Slumrat Rising

Chapter 129: Hanging Around

“I am intensely uncomfortable with this.”

“Oh, stop being a baby and put your hands behind your back.”

“Standing naked in a forest, tied up, about to be hung from a tree by a strange old man, you can see why this might set off alarms?”

“Strange? Strange! How am I strange?”

“You are a six hundred-year-old terrorist who lures young men out into the woods and gets them naked and tied up. Is this normal around here?”

“Alright, I have had enough of this. We are not terrorists! I am not a terrorist! You haven’t lived long enough to see it, but Starbrite has ruined, RUINED this planet. I am a patriot and a champion for the world. You will cease to refer to yourself or me as terrorists.”

“Sure, sure. Can’t help but notice you’re ignoring the rest of what I said, though.”

“It is perfectly normal- don’t wiggle I need to line this up right- perfectly normal to get naked for a serious magical ritual. Especially one focused on transformation like this one. I can assure you, you have nothing I haven’t seen many times before.”

“That’s reassuring. You have lots of experience- too tight, too tight! Lots of experience with tied up naked young men in the woods.”

There was a pause.

“Well. I do. Now that I think about it, I do actually have a lot of experience with that. It’s a pretty common ritual thing. Not always woods, of course. Or always young men.”

“Oh?”

“Mmm. Time was, hardly a solstice or equinox went by where I didn’t have some youngster tied down over a stone altar on a mountainside or chained to the bottom of a pond or something. No, don’t straighten up; I’m just grabbing my knife and a rag. This bit is always messy.”

“Every solstice and equinox? Busy guy.”

“Ah, nostalgia is both a curse and a refuge for the old. I look around and see the bitter remains of happier days.”

“GOD! Did you dip that in ice water? What the hell is that?”

“The sacred oil needs to be kept in a cold box, or it goes rancid. You don’t want the scarification to get infected by rancid oil. BELIEVE ME on that.”

“The voice of experience.”

“You want a neophyte carving sacred geometries on your flesh?”

“Fair.”

“But you do actually bring up a good point. I have spent a lot of my long life guiding youngsters, training them, and shaping them into the people Siphios needed them to be. “Teacher” is never just a religious title. We are actually teachers.”

“And part of that is guiding them through rituals?”

“Naturally.” Merkovah looked sad as he looked around the forest. “What do you notice here, Truth? About this forest, I mean?”

“I’m not a trees guy, honestly. Big. Some saplings. Now that I’m looking at it, there are a lot of dead trees too.”

“Not to sound like the old timer I am,” the youthful-looking exorcist said, “but it didn’t always look like this. The Silent Forest was mysterious. And terrifying. And heartbreakingly beautiful. The first time I fell in love, romantic love, was waking through the clouds of pink-blue lights that the Toam trees scattered like pollen. She was my age, brilliant, and beautiful, and I wanted her more than light and air, and she was in love with another. Eventually, she left the woods. I didn't. They got married and had kids. I wound up teaching her great-great-grandkids at one point.”

“The magic faded.”

“The last Toam tree died a century ago. We preserved some of the seeds and pollen, but unless the conditions change… it can’t come back. The fairies vanished. Just vanished. Here one day, gone the next. The mystic, sacred waters became ponds. Wise beasts, more spirits than animals, became simply animals. Some were friends of mine. I… hope you never see the light of understanding leave someone’s eyes. Watch them forget you as they forget themselves.”

Truth just shook his head. What could he possibly say?

“Same thing happened everywhere. Sacred mountains became just mountains. Sacred trees became ordinary. Holy places became just another place. A few tiny pockets remain, clinging to the last dregs of divinity. National treasures now, when once they were simply part of the common wealth of the nation.”

“This tree…”

The sun set. Merkovah didn’t answer Truth. He just tossed the hemp rope up over a branch and hauled.

The noose tightened around Truth’s neck, creaking as it yanked him up. So tight it seemed to burn. Truth couldn’t help panicking, thrashing. The hemp cords binding his hands were suddenly impossibly strong. They should have snapped like a thin string. They held. His arms could crush demons and shatter walls but couldn’t stretch the rope. He tried to yell, to tell Merkovah to stop, but the rope had choked away his voice. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’tbreathe! The animal panic of feeling the air choking off made him jerk and heave and struggle wildly to get free.

Merkovah calmly tied off the rope around the trunk of the tree, then knelt in silent prayer. In a few minutes, Truth’s legs stopped kicking. Merkovah didn’t even glance over.

____________________________________________

Truth knew that what he was seeing wasn’t real. This was a hallucination, some part of the ritual he was undergoing. It still felt real. It still felt odd as hell to be dressed in fancy clothes with an apron over it, serving mediocre coffee to seven severely warped-looking individuals.

Filling the entire width of the head of the table was a singular egg of a man, enormously fat, bald-headed, and conspicuously dressed in the finest suit a very great deal of money could buy. Then, working around the table were a series of visually distressing sorts, ranging from one fellow who would have looked healthier if he had been dead for a week, an opium fiend, a brutal edgelord, two who were desperately trying to act cool but weren't at all, and a handsome young man who looked like he had snorted all the cocaine, and would agree with anyone who had more cocaine. And would stab anyone who didn’t have cocaine four hundred and forty-four times.

Egg Man had a dozen plates in front of him, but the rest just stuck to coffee and the free bread. A seven top for brunch, and you just knew they were lousy tippers. Could be worse, he supposed. They could be church ladies.

“It must be poison. The most subtle and elegant of disposals, transitioning commoner and king alike into the primordial nothingness.” Deadman said. “Death, the ultimate negation of meaning. The final humbling of any crown. Silent and invisible, a true comrade to the common man. An unmaking of structures to most perfectly demonstrate the universal anarchy.”

“Poison would defeat the entire purpose. Revolution is a BANG!” Try-Hard #1 slammed the table, making the spoons rattle on the saucers. “No need for complicated plots. I’ll make the bomb, and we toss it through the carriage window when he parades through town. Anarchism is in the people, but requires a spark to set the blaze in their hearts.”

“No, this won’t do at all, won’t do at all. The emperor is the most wicked and cruel of his contemporaries, his serfs, serfs in this day and age, mind you! Still remain chained to their tenant farms and suffer under the knout.” The edgelord snarled, jabbing with his butter knife. “We get in with blades. Blend into the hotel staff, knock on the door “Dinner time!” Then we STAB HIM. Pigs deserve to be butchered.”

“I could go for a pork trotter right now. It’s been a long time since dinner, and even Lobster Mayonnaise can only carry one so far. Gentleman, let there be no quarrel between us. We can combine all these ideas. We put poison on the blades, strap the blades to the bomb, then throw the bomb through the hotel window. This will also give us the opportunity to paint slogans on the walls and pin up our manifesto. Which… does anyone have a copy I could look at? I’ve misplaced mine.” The coke fiend was vibrating at the thought of carnage. He hadn’t touched his bread but necked the coffee and was waving for a refill.

“The people are a sea, and we revolutionaries are fish in the sea. We are our manifesto, a living testimony to the truth and rightness of our cause. We must demonstrate by action what defies description. To do otherwise would cheapen our anarchic hearts.” Egg Man casually demolished a plate of bacon and punctuated his pronouncement with a dainty sip of coffee. Then frowned, glaring at his cup. He set it down on its saucer firmly.

The opium fiend nakedly added a few drops of laudanum to his coffee and drank deeply. “It’s so wild to me. We are going to murder an emperor. We, sitting at this table, are going to kill a crowned head to make the point that no head should wear a crown. It’s not like we are in hiding or anything. A conspiracy right out in the open. And nobody is even looking at us. No detectives peep from the bushes. No secret agents with hearing trumpets.” He giggled.

“Our masters are too blind to set their dogs on the right trail.” Try Hard #2 sniffed. “They would rather smash up a dockside saloon than disturb the diners at restaurants of quality. This is why, incidentally, we need to kill the Emperor at church. Smash the whole edifice of authority from the very top. I do like the bomb-knife-poison idea, though. Iconoclastic and innovative.”

“The passion for destruction is also a creative passion,” Egg Man agreed, wiping a bit of pastry cream from the corner of his wide mouth. “And the church idea likewise has merit. The existence of a boss in heaven is the best justification for a boss on earth, after all, and where there is the state, there will be slaves. It thus follows that for humanity to be free, God must be abolished.”

This was met with murmurs of approval. The Egg Man took the opportunity afforded by the brief applause to snag the coke fiend’s bread roll and butter, directly merged the two, and swallowed it in a single bite.

“Gentlemen! I thank you all for your input. You will receive your instructions privately, but rest assured that our great work is underway. We already control the newspapers, the telegraphs, the railroads, and the ocean liners. Our people are everywhere, invisible, and ready to act when they see the curtain rise. Go. I have things well in hand.”

The table broke up, heading off singly or in pairs as the enormous man swept every remaining crumb into his mouth, including the sugar bowl and the little pitchers of cream. Truth felt that was his cue.

“Your bill, sir.”

The gargantuan bulk jerked to a surprised halt, rotating in place to face Truth. “My bill? My bill? Young man, do you have the faintest idea who I am?”

“No, sir. Do you have an account with us?”

“You have an account with me. This is my place!”

“Very good, sir. I’ll just need to verify that with my manager. I’m sure you understand. However, this was a six-person table, not including yourself, and that means a flat service fee of ten percent. Which must be paid.”

The Egg Man was giving him an increasingly bewildered look. “Young man, do you grasp what was going on here?”

“Yes, sir. I think I was quite a good sport about your amateur theatrical group pretending to be anarchists.”

The rich man burst out laughing. “Yes, you could call it that! As phony as could be. And I, the stage master behind it all. Each actor lost in their role. But the play’s the thing, isn’t it?”

“I’m sure you are right, sir. And yet, you can hardly expect the audience to pay for the ticket if they were never asked if they wanted to see the show. Far less if they were used as ushers and stagehands.”

This got him a hard look from the Egg Man.

“You aren’t big on metaphor or symbolism, are you?”

“Cash on the nail works for me, sir. Literal as you like.”

“Your accent seems familiar. What’s your name? Where are you from?”

“Truth Medici, recently from Siphios.”

“Honest in your fashion, I suppose. I vaguely recall Siphios. Better coffee than here.”

“True.”

The Egg Man was looking distinctly less eggy. His face was extending into a muzzle as long horns sprung from his bald head. A mane silently grew out, and a terrible blend of dragon and lion slowly rose out of the enormous body. The skin slowly rolled down, revealing the serpentine coils within the bulk.

“Well, I think you have learned something today, Truth Medici. Who should not be here past the end of our little play.”

“Couldn’t say, sir. Above my pay grade. Speaking of pay…”

“You even carry an echo of that youngster’s curse. You would think he could take my hint. Goodbye, Mr. Medici. In some tiny way, I might possibly remember you.” The figure grew and grew, the café fading away, the city, the whole world fading away until there was only Truth and the impossible enormity in front of him. The being became so vast Truth lost sight of where the being began, and the universe ended. From somewhere, there came a terrible light. A terrible blinding light. And he couldn’t breathe!