Chapter 38: Patches

My journey through Pandemonium was quite possibly my greatest challenge, and it began with a trip to Matoya's cave. As I mentioned, she was a merchant of questionable alignment, though I've never heard Turk speak ill of her motives, only her judgment.

I found another window to write by. It feels comforting to look out on the wide spaces while reliving my journey inward. Through seedy hovels and thriving townships I learned how some had made their own Havens, far closer to warmth than one could find on the surface. For a time I thought I saw hope in these dwellings, but deeper than them I saw only danger. The Devils were not their own masters. They were dogs sent in advance of hunters, and the hunters too served another.

My path to this window took me through many bare halls and dusty bed chambers, dry and sparse like those for servants, and one gem box of a room that might have housed a mistress. The satin violet quilting that covered the walls reminded me of Eris, so I stayed a night there, remembering the touch of her skin. Often we would both wake in the hours before morning. Too tired to rise, we would find each other's eyes and, seeing them open, lean in for a soft kiss. As her health waned, and she lacked the strength to lean towards me at night, we would touch our fingertips together and smile. Always her eyes were brimming with tears.

Where I sit now is in a guardhouse adjacent to a stout turret. The turret commands a wider view, but there is a windstorm that, while rousing to stand amidst, makes writing a chore. The sky is erupting with color, a pretty sight, but with each hue comes a tear, or a vortex even, and I've seen in the far distance a hailstorm so concentrated and intense that it ground a mountain into powder. I hope this does not happen in very many places. It would be sad if only those who bred Blitzkrieg and his ruined form of life survived into the new dawn. Come dawn's end, the will of the Fates will be known. For now, all I can do is revel in the majesty of the Four Winds and hope.

I will tell you a little of the Devils now, assuming, no, hoping, that you know nothing about them yourself. They come from far beneath, and we know little more of their origins than that. While our contemporary scholars have mused over the mysteries of the sky, the caverns deep beneath us have been largely ignored. I've encountered three magnacities in my short life; Haven, Thieve's Gate, and Thirty-third Day. They have little in common, and I suspect they each have much to teach us about the world of the past, if only we cared to learn from that which lies directly before us.

Thieve's Gate sprawls underneath a vast canopy that seems like the wings of a mother bird spread over her chicks. The districts beneath are widely disparate in architecture and build code, suggesting they were individual settlements that sprung up independent from each other, and only later were brought together by the shielded habitat draped above them. That portion of the city is built, as I said, like a shield, and its interior, in my eyes, was clearly adapted into a habitat after its construction. The original purpose of the upper city was likely meant for protection of the settlements beneath, as it emits a field similar to one I was reared within that protects against airborne toxins, while also generating ambient light and heat. The repair and maintenance of this field was what aided Jadus's rise to power, and also gave him the excuse to turn a peaceful people into a gang of thieves.

I won't say much about Thirty-Third Day just now. Later I will give a full account, for I spent a long and pivotal amount of time there. Also, it is far too uniquely complex and villainous to quickly sum up. What I can say simply is that I suspect it to be the one true magnacity; and I mean 'ture' in the sense of what a magnacity is for. There are records in the Bibliotheca... were records, that show in frightening language how our world became tragically overburdened. These records are widely regarded as myth, despite the evidence to the contrary, and what I call myth has been viewed as scientific record. Myth is a language, I've always said, for understanding that which transcends understanding, and the overburdening of our world was logged in terms that can be translated too cleanly to be myth. We spread across the surface, and the weight of our offspring proved too much, so we built castles in the sky, and for a time we were well, but our castles on the land were built upward until they wore the clouds for skirts. Then the castles in the sky fell, and the sky turned black and here we are.

So downward I traversed, into a city of pure malice, and I saw there a portal to the Sun that burns below. At some point in our lost history, someone went downward, away from cloud and star, and bided their time until the surface world was weak, then sent their worst creations to claim our land as theirs. Haven is the only magnacity built below ground. I wonder now if it was not a target for the Devils long ago, being so much closer to them. My best guess is it was the first, at least on our pair of islands, and somehow it was learned that terrible people lived in the deep earth, moving the construction of massive safe habitats upward.

So the Devils, they came at the beginning of our most recently written records. One might say they precipitated the writing of those records. They are animals in the shape of men, occasionally accompanied by she-beasts we call hesperax. At first they were thought to be hybrids of giants and humans in uncanny armor. Then one was defeated, and it was found their armor was not a thing they wore, but as a carapace is to a scarab. Inside they are pulpy and covered in slick fluids, with dead eyes as white as corpse flesh. That they change their shells I know, as I've heard the same, hideous voice come from one devil in several guises. My cape and tabard came from who feigned nobility. Before the day we slew him, I'd seen him in a shell that looked like disease. But their voices never change, nor does the light within their visors.

When the merchant Matoya captured her Devil, and pried loose his exoskeleton, the beast inside was in constant agony. It can only be assumed he killed her when he escaped, unless she was killed mercifully during the maelstrom that allowed the devil to escape. Turk and I had ridden hard for days, with only his fellow captains alongside, and of course, Abdiel. In those days, I was seldom far from that seasoned killer. Either Turk did not trust him, or he did not trust me. EIther way, I was always glad for his company. I was especially glad for it when we rode to Matoya's old cave, and out strode a kaleidoscope of metal and polymer obscenity.

Patches claimed his name was Colonizer Kharn. He'd replaced his natural shell with bits and pieces of hardened material, each stapled grotesquely into his soft under flesh. He was a menagerie of broken mounts, demolished homes, and dead warriors. Worst were his eyes. One was covered by an ocular protuberance, the other open to the world, smoked over like a cloud of milk and steam. Looking into the eye frightened me.

He was tall, eight feet or more, but amongst his fellows he was of a nominal build. When he came through the cave's door he filled it entirely as he hunched under its archway. When he spread his shoulders after exiting, we all reflexively reached for our arbalests. No matter how many of these creatures I saw, I never became accustomed to them. Even one of average size could freeze my heart. And when they spoke, the air grew colder.

"Turk," Patches said, his mouth grinning behind its mesh shield.

Turk removed his helm and dismounted. His destrier bobbed at the sudden absence of his weight. "Traitor," he said with a return grin. He kept his hand on his arbalest. Patches looked at his hand and weapon.

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"Jumpier than usual. Shall we speak inside?"

Turk cut a laugh off with a sudden scowl. "We're not here to shop."

"Shall I fire up the grill?" Patches asked after a spurt of mocking guffaws.

In the corner of each eye, I saw the captain's loading their quarrels and loosening their blades in their scabbards. Abdiel had moved silently behind Patches and was poised on a shelf of rock halfway up the cave's entrance. In addition to his arbalest and partisan, Abdiel carried a bearded handaxe and a poisoned dagger. His dagger was drawn. I would have watched him, marveling at his lethal grace, but I assumed that Patches had the same sense of monochromatic eye movement as all with such ocular idiosyncrasies do, and I did not wish to give Abdiel's position away. It cannot be the blood. I repeat, it CANNOT be the blood. If the blood is so imbued, the embryo will grow wild within the chamber, and you will not be able to direct the things it produces.

-forgive me-

 

I never intended to preach.

the snake dream

 

i wake in a watery tomb, there is glass, sometimes all glass, sometimes a small window, always i am watched, and into me they go, and there is an egg, woven like the orb of a spider, round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round in the innermost center of my spine, and when that orb is fully woven it beats like a heart, and i am no longer a boy but a hermetic furnace, and i question the meaning and sense of everything i have ever done, if i am merely here to carry this thing to the place where it performs its dharma, then i wish that i was never a boy at all, but a dumb animal, pushed by instinct to that place, and i cannot begin to fathom how such a fragile soul as i am chosen to bear this thing anon, so i fight it, delay it, because i hate it, though i do not understand it, and i ignore it, and every time i die and see myself knit back together i curse it, those serpants that weave around me in the dark of my long nights

Turk wanted to learn something from Patches' transactions, because apparently the Devils keep obsessively detailed records of everything they do; another reason to hate them. So Turk brought his captains because they are his best, and he brought Us as his slave knight, because We could fight and die and fight and die and fight and die and get back up and wear Patches out while they reloaded their weapons. This all came together in Our head as Patches slowly looked around at the captains, and eventually at Abdiel. He looked at Turk and asked what we all came for, and Turk told him, and Patches laughed and spat, then picked up a hilariously large mace that lit like a furnace and whirred like an engine, and We, not wanting to deal with the exhaustion We were brought for, dismounted Our courser and took off Our tabard and armor, revealing to Patches the wraithkin brand on Our chest. He slumped his shoulders, dropped his mace, and waved us inside. Turk grabbed Our arm and reminded Us that We shouldn't go showing Our brand to just anyone. We reminded him that it was burned onto Us in a building full of people, and he told Us that that happened a long time ago, as if that was supposed to explain everything. We argued that it was on Our tabard, and he said that what was knit in flesh is deadlier than what was knit in cloth. The end.

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