9 - The Soul-Sense
The endless Road of Graves rolls before you and your Blue Lady. An unwound cobblestone yarn. The epitaphs on each stone stand out with oddly sharp texture. Each name is bold and legible. Even the worn ones.
You blink.
Something snaps.
Within your chest a bright and painful flower takes root. Like dandelions of fire it spreads in dots through your body. A groan escapes.
You see your Lady’s hand touch your pauldron, but you feel nothing through the fire under your skin. Every sense - sound, touch, taste, sight, smell, sixth - hurts. The air burns like snorted water along your throat. The stir of the wind scrapes like an ear infection. Even your sense of time burns. You cannot count the seconds, yet each one seems like a doctor’s hammer tapping directly on the tissue of your brain.
Snap.
Pain vanished.
An Age Before The Road
The stones are fresh.
The Road is not one of graves, but an ordinary road of mundane cobbles. Remorselessly smooth, tortuously-mortared cobbles. No epitaphs oxidized with moss. This surface is too pure.
Five-thousand years ago the demon kings burned and salted each other’s kingdoms, ruling a slave-race that were themselves half-demons. Terror and blood were the orders of the Time.
Is this hallucination? Self-hypnotism?
The first demon-slave will attack alone. From the sinking sun at the end of the road it widens and stretches into a black silhouette. You’ll see it raise its face to the air, and sniff with a nose in the shape of a swine’s.
Lucky for you, you still have your Polished Steel Longsword. Draw it. Parry the first blow from the demon-slave’s crooked axe. Capitalize on your unbalance foe. Carve a red opening in the demon from shoulder to groin, like a pea pod.
You’ll have to fend off multiple waves of such demons. They come in groups of up to four. Some come from the road, some from the violent hills. With each one you slay the sun will sink. Lower. Lower. The Road will shrink.
Somewhere, back in your own time your life is shrinking too.
You’ll have to slay twenty-seven demons in order to proceed. They will keep coming after the twenty-seventh falls, so as soon as you’ve slain that many, begin praying to the seven necromancer-gods for deliverance.
One will answer.
Snap.
With this snap of your soul the squealing demon-slaves vanish. In their place you’ll find a thrashed, flayed giant.
The Red King.
You’ll now have to fight effigy of the deathless lord of vengeance. He stands ten feet tall, a scarred and naked man-thing, face contorting into such a scowl as could only by caste in wax or plaster. He wields a red sword.
In an instant the effigy will raise his sword, howl, crouch, and spring.
You have one chance. Time your cut. Move faster than your eye can follow. You will know success by the feel of Steel biting skin.
The effigy vanishes in red mist. The sun sinks. The road grows dark. Your senses turn fully black and blind.
Your Blue Lady’s voice begins softly, but echoes louder with each word.
“Breathe easier my Cracked Cup Knight. Can you smell that? It is tea, I found mint and rose hips not far. Be easy. “Here, I will hold your hands. “Your back contours again the wrinkles of a large oak. I pulled you from the carved stones of The Road. “I left your helmet over your face, I know your vows. Do you feel that tree’s rugged skin?”
Like fingers gone numb, flexing and unflexing, prickling as the blood creeps back under the pale skin - in this way do your senses return.
| Touch You feel the bark of the tree, your spine contouring against the trunk. | Sound Your Lady has fallen quiet. But in the succeeding silence is a sound you know. Caw. Cawcaw. A crow. Between each of its croaks, somewhere in the boughs, you hear the hiss of light rain. |
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| Taste and Smell Breathing deeply, air swells your lungs. The taste and smell of petrichor light up another part of your lost sense. | Sight First you see nothing. Then light, and color, and a vague rectangle of shape. Then, your Blue Lady. Her face is bent over yours, looking down at your eyes, you knew, behind the shadow of your visor. Around her neck she wears a thin silver necklace. |
Your eye is most troubled.
The Necklace. Dulled as you are, yet still you understand her intention. Will you allow this? You must not. No matter that it is painful, shake your head. Do not let her throw herself into that mancer’s debt once more. Stand up. Stand. Up. It is no use. Your arms do not feel that wet grass. See how they droop uselessly at your hips. To your Lady’s left, to her right; the epitaphs on the Road of Graves. They blur in your eyes again. Focus. Try harder. Is your willpower meant only for when you feel well?
You still see clearly enough to catch your Lady’s smile.
“I see your eye’s direction. I have already touched the spell of Far Speaking that is in this necklace. “I will call Othelmedir. The mancer will know your affliction. “My Cracked Cup Knight, the sun is still high, and few are travelers on this span of the road, where wend the hills west of Middlemoss. “Rest. “Othelmedir will heal your eye and touch.”
The black tunnel sinks in around your vision. A shake of your head only sets it pounding. Your neck and arms loll.
The smell of the rain vanishes like the cloud that has spent its fury.
Caw… Caw… The croaking becomes muffled, distant. Your Blue Lady speaks, but the words are garbled, as if your helmet were stuffed with wool.
The last sense you know is the warmth of your Lady’s hands around your own.
No time for thought. Fight.
Immediately bring your sword sideways to parry a jab at your sternum.
Sword - not Steel.
You will find yourself familiar with the weight of this weapon anyway. Good thing too, as your foe cuts with an overhead chop. Spring back and raise your sword to block. The tip of the blade will ring like a small silver bell.
By now you’ll probably notice you have no armor, no helmet. You must rely on your quick maneuvering limbs - pliant like young saplings not yet hardened into trees - to stave the second, and the third, and the fifth and sixth blow. This foe that wants to kill.
This is a memory.
A memory of home.
A memory of your old weaponmaster.
Though it is only a memory the bristling mustache and goatee, like three straw brooms covered in ashes, seem real.
So does the fight for your life seem real. So does that blow which would have gouged your scalp. Crack. Crackcrack. The sharp retorts of steel on steel rings in the court.
If you glance right and left you’ll notice the yellow stucco walls of your Lady’s keep. It leans like an outgrown tree over the edge of a plateau. Your eye might be caught by The Lake of Tomatoes, shining distantly, hot and red under the slate-colored sun.
But something will catch your eye eventually, and then you’ll feel it.
Thud.
No matter what you do the weaponmaster’s boot will catch your sternum. You will fall, your sword will fly away. You’re going to see, for a second that feels like an hour, this weaponmaster tensing to finish the kill.
“Stop.”
A voice like a gentle thunderclap rolls.
Your Old Lord is there.
Your Lady is beside him.
She will catch your eye, and smile.
He will nod.
Then your old weaponmaster will tuck his sword away, bend, and pull you to your feet.
Snap.
Another fight. Different foe. You’ll find yourself mid-swing. A reversal on a swing that has knocked your enemy’s guard wide.
To win, simply bring your fresh Polished Steel Longsword out in a diagonal upward arc. An unblockable cut.
Your Steel opens a canyon through his enemy’s tunic, through the torso. A river of blood and intestine spills onto the polished blue-and-white tiles of the castle’s audience hall. Your opponent, a different knight, a different clan, stares with bulging eyes. His sword falls. Clatter. Then he falls too.
A pool of red spreads from the dead man.
The castle employs seven men in the rite of the duel.
| The Four Burdened Ones Four to grasp the arms and legs. Four to bear the dripping body. Four to depart unknown. | Scholar of the Arid Art He lives behind a slatted birch door, to the side of the dueling hall. He draws from a body its water, and returns the body to its clan. | The Wringers Twain They soak the sacred foe’s blood up from the floor, and wring it into a silver-gilt iron ewer. |
|---|
You must complete the ceremony. In one fluid motion draw a silken handkerchief the color of the sun from the white velvet pouch on your left hip, run it along the bloodied edge of your Steel, tuck the cloth into the empty pouch of black velvet on your left hip, and sheath your sword slowly, counting out exactly three seconds from the moment you begin to stow to the blade, to the moment you hear it’s pommel *shink* against your scabbards copper throat.
Then spin in place. Face the high table.
Your great Lord, your beautiful Lady, your weaponmaster, two stewards, and sixteen visiting members of your dead opponent clan; all sit with expressionless faces at a long marble table, cast in a honey color under a ceiling of tinted glass. Your weaponmaster’s face is as masked as any other - such is the rule of the ceremony - but you think you notice, under his breastplate, a swelling chest.
Your Lord rises from the central chair.
“Lionized is this family through the sword of her servant. “Thou hast slain, sir. “Celebrated should that foe be through the courage of her servant. “He hath died, my lords.”
Two by two, starting with the two beside your Lord and Lady, moving outward in pairs along the marble table, the rival family’s lords rise. Each wears a crimson robe covered in white hexagons. Each carries, at his side, a short blade. A one-foot knife.
Each lord turns to your Lord.
Each sets his left hand on the pommel of his blade.
The grip of your Steel is tight in your hand. Your jaw strains. You see the same tension stiffen your weaponmaster. For a moment, the mood holds.
Your Lady’s voice fills the high hall.
“Rival guests, your company this day rings the chimes of my Lord’s inner laughter. “Our hearts crack for your champion. “He held a fine sword. He carried his armor shiningly. His step shook the stones of our castle. “Fateful stars only could spill the blood of such as he. “We shall send him home to you with all ceremony.”
The nobles turned to the Lady. They bowed, stiffly, with faces blank.
Then, slowly and in perfect observance of ceremony, they withdraw through the hall’s linden wood doors and march in procession from your family’s keep.
You try to hold your gaze motionless, eyes fixed on the painting-like image of your Lord and your weaponmaster and your happy Lady at their high marble table. Try as you may, however, something in the movement at an antechamber door pulls your attention. As if your eye were a fish on the hook, and the movement were the reeling-in of the fishing line. You know you must look at the door.
You look.
Othelmedir.
The dark-skinned, grey-haired mancer watches you. Dressed in his robes of satin like onyx, towering like a belltower, he casts the long shadow of an arm as he raises its physical counterpart, and beckons.
You feel yourself ripped from the memory. Not a painful tearing, but like the peeling off of a huge and dead scab. In a second the hall is gone.
You stand in a plain room of featureless stone. A small felt table stands between yourself and the tall mancer. Your senses turn instantly old. Not ‘slow’, but stretched and strained.
You are again the Cracked Cup Knight, dim soul, damaged vessel.
Othelmedir’s voice summons its distinctly deep, distinctly resonant sound.
“Your soul-to-sense tether is broken, sir. “Your cracked body can sustain it no more. “Throat, slit. Limbs, severed. Disemboweled. You have risen too often, your body is a cracked teacup. Can you understand? The motif of desire, which bridges the gap between soul, sense, and body – it is worn thin. “Your soul remains in good condition. One might say it is too hale. “Your sense by contrast is emaciated.”
Not now. Not in the place where your body now lies. Not with your Blue Lady on that Road familiar and strange, alone. Why does your body surrender now?
“Your Lady rang. “You two have gone far from our red lake, far along the Road of Graves. She pleaded that I restore you, once more, no matter the distance which separates us. “I cannot. “She would not understand. But you will, no matter that you do not wish to. “I cannot suture your soul-sense. It is beyond necromancy.”
The Indigo Lodge
The Kustodevite sect of mancers present the soul as a lodging house. A painted lodging house, with many floors, many rooms, many windows and doors. The house begins with the boy on the roof, waving a flag at the pigeons in the sky. It descends, through rooms and persons: the husband and wife dining on the balcony, the maid dusting curtains, the three old friends playing cards at a table on the porch. The lodge ends at the bottom, with the coffin-maker in the cellar.
Othelmedir watches you.
“Your own sense is not sufficient. Still, you might steal another’s. “I shan’t give you my own, ha ha ha. “But your teacup lies near Middlemoss, on a well-traveled stretch of The Road. “It is not likely that you shall find any sense. But, stranger things have occurred.”
Would it be YOUR sense? If you steal another’s sight and touch? There is no valor in that action. And even were you to take it, would the virtue - and sin - that is YOU be the same? You are hardly the same knight, if all the senses which affected that virtue - that sin – came from another.
“I have given you the correct diagnosis. “I go. Search the road or be done. “Know this: your Lady rang. And I answered. “I shall be repaid.”
Othelmedir vanishes.
You stand underneath The Road of Graves.
The underside of the epitaphs run out - pale and unweathered - before and behind. There is no soil, no encompassing dirt surrounding your cracked body. It is like you stand behind a reflection, one without stars, or a slate-colored sun, or sky.
With only the Buried.
They floated above your head. One Buried for every Road flagstone. They lay horizontal to you, staring at the top of your head from empty sockets: skeletons, wrapped and embalmed corpses. You find it disconcerting; not the staring, but that the Buried face toward you, face down.
Near one edge of the road, where four new stones must have been freshly appended, four Buried stare down from bodies only half-decomposed. A mother in a dress of wormholes. A father whose nose has been eaten away. Two children; boy, and girl.
You will want to sprint now. You’ll know why shortly. Your plate mail lacks its regular weight, nor makes its usual clamor. Each pounding step on the bottom of The Road will produce only a tinny *Tap. Tap. Tap.*
Take care which dead you pass under. The empty eyes may affix Baleful Judgements on you. Try keep under the skeletons, the long-dead, the empty bodies.
After five minutes and ten-thousand miles you will hear the reverberations of another set of steps. Barefooted steps. Behind you. Keeping time.
There are only two ways to look.
| Ahead The Road seems to have narrowed to only a few stones in width. The line of watching Buried overhead thins respectively. Only a narrow band of complete, floating skeletons remains to witness your passage. | Behind Where the Road of Graves ran there lies now only a bristling nothing, filled of static. At the center of this mouth there lurches a form. The tattered, bloody, ten-foot aspect of The Red King. |
|---|
Two things of smoke and mist will drop just before you. Call on your trained instinct for succor. Bring your Polished Steel out and cutting. You have time to strike only one of the mist things. Then the other throws itself at you.
Though it is only a vaporous thing, you feel your whole body stiffen as if bound. Though you may try to raise your sword, your arm heeds not your will.
Behind you, the bare-footed steps slow. Stalking in. You shut your mouth as the cloud creeps up your neck. Your face falls numb. The soft footsteps become softer still. Muffled. Now you hear only the breath of the cloud. Rasping. Vicious.
If you’ve reached this point, only two courses remain. Hold fast and succumb to The Red King.
Or, open your mouth and - inhale.
Fire creeps down your throat.
Your ears boom like drums in a cave.
Pressure fills your skull.
The Road dissolved.
Your eyes snap open.
The branches of the old oak tree spread like a thick and knobby spiderweb. The livid sky - that sky of the Time of Dying - lies behind the web of the tree. It seems to your sight, however, that the sky is in the foreground, the tree behind. It is as if all the tiny fragments of the firmament lie within reach of your fingertips, and behind them expands some trackless flat sky of wooden bark, only seen through the gaps in the blue. The sun is there, but no clouds.
You breathe.
The air that comes into your lungs does not burn, as did that poisonous cloud in your hallucination. But it seems like strange air. As if it were made of different gas. The air seems light, and has the slightly bitter taste of winter air. Yet now is the season of Summer. No visionary summer either, but the true, hot reality.
You sit up.
You see The Road of Graves. The tree under which you lay grows only a few yards from the nearest epitaphs.
This wind has a taste you do not recognize. And a cold stranger’s hand. Whatever ancient sense is in you, which now sees and touches your world, is unlike to your own. Your own lost sense. The flesh of your hands looks the same; scarred and stitched and calloused. Hmmm. You still feel the sting as you press the nail of that thumb against your index. Your face- ah. The touch of cold metal. Your helmet- Your Blue Lady.
As you rise - your muscles returning the sensations of someone else’s body - you’ll catch relieving sight of your Lady, approaching, then beside you.
“My Cracked Cup Knight. No, keep the motion from your limbs. You need not rise. All is a tranquil woodside scene. “Can you see the lines that worried my face? “Can you hear the song of my voice? “You have been lying for a canter of the sun. Rest longer, until that slate-color begins to tire. Here, I will hold your hands again.”
You feel her fingers close around your own calloused, stitched, scarred hands. You rest in this way, for a time.
When you feel ready, you look up again.
The sky and the trees seem normal to you now. The same slate-colored sun has begun to dip towards evening, but there are some hours still of daylight.
You find your armor, shield, and Polished Steel Longsword lying against a large root of the tree. As you lift your heavy scabbard and looped it around your waste, you touch the hilt. You can almost feel the tension within the sheath.
The Steel feels ready.