Arcane II (3 page)

Captain Pizarr spoke calmly. “We are your new gods. You will bow before us and worship at our feet.” He paused to glare at the gathered savages. Pizarr was no Sociocast but as Captain he had learned how effective simple intimidation could be. “Your old gods are dead, defeated.”

Hualpa stepped forward now. The High King’s eyes glittered with dangerous intelligence and a feral hunger I had seen before.

“So
you
lead this malodorous mob.” Hualpa waved a dismissive hand at us. “You have slain Catequil?” The High King watched Pizarr closely. “Tell me, what did he look like?”

This was dangerous ground. Pizarr would have to tread carefully.

“Your gods are dead, one and all. I did not say I personally killed each one.”

“I think you are not gods. I think you are men.” The High King glanced sideways at his retinue. “You certainly smell like men.” The retinue laughed dutifully. “You are rough and dirty like men. You walk and leave footprints in the sand like men. You
lie
like men.”

“And we are gods. Anger me at your peril,” said the Captain.

Hualpa smiled. “Any halfwit can toss a young girl in a bonfire and break her mind with pain. You think me a fool. You think yourselves superior. You are deluded.” The High King examined Pizarr through dark, heavily lidded eyes. “Kill him.”

Two spears lashed from Hualpa’s retinue and impaled Pizarr in the chest and gut. The force of the blows staggered him back several paces. I had to give them credit, they were fast and accurate. I hadn’t even seen who had thrown the spears. Captain Pizarr stood for a moment looking down at the spears. His knees wobbled unsteadily and I thought he was going to collapse. Had they killed the Captain? I was unsure what to feel. Jealousy? Relief? Anger?

“Your leader dies,” announced Hualpa imperiously. “Whom shall I converse with next?”

Pizarr looked up and met Hualpa’s eyes. He shrugged off his stained Captain’s jacket and it hung heavily from the spears protruding from his back. He opened the shirt, tearing it where the spears had it trapped. The shirt, once expensive, was now little more than mouldy tatters and came away easily. He stood, torso exposed. In the stress of the last few days the rot had spread quickly.

“Gehirn, pull these from me, if you please.”

I dragged the spears through and drew them out Pizarr’s back. They were smeared with festering innards and clinging shreds of rotten meat. A choked gagging noise escaped my clenched teeth and I felt ill. I’d been hiding from myself just how far along his Cotardist tendencies had progressed.

My mind still worried at the question: Why hadn’t Hualpa simply conscripted Pizarr’s crew, taking their minds with his overpowering belief in himself? The High King certainly spoke well enough. Glib and charming, he displayed all the usual Sociocast traits.

Then I remembered. I leaned forward and whispered in the Captain’s ear. “Hualpa called us deluded.”

Where belief defines reality, delusion is power. Captain Pizarr saw it immediately.

The Captain addressed Hualpa in a quiet voice. “I am the god of death. This,” he waved me forward, “is the god of fire.” My heart sung like the ringing of the ship’s bell. “Burn them all. Leave the king.”

***

As the months crept past, Captain Pizarr’s control of the crew sloughed away like the dead skin on his torso. Minds weakened by months of near-starvation faltered and snapped. The knowledge that the natives were virtually defenceless in the face of rampant delusion only fanned the flames. Those who had nursed petty delusions in the shadows of men such as myself and the Captain learned to embrace their deficiencies. Sociopaths, Phobics, Kleptocasts, Delusionists, Somatoparaphrenicasts, Dysmorphics, and Intermetamorphosists were suddenly appearing where sane men had once stood. Sanity is a thin and flimsy barrier when standing between a man and the wealth and fame he craves.

I fought to maintain some semblance of the order King Furimmer would expect from his representatives. I turned men I had once shared meals with into cinders. But embracing one’s delusions strengthens them. Each man I burned weakened my own already tenuous grasp on reality. Knowing it was happening was no defence. The crew, who had learned to fear me, soon came to hate me as well. Outcast from my master’s court and now a pariah amongst the crew, I retreated deeper into my depression.

Each night I burned myself on the the small fires I dared, charring patches of my own flesh in self-flagellation. But punishing oneself never brings lasting relief and afterwards you hate yourself all the more.

It was all I deserved.

Captain Pizarr was straying from the scope of King Furimmer’s orders and eventually I would be forced to act, forced to betray my only friend. Furimmer’s
compulsion
would allow no less.

The lonelier I felt, the more powerful I became and the more the men feared me.

The Captain became increasingly distant—lost, I suppose, in his own decaying hell. I soon grew to hate him for bringing me to this beautiful land of fabulous wealth. He had abandoned me to the accusing eyes of the crew. In darker moments I saw Pizarr’s betrayal as simply the latest in a lifetime plagued with perfidy. Pizarr’s. Furimmer’s. But my own burned the deepest.

What had I done that so displeased King Furimmer? Why was I even here? I suspected fear was the answer. I was a Pyrocast approaching my pinnacle of power, that moment when delusion would overpower the remaining shreds of my sanity. If only I had someone I could talk to, someone I could trust. Just one friend. My loneliness made me angry and my anger ensured I’d remain alone. No one befriends an angry Pyrocast.

The men began hailing Pizarr as a hero. They lauded his previously much maligned decision to kill the Ship’s Councillor as an act of great bravery and foresight. Councillor Reizung would never have allowed this mad deterioration to have occurred. Though Pizarr showed little sign of being aware of the crew’s opinions, I noticed with some jealousy that the Captain was beginning to display Sociocast tendencies. Worship brings out the worst in people.

Pizarr struggled to run the rapidly crumbling remnants of Hualpa’s kingdom with little or no understanding of what motivated its people. They clung desperately to their flawed world view. The masses refused to worship us as gods but saw us as both more and less than men. Intrigued by the natives, he began studying their religion; a bizarre concoction of inbred children, sun gods, and colourful birds. He would tell me about it on those rare days he deigned to see his closest friend. I think he found some comfort in their unshakable belief in an Afterdeath where redemption was always a possibility.

“Surely,” he said, “if the uncounted millions of natives believed strongly enough, such an Afterdeath
must
exist.”

I remained unconvinced.

Hualpa continued to act as if he were still High King and not a powerless puppet-king. It was a delusion he didn’t have the lack of sanity to enforce. Noting our insatiable lust for precious metals, the High King offered to fill his prison with gold and silver if Pizarr promised to free him and leave Tawantinsuyu. Captain Pizarr, at this point little more than bone and dried sinew, promptly agreed. The gold was delivered and then shipped to King Furimmer who in turn officially recognised Pizarr as Steward of the New Lands. High King Hualpa muttered something about the wisdom of making deals with predatory cats, and remained our prisoner.

Three months later, fearing revolt from the Tawantinsuyu people who vastly outnumbered our small and deranged crew, the Captain ordered Hualpa’s death. I was called forward to burn the High King. Upon hearing of this, High King Hualpa begged Captain Pizarr for another death. Fearing to anger Haulpa’s subjects, Captain Pizarr had the deposed monarch strangled as an act of mercy. I was sent away unsatisfied.

It was too much.

That evening I found Pizarr alone in his single-story abode, a clay brick home faded a warm amber by the sun. The Captain wore nought but a thin robe. The yellowing bones of his ribcage were clearly visible through the sheer material. His left arm hung at his side, bones wrapped tight in sinews blackened by the sun and heat. Several of the fingers of his left hand had fallen away at some point.

“Captain, you look well.” Tears leaked from my eyes. Either he couldn’t see them or chose to ignore my distress. I grinned, showing my clenched canines, and my jaw hurt.

“I’m dying.” Pizarr laughed humourlessly. “Actually, I’ve been dead for some time. Perhaps months.” He peeled a long strip of sun-dried flesh from his abdomen and tossed it to the floor at my feet. “But I’ve lost my fear. I now welcome the end.”

“Just as well,” I said. He didn’t hear the quiet threat. Or he ignored it. He looked dry, like tinder.

“I’ve come to believe as the Tawantinsuyu people believe,” he said. “There is an Afterdeath. A chance at redemption.” He squinted at me with filmed eyes from which all colour had bled. “Redemption,” he whispered.

I snorted with disgust. “The Tawantinsuyu are powerless. They’re sane, each and every one of them. Their beliefs count for
nothing
.”

Pizarr’s smile didn’t reach his dead eyes. His expression was that of a corpse. “But there are millions of them and they all believe. The delusions of men such as you and I pale before the faith of the masses. It’s what keeps this world from utter chaos. You know this to be true. There is an Afterdeath.”

I suddenly understood. “You’re leaving. You’re going to this Afterdeath. You’re abandoning me and you’re betraying King Furimmer.” I was to be abandoned by the one person in this gods-forsaken land who would even talk to me. I had one thought: betrayal. I tasted hot bile and my eyes stung with rage. I felt hot and flushed. Was this Furimmer’s
compulsion
working upon me? “You can’t leave,” I said flatly, struggling to control myself. Maybe I could reason with the Captain. “King Furimmer—”

“To the hells with Furimmer,” Pizarr snapped. My guts twisted. “He’s not here and he’s not rotting in his own body. This is my chance to change
everything
.” Pizarr, foul gums black with rot, his skull a death’s head, grinned lifelessly. “I’ve been watching you, Gehirn. You’re starting to crumble. You’re losing control. You should be thinking about the Afterdeath too.”

“You’re insane!” Pizarr’s answering laughter fuelled my rage. “You believe as the Tawantinsuyu believe?”

Something in my voice sobered Pizarr and stopped his laughter dead. He nodded. “Yes.”

I grinned, sick with the taste of betrayal. I told myself I didn’t want this. It was a lie. “They believe that if their bodies burn, their souls won’t make it to the Afterdeath.”

Pizarr stared at me with fogged eyes. He held out the remains of his working hand, pleading. “Don’t.”

I saw him reach for the sword he didn’t know how to use and laughed at him. It was still aboard the ship.

“You’ve betrayed King Furimmer. I am the King’s Executioner. Your soul will not be making it to the Tawantinsuyu Afterdeath.”

The good Captain who had left King Furimmer’s lands with such plans for the future, hoping to escape the man he had become, had seen those dreams crushed under the weight of his own depression-driven delusions.

“You watched me feed the fish,” whispered Pizarr. “I remember when dissolution had been my only goal. Even nothing is better than
this
.” His eyes met mine. “Do it,” he said.

My only friend. I sobbed. There were no words, they too abandoned me as I let go. This would be a fire the gods saw from the very heavens.

With You

Ian Welke

They come for us at dusk. The sky still holds traces of the sunset, Halloween orange, mirrored on the water of the Pacific. I’ve walked to the water’s edge, feeling the wet sand cool under my toes, refreshing in the too warm Santa Ana’s So Cal autumn. The wind picks up again. Hot and wrong. Everyone’s on edge as it is, thinking this might be the night. I open my eyes as the wind stops, sand caught in my hair and my beard. A flash from the hills.
Is that a signal light?

Shotgun blasts rip through the air, and the children scream.

Your voice echoes in my head, loud and commanding, but not a scream: “William, take cover.”

I drop to the sand, falling atop kelp that’s been washed ashore. The shots come from every direction except the ocean. The four church leaders run for the water. Walter, the oldest member of our church, takes a shotgun blast to the back. His momentum sends him sprawling into the tide. The three others make it to the incoming waves, splashing and jumping into the hopeful safety of the water. Janet stops moving, going limp in the waves. I lose track of the other two, wincing at the sand in my eyes and the sharp pain in my head.

My ears ring. The whole scene is a cacophony of gunfire and screams.

Looking back towards the beach, the face of one of the women—what’s left of it—stares at me inches from my eyes. The left hemisphere of her head’s been ripped open. Red hollow of her empty eye socket. I can’t even remember her name, just a flash of having had coffee with her after church once. I heave. Bile stings my esophagus and nostrils, my sick puddling in the sand.

I roll to my side just to get away from the sight of the dead woman in front of me. Boots kick sand in my face. I look up as the butt of a gun comes down. The world pinholes to nothingness.

***

It hurts to breathe. Something, a bag or a mask, covers my head. The coarse material scratches at my skin, and allows little air and no light to pass through it. The stench of vomit and my fetid breath fills the little air. My eyes sting from sand.

I hear a van’s sliding door open, and someone pulls me out. Two men drag me by the shoulders. They drop me on my knees and tether my bound wrists to a metal pole.

“He sounds like he’s choking,” a woman’s voice says. Someone pulls the hood off my head.

My knees throb against a cold tile floor. A sliver of light comes from a partially closed door leading to another room. The room they’ve put me in is some sort of disused office. From what little I can see of the outer room, it might have been a warehouse. A low electric hum melds with the ringing in my ears. It takes me a moment to separate the two. A droning sound like a washing machine cycle comes from an attached room. The tile on the floor bares dust and a black mold. To my right four holes in the tile mark where desk legs once stood.