by J. S. Morin
The song ended, and voices from the crowd called out for others. Rhiannon scanned the crowd, listening to the suggestions. Finding a fresh glass of water on a nearby stool, she drank and mopped at her brow.
“How about ‘Magic Man’?” a grating voice, not of Lloyd’s making, shouted louder than all the others. “Or what about ‘Little Lies’? Oh… I know! Sing ‘She’s Not There’!”
Lloyd sprang from his seat at the back of the club and shouldered his way through the crowd. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. That voice had sounded like Carl Ramsey. Every patron, every server, every bouncer in the club was one of his own creations. None of them had it in them to play practical jokes on him, even if they were largely autonomous.
A movement below waist level caught Lloyd’s attention, off at the side of the room. He altered his course to intercept, but the ambiance of a packed house came with matching navigational troubles. He collided with a server, spilling a tray of drinks, and rebounded from the wide back of one of his own bouncers.
“Hey, pal! Watch where you—oh, sorry boss,” the bouncer said, helping Lloyd to his feet.
There was no time for this silliness. With a quick glance toward the stage, he confirmed that Rhiannon’s attention was elsewhere. Exerting his influence as master of his own mental domain, Lloyd simply disappeared and reappeared in the path of the skulking form.
“Going somewhere?” Lloyd asked, looming over a crouching Carl Ramsey.
Carl replied with a sheepish grin.
Lloyd’s next words were lost as a jolt of pain hit him in the kidneys. Carl sprang from his spot on the floor and grabbed him. His assailant from the rear already pinned Lloyd’s arms back. With a shocking strength for a man his size, Carl’s punch drove the wind from Lloyd’s lungs.
The two of them dragged Lloyd to a booth in the VIP section of the club and ousted the patrons there. With no free will or sense of indignation to call upon, the displaced patrons relinquished their seats without complaint. But the momentary panic soon faded. Lloyd wasn’t accustomed to being assaulted, least of all in his own mind. He was used to thinking of himself as he was in the flesh, but within his mental corridors he was more than that. He composed himself, assured that he was in no danger from Carl Ramsey.
“Went to a lot of effort, digging you up,” Carl said, wedging himself into the booth beside Lloyd. “You’re a hard man to find… you know, for this whole circus being up in your tent.”
“You could have at least let us know that Rhiannon was all right,” Carl’s companion said. The voice was identical, if a tad less aggressive. Lloyd snapped his head around to see another Carl slide into the booth on the other side of him. “We were worried sick.”
“And that’s not something you should have messed around with,” the first Carl said. “I may not always be around, but I’ll always be there when Rhi needs me.”
“So, you’re aware what’s at stake here,” Lloyd said. Carl was pressed against his side—both his sides—too close for comfort. He elbowed them for space, but Carl ignored the discomfort and paid his jostling no heed. “You’re prisoners here, all of you.”
“Not all of us,” the first Carl said. “You’re the latest attack dog after Mort. We wouldn’t still be here if you didn’t need hostages. Mort’s still in his own head, and you’re probably going mindo e mindo with him right this very second.”
“And you think you can provide a distraction to give him an edge?” Lloyd asked, scoffing at the notion. “You’re an irksome, loud, boorish creature, and your very existence annoys me. Beyond that, you’re no threat at all. I have my mental focus honed sharp enough to slice hairs lengthwise.”
“Work on that one,” first Carl said. “Lacks zip. How about ‘sharp enough to cut diamonds,’ or ‘sharper than a porcupine’s razorblade’?”
“Rhiannon,” the second Carl said. “Let’s not lose focus here. We need to get her back safe.”
“Rhiannon is in no danger,” Lloyd replied. “At least, not from me. Mordecai The Brown is a killer and a renegade. God knows what that man might do to save his sorry skin. My biggest risk in taking him in is that he’ll choose a Pyrrhic victory over surrender.”
“Our only concern right now is Rhiannon,” the second Carl said. “Mort is your problem.”
“I assure you—”
“Listen, pal,” first Carl said, putting an arm around Lloyd’s shoulders. “You got something screwy cooking here, and I don’t like it. You dump me and my crew in our own personalized hells, but Rhi gets to be a star? Good for her, but that means you’re planning on making nice once this is over. But she’d never forgive you for dusting Mort, so that means you’ve got something in store for her to either erase her memory or make her think this fairy playhouse here is real.”
“We’re willing to bargain,” second Carl said. “Anything for her to come out of this unharmed. And no offense, Lloyd, but she can’t see you anymore.”
“How dare you!” Lloyd said. He placed his hands on the underside of the table. But before he flipped it over in dramatic fashion, he remembered Rhiannon up on stage. For now, she was oblivious to the presence of her brother—or brothers—but a showy fit of temper would ruin that. Lloyd took a slow breath. “What can you possibly offer me?”
“What do you need?”
“Mordecai The Brown’s head in a box,” Lloyd replied. “So unless you can delivery that—”
“Deal,” first Carl said.
Lloyd paused, mouth agape. “How’s that?”
“You want to trade Mort for Rhiannon? Fine,” first Carl said. “Mort may be family, but Rhiannon is my little sister. I’d airlock the whole crew if that’s what it took to save her.”
It sounded as if he meant it, but Carl Ramsey was notorious for nothing so much as his facility with the truth. “Deliver and she’s yours.”
“I probably can’t kill him,” first Carl said.
“That wouldn’t go well,” second Carl said quietly, shaking his head.
“…but if you can do the dirty end of things, I can lure him out for you,” first Carl said. “Am I wrong to think that you need him inside your head to overpower him?”
Lloyd weighed his next words. He had to be prepared for Carl to have a line of communication directly to Mort. Nothing he said could be news to the renegade. His best hope was that Carl was playing him straight. His most reasonable hope was that Carl was a ham-handed idiot, plotting on his own and might inadvertently lead Mort to his downfall.
“I’ll allow you to contact Mort—under the guise of an escape. You bring him to a parley at the border between our two minds. Convince him to step into my domain—or shove him, for all I care—and Rhiannon is free to go.”
“Along with the rest of the crew.”
“Along with the rest of the crew,” Lloyd echoed. “I already had a deal to that effect with Mordecai, but I’ll still honor it.”
The two Carls stood, giving Lloyd a welcome reprise from their cloying, bourgeois odors. “Oh, and if you were thinking you could double-cross me and take Rhi anyway,” first Carl said. “I’ll put a bullet in your skull.”
Lloyd offered a condescending smirk. “How quaint. But I don’t think you’re in any condition to follow through on that threat. I’ll release you and your crew once I’m ready to set foot on a civilized world, with more than adequate security.”
“Who’s to say that right this minute I’m not sitting in the common room with a revolver trained on you?” first Carl asked. He stroked the stubble on his chin between thumb and forefinger. “I wonder how much concentration it would cost you to go look? More than you can spare right now?”
The cocky sonofabitch was bluffing. He had to be. But it didn’t matter. Carl was just trying to rattle him when he could least afford it. There was no time to waste. While Carl distracted Mordecai, it would be his time to launch an assault on the renegade wizard’s mind.
# # #
The workings of the stone men were surreal. E
ach was roughly man-shaped and man-sized—Lloyd-sized, to be precise—but the difference was in the details. These things didn’t have any. Each was a child’s clay sculpture of a person, except they were formed from granite. There were no joints or hinges or pins; the limbs moved like flesh bereft of bone. Without faces, it was only by their posture that Carl could tell which way Lloyd’s workers faced.
But the stone men worked tirelessly. Deep beneath the imaginary earth of Lloyd’s realm, they tunneled. Their destination was Mort’s mind, and the undefended lower reaches thereof. Of course, the undefended bit was mostly optimism—Lloyd didn’t seem certain how perceptive Mort might be to intrusions into his subconscious mind, and Carl hadn’t the foggiest notion. He was just there to deliver a message.
Of course, Carl had played a switcheroo on Lloyd. Older Brother and Worrier weren’t cut out for this sort of mission. It was Hero Carl who was being called into action once again. But of all the aspects of heroism that grated on Carl, it wasn’t the fear, the danger, or the physical demands that got to him. It was the waiting. Being heroic was an in-the-moment sort of deal. You didn’t hear stories about heroic hours of waiting in ambush, or the harrowing days in the wilds between a completed mission and the extraction team coming. Because that shit wasn’t heroic. It may have been necessary. It may even have involved heroes. But that shit was boring, and that wasn’t what Hero Carl lived for. Let Witty Banterer wile away the hours, or Go-With-the-Flow Carl. There was no Geologist Carl to wonder about the accuracy of imagined sedimentary layers or Miner Carl to either help or advise in the actual digging. It was just Hero Carl, growing antsy as the moments stretched on interminably.
“Since you guys aren’t fucking real, do you think you could imagine up some laser bore-cutters?” Carl asked. “Maybe some sort of enormous burrowing worm? I’m not squeamish; I’d muck through giant worm shit to speed up this little invasion.”
The stone men kept digging. Their flat, fingerless hands scooping away dirt and stone alike and passing it back to be extracted from the tunnel.
“Nothing, huh? You clowns are a real pleasure to work with. I hope you’re as brainless and plodding when it comes to fighting, so Mort can clobber you.”
One of the stone men stopped and looked over its shoulder, prompting Carl to hold up his hands in surrender. “Hey, easy big guy. I was just trying to get a rise out of you. It’s dull as paperwork down here; I was just hoping for a little back-and-forth. You know, someone to talk to?”
But it was pointless. Lloyd’s creatures would not provide Carl any entertainment as he waited for them to breach Mort’s defenses. Carl hummed and sang, fidgeted and watched, paced and leaned against the tunnel walls. He shouldn’t have been able to see a damn thing down there, with no lamps, flashlights, or even a torch. There wasn’t any magical light that he could detect; it was just bright enough to see, like an underground scene in a holovid. As soon as he realized that fact, the whole notion of the lighting started bothering him.
Carl might have driven the heroic part of himself crazy were it not for a minor cave-in up ahead. The ceiling fell in above where the stone men dug their horizontal shaft. But there wasn’t much dirt in the cave-in, and a number of cut stones fell into the tunnel along with it.
“Jackpot,” Carl said with a grin. “All right, boys. Can’t say it’s been fun, but this is where I take over.” He weaved his way among the stoic, faceless workers until he reached the cave-in. Regular, real-world Carl might have asked for a leg up from one of Lloyd’s minions, but Heroic Carl just leapt, grabbed the ledge of the floor above, and pulled himself up.
Imaginary world or not, Hero or not, the sight that met Carl stole his breath and had his heart hammering in his chest.
“Greetings, Bradley the Elder,” the dragon grumbled in a smooth bass voice. The black-scaled creature nearly filled the room before him. As its head snapped forward, Carl worried that he’d been mistaken for an enemy. Instead, the dragon stuffed his head down the newly formed hole and breathed fire.
The heat reminded him of standing next to an unshielded reactor during an engine test. Carl pulled up the collar of his jacket to shield his face from the worst of the searing wind that swirled through the chamber. When the dragon breath ceased and he dared to look, the floor had sunk above the stone men’s passage, and a pool of cooling magma marked the sealed tunnel entrance.
“You’re… um…” Carl snapped his fingers, trying to recall the dragon’s name. It was something gibberish and Arthurian-sounding.
“Kythrast,” the dragon supplied, ducking his head in as much of a bow as the tight quarters would allow. “Lord Mordecai will be relieved to see you.”
“Things going that bad?” Carl asked.
“His Lordship is most vexed by this conundrum,” Kythrast replied.
“Where are we?” Carl asked, taking in the scenery. It was another underground chamber, but this was stone masonry, with mortared stone blocks and torches in iron wall sconces.
“Aside from within the borders of Mortania?” Kythrast asked. “I couldn’t say. This section of the castle is mere moments old. Lord Mordecai was impatient for your rather sedimentary companions to find a section of the lower dungeons to breach and could not abide the errant path they mined.”
“Um, thanks,” Carl said. “That was a bitch of a wait. So where’s Mort? I’m here to double-cross him, and I’m looking for ideas.”
The dragon leaned close and narrowed an eye larger than Carl’s head. “Your appearance aside, you are every bit the snide little Bradley the Younger who dwells in this realm. Well that I know his quick tongue and dull wit, or I might mark you as a traitor.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Carl said with a dismissive wave. “Just lead the way to Mort. I don’t have time for the epic poem version.”
# # #
A boulder the size of a cottage tumbled through the air, scale and distance conspiring to make it seem lazy in its ballistic course. Near its zenith, Mort wagged a finger and nudged it aside, shifting it off course and away from the castle. A moment later, it hammered to earth, sending a soft tremor through the stones of the battlements but destroying nothing more than the gardeners’ handiwork. It was the first of many such boulders, launched from Lloydsville and heralding the commencement of a full-scale assault.
Mort smirked. Lloyd had chosen to meet him on his own terms, at least technologically. Trebuchets stood in orderly rows behind the massed soldiers who advanced across Mortania’s border. Simplistic, towering constructions of imaginary wood and rope, they toed the border between simple tools and scientific witchcraft. Each was nothing more than a system of weights and levers, drawing strength from gravity and conferring it upon a projectile of elemental earth.
Lloyd’s cleverness was not lost on Mort. By luring him into a fight on his own terms, Mort would be inclined to battle head-on. This was no alien intrusion into his mind—or so the ruse went—but an assault he could retaliate against. Mental combat was equal parts willpower, concentration, and imagination. A proper ancient siege would wear on Mort’s concentration as assault after assault pounded his mental defenses. And by offering him a familiar threat, appropriate to Mort’s mental realm, Lloyd was goading him into confronting it rather than cowering beneath a mountain or an in underground lair.
As Mort flicked hundred-ton boulders from the air like mosquitoes, he wondered whether Lloyd’s plan might eventually work. There was a tedium in defending against the orderly, rhythmic progression of trebuchets launching their payloads toward his forces. Without risking the safety of his friends, his options to strike back were limited.
“Lord Mordecai,” General Tanny said. “We should meet them in the field. How long can your magic hold out against this bombardment?”
The stone soldiers of Lloydsville marched across Mort’s border in droves. They carried no weapons, flew no banners, and shouted no cries of battle. They were automatons, nothing more. Each soldier in Mort’s army had been painstakingly replicated from a per
son Mort had met, however briefly. He’d fleshed out their personalities and given them work in the towns and villages that surrounded the castle. They’d grown lives of their own, meeting one another and forming friendships, falling in love.
“Lord Mordecai?” General Tanny prompted.
Mort shook his head. He couldn’t, not even if it helped keep the ruse in place. “No. We keep to the safety of the walls. We don’t need to rout this army in the field. I doubt they’d break anyway. We just need to weather the storm.”
“With all due respect, milord,” General Tanny said, leaning over the battlements to place herself in Mort’s field of vision as he swatted boulders. “We can outmaneuver them in the valley. We can fight a slow retreat, making them pay for every inch of ground between here and the castle. Once they have us surrounded, we have no option but to fight them on the walls.”
“That’s what castles are for,” Mort snapped. He was tempted to shatter the false Tanny’s illusions, to tell her she wasn’t real, just a sliver of his own mind. What did she know about this sort of combat that he hadn’t imagined into her head? She couldn’t know better than him.
Another part of Mort wanted to end the charade for Lloyd as well. He could call thunder from the heavens and unleash as swarm of dragons each as massive and ill tempered as Kythrast. Let them tear through the barriers around Lloyd’s mind and sunder his plain, boxy fortress to rubble. Let them snuffle around in Lloyd’s head until they found the core of his being and charred it to cinders.
Of course, he’d undoubtedly ruin the minds of the real Tanny, and Mriy, Roddy, and Kubu as well. Rhiannon was in there somewhere as well. Some bit of Carl might survive such a cataclysm, but how much? That boy’s mind had been through enough already, held together by bits of twine and spit. Considering the consequences of his actions cooled Mort’s temper, quenching his focus with a hiss of steam that left it harder than it had been before. He would hold out.
