by A J Dalton
She dived back into the earth, under the campfire and then back up to clamp her stone hands around Slim’s ankles. He yelped and dug down with the point of his knife, blunting it.
Freda continued to rise until she had Slim dangling upside down a foot or so above the ground. He bent and twisted while slashing with his knife. Fortunately for Freda, he’d left his sun-metal sword with his bedroll, since its bright blade would have risked giving him away. Slim realised that he would not be able to win free of her and so began yelling for help.
The other heavy men rolled from their beds and to their feet. The Captain brandished his sun-metal at her. ‘Who goes there?’
Freda dropped Slim and lowered her hands to her sides so that she would not appear too threatening.
‘Id crept up on me and addacked me!’ Slim shouted. ‘I was drying to defend myself! Get the freak away from me!’
The Captain’s eyes went to Freda.
‘I had to stop him,’ she said, straining her voice so that it wouldn’t be too gravelly and frightening. ‘He had his knife and was going to do something bad to you.’
The Captain’s face became grim as he turned on Slim.
‘No, it’s not true, Captain. You can’t believe a monster like this over one of your own men. It must be the thing that broke out of the mine, the monster that’s killed who knows how many. It’ll say whatever is needed to save its own neck.’
‘Or it did whatever was needed to save my neck from the likes of you, Slim.’
‘But Captain, you can’t believe that!’ mole-face whined. ‘I’d be crazy to try anything like that.’
‘What I believe, Slim, is that you’re capable of talking your way out of almost anything. Is it so crazy to think someone could slit my throat during the night? Is it so crazy to think that when I was found cold in the morning there would be speculation that some thief in the night had crept into the camp? Is it crazy to think the children would be searched and one of them would be found with a bloody knife nearby, a knife the child disavowed any knowledge of? Is it crazy to think you’d be the loudest when it came to calling for my memory to be avenged, Slim? No, it is not crazy. Be quiet, Slim! Is there any here who would speak in his defence?’
None of the men spoke up, although the youngest looked from face to face before deciding to keep his peace.
‘Now just hang on there, Captain. This is no jury or military tribunal,’ Slim protested. ‘You can’t do this! It’s murder!’
‘It’s a hanging now or a court martial at Old Fort. I won’t waste a tribunal’s time with you, Slim, and I wouldn’t put it past you to get through without punishment, so I am exercising my discretion as an officer of the blessed Saviours to see you hanged here and now. Big Harold, Horse, hold him. You,’ the Captain directed the youngest, ‘get a rope.’
Slim struggled wildly, but Big Harold had him in a vice.
‘I demand my right to be heard by holy Saint Goza! The holy one will want to know why you have sided with this pagan monster against one of the People under his protection. There isn’t even any proof against me. He’ll see all of you executed and damned for all eternity! You dare not deny me my sacred right!’
‘I will take full responsibility for the hanging,’ the Captain informed his men. ‘Horse, gag him and then take him away among the trees. The children do not need to see or hear this.’
‘Captain, he has a right to his final words. What if he wishes to repent before he is hanged? Or he wishes to pray to those who have gone before him?’
The Captain was silent for a second. ‘So be it then. Let all hear his lies and screams.’
Freda shifted unhappily, her size drawing everyone’s attention. ‘Y-you are going to kill him? I don’t like it when there’s killing. I stopped S-Slim just so there wouldn’t be any killing. What if Slim says he’s sorry and promises not to do it again? Or you could punish him without killing him.’
Big Harold looked at her blankly, the youngest like she was insane.
‘See! It’s retarded. You can’t take the word of a creature of the Chaos over my own. That’s it! It’s part of the Chaos and a living corruption. It lies by its very nature!’ Slim yelled.
‘If I were you, Slim,’ the pipe suggested, ‘I’d keep quiet for a moment. Might be the monster’s doing a better job of saving your skin than you are.’
The Captain shook his head. ‘I thank you for stepping in to pre-empt Slim’s evil intent, but this is now army business. If a man seeks to take my blood, then I may take his in return. If Slim’s was a crime just against me, I might be moved to accept some alternative reparation. Yet his was also a crime against a superior officer, the army, the Empire, the blessed Saviours and the Saints themselves. Death is the least that he deserves. An army is only as strong and swift as its discipline and punishment. For me not to enforce suitable punishment now would only conspire with and encourage the crime. Slim can never be trusted again now that he has betrayed the trust and fellowship of his comrades.’
All the men, save Slim, nodded at the Captain’s words.
‘Take him away.’
‘Noo!’ Slim cried piteously. ‘Have mercy! I haven’t done anything. The Saint and the Saviours are watching you!’
Big Harold and Horse half dragged and half carried Slim off into the darkness among the trees. The others trailed after them. The Captain looked back over his shoulder at Freda, who stood rooted where she was.
‘Please, make yourself comfortable by the fire. I’ll want to talk to you after we’ve attended to Slim. We won’t be long.’
But Freda wanted to get away from this place so she would not have to hear the screams of the man she’d condemned to death. She covered her ears and ran. She dived into the ground, but no matter how deep she went, she could still hear him. I am a monster, she moaned.
Minister Praxis tried not to think badly of the holy Saint as he winced in discomfort for the umpteenth time that day as he rode the hard-backed and malodorous mule towards the foothills of the southern mountains. He’d been tempted to name the animal Azual, but had managed to resist such an outright blasphemy. After all, the holy Saint would know everything he said and did … perhaps even what he thought.
Yes, he must find a way to banish such blasphemous thoughts from his head. Otherwise, they would distract him from his holy mission to become Saint Praxis of the Mountains. Nothing must be allowed to jeopardise his mission, not even the thoughts in his head. Besides, the thoughts were probably not even his own; they were more likely the whispering voice of the Chaos, which would be a more constant threat now he was moving beyond the edge of the Empire and civilisation.
I bet Azual’s mother would have preferred this mule for a son anyway. See, there was another of those thoughts! Yet how to banish them? Pain would distract his mind from the whispering, he knew, so he wasted no time removing his long black coat and rolling up the white sleeve of his shirt, to reveal his milky flesh below. Then he raised his riding crop – which the mule had blithely ignored thus far anyway – and slashed down with it across his forearm. He whimpered in pain and a red weal appeared on his skin. Clearly, his body was too weak to suffer its divinely inspired and correct punishment without complaint. It would require further punishment until it had learned not to be so self-pitying and therefore vulnerable to the indulgent temptations of the Chaos.
How he would like to take a whip to Azual! No! He slashed down again, gritting his teeth and refusing to voice a cry. Better. Maybe if he’d flogged his students more, then he wouldn’t be lost in the wilderness right now. Spare the rod and spoil the child. It was Jillan who was to blame, that evil and bewitched boy. In fact, the boy was so despicable that he was probably not even human – yes, he was no doubt some doppelgänger creature of the Chaos. And his parents had lived in that cesspit lair of the Chaos, New Sanctuary, until the holy Saint had come and cleansed the place. The mother must have fornicated with demons and devils in some pagan ritual or other – yes, he could see it now. How weak
the flesh! He slashed down on his forearm again, hardly feeling the pain now, now that his faith had revealed the schemes of the Chaos to him so that he would be able to resist its corrupt influence and blandishments.
The holy Saint was as wise and merciful with the People as he was terrible and unforgiving with the Chaos. The holy one had seen that Jillan, rather than the dutiful Minister, was to blame for all that had happened. He had also seen that one as faithful as the Minister was wasted in a backwater like Godsend and that the Minister was ready to be put on the path to sainthood, for this is what the journey to the mountains was. On this final journey as a Minister he would cleanse his mind and body entirely, so that he was ready to be a vessel for the divine will of the blessed Saviours. At the same time he would cleanse the mountains of the pagans or the pagans of their corruption. The Empire would be enlarged for the good of all and the further glory of the blessed Saviours.
Now he welcomed the bite and pain of the crop, for it brought him closer to purity and divinity. The pain was a joy instead, a religious ecstasy of revelation and enlightenment. And the bony back of the mule was no longer a punishment; rather, it was a sweet scourge to the area of his flesh that was most vulnerable to temptation and the wanton whisperings of the Chaos. He must not allow his body to control him, lest it compromise his faith; rather, his faith must control his body.
Yet will your faith feed you now that most of your food is gone? Silence! He slashed down hard with the crop, opening up the flesh and making blood run into his white shirt. Just as his congregation had fed, housed and clothed him in Godsend, as was their duty, so his faith would see to it that he had food here in the wild. He’d seen winter berries and mushrooms several times already on his journey. You do not know which ones are poisonous and you dare not try them on the mule.
He slashed harder and deeper than before, neither flinching nor wincing. Faith did not demand answers and guarantees. If anything, faith rejected such demands, for they were born of the Chaos and sought to ensure cooperation through second-guessing, fear and intimidation. ‘Sacrifice and duty safeguard the People against the Chaos,’ he said to himself, quoting from the Book of Saviours. Besides, it did not do well to overindulge the body in case it became used to and demanding of such indulgence, self-pitying when it did not receive it and then too weak to suffer even divinely inspired and correct punishment without complaint.
Smiling to himself, the Minister put his forearm to his mouth and sucked at the oozing blood. He patted the mule as well, not that the stupid brute showed any sign of noticing it. There was no chastising or encouraging certain creatures. Like Jillan, they could not be successfully taught or censured. Like the Chaos, they were corrupt in their essential nature and could only be dealt with in one way: by way of total destruction.
The Peculiar never rested, could never find rest, as much and for as long as he had craved it. The life and thoughts of other beings constantly niggled and tore at the edges of his being. The more the Geas had grown, the worse it had become, and so the Peculiar had welcomed the arrival of the elseworlders and the brutal curtailing of the Geas. He’d even aided them in toppling those childish godlings Sinisar, Wayfar, Gar and Akwar, although he had stopped short of helping the elseworlders seize the Geas and all the power of this world. After all, he didn’t want the elseworlders becoming too powerful, for then they would think to turn on him in order to force his secrets from him. If the power of this world was going to belong to anyone, it was going to belong to him, and if he couldn’t have it then he would have to see it destroyed so that it did not fall into the wrong hands.
He’d always kept his motivation from the elseworlders, for he did not want them understanding him and being able to predict his actions. His initial cooperation had bemused them, and he had refused to give them his name, so they had always referred to him as the Peculiar instead. Sharing his name with them would have enabled them to apprehend something of his nature, and he certainly didn’t want that.
There was an uneasy alliance between himself and the elseworlders. They had no reason to trust him, and from what he’d seen the elseworlders didn’t even trust each other. In some ways he was surprised that they’d managed to become any sort of force in the cosmos. Still, there it was.
The elseworlders came to him every now and then with some request or other. Sometimes he would indulge them – if he judged it to be in his own interests or if he judged it harmless and wanted to surprise them – sometimes he would dismiss them disdainfully or with feigned sorrow. In payment, he demanded they build him a chamber of sun-metal, and then another chamber around that, and then another, and so on, so that he had somewhere the life and thoughts of the other beings of this world would struggle to reach, somewhere the roaring agony of their existence was reduced to a whispering irritation, somewhere he was not always on the brink of insanity.
The chamber was his only refuge, but now someone banged on the outermost surface. Someone was coming in! He quickly shifted into a grey nondescript humanoid form, for he did not want the elseworlders knowing his true form and origin, and waited for the visitor to enter his inner sanctum.
The visitor banged on the wall of each chamber as it came so that the Peculiar would have ample warning of its arrival. Six crashing sounds in all and then the small, final door began to open. A willowy elseworlder bent almost double to come inside and then unfolded to stand at full height, which was almost to the ceiling. The elseworlder shadowed its eyes with its hand, the brilliant light from the sun-metal clearly causing it some discomfort.
‘Which one are you then?’ the Peculiar asked in an untroubled voice. ‘You all look the same to me.’
The elseworlder gently nodded its elegantly sculpted head, a gesture the Peculiar didn’t really understand but took for some sort of etiquette. ‘I am Thraal, the one who has spoken to you on the last three occasions. They say the planes of my cheeks are wider and more angled than most of my kind.’
‘Do they? I suppose it doesn’t really matter which one you are anyway, does it?’ the Peculiar asked without inflection.
‘As you say, Peculiar. I represent my entire kind with this visit, so indeed it does not matter.’
‘For reference, how long has passed since your last visit?’
‘Some three hundred years, give or take.’
‘Is the world much changed? How fares your Empire? It can’t be faring too well if you’re having to visit me.’
‘On the contrary,’ the elseworlder replied smoothly. ‘And perhaps you will soon see for yourself. But I am curious. What have you been doing for the last three centuries? What is it you do here in this chamber on your own? What sustains you? Does not the sun-metal stop almost all energy from entering?’
The Peculiar stifled a yawn. ‘Didn’t you ask me these questions during your last visit, and the ones before that? I keep myself busy, you know. I sleep a bit, meditate a bit, compose terrible verse, you know, the usual sort of thing, much like you do, I imagine. As to how I sustain myself, well, anticipation of your next delightful visit, Thraal, is all I need to keep me going. But enough of my impure thoughts of you. What is it I can do for you?’
The elseworlder blinked slowly, as if committing each word the Peculiar had said to memory or as if silently sharing the words with others of its kind. ‘We wish you to deliver a particular boy to us. He has the sorts of powers at his disposal we have not seen among the People in a long time. We wish you to end the plague that has begun in the southern region. We suspect there is a connection between the boy and the plague.’
‘Fancy that! An old-fashioned bringer of plagues and curses.’ The Peculiar smiled with an air of nostalgia.
‘There is a third thing that we wish.’
‘Oh, sorry if I interrupted. I’m not good at standing on ceremony, you know. I get backache, you see, and that then brings on my piles. Terrible trouble they give me. Blood and everything. Had some turn septic once. Very nasty. Do you ever get ’em? Piles, I mean?’
‘Don’t want much, do you?’
‘Explain please, Peculiar. I do not understand your words and manner.’
‘Are your kind incapable of dealing with such apparently trivial matters? You have a whole Empire at your disposal, complete with Saints, Heroes, Ministers and slaves to clean your cesspits, do you not?’
‘We will build you a seventh chamber although it will use up the Empire’s entire reserves.’
‘Do you know, Thraal, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you sounded desperate. Tell me, why has the mad one begun to scream again?’
Thraal hesitated. Then he said evenly, ‘We believe the Geas has finally begun to move.’
‘Well, why didn’t you say so before? That’s put a different spin on things. All right, I’ll do it. Two conditions, however.’
‘What are your conditions, Peculiar?’
‘First, I want the seventh chamber built even if I complete only two of the three tasks, and second, I want a helmet fashioned entirely of sun-metal provided to me before I set out.’
‘Then a binding bargain is struck between us.’
‘And I want you wearing something nice for my return, Thraal. Those stiff and dowdy robes of yours really do you no favours at all. Have you thought of something with a bit of colour? Red, maybe, although that might make your face look even more washed out. Green, perhaps. Just what colour are your eyes?’
‘We need the tasks to be completed as soon as possible.’
The Peculiar released an exaggerated sigh. ‘You really are no fun, are you? Very well. I will go out into the world as soon as my helmet is delivered to me. Make it a large size so I can grow into it. And no scrimping! I know what you lot are like. I’m sure the walls of the sixth chamber are thinner than the others. Make sure the metal in the helmet is good and thick.’
