Tong Lashing

by Peter David

  “No. You are its master. For the moment, in any event.”

  “So I’m… unscathed?”

  “I didn’t say that, my love,” she said sadly. “Such power as you unleashed does not come without a price. A pound of flesh, as it were. The sword chose the price. And you will have to live with it.”

  I started to sob. I had never felt so miserable. She clucked disapprovingly. “Oh, now, Apropos…”

  “I ruined it, didn’t I, Mother,” I said.

  “Yes. But that’s all right, my love. You ruin everything.”

  The last words had been said with a deep, fearsome growl, and it was no longer my mother standing there, but Aulhel, and he was laughing, loud and long, and others began to join in, also laughing at me, and my head was swimming in laughter and humiliation, and then I awoke.

  I was lying right where I had been, except that sunlight was streaming down upon me. That should not have been possible. This was the shadow town, where the sun never shone.

  The buildings were gone.

  All gone.

  There was a faint ringing in my ear. I reached up automatically to touch it, and came away with dried blood on my fingertips.

  My right ear was gone.

  Something sharp had violently cut it away.

  The ringing… which nowadays is reduced to faint background noise, but I can still detect every now and then… continued.

  Among my possessions was a small tapestry I had been given. It showed me as older, grim-faced… and missing an ear.

  Was it all fate, then? Had all of this been completely out of my hands? Could it truly have been that, no matter what I had done, the same appalling fate awaited me and everyone who had been near me? Could the gods truly be that cruel?

  Sadly, I knew the answer to the last question instantly. And that was enough to answer all the ones previous to it.

  I had collapsed upon my walking staff. Under my “friendly” auspices, it too was spared. Slowly I hauled myself to my feet.

  Veruh Wang Ho was dust at my feet. At least I was reasonably certain it was him… he… her…

  Her.

  I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly as I saw the anguish that had been reflected in her face, trying to defy that which the gods had given her in one of their typically cruel jokes. Yes. Her.

  The ground was burned in all directions. I took a few steps and stopped once more. The faint wind was continuing to blow ashes all about, but I saw one thing upon the ground that seized my full attention.

  Burned into the ground was a scorched silhouette. A young woman, it appeared to be, embracing what seemed to be the outline of a dragon.

  Mitsu. And Mordant. All that was left of them, blasted into the ground by the force of the energies released. I didn’t know why they had been singled out. Perhaps because Mordant had magic in him. Perhaps because of where they’d been standing, or who’d been standing in front of them.

  Or perhaps the gods were even bigger bastards than I’d credited them.

  I stood there for a long moment, waiting for the tears to start.

  Waiting for something.

  Nothing came.

  Nothing.

  And then I started to laugh.

  I didn’t know where it came from, or why, but I continued to laugh. I turned away from the scene of lethal devastation and started walking, and I kept on laughing until I finally figured out why.

  Because I was nothing. Finally and completely, because I was nothing.

  That used to upset me.

  It didn’t anymore.

  I moved through the city then. The farther I got from the blast point, the more I began to see signs of life. It had been a devastating blast, but it had not torn apart the entire city. There were survivors, many survivors.

  Except they didn’t appear to be happy that they had survived.

  Buildings had been knocked down, flattened. Entire blocks had been obliterated. And the people…

  The innocent people…

  They wandered about aimlessly, or simply sat in one place and stared off into space, wondering what they had done to deserve this. Many of them were horrifically burned.

  I felt nothing.

  I heard the sounds of children crying, of dogs barking. So much pain, so much pain.

  And I felt nothing.

  When I had been holding the dead Kit to my breast, I thought—in my cries that I did not care—that I had embraced the totality of nothingness. I had been wrong. I had barely scratched the surface, not even begun to realize the remarkable strength that came from utter nothingness.

  I had hated the notion that I was known as Apropos of Nothing. I had wanted to have something, love something, stand for something. How typically Apropos, to want to rid myself of that which was, in fact, my greatest strength.

  Something makes you weak. Something makes you second-guess. Something makes you doubt. Something makes you love, or hate, or fear, or make mistakes.

  But nothingness… in nothing, there is no love or hate or fear. Nothing never makes mistakes.

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” “Nothing for nothing.”

  “Nothing to fear.” “Nothing matters.”

  In the beginning, there is nothing. We come from nothing, we go to nothing.

  The message was clear in day-to-day life, and I had been too blind to see it. Ali had tried to teach it to me, and I hadn’t been fully ready to appreciate it or understand it. I had thought the strength I sought from Ali came from the sword.

  It didn’t. It came from nothing. The sword was simply a tool.

  Nothing was impenetrable. Nothing was invincible. I had nothing to fear but something.

  Darkness was nothing. One could hide in darkness, strike from darkness.

  Something always bogged you down. Be it emotions or sentiment or inordinate possessions. But you were never slowed by nothing.

  “What are you doing?” Nothing.

  “What are you looking for?” Nothing.

  “What are you thinking about?” Nothing.

  “What’s the matter?” Nothing.

  “Ah, that damned son of mine! He’s good for nothing!”

  That’s what I was going to be. Good for nothing.

  Finally.

  Here I’d been chagrined that I was known as Sir Apropos of Nothing, as if that made me less than others when, in fact, it made me so much more.

  I had been walking slowly at first, but the more people I passed, the more I embraced nothing, the more confident I became. I didn’t care about the blood on the side of my face. So I was missing an ear. So what? I had another. And besides, it wasn’t as if a lot of people in the world were saying anything so damned interesting anyway.

  Once I would have felt terrible for all these people, whose simple lives had suddenly been sent into disarray.

  Now I didn’t.

  Once I might have tried to stop, to help them, all the time rationalizing that I was doing it for myself. Yet now I didn’t have to engage in any such subterfuge for the simple reason that I wasn’t remotely interested in trying to help them.

  Why?

  Nothing doing.

  If I did nothing, the world could not hurt me. Never, ever again.

  Finally… finally… I was at peace.

  There was only one lingering problem, and that was the sword at my side.

  It was something.

  It was responsibility. It needed to be guarded against, maintained. The other weapons I carried, they were just for defense. To defend myself from what? From something. And from those who wanted to give something, namely death.

  Death was something. Death was peace. Death was release.

  Life… life was nothing. I had seen that all too clearly, knew that beyond any hope of denial. I knew that the moment I saw the dead Kit. Life was nothing. Arbitrarily assigned, not cherished by nearly enough, not comprehended by those in power who would take that which they had not given in the first place. Oh, perhaps life wasn�
�t actually nothing, but it was treated by nothing by enough people—kings, rulers, brigands, thieves, monsters—that it became nothing by default, because everything in the world is defined by humanity.

  So my weapons would enable me to hold on to the nothing called life.

  But I didn’t want the demon sword because of all the somethings attached to it.

  I didn’t know what to do with it, however.

  And then, as I made my way out of town, I came upon two people approaching.

  One was an overweight warrior. He had stern, pitiless features, a sword tucked through his belt, and he looked at me with—well, with no curiosity at all, unlike everyone else I had encountered. This fat man did not seem to care about me. He seemed to have an appreciation for nothing.

  Even more curious was his companion. It was a little boy, being pushed along in a sort of cart. The boy stared up at me, and he also was not curious. His dark eyes merely fixed upon me. Obviously the fat man was the boy’s father.

  We stopped and faced each other: The fat man, the little boy, and myself. The father, the son, and me… a mere ghost of what I had been when I first washed up upon the shores of Chinpan. And yet, I was not bothered by that.

  Because nothing bothered me.

  “Did you see what happened there?” I asked, nodding toward the devastated city behind me.

  “I saw a cloud,” rumbled the fat man. “It seemed like a giant toadstool.”

  “Yes. I saw it too.”

  “It’s gone now.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s still there. It will always be there.” I studied him a moment further. “Tell me,” I asked. “Would you ever be in a situation where you would give up? Where you would not care about anything?”

  “Never,” said the fat man. “I have a son. Not caring is a luxury I do not have.” He paused. “Do you have a son?”

  “No,” I said, not realizing I was mistaken. “Which is fortunate, because if I did, he would probably want to kill me,” I added, not realizing I was right. “Here.” I held up the tachi sword. “Take this.”

  He looked at me askance. “Why?”

  “Because I am giving it to you,” I said reasonably.

  He took the sword from me, eyed it. He pulled it from the sheath, whipped it back and forth through the air. “It is a fine blade,” he allowed and deftly slid it back into the scabbard. “What do you wish for it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then I will give you nothing.”

  “Accepted.”

  And so we parted ways, we three. The fat man, who had something to live for, namely his little boy.

  And I, Apropos, struck out for the north, knowing at long last that I truly had nothing to live for… and was finally looking forward to living it.