The hyperrealist was eyeing me intently. “Don’t fall asleep just yet Evander. That would be quite dire,” he said with a cool grin.
“You must pierce every Scammander in the court except for the one which you believe is the Scammander you wish to save. Some are merely images, some others are actual creatures. For every image which you don’t pierce and which is actually an image, you can choose to not pierce an image you think is actually a creature, thereby saving it also.
“However, if the image proves to be a creature, they will perish at the conclusion of the game. If you fail to pierce every illusion on the board, then I will murder all the creatures on here, and add the years of their lives onto yours.” A very sinister grin spread over his face. “I have known for a long time that you would come to me Evander, and have taken extra care to see that this game is personally important to you. I am very anxious to see how you perform in this task.”
“What makes you think I want to save Scammander,” I chided the illusionist.
“I’m hoping you don’t; that would please me greatly. If you kill only Scammander, I will spare the rest of the creatures on this board. But if the illusion you strike is an actual illusion or a creature other than Scammander, I will slay the entire court,” he said grinning. “And that is a lot of years I will be adding to your wretched life.”
“One last question,” I said. “Is there any chance that Scammander’s mother is on this board?” As shock spread across the enchanter’s visage, I thrust the sword through his stomach. The image zig-zagged left and right as it faded away, scowling at me.
I was left staring at a chessboard full of vacantly grinning Scammanders who were all looking at me. I walked slowly to the edge of the court and took a deep breath. I twirled the blade in my hand, then stepped past the first image, swinging the sword over its head and cleaving the Scammander behind it in half. He dissolved and spilled like glowing blue and white sand across the cold marble floor.
I aimed at the torsos, and shot down the center of the board. I rushed through two images which spread over me like mist, lingering in my fur the same way a grey morning lingers in a forest of pines. As the steam of the third image dissolved around me, I crashed into a heavy body and sank the vorpal blade into its flesh up to the hilt. My face crashed into the deep folds of its robes and one of my horns got caught in a sleeve. I twisted and thrashed amidst the folds of the robe, until I heard the fabric rip as my horn freed itself from the creature’s sleeve. I stumbled back, still holding onto the blade, which was stuck. I wiggled and jerked the sword back and forth until finally the thick corpse fell off the sword. Its arms flapped and clapped about then tumbled off the tip and smacked onto the tiles. Scammander gazed up at me with an eerie smile, his robes slowly darkening as blood spread out from his stomach.
I began trembling, then wiped my brow and took a deep breath. All the Scammander’s had turned to look at me with their strange smiles. I looked down at the Scammander at my feet, whose bright blonde hair was scattered all about his face except for one opalescent eye, which gazed up at me through the long flaxen locks. I looked up again, still trembling, and took another breath.
I ran down the edge of the gloomy court, wrist up, sword resting at neck level. Heads dissolved and whisked away like candle smoke as the edge glided across their ethereal necks.
Then came the final row. Again and again I thudded into thick bodies, getting tangled up in robes and rib-cages. I sank into sinews and desperate, hot heartbeats as the blade grew duller and duller. Cutting illusions had decreased its sharpness, making my labor down the final row nearly impossible to finish. But I was now standing in front of the last grinning Scammander at the end of the row. The strike simply sent us sprawling to the ground. I straddled the illusion with my knees and grabbed the pommel with both hands. I raised the sword above my head then drove it down into Scammander’s chest, at which point the image faded away.
I walked back to the first Scammander and stood in front of the image, then laid the dull sword across my shoulder. Scammander probably wasn’t even on the board. The image looked at me with the same indifferent grin.
I swung the sword off my shoulder and lunged forward then wrapped my arm around the image and thrust the blade into my stomach.
Both Scammander and the sword vanished.
When I looked up again at the board, I could now see all the bodies.
The only thing louder than my screaming was laughter.
Le Livre à Venir
“It is difficult to imagine, or at any rate deal with, a book that is neither placed nor collected together under a title bearing its name.”
Derrida
With the maddening laughter beating my temples like frenzied batwings I sprinted across the checkered floor and climbed the cloudy columns before sprinting down a shadowy colonnade, stopping at a closed door where the laughter was the loudest. I burst into the illusionist’s room to see the icy magician doubled over in his chair cackling with glee, drool running off his chin and hanging in long clear threads from his hair.
I jammed two fingers in his nostrils skipped behind the chair and ripped up through his face, driving his nose into this brain. His body slammed back into the chair as my arm jerked to a stop with half his face and scalp hanging off my fingers. I pulled the gory remains from my hand and shoved it onto the slouched corpse.
“He’s human,” I said, backing away from the body and bumping into Scammander.
“Is he?” Scammander said peering around me and looking at the corpse. “No, he appears as what you hate the most,” he said moving closer. “I used to call him…master.”
I sank down in the corner between a bookshelf and a slim arched window. “So are you going to eat his dead wizard brains?” I said peering up from the corner, still trembling.
There wasn’t much of his face left.
I gulped and looked down at my hands, then grimaced and flicked skin and bits of clotted blood and stringy hair out of my fingernails. “Was he insane? Like Hythloth?”
“I think his specialty was driving others insane.”
“He told me that a great circle of minotaur sorcerers forged that blade Momentum.”
“The tomb of moments,” Scammander whispered, still staring at the body. “Let me see it,” he said shifting his eyes over to me.
“It disappeared.”
“Can you summon it? Did he teach you how?”
I couldn’t, so I just shook my head and shrugged.
“He probably gave you a copy,” he smirked.
“What about Hythloth’s?”
“Probably a copy also,” he frowned. “Just another image.”
I rubbed my recently regenerated arm, which had been growing stiff and sore. “The pain and blood felt real enough. Do you think minotaurs actually created that sword?”
“Don’t believe anything in here,” he said looking at his arm. “I’m not even sure we are actually here or even awake,” he said pinching himself and wincing.
He set his hands on his hips and slowly turned around the study. “I could have sworn I left something in here,” he said searchingly. “Like a staff or a robe…something.”
Scammander backed into the bookshelf, sending a few tomes tumbling off and down onto the floor around me. He slipped his arm behind the shelf and smiled as he grabbed something. “Aha!” he shouted, pulling a staff out from behind the bookcase. The rod was made of dense black glass with a golden owl sitting atop an orb of amber. As he rotated the staff I saw a miniature Scammander and Hythloth immured in amber, their faces frozen and screaming and their palms pressed up against the inside of the orb like they were begging for help to escape. He kept turning the staff and I saw nine princes in amber, all with screams frozen on their faces and their palms pressed up against the inside of the orb.
I looked at Scammander as he leaned on the staff. “Don’t you need magic to have any use for that staff? You’d be better served with the shotgun.”
“Ye
s well if I walk around with a shotgun everyone will know I’m up to no good won’t they?” he said examining the dark staff. “Besides, this makes me look quite wizardly.” He held it away from him for a moment, inspecting it more intensely. “I think it was mine to begin with,” he said running his finger along the onyx caduceus. “Something about this stone.”
“Is there some sort of artifact that can help me summon those weapons?”
Scammander huffed. “The only weapon worth summoning would be Momentum, and if it really is Momentum, then as you already know, there is no way to summon it. It obeys no laws.”
“I don’t think he finished the spell. The one he cast on me…well I just saw a bunch of weapons.” A lone book tumbled down and impaled itself on my horn.
“What?” He exclaimed as he whirled around, looking terrified. “Loose magic is very dangerous.”
“Why don’t you just remove it. I’m sure there is a talisman on his desk or something,” I said as I slid the pierced codex off my horn and flung it across the room. It landed with the pages opened on the floor so that the cover was facing me. The book was titled Death by Starvation. I’d have to remember that one.
Scammander looked at me for a moment, rummaged through the desk, knocking quills and sheets of paper off it, then looked at his former master’s corpse. He grimaced and wiggled his fingers in front of the body, then slid his hands around the robe and rifled through the pockets. I could tell this wasn’t the first time he had stolen items off a corpse. He produced a necklace with a large blue sapphire, then tied it around his neck.
“Ok, close your eyes. I will try to remove the curse,” he said as he spread his arms wide, then closed them and arched his fingers.
I shut my eyes, hoping for the worst.
“Oh wait,” he said.
I opened one eye.
“I don’t know any magic.”
I opened the other eye and sighed. Scammander jerked the necklace off and tossed it behind him. He looked at the desk again, then turned around and looked back at the bookshelf.
“Don’t move,” he said. “It’s imperative that you don’t move. Try to be very still.”
He crouched down then spread his arms wide again. “What I’m about to attempt is very dangerous.”
He looked at me for a second then sprang forward, putting his foot between my horns and lurching up as he grabbed something off the top of the bookshelf. I took a playful swipe at his ankles but he laughed as he hopped over my arm, holding a weathered brown bag.
“What is it?”
“An old dragon gut, a wizard’s bag,” he said turning the dried stomach upside down and shaking it. When nothing came out Scammander peered into the old wyrm stomach.
“What’s inside?”
“Just some old scrolls,” he said. “I was really hoping for some wands.”
“What would you need a wand for when you have a staff?”
“They carry potent magic spells bound up in them that anyone can use. The only drawback is that they usually only have very few charges.”
He continued rummaging around.
“Here,” he said, flipping a tiny blue shard to me. “It’s best you hold on to this.”
“What is it?” I said looking up from the stone.
“A memory diamond.”
“Does it work?” I said examining the dull stone.
“It’s dead,” he said. “There’s no glow.”
“How do you reanimate it?”
The possibility of witnessing Scammander employ the full range of his devastating arcane knowledge to destroy the world and everything in it—or at least humanity—would be a task worth living a little longer for.
“Bind a wisp into it, which is extremely illegal, even for me—and difficult.”
“How difficult?”
“They generally take about two hundred years to track and trap, and as far as I know, there is only one living mage who still performs that kind of task,” he said with a grimace.
“Well let’s find him.”
“I don’t even know if it’s mine, mind.”
He eyed the azure diamond uneasily. “And watch what you say—there’s probably a trigger on it. It might not be able to record, but it can probably still steal—it just won’t save the memories—they will be lost forever.”
I looked back down at the tiny blue stone. I certainly couldn’t see any ethereal, steamy, memories drifting around in the hard edges. “How do I know what not to say?”
“You don’t,” Scammander replied. “But if you pronounce the trigger it will steal everything you have ever known. It’s as close to death as I can get you for the time being,” he said with a grin.
“But now Evander, it is time for you to learn, for more important than knowing is learning. I cannot know everything, but I can learn anything, and that is what truly makes me great among all the debris that blows around in our worthless world.”
“Learning,” I sighed.
“Yes, to learn you must doubt and believe at the same time,” he smiled. “Come, brother. I will show you where the lost library of the elves resides.”
We strolled out of the study across the soft dream-sewn tiles and along the corridor behind the fleecy cloud-colonnade, until we came to a door of gilded oak. Engraved in the dark wood was a shaggy gryphon with a giant paw raised in the air, standing above a closed book.
“Scammander, what guest have you brought to our sacred hall, filled with learning and paradoxes?”
“Dear Cantabrigiensis, I present my brother Evander who would like to drink of our wells.” Scammander tucked his thumb and spread his four fingers wide. I grabbed his index finger with my right hand.
“Step forward and kneel,” the enoaked gryphon said in an earnest, timber tone. I approached and took a knee, careful to sweep my robe over my heel.
“Repeat after me,” Cantabrigiensis said. “Hinc lucem et pocula sacra.”
I repeated the phrase in earnest.
“Now, Evander, drink.”
A small, half empty, cold chalice appeared before me.
When I had finished a small white rose appeared, pinned to my shroud on the left side of my chest.
The gryphon began to speak. “You should read until the flower wilts, Evander, for when the petals are all withered, your mind will have lost its ignorance, and with it, much that is cherished by the denizens of this citied world. But if you have read lovingly, with your heart, then a new world will blossom in your chest, infinitely fecund and infinitely new. New and hidden cities will emerge as though from nothing and you will be able to find—or lose—yourself in them.”
When Cantabrigiensis had finished speaking, the door swung inward to a marvelous library. I looked back at Scammander, who nodded and waved me on.
“Don’t read the scholars, it will only waste your time and make the flower wither faster,” Scammander said as his face disappeared behind the closing door.
I immediately set out to find Death by Starvation.
I hadn’t been reading. At least not for an hour. Thoughts filled my head and compelled me to move and walk as I thought more and more. Then, as I normally did, I stopped in front of the large rose window with elven sages on it, and a poem in a strange language below it. Shafts of stiff arctic light hung in the air, suffused with the color of the glass. I was gazing at the large rose window when Scammander came up next to me.
“Those are the ‘Three Fountains’ the first three elvish poets. Percy Twinklestar, Roderick Pinesong, and Corwyn Silverose,” he said pointing his finger to each bard. “Then there is Eiron and Eironia, brother and sister poets. We all have to learn their cantos of friendship before we are sent off to the Academy, and some suspect that they wrote the poem below that rose window. The last poet is Banquo, who is generally quoted during the holidays, and chose to style his name after the early philosophers.”
“Why do some only have one name?” I asked.
“Sages don’t have last names,” he said. �
�The poets invented last names.”
“But neither do Eiron and Eironia,” I said.
“Poets were never known for their consistency,” he chuckled. “I always admired that about them.”
I nodded as he began pointing out the famous elven philosophers.
“Those are twins, Leander and Oleander.”
I looked at my withered flower before waving my hand dismissively. Listening to a discourse on the lives of eminent elven philosophers was not going to help me kill human beings or help Scammander rediscover his magical talents.
“What have you been doing all this time? Have you been reading? Did you recover your magic?”
“No—”
“Why not?”
“Too many books,” he scowled and shook his head. “I’m not going to read all that again,” he said as he pulled the shotgun from under his robes. “Besides, who needs magic? I like this thing much better.”
I wondered if I could grab it from him and shoot myself before he could react, but he quickly tucked it away.
“I’ve been trying to find a way out of this place.”
Then, as I had heard so many times before, a door opened and gently shut somewhere in the library. Often, when I had finished a particularly inspiring passage I would close the book and walk around the library, thinking about the text and searching for my companion.
It looked like I had finally found him. A short elf in a thick ebony robe with large circular glasses was approaching us, and under his arm he was carrying one of the largest leather-bound books I had ever seen.
I looked over at Scammander, who had slinked over to the bookshelf and was peering out from behind. “What should we do?”
“Kill whoever it is. It could be that icy illusionist in disguise.”
“He looks harmless,” I muttered, squaring off and planting myself directly in the path of the wandering scholar.
“Just wait until he starts talking about books, then you’ll see how harmless he is,” Scammander hissed, slinking further back behind the bookcase.
The elderly elf came closer and closer, scratching his chin and looking at the ground until he finally bumped into me. I caught a glimpse of fading blue mist in his eyes as he stepped back and looked at me for a moment before turning his head to my wizard companion.
Splatterism: The Disquieting Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant: An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse Page 6
