Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey (38 page)

The jar lid opens and she feels herself completely disoriented as Mowler removes the bag with her in it and bangs it on the table once, twice, thrice. Something in her side breaks and she is helpless to resist as the sorcerer reaches into the bag and grabs her, pinning her arms to her sides and squeezing the breath out of her.

She can’t see her surroundings, only rushing light as he throws her down on the table. She tries to fly, but something holds her down. Not Mowler, who is no longer touching her, not her injury, which, while extremely painful, is not completely debilitating. No, some force holds her there. She looks around her on the table and sees a circle of black symbols scrawled on the tabletop around her. She strains her wings against gravity, but to no avail. Her feet are rooted to the place, as if they had been doused with a quick-drying glue. She is not going anywhere, not now.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Mowler affirms.

She can move her head, so she looks around, as much to avoid having to look at Mowler as to assess her situation.

He is as hideous as ever. But there is something different about him now. Something has changed since the last time she saw him die. Burn scars in the shapes of writhing tentacles line his neck, spine, both jaw lines, and his chin—as if a fiery octopus had swallowed him up to the shoulders, then tried to pull the rest of him into its beak before he managed to free himself from its grasp with one last, desperate effort. He walks now with a gait that defies gravity, as if he is always about to fall flat on his face until some spectral puppet master violently pulls him upright. Pure evil ambition animates him in a perpetual Saint Vitus dance, a mockery of nature that makes death itself turn away in ashamed impotence. His limbs bend, jerk, and snap with such suddenness and at such awkward angles that Pomp wonders if his bones have been completely shattered.

Still, he moves swiftly, snatching up supplies from around the room with spastic accuracy. Pomp feels a cold chill, followed by a deep aching in her belly as she watches him grab a long, slender, curved knife that seems very familiar to her. After picking up a piece of chalk, he plucks a jar from a table other than the one to which Pomp is frozen.

This jar speaks. Screams, really.

She knows the voices.

“Doribell! Ilsie!” Pomp calls out.

But they are too busy screaming to hear.

Mowler shakes the jar so violently that Pomp can hear the ring of the metal lid and glass bottom as the fairies’ bodies bounce around inside. He then pours the pair out of the container and on to the floor. Their wings have been plucked off, and their backs are bleeding from the cavities where their wings used to be. One of them—Pomp thinks it’s Ilsie—shakes off her dizzies and tries to run away only to be grabbed by the teetering sorcerer who grasps one of her legs in both hands and snaps her knee backwards with a sickening crunch. Doribell is in too much shock to help her injured sister. She just sits up and stares at a wall.

“No!” Pomp screams. “Leave them alone!”

“Or what?” The madman turns to look at Pomp with a baleful glare. “You have no say in the matter,” he says, picking up Doribell and ripping the hair from her head like a spiteful child with a broken doll. Doribell screams, then stops as the stunning pain leaves her gasping and voiceless. “However, as a favor, you will get a foretaste of what is to come. But you will do so in silence!”

He thrusts a crooked arm at her, as if throwing something across the room. She finds her lips instantly sewn shut with some kind of rough, itchy thread that irritates the new puncture wounds that perforate her lips. She is helpless, able only to weep and watch.

Mowler lopes over to a corner of the room and wheels over a full-length mirror, positioning it so that Pomp can see herself standing on the table. He takes a piece of chalk and scrawls something on the floor halfway between her and the mirror. Then he writes across the mirror with a piece of soap. The flowing script resembles that which she has become accustomed to seeing: the language of devils and sorcerers, Hell’s alphabet. Next he retrieves Doribell and Ilsie, dangling them by their raw head and broken leg, respectively. He drops them, unresisting, onto a matrix of symbols on the floor, sets the knife down on the perimeter of the magic square, and kneels down with his back to Pomp. She can still see his every move in the mirror.

The old man’s eyes roll up and back into his head as he repeatedly chants the words “Kek kek agl agl nathrak”. He raises his hands toward the ceiling, palms up, then pulls his fingers to his palms, beckoning.

The mirror ripples, distorting the room’s reflection, then returns to normal. It ripples again, bulges from the flat glass, then roils, sending out glass bubbles that gently float through the air before touching the floor or some nearby object and shattering into a miniature shower of glass. Bubbles soon pour out of the mirror, and the room becomes a scintillating orchestra of popping globes and tinkling glass.

A hand emerges from the mirror. At the tip of each finger and on the back and palm of the hand are eyeballs. Each orb darts about, scanning the surroundings from every possible angle. Then another hand, also studded with eyes, emerges. The hands part the bubbles like a curtain.

The thing that issues forth from the face of the mirror is shaped like the headless body of a very fat man. Its entire body is littered with eyes—some brown, some green, some hazel, and some ice blue. Pomp wonders how it protects the eyes on the soles of its feet, which Pomp spots as it steps down onto the floor.

“Panopticus!” Mowler says. “What news from below?”

A voice sounds, but Pomp sees no mouth on the devil, only eyes.

“Archaentus, Pollyx, and Cant report that all is in position. Vespit nearly betrayed us to him, but we discovered the subterfuge and dealt with him accordingly. It will be a long time before he regains enough wherewithal to pose a threat.”

“And by then,” Mowler says, “I will have consolidated my rule. He will have no place to hide but under the scattered remains of Beelzebub himself. I should like to feed them both to the worms for several thousand years, bite by agonizing bite.”

“It would only be appropriate, my liege,” Panopticus says.

“In the meantime, though, I have a sacrifice to arrange. Are our other agents in position?”

“The Sultan’s head eunuch is prepared to open the floodgates at your command.”

“I trust that he hasn’t yet shown his hand?”

“No one suspects a thing, my master. Only you and he know the end game.”

“And what a glorious game, Panopticus. The greatest sacrifice ever to take place on the face of the Earth. The souls of tens of thousands freed from their mortal coil, almost all at once. Can you imagine the power that will be unleashed?”

“I can, my master, yes.”

“And I shall harness it all. No one will stop me, man or devil, from ruling the dominions of Hell!”

“The devils crave order more than anything else, master,” Panopticus says. “We are helpless to overcome the entropy within and around us, the entropy that the Lord of Flies seems to embrace, unless you come to instill order.”

“Then it is critical that you heed my commands, Panopticus. You will have your king when I snatch the Crown of Hell from the defeated Beelzebub. But our preparations must be carried out. You will go to the Pasha Mustafa Il-Ibrahim in disguise as a
traitor to the Holy Roman Empire. I’m sure you will impress him with your keen observations. Tell him something that he thinks only he knows. He will let you into his good graces. Then tell him that Emperor Joseph is building a secret weapon that will surely defeat the Ottoman Empire if it isn’t destroyed. He’ll want to consult with the sultan, but you must convince him that the sultan will take all credit for having discovered the threat and rooting it out. It’s in Pasha Mustafa’s best interest to take the matter into his own hands and capture the weapon with his own army. If the sultan is impressed with his pasha’s ingenuity and bravery, it is well. If the sultan takes exception to his brash actions, Mustafa will have, in the weapon itself, the greatest bargaining chip possible. The sultan will have no choice but to praise and publicly reward his pasha.”

Panopticus bows. “What shall I tell him this secret weapon is?”

“A cannon capable of destroying a city quarter or an entire village in one shot, hidden beneath Schonbrunn Palace.”

“Yes, master.” Panopticus bows and begins to slowly back away toward the mirror, maintaining his obeisant posture.

“Before you go,” Mowler says, “you will perform one more task for me. I’m sure you’ll find it enjoyable.”

“What is your will, master?”

“I am in need of a little makeover. My disguise takes more and more energy to maintain. I need to be able to keep Edelweir’s face without so much effort. You will do this for me.”

“Yes, master.”

Mowler holds up Doribell in one hand, the nasty curved dagger in the other.

“Then prepare to receive the sacrifice,” Mowler says.

Pomp watches as he draws the knife along Doribell’s length.

“Doribell!” Ilsie cries out, then sobs.

Panopticus makes a sound like a man who has just risen from a restful sleep and is stretching out, refreshed, a sound of gratification, of needs fulfilled.

“Ah!” the devil says. Pomp can only imagine him smiling. “Her death, seasoned with your malice, tastes good. But her sister’s sorrow is delicious to me. Delectable!”

“You shall have the second course when you have done as I have ordered. If you do
not
. . . .” Mowler smiles a rickety-toothed grimace, “. . . well, you know what I did to Tawdragari.”

Panopticus bows. “Hell will never forget such punishment as that, master. I willingly give you all.”

The devil holds his hand out toward Mowler’s face. Rays fan out from the eyes at the ends of his fingers, shattering the remaining glass bubbles between it and Mowler. The rays engulf the over-aged sorcerer, and Pomp watches with morbid curiosity as Mowler’s stooped back and limbs, all akimbo, straighten with the sound of snapping bone and tearing muscle. His face puffs out from skeletal thinness to some semblance of normalcy in mere seconds. A thin black mustache grows over his newly reddened lips. His teeth straighten with a series of snapping and crunching sounds. This transformation elicits from him a series of high-pitched shrieks that subside into low groans. Eventually a new voice emerges from a new body, both those of Graf Viktor Von Edelweir.

“Ah, much better!” he admires himself in the mirror. “I shall have to think carefully about how I wish to appear when I take over as ruler of Hell. I fancy a curly, blond-haired Lucifer would look quite handsome under the Crown of Hell. We shall see.”

“We shall, my master.”

“Then go with this, Panopticus!” Mowler says before slipping his knife’s fang into the hapless Ilsie, who mercifully faints away at the issue of blood. “Take the energy of this dying sprite and use it for the convincing of Pasha Mustafa Il-Ibrahim! Go quickly and do my bidding!”

The eye-studded devil walks backward into the mirror and pulls the bubbling glass veil closed with its hands. The face of the mirror flattens and cracks as the remaining bubbles in the air fall to the ground all at once, spraying the room with crystalline dust.

Mowler drops Ilsie’s limp body to the floor. A stream of blood trails out from beneath her.

The sorcerer-cum-Viktor turns to face Pomp.

“What you have seen is only a tiny view of what is to come. Think not of merely two sacrifices or two hundred or even two thousand. Entire armies, whole cities will fuel my rise to power over the regions of the damned. You see, my little friend, I don’t
fear condemnation for my sins. I embrace it. I know my fate lies in Hell. So why not become the ruler of my own fate? You shall see the sacrifice not of two meaningless fairies, but of two empires at once! And my dominion shall be greater than them both! Greater than the entire Earth!”

Pomp strains against the twine that holds her lips sewn shut.

“Amusing. I like your spirit! In fact, I shall save you for last. You shall watch your friends die first, then yours will be the final bit of energy needed to take me beyond the veil in a triumphal procession where I will snatch up Beelzebub’s crown and sit on the Eternal Throne!

“But I don’t want to squelch that fire of yours before its time.” He makes a grasping motion toward her, as if grabbing something out of the air, “So I will rescind my declaration of silence.”

The twine vanishes, and the needle-wounds in her lips heal in an instant.

She screams a stream of vindictive obscenity at him.