by Defendi, Bob
“Without ever being here?” Damico asked.
Jurkand shrugged. “I wasn’t that nearby when you affected me.
Damico nodded.
He had felt something more like himself since Lotianna had begun acting like a Human being again. He hadn’t been able to get her to talk, but just spending time with her bolstered his spirits, and she didn’t seem to mind. She might not be talkative, but if anything, she seemed to enjoy it when he spent time with her again.
But that didn’t stop the drain. He could feel it more now, greater and greater with every person he met. Sucking at his soul, devouring his energy, hungry like an American kid.
And it was killing him.
He didn’t want to die. He wanted to go on, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield… or any other Tennyson poem you might like to quote. These were real people. Real people doing real things. He wanted to be with them forever, to be one of them. To just live with them.
To live period.
He could be happy here, if things were different.
He was willing to accept it. Still, now he knew what he’d been missing. He smiled at Lotianna. She averted her gaze shyly.
But she smiled back.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“No quote this chapter. Deal with it.”
—Bob Defendi
uldron wasn’t the sharpest knife in the bandolier. You could tell by his name. Carl’s greatest creative achievement was naming a spider demon “Spidra.” He required pre-written notes to talk his way out of a speeding ticket. He couldn’t invent a reason to go to the bathroom.
But we were talking about Duldron.
Duldron was a wainwright. He had started early in life drawing circles in the earth, putting training wheels on puppies. He only argued using circular reasoning. His greatest wish was to truly fulfill the circle of life by being eaten by giant brocli. That isn’t how you spell “broccoli,” but Duldron was illiterate, so he won’t know the difference.
Anyway, every day, Duldron went to work in the wide open room under his apartment. In it sat a perpetually unfinished wagon. He spent the entire day taking inherently long, bushy things… trees for instance… and making them round. He worked with a saw, a chisel, and a plane because those were the only carpentry tools Carl knew.
Shaving and sawing and hammering (with the chisel, presumably). He would carve spokes, and then he would build hubs and then he would shape the rim. When he was done, he would have the ultimate symbol of technology:
The wheel.
In a day, he could build a wheel. In a week he could build eight. Duldron wasn’t very good at counting either. When he dropped a tool, it took triple-redundancy computations to determine if he’d lost a toe.
But he loved wheels. Did I mention that?
Now Duldron worked in his perfectly bare shop with his unfinished wagon he never touched and the walls made of perfectly rectangular wooden planks. There sat a water barrel in one corner, brackish from lack of use but there because all workshops needed a water barrel. If he had a wife, at the end of the day he would dip his head into the water in a manly fashion, throw back his hair in a cascade of droplets, and carry her off to bed. But he didn’t have a wife. Or hair. His manhood wasn’t drawing any gasps from the ladies either. But it was perfectly round.
But I’m about as on-topic as an internet forum.
At that moment, a moment fairly arbitrary because I never told you what Duldron was doing, the line between Damico and the unmentionable Artifact crossed over him. He looked up, startled.
He examined the wheel. It was round; that was true. It had ten spokes. The rims were hard and smooth. They’d move over the artificially-level roads of Carl’s world so perfectly their wagons wouldn’t need shocks.
He stared at it some more.
It was made out of oak. He’d sanded it to a mirror finish. When he made a wheel, even untreated wood appeared lacquered.
Oak. He wondered if that was the best wood for the job. He’d never thought of it before, but maybe a more flexible wood like pine might handle the wear of travel better. Maybe a band of metal around the rim might keep it from splitting. Maybe these were bad ideas, but they were ideas. He’d never had an idea before.
And maybe modeling the number of spokes off the number of his fingers wasn’t the best idea either. Maybe eight spokes would be better; it would certainly be easier to drill them in the right places. Maybe twelve would be good if eight were too few. Twelve was divisible by four, two, and three, so modeling them on a round surface would at least be easier than figuring out the proper spacing for five.
Hmmm.
The questions puzzled him, mostly because he’d never thought of them before. These seemed to be the basic questions of his craft. He’d never even wondered whether he should be considering them.
And for the first time in his life, he wondered about everything.
Why hadn’t he married? Did he really believe in Ralph, the Porcelain God? It was said everyone worshiped at the porcelain altar at some time in their lives, but did he really have faith?
Most of all, did he like his life?
He worked twelve hours a day in an unadorned room making circles. Circles. All day long, every day. He went out at night, and he picked up whatever barmaid seemed handy. He took her home and made long sweet love to her all night.
He ate his meals in a seedy dining hall. He never found love; he never affected the world; he never did anything of consequence at all. He just drew perfect circles all day long. You know. For kids.
It was a hollow, empty life.
He stared at the wheel he’d finished an hour ago, picked it up, rotated it slowly in the air. Why did he like this? What purpose did it serve?
He spun it faster and faster. The math, previously beyond him, seemed so obvious now. The way the thing could convert any force into movement, change the direction, shape the vector. It was amazing, really. Ingenious. Who had invented it?
But it was a hollow life.
All day working, sweating. All day grinding and shaping. All day measuring out one fifth of an arc. Chiseling out holes because he didn’t have a drill. Fitting and molding and creating.
The wheel could take a force and amplify it. He could see that now. He held the thing in his arms and studied how far he had to move the outer edge to get a small turn from the axle. Mechanical advantage. In essence, each spoke operated as a lever.
Amazing.
But no love. No real home. No future, almost no past. Just lonesome meals and meaningless sex. He made money, but he almost never spent it. He just used it to buy materials when he needed to make more wheels.
Why had he chosen it? Why did he live it? He needed more, didn’t he? Every man needed more.
He examined the unfinished wheel. Then his completed work. Suddenly, it hit him.
The wheel amplified force through mechanical advantage, but it wasn’t where the force came from. The wheel wasn’t natural. All that advantage came from the work he did here, in this workshop. The wheel and axle weren’t the lever. It wasn’t them that moved the world.
It was him.
It was a hollow life… or was it? Either way, he loved it.
But maybe tonight, after anonymous sex with a nameless barmaid, he might cuddle. Just a little.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“No pun too low, no joke too old.”
—Bob Defendi
o I got a question,” Damico said as they walked through more featureless, generic wilderness.
If he walked around any given tree here, he was sure he’d find they were painted, two dimensional boards with rear supports and snickering stage hands.
“Shoot,” Gorthander said.
Omar, Arithian, Jurkand, and Lotianna just walked on in silence.
“You know those anti-piracy commercials they used to put in front of movies… ‘You wouldn’t steal a car, would you?’”
“Ye
ah?” Gorthander asked.
“Notice how they never tell you whether the car has the latest Marvel movie playing inside?”
“Yeah,” Gorthander said.
“That’s the problem with the world these days. It’s all trick questions.”
They came over the rise just then, and Omar, in the lead, froze. Arithian stopped behind him. Lotianna to the left. Jurkand pulled up next. Finally, Gorthander and Damico came up next to them.
“Ladies and Gentleman,” Arithian said, “The Swamp of Unknown Peril.”
Below them was a rather round depression in the surrounding hills. At the bottom was an even rounder peat bog about fifteen feet across with vapors rising up. It occasionally burst into flame for no reason. A small lizard basked, half out of the milky water. Gnats swarmed in the air.
“I was rather expecting something more… impressive,” Damico said.
“I was wondering how we were going to get across the Swamp of Ultimate Doom,” Gorthander said.
“Give me a running start,” Jurkand said. “I’ll sail across on my belly.”
In the end, they walked around the Swamp of Unending Agony. It added about five minutes to their trip.
An hour later, they came over the next ridge of hills and stared across at a line of mountains some ten miles high, the walls near-vertical cliffs. The peaks clawed at the sky with such wretched violence that they’d developed their own weather systems.
“Uh, wow,” Omar said.
“The Mountains of Fell Ruin, I take it,” Damico said.
“Damn,” Jurkand said.
“Yeah,” Damico said. “Someone’s seen too many Middle Earth paintings.”
They drudged on, their hopes crushed. How were they going to cross mountains like that? How were they to find the very Heart of Darkness if they first had to scale ten vertical miles. Would there even be air at that altitude?
They found a wide road cobbled in flat stones and began walking along it. Soon they passed a wagon. Then another. When Damico crossed behind wagons, people in them would begin talking animatedly. Some would argue. Some would begin passionately kissing. One wagon rolled off the road as all its occupants just got up and walked away.
As they got closer, they could see that the road led right up to the mountains. Soon they passed a sign:
“Funk and Wagnall’s Memorial Turnpike. When you need to travel, go there on your Funk and Wagnall’s.”
Damico rolled his eyes.
At the end of the plains, the road curved up into the foothills then ended at a large, dark opening. The sign above it said, “Purple Worm Trans-Alpine Tunnel.”
“He certainly makes it easy, doesn’t he?” Jurkand said.
“Well, I suppose it’s hard to be an evil overlord if all your tax collectors die of exposure on the way to your dread fortress.”
“True,” Gorthander said. “True.”
It took a day to travel all the way through the tunnel, but there were lamps lit by some sort of natural gas… the kind that came out of a dwarf’s ass, from the smell. They camped that night at the halfway point, and Lotianna curled up about five feet away from Damico when they went to sleep. When he woke up, they were sharing body warmth.
They came down out of the mountains and across a fetid plain with standing, infested water. Bugs swarmed, and the mosquitoes were thick enough to demand insect suffrage. Vents of flame climbed into the air from geysers in the earth. He passed the same dead-cow skeleton five times like he was in a Speedy Gonzales cartoon.
“Some scenery, huh?” he asked.
“Hraldolf had it shipped in from all over the world,” Jurkand said.
“Even the mosquitos?” Damico asked.
“Especially the mosquitos,” Jurkand said.
The things were so big that he expected one of them to hit him in the shoulder and say, “Hey, boy. You’re wearing my jacket.” They were the kind of mosquitos that could carry off a Shetland pony complete with the birthday party and the ten-year-old rich girl. These mosquitos needed special FAA permission just to settle down and have kids.
As the party traveled, a keep grew in the distance. It was big with jagged towers and crenelated walls. Spikes adorned the tops of roofs and the peaks of towers. Rusty stains covered the masonry. Bodies dangled from pikes.
“That is what Sleeping Beauty’s Castle would have looked like if Walt Disney had been Aleister Crowley,” Damico said.
“That place is certainly a magic-bullet cure for optimism,” Gorthander said.
As they approached, the people took on increasingly downtrodden expressions, as if there were some sort of law. They dragged their feet; their wagons swayed. Their animals showed more and more rib.
Eventually, they realized there was a village in the shadow of the fortress. They approached cautiously, skirting the village and heading for the side gate to the castle wall, trying to plan their next move.
A large sign hung over the top of the gate, painted in what appeared to be Human blood. The words, however, were clear.
“Heart of Darkness Bed and Breakfast. We’d love to have you for dinner.”
“I hate funny overlords,” Damico said.
They backed off and wandered away from the fortress, quiet and somber. Over the first hill, they stopped and took a breath. Arithian peeked his head back over the top.
“The place is well-defended,” Damico said.
“I count one hundred or more guards, overlapping fields of fire, loaded crossbows… vigilant,” Arithian said.
“So, what do we do?” Gorthander asked.
“I say we beat feet,” Damico said.
“What?”
From the tone in Gorthander’s voice, Damico might have just said something vile about his mother.
“I’m not going in there,” Damico said, “or if I am, I’m doing it alone without all you noisy bastards.”
“That leaves us out of the adventure,” Omar said.
“Yeah, that’s why I say we just turn around and walk away,” Damico said.
“But the adventure is right there,” Omar said, whining a little.
Damico rolled his eyes. “I’m not going in there. It’s a death trap.”
He almost said it was a stupid adventure too, but he knew Carl wouldn’t pass that along. If this really was real. Which it wasn’t. It didn’t really matter. If he was in Hell, he still had to play by the rules the Lord Satan set for him.
“So, do you have a better plan?” Gorthander asked. “I didn’t come here to eat Brian’s Cheetos.”
“Hey!” Omar said as if he’d just noticed something in the real world.
“I say we back off, stake the place out, and wait for Hraldolf to leave. Then we nab him and ransom him back to his people for the Artifact.”
Gorthander smiled. “I like it. Thinking outside the box.”
“But the adventure is storming the castle!” Omar said.
“Screw the adventure,” Damico said.
They both looked at him funny. Carl hadn’t passed that on of course. Or at least his eternal tormentor didn’t want him to think Carl had.
“Fine!” Omar said too loudly.
The moment they moved away from the castle, the sound of the gate rose up behind them, then the sound of booted feet. Damico scouted ahead, found a grove of gnarled oak trees, and waved for them to follow. Once the others were inside, Damico hid them, the skills coming easily.
Then he snuck out to the edge. Ten guards walked over a green hill of waving grass and straight toward him. He pulled back and waited for them to come into the grove, cursing Carl, or Satan, or whoever. Someone wasn’t happy they left the Heart of Darkness without sieging it.
He waited until the guards tromped into the woods and then fell in behind them, stepping between the leaves and acorns without a sound. He raised his sword, inserting it between the shoulder blades of the rearmost guard. He caught the man, a hand over one mouth, and eased him to
the ground, cutting his throat and moving onto the next one.
Easy.
Too easy. He’d just killed a man. Killed him. Damico stared down at the body, stunned. These were men. He’d killed a man. No. These were targets in a game or they were his tormentor’s tools. Either way they weren’t real. They weren’t people. They were just things.
He kept telling himself that. Over and over again.
The next one fell just as easily, if not more… and the next. And the next. Each time it didn’t just become easier physically. Each time it became easier to convince himself these weren’t Humans. They were objects. A sociopath kills because he wants to. A psychopath kills because he doesn’t believe you’re real.
No, Officer. He was such a quiet young man. Kept to himself. Of course, he played those evil devil games.
Damico dropped two more before the guards walked straight to his people. Then another fell, sleeping, to the ground. The remaining three turned, their faces screwed up in confusion then looked up in horror.
Gorthander and Omar stormed out of their hiding place even as Damico attacked one more time from behind. The bad guys fell in seconds.
They moved on, sliding to the edge of the grove. Damico checked both ways then headed to the right, down a valley of green fields of waving grass gone to seed. They made whispering movements as he walked, the rest of the party falling in behind him.
He came to the end of the valley and peered around the corner. He could see a large, open area ringed by hills. The ground was muddy in places, dusty in others, the hills covered with bits of bare bushes and a single skeletal tree. It resembled a Bob Ross painting, if Bob had just discovered his wife was boinking the producer.
In the middle of the basin stood twenty guards.
“He’s persistent,” Damico whispered.
He held up a hand to stop the party and then led them up over the ridge and down between hills to the east of the basin. They glided along, Damico a ghost, the rest clanking and clanging as they came.
At the next ridge, Damico crawled up through the dirt and the mud, poking his head over the top. In front of him, grubs and cockroaches writhed and squirmed like the people in the final scenes of Conan. He raised his head farther.
