Chapter 42: Les Enfant

Goth gave instructions to me last, sending me on an errand that in vague terms he attempted to explain as well as obfuscate. He said nothing to overtly reveal this, but I suspected it touched on the tensions between him and Turk. It seemed that while Goth objected to Turk's association with Patches, he too had an unsavory contact he could not do without. His name was Doctor Danders.

My courser sputtered as we sped through an expanse of bare drumlins. I pulled to a stop and let her cool down, stretching my legs on a stroll to a nearby peak. I remember there was an electrical storm, and I could see the large, brooding silhouette of Thieves Gate in the flashes. The rest of our host was heading there, to Jadus's domain, where we would launch from the docks of the pirate king to the southern island, there to rob the stables of Lord V.

Turk had explained some of the operation to me while we camped outside Matoya's cave. Pandemonium was more a machine than a dwelling, a gargantuan mechanized worm that bored through the deep earth, its rank innards roiling with Blitzkrieg's profane cult. I contemplated the prospect of riding a beautiful and noble pegasus through the wake of Pandemonium, and shuddered when I thought of how easily any one of us could become lost in that vast pit, doomed to wander until death in the cold veins of our dead world. If such were to happen to me, I, seemingly immune to death, could end up wandering for an eternity if my steed were damaged or slain. I determined myself to claim one of the healthiest, most heavily barded pegasi we found.

Patches had given me a spyglass. I half expected it to house some mind flaying apparition, or for some parasite to break through the eyepiece and crawl into my brain. Sadly, no such thing ever happened. I merely gazed into the distance, seeing the far stretches of blackness through the spyglass's optoelectronic image enhancement that did next to nothing down range. It did offer some help in determining the presence of far away objects, and with it I saw that a large creature was stalking the plains beyond my destination. I couldn't be sure, but it looked like a larval Archon, an immense being when grown. Archons fed on the poisons in the air, cleaning it in their slow, ethereal ploddings, but as a boy I saw the last one die.

What I was looking at here was a predator, and an unnatural composite. Each limb was from a different creature, and its head was not of organic matter, being more of a hole at the end of an appendage than a proper face. Its tail ended in a claw that protruded from a round nub like a nail, and above its tail was a long, thin feeler. An animal wandered close to it, likely not aware that it was being stalked. The feeler struck the animal and froze it still, then the tail stuck into it and pulsed. Fascinated, I observed as the animal was drained of all its organs, its crushed bones and dried skin left in an unwanted pile. The composite seemed to grow in size, and its stalking pace quickened. I sighed, then mounted my courser and rode her to the compound of Doctor Danders.

His compound was made of four buildings in the hollow between three shallow drumlins. A motley of servants labored all about, tending a fungus farm and carrying barrels to and fro. Two were pulling a blanket over a gurney. The impression under the blanket looked malformed. The servants (human, I supposed, or human-like, but not lucien or tyfloch) lifted the gurney and carried it to a long trough full of grey syrupy fluid, then tilted it and the body slid off slowly, as if it were trying to remain on the gurney. The servants ignored me, or rather, they saw me, and acted as if my presence were of absolutely no consequence.

I walked past them unnoticed to the largest building and searched for a door. I never found any, as the buildings all had smooth walls with no visible crevices where a door might be. While circling the smallest of the buildings, I dispassionately placed a hand against it. The wall felt warm and soft, with a throbbing deep within. It was like pressing your hand against a person's chest and feeling their heart beat, and I recoiled with shock and disgust. Then I felt remorseful, and I put my hand back on the wall, gently teasing it with my fingertips. The door opened, a slanted oval, and a man with a face like an owl's, or perhaps an owl with the features of a man transposed over its feathers and beak emerged. He was large and hunched over, with rounded shoulders and a flat torso that paunched out in the belly. Though he was as tall as me and nearly as broad, his posture and demeanor gave him the quality of a much smaller man, a sort of timidness that stirred a twinge of pity in me.

"That was fast..." he was saying in a voice that seemed loth to be heard. Then he saw me, and his complexion left him nearly as pale as me. "These walls were made for you."

He kept looking at me with his mouth agape, and I swear his eyes twinkled. He rubbed his hands down his stained longcoat and gestured for me to come in.

"I'm here on behalf of Goth," I said as I entered the building, checking my corners and taking note of the overall layout.

"Yes yes," said Danders. "You must be hungry."

I was, but I preferred my rations to anything this man might have to serve. There was a warm stickiness to the air, and a musty sweetness that I found extremely unnerving. I looked at Doctor Danders and shook my head, then set my spear against the wall and handed him the pouch Goth trusted me with. Danders stood frozen, looking up at me, so I shook the pouch to alert him to the chinking of coins. He took the pouch and set it on a countertop, next to a wash basin and a jinn's vessel, then gestured for me to come further into the building.

"I was sent to deliver payment." I turned.

"No you were not," said Danders. "You were sent to determine if my work warranted payment, and deliver it only if you approve."

I made a movement with my mouth to convey the ridiculousness of what he was saying. "And how would I even know? Goth gave me some coin to pass on to you, and said nothing more. I bid you good day."

I turned again to leave, and was shocked by the fierce strength of the doctor's grip. He halted me and spun me around.

"Turk will be upset if you don't inspect my work. Trust me, Boy of the Batch, you will want to see this."

You are reading story Erebus at novel35.com

I gave his hand a cold look and he let me go, then I turned again for the door, but it was gone. I sighed, and again teased the warm, fleshy feeling wall with my fingertips. There was a distortion, like I saw a ripple of some membrane, but only an echo of the eyes, with the grey metal wall standing still in front of me. I gave Danders a look of severe annoyance.

"You think you're the only ones tasked with saving us from Tarthas?". He was agitated, and sweating. He dabbed his brow with a soiled cloth he took from his longcoat pocket. "Turk fights the Devils, Goth fights Turk, and your lot fights the sky, but I fight the deadliest enemy of all."

I sighed again, and gestured with my head for Danders to lead the way. I made sure he saw me take hold of my spear before he turned and hurried further into the building. I peered into the ether before leaving, and saw with my ghost sight a needle of light burn through the coin purse and spiral around the room, quickly honing in on the vessel nearby. There was a flash of blue as Danders's jinn emerged, but he was far too distracted to notice.

We moved through a downward spiral of hallways. I tested one stretch of wall with my fingers and a door began to open. I saw a bed like the Dolomites often used when performing exploratory procedures on live subjects, though this one was far less clean. It was made of rust stained iron, with a thin cushion and half gnawed straps. I heard a trampling of feet coming towards me, and saw an engorged forehead with a tuft of wet hair begin to come into view. Danders slapped his hand on the wall and the door shut in time to cut off a loud and hungry moan.

"Please don't."

I held his gaze until he became nervous, then commanded him onward with another impatient tilt of my head. This time I took my spear in both hands as if I meant to prod him along. It had the desired effect of hurrying him. Still, our descend took much longer than I cared for, at last ending in a large room painted in bright, clashing colors. There were a number of strange objects littering the floor. When I call them strange, it's not because I could not identify them, rather I say they were strange because they were much too large to be what they were. Giants live the longest of any kinred, and the sad fate of their kind is that no child has been born to them in a very long time. Therefore, no one living of the smaller breeds have seen one, but I imagined their nurseries might be stocked with toys like the ones I saw in this room.

"He's making a grumpy," said Danders.

I was confused, to be sure, by his statement, but I was too disturbed and bewildered by the room to notice him. I looked with both modes of sight, seeing only what the squalid gas torches revealed. In the corner, in the farthest end of the room, was a curtain half drawn, with the foot of a massive crib showing. I looked up at the ceiling, which was high enough that if I jumped and thrust my spear over my head I could not touch it. It was painted with a blur of color that I could not discern, a bright blue with splotches of white and flecks of dirty yellow. Near the curtain was a door. Not like the ones I'd seen elsewhere in the building, but a natural door hung in a doorway. I heard a squelching and a grunting, and a sour, musty odor seeped into my nostrils. The squelching and grunting continued, broken by an occasional splash of water. I looked at Danders, demanding with a stern face a prompt and thorough explanation.

"Time," he said, his hands clutched together as if he were begging. He came hurriedly towards me, and I stopped him with my spearpoint, though he stood so close his clothing brushed against it as he talked. "Time is the oldest foe." He laughed. I did not. "That's funny. You don't think that's funny? It is. Time, oldest foe. Ha! You don't wanna laugh? That's fine. Don't laugh. We all forget how, eventually. Time rapes it out of us. It turns us around and makes us its dolls. They tried to fight it with the Batch, but they didn't win. Not really. You can get stabbed, or shot, or burned, or you can fall off a cliff, and you'll get back up..." His eyes trailed down to my tabard. "Is that on your skin too?". He began to reach for my chest and I pressed my spear into him. Blood trickled from his sweat stained tunic.

"You're as bad as Turk. Goth knows how to laugh. He didn't, but I reminded him. But we all forget. I had to remember, and it took me a long time." His hands rose clutched again. His swollen, discolored knuckles turned white. "Don't you miss being a child? Oh wait, I'm so stupid." He slapped his forehead. "Of course you don't. I'm guessing your memory is pretty blurry, until you were about ten or twelve. Am I right? They started that after Belial went AWOL. Oh he was... he was somethin'. But you've seen children. They're so happy. It's because they're stupid. But they die, because they're fragile. They need to be strong, like us. And we need to be happy, like them. And... Have you..." He tried to move around my spear and approach me, his hands poised to pull down my collar, or to touch my face. I held my spear against the base of his throat and walked forward, backing him into the wall to our left.

"Have you ever noticed how dangerous a combination strength and stupidity are?" He gulped between words, trying to save his throat from being scratched as his larynx moved. "When we're children, we're happy because we don't know any better. And we heal so much faster. That's what we need to defeat Tarthas. We need to defeat time, and this terrible, pestilent world by not letting our souls be drained of our innocence. We need to be children forever, with the strength of adults, and the stupidity of an animal so we can use our strength to master this world on accident."

His voice was almost raised to a shout, and he dropped to his knees, laughing ecstatically and dripping sweat from his pasty brow. He began nodding vigorously, and I was overwhelmed with the desire to leave. A rush of water came from the room beyond the curtain, and the door handle began to turn.

"Don't forget to wash your hands!" Danders shouted. His smile was out of control. "I've done it. I've really done it." His words were now interrupted by disbelieving laughter. I heard the running of a faucet, then the turning of the handle, then the thudding of very large feet. I turned my head slowly.

You will likely despise me for urging you to do this, but picture the face of an infant on the head of a man, and the smoothness of an infant's skin stretched over the body of a man, grown to hideous and unnatural size, obese with baby fat that jiggled loosely over thick muscles, its hands hairy like a man's, its knuckles dimpled like a child's. Now picture it's waist wrapped in a gigantic diaper, and its muscular calves ending in fat knees that buckled as it staggered forward. I thrust my spear quickly, hoping to slay Doctor Danders before he could take hold of me, but my spearpoint pierced only the substrate paneling of the wall.

The creature stumbled rapidly towards me. Its laughter was hideous, being the gleeful guffaw of a happy newborn, with the pitch of a large man halfway through a pitcher of beer. I tried to dodge and stab the creature, but I felt a sudden impact on the back of my head followed by a vicious kick to the back of my knee. Then the creature was upon me, clawing at my face with those sharp, newborn nails, powered by the vice-like grip of a stone mason. I screamed from the pain and the horror, and slipped on my own blood while I tried to wrestle free, but the thing was far too strong and none of my various gifts responded to my desire for their obedience.

You can find story with these keywords: Erebus, Read Erebus, Erebus novel, Erebus book, Erebus story, Erebus full, Erebus Latest Chapter