Seventh Discourse (part 12 of 12)
Wand Smoke: Kashim's Discourses
From Seventh Discourse (part 11 of 12):
The plan is to cut right, then to cut down the two spare gremlins. Their smaller, more maneuverable arms are the greater threat, but they’re also likely to hesitate again, especially when Blue is too busy operating the machination.
“Pedalers one and two, increase to quarter power.” Then, to the Wizard he says, “Target acquired, pumps armed. Dyadic current charging. Full weapons system ready in five…four—”
Domhnall snarls, “Commencing test!”
I start left until I see the Wizard tracking me with his engines, then duck and bolt right as fast as I can in these damned sandals. It’s not quite quick enough. The barrels catch up before I get far, maybe a dozen paces, close enough that whatever leaden load comes out of those muzzles will pierce my coat and shirt like a cactus shriek skewers a lizard. This is it. Kashim, blasted to pieces by a senile old man with delusions of grandeur. Pathetic. I imagine Donann grimacing, sick with disgust, with disappointment. And I can’t even blame the Demon on my back. It all came down to chance and sandals. Bitter rage burns in my heart, in my lungs, in my mouth as I curse, struggling to defy destiny.
Then the twin engines loose dual streams of luminescent blue fluid. It’s coolant. Those weapons aren’t engines at all, but huge, wand-shaped hoses whose projectiles are too slow to deal death now that I’ve finally found my footing. I sprint sharply to the right, as close as I dare get to the swinging pair of streams till I reach the spare pedalers. They stare witless and flat-footed, even as I shear their heads in a single pass, dash left, then around the harness like hyenas circling a prideless lioness. On the polished stone floor, the Wizard struggles to spin and keep his balance, let alone track me with his streams. Instead, luminous coolant bespatters the dais’s reliefs of ancient champions, turning them into blue, alien figures overlooking the battle. And I too become one of them.
Rounding the Wizard, hoping for an opening or to snatch one of the fallen gremlin’s deathwands, I sever the hose between the coolant tank and Donhnall’s righthand weapon. But when I do, icy blue fluid erupts from either side of the cut tubing. It soaks through my pants and makes sodden my sandals, tingles on my skin, the hair risen like right before static shocks you.
Then Blue calls out, staring me down through his targeting lens, “Dyadic current armed!”
Electricity arcs between the orichalcum rods, and though the engines’ aim is off, the two mounted skulls turn in keeping with Blue’s target. Sparks hiss in the bone devils’ empty sockets, and white lightning jumps along the single remaining stream, tracing the coolant’s path everywhere it touches. As it passes, without the containment of glass or the narrow conduction of a copper wire, the fluid expands, solidifies. Crystals mound where I’d been chased down by the dual streams: along the ground, over Morgan’s puddle and the headless bodies of the spare pedalers, around the Wizard himself, and over the sculpted wall of Yggdrasillic warriors—then the crystals reach my legs. They both freeze in place, encased in ice while the rest of me—convulsing fingers and gritted teeth—clench against an electric wrath sharp as the lightning bite of Demon Tufani.
Domhnall grumbles, his displeasure audible now that he’s removed his trigger finger from the remaining engine’s release valve. “Still conscious, are you?” Then to the gremlin, “You see now, Hauls, why twenty-five percent is insufficient? You’ve ruined my test! Unless…” His bushy, gray eyebrows cock, one after another, and his wispy mustache parts as he grins. “We’ve already come this far. What’s the harm in pushing further? Bring the pedalers up to speed. Fifty percent capacity!”
“Hauls will bring them to thirty. Coil already burned. Fifty is—”
“Listen here, you recalcitrant cur! I possess the Eye. I am the visionary! It is I to whom the celestials impart their wisdom—and I said bring us to fifty percent!”
The gremlin sighs a scratchy, gremlin sigh but ultimately passes along his master’s order.
I brace myself. A quarter-strength current was enough to subdue a man twice my size. Doubled, it’s likely to stop my heart—might even set my oily wool on fire. I try not to imagine my beard ablaze, broiling my face, but no other conclusion follows from the crack! and snarl! of that electric arc. I shut my eyes but can’t unsee orichalcum rods so hot, they’re glowing; and those devilish skulls, glowering, bear down with sockets burning with ghastly white sparks. Then there’s that black and yellow targeting lens, so much like the eyes of Scholomance, like a great Demon hornet whose wings thrum in the whir of the gremlin pedals spinning faster and faster, until—
Nothing.
At once, the harness groans its last gasp as smoke billows from the head of the machination. Lightning leaves the rods, and the skulls go dark but for their undulating symbols. And the Wizard himself? He curses, his fury stoked with every measure his experiment grows colder. Throwing his weapons down, he shrugs out of his shoulder straps fast as his old body will allow. Blue and the two pedalers hardly escape from their stations before the cumbersome tank clangs! sideways on the ground. I wince, so loud is the noise, but Domhnall doesn’t seem to notice the sound. His wrinkled face is red with rage; his blue eyes are sunken, made small and dark as a shark’s despite the lens’s magnification. And like a shark, he points his ruddy nose toward his prey. Not me. Instead, he blames Blue, the one dubbed Hauls-Ropes-Faster.
The yellow-coated gremlin hasn’t even oriented himself before the Wizard begins casting aspersions. He curses, “Hauls, you insubordinate nitwit! You dissentious buffoon! Look at what you’ve done! The test is ruined, all because you refused to yield to my directives! Had you only listened, had you only acted in accord with my vision, then—Bah!” He turns away from the gremlin, faces the dais, gazes upon the throne and the defaced champions beneath it. “Why bother to explain? You won’t understand. You can’t, not until you’re all made one with the celestial inevitability. Only as machines, purged of your pesky nature and humanity, can the vision of my perfect world be brought into being!”
“Wizard!” I interject, sick of his arrogance masquerading as intellect. “Your insight is blind!”
He spins to face me, spraying spittle all the while. “How dare you—”
“How dare I what? Call out your nonsense?”
“Ignorant savage! Your primitive brain cannot fathom the future my calculations will create!”
I grin, feeling my strength returning…slowly. I need to keep him going, so I demand he, “Enlighten this ignorant Skræling, old man. What the fuck does ‘perfect world’ even mean?”
“Just like my damned apprentice, always begging for clarification! As if the master must explain himself and not the other way around—No, savage. I won’t waste my breath answering your simpleminded questions.”
“You won’t? I think you mean, you can’t.”
That does it; he’s not going to let that stand. Like a dorsal fin bloody with chum, his nose runs red with rage as he exclaims, “No! It’s you who can’t comprehend perfection: a world free from errors, from flaws, from mistakes like you ignoramuses!”
“As opposed to what?”
“Enough! Why should I—”
“Why can’t you, you mean.” Now it’s me who can’t keep from laughing, from asking attacking questions pernicious as they are ticklish. “And if answering that’s too taxing, I have to ask, how’d you manage to grab the title Wizard when you can’t speak Yggdrasillic as well as a Skræling?”
His chum-red flush darkens. Crimson turns sanguine, then purple at his frothing lips. Maybe there really is alien blood in him, though he answers like any other human—that is to say, in circles. “As opposed to a flawed world full of imperfect cretins like yourself!”
“So a flawed world is one with imperfections, and a perfect world is one without imperfections?”
“Yes!”
“That still doesn’t answer my question. You haven’t said what your perfect world is, only what it isn’t—because you don’t know. All you have are assumptions, insights as occluded as your dimming vision. The truth is, you retch lies, then you swallow your own vomit. You believe yourself a master when really you’re just a plaything of Demon Kiburi and a slave to the deceiver Spirit Udanganyifu.”
At that, Domhnall glares over his lenses through opaque cataracts. He snaps, “Silence, savage! No more of your rhetorical sorcery. Such superstitious babble belongs in the scrap heap of history—along with Ogier’s other mistakes: his naïve notions of self-governance and his tolerance for the Union faith. What are they but impediments to the progress of our science? The Old King learned that lesson too late. But now I have been chosen to take his place, to surpass him! I am the visionary on whose shoulders the world shall ascend to join the Spirits on their celestial mantle!”
“You’re an old man whose eyes glimmer in the twilight of his own imagination.”
“‘Silence,’ I said!”
“If you really think you’re right, that you have the insight and power to bend fate to your will, then silence me yourself. Strike me down. It should be easy. Compared to the world, what am I but one stray Skræling? So, what are you waiting for? Draw your weapon—only, you already have, and there it rusts, another pile of scrap for your dungeon, just as will become of your perfect vision.”
For an instant, Domhnall’s jaw clenches, gnashing livid impotence between his teeth. Then his cheeks go flaccid; he raises his chin and swallows his weakness as haughty fools always do when they lose an argument. Staring down his nose and through his lenses, he scoffs unintelligibly, then commands his minion. “Hauls! Call the other Gremlins down from the lab. Have them bring me my orichalcum wand—it’s the lamp-shaped one—I know those mut-minds will ask. And when you go, be sure to let them know that they won’t be needing their own. They are only to observe as I put down this Skræling cur, a reminder of what stupid savagery we work to abolish, of what power with which we shall replace it!”
There comes no reply.
After a pause, he tries again. “Hauls?”
I laugh at the Wizard’s self-aggrandizement and ask, savoring the irony, “See what I mean? You’re so blind, you failed to spy fate turning against you. Fickle bitch, isn’t she? Misfortune, my lady Donann.”
Only then does Domhnall lower his chin and look aside from his presuppositions. Behind him, all three gremlins are frozen in jagged crystal prisons adjacent which looms their warden. It’s Morgan, reconstituted in her girlish form—but more than that, transformed. The alien fluid seeped into her wounds, turning the pink, iron-burns luminescent blue. Her hair in streaks has changed as well. The strands are thick as quills and deep indigo as what has become of the seashells threaded throughout her gown. Though, I don’t know that I can call it a dress anymore. It must’ve dissolved all the solidified coolant, then absorbed it, glazing the shells so that they shine with a strange light. Like the occult symbols carved into the gremlin skulls, they seem to shift with each shimmer, to twist and stretch. And that’s not all. Every few seconds, violet light pulses from inside the shells and from the depths of her right, coolant-corrupted eye.
It is the Eye which seeth beneath the bottom of the ocean. The I which lieth beneath the bottom of the sea—but dark as a stormy night, vast and empty but for the unchecked wrath of unnamed, unknowable Spirits.
There are reasons why occult and alchemical magics ought not cross betwixt women and men—but these celestial beings of which the Wizard speaks seem to exist in defiance of human ethics.
Morgan, demi-conscious, lurches, dragging her sleep-walking body so that her possessed eye might look upon Domhnall. At once, the Wizard’s shoulders hunch, and the brittle white wisps about his chin bristle. He mutters, trying and failing to scream. “Quick, the orichalcum wand…someone…” But the only person to approach is Morgan.
As she reaches with a contaminated hand, five tendrils of blue fluid flow from inside the shells like the five fingers of an alien appendage. They extend beyond her mortal reach, wrapping serpentine yet straining to lift the old man off his feet. There isn’t enough fluid. She must’ve used too much constructing Hauls and the pedalers’ crystalline prisons. It lures the Wizard into thinking he’s got the upper hand.
“Hmph! It seems a woman’s too weak! But that Eye—I’ll have that for myself! A second with which to gaze into even greater futurity!”
At that, Morgan utters something in the celestial’s guttural tongue which I doubt even Domhnall can understand. Then her dark Eye ignites, and the Wizard’s own Eye of Amgine levitates off his chest to rest at his forehead. Lightning strikes, a lingering arc of violet that tears at nature herself. I can hear Donann wailing, feel the monkey Demon clawing into my back as if these Spirits were more than mere metaphors, as if we’re waking to the Wizard’s nightmarish daydream.
That’s what this is, I realize as the Old King’s Keep starts to breathe; the dais reliefs of champions yawn and blink; fires leap from their braziers to dance and sing with shadows cast from the columns along the wings; the iron throne rusts and crumbles, whirling in a wind like a blood red dust-devil; meanwhile, stitched images of Kings Gøtrik and Ogier desperately claw themselves free of their tapestries; and the broken machination, cold and dead absent its pedalers, resurrects itself without any source of power but for its incarnating body of luminescent blue ooze.
Now I must choose: do I destroy the mad-stone or try to use it?
I hate to concede, but even I don’t dare steal something so antithetical to being. Call it Skræling superstition, but if there are no sympathetic gods in the Steppe, then why should I surmise the heavens are any different? No. I ready my saber, my legs long since freed from their crystal encasing with Morgan’s celestial changing. I doubt Domhnall ever noticed, ’cause he doesn’t notice now as I stride beside him and slice the Eye of Amgine.
I can’t believe it, that mundane iron could cut a Lapis in twain. Yet, lest my eyes deceive me, there it is: half of a Philosopher’s Stone rolling in a circle at Domhnall’s feet. Immediately, the dream dies. The Wizard blinks, breaking his gaze from that of Morgan’s, inviting the lingering lightning to strike his mind full with nightmares. But where’s the other half? I worry for a moment till my eyes pass over Captain Fènghuáng’s saber. Gone. Or should I say it’s been changed? I suppose it depends on one’s angle. Is a weapon its mere material arranged into a particular shape? Or is it the story of its master and those it had slain?
Sentiment, according to my Demon of conscience, demands the latter answer. For neither shape nor substance remains of the Captain’s Dà Kòu saber. The metal is unknown to me, though my Eye of Scholomance suggests adamantine properties in the shallow, reversed curve of the sickle-shaped blade. Broad and thin, it jumps lively in my hand, yet firm. The shagreen grip has been preserved, albeit shortened; and the disc guard duplicated top and bottom in the serpentine shape of the self-devouring Ouroboros. Looks like I’ll need a Kifo shield if I want to keep my fingers fighting with it.
Speaking of fingers, the splash of dissipating tendrils snatches my attention. Morgan’s celestial possession has come to its end. The living gremlins’ crystalline prisons melt, the occupants rendered unconscious. Simultaneously, alien fluid oozes from her seashell dress and from the streaks in her quill-thick hair—even from her skin until she’s as flush and fair as her native Sealand breeding. Only her Eye remains unchanged. It stares at me dreamily, ocean blue and alive with lightning, while her other eye blinks away sleep. She yawns, then suddenly jerks, staggering to keep her balance like a sleepwalker disturbed. “Where am I? Daddy? It’s cold. Why am I so wet?” Then finally her eyes recognize me. I see the memories flash electric behind celestial blue. “Kashim? I just had the queerest dream.”
“Look about you.”
“Then it wasn’t a dream. It was real!”
“It was both.”
Morgan squints through the dim light of the braziers, irked. “What does that mean?” Then she second guesses herself. “Nevermind. Let’s just get out of here. It looks like you got what you wanted.” The girl gestures toward my sword.
“Aye,” I admit grimly, “but what of your revenge?”
She rolls her eyes and starts toward where I stand over the Wizard. “You’re still going on about revenge? Ain’t he already dead?” Looking closer, through his smoldering beard, we see evidence of breathing. And in the silence between our speech, we can even hear him snore. Morgan glances from Domhnall to myself. “Will killing him heal Daddy’s back? Or fix what nightmare’s been done to my hair?”
I shake my head, stifling a laugh. “Nor will it bring back anyone who was killed.”
“Then let him live. I don’t care what happens to him anymore. I just want to go home and…”
“And what?”
She turns away from me, toward the cast iron throne high upon the dais. After a long stare, she says, “I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’ll just have to figure it out when I get there.” An honest answer. I tell her I’m impressed. And she asks, “For what?”
But there I lay the conversation to rest and instead collect the clipped pointed knife and a couple wand shells from the gremlins I’d decapitated. They’re soaked through, ruined; though Morgan says they look like the munitions produced by Merrigold’s Machinist Guild. I guess that’s where I’m headed next, after I visit the infamous Township. The girl tells me it’s along the way. By carriage or by boat, it’s all the same.