EN World Short Story Smackdown - FINAL: Berandor vs Piratecat - The Judgment Is In!

Round 2, Match Eleven
Piratecat vs. Ycore Rixle


Fast Learner
By Kevin Kulp (Piratecat)


He looked slowly around my now-littered home. One foot nudged a twitching corpse. There was moisture leaking from his eyes.

“I surrender?” he asked uncertainly.

“Okey dokey,” I said, and started humming a jaunty little tune. I made up the song myself a long time ago. It’s the only one I know, and it’s fun to sing, so I sing it a lot. “I don’t have a name. What’s yours?”

“Morro,” he said. “You killed everybody.” He sounded shocked.

I stopped humming. “Not everyone, Morro. You’re still around!” I wondered if I’d made a mistake. “Is that okay?”

He looked at me, shuddered a little, and looked at me again. “Is it okay? Yes, it’s okay. Except that you just killed my wife Sara and three of my best friends. And you killed some of them twice.” He took a gulping breath of air.

“Oh. Whoops?” I wasn’t really sure of the proper manners. I hadn’t met many people who were still living. “You can leave if you want to. It’s okay.”

“No I can’t. I don’t have any way to leave.”

“You don’t? Why not?”

“See that pile of bones over there?” My eyes bobbed in agreement. “That was Linae, our wizard. She got us down here. Without her or Griff I have no way to get home. And even if I could, I wouldn’t leave without Sara’s body.”

“Can’t you swim?”

“No. We’re a long way under water.”

“A long way from what?”

“From... have you never moved?”

“Nope. Not really. I shifted once, but it ended badly.” There was an awkward pause. “What did you mean when you said I killed them twice? I didn’t even know I could do that.”

He pointed at a mass of steaming charcoal. “Cendra was trying to attack you –”

Pain. Massive pain caused by sharpened metal. I had focused one eye and blinked very quickly. Just a tiny bit of power, not enough to deplete my carefully hoarded reserve, but more than enough to make the pain stop coming. The human screamed and grabbed her melting face, staggering backwards as her flesh rendered from the heat and wept down her face like bloody tears –

“– and you killed her just like that. She was tougher than anyone else I knew.” He snapped his fingers. I’d never seen anyone do that before, so I was pretty excited. I wished he’d do it again. “Griff ran up to bring her back to life. They were in love, so he probably figured it was important.”

“Um, what’s love?”

The man sighed, pushed half of an older skull out of the way, and sat down on a rock. He didn’t answer my question.

“So Griff ran up to heal her, and you –”

– Suddenly the tall man was standing next to the melting woman with the metal. He said words that sounded suspiciously like prayer, but not to any God I’d heard of. Golden light leapt out of his hand, bright enough to hurt. A volcano of light, and the dead woman’s wounds simply vanished. She floated a foot off of the ground, motes of liquid fire swirling around her like excited eyes, and then she was whole and healthy once again. Their eyes met for just a few seconds with a look I didn’t understand, and she reached for her sword as she started to rise and turn towards me.

So I killed her again. More thoroughly this time, not stopping until the metal melted and the bone turned sizzling black. Her friend, too. She looked a little surprised as she died the second time, so I turned –

“– and you killed them both. He plucked her soul back from the afterlife, and you burned them away like they were scraps of wood.” He was shouting now, and his voice was loud in my cave. Then he started to cry.

“What’s wood?” I asked. I got no answer. I went back to humming.

- - -

Hours later, I was learning how to make small talk.

“I’ve had a little more than thirty heroes come down to try and defeat me. It’s always fun to visit with them, but they always try to kill me first. So that makes it harder to talk.” The thought made me sad.

Morro nodded. “I can well imagine. Sara and I led this expedition because we’re technically Knights of Reef. After all the tidal waves, and that one horrible explosion that wiped out most of the inner islands, the High Governor commanded us.” He laughed, but it hadn’t been funny. “We were supposed to be the best in the city.”

“You were pretty good,” I ventured, trying to cheer him up. “I almost got nervous. That doesn’t usually happen.”

“Thanks,” he said flatly, and changed the subject. “Divinations suggested there was some sort of horrible disaster-causing, sea-smashing threat down here. We didn’t expect you. I assume you’re the guardian for the threat?”

“Nah.” I was feeling bashful. “I sort of am the threat.”

His whole body stopped moving for a few seconds, complete still. Then he turned just his head. “You caused those earthquakes and tidal waves?”

I felt funny. “Umm. Yes? I’ve been saving up for something special, but every once in a while I find myself fighting someone, and I forget myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, God made me to be a nifty magical conduit. I absorb magic from the sea, and I use it to open gates to this place with a lot of fire. It takes all my concentration not to let the magic out.” I shuffled a tentacle. “That explosion thing last year. I sort of –”

– I had never felt so full before, every pore of my being trembling with magic until it felt like I couldn’t possibly take any more, but I had to! I knew I had to, if I wanted to fulfill my purpose, just a few weeks more, but it really felt funny, and I just needed something to distract me, and I hadn’t ever really seen my reflection before. All this effort to concentrate on my restraint, but maybe I could see what I looked like if I slithered a little over to the side and actually looked in the water. Hey, I looked pretty good! Lots of eyes, and the tentacles looked really stylish, and I bet if I lifted up all my tentacles and spun around... oops, leaking, leaking away –”

“– sort of got distracted and let some of my energy out. I’d be finished here already if that hadn’t happened. I got yelled at afterwards. And usually when I’m fighting someone, I sometimes forget a little bit. That may cause problems in the water.”

“Yeah. Problems. Yelled at by who?”

“By God.”

He seemed confused. “God? Which God? There are over forty of them last time I counted, plus innumerable demigods that spring up every time someone gets a little randy and turns himself into a dolphin. Which one made you?”

My eyes spun around my body in consternation. “I’m not sure what you mean. There’s only one God, and I know him pretty well. We’re buddies. He created me and gave me my destiny. His name is Verminox.” I sighed with affection.

“Verminox?” He stared at me. “Verminox the Dark Wizard? Verminox of the Bloody Sail? Verminox the deadly evil bastard who every freaking hero in the Sea Realm has sworn an oath to one day destroy? That Verminox?”

Boy, that didn’t sound right. “...maybe? He has brown eyes. Does your Verminox have brown eyes? ‘Cause maybe they have the same name or something.”

He rubbed his forehead. “No, I don’t think so. That explains why you’re so powerful, at least, but Verminox is no God. What are you supposed to do as your destiny?”

“Boil the ocean. I should be ready early next year.” He sputtered a little. He must not have believed me. “No, Morro, really! I can feel the power building in me again. If I didn’t let too much out in that last fight, it won’t be too much longer now. Maybe you can keep me company until I do. It’ll be fun.”

There was a long pause from my new friend. “Let me get this straight. You’ve just killed everyone I care about. If you stay alive, you’ll rip open a gate to the plane of fire, so you can boil the ocean and everything in it. I have no way to hurt you. And you just invited me to keep you company.”

“Uh huh!” I confirmed, and squelched up and down a bit. “Hey, do you know any fun games? The only one Verminox plays with me is ‘Silent Aberration.’ It’s not very much fun. I can’t say anything when we play.”

“No, I imagine not.” His voice was quiet. “Thousands of people die every time you forget yourself. Probably hundreds of thousands when the central islands exploded and created a tidal wave. The beaches were full of corpses. You have to stop this.”

“Gosh,” I said, trying to shrug like I’d seen him do. I failed. No shoulders. “It’s my destiny.”

He paused. “Sorry, did I say thousands of people? I meant thousands of interesting people. Who like to play games. And tell stories.”

I squinted all the eyes that could squint. “Really?”

“Yup. There’s a special city where I’m from, named Reef. It encloses all of the sea Realm, Grand Bay to Laughing Point to Pelass. Those are just names to you, but you would love it. It is a place where the air smells like stories. The crystal roofs of buildings capture all the colors of the sky and the sea, and minarets pierce the clouds of sea mist that floats across the waves.” His voice had gotten heavy, like he was recalling a thing he loved. A thing I’d love, maybe. “The sea at sunset is the color of your central eye. In Reef, people come every year to the Grand Arena, a huge bowl of polished stone that hangs out over the sea like.. like your vent-hole hangs over your body. They spend a week there every year, telling stories and playing games. Meeting people. Laughing.” He paused. “But you probably wouldn’t like it.” He turned away.

“No, wait!” I said. “I might. Maybe. I don’t know what most of those things are. Are they good stories?”

“Sometimes. My favorite last year was the story about the creature everyone thought was a monster, but who turned out to be the most beloved prince anyone had ever known.”

I gathered in breath. “How’d it end?”

“I don’t know,” he said sadly. “I think you may have been fighting someone at the time. The sea lifted itself and smashed into the city before the storyteller could finish. I fell in the ocean, and I would have drowned if the woman who would become my wife hadn’t saved me. I owed her my life, and I loved her at first sight.” He stopped and looked at me. “I’d like to go back next year and find out how the story ends.”

We both fell silent.

“There’s a part of me that loves to destroy things,” I said slowly. “But that city sounds awfully nice.”

Morro stretched out on the ground. “You have time to decide, I think,” he said. “I have faith you’ll make the right decision. You seem like a fast learner.” He turned away.

The thing is, I knew he must have had a wife for longer than a year if he was so upset that she’s dead. He didn’t want me to complete my destiny. He was lying so I’d do what he wanted.

But did it matter?

I sat in the darkness, thinking, and humming my favorite tune quietly to myself.

Piratecat said:

Sure! It's a plan. That's exactly what I'll do. So you shouldn't work too hard on yours, since I'll be slacking off on mine. I'd hate for you to put yourself out or anything.

Click to expand...

Yeah, right.

[sblock]How do you come up with these things? I’m starting to get worried for the finals here I mean, not only is that a nice story set in a role-playing world, but the ending... the ending is beautiful. I’m glad I’m not a judge and have to closely comb for criticism. And now I'll play "Silent Berandor"... [/sblock]

Match 12 -- Rodrigo vs Mythago in Ceramic DM A Go Go

All in a Day’s Work

I crawled out of bed and yelped when my feet hit the floor.

“Damn, it’s cold in here.”

The words barely had time to condense in the air before I vaulted to the window and threw back the curtain. I beheld a veritable winter tableaux Thomas Kinkade would have been proud to call his own.

“Oh, damn it to *hell*,” I groused.

I hated snow days. Hated them with a divine passion. Hated them more than Cain hated Abel, more than Punch hated Judy, more than any ex-wife hated her ex-husband. I really didn’t care for them at all. Not one little bit.

Grumbling to myself, I dragged a dusty chest from under the bed and popped the cover. We hadn’t had a snow day since God knows when. I hoped the dusty and wrinkled winter clothes contained therein still fit. I’d been eating a lot of pizza lately, and you know what they say – “A minute on the lips, an eternity on the hips.”

I pulled the flannel-lined jeans up, grunting a little as they caught on my hips. I had to suck in a bit to get them to button, but when I exhaled, they held together. So long as I didn’t have to bend over, I’d be fine – it would really suck to split my pants in front of a client. Some things can be hard to explain.

The shirt fared better, and I completed the ensemble with a leather jacket and pair of Timberland boots. Of my cashmere gloves, only one remained. I suspected its mate was in the same place dryer-eaten socks go, but I didn’t have time to go look for it.

Reluctantly, I grabbed my Blackberry. I despised the damned thing, but we’d helped design them, so we got a great discount and management handed them out like candy. Evil, poisonous, spirit-sucking candy. I snagged my keys and some change for the ferry out of the urn I kept by the door as I headed out into the frigid air.

I hadn’t made it ten feet when my electronic ball-and-chain started chirping at me. I considered answering it, but my hands were nice and toasty inside the jacket pockets.

Screw it, I thought. I’ll check it when I’m on the boat.

Despite the exertion of the hike to the docks, I was shivering when I got there. The sight that greeted me did little to warm my bones. Every single one of the boats was encased in ice and rimed with hoarfrost, immobilized like flies caught in amber. (Picture 3)

I saw the ferryman standing on alone on the pier and went to give him what-for. One look from the cadaverous old coot stopped me dead in my tracks. He just frowned and pointed at a dilapidated bus idling nearby.

Great. The bus. Could this day get any worse?

I joined the queue shuffling aboard the coach. It was going to be crowded, so I threw a couple well-timed elbows, knocked some sucker’s briefcase out of his hand, and pushed my way to the head of the line. Damned if I was going to stand all the way to the city.

*

Why do I hate snow days so much, you ask?

Lots of reasons. The commute sucks. Things are twice as busy as on a normal day, and on top of the usual contract-signings and collections work, we have all the special cases that have lain dormant since the last snow day to deal with. And does the boss hire temps to help out, or outsource some of the mundane stuff to some hell-hole in India? Of course not. We don’t even get overtime.

*

The bus dropped me off near my first appointment. I was running a little late, but there was no way I was starting the day off without my coffee. I darted into the Starbucks across from the building where my client waited obliviously, and stood in line for ten minutes for an overpriced cup of joe. The monkey working the machine forgot the whipped cream on my venti mocha and I considered cursing him, but figured his life sucked enough as it was.

I hurried back across the boulevard, brakes squealing and horns honking. I flipped off the irate drivers, and strode through the rotating doors of the Criterion building. I double-checked my Blackberry, but as usual Dispatch had sent me out without anything but the bare minimum of information. I stopped at the front desk.

“Excuse me, miss. I’m here to meet with Sandra Dupree, but my employer didn’t give me a suite number, just the name. Can you help me?”

I waited. Finally the overfed, underexercised security guard put down the copy of Cosmo she was reading (“Seven Ways to Satisfy Your Man” – try not eating him out of house and home) and looked at me.

“What was the name?”

I told her.

She turned to the antiquated computer terminal that occupied half of her desk. She hit the keys a number of times (mostly <Backspace>) and grunted.

“Suite 1424,” she said.

As I turned towards the elevators, she called out.

“Hey, you need to sign in before you…”

I gave her the look over my shoulder and she shut her trap.

The elevator was one of those New York deathtraps that should have been retired fifty years ago. After much mashing of buttons, it finally arrived. As I stepped through the doors, I could hear the cables groan as they stretched. I wasn’t worried about them breaking, but getting stuck in an elevator would really screw up my schedule.

Fate was on my side, however, and it finally struggled to the 14th floor. I stepped off and did a quick twirl as I read the little signs on the wall indicating which direction the different offices were in. Spotting one that read ‘1400-1426 ->’ I spun left and strode down the lovely brown-and-orange carpeted hallway. Behind double-glass doors, I saw an attractive young thing sitting behind a desk.

“Excuse me, Miss,” I said for the second time in 5 minutes. Politeness is big with the boss. Says you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. He should know, I guess.

She looked up at me and smiled.

“Can I help you?”

“Please. I’m here to see Sandra Dupree. No, I don’t have an appointment. No, she isn’t expecting me. Yes, I can go right in,” I replied. Politeness is all well and good, but I was on a tight schedule.

Her pretty smile faded, and she started to say something, but I gave her the look and she just turned and pointed down the hallway.

“Down there all the way to the window, it’s the third cubicle on the left.”

“Thanks, beautiful. You have a great day, okay?” I poured on the charm. I can do that when I need to, and I was inordinately pleased to see the smile return.

I strode down through the planted rows of the cubicle farm, soaking in the waves of quiet desperation. Some days I think I have it too easy. Then I remembered it was a snow day and recanted.

Sandra was sitting in her slave pen, back to me, when I approached. She was typing an email -- a quick glance told me it was *the* email – so I waited quietly until she clicked ‘Send’.

“Huh-hmmm,” I coughed.

She jumped about five feet in the air.

“How long have you been standing there?” she gasped.

“Long enough. So, I’ve been sent here to inform you that according to Section 3, Paragraphs 7 through 12 of the Concord Eternum, the email you just sent is considered a binding contract which must be fulfilled no later than 24 hours from this point.”

She gave me a blank look.

“The email. The one you just sent to your boss? The one where you said, and I quote, ‘Howard, you are a disgusting, vile man, and I don’t care if you can fire me, but I’ll sleep with you when Hell freezes over.’”

Still the blank look. What is it with these people?

I sighed, muttered a phrase or two in my native tongue, and let the disguise drop.

She turned pale as a ghost (which, if you’ve ever seen one, is pretty damned pale) and started to scream. I gave her the look, too, and her mouth snapped close with an audible click. (Picture 2)

She looked at me, looked at the computer, looked at me again, and then dived under the desk and began yanking cables out of the wall as fast as she could. (Picture 1)

I rolled my eyes.

“That won’t help. You already sent it. No take-backs, that’s one of the rules.”

With a sob, she crawled out of the plastic cave and into the artificial sunlight. The fluorescents made her look a little green. I hoped it was just the fluorescents; I hated it when they puked.

She started to speak, stopped, started again and finally managed to squeak out a single word.

“Why?”

“Beats me, sweet-cheeks. I’m just a corporate drone like you. ‘Why’ is way above my pay-grade. All I know is there was frost on the windows when I got up this morning, and snow on the ground, and a message on my phone telling me you were going to make a promise today.”

“So I have to sleep with Howard? But he’s repulsive. “

“Sleep with him, don’t sleep with him, all the same to me. I’m just required to inform you of the nature of the contract you’ve entered into, make sure you understand the penalties,” I said, “and get your signature on the line which is dotted.” I love that movie; half my best lines came from that movie.

“So, Option A, you sleep with him, a little of you dies inside, and the world is a slightly grayer place. Option B, you don’t sleep with him, we get your immortal soul, and the world goes on exactly like it always does.”

“Sign here,” I held out a clipboard, “and put your initials next to each paragraph indicating you’ve read and understood.”

“Are you crazy? I’m not signing anything. Do I look stupid enough to sign a contract with the Devil?”

“First of all,” I replied, “I’m not the Devil, merely one of his minio…assistants. And second, if you don’t sign, you’re assumed to have defaulted on the deal, we get your soul whether you sleep with him or not. And don’t get me started on the penalty clauses…”

She reached out nervously, took the clipboard, and grabbed a pen with the company logo from a coffee-cup holder on her desk. I could see her lips move as she read the contract to herself. She reached the end, sighed, and started scribbling.

When she was done, I took the clipboard out of her shaking hands, and tore off her copy.

“Thank you, and have a nice day,” I said, handing her the sheet of paper. I stepped away from her desk to file the paperwork in my messenger bag, and as I left I heard her calling her husband to tell him she had to work late. I kind of felt bad for her; most mortals don’t think twice about such verbal clichés, but what can you do? I didn’t make the rules.

I strolled out of the office, patted the cute secretary on the ass as she walked past me down the hall, and waited for the elevator.

*

The rest of the day didn’t get any easier. After Mrs. Dupree, there was the old Jewish guy who was going to have to sign over half his business to his wastrel son-in-law because he got angry and told him it “would be a cold day in Hell” before he let him ruin the company.
I grabbed another cup of coffee on my way to a meeting with a weepy co-ed who’d chosen a bad day to tell her true love exactly how long she’d stay with him. That one was rough. I didn’t lose much sleep over the connivers and cheaters and such, but screwing over decent people on a technicality never got easy.

The worst part was that they’d blame us for their fate, when it was the Big Guy Upstairs himself who let that clause slip by during the negotiations. If he’d been more on top of things and less focused on winning the ‘bells ring/angels wings’ crap, the mortals would have been a whole lot better off. You’d have thought that Captain Universe would have known better than to get into a legal tussle with the Prince of Lies.

Right before lunch I almost got screwed by dispatch. I got to the client’s home right before the critical moment, and just as I was about to reveal myself, she switched from ‘Hell’ to ‘Heck’ at the last second. We would have gotten sued for sure.

The afternoon was jam-packed with a dozen more sob stories. Nothing interesting, just your run of the mill ‘words spoken in anger’ stuff. And that was why I hated these days so much. Normally, we’d do a little research, get to know a prospective client, figure out what it would take to seal the deal, and before you knew it we had another soul for the team from Down Under. It took finesse; maybe not as much as in the old days when people really believed, but there was some skill involved, and you’d get to work with the poor guy for the rest of his life.

These snow-day specials, though, had no art. It was wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, no subtlety, no thrill of almost landing a big fish only to have him wriggle off the hook at the last second. And there were so damn many of them.

*
I was standing in the hallway of posh, art deco office building, waiting for the elevator. The bell chimed as it arrived, and as I stepped on I collided with another man who was trying to exit.

“Damn it, wrong floor,” he grumbled, and irritably gave me a look. Actually, he gave me *the* look.

“Ralph?” I asked. “Ralph Anslem?”

He paused and peered at me curiously.

“Oh, hi Steve.”

“Sam,” I corrected. “What brings you here?”

Ralph was a lucky bastard. He was assigned to Legal. Not the Legal Department – you needed to be a full-fledged Prince of Darkness to run with the big boys -- but the division of Contracts and Collections responsible for the souls of lawyers. They did almost as much business as the rest of us combined, but they got to work regular hours, stayed with the same firm for decades, and basically never had to lift a finger.

“I’m with Kellerman, King, and Dobrinsky. They have the top three floors in this building.”

“Nice. Bet it has a health club, too,” I muttered enviously.

“Oh, yeah,” he enthused. “Swedish massage, too. They really look after their people here.”

I started to make some snotty remark when my Blackberry went off. A moment later, so did Ralph’s.

We looked at each other, chuckled nervously, and let our hands fall to our holsters like gunslingers. I snuck a quick peek at the display and felt my blood turn to ice water. The subject line was short – just three numbers – but that was enough.

I glanced up at Ralph, and couldn’t help laughing. He’d gotten so rattled by the text message that he’d let his disguise drop. Too bad his supervisor wasn’t around to see it.

I pulled up the email, saw the address, and was chomping at the bit waiting for the elevator to reach the lobby. As soon as the doors parted, I pushed past Ralph and sprinted for the exit. I grabbed the only cab within sight, and slammed the door in my co-workers face.
I looked at the email as the taxi sped away, one pissed-off devil in its wake.

“Where to, Mac?” the driver asked.

“St. Patrick’s Cathedral,” I replied, thinking this could be the chance of a lifetime.

*

When I got there, I saw a bunch of priests and nuns milling about outside. I was curious. It was written into the Concord that neither side could divulge to mortals the nature of the deal, but the Church has been around a long time, and I’d always assumed that if they didn’t know for sure, they suspected some of the details. Anyway, I’d never gotten to bag a priest on a snow-day special, and didn’t know of anyone else doing it, either.

I sidled up to the nearest, hoping to get close enough to overhear any damning utterances without him realizing he was in my presence. Can’t be too careful. Holy water leaves a mark, you know.

He was mumbling something in Latin, and I wished I’d paid more attention in class. Hardly any use for it anymore. But I knew enough of the ecclesiastical jargon to catch the gist of it. Standard ‘Oh heavenly Father’ stuff for the most part.

I wandered through the crowd unnoticed until I ended up too close to an overly enthusiastic nun and caught a rosary bead in the eye. Close call – getting nailed by the crucifix would have hurt something fierce. She started to apologize, then pointed and gave me that ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ look when she realized what I was.

Oh crap, I thought. Now I’ve done it. If I’d screwed up and let one of the holy rollers get away, I’d be in big trouble. Even if they didn’t can me, I’d probably get transferred to Detroit or someplace worse. Assuming there was someplace worse.

I backed away slowly, but it was too late. The rest of the congregation had heeded the nun’s warning, and they’d started blindfolding themselves and sticking their fingers in their ears. See no evil, hear no evil, I guess. And the chanting continued unabated, so that took care of ‘Speak no evil’ too.

I was slinking away with my tail between my legs and hoping maybe they weren’t clued in to the whole snow-day thing when another taxi came screeching to a halt. Out popped Ralph, and I could tell he wasn’t happy as he came storming towards me.

“Cute, Sam, but I’m the senior representative on the scene. This one’s mine – check your email if you don’t believe me.”

Sure enough, I’d gotten another message, this one telling me that Ralph was in charge and I was to follow his lead. I shrugged and gestured to the crowd.

“Knock yourself out, Ralph,” I said and leaned against the wall to watch.

Ralph strode towards the people, pulling a ream of paperwork from his fancy Italian leather briefcase. He didn’t even look at it, just thrust it in front of them and told them to sign. Weird. Even stranger, they did. They didn’t even take off their blindfolds, just scrawled something on the sheet. It took Ralph almost a half-hour to get them all done.

He came walking back to me with a -eating grin on his face.

“That’s why you’re stuck where you are, Sam. When this gets processed, I’ll get promoted to the Legal Department for sure. No more Earth duty for me!”

As he was gloating, the chanting had increased in volume. I caught the tail end – something like ‘hades eluvium congelo’ and suddenly the entire herd was going airborne, flying skyward towards a suddenly bright sun. (Picture 4) A spectral hand reached out in welcome, and within moments, they’d disappeared from view.

Ralph stood in the now-deserted square, a look of total bewilderment on his face.

“Ralph, what did you do.”

He looked at me, too stunned to speak.

“Ralph, why did the Hand of God scoop up my, I mean, your clients?”

He was useless. I grabbed his briefcase and snagged one of the contracts. As I read it, I began to laugh.

“Oh, Ralph, man, you are *so* screwed. Did you even look at this before they signed it?”

Used to be these things were written in blood, and for the big, long-term Faustian style bargains they still were. But for one-offs like on snow-days, they used the magic blank paper that just automatically filled in with whatever the client was going to utter, and if they changed their mind at the last second (damned free will and all), it updated instantly. Saved a ton on typing, that’s for sure. You just had to be careful to make sure they signed *after* they spoke.

Paragraph Two was the part where the activating clause was detailed. On Ralph’s form, it was filled in with “The devil will be banished from our city and God will call me home *when hell freezes over*.” Signed, Father Murphy and Ralph Ael, duly authorized agent of the Dark Prince Lucifer.

There was a bright flash of light accompanied by a loud pop and the stink of brimstone.

Uh oh.

“Which one of you is responsible for this?” a voice boomed. A taloned hand held out a copy of the errant contract.

Without a word, I pointed at Ralph. The Elder Devil from Infernal Affairs grabbed him by the throat, uttered a blasphemous curse, and dragged him into the fiery pit from whence it had just arrived.

*

So, that’s how I ended up working at Kellerman, King and Dobrinsky, and Ralph ended up in Murmansk. Turns out there are places worse than Detroit, if you can’t stand the cold. Bet they get a ton of snow-days up there.

There is in the ocean of Tvir a strip of land which has no slope and no neighbor. It curves like a moon caught in crescent, and on the land the towers of the city of Sarntis rise, redolent of lime trees and the hookahs of poets.

It was late in the day, and the sun was sinking under the waves like a lure to a nocturnal leviathan, when Knight Admiral Rhys recognized an ill portent in the throne room. The girl with whom he was sharing these delicious grapes – what was her name? - stopped giggling. Everyone stopped talking, actually. This was the hour when the grape girls and the oil girls came round, all laughing, and he would put aside the rolls and charts and wonder at how a Knight Admiral could ever select just one consort. But now: silence.

He looked up to see the prophet.

So. The time had come.

Rhys had known it would. He was a bastard, but he wasn’t stupid. He had heard the rumors in the coconut groves and the narghile houses where he walked with his brother and discussed the grape girls and the oil girls. Such always came, and it was his misfortune to be Knight Admiral when the hour came round at last.

Now the prophet shuffled forward in rag sandals, clicking his stick on the polished marble floor.

“Doom,” the old man said. “Doom will come to Sarntis. The dreamers in the ocean wash up with the waves, and the fires of their hopes burn down your towers.”

There was more but Rhys was not listening. He was Rhys the Bastard, and for a reason. He flicked a lever under his desk. A marble wall tile rattled up, and from their kennel the rykhounds came yowling.

***

“Sarntis has never been at war.”

The conference was in the king’s sea office, on the Foam Portico overlooking the beaches and the lime trees. It was twilight still, and Rhys was there, and king Volle, and, notably, the grape girl that he had been in converse with. What was her name? Apparently the king liked her for a handmaiden.

“No, we have never fought a war,” the king said. “It is not our way.”

“Let us hope we can keep the old ways, despite the prophet,” Rhys said.

“And if we cannot? You’re the Knight Admiral. All eyes fall to you. Are you saying you won’t fight?”

“Of course I’ll fight. But Knight Admiral is a hereditary position, not an earned one. Keep that in mind as you make your plans.”

“And you keep this in mind: no more of your hounds siccing old men at court. If your beasts had not spooked him, then instead of burning himself to oblivion – or whatever magical disappearance he wrought– the prophet may have stood fast and talked. He might even have explained that nonsense about the dreamers.” The king stared off into the twilight. He took a wine glass from the girl and sipped. In Sarntis, there was wine even at war conferences at twilight.

“Bah. He was one man, in rags,” the king went on. “Probably this is a squall that flashes on the horizon and never makes landfall. Nothing but vain fantasy from a man who could sell his dreams to no one else.”

“And yet, as you point out, I am the Knight Admiral. The prophet had a presence. His eyes were wild with surmise, but he knew you. The question is, how do we investigate? Sarntis is not accustomed to mystery, or to peril.”

“Isn’t your brother a wizard of sorts?” the grape girl asked. She was looking at the Knight Admiral.

Both nobles stared back at her.

“Tara,” she said. “My name is Tara.”

***

The wine flowed while they waited for the grape girl – Tara – to fetch Dal.

Dal was younger than Rhys, and only in Sarntis could the two be imagined brothers. Dal was a broken man who refused the litter that his deformities and his station warranted. Instead he traveled on a small wheeled chariot pulled by two clockwork tortoises, designed by the cripple himself and powered by the remnants of the dream that had saved him.

The stars were burning holes in the firmament’s cerecloth when the whirrs and clanks of the turtles finally announced Dal’s arrival at the Foam Portico.

It was a moment’s work for Rhys to tell his brother the story of the prophet.

Dal’s face fell, and Rhys’s heart followed. If Dal were worried, then the prophet was genuine after all. For Dal knew Sarntis as few others did.

“We must find out what this doom is,” he said. “For all dooms can be avoided. And we must get help. The city must rise.”

***

“I don’t understand,” Tara said. “Why am I here?”

Knight Admiral Rhys and his grape girl were behind an arras in the shade of the stage wings at the Amphitheater of the Prothalamion. Rhys smeared a lime on his lips against parching in the heat. After the nobles assembled, he was going to be doing a lot of speaking. Through a hole in the arras, he watched his audience, fanning themselves in the sun, some fresh from dreaming a thousand gold in the morning sea, some waiting for evening dreamtime before work, and many that only peripherally depended on Sarntis’s unique industry.

“We’re here because Dal is steeped in retorts and bubbling sulfur, divining the nature of the doom. That’s his half of the job. Our half is to get help.”

“That’s why you are here, Knight Admiral. Why am I here? I’m a grape girl.”

“Call me Rhys. And you’re here because you know these people. See old lady Thel? You carried her wine at the suckling roast. You knew my brother was a wizard. Tell me those people’s secrets: who is in whose bed, whose debt, whose dreams.”

He stared through the arras-hole out into the chrysoprase, sard, and onyx amphitheater, lustrous in the midday heat. He did not want to meet Tara’s eyes because he could imagine the surprise and suspicion there. All the stories at court, all the women that he had been with. Rhys the Bastard, they called him. Maybe she thought this was another ploy. No matter. She would either help him, or she wouldn’t.

And in the end, she decided to help. He was impressed with her acumen and the suitability of her secrets to his purposes. Was this how one selected just a single woman?

He stepped out from behind the arras armed with Tara’s knowledge. He wielded it skillfully, menacing this trade, promising that lure.

But unlike Tara, the nobles were not convinced.

They said he was the Knight Admiral. Defense was his duty. Sarntis had never been to war, had no standing navy, or armed forces at all. His fault, for not having foreseen this. The rich (and that was everyone in Sarntis) would flee, and maybe come back if Rhys found a way to avoid the doom – if, indeed, the doom were real. Was his only evidence the words of a madman and a cripple?

***

So Rhys, Tara, and Dal went to see the doom and prove its threat. They flew across the waves in the Crepuscular, a galleon with dragon wings for sails and half a will of its own for an anchor. A mighty dream-fact was the Crepuscular.

Wind lashed Tara’s hair. She didn’t serve grapes, or wine, or tell secrets. And she didn’t ask why she was here. She smiled whenever Rhys met her gaze. That smile, at least, the Knight Admiral could understand.

But Dal? Why was he happy? The young cripple tooled around the aft deck on the back of a clockwork tortoise, sounding waves with a knotted rope, bubbling three alembics on the gunwale, shouting orders in a strange click-language to the other tortoise (which looked to Rhys to be doing some sort of Thunttian bear-dance, all that was missing was a red ball on its nose). Dal, of all people! Smiling!

That made Rhys happy. Why else had he spent ten years in the waters, dreaming? It was true: the Knight Admiral could have risen above his hereditary title. He could have been a duke or a comneni, either through talent or lucre. But he had spent a decade in the Sarntian trade of dreamcraft and sold not a single piece. The work went to Dal. Their parents did not exactly tell Rhys to let Dal die. They simply ignored the waters off the coast as if magic did not float there, as if those who swam in the Sarntian Tvir for a year or more could not, through skill and yearning, suture together fact and dream. Rhys was old enough to despise his parents for their cowardice (for a failed dreamer is often a drowner). Rhys walked into the ocean at fourteen and floated, dead to the world, dead to the salt and the foam, dreaming. Each year, Dal got healthier. At twenty-four Rhys awoke and walked out of the waves, across the beach and the Smoke Way, and into Dal’s room. His parents had passed, but Dal lived. The younger brother was still a cripple, and club-footed and bandy-legged to boot, but he lived, appearing healthy, almost Sarntian, from the waist up.

And now he smiled!

And shouted!

Actually, now his shouts were not in the click-language. “Rhys! Tara! There!”

They had been sailing for a day and a night and a day. The stars were out again, lighting the sky like someone had smashed the sun and left pieces guttering here and there. But in one part of the sky there was nothing but a black void. No stars? No. Something was blocking the stars.

Tara stood closer as Rhys hollered again, this time in the click language. A swarm of clockwork birds flapped up out of the open hold, each one carrying a limelight lantern. The birds scudded across the ocean waves, faster than the Crepuscular itself, and set up lights around the doom.

The thing was enormous. Taller than the tallest tower in Sarntis, and just as wide. Coiled around its central eye were chrysoprase, sard, and onyx tentacles, all the stones of Sarntis. An oleaginous effulgence glazed the eye like a hookah-smoker’s after long hours at the pipe. At length, the eye blinked in the lime lantern beams. A roar came across the waves from the base of globular monstrosity, where swirled a miasma of salt spray and the fatty effulgence that turned Rhys’s gut to contemplate. But the thing was merciful in its hatefulness: it spared Rhys a long view. Once focused on Dal’s birds, the eye was quick to act. Its tentacles snapped out with such ferocity that Rhys expected them to rend the night sky itself. They did not. But they struck each and every lime lantern-bird. The birds died with keening wails, and then all was dark, and the Crepuscular reversed course, the roar of the miasma chasing it back to Sarntis.

***

Now the Knight Admiral took the stage with more confidence. The entire city had turned out for this. The stage was a platform suspended from two distant towers by cables Dal provided. A sea of people was under and around Rhys as he spoke, his voice amplified by yet another of Dal’s ingenious devices. And while the younger brother had nothing to amplify Rhys’s arguments, the encounter with the eye fired his words and steeled his resolve. Tara and Dal also spoke, describing the doom that approached.

The jeers were beyond Rhys’s belief.

He gestured to Dal. Louder! But as loud as the Knight Admiral’s voice became, the crowd’s boos swelled louder. At the end, Rhys could feel the platform swaying as the people pounded and yelled and shook the supports.

“Time to go.” Rhys picked up Dal, descended, and with the aid of a cloaking spell, dodged through the crowd, Tara in tow.

“What are we going to do?” Tara said, ducking a vase that would have cost a mainlander a year’s salary as it shattered against the wall. After they had made their way through the worst of it, resting against a marble wall, she said, “This is madness. They’re mad. And they’re leaving.” She pointed down Smoke Way, to the docks, where every sloop and caravel was raising sail.

“We have to get to the king and –“ Rhys started.

“Time to go,” said an unfamiliar voice.

There was a tall man, grey beard, bald pate, in a commoner’s ruby-embroidered tunic. He held Tara’s arm. Rhys drew his sword. He was a bastard, but he wasn’t stupid. This was daddy, obviously.

Or maybe he was stupid. What good was a sword here?

“Tara,” her father said. “Now. We have a zeppelin waiting. And you, Knight Admiral, let my daughter sink from your thoughts as you and this city will sink beneath the waves. Sarntis is doomed. It has been coming for a long time. You should have been prepared.”

“I asked for help. Every year. Again and again I was told that nothing would come to Sarntis. We are too distant to be attacked, too benevolent to be hated, too understanding to offend. Our wizards have proved again and again that the dreamcraft of Sarntis can never harm anything, so why would anyone see us as a threat? So it was argued. Still, I asked for help. But there was never any help for me.”

“Then you should have forced people!”

“That is not our way! Help me now. Together we can convince more. The city united can stand.”

“You disgust me. Tara!”

Rhys did not understand the look in Tara’s eyes. But he wasn’t going to force her to stay. He wasn’t going to force anyone to stay.

She left with her father.

***

Rhys and Dal caught up with the king in the coconut groves in the courtyard of the palace. Mainlander servants scurried past with treasure-laden trunks. The king had a galleon in the harbor.

King Volle told Rhys that the people of Sarntis were dreamers, not warriors. He mused that perhaps it was wrong to sell dreams for gold, and the gods, so long thought dead, had returned to punish the dream merchants. At any rate, it was foolish to take up arms against the doom. What could be done? The people of Sarntis could take their riches to another place.

And trailing him from wagon to wagon, weaving through servants loaded with paintings and intaglios and dragon ivory, Rhys argued that without Sarntis, his brother would not be alive. Gold cannot heal a cripple.

“No. No, it cannot, Rhys. But I can heal you. You have been crippled by your duty to me and to our city. Be free, Rhys. Go. You do not need to save this city. Go find that girl that I saw you with, that night on the Foam Portico.”

Instead, Rhys watched his king leave, on a galleon riding low in the water, weighted by a city’s treasure and, Rhys wished, guilt.

***

And so Dal and Rhys were alone in the city when the eye rose on the horizon. It was little more than a shadow under the clouds now, but in a day it would be upon them.

The lime orchards were more fragrant than ever before, the scented waters of the hookah parlors sweeter, as the brothers walked the Smoke Way. The creaks of Dal’s chariot wheels, and his turtles’ whirrs and clanks, were louder than Rhys could ever remember. Something about the desertion of the city amplified the few sounds and smells that were left.

They discussed strategy. They spent four hours sinking a chain across the harbor, in the absurd hope that the eye had a keel.

Dal had eldritch seals guarding his laboratory. They lifted them, placed them on ropes, and festooned the towers. The hope was to catch a tentacle as it reached for the marble and emerald spires.

The planning went as well as possible until Dal decided to leave.

That pushed Rhys to despair. At first he thought that his brother was merely missing. Perhaps his chariot broke, and he was stuck in a high tower with no way to descend. Or a seal had gone off and injured him. That was unlike Dal, but Rhys wanted to believe it had happened.

A thorough check of all the buildings nearby took even that unlikely possibility from Rhys. Not a sign of the chariot or the wizard.

Then he decided to check the docks. What he found there made him regret the decision. If he had stayed in the city, looking for his brother in the towers and the narghile houses, most likely he would have died when the doom came, oblivious to the real truth. In his despair, he wished for ignorance. But he had seen the docks.

Besides the Crepuscular, which would sail only for Rhys, there was one boat left in the city. The people had taken all of the others. But for some reason known only to wizards, Dal had a strange narrow boat, little more than a split log with pontoons, in his laboratory. They had placed it in the docks after hauling the chain across the harbor.

Now it was gone, and so was Dal.

Rhys wept for several hours on the planks of the Smoke Way pier while the doom swept closer. He snapped out of it when the increasing winds – storm strength now - blew an alembic into his forehead. The pain took his mind off the grief for a moment. As he picked the shards of glass out of his forehead, he remembered all the time Dal spent in his laboratory – and he had the answer. He tied a bandana across his head to stop the bleeding and ran. If only the Crepuscular was fast enough.

***

It was, and it wasn’t.

He sailed out to where he had spent a decade dead to the city, dreaming of a brother who was whole. The dreams of Sarntis could never be used as weapons. That was an established fact. There had never been a wizard in five centuries who could overturn that. Dal was a rebel, to be sure, but not even he questioned the nature of the dream-magic in the Sarntian Tvir. But there was another possibility. Rhys had not thought of it, of course. Too busy with Tara or pleading with the nobles. But Dal was always the smart one. And Dal would know that Rhys would never, ever let Dal try it. Better to die facing the doom.

Taking a boat from the Crepuscular, Rhys fished Dal from the water.

“I have lived forty lifetimes since you saw me,” Dal coughed. His legs were useless, and his arms were little better. He sprawled in the bottom of the boat. “Each one a new nightmare. I have seen our parents die a thousand times, crying for you. I have seen Tara leave us every morning. I have seen horrors to make the eye that is coming here nothing to me.”

“It’s going to be ok, Dal. It will be ok. We’ll run. We’ll go somewhere else. Let the doom have the city.”

“No. Without the city, I would not have lived. Take it.” He lifted a small black ball to Rhys. “It is not a dream that I crafted. It is a nightmare.”

Rhys felt the emotion rise in his voice. He understood what his brother had done for him. It would be a long, long time before he saw Dal smiling again.

***

Back on the docks, Rhys set Dal in his chariot.

Black ball raised high in his hands, he started to chant as Dal had instructed him on the ride back in. He wasn’t counting on the doom’s tentacles.

With a thunderclap, the tentacle reached somehow across a mile of open water. It knocked the nightmare ball flying.

“The eye sees! The eye sees!” Dal shouted and twisted in his chair. Rhys shook his head. There would be time for Dal later – or not. He needed to act now.

The black ball – where was it?

“Looking for this?” Tara smiled at him. She held up the nightmare ball. Behind her was the most beat-up zeppelin the Knight Admiral had ever seen. But that only registered for a moment. Tara tossed him the nightmare ball.

He chanted quickly. The heat coming from the ball told him the spell was working. Dal screamed and twisted in his chair as if knives, long inserted, were being pulled slowly out of his skin. The nightmare rose out of Rhys’s hand, crackling, burning, ascending into the clouds in a conflagration of torment.

The lightning, fire, and smoke inferno was accompanied by a thousand screams. As the nightmare raced across the harbor, Rhys realized that every one of those screams belonged to his brother.

***

The doom and the nightmare collided and annihilated. The wind and the rain and the fire seared the tops of buildings and blew down the lime orchards, but the whole of the spectacle was not recorded, for Rhys and Tara only looked at each other, and Dal was still mad.

In the years to come, that madness would fade, and the two brothers and Tara journeyed far, far from Sarntis.

At night under the distant stars, rocking on Crepuscular or lying on Thunttian grass, the former Knight Admiral would recall how he had been tempted to turn the nightmare against the city after annihilating the doom. But he always ended his reveries believing that he had made the right choice, and he drifted off to sleep in Tara’s arms free of nightmare, and hearing his brother tinker or snore or click happily nearby.

One day, the city will dream again. There is no doubt of that.

But for now, though people have returned to Sarntis, that city gleaming in marble and redolent of narghiles, few of the returnees are poets, and even fewer are dreamers. It is difficult to craft poems and dreams amidst the hot wails of torture. The word spread, as it always does, and today there is value in novelty. When the mainlanders come to Sarntis, they want nightmares instead of dreams.

Rodrigo (and mythago):

[sblock]Nice! That will be a hard round to judge between you and mythago. You wrote a really funny story; at first I thought you could have told us from the beginning about the nature of the narrator, but you uncovered it early enough, I think.

Curiously, reading your story also made me realize a few things in mythago's entry. I think both of your "duck under the table"-uses aren't that integral to the story, you both more or less went on the devil picture and then the freezing one as secondary image.

Also, I think both of your protagonists don't really do much (for the central conflict, I should add regarding Rodrigo's); they report the story, so to speak. I wonder if that will be a negative influence on the judgement. I enjoyed both stories, anway.[/sblock]

For Berandor:
[sblock]
Thanks. I decided after my last entry to go the more light-hearted route. I really wanted to hold off on revealing Sam's nature as long as I could -- I was having fun playing with the cliches and language and trying to keep things just under the surface, so that if you read it again, it would be funny in a different way.

This was a fun story to write. Bonus points for anyone that gets the Sam and Ralph reference. That and reading an ENW discussion on alignment were the fodder for this tale.
[/sblock]

Piratecat II

[sblock]Now that the story has had time to sit, I think the monster was a little off in its description. On the one hand, there's the fixed fate it has and tries to bring about, but on the other hand it readily accepts (or doesn't protest) when its "God" is called a simply wizard – and the monster seems smart enough (going by the end) to not just be fooled or confused by that. But I'm not even sure that's a true nitpick, or just an imagined one.[/sblock]

Ycore Rixie:
[sblock]While the basic plotline was quite usual, I must say I enjoyed the flavor of your story immensely, with the city of dreams and everything. I also really like the style of it, the vocabulary you use, and your fictional names. I really had the impression of a fledged-out world in there, which is great considering the time limit. Maybe the bastard thing should have been kept through to the end or cut entirely, I don't know. But Rhys didn't seem like such a bastard, really. Thanks![/sblock]

Good luck, both.

Rodrigo Istalindir said:

For Berandor:
[sblock]
Thanks. I decided after my last entry to go the more light-hearted route. I really wanted to hold off on revealing Sam's nature as long as I could -- I was having fun playing with the cliches and language and trying to keep things just under the surface, so that if you read it again, it would be funny in a different way.

This was a fun story to write. Bonus points for anyone that gets the Sam and Ralph reference. That and reading an ENW discussion on alignment were the fodder for this tale.
[/sblock]

Click to expand...

[sblock]I guess knowing the pictures spoilt that surprise somewhat [/sblock]

Congratulations to all our competitors for getting their stories in. Judgments to be posted as soon as possible.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

Rodrigo Istalindir said:

Reluctantly, I grabbed my Blackberry. I despised the damned thing, but we’d helped design them, so we got a great discount and management handed them out like candy. Evil, poisonous, spirit-sucking candy.

Click to expand...

Well, *I'm* sold

[sblock]Really, my goal here was just to get SOMETHING written so I didn't let my esteemed opponent down - it's a miracle I was able to write this much.[/sblock]