Mindripper

by Baron Blackwell

  Something immense was coming, and no matter how hard Kalum tried he could not fathom the true shape of it. Yet he knew one thing for certain, whatever horrors moved unseen went far beyond the hunt for a mere Mindripper.

  “Sir. . . ?” Bodua brought his horse abreast, trailed by a dozen other mounted men.

  “The sooner this is over the better, Lieutenant.” Kalum forced a smiled, then spurred his steed into a sprint before Bodua could return a reply.

  The Wearer of Nightmares was coming.

  Shaitan himself!

  Kalum panted atop his horse, as immobile as any fish on a hook. What could it mean? Should he tell the Worship?

  Questions. Always these endless fucking questions.

  ■■■

  Kalum rode from one conundrum to another, saw his world swing about his horse’s stampeding limbs for the way the steed kicked air when he pulled it to a stop. He descended its back in the courtyard of Minos’ estate, throwing the reins to one of the many soldiers stationed outside the stables. He ignored the thunder of his trailing entourage, threaded his way past those acting as doorway sentinels. Then he was striding through lavishly decorated halls, over polished floors, over expensive rugs, around corners choked with soldiers and Blackcloaks.

  After inquiring about her location from passersby, he found the Worship seated before a hearthfire, the whites of her eyes steeped in fractured light. She had chosen the trophy room to establish her command, where she could be reached with ease should the need arise.

  “Kalum, sit,” she said, not looking up from the fire. Fana made a slow circuit around the chamber behind her, pressing curious fingers to stuffed animals—wide eyed pheasants and bewildered elk. . . .

  Kalum pried his gazed away from Fana, who likewise had not so much as glanced in his direction as he entered, and plopped himself in the leather-backed sofa across from the Worship’s own. Even beset by inner conflicts, exhausted for lack of sleep and needled by the need for Dust, the Nun’s presence proved irresistible, a sauntering magnet that tugged at the pith of iron bones.

  “Report,” Osei said in a voice that made all else like smoke.

  “They used the sewers to escape,” he began without preamble. “My fault. If I had gotten here sooner—”

  Osei waved his complaint away. “I’m as much to blame for that particular error, so why don’t we allow that one to lie? I’m too old to harbor grudges against the past, Kalum, and you’re not yet so big a fool. This Mindripper will succumb as all the others have before it.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  As the Worship turned her cataract gaze upon him, Kalum shifted his own onto the fire. Flames bobbed and rippled, knotted about half-eaten logs like ethereal leaves. The heat heaved waves of pulsing warmth across his sweat-slicked skin. The sight was hollowing. Sometimes he forgot, but this was his destiny, an eternity of burning and squealing.

  “What makes you say such a thing?” Osei asked.

  Kalum scrubbed at his face. “Dreams, your Worship. Dreams.”

  “And what sort of dreams are those?” Fana asked in a haunting tone.

  He did not look at her, but could feel her green eyes gleam, her eyelids narrowing, trying to drag and engulf those secrets horded.

  The Worship motioned her to silence. “This is Kalum’s way, Sister Fana. When he is sleep deprived, he takes on my worse affects, it's the fault of our constant companionship.”

  “An old woman?” Fana tilted her head slightly, her manner now one of childlike curiosity. “Is that what you say he becomes?”

  “At times.”

  Kalum felt no anger at their needling. Nor did he experience the glee which follows gentle teasing, the joy of belonging to a diverse group of individuals. A kind of determination hummed through him instead.

  “Mock me if you want,” he said, “but something about this makes little sense. Why would the Mindripper murder the Lord-Commander? A grudge? Perhaps? But why murder him when it could turn the man into one of its thralls?”

  Their silence was almost narcotic.

  Then the Worship was peering past him, the many wrinkled frown receding from her brow. Long used to this behavior, Kalum turned to see Lord-Inspector Sargon Turay enter the chamber at a run, a leather-bound tome clasped in his hand.

  “We found something,” the man hissed, coming to a stop.

  “Go on, Lord-Inspector,” Osei said. “You have our full attention.”

  “This is Minos’ personal journal.” Sargon exhaled, regaining some of his stoic manner. “We found it in his library and—I’m not sure how to say this—”

  “Just say it,” Kalum spat.

  Sargon nodded. “It seems the Lord-Commander was the Scarlet Apron. If I hadn’t just read the accounts of the murders written in his own hand, I would have not believe. . . .”

  An absence of sound.

  Sargon still spoke, Kalum no longer heard him, no longer heard anything at all. The wildness that had been kindled within spread on the wings of bleak possibilities, whipped to excess. As individuals the hairs on the nape of his neck stirred, steeped in the aura of disaster.

  He found himself on his feet, gazing at bewildered faces. “We must recall the 13th regiment from Carnon.”

  “What? Why?” Sargon asked.

  “Because,” Kalum intoned as a fist hammered inside his breast, “whether by design or happenstance what we discovered here will set the city aflame. We must assume that the Mindripper knows this information, and that it will spread.”

  “You fear riots?” the Lord-Inspector muttered.

  Kalum nodded, but riots were the least of his fears. Everything about this held an air of deceit. But if manufactured, what sort of cunning would it take to devise such a scheme?

  Modin, the White Worm had such a mind, but he was dead.

  And God help them all if this new Mindripper was even half so cunning.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Daybreak

  Enk awoke with the sun shining on his face; It hung low on the eastern horizon, an azure orb clasped within a rectangle of undulating air. His home rippled in its waxing brilliance, so that its most modern addition seemed steeped in an aura of religious fervor—a place set apart. The glare was such that his eyes failed to comprehend its splendor, at least at first. Difficult to think. He blinked, and the phantom of remembered moments slipped through his grasp like charcoal-colored vapor. The attempt to hold on only made them retreat faster.

  Life was filled with these little deaths, he knew, and none were so ubiquitous as the dying that separated the dreaming world from the waking one. To regain consciousness suddenly was to be thrust out of the womb anew, to be beset by the same specter of unfamiliarity that dragooned youth.

  Swaying silently upon his head, his hair danced with a beguiling zephyr. His body ached where he had rested against the tree. Bark and wood made poor substitutes for feathered beds.

  He probed his forehead with a finger, then hissed. His skull throbbed with the jagged remnants of previous abuse.

  “Do you think the rumors are true?”

  Blaring fear. The voice had come from the other side of the tree, very close, along with the racket of booted feet treading across gravel. Peacebringers?

  “Which one?” a second voice asked. “Too many to pick from.”

  “The one about the 13th,” the first voice said, then spat loudly. “Blah, I just hope we’re the ones that catch this criminal. I want to be the one who lathers him with lead.”

  A laugh. “When did you become such a bloodthirsty brute?”

  “When I was forced to trek aimlessly through—”

  And so it was Enk found himself staring into the barrel of two muskets, fumbling for his power in the vein attempt to rescue himself from the whorish ministrations of fate. Existence pitched almost immediately for the searing torment his action instilled within his skull, and he collapsed back into bark, his inner mystery spluttering back whence it came, unused. Unspent. He groane
d: the waking world had become something nebulous set outside the realm of shuttered eyelids. Dream-like images swam out from the darkness before him, cooing and cajoling. He resisted, fighting for consciousness for fear that a misstep here might lead to a dying from which there was no return.

  Ears tingled.

  “What division are you with?” the first voice asked.

  Confusion. Panic. Division?

  Enk opened his weary eyes, wincing from the gouts of flames still disgorging onto his brain. Two Peacebringers, one chubby and the other lanky, appeared just after the blur receded from his vision, their matching uniforms twitching as much as simmering. They stood a hand’s span apart, wearing identical befuddled expressions, haphazardly lowering clutched muskets.

  If they harbored any ill intent to his person, they gave no outward signs. This confounded him, until he caught sight of his own Peacebringer regalia.

  Stupid. How could he forget something so fundamental?

  “Were you attacked?” the chubby Peacebringer asked.

  Enk thumbed one of his brass buttons, stalling for an interval to construct the fiction that would see him escape unmolested. “I . . . think so.” He smiled through gritted teeth. “Was taking a piss when someone or something struck me in the back of the head.”

  “Did you get a good glance at them?”

  “No . . . just pain and blackness.”

  “Pity.”

  Enk scooped up his discarded musket, secretly marveling at the fact he had not lost it somewhere along last night’s mad flight. The Peacebringers yanked him to his feet and dusted the dirt from his shoulders.

  “Thank you-you.” Enk clamped his weapon tighter for the seesawing of the world. “What I miss?”

  “Nothing good,” the chubby Peacebringer said.

  The lanky one snorted. “That’s an understatement. Mark me, there will me riots today, riots to put any of the others to shame.” He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “The rumor is that Monos Jamal was the Scarlet Apron.”

  “The Lord-Commander?” Enk asked, his voice coarse with outrage and incredulity. “That can’t be possible. Can it?”

  The chubby Peacebringer spared Enk a grim look, shook his head. “That’s what I said.”

  “Let’s take you to see the Sergeant,” the lanky Peacebringer said.

  Framed by the two Peacebringers, Enk stumbled away from his home and toward the clamor outside its gates. The old ache returned to his breast within a handful of steps, fresh droplets in a glowing pond of rolling horror.

  The lanky man frowned at him. “That blow really did a number on you.”

  “It certainly appears so, doesn’t it?” Enk said, smiling.

  “Bah, this is nothing,” the chubby Peacebringer said, his voice glutinous with laughter. “I knew a gent once who took a blow to the head during a tavern brawl, left him paralyze from the waist down.”

  Enk gave a little laugh of his own. “So what you’re saying is I’m lucky?”

  “That’s the way I’d look at it.” The chubby Peacebringer clapped Enk on the back.

  Enk lurched forward, fought vertigo, chest lead leaden. Abandoning his musket, he caught himself on the gate, dropped onto his knee.

  Hoarse sounds filtered through the honeycombed iron, myriad and near, exhausted voices mixed with the clatter of hooves and the softer chorus of marching boots. More Peacebringers concealed by walls of the estate.

  Too many to . . . even if. . . .

  He glanced back at his companions. The two Peacebringers exchanged a look steeped in shared disbelief, then rushed to his side. They lifted him upright and very nearly carried him past the gate, stooping to accommodate his middling height.

  “You’re a lot worse than I thought,” the lanky Peacebringer said.

  Enk could only gulp. Armed men knotted the street immediately in front of them, clustered around several thick carriages with iron bars. Peacebringers and their Padraig Wagons. The posture of the men were that of bored sentinels, guards whose weariness had almost outrun their sense of duty.

  He stiffened his feet, wrenched himself to a stop and pointed back at the gate. His companions traced the arc of his finger to the discarded musket.

  “I’ll get it,” the chubby Peacebringer said, leaving Enk leaning on his partner.

  “Who’s that, Sesay?” one among the squad of Peacebringers asked the lanky thrasher as he dragged Enk onward. “Got yourself a new butt boy?”

  Boisterous laughter.

  Sesay grunted. “I found him napping. Where’s the Sergeant?”

  “What about Kimathi?” a third man asked, his voice dripping with mock incredulity. “Does he know your eyes have strayed from his gigantic backside?”

  “Ha. Ha. Funny fucks, aren’t you?” the chubby Peacebringer—Kimathi said, rejoining Sesay, shouldering Enk’s musket as well as his own.

  Enk gritted his teeth. Alarm danced about the rim of his mind, hammered the metallic sheet hard, blows that wobbled the entire surface. It was an almost certainty that his lie would not hold up under any serious investigation. He needed a way to disentangle himself from these men before anyone had a chance to put him to further questioning.

  Yet beyond this present danger. . . .

  Tizkar waited out there somewhere, implementing the next phase of his wicked scheme. There was no time to waste on these fools! If only his head would stop ringing, then he would be able to formulate some sort of plan.

  Sesay rested Enk against the side of a Padraig Wagon and turned back to face Kimathi. “Where in the Hundred Hells is the Sergeant?”

  “What’s with the bloody racket.” An angular-faced man, the Sergeant, climbed down from the front of the horse-drawn wagon, a wine bottle dangling from his hand.

  Sesay and Kimathi saluted. “Sir.”

  “Who’s this then?” the Sergeant asked, eying Enk. His manner exposed a soul lurching with the aftereffects of intoxication.

  “This is—” Sesay began.

  “Name’s Gezer, sir,” Enk said, standing straighter. “I was attacked last night while out on patrol, or at least from what I can gather.” He touched the back of his skull and winced. “Your men found me unconscious.”

  “He was curled up behind a tree, all cat like,” Kimathi said, gesturing back the way they had came. “Almost shot him.”

  “Ah . . . another one.” The Sergeant rubbed at his red-rimmed eyes. “I hope this is not becoming a habit. Whole city is going to the pits, I swear.”

  “I’m just glad to be alive,” Enk said.

  “Ah, what’s your name again?”

  “Gezer, sir,” Enk replied. The urge to peek inside the man’s mind nearly seized him, but he pushed it away for fear what slipping back into unconsciousness here would entail.

  The Sergeant nodded slowly. His company of Peacebringers stood scattered about the street, exchanging looks and staring agog at their leader. Their eyes, when they touched Enk, held a hint of hostile appraisal that had not been there a moment before.

  There was too much happening here, and Enk had a handle on too little of it. But one thing was certain, his lie had not found receptive ears.

  “Sir. . . .” He took a deep breath. “I have to be honest, I wasn’t out on patrol last night—well, I was but not here. I’m stationed in the Shade. That’s why you don’t recognize me.”

  The Sergeant frowned. “Go on.”

  “Utu Levin is—was my Captain. I-I didn’t really plan on. . . . My shift was over and me and some of the boys went to a tavern for a few drinks. We warned the Captain about her, sir, but he wouldn’t listen. Now he’s dead.”

  “You didn’t really get attacked did you, Gezer?”

  “No, sir,” Enk said, ignoring Sesay’s and Kimathi’s amused expressions. “I walked here after the tavern. I told myself I was going to take a piss on the whore’s doorstep for what she did to the Captain.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. I guess I drank too much. I didn’t even make it to
the door. I’m not a criminal, sir. Really, I’m not.”

  The Sergeant gently clapped Enk on the arm. “I’m glad you told me this, things might have taken a much different turn if you hadn’t.”

  Enk smiled sheepishly and said, “The boys always said I wasn’t much of a liar.”

  “Here,” the Sergeant said, uncorking the wine bottle with his teeth. “Have a drink.”

  Enk felt himself blench, sickened more by the memory of the last time he indulged than the vinegar scented vintage. He backed away. “I couldn’t, not now, Sergeant. The very smell makes me want to spew.”

  “You sure?” The Sergeant sloshed the contents around in its glass container. “Drinking more is the only cure for a hangover I know.”

  “Positive.” Enk swallowed.

  “It’s your skull, not mine.” The Sergeant shrugged and turned to face Kimathi. “Why do you have two muskets?”

  “This one is Gezer’s,” Kimathi said, his gaze rapt on the mentioned musket.

  “Give it back to him then, or did you plan on keeping it? Another toy for yours and Sesay’s late night trysts?” The Sergeant took a long swig from the bottle.

  Kimathi tossed the weapon at Enk’s feet. “You know what? I’ve about had it with these jokes made at my expense. You spend one night curled with another man because it’s cold and everyone thinks you bent twisted. Everyone knows how the winters here get.”

  Enk hid his smile as he bent to retrieve his musket. Something hard clubbed the base of his skull and shattered. A murmur—now a dull roar, then back again—passed through the surrounding throng. The stench of cheap wine and horses predominated.

  He cried out, tried to stabilize his reed-like legs, but the callused hands of the earth embraced him nonetheless—as did the innumerable aspects of the dark, twisting and warping his vision.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Her Embrace

  The oscillations of the world was such that only shadowy forms could be discerned. Enk heard the Sergeant spit out what he had pretended to swallow. Flashes of color chided the black, cut and danced across it, rising from where the bottle had struck his skull. He glimpsed Sesay for an instant, watched the man shrug then smile, then this view likewise spun into confusion.