The landscape of our society is changing, deforming. It was too ugly to look at full in the face when I was born, and now things are even worse. We don’t know how things got to this state, and our theories are likely just as wrong as the mythology believed by the characters in my novel. That’s the whole Gods-damned point. Like the points at the top of your head and the tip of your prick, it appears to exceed your reach and your capacity for search and inquiry. As for the rulers’ communication network, I must apologize. I thought that imagination was permissible in fantasy fiction. Did you not use a spell to cheat yourself of the privilege of reading my work? Is it not possible that in the far future, spellcraft might evolve to the point where the powerful can communicate to their agents almost instantaneously?
In a roundabout way, I must thank you. I haven’t had this much fun handing out a verbal beatdown since I cancelled my membership in the Provisian Rifleman Union for trotting out one too many militia-inspired ‘the Dry Men are taking our guns!’ communiques. I have pulverized you, and it feels very good. But if I ever see you in person, I will kick your teeth in.
Victoriously,
Forrest G. Cromwell.
Excerpt from Dark Messiahs
(Though Sir Robert Wolfram scuttled Cromwell’s chances of getting his novel Anthems of Armageddon printed through his father’s publishing house, Cromwell had more success with his nonfiction book. Dark Messiahs details his travels with the notorious motorcycle club. Cromwell was left embittered by the terms of the contract, which he felt gave him a tiny sliver of the royalties that he deserved.)
The sun cuts through the smog-haze on a forbidding stretch of Trash Junction highway and heliographs on the lens of a pair of dark shades made from translucent dragon scales. The rider, a muscled giant wearing a necklace of goblin skulls and a gallery of ink chronicling decades of violence and debauchery, is glad to tell you where he got the sunglasses if you ask nicely. “Ripped them off the eyes of a mountain dragon just north of Oily Peaks,” he says. “Got a little singed—” he pulls down the shades to reveal a missing eyebrow and a tight network of scar tissue “but it was worth it. You got to earn your trophies or they ain’t worth heepshit.” He revs the engine, filling the air with azure smoke from the blue absinth they mix with the gasoline. “I fucked the dragon up the ass before I killed it.” He adds.
This is SataNick the Panick, a typical specimen of the Provisian phenomenon known as the Dark Messiahs. They ride a fleet of screaming hogs, chrome monstrosities belching intoxicating fumes from the anuses of exhaust pipes the size of cannons. They blow into towns from Archland to Crater Cove and over the hills and up the skirts of every wife and daughter they can find, willing or unwilling, and leave them forever changed. They make the Trash Junction Tyrants and the Provisian Pitfighting League look like a bunch of pathetic pansy-ass pussies. They run guns and pixie grind around the stinking rim of the nation, and they have their finger on every trigger and in every pie and penetrating every orifice.
If another motorcycle club is hapless enough to find itself in the way of their tar-burn trail of rape and carnage, the assault that ensues is so grotesque and heinous that anyone who survives the sleeve bar facials and chain whipping is permitted to patch over from the Paradise Demons or Hopping Harpies, though old timers can count the number of survivors on one hand. Anyone who can live through a rumble with the Dark Messiahs, and not get pounded into a crimson asphalt paste with the rest of their chapter, is considered a Righteous Dude.
That’s the first thing that you learn about the Dark Messiahs. They divide everyone into three categories: Righteous Dudes, Old Ladies, and Squares. Only the barest sliver of the Provisian populace qualifies as Righteous Dudes, and having the title does not ensure that you will keep it for any length of time, as I would learn at the end of a twisted and brutal odyssey. To be a Righteous Dude, you have to be a Dark Messiah, someone any Dark Messiah respects, or someone who doesn’t wear the cut but who they find useful or interesting. Once you fall out with one of them, you’ve fallen out with all of them, which is why I now travel everywhere with a Provisian Peacemaker that can shoot through an engine block.
Old Ladies aren’t necessarily old, and are seldom ladies. An Old Lady is any female that any Dark Messiah desires for any length of time, whether she is a matron of forty or in her first blush of womanhood. Only men can be Dark Messiahs, and they have no more respect for women than they do for Orcs, goblins, or Kargivians. Women are a commodity to be shared like Rumble Rum or ThinkInk—something to be consumed regardless of quality, shared among them, and then discarded like refuse or rags. You can see Old Ladies perched on sissybars and clinging to their consorts, balanced on the excruciating Edge that lies between unimaginable degradation and a gruesome death eating the pavement of the TJSH at ninety miles an hour.
Squares are everyone and everything that is not a Righteous Dude or an Old Lady. I was able to live long enough to write the story only because there was a brief window in which my intimate knowledge of dangerous drugs and firearms bought me enough credibility to be a Righteous Dude for a time. When the glamor faded, they were ready with heavy chains and tire irons, and I’m Gods-damned lucky to have gotten out of it alive, let alone with only a wired jaw and a half dozen broken bones.
Before they consigned me to the realm of the Squares and certain death (should I ever meet any of them again) I did get an answer to a nagging question. They wear a patch with a man nailed to two-by-fours, emaciated and bleeding from hands and feet. It shocks me every time I see it: an act of brutality so cruel it would make the Provisian Special Forces blush.
We were flying high on good Elven Vodka and bursting pixie heads, watching as Old Ladies danced naked around a bonfire built on the charred bones of enemies. “That guy on your patch,” I said “Who is he supposed to be?”
Charnel House laughed. “It’s Christ. Ain't you never heard of Christ?” I shook my head. “He was the first Righteous Dude. The Squares nailed him to a cross and he came right down and massacred them with fire and glory, turning their cities into ash and their women into salt. We wear him on the patch because he taught us to fuck shit up. He reminds us that our way is the only way, and at the end of the line you hang in or you die.”
They lit into me not long after that. They perceived my reluctance to touch one of the old ladies as a mortal insult, though in truth I was scared of what would happen if I got too friendly and made her wear the bark. Soon the pain of the beating was so savage that I couldn’t even feel it, only hear it—a percussive tattoo of metal on bark, every strike blowing like a powder keg. They tied my heels and made to drag me behind their caravan, but the rope broke and I tumbled into a ravine, where people walked by ignoring me for hours before a local sheriff finally happened by and put me up in a hospital so he wouldn’t have the nuisance of a corpse on his hands.
“You must be dumb as heepshit,” he informed me. I was finally awake, and able to perceive nothing but a net of pain crisscrossing my body, dulled by a drip of opiates. “If you survived and you’re not riding with them, they can only take it as a mortal insult. You’ve got to heal up fast and get the fuck out of my town.”
I tried to talk, but the wires were a dungeon in my mouth. It took all my strength to mumble my question. “What’retay?”
“What are they? You shouldn’t need a lawman to tell you that. They’re Retrotypes. They’re an atavistic throwback to the way things were in times past. Since the days of old Previsia, there’s always been folks who don’t fit in and don’t want to fit in. They don’t have no hope or opportunity, but they’d just as soon rip off the jaw of a Panarchist as talk to one. They hate mutes and foreigners and women, but they have no ideology except the road. And where that road leads from or to, I don’t know and I don’t want to find out. And I don’t want to truck with anyone dumb enough to ask questions like that.” He fussed with his badge and smoothed his comb-over. “So the moment you can walk, you better gimp your way the fuck out of my town.”
That was the first time I saw the true face of Provisia. Addled and anarchic, a shit-show with no ringmaster, and no quarter to be had from either the law or the lawless.
The Goblin Games are Ghastly and Egregious
(The following is the original draft. Vicarious Living cut it down to a third of its length and printed it without clearing the changes with Cromwell. He was enraged and vowed to never write for them again.)
The tent flaps billow like the flesh folds of some vast and incomprehensible monster. This is the Goblin Games, a horrific spectacle of post-peasant stupidity and meanness. I’m talking about the kind of rednecks who admire the Ignobles so much that they rend and stitch their own skin just to look like them. I’m talking about the kind of people that fly Provisian flags from the roofs of their ramshackle mobile homes. People desperate to cling to illusory dreams and assert their superiority over so-called lesser races.
And how do they do that, you ask? It’s not hard. Send a bunch of militia men into the mutant mountains with tranq guns and a mission—to bag a few dozen goblins--alive. Why goblins? Well, they’re mutants, so to the post-peasants they are immediately the disgusting and contemptible enemy. But unlike other mutants—Orcs for example—goblins are small and vulnerable. You can shove three of them in a sack and carry them over one shoulder. So the Goblin Games are based on an unfortunate confluence of circumstances. You have a sizable Ignoble-leaning post-peasant population right at the foot of Mutant Mountain. You also have goblins who live there, who are no smarter or stupider than people, or Orcs, or elves or dwarves or what have you. In short, you have a mix of a despised minority, a dumb and hateful majority, and physical vulnerability.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m no bleeding heart. I’m no Leveller or Panarchist who dreams of a utopian fellowship of the races where there’s no rich or poor and everyone has their say. Fuck that. I’ve seen too much of this vile and shit-encrusted planet to think that we’re capable of building a paradise. I don’t object to making a few nobles, and doing it dishonestly whenever I can. The Goblin Games is where I draw the line—save just this once, for reasons that you’ll understand shortly.
The stench of the carnival food hits me before I can get anywhere near the tent. It’s an unnerving and animalistic experience--I understand for a moment how it must be to be a flaff, to have better smell than vision, and to wish I didn’t. Everything is deep-fried and greasy, which wouldn’t be too bad except for the lurking odor of shit and sweat laden with Provisia’s most lethal stimulants. It’s a vile, biochemical miasma, an odor that sears itself in my memory like trauma. I watch a filch parasite crawl furtively onto a triple-fried leg of candied heep, scan for danger, and burrow inside, a perverted inversion of the food chain. This is the standard food for post-peasants, for the people so embittered by the end of the agrarian age that they would love nothing more than to drop dead of a heart attack. When there’s no farming left to do, the farmers grow new crops. They grow their sense of rage and their misbegotten ideologies. They grow their hate and their guts. They grow their grievances and their debt and their pain.
I walk into the tent, puffing the second biggest joint I’ve ever smoked. Immediately, I get dirty looks from the post-peasants. They love their pixie heads and amphetamines, but they hate the counterculture connotations of the demon weed. They can’t do shit about it, though. What are they going to do? Call the Dry Men-connected deep state Provisian feds on me? I exhale heavily into the face of a fat man with a Provisian Flag tattoo and faux Ignoble sutures covering his face, and he coughs until he brings up a prodigious wad of phlegm. He looks like he deserves the abuse, and I can tell at a glance that he won’t fight back.
I ask for help and an inbred child tells me that “they done keep them thar goblins out backa th’ tent up inna those pens.” I’m too far from the entrance now to turn back and go around the perimeter, so I just shove and elbow my way through. There’s hollering and fighting words, but no one seems to mind. The Goblin Games is a place where people go to get abused—to fight and be fought, to lose money, to have their children spit on and their women groped. There’s the ugly certainty that the real purpose of this event is a kind of meta-self-loathing, a sadomasochistic heep-fighting match with sentient beings.
When I finally reach the exit, I find a massive redneck guarding the pens. He’s so big that you figure he’s got to have orc or troll somewhere in his family tree, though you can tell if you asked him he’d trace his kin back to Provisia’s founding fathers. “Whatchu wantin’?” I flash him the press pass, and he squints at it to pretend that he can read. “Press pass. Let me talk to one of the goblins.”
“Interview ‘em?” He guffaws “That what they got those lib’ral media folks doin’ now? Chattin’ up mutes?” I’m not sure how to answer his question. Anyone who’s spent more than two minutes with me knows I’m a nihilist of the first order. As for talking to mutants, was this motherfucker so stupid that he was tasked with guarding the goblins and somehow didn’t know that they speak Provisian? They don’t have their own language like the Orcs. They’re not like pixies, who are no smarter than dragonflies despite the awesome stimulant capabilities of their worthless little brains. They’re clearly an intelligent race, not flaffs or tweeps.
“I get it.” I say at last. “You’re dumb as a magnetized filch parasite.”
“Yessir.” He says proudly. “I is dumb, but I ain’t no mute. And no lib’ral journalist gon’ interview no mutes on my watch no how.” I lift my shirt to flash my weapon, a Provisian Peacemaker. It isn’t a threat. I know his type well enough to understand that possession of a firearm is itself a kind of credential to him, more valuable than any press pass. He clears out and lets me speak.
There are thirty goblins, lined up in dirty bamboo cages stacked on top of each other in teetering rows. I’ve seen factory-farmed heep with better living conditions. There was a fetid excretory smell unlike human shit or manure or compost. I tried not to think about how they did their business in those tiny cages. Goblins are small—so small that some people can nearly encircle the waist of a goblin with a single hand. We are giants to them, and seeing a goblin will bring home the fact that freakhood is in the eye of the beholder. That said, to our sensibilities, they are profoundly ugly. Even a post-peasant blasted on Rumble Rum wouldn’t fuck a goblin woman, and for once their dumb-as-heepshit reactionary views wouldn’t be driving the decision. Ignoble hangers-on hate Burialists too, but you could bet they’d get frisky with a buxom merwoman if they got a chance, and if merwomen were real and not a product of oversexed racist delusions.
The joint is giving me profound enjoyment, and I pick a goblin stacked in the second row so that I can sit on a haystack and keep puffing. As it happens, when I looked through the bars, I find that the nearest goblin is not in a state of anger and terror. The cells are claustrophobic even for beings so much smaller than people, but the goblin is sitting cross-legged and relaxed, as if he has made peace with his situation. “You look pretty serene for a guy pitted against his own in mortal combat by hateful hicks.”
The globe eyes open and regard me with subtle intelligence through the bamboo bars. “I took the tree-men of Burial as a legend.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot. The name’s Cromwell. Provisian Air Force, sports desk.”
“You’re a pilot?”
“I’m a guy who won’t be safe anywhere but a military base for the foreseeable future. When they find out I skipped training to go to the Goblin Games, I’m gonna have some trouble. Those uptight MP geeks will have me court martialed and put in a cell so small it will make yours look like the best sucker’s suite in Plutocrat’s Palace. So give me something, man. You’re going to have to kill your own tribesmen in a frenzy of brutal blood sport in less than an hour. I’m hitting the trees so hard that I could get reported for child abuse. Yet you’re the calm one. Why?”
“Goblins don’t have tribes.”
“What?”
“You said that I
have to kill my own tribesmen. Goblins have clans.”
“Answer my question, you pedantic little fuck. What’s the score?”
“The Ignobles and post-peasants have been staging the Goblin Games since the Schism. We know that some of us are going to get captured and made to fight every year. It’s settled in advance.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, that no one wants to slaughter a clanmate’s child and then tell him about it when he wins his freedom. The Goblin Games are fixed. We throw the fight every year so the youngest wins his freedom and returns home.”
It takes me some time to process this, and I’ll tell you for nothing that it wasn’t just the demon weed. That this goblin could accept his own death so passively, and that a persecuted community could show such solidarity in the face of this horror, makes me feel ashamed and alone. “You’re saying that twenty-nine of you die willingly so that the youngest can live?” It makes no sense. I’m not close enough to anyone to do that. I wouldn’t have died willingly even for my gang of Bloodhawks from my orphanage days, the closest thing I’ve ever had to a family. If I were in his place, I’d go along with it and ride everything out until it was just me and the youngest, then rip his throat open. Any number of excuses would be acceptable. You could say that the youngest died in captivity or by accident. You could just not go back to your clan and start over in a place where idiots don’t hunt you and make you fight for their entertainment.
“Stilgosb is the youngest, and Stilgosb will live. I’m at peace with that.”
“You’re telling me they’ve been doing this shit since the Schism and no one’s picked up on the fact that the youngest always wins?”
“Can your kind tell the difference between a male goblin and a female one? A chieftain and a cleric? How then can you tell the difference between a young goblin and an old one?” I want to yell at him that the post-peasants aren’t my kind, and that I’ll rip one of his oversized ears off to remind him of it. But he isn’t the problem. It’s these crazy carney bastards and their stupid Games. I’m in a mood to get back at them a little.
Fables of Failure Page 5
