Divine Madness

by Harmon Cooper

  I took one step onto the surface of the water, glad to see that it would hold my weight. It was springy, the buoyancy reminding me of walking on a waterbed.

  I knew I was dreaming, but that didn’t stop a lump in my throat, an elated feeling in my chest as I walked across the surface of the lake.

  I approached the seated figure, recognizing him immediately.

  “I don’t think I will make it,” Lhandon said suddenly, his face turning white, more storm clouds appearing above him.

  “You can make it,” I said as I lowered to the top of the waves. “Tashi and Roger will come; I know they will. Just stay with me.”

  I look to him, tilting my head as I asked, “Are you dreaming?”

  “Am I?” Lhandon took a glance around, his eyes bulging for a moment. “What is this place?”

  “We’re in Massachusetts.”

  The portly monk smiled as a couple ducks landed in the water next to him, the storm clouds behind him starting to dissipate. “Maybe… Maybe I am.”

  “You are, we’re at a lake near the city I live in.”

  “May I see the city of Massachusetts?” he asked, glancing toward the east.

  “Sure,” I told him. “And the city is Worcester, the state is Massachusetts.”

  Lhandon lifted into the air, looking down at his hands as he did so. “It’s that easy?” He nodded at his own question. “Yes, of course, it is. We are dreaming. I have had these types of dreams before.”

  We rose higher into the air, both of us turning toward Main Street, Sears Island now behind us, the ducks still playing in the water below.

  “How fascinating.” Lhandon noticed a red sedan pulling onto a road beneath us. “Your world has mechanical transport?”

  “It does, it has mechanical everything, like I told you. But no magic.”

  Lhandon laughed. “Yet here we are, flying through your world… You should have more faith in the place you come from, Nick.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I told him as Bancroft Tower came into view. Erected in honor of Admiral Bancroft by a group of his closest friends, the stone tower sat on a hill overlooking a quaint neighborhood.

  “You have castles as well?” Lhandon asked as he turned toward the tower.

  “No, this was just made to look like a castle. Well, I guess that makes it a castle.”

  Lhandon laughed. “Such a fascinating world,” he said as we moved onward, the storm clouds from earlier suddenly gone. The sun reflected off the windows of the glass buildings downtown creating a beautiful sparkle.

  We were just beginning to lower to the streets when a pained expression came across Lhandon’s face.

  “What is it?” I asked him.

  “No!” he shouted, his body cutting in half, entrails spilling out onto the street below.

  Lhandon’s body landed on the sidewalk, the lower half of his torso rolling out to the street only to be hit by a car.

  I awoke with a gasp, both Lhandon and I partially out of our drawers.

  I looked over to see the evil monk Gomchen standing over Lhandon, smiling as one of his henchmen cracked his switch against Lhandon’s bare chest.

  The wounds were infected, some of them oozing pus, the skin around his laceration starting to turn purple and black, bloody.

  “Let me heal him,” I said, desperation in my voice. “You’re going to kill him!”

  “No, no,” Gomchen said, turning his attention to me. “I refuse to believe that such an enlightened monk, one who has his own monastery, an Exalted One even, would die from a light torture such as this. Besides, he should be able to heal himself. Perhaps he won’t heal himself just to show us how much he can suffer. How selfless.”

  “He gave his power to me,” I said, all the muscles tensing in my body.

  “Then he is a fool,” said Gomchen. “Truly. Feed him.”

  Rather than stick the metal tube in, the reptilian guard simply dumped the bucket of fish offal over Lhandon’s face, the portly monk barely putting up a fight.

  I knew screaming at them wasn’t going to do anything, and try as I might, I knew I wasn’t going be able to break free from my chains.

  I wished at that moment that I had been given a different power, one of strength, one that would let me tear out of my shackles and murder the three Druk men.

  The second guard dumped a bucket of cold water over Lhandon’s face. The next bucket they dumped over his chest, washing some of the fish guts out of his wounds.

  “Do you still think your friends are going to come?” Gomchen asked me.

  “They will, and when they do…”

  “Maybe they will arrive tonight,” he said with a laugh as he turned to the exit of the cell. “Which means that you won’t need any food and water. Now come,” the evil monk told the two guards, “and leave them exposed for today. Perhaps it will help air out the Exalted One’s wounds. We can’t have you dying before Sona and Evan arrive.”

  They left, my focus immediately shifting to Lhandon. “You have to stay strong…” I started to tell him.

  “We… we dreamed together,” Lhandon said, not turning his head to look at me. “You took me to Massachusetts. Thank you.”

  He started to drift off.

  “Stay with me,” I told him, pulling at my shackles even though I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to reach out to him, that I wasn’t going to be able to break free and heal him. “Stay with me, Lhandon!”

  “See you… dream…”

  I let out a deep breath, followed by a loud scream, one that shredded my vocal cords.

  “Come on, Roger, Tashi,” I whispered, trying to focus on my breathing, to move back to a meditative state. Lhandon hadn’t cast his rune, meaning that I was going to have to go to sleep on my own.

  No matter—we needed a plan for what we should do once Sona and Evan came, and this would give me plenty of time to think it through.

  I just hoped that Lhandon made it until then, that he would survive this.

  If not, there would be hell to pay.

  Chapter Thirty: Cold Hands

  I didn’t know when I fell asleep, but I definitely recognized the sound that woke me up.

  For a moment I thought I had been dreaming, that this was yet another dream in which I was in control, modifying my reality as I saw fit.

  Then I heard the grunt again.

  I craned my head to the right to see…

  “You?” I asked, startled to see the masked lion man.

  “And us,” a familiar voice chimed in.

  I looked to the left to see two masked lionesses, Roger on one of their shoulders.

  “Saruul?” I asked, barely able to get her name out.

  She pulled her black mask up to reveal her face, the woman next to her doing the same.

  “Let’s get you out of there,” Saruul’s mother said.

  “What that hell was happening in here?” Roger asked, taking a quick look around. “It smells worse than a latrine!”

  “We need to help Lhandon,” I said, my chest swelling as I tried to contain my excitement.

  “Let’s get you out first.”

  Saruul and the masked lion man came to either side of my drawer. The man took a ring of keys from the front of his belt, fumbling with it for a moment as he checked the locks. Both of them were wearing the clothing of the reptilian guards, leather armor with engraved images over their chests, a splash of blood across their breastplates.

  “Where’s Tashi?” I asked as my last shackle fell, not at all concerned with the fact that I was naked.

  “He’s in the village, ready to prepare a distraction once we escape from here,” Dohna explained. “He’ll bring most of the plankways down if he has to.”

  “We don’t need to escape; we need to get to one of the ships,” I said.

  The masked lion man helped me out of the drawer, my legs wobbly at first, my feet completely numb. I used the wall for support, ignoring the numbness as I traced up Healing Hand.

 
; “Are you seriously thinking of sailing at a time like this?” Roger asked. “The entire village is about to be looking for us…”

  I placed my hand on Lhandon’s forehead, still using the wall for support. The monk came awake almost instantly.

  “N-Nick?” he asked, his throat parched. His mouth dropped open. “We’re saved!”

  “I have water.” I looked to Dohna to see her pulling a bag off her shoulder. I also noticed that she had two blades sheathed at her sides, Saruul armed with just one sword, the hilts of all their weapons polished and sparkling.

  My legs still tingling, I continued to focus on healing Lhandon as the masked lion man and Saruul pulled his drawer out from the wall, and Dohna gave him water from a leather bota bag.

  “Please, don’t look at me,” Lhandon said, his face turning red with shame. The lashes on his stomach stitched together, the wounds starting to disappear as if someone was erasing them.

  “What matters right now is that you are healed,” I said firmly.

  “I was really scared,” the portly monk said, swallowing hard. “I was starting to have pretty terrible dreams, dark ones, demons coming for me. How did you get here?” he asked suddenly, looking to Saruul.

  “We’ll get to that,” she told him quietly.

  Once Lhandon’s other wrist was freed, the masked lion monk helped him out of his confines. I now focused my own healing power on myself, the tingling sensation leaving my legs.

  “Please.” Dohna stepped behind me and placed my robes over my shoulders. She also handed me the bota bag, which I readily drank from, the water surprisingly cold.

  As soon as I tied off my brown robes, Saruul leaped into my arms, her legs wrapped around me.

  “I can’t believe…” she started to say.

  “How did you get here?” I asked, repeating what Lhandon had asked earlier.

  “It was your ghost, no, double,” Saruul said, correcting herself. “Your double appeared. At first, I thought you were dead. I started screaming, and then Mother came and saw it too. We went to the temple to see what Jigme said. He instructed us to follow the double.”

  “And what about you?” I asked Roger, Lhandon now getting dressed.

  “Your double came to us while we were secretly trying to check every house in Sarpang, hoping to uncover some information at the time. He started heading out toward the Great Plateau. So we ignored him. Then he came back. And we ignored him again because I’m an idiot; I’ll admit that. Tashi wanted to pay attention to him from the get-go. So then he came back and motioned for us to follow him. So we did. In the end, we didn’t have to go very far once we saw their group moving across the plateau. The doubles merged together, and brought us here.”

  “Thank you,” I said to my former opponent, who merely nodded.

  “What did he say?” Lhandon asked.

  “My double split into two and gathered both parties. Saruul and her mother confirmed with Jigme that they should follow the double, Roger was reluctant at first but eventually, they met up.”

  “My word! Two doubles?”

  “Double trouble is what I was telling Tashi. And don’t ask me who he is,” Roger said, thumbing his wing over at the masked lion. “He hasn’t said a word since we joined them.”

  “Did Jigme know that it wasn’t his actual double, that Nick was alive?” Lhandon asked, the monk still in the process of securing his robes.

  “No, he didn’t know,” Dohna said. “But he had read about something like this happening before, and said it was worth investigating. We came as quickly as we could. We’re sorry it took us…”

  “You came through the Great Plateau,” I told her. “Having just done that, you made record time. Believe me.”

  “Perhaps we could have come faster,” Saruul said, bowing her head in apology toward Lhandon.

  “All that matters now is that we are free,” Lhandon told her.

  “Who did this to you?” Roger asked me. “Was it someone we know?”

  “It is someone that Lhandon and I know, a Druk monk named Gomchen. He was with Sona when she attacked the monastery.”

  “Well fuck that guy, and we don’t need a fortune teller in our group to know what will happen if I ever run into the bastard. I’m talking knife in the eye over here.”

  “We should go,” Dohna said, “but before we do, what were you saying earlier about taking a ship?”

  “What time is it?” I asked her.

  “Four hours past the start of the new day,” she said. “Why?”

  “We would be getting there a little early, but it should work,” I said. “I met a woman whose family runs a ship that leaves for the Island Kingdom of Jonang every morning. Her name is Tsegi. She seemed reliable and she claimed to have a no questions asked policy.”

  “Is that what you want?” Saruul asked.

  “We didn’t make it all the way to Sarpang to give up now.”

  “We should hurry then,” Dohna said.

  “And I need to get my Flaming Thunderbolt back,” I told them with finality, “and my Fist of Force ring.”

  “All of our stuff was taken,” Lhandon added. “Including the black pearl that the Exonerated One left behind. But don’t worry, I have a plan for that. And I’m so lucky I left many of my things in Dornod, including the letters from the Eternal Hermit. That would have been disastrous!”

  Dohna shook her head. “It’s too risky to try to get anything back now. We haven’t been discovered yet, and there’s no telling where your stuff is, nor do we know just how connected Gomchen is in the city. I believe the best thing to do is to leave it for now.”

  The masked lion man grunted in agreement.

  “Leave it?” I exchanged glances with Lhandon, who merely nodded. “But…”

  “Nick, the most important thing we can do now is get out of here,” Saruul said as she pulled her mask back over her head.

  She turned to the door, the lion man and her mother joining her. Lhandon was the next to join them, Roger settling on my shoulder.

  “Where are we anyway?” I asked, instantly regretting not going after my weapon. “We haven’t been able to figure it out.”

  “We’re in one of the buildings built into the cliffside, in the basement. It is a private residence. Three stories tall. The bridge that connects to the main plankway is on the second floor,” Dohna explained as we made our way out of the cell, past two downed guards in the stairwell. These ones still wore their armor, and I assumed Saruul, her mother, and the masked lion had stripped their gear from another group.

  We encountered that second group on the next floor up, where we came across three dead bodies with their armor missing.

  Our group was moving too quickly for me to really pay attention to my surroundings, but I did notice that everything had been cut into the stone, including a nook with seating carved in the wall, tapestries hanging around it.

  We reached the other end of the first floor; Roger flew up to check the next floor, making sure we were clear to move on, whistling at us when he was certain.

  The next floor up featured a nicely arranged living room with an incredibly long carpet reaching all the way to the door at the other side. There was a smell in the air that reminded me of incense, with an earthy hint to it, as if the heat of the day had warmed up the stone walls.

  Even though the windows were closed and decorated with dark stained-glass images, we still kept a low profile as we moved toward the exit.

  As we reached the front door, Lhandon accidentally bumped his leg against a wooden cart, causing a glass to fall and shatter against the carpet.

  “Sorry…” he said, bringing his hands to his mouth.

  The masked lion man crouched next to the door, Dohna doing the same on the other side.

  Perched at the window now, Roger pressed his eye against the darkened glass, trying to look out, giving up once he realized it was too murky for him to actually see anything on the other side.

  “Take this,” Dohna told me as s
he handed me one of her swords. “Trade me.”

  She motioned toward the bag I was carrying, the one she’d had earlier. I gave it to her, Dohna slipping it over one shoulder.

  “Some of us have to cross the Great Plateau again,” she said, turning her attention to Saruul.

  “I’m going with Nick,” Saruul said suddenly, a lump appearing in her throat.

  Her mother nodded. “I know you are. I’m talking about him and me,” she said, tilting her head at the masked lion man, who replied with another grunt.

  “You’re coming with us?” I asked as Saruul let out a sigh of relief.

  “There is absolutely no way I’m letting you two get into this situation again. Had I been there…” The front of her mask twitched. “I would have done something. It would have been a lot more difficult to poison you.”

  “This is great,” Lhandon said, “I’m sure your skills will come in handy in Jonang.”

  “I’m so glad you’re coming with us,” I said, feeling the urge to hug her and simultaneously realizing that we were in a fatal funnel situation here: either we were going to run out of the door and no one would be waiting for us, or the exact opposite was about to happen.

  “So we’re supposed to go toward the docks, and look for this lady that runs a ship, right?” Roger asked.

  “Tsegi, her name is Tsegi,” I told him.

  “Short for Battsegseg?”

  “How… how did you know that?”

  “I went to one of the best bird schools in Lhasa, Nick, I’ve told you this before. And another thing—”

  “I will help you,” Saruul told Roger, cutting his rant short. “I can morph; it’ll make me faster.”

  “Somehow I don’t think the snake folks around here are going to like seeing a lion running toward them…”

  “No, this is a good idea,” Dohna said.

  “Give me my sword back, and you take Saruul’s,” she told me.

  After I presented the weapon to Dohna, I took Saruul’s sword and hooked its scabbard to my belt.

  Dohna turned her attention to her daughter. “I’m going to miss you,” she said suddenly, coming forward and placing her hand on the side of Saruul’s head.