Still, no matter how he felt, whether full of potential or tired from work, purple flags still flew over a great granite fortress that dominated the horizon.
* * *
Time passed and several jobs came and went. Wodan found it easier and easier to walk out on jobs in sudden fits of anger as various frustrations boiled over unexpectedly. Fortunately he had good contacts with older jobs that always assured him of new employment.
One night he found himself wandering a strip of bars. Coins jingled in his pockets but he always found an excuse to not enter any of the bars. In the back of his mind, he knew he was being irresponsible; while he watched his funds when it came to most expenses, he had been selling his jewels for paper in order to write stories that were not selling. As he crossed up and down the strip, he realized that writing had become an addiction. He was losing himself in fantasy in order to forget that he was in Pontius for a reason. Only drinking in a bar could help him forget that reason, and he hated himself for willfully seeking oblivion. He had surprised himself in the past by overcoming challenges that boggled the mind, but he was surprising himself now by showing an inability to handle even the bare essentials of surviving and living responsibly. His life and his purpose were slipping by, and he stood in numb horror at what he was becoming.
As he made his way home, his thoughts were cut short by three Ugly youth standing in his path. He realized they had been saying something to him and he hadn’t even heard them. He saw scars and cheap black tattoos on their faces, and each one was much bigger than he was.
In a flash Wodan saw one of them approach while the other two maneuvered behind him. Other people left the area as if they sensed danger and were grateful that the predators had focused on another. All conscious thought was drowned out in waves of terror as the lead Ugly ran up to him, muscular arms held out wide, then the Ugly’s face contorted and he shouted, “THE MONEY!”
Wodan felt the jarring impact of a fist on the side of his face without ever seeing the punch itself. Strangely enough, the impact did not hurt, but the blow tossed him sideways and sent him tripping over a pile of garbage. He landed against a wall to keep from falling, then a foot crashed into his ribs. Agony trailed up the length of his body, driving the air from his chest. Two more blows landed on his back and legs, then his ears were assaulted as the youths cackled like hyenas falling on a corpse.
Wodan’s body reacted to save his life - he reached into his pocket and flung his heavy coins into the street. He heard the rain of metal clattering in the distance. Hours of energy spent as a slave to gather those funds were now gone, thrown away in a desperate bid to sate the hunger of monsters. The Ugly youths stopped their assault but he was unable to run. He held onto the wall, eyes closed, unable to breathe as he listened to the scarred youths huffing and racing one another to pick up the coins.
Once the coins were gathered, one of the youths slapped Wodan on the back of his head, then they ran laughing down the street. Wodan pushed off the wall but, still unable to breathe, he fell back against the wall and waited. He wiped his face and felt thick syrup running from his nose.
Perhaps a minute of calm, silent humiliation passed, then he was able to gather himself and limp down the street. His mind was not a chaotic jumble of vengeful fantasies. Instead, he simply walked through darkness, one foot in front of the other, understanding that he had been shown a simple, merciless truth.
When he returned to his apartment he stripped off his shirt, then stood before a mirror and watched the blood run from his face and splatter into a sink. It coagulated into small, dark islands. He picked up some cheap wine from his collection and, holding it like a club, walked up the pitch-black steps to the top of the building. The door leading to the roof was locked. He left the stairwell, then found moonlight seeping through a window at the end of the hallway. The window was painted shut. He heard two old people of indeterminate gender moaning in a nearby room, panting and slapping. Without thinking he pulled out the knife Matthias had given him, which was always on him but which he failed to use tonight. He jammed it under the window and, jerking it up and down, cracked the window open. He felt no surprise at the knife’s strength.
He clambered up the fire escape to the roof. A single chair waited for him. He sat in it, drank the wine, and stared at the moon as he blew angry clouds of smoke at it.
He had finally been forced into a place where thought was necessary. Why was he even in Pontius at all? To work a job? To establish connections, make a name for himself? Would he eventually settle down with another slave like himself? Would they choke down their anger together and dance the dance that made more slaves? Would he give up on his seemingly unrealistic plans because they proved too difficult? Could he go on pretending that Pontius was Haven and that he was still a child? Could he pretend that evil would go away because the universe would heed the prayers of his annoyance?
Why had Langley and the others bothered to save him in the first place?
Wodan had gathered no friends. He took none of the steps necessary to properly socialize himself. He had made no attachments, despite loneliness. He had treated none of his jobs as anything more than a way to feed and clothe himself; if any job had ever made some real claim to his life, he walked, time and again. He had never even made his room a home. He still slept on a nest of blankets and piled his clothes in a corner.
And he’d done it all because, somewhere deep inside, he had never forgotten that he was here for a purpose. His homeland had cast him out, and had even declared that a cancer in his guts had given him a limited shelf life. One year was gone already. It had been wasted. He was here for one purpose, and one purpose only.
I’m here to destroy the Ugly, he thought. Even if it seems impossible.
He could not fight the youths, the Body of the Ugly. He could not physically match up to any of them. They were too aggressive, too savage. And even if he could, he would just end up as some kind of serial killer, murdering every day until he became an old man while the Ugly remained the same. No, he had to strike at the leaders, the organizers, the evil men who did the actual work of continually repairing the machine that grinded up the souls of its victims.
Red seeped into the horizon and he ended his ritual of psychic cleansing. He entered the first day of his twenty-second year drunk and covered in blood and barely able to breathe from the pain in his ribs. He vowed that he would begin again. He would draw the Ugly into his own personal death sentence and he would not stop until either he or the Ugly, and perhaps all of the gangs, or even Pontius itself, were consumed by cleansing fire and utterly destroyed.
Chapter Eight
Bacchanal of the Entertainers
Finally, I was reunited with my Lord. I am sworn to secrecy about much of our meeting. He was still only a shadow of what he would become, but this night marked the beginning of my transition from a man who was lost and angry to a man who served one greater than himself.
- from The Entertainers: Chapter Jarl: 49:7
* * *
Wodan went to the well and sat near the old men. A group of children gathered around a worn stone that could have been a statue ages ago. They began burning insects, staring with wordless intensity. The old men left suddenly and Wodan was left alone to watch the clouds. His ribs still ached, and he traced lines around the scars in his palms.
A young man approached. He was lean, only a little taller than Wodan, and had a regal hawk nose and wide mouth. He had long burnt-reddish hair that he tied in back, and a heavy brow over sharp eyes. He went to the well and raised fresh water and looked openly at Wodan. Wodan had grown used to spotting the telltale signs of psychopathy, or when someone was simply going to ask for money, but the outlander seemed free of warning signs. A thousand times before, Wodan had passed up interactions with others. This occasion felt different; it carried the weight of destiny turning against a fulcrum.
The newcomer slurped water from a bucket, then poured the rest on his face.
Wodan p
roduced a cigarette, then said, “You got a light?”
The youth nodded and sat beside him, then produced a cigarette of his own and lit an actual butane lighter. Wodan touched his cigarette to the newcomer’s fire, looked but did not see a golden Smith gear, then nodded in thanks.
“I’m Wodan,” he said, extending his hand.
The other shook it, looked Wodan up and down, then said, “Zachariah of Hargis. You’re an outlander, too. Where are you from?”
“The north. Far north.”
Zach leaned back and launched into a story as if the two were old friends. “A long time ago, the original Hargises got into a feud with another family. Now, some of the Hargises were law-readers and settlers of disputes. Other Hargises were pioneers, real rugged types. The feud started innocuously enough among law-readers who debated for a living, but it spread to the pioneer types.” Zach recounted how one old Hargis man was whittling toothpicks in his yard so that he’d have something to set out on the table he’d just made, when he heard a man whistling as he passed by. The man was a distant cousin of the family with whom the Hargises were feuding - and so the Hargis man notched arrow to bow, snuck up on the man, and let fly with a bolt that passed through the other’s brain stem and out of his mouth. After the feud carried on like this for several generations, the Hargises split into two camps. One group remained to ride out the feud, and eventually became rulers of the land named after them, while the other grew weary of the bloodshed and rode north, never to be seen again.
“We always assumed that the ones who went north,” said Zach, “became food for devils.”
“I knew a Hargis in my homeland,” said Wodan. “I think some devil did end up eating him.”
Zach laughed, and when he did so his mouth slitted upwards at the ends, sharp and almost cruel. Wodan did see a resemblance between Zachariah and the late Saul Hargis, although Zach’s features were heavier, refined but also brutish. He was a descendant of those who had endured a feud, rather than flee like Saul’s line of the family. Wodan wondered what the late Korliss Matri would have thought of him.
At Zach’s questioning, Wodan tried to explain where he came from without giving away details of Haven. Zach’s eyes grew distant, then Wodan stopped. “God’s death,” said Zach. “You’re Wodan and you wrote Satire.”
Wodan felt a rush, then said, “Are you a publisher?”
“Of course not! I’m just passing through.”
“You’ve never read Satire,” said Wodan, hoping that Zachariah was not part of an elaborate scam.
“I did, and it’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read,” said Zach. “It’s written from a second-person perspective, as if the reader was telling the story. The reader gets to make choices, which makes little sense if you assume that unseen forces control the fate of mankind. The main character is a satyr, a “beast of the earth”, and the reader chooses how he will live his life. The goal of any choice is to increase the power and depth of happiness, which is interesting because one of the Ancients once said that ‘happiness is the feeling that power is increasing.’ Satyr goes on a journey and learns from the animals of the wasteland – or, as you call it, the Land. I read two of the different endings. In one of them, Satyr was demonized by others who were horrified at what he had become. He was hunted and most likely killed. In another ending, he found a new home in an unexplored land that was cold and hard and beautiful. So, now do you believe me?”
“Okay, fine,” said Wodan. “But how in the world did you get hold of it?”
“My brother Jessup is an Entertainer.”
“Entertainers are talking about me?” said Wodan. He remembered the strange, secretive wasteland cult that found meaning in cultural patterns. “I had no idea there were any in Pontius. If I’d known that, I would have just gone straight to them and bypassed the publishers.”
“There are Entertainers here, but you don’t go to them, man, they come to you.”
“Will I get any money for this?” Wodan was concerned because he had wasted all of his jewels on paper so that he could continue writing. His old mentor had given him that money because he’d risked his life to fight Haven’s enemies. That money could have been used to fight the Ugly, but it was now gone and Wodan had nothing to show for it.
“You’ll never get any money making stuff like that. I saw it because I know a few Entertainers. Probably one of them got a copy from some publisher’s secretary who saved the piece from being sold for pulp.”
“Are you an Entertainer?”
“No – only my brother was willing to throw his life away for something like that. Unfortunately his girl left him recently, and now he’s lost his mind as well.”
“Damn, sorry to hear it.”
“It’s not so bad,” said Zach. “To an Entertainer, having your ego undermined to the point where your identity-mask falls apart can be considered advanced training, a learning experience. As long as you survive the trip, that is.” Wodan flexed his hands unconsciously.
Zach suddenly looked around, then took off at a brisk walk. Wodan walked alongside him. “I liked what you did with Satyr’s horns,” said Zach. “You know, curved horns, like that, like what goats have. Spirals, you know?” He waved his fingers in a tightening circle. “They’re found all throughout nature. It’s a biological equation that crops up all the time, a repeating pattern.”
“Crops up, like in what?”
“Like in leaves, on those wide palms you see on Bardic Oaks, or when a Redwater Spider digs its hole, it spirals downwards, so its prey falls in at the concealed narrow part and ends up at the fat part of the trap, deep down. Also on lots of seashells, or the shells of snails like they have in Greeley. And it reminds us that there’s something behind that, you know? The tree hides behind the leaf, a living thing hides beneath the shell, death and mystery hide behind the labyrinth.”
Wodan had heard of none of the specific examples that Zach gave, but he understood the general idea and it filled him with a strange, exciting foreboding.
“Also,” said Zach, “the orange robes at Srila call it a Golden Ratio, and they based the dimensions of their temples, and their position relative to one another, on the Ratio.”
“Wait - who are they?”
“It’s an old culture far, far south of here. They repeat rituals, though much of the meaning has been lost. But their temples, man – how can I even explain? They don’t enshrine the square, like you see in Pontius. It’s quiet in Srila, everything is deathly still, and there are these ancient stone structure that are… awesome, humbling. Like a reminder of a deeper sort of world where speech and the forms of conscious thought that we hold dear are more a hindrance than anything else. Of course, most of the orange robes have no idea about any of this stuff, they go and pray at different shrines the same way dullards here crowd into a bar and talk about money and career and endless despair and all that.”
As they walked in a sort of run and one idea connected to the next, Wodan realized two things. One was that his obsession with revenge had already had a negative effect on him, and was turning him into a small, mean-spirited person, bit by bit. He did not know whether or not this was because he had taken little to no action towards the realization of his dream of justice, and so the thing was darkening his soul, or if simply dwelling on such a thing could turn a person into a small-minded, frowning goon. The other thing he realized was that he had blinded himself to the potential of humanity by secluding himself and associating only with the simple people that he worked with at the bottom of the barrel. He realized that it was not long after he’d had his epiphany on the rooftop that life had thrown him in with a strange person whose mind was on fire with strange ideas.
Wodan was taken aback. He grabbed Zach’s shoulder and brought him to a stop, then said, “Zach, just who are you?”
Zach looked around. They stood before a squat grayish-brown building indistinguishable from the others lining the avenue. “Ah, we’re here!” he said. “If today is the
day, then this is the secret bacchanal of the Entertainers.”
“If it’s a secret,” said Wodan, eyeing the building up and down, “then why would they have anything to do with us?”
“You wrote Satire, and I’m a royal-born prince. No door will remain closed to us.”
* * *
They entered a dim room that looked like a business establishment, but Wodan saw nothing for sale. An aged clerk sat at a counter and eyed them suspiciously. Zach looked around as if some detail would suddenly spring out of the plain, dingy room.
“A prince!” Wodan muttered to himself. “Zach, who’s that guy over there?”
“Don’t look at him!” said Zach. “He’ll throw us out if he thinks we’re scamming him. That’s his job.” While Zach looked about, he said, “I’m a prince of Hargis. My land and my family name are one. My father rules and my brother Jessup is the heir. That’s what we became, those of us who endured the feud. Out of the chaos of the feud, came order. Revenge became justice. You see?”
“Tell me about Hargis,” said Wodan. He no longer felt silly for being stared at in a dim, quiet room while Zach peered at corners and floorboards.
“We’re a monarchy. We don’t have corruption and gangs filling in black markets like Pontius. Instead, we have troubles with dogmen. That’s where most of them come from. We have to have a strong military, and a hardass on the throne, to deal with them. We’ve got a four-sided blueprint for rule that we’ve always followed. You’ve got a King, first off – head of the nation, dispenser of justice, seat of order. He inspires noble bearing, virtue, and all that. Then you’ve got a Warrior, a powerful soldier who becomes a figurehead. He protects the people and his deeds become legend. The one who tells his story is the Entertainer – or, if your nation has gone in a direction where truth becomes unwelcome, then he takes the form of the Court Jester. In either case, he’s wise but innocent, a fool that speaks out of turn and breaks the stasis of social convention. Finally, there’s the Philosopher. He’s a little more detached than the Entertainer, but serves a similar function. He investigates virtue and finds various truths, but he uses more abstract means.
[Demonworld 3] The Floyd Street Massacre Page 6
