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

  “Ia! Ia! Sussilient k’klee!”

  This he repeated many times—so many, in fact, that Heraclix grew bored of counting. Heraclix felt certain that day had turned to night outside as the wizard continued the mantra. A loud snap seized the golem’s attention. This was quickly followed by a crackling sound that filled the room. The temperature in the room plummeted—both Heraclix’s and the old man’s breath became visible, and frost shot through the room, veining the walls, ceiling, and floor with ice, causing some of the glass instruments in the room to crack or shatter. Heraclix’s skin tightened in the cold, causing his stitches to strain against his flesh.

  At this the man, with a deftness and speed that Heraclix had not seen before, set down the book, opened the jar, and grabbed the shivering fairy (whose brittle wings showed laced frost despite her natural invisibility), swept up the dagger, and stood to his full height in the circle. Heraclix could not recall ever having seen Mowler stand so tall and confident. It frightened him.

  Mowler lifted the dagger in his right hand—the barely-visible fairy in his left—then brought the two together, sliding the fang of the blade into Pomp. Her yelp was not drowned out by the magician’s change of chants.

  “Kek kek agl agl nathrak,” he said in slowly increasing volume as a form took shape from the candle smoke. A memory started to take shape in Heraclix’s mind, passed into the present, then dissipated before he could fully grasp it. Still, he knew that he had seen something like this before. Somewhere. Somewhen.

  Mowler removed the dagger and cast Pomp to the floor between the magic circles. A sparkling mist formed in the circle opposite the wizard. Each drop of blood that escaped from Pomp’s body added to the concrescence of the apparition. A bulbous pair of multifaceted eyes appeared beneath a tall golden crown. Heraclix had seen this manifestation before in one of Mowler’s books: Beelzebub, Lord of Flies. Below the neck, it was dressed sharply—all frills and gaudy lace under a dark purple riding coat. Its claws showed from under the sleeves, needle-like and dripping green venom. The insectile demonic eyes confused the onlookers, so that everyone in the room—Heraclix, Pomp, and the sorcerer—thought that the demon was looking his, her, and his way, respectively. The demon’s proboscis, however, pointed directly at the sorcerer.

  It spoke, like the buzzing of a thousand flies, in a tongue Heraclix had not before heard, nor could he comprehend it now. Mowler spoke, but his words were equally meaningless to the golem. The only thing that Heraclix understood at this point was that the magician’s sacrifice of this entirely innocent creature had pushed his fear beyond horror, into rage. He did not have the heart to stand up for himself, he admitted, but his heart couldn’t contain the anger that drove him to stand up for the girl. Enough was enough!

  He stepped out of the shadows, determined to kill the old man once and for all. His left eye twitched of its own accord, eager to do the deed. One of his hands clenched open, shut, open, shut, curling into a tight fist then relaxing, slack, as if deciding whether to gently caress or to pummel the sorcerer. Mowler was oblivious, preoccupied with his shouted negotiations with the devil, Beelzebub, who was beginning to show signs of acquiescence: a tilt of the golden-crowned head, the wringing of clawed hands, a tone of measured restraint—even respect—in the buzzing voice. The old man seemed emboldened. His greedy eyes widened in triumph. A maniacal smile scarred his face. His eyes focused in condescension for the Lord of Flies.

  Heraclix leaped, propelling his powerful frame at the old man’s back with all the brute strength he could muster.

  He might as well have tried to jump through a stone pillar.

  A lightning aura around the magician’s circle momentarily flashed as Heraclix hit the barrier. He vaulted backwards almost as far as he had lunged, his body shot through with hot pain that forced him, writhing, to the ground.

  Mowler turned, only for a moment, to see what had happened, a mixed expression of curiosity and wicked humor on his face.

  And in that split second, streams of flies, each accented with tiny licks of flame, poured into the corners of the room through the eight vertices where the walls, floor, and ceiling met. They shot out like burning black tentacles, a flaming insectoid octopus converging on the sorcerer within his circle, feeling their way to their master’s nemesis. Each of the eight swarms struck at the barrier around the circle, and each was immediately repelled. Mowler, agitated by the flies and the lapse in concentration that Heraclix had caused him, turned with renewed energy and focus toward the demon, chanting again in that unknown tongue, which caused Beelzebub to cringe and cower, dropping to one knee with a weight that shook the floor.

  Heraclix was surrounded by flies. His body smoked and portions of him smelled like cooked meat. The wracking pain in his body and head subsided, but the insects persisted. He noticed a few of the flaming insects burrowing between the seams of his flesh, having abandoned the wizard for easier game. The golem swatted wildly, killing dozens of the black fiends at a swing, and showers of sparks spattered across the floor. The swarm left him alone long enough for him to sweep the dead carcasses away, in preparation for the next onslaught.

  But the next onslaught did not come.

  The reason was as simple as this: corruption begets corruption, and nothing is quite so corrupt as a recently deceased demonic fly, especially one bred from the damned larval soul of a lecher whose acts in life were so debased that Beelzebub had made sure that the miscreant became his servant, rather than letting the erstwhile pervert rise through the ranks of the abyss in the service of some other, less disciplined prince of darkness. Astaroth, Belial, and Dispater were, after all, rather “untidy” with their demonic hordes.

  This dead demonic carcass, its soul fled to the deep pits of larva, condemned to grow into another round of hateful and tortured physicality, ad infinitum, tumbled away from Heraclix’s sweeping hand. It rolled right onto the chalked edge of Mowler’s protective circle, breaching the hallowed barrier, corrupting it with a corpse. A rift opened in the magical protective fabric that had, heretofore, assured the sorcerer’s safety. It took less than a second for the black tentacles to withdraw from Heraclix, reform, and writhe in through the opening. Soon the wizard was crawling with thousands of the fiery biting flies. With the wizard kept busy by his minions, Beelzebub knocked down the candles that anchored his temporary prison. The molten wax cascaded over the binding sigils, creating several paths of escape for the demon. Beelzebub dissolved away into a cloud of flies with the hint of a smile, if such a thing were even possible, then exited the room through a crack in the wall.

  Seeing the wizard screaming on the floor, Heraclix took the opportunity to follow the demon’s lead. He picked up Pomp, grabbed a pouch of gold coins that he knew the sorcerer kept near the door—along with a hooded cloak—and reached for the door. He looked back, nearly mesmerized by the cloud of flies, which flew in a vortex, carried aloft by the smoke that was quickly filling the room. Flames spread out underneath the tornado of insects, fanned by their wings. The fire spread in arcs across the floor and slashed up the sorcerer’s robes. A table of broken beakers ignited into flame, setting a wall and the curtains ablaze. As he opened the door, Heraclix could feel air rushing into the room, feeding the increasing inferno.

  Heraclix threw on the cloak, cradled the semi-conscious Pomp with one arm and walked out into the darkened street between tall buildings that loomed overhead like a murder of ravens. The eyes and mouths of the buildings’ blue facades soon lit up yellow with lantern light at the first cries of “fire!” Alarm bells emptied the buildings of their residents. People poured out of their dwellings and ran to see the conflagration. The streets were choked with streams of people as thick as the flies in Mowler’s apartment. Heraclix turned, with Pomp, into an empty alleyway to avoid the crowds.

  She looked up at him, alive, but breathing shallow little breaths. “You are taking me to stay with you. Why?”

  He hesitated, cradling her in his arm like a child. “I don’t
quite know why. I suppose I just feel like I should. It doesn’t seem fair that death should take you.”

  “I have heard in my ears of death,” she said. “Will I die?”

  “No, the morning is coming. You will see another day,” he said, not sure if it was true, but feeling that it was the right thing to say. He sat down in the alley with his back against a wall, still holding her close to his chest to shelter her from the cool air.

  She drifted off, for the first time in her eternal existence, into sleep. Heraclix wondered what one who has never before slept might dream for the first time. He wondered, also, if he would ever sleep or dream again. Meanwhile, the rising sun illuminated the walls of Mowler’s apartment building to match the glow of the flame-tongues that flickered out of the windows, one fire to cleanse the night, the other to awaken a new day.

  CHAPTER 2

  Morning comes, like he said it would. The sun shines and she gets up and flies, free. Tall buildings and alleyways can’t hold her, not here. But she isn’t leaving without a little fun. She is a fairy, after all. How else would she leave a human city?

  First, the monks. They are out chanting, so early in the morning, all in a line. They must be disturbing people. She flies under the first one’s robes and yanks on his loincloth. At least she thinks it’s his loincloth. She doesn’t have time to check closely; he is yelping like a beaten dog, and the line of monks is collapsing all around her. Time to go.

  Next, the city guards, that pair leaning up against the wall. Too lazy! She slides one of the guards’ daggers out of its scabbard and pokes the other in the rear. The stabbed one shouts. The dagger falls to the ground. A fight starts. Now they will be alert!

  And what is this? There, a baby! Fussing in a flower-adorned basket. So high up above the dirty streets where the peasants walk. This child is clean, as clean as the shining marble patio beneath the basket.

  Pomp peeks into the apartment. Beautiful paintings of beautiful women and men adorn the walls. Silver trays are strewn with fruit and Turkish Delights. A noble lady dressed in rich silks argues with a servant over a broken vase at their feet.

  Maybe this is why the baby is beginning to cry.

  It looks like the mother has put the child out for some fresh air, or to keep the noise of its bawling out of the house so she can hear herself yell. She won’t mind if the crying stops. Besides, if she can buy such fine things as silver and silk, she can buy another baby. One that cries less, perhaps.

  Pomp lifts the basket up into the air and flies away with it. The mother runs out onto the patio, but it’s too late. The baby stops crying. The mother starts.

  He’s heavy, and she sinks, but she doesn’t drop the basket. She arcs down and accelerates. Ahead of her, the air is torn like a cloth. It’s always like this when she travels between the land of men and the land of fairies. The cloth is mankind’s world. Through the torn holes is the land of her sisters, Faerie. She chooses a hole and takes the baby through to her homeland.

  She takes care of the boy. He grows—such a strange thing—into a man. He is happy until he is a man. They give him everything he wants, the fairy folk do. Then, now that he is a man, he is unhappy. He is, in fact, very angry.

  Why does such a sweet boy grow into such an angry old man? This is Pomp’s question.

  “Why must I grow old and die?” is his question. “You all keep on living. You don’t change. I don’t want to change! I don’t want to die!”

  The afterimage of the angry old man fades, overshadowed and replaced by Heraclix’s engulfing frame above her. He is enormous. He blocks out the sun. But the sun has jumped in the sky. It’s moving faster than usual, Pomp notices. Pomp must be moving faster than usual, too. She is here in the alley; she is there in Faerie; she is here in the alley. How can this be? It is almost too much to think about.

  “You’re back,” she says.

  “I’m back? I was never gone. You were,” he says, amused.

  “Gone where? I am here”—she touched her hands to their respective shoulders—“I am always here.”

  He studies her with the red right eye, the one she does not know.

  “While you’ve been sleeping,” he says, “I’ve been thinking, and something’s come to me, an intimation, like knowledge out of nowhere,” he scrunches his brows together, “but from somewhere.”

  She looks at him, confused.

  He stares at her. “You’ve never slept before, have you?”

  “What is ‘slept?’”

  He has so many words in his mouth that her ears do not know.

  A smile tears his face. “That’s what I thought. What did you dream about?”

  “What is ‘dream?’”

  His smile sags back into a scar, which puckers and rolls as he thinks, concentrates, looks for the right words.

  “What did you see, right before you saw me?”

  “The angry old man.”

  “No, I mean just now, before you opened your eyes.”

  “I see blackness when I close my eyes. It is why I don’t like to do it.”

  “But this time you saw something, didn’t you?”

  “Before I open my eyes to see you, I see the angry old man.”

  “That was a dream. You didn’t really see Mowler, you just thought you saw him.”

  “I see the old man, then I see you.”

  “But that can’t be true. Mowler, the wizard, died before you saw him in your dream. It was an illusion. How could he be there, being dead? How can you be sure it was really him?”

  She pauses for a moment, thinking, then says: “You say you think I don’t sleep?”

  “I say you did not sleep before this time, yes,” he folds his arms in self-satisfaction.

  “How could you know I don’t sleep?” she asks.

  He tries to recall and document the source of his knowledge that fairies did not sleep. Strain as he might, he can’t pull the thoughts out from the cloud that fills his head.

  “I don’t know,” he says, finally.

  “Then we agree!” she says. “I don’t know, you don’t know.”

  “Not necessarily,” he holds up a finger, gesturing his disagreement. “I know fairies don’t sleep—I just don’t remember how I know. You, on the other hand, remember things in the wrong order because you have dreamed for the first time.”

  “What is ‘remember?’”

  He shakes his head and covers his face with his hands.

  Pomp climbs off of Heraclix’s lap and sits down in front of him.

  “You say you saw the angry old man.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “He says he doesn’t want to die.”

  “Had you met me before the old man said that he didn’t want to die?”

  “No. He is with us when he says it.”

  “Us?”

  “Pomp and her sisters. And he is not the old man. He is the boy.”

  “Now I’m thoroughly confused.”

  “Pomp brings him to our home, and he grows into the angry old man.”

  “Mowler?”

  “I don’t know if Mowler is the same man.”

  Heraclix stands up, blinks his eyes, makes strange grumbling noises.

  “You don’t like Mowler!” Pomp says.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Me neither.”

  Heraclix sounds desperate: “This old man you saw—why was he angry?”

  “He does not want to get old. He doesn’t want to change. He wants to be like the fairies, not a man. But he is a man. He never wants to die.”

  “And does he hate fairies?”

  Pomp begins to shiver as a cold, uncomfortable feeling trickles down her spine.

  “Pomp thinks so.”

  “Would the angry old man . . .” Heraclix pauses, “. . . would he kill a fairy so that he did not have to die?”

  Pomp nods. She is shaking.

  Heraclix is thinking, looking out into somewhere, but nowhere, looking for
something Pomp cannot see.

  “What do you see?” Pomp asks.

  “The past. Or at least a part of it.”

  “What is ‘past?’”

  “It’s what happened before now.”

  Pomp looks up at Heraclix with a skeptical squint.

  “I met you in Mowler’s apartment. You came there in a jar. Before, you were free. And I have a hunch that I might have once been free.”

  “But Mowler pushes you around.”

  “That’s precisely it. What did I have to fear from him? I am physically superior to him in every way: stronger, faster. Yet I didn’t fight back.”

  “You should.”

  “But I didn’t. Something held me back.”

  “What holds you back?”

  “Guilt.”

  “What is ‘guilt?’”

  “‘Guilt’ is feeling bad for something you’ve done.”

  “Why do you have guilt?” Pomp asks.

  “I don’t know, exactly. But I think it might have something to do with . . .” Heraclix stops.

  “With what?”

  “With whatever happened to me before I awoke in the cauldron of blood.”

  “Is this ‘remember?’”

  “No. I don’t remember.”

  “But you have guilt.”

  “Somehow, yes.” He shakes his head and forces a laugh. “You must think I’m crazy.”

  “It’s all right,” she consoles him. “I am still bound to you.”

  “Bound to me?” He looks around as if an answer to his question is somehow in the air, if he could only find it on the wind.