  Rein it in, Kvasir sends, pulling me back from making a huge mistake. We’ve spoken of this already.

  “In case you haven't noticed, Howard, Mr. Freysson and I are two of the more extreme foreigners you will ever know in your entire life.”

  Yuri, dammit…

  Howard’s eyes widen. “Oh, but I meant no offense against either of you.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” I quip. “There would be no benefit in that, would there? We might take our bedtime stories and go elsewhere.”

  “The truth of the matter, Howard,” Kvasir intervenes with calm rationale, “is that no matter how you look at your fellow man, a large population of any race is the only certainty that mankind as a whole may survive at all. Uncomfortable though these crowds are for us, neither I nor Mr. Corvinus can dispute the reason for them. It is mankind’s natural support plan, like the defense mechanism of a large herd, come the time that beings such as Nyarlathotep gain the foothold they are looking for in this world.

  “My own kind, those Boreans who made the Great Crossing, are so few now. When we are gone, there will only remain our distant relatives in the Dreamlands, and they care not about you or anyone else. They live to serve Nyarlathotep, so humanity will have no more aid from us.”