Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey Read online

  Pomp knows that Mowler is still alive. But where is he? Wherever he is, he is surely dangerous. Pomp must be ready to face him, to help Heraclix. Perhaps she should arm herself. No, not perhaps. She will yet. She will now. Now! She flies for Faerie!

  By the time Heraclix had roused himself from his vigil in the graveyard, the sky had darkened. The stars and moon shined down on the road leading back to Szentendre. Bright firelight lit up the open doorway of a tavern, inviting him in from the cooling night. He entered boldly, not caring about the whispered remarks of the locals or the murmured insults of a quartet of what appeared to be traveling dandies who glared at him as he walked in. What did it matter what they said? Had he not already been through Hell, and couldn’t he break their necks like twigs, should he choose? He had nothing to fear, nothing to regret. Nothing really mattered anymore.

  He spent and drank liberally and was surprised that, after a quarter cask, the alcohol began to have some slight effect, relaxing him and adding to his carefree attitude a touch of warmth and good cheer. “Huzzah!” he yelled with the crowd as a pair of mountebanks took the stage, juggling and jostling each other in an act that swiftly devolved into comedic violence before the two were removed from the stage by hook to a chorus of good-natured jeers.

  A bawdy cabaret followed, which sent the bar’s customers into a frenzy until the stage manager came out onto the stage to calm and shush the crowd. The manager was pelted with insults and rotting fruit. Still, he calmed the crowd and spoke in an exaggeratedly soft voice:

  “My friends, I beg your indulgence for silence. You see, my next performer is up past her bedtime . . .”

  “Pervert!” someone yelled.

  The stage manager shot a stabbing glance at the miscreant, who slid back into the shadows.

  “She is very young and sensitive,” the man continued, “but I assure you that your patience will be well-rewarded. For she is a virtuoso who, it is rumored, is soon to be invited to the imperial court to perform before the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, himself.”

  One of the dandies started to laugh, but his mirth ended in a weak chuckle under the collective glare of the audience.

  Tiny footsteps sounded across the stage as a young girl with straw colored hair and blue eyes, wearing a light blue dress, entered from behind a side curtain. She looked innocent but confident, ignoring the baseness of the crowd, determined to beautify this place with her voice, despite the circumstances in which she found herself.

  Any tension in the crowd melted away as the girl began her song, an old French lullaby. Heraclix was unsure who in the crowd understood the plaintive words, but they listened in a respectful silence that was only broken by the occasional sniffle. A longing sadness filled the room as she sang. Even the dandies nodded their approval.

  Heraclix knew the song.

  He remembered another voice singing that song, a voice from long ago, a voice arising out of the melding of his own and that of his beloved wife. Rhoda had sung that song, her voice airy and full of gladness . . . to be alive.

  He held the baby close to his chest, his back to the wind, sheltering the infant from the weather. Rain blew past them toward the pall-bearers, who carried their grim cargo ahead of the funeral party to the hillside graveyard.

  “Don’t cry, Rhoda. I’ll take good care of you.”

  Behind him, a light snow fell on a small, freshly-filled grave; in front of him, the church vomited flame into the night sky. Shouts came from the road at the bottom of the hill. He disappeared into the blackness before the townsfolk arrived.

  Beyond the hooded figure, the man who had claimed to be able to speak with the dead writhed in a stinking alleyway, clawing at his moon and star tattooed throat with bejeweled fingers.

  “That man was a charlatan,” the hooded figure said, “a purveyor of parlor tricks. But I, I can teach you where real power lies, Octavius.”

  He handed over a scroll.

  The writing was unlike anything the recipient had seen before, strange, alien. But a feeling of anticipation soon overpowered any fear that he might have initially felt.

  “We should talk,” the hooded man said.

  “We should talk,” Octavius repeated.

  He took one last look back at Szentendre, then faced east. The road ahead of him seemed to contract as he walked. He traveled a great distance as if in a moment and soon found himself in the midst of a city of white, plaster walled buildings that reeked of incense and hookah smoke. High above the buildings, the sky was pierced by bulbous minarets. The doorways of the dwellings were laden with silk curtains and brass lamps.

  The smell of the sea was on the air.

  His ears tickled with the sound of a language he had never before heard, a tongue that he thought would hold the promise of being able to tease out secrets from beyond this Earth, and possibly even beyond the veil of death.

  The girl’s song changed keys as she broke into a light aria, and a surge of hope broke through the gloom—a brightness rang forth through her voice, a burst of climactic optimism that left the place feeling a little warmer, a little lighter, a little happier. The crowd erupted into cheers.

  Heraclix could sense that Pomp was gone. But, at this time, he reasoned that it was for the better. He had business to attend to, somewhere to the east, alone.

  CHAPTER 14

  In the meadow beyond the graveyard, where blue and orange butterflies hover aloft on a gentle breeze, Pomp flies through the veil between realities to the realm of Faerie. A subtle change in the direction of the breeze is the only indicator that she has passed into another world. She wonders if Mowler could find his way back to Faerie and what he might do once he gets there. The Fey would have their fun for a moment after his arrival, but the sorcerer would eventually have his way. The consequences would be tragic. This thought compels her to move swiftly through the realm. She will spend time with her sisters later. For now, she has business to attend to in one of the darker corners of Faerie.

  Not all parts of the fairy realm are as pleasant as the place through which she travels. Even innocence has its dark side, and this darkness manifests itself in a few small areas on the peripheries of Faerie, where the border between Pomp’s realm and Heraclix’s world are thin: graveyards, murder scenes, or battlefields, for instance. Pomp understands, now, the real danger of traveling through such places. Where once she playfully flew and frolicked, she knows now that her quest will be difficult. Still, she has a purpose, and she must enter one of the darkest of these areas, the place known as “The Armory.”

  In a land where whimsy and frivolity are perpetual, there are inevitably standing structures whose construction and purpose have long since been forgotten, not because of the passage of time, which matters little to immortals, but because the attention of the land’s inhabitants is so fleeting and so easily scattered to whatever shiny thing passes by. The Armory is just such a place.

  To call it a structure is misleading, though it is obvious that some guiding hand organized it at some point in what the otherworlders would call the past. The structure is a perfect circle of lofty oaks, eighty feet from root to top branch. In the wrong light, one sees skulls in the bark, tentacles in the branches, and sharp claws in the roots, a twelve-headed wooden monstrosity.

  She has never been inside the Armory before, though she has heard of it. What fairy hasn’t heard the tales? As she slips between a pair of giant oaks, she feels threatened, as if she does not belong here—as if she is an intruder, a profane presence in a sacred space.

  She anticipates that Mowler, having once tried to take her life, will try to take the lives of many of her kin—those who raised him as a child. And, since they are too busy playing to defend themselves, she will attack Mowler before he can come to Faerie, before he can do any more harm. She has come here to prepare for this inevitable confrontation.

  “Halt!” a booming voice calls out from somewhere in the canopy above.

  “State your name!” another voice cries fr
om a slightly different direction.

  “Yes,” yet another says, “whooo are you?”

  She looks up to see twelve pairs of yellow eyes leering down at her. The eyes flash and blink in such a confusing way that she doesn’t know if they are attached to faces at all. Then her sight adjusts a bit to the gloom. She suspects that she sees something . . . very odd . . . but she cannot be sure.

  “I am called Pomp,” she says, hoping to verify her suspicions.

  “Pomp Cimbridotter, Raiser of Man,” one of the twelve says. “What is your business here?”

  She tries to stare at one of them, hoping to see it a bit better, but the whirling crown of eyes is so distracting that she cannot concentrate long enough to see clearly.

  “I am here to arm myself.”

  “Who invades the realm?”

  “No one . . . yet.”

  “Yet?”

  “Mowler will invade.”

  “Mowler invades? The unhappy son is back?!” a chorus of voices sounds.

  “Yes!” Pomp presses, taking advantage of the guardians’ lack of chronological perspective. After all, if they didn’t know about “yet” yet, they would never understand her and never help her. “Yes, Mowler invades!”

  “Open the doors of the Armory,” one says in a surprisingly calm, solemn voice.

  The others grow silent.

  The ground in the middle of the circle tears open into a fissure from which rays of bright light shine forth.

  Pomp looks away, up into the trees. A radiant white light bathes the Armory up to the topmost branches. She sees them clearly now, twelve immense owls of different breeds, whose heads rotate to reveal that each possesses not one, but three pairs of eyes and three beaks. Their faces spin around their heads, causing Pomp to look away from the bizarre congeries and down into a white rectangular pit that has opened up before her.

  A stone ramp leads down into the pit. Pomp descends slowly, allowing her eyes to adjust to the dazzling brightness of the place. The walls are composed of brilliant white dirt, pebbles, and roots; the purest she has ever seen. At the bottom of the ramp is a stone dais raised on the backs of twelve carved marble dragonflies. Atop the dais is a white bow and a quiver of exactly twelve arrows.

  She had seen them used before, back then, when an army of men had invaded through a rift created by magicians at Mohenjo-daro. Cimbri, a very brave and well-renowned soldier with a keen sense of humor, as well as a close relative of Pomp’s, shot a love arrow at an enemy lieutenant’s horse. The beast was quickly filled with erotic desire, not for the nearest horse, but for the nearest horse’s rider, who happened to be the general who had most strongly stoked the fire of war in his men. The lieutenant’s horse had felt a strong sense of admiration for the man but was now inspired by something other than a courageous heart. The horse’s vision was corrupted by lust. Epaulets looked like a saddle, the general’s coattails looked like a . . . well, a tail, and the leader’s spit-shined boots appeared rather hoof-like in the black stirrups. The passionate beast, in trying to mount the man, dismounted the man. The general was quickly turned to pulp in the confusion of hooves. The forlorn horse, enraged, turned on his companions and a general (or general-less) chaos ensued at the front.

  Cimbri then flanked the enemy and shot a pair of dancing arrows into three other officers, one on either side of the advancing army and one in the middle. These began a silly dance in which they mimicked, with great accuracy, Pomp thought, the actions of a chicken whose feet had been glued to the floor before having its tail lit on fire. The army was quickly coming to the conclusion that some madness had overtaken their leaders. Still, they were able to hold their formation together, just barely.

  Cimbri’s next three arrows, carefully placed sleep arrows shot into the remaining officers, precipitated a rout. The lieutenant’s horse, still looking for the jellied general, was left behind and died at a ripe old age after years of aimlessly galloping around the countryside, providing entertainment for any fairy with enough patience to set up a scarecrow and clothe it as a general.

  Now Pomp reaches out and takes the bow and quiver of arrows. It’s her turn to take the weapons. She will yet play Cimbri’s part. She looks up to the owls, each of which nods three faces in approval.

  “Go forth!” the thirty-six beaks call out in unison. “Destroy Mowler! We depend on you for the defense of the realm, Pomp Cimbridotter.”

  She exits the Armory then immediately flies through to the world of men. Perhaps she will encounter Mowler on the other side—or at least be closer to her target than when she left Heraclix at the graveside meadow. There is only one way to find out, so she plunges on.

  Upon entering the mortal’s world, she is engulfed in the midst of smoke and confusion. The world spins around her, and she is battered to-and-fro by a jostling mob that is entirely heedless of her presence above their heads. She is thrown from staff to pitchfork and back again, volleyed toward a torch. She barely stops in time to avoid being singed by the flames. Then she is unceremoniously swatted out of the air by the random swing of a peasant’s wheat flail. She lands in tall weeds along the path that the mob is taking toward their destination.

  There is something familiar about this place. Pomp has been here before. She looks around, but it’s difficult to see from the ground, here in the weeds. And where is all of this smoke coming from?

  Pomp flies up—careful, this time—to avoid the farm implements and torches that bob dangerously up and down above the mob. When she clears the trees, she sees the source of the smoke down the trail: Nicklaus’s little cottage is on fire! The windows have been broken out, and the flaming door is ajar. Fingers of fire shoot out of every opening, wrapping up and around the roof, embracing the structure in a churning death grip of immolation.

  The mob ascends the path, under a cloud of belligerent voices, up into the hills. They are led by the immaculately dressed Bohren who shows not one sign of blood or smoke on his clothing. Pomp wonders how this could be, then turns her thoughts back to the matter at hand.

  The group’s tone and direction hint at their intent, then Bohren makes it explicit:

  “Death to the Auslander! Death to the Serbian pig!” Bohren yells, goading the rabble.

  Pomp deliberates. The Serb admitted to committing war crimes and atrocities. Even his severed hand carried on the work of death, causing her friend, Heraclix, to murder a soldier. Surely, the Serb’s legacy of hate deserves a fitting end. It is just. However, the Serb had healed hundreds, maybe thousands of others, including Heraclix. He seemed to have become almost kindly—truly repentant. But he can never fully restore the lives he has taken. Wasn’t he condemned to Hell already? Could his own death make up for the deaths he had caused, restore balance to the scales of justice? And what if it couldn’t? Would Hell benefit from one more inhabitant condemned to be reborn as a maggot, grown into a devil-fly or a demon-swine to be the plaything of arch-devils and sorcerers? How would she live with herself, knowing that she had let this man—however wicked in the past, this man who helped and healed her best friend—let him die at the hands of an angry mob and let him be damned, eternally, to Hell and misery?

  No. Poor Nicklaus had died today already. Pomp won’t let the mob take Vladimir Porchenskivik.

  Bohren presses into the forest, unnecessarily hacking down small branches and slashing tall ferns, giving his followers the false impression that he is blazing the way before them, providing egress for their collective anger and fear. Others down the line follow his example, everyone seeking glory, some veering completely off the path just to thwack at a branch, like children demonstrating their bravado on a defenseless tree. Cowards!

  There are well over a hundred, all told. Impossible to stick them all with arrows, Pomp believes. Then she remembers Cimbri’s example, how the great warrior used a few well-placed arrows to defeat an entire army. Pomp can do the same!

  She flies ahead and perches herself on a high branch that overarches the path. After carefull
y selecting an arrow, she aims for Bohren, waits until he comes into range, then lets the arrow fly. The projectile hits him squarely in the neck and he instantly collapses into a heap without so much as a peep of surprise or a grunt of pain. He is on the ground in less than two seconds, sleeping and loudly snoring. The line milled to a halt around the crumpled figure of their ersatz leader. Two of the men directly try to lift him to his feet and rouse him from his slumber. But Bohren is unresponsive. A woman further back cries out: “The Serb has killed Bohren with his dark magic! Kill the Serb! For Bohren!”

  “For Bohren!” the crowd responds, then chants as it marches, inexorably, to the Serb’s castle.

  The two men drop Bohren, who is quickly trampled by the mob. His clothes do not look so good now. The mob, enraged that their leader has fallen, speeds the pace of its march up the hills, through the forest, toward their target destination. They surge with a newfound energy, eager to find the object of their wrath.

  “That didn’t work so well,” Pomp says.

  Thankfully, she can fly straight through the trees, as the crow flies, deviating little from her course, while the coarse mob must follow the meandering path. She waits beyond the mouth of the path in the clearing. The first man through is a short, skinny man, slovenly, with light brown hair in a bowl cut. He walks with a bent spine and hunched shoulders, though he is strong enough to wield a maul. The man smiles and looks around as he comes into the open circle surrounding the castle, looking about in stupid awe, gawking as the rest of the mob starts to pour out of the woods behind him.