by Dave Hangman
in Issue 148, May 2024
“A man’s greatest challenge is to hunt the adur within him.”
Sentence Jarati
“Damn pįołedů!” bellowed Benthel completely inebriated as he tried to pour himself one last swig from his black flask containing the spirit he distilled himself. The bottle was empty despite his attempts to get one last drop of his concoction. He looked at it with glazed eyes and grumpily slammed it down on the table. “Damned pįołedů!” he repeated in the pasty voice of a drunkard. “Because of you, I’ve gone halfway around the world,” he shouted, “and I will never return to my people to practice my medicine,” he added, sobbing.
Jrig watched him unperturbed, sitting in the shadows inside his ghorfa. It was a vaulted room built of adobe with a single entrance that was stacked on top of others to form multi-story structures. His room was at the top, on a fourth floor. The adobe structures formed the perimeter of a large courtyard. In Takorah there were no streets but only courtyards connected by narrow tunnels and alleys. In each courtyard, steep zigzagging stairways gave access to the ghorfas, as if they were the cells of a great beehive.
They had been stranded in Takorah for ten long months now, between the arid desert and the even more barren coastline populated by the skeletons of ships and cetaceans bleaching their bones in the sun on the torrid sand. He and Benthel had become in a few months two more skeletons in that desolate landscape.
The healer got up suddenly and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” asked Jrig.
“To get drunk.”
“You’re already drunk.”
“Well, even more so!” bellowed Benthel, jumping up and stumbling over the sparse furniture. “I’m sick of this place and of chewing this damn sand!” he complained, referring to the dust that every afternoon brought the hot wind from the desert.
“I didn’t ask you to come with me,” replied Jrig irritated.
“You are my lasnyk! But you have no more honor than Salsenim Dowa,” he indicated, shaking his finger. The alcohol was making Benthel unable to control his verbal incontinence. “You don’t respect the ethical code of spirit men. You’re like the Kalruni. Worse, you’re like your filthy brothers the pįołedů,” he accused bitterly.
“Look who’s talking to me about honor, a slimy drunkard.”
“A spirit man,” he bellowed, facing the albino, “who respects his four marks!”
“Are you going to slowly poison me like you did with Salsenim Dowa?” Jrig asked sarcastically.
“A spirit man is forbidden to kill his lasnyk.”
“You don’t say! You want to stop being my vedeny?” Jrig stood up, fed up. “Then go ahead, I’ll release you from your damn engagement.”
“That’s not the way it works. You don’t even know how to behave like a lasnyk,” the healer mocked. “In Darhamheb I saved your life. Then I should have gotten out of your bonds.”
“Why didn’t you? Who was stopping you?”
“In Tushrata I helped you with your plan and from there to Belbapur I warned you a thousand times against that whore.”
“Get the hell out of here, damn it!”
“You are no longer my lasnyk!” Benthel shouted and stepped out onto the landing that overlooked the void from the fourth floor. “My life belongs to me alone again,” he said, beating his chest with one hand.
“You’re going to kill yourself!”
“Does that matter to you?”
As soon as he took the first step he stumbled and his body rolled down the stairs. He felt the cobblestone digging into his ribs and his head bouncing off the steps. Frightened, he clutched at a wooden beam with one arm. He had half his body dangling in the void. When he raised his eyes, he saw that Jrig had a firm grip on his clothes and his other arm. He had been faster than his own fall. Benthel’s face was now the pure reflection of fear. The pįołedů pulled him with effort as if he were a heavy bundle and hauled him up the ladder.
“You’ve got a gash. You’re bleeding. Get in!” he lifted him up. “Lie down!” Jrig ordered firmly.
He forced him to lie down on a straw mattress and with a rag put pressure on his skull wound while with the other hand he tried to see if anything was broken. He would only get a few bruises. Benthel looked at him gratefully and closed his eyes. He was very tired. Jrig didn’t have to wait long to see his friend asleep, overcome by alcohol. He tucked him in with a blanket. It was stupid, it was hot enough.
“Get some rest! I’ll get something for dinner,” he said, but the healer hadn’t listened to him for a while.
He went down to the harbor, towards the taverns, but did not enter any of them. Instead, he checked the few ships anchored at their docks. They were all headed south, to Droka and Koduvai and even to distant Belbapur. No one knew of any ships heading north to the Open Sea through the dangerous Point of the World to the Spirit Men’s Islands. No Jarati or Koduvar sailor would undertake that route. He was told that perhaps in Shuruq or Orisar he would find a longship that would make that journey, but not in Takorah.
It was dusk when he went out the city’s east gate to visit the small tent camps that the caravans used to set up on both sides of the Vudrum River. There they were housed for the first few weeks after his arrival. He learned that in about a fortnight a small caravan would be leaving for the north, towards Eladur, crossing the desert of Adar. Perhaps from there they could find another caravan to cross the Jaraz mountain range to Orisar. Without hesitation, he closed the deal for the journey.
When Jrig told Benthel of his plans the next day he saw that, even without saying a word, the healer’s eyes sparkled with enthusiasm.
“From Orisar you can embark for Hidden Island,” Jrig said. “There our paths will diverge.”
“Is it because of what I told you yesterday?” Benthel wanted to know in embarrassment. He felt that his lasnyk had decided to get rid of him. “I was very drunk,” he justified himself.
“You were right. You’ve long since earned your fifth mark. The time has come to stamp it.”
“We’ll do it when we part,” said the healer, postponing the decision.
“That’s all right. Maybe on the way we can hunt an adur,” commented the pįołedů, making it clear that he wished to settle that conversation.
Jrig would never have imagined that there were so many different kinds of desert. First, they faced the sandy desert. A sea of immense dunes that, like waves of fine sand, constantly changed shape and, at the same time, remained unperturbed. Then came the stony desert, if possible even more unforgiving. An immense plain of coarse sand and black stones cracked by the sun that wore out men and beasts. Then an ancient salt lake appeared, dry for an eternity. A hard crust of petrified saltpetre.
Finally, rising red and ochre on the plain, they entered the rocky desert. Naked rock punished by the sun, where the wind had swept from its summits all traces of sand and vegetation. The Jarati assured that voices, screams and laments were heard in it during the dawns. And so, it was. According to them, they were the restless souls of the travelers who had perished among those rocks and of the diabolical beings that had devoured them and were now looking for new prey.
Long before dawn, when it was still dark, Jrig would go out alone in search of the voices among the rocks. His race brothers pįołedů believed in the power of the mythical lords of the waters, the heavens and the earth. He believed in nothing. Whatever faith he had professed had been impaled alongside his enemies far to the north. Every morning he returned with a prey, a goat, a hare, a lizard or a bird, but he never caught any of his elusive demons.
“Will you hunt an adur tonight?” The Jarati asked him every day.
They seemed to encourage him in his fruitless quest, perhaps interested, Benthel thought, in his continuing to provide them with good meat. Little did they know that these poor creatures were the product of his pent-up anger.
He became so obsessed with the saber-toothed beast that he dreamed of it. It was his way of escaping his disappointment, his unfulfilled need to feel loved. He imagined that the beast’s head was as big as his chest and that in one bite with its sharp fangs it would rip his heart out.
“That’s how ruthless Pudu had been,” he confessed to Benthel when he revealed the contents of his dreams. Even he himself realized its obvious meaning.
The healer kept silent, but he would have liked to remind him that the seemingly innocent girl was the worst of monsters.
One morning he brought the body of a wild cat. From its skin he made a small cloak that covered only his shoulders and gave him an even fiercer appearance. The Jarati shouted excitedly that he had finally caught an adur. Jrig felt an intense bitterness as he realized that he too had been deeply deceiving himself.
At last, they arrived at Eladur, a small fortified village, half rock half adobe, situated on a steep escarpment above the rocky Todra Gorges. The valley floor was the seasonal bed of a small stream that quickly became a dangerous runoff after any unpredictable torrential rainfall. The fortress was crowned by defense towers designed to protect the houses, crops and the few palm groves that grew along the stream.
Time seemed to have stopped there. There were no taverns, not even a market worthy of the name. The people disappeared during the day, busy in their painful tasks, and only at nightfall the city revived timidly around a few convulsive nocturnal dens that sprang up around the so-called ‘readers of lives’. They were a mixture of alchemists, magicians and sorcerers. The locals claimed that they could perform all kinds of wonders, from transmuting matter to manipulating natural laws and, above all, they were said to be able to captivate wills.
It was in one of these places that Jrig learned that the city’s name was the contraction of a Jarati expression meaning ‘house of the adur’. In those lands everything seemed to revolve around that elusive mythological beast, which he was beginning to find annoying. He was even more surprised to learn that eladur was also the Jarati word for enchantment, sorcery. It didn’t refer to the city being enchanted, or even harboring the ‘readers of lives’ or some other kind of magical power, but that the city itself was and was there by sheer enchantment.
They spent a couple of weeks without finding a single caravan that would allow them to cross the mountains in Orisar’s direction. They began to feel that they would never be able to leave that lost place until they met an old man who was almost blind with white eyes due to profuse cataracts. It was the old man who, still without seeing them, discovered them wandering desolately through Eladur’s narrow streets.
“Who is there?” he shouted in the shadows even before they could see him sitting inside a doorway leaning on his staff. A dozen wind chimes fluttered in the night breeze, singing an eclectic and intriguing concert.
“You have a good ear, old man,” the albino pointed out, catching a glimpse of him in the gloom.
“Ah, you’re the one looking for the adur!” he heard him say in surprise, “Come in, come in. I’ll help you find him.”
Jrig smiled at the thought of how quickly the news spread among those people. The old man got up and began to walk through the shadows to a small wooden door at the side of the hallway. He opened it and invited them in.
“Do you have a big saber-toothed tiger in your house?” the pįołedů asked mockingly.
“We all have a powerful and wild beast inside us,” assured the octogenarian. “You have a gigantic adur inside you and you have to learn to master it.”
Jrig was amazed at the old man’s lucidity who, despite his blindness, seemed to see through his abundant cataracts. When they entered the room, it was lit only by a couple of dim candles. Hundreds of wind chimes of all types, shapes and sizes hung from the ceiling, metallic, bamboo, mother-of-pearl, glass, seashells, each with a different design and decorative motif. No two were alike. A gentle breeze made them tinkle, singing a sweet and soothing symphony.
“Are you telling me that this creature doesn’t really exist?” Jrig asked, dodging the old man’s shrewd assertion. “At dawn its cries can be heard in the desert.”
“Don’t be stupid. It’s only due to the bursting of the overheated stones in the sun when the temperature drops sharply.”
“But the Jarati believe that it does exist…”
“There is usually no judgment or reason in the face of fear,” said the blind old man without letting him finish. “You won’t find the adur in the desert, but inside you, and you will have to hunt it.”
“How?” he dared to ask at last.
“The adur is killed in solitude and inside a cave. It’s a personal and non-transferable experience.”
“In a cave? What do you mean?”
“The cave represents the powerful egocentric beginning of our individuality that develops within us and wreaks devastating havoc in our life. The ego must subordinate itself to the soul. You have to block your strong, immature emotions, for overly intense feelings distort the thinking process, just as my cataracts distort my eyesight. But, at the same time, you must strip the adur of its magical skin, which will allow you to retain some of its animal, vital and creative qualities, which are what make you invincible.”
“Are you a philosopher?”
“Claptrap,” growled Benthel. “Just a foolish old man’s talk to pretend to be wise.”
“Give me your hand,” the elder asked the healer.
The spirit man hesitated. When he finally shook the old man’s outstretched hand, Benthel let out a faint whimper and was instantly struck down. The old man held him as he collapsed. He put his hand under the back of his neck and laid his slumbering body on some cushions.
“What have you done to him?” Jrig shouted angrily.
“Your friend needed to relieve his tension. He didn’t have his black flask with liquor handy today,” the pįołedů gaped at those words.
“Who are you?” he asked a little more calmly.
“My name is Oglan’hazir and I am a reader of lives.”
“I should have known better.”
“Actually, I am the great lives reader,” he said emphasizing the article. “Now I will help you tame the adur within you.”
And without further ado he threw some powder on his face. Jrig cleared his throat and began to cough intensely. His eyes watered and stung like hell. His vision blurred. He had to rub his eyes hard with his knuckles to partially regain his vision. His eyelids were swollen.
“What the fuck was that?”
“Now I will help you through the big door,” said the old man, ignoring the albino’s complaints.
He took him by the arm and led him to the door frame of the adjoining room. The wind chimes were still tinkling as if a mist was stirring inside Jrig’s head.
“Come in,” the old man commanded and tugged his arm until he pulled him into the new room.
When Jrig realized he had his left arm outstretched but no one was holding it anymore. He looked perplexed at his disoriented hand. The room was in semi-darkness with only a single dim light coming from the back. Still with a sharp sting in his eyes he could see against the light a hooded young woman’s figure. She wore a long white robe tight to her body with a golden belt embossed with the Marjum goddess belbas signs. The girl slowly pulled down her hood. Jrig then saw a jet-black stripe across her forehead and within it green eyes that sparkled like emeralds.
“Pudu?” he asked incredulously. “Pudu!” he repeated ecstatically.
“Puduhepa Dea Cibum,” she answered, in a voice that at first sounded to him like the old man’s but ended with the sweet intonation of the graceful nubile goddess of pleasure.
“Pudu, you have come!” he told her with a frank smile like that of a child at the sight of his beloved mother. He wanted to touch her. He longed to feel the touch of her fine velvet skin, but most of all he yearned for the kisses of her red heart-shaped lips. Suddenly he was overcome with fear. “Have you had to flee from danger in Belbapur?”
“No. The members of the court of faith are eating out of my hand. I have come only for you,” her affable reply reassured him.
“For me? Have you changed your mind? Can we get back together?”
“I have come for you to taste again the nectar that completely captivates the senses,” Jrig gawked. He hadn’t expected such an offer.
“Do you still love me?” he asked his innocent question, unable to contain himself. For months her lost love had tortured him.
“Yes, I still love you. Although you know that question has many answers,” she replied slowly. “I love the moment, I love the risk, I love the power,” Jrig kept sharp in his memory the harsh words of their last conversation. “The question is whether you love me.”
“Of course, I do!” he hastened to answer, “Have you even doubted it for a moment?”
“Then you will be at my service.”
“Yes, I always have been,” he assured, dazed, not quite understanding what she meant.
“Will you be my hitman? Will you do what I ask you to do?” Pudu’s eyes were dull. They no longer had that irrepressible passion that drove him crazy when he first met her. His perverse lascivious goddess had the same face but her soul seemed different.
“Pudu, I don’t want to be a hitman anymore,” he argued with all the tenderness he was capable of. “You know that.”
“Will you do it for me?” she insisted.
“Don’t ask me to do that,” he begged sadly.
“Do you really love me?” she asked. He almost had a tear in his eye. “What is it that you like about me? That I am like the goddess, wicked and arrogant? That my love is that of a praying mantis, dangerous?” Her sentences seemed to be constructed from fragments of her own memory’s recollections. “If you love me, you will have to let me devour you. Give me your soul. Let me control the adur in you.”
“I cannot. Even I cannot control the beast. When the killer instinct awakens in me it’s irrepressible, impossible to contain.”
“You know how I am,” she said. He nodded. “I need your strength to satisfy my own appetites. Give it to me!” she demanded. “Now!”
“Whew!” Jrig felt a powerful hand grab him from the inside. He felt an intense pain in his gut that cut off his breath and made him fold in on himself.
But it was just at those moments that his most primal survival instincts kicked in.
“You told me there was no affection in your love,” he recalled. “You said it to take me away from you,” he no longer knew if the torment he was suffering inside was due to that moment or to the torment of his memories. “You feared what the Omurapis might do to me, and you even feared what your own ambition might turn me into. That too is love,” he said. “But in you… in you, there is not even a small trace of affection.”
She looked at him with eyes full of surprise that for the first time seemed frightened.
“Who are you?” he asked her directly. She did not answer. “You’re not Pudu,” he finally stated bluntly. “Who is hiding under that veil?”
The girl reached up and threw another blast of powder in his face. He covered his face with both hands as he furiously scratched his eyes, which stung as if their sockets held two burning torches.
“Gggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” in the darkness Jrig heard the menacing snore of a big cat.
All his muscles tensed. He drew his sword and dagger without being able to see his enemy. He heard him purring and felt his heavy footsteps stalking him. His irritated eyelids almost prevented him from seeing. His sclera was as red as his iris. Again and again, he rubbed his eyes with his forearm as if he wanted to remove a persistent, imaginary spider’s web.
A sixth sense made him stop and focus his gaze on the darkest part of the room. No, he was now in a cave. He felt the coldness of the stone in the atmosphere and the ooze of water on the walls. He felt bewildered. Two huge, slitted, fierce, intense yellow eyes caught his attention. They stared at him, without the slightest flicker. Behind them he glimpsed a huge feline head and powerful saber teeth. He felt no fear, only confusion. The feline bared all its affiliated teeth. An intimidating snore erupted from its throat.
“So, the old man was right,” he said to the beast. “At last, I have found you. I will have no choice but to kill you.”
The huge adur stepped forward showing his fierce face, ready to pounce on his prey. However, it was the pįołedů that unexpectedly launched the first blow, a powerful thrust directed against one of the beast’s eyes. The animal flinched and was heard to roar wounded with rage.
Jrig, half-blind, remained very attentive. He knew that a single accurate blow from that monster would be enough to end his painful life. The animal leapt at him with its threatening claws. The albino dropped and rolled on the ground dodging the attack while with his sword he tore the beast’s hip. It was no more than a flesh wound but it was a warning.
Enraged, the adur leapt furiously at him again, its jaws gaping, its claws unfurled and its terrible incisors desperately seeking his neck. Jrig deflected the first swipe with a powerful slash of his sword, wounding the beast in one hand. Then, he spun swiftly on his feet and plunged his dagger deep into the monster’s side. The gigantic feline howled and struck him with its hind leg, causing a scratch on his chest and another on his face.
Both stopped for a moment. The monster snorted furiously, wounded and angry. It emitted threatening roars and clawed at the air more intended to intimidate than to harm its adversary. Jrig contemplated his handiwork. He had left the adur one-eyed and wounded it in one leg and both sides. Appreciating his wingspan for the first time, Jrig thought it had been good for him to be nearly blind and thus unaware of the risk.
“You’re a little slow for a beast with so much legend,” he said calmly. Somehow, he was sure that the beast understood him. “Now I’ll tear off your skin,” he assured it, “and we’ll see if it’s really magic.”
The huge adur attacked with rage. It lunged at him, trying to corner him, taking advantage of his gigantic size. It launched swipes left and right that time and again found the pįołedů’s sword and dagger in its path as if it was striking useless blows against some stingers. When the monster backed off to change tactics and recover from its wounds, the albino knew it was time.
“Is that all you know how to do, no one taught you how to really attack your enemies?”
As if it had understood his words, the adur once again bared its colossal teeth fiercely. It immediately leapt at him with all the strength of its immense body. Jrig had taken note of its previous attacks and knew that this was exactly what its instinct would prompt it to do. The albino threw himself on his back underneath the beast, dodging its bite, to thrust his sword and dagger into its belly. Still, he suffered in his flesh the deep scratch of one of its claws. The beast almost crushed him as it fell on him with its full weight. But it got up instantly mortally wounded, dragging its hindquarters.
The pįołedů rose to its feet. Once again, his body was bathed with the thick blood of his enemies, but also with his own. He felt that he was still the same boy full of wounds, grime and bruises that he could seemingly never run away from. His life was still worthless. He sensed that the strange hand handling him saw in him only a puppet, worse, a bug to be used and tortured, and that infuriated him. His irritated eyes only radiated anger. He was determined to finish off his formidable prey. He cautiously but steadily approached the dark corner where the beast had hidden.
From there came a fresh blast of powder that sprayed his face. He cursed the hand that scattered them while he wiped his face with his forearm. His two hands held firmly his bloody sword and dagger. He could barely open his eyes. They were boiling with pain. He no longer had corneas but glowing coals. The suffering didn’t matter if he could kill the beast.
“Jrig! Jrig!” he heard his name in the gloom pronounced by a voice he had not heard for years. “Jrig! Save me, Jrig!”
It was a girl’s voice. Her sweet, almost childlike tone was burned into his memory. She was the only person who had turned out to be his family. The only being who had truly loved him without his having reciprocated.
“Tůmi?” he asked in fright and felt a terrible pain in his soul.
“Jrig! Save me, Jrig!” she repeated.
“Tůmi? It’s not possible!” reason clashed with his senses. He must have lost his sanity.
He wiped his face again viciously using the knuckles of his hand. The swollen eyelids barely let him see. Still, he strained to peer through the gloom for the person whose voice was so familiar. At last, he saw her emerge from her corner. It was a little girl with golden hair, helpless and with a frightened face, stretching out her arm imploringly towards him.
“Jrig! Save me!” she begged again.
At the sight of her, Jrig’s heart broke. She had a deep wound in her stomach, the bleeding from which she tried to contain by covering it with one hand. The other hand, also bloody, was stretched out towards him, yearning for help. She was just as he remembered her the day the burly Tîlvis slapped her and sent her flying through the air. The day he discovered his powerful killer instinct.
“It’s impossible! You’re dead!” he muttered to himself. “And so is Tîlvis. I killed him myself.”
“Göbeķ has raped me and handed me over to his men,” the girl said in tears. “Are you going to let him hurt me anymore?”
Jrig remembered her golden curls and her angelic face. He remembered her candor and naivety. He saw the helpless girl who loved him with fervor, whom he adopted as his family and in whom he was able to place some affection for the first time. But he was unable to remember the color of her eyes. No matter how hard he tried he was unable to remember it. He felt that emptiness in his memory like a stab. The eyes of the girl before him were violet, but those were not Tůmi’s eyes, but those of Sässa, the daughter of Hyväk’s second wife. Those he did remember from the night his revenge was forged.
“Göbeķ is an animal,” shrieked the bloodied little girl. “He was about to kill me. Deliver me from him and from all my enemies.”
“Doštťůmi,” he used her more formal name, “you are already dead,” assured the pįołedů, “and that is where you must return.”
He stood upright, raised his sword and, at the frightened look of the girl, with a mighty slash he tore her chest. He felt that his soul was made of glass and burst inside him into a thousand pieces. Instantly his strength disappeared. He didn’t even see Tůmi fall dead after tearing her with his steel. His head was spinning and he felt his legs no longer supported him. He drove his knees into the ground, sat back on his heels and dropped his heavy arms. The sword and dagger slipped from his hands. He was not even able to hold his head, which collapsed against his chest as he began his journey through a deep sleep.
“Now you can go through the truly great door,” he heard a voice say in his mind.
Jrig saw before him a door with mysterious engravings. Moved by an irrational force he reached out his hand and opened it. On the other side the darkness was total. He took a cautious step and went through the door. When he was inside, he felt the ground disappear beneath his feet and he fell into a deep abyss. Suddenly a powerful glow dazzled him with such force that he felt thousands of pins sticking in his mind.
He was in a huge white room with a light so intense that his eye sockets ached. There was a solitary object, an urn, no, more like a coffin, a distant, transparent sarcophagus. He thought it was for him and he must be dead by now. He walked in his dream towards his sepulcher, but in reality, it floated in the middle of a white immensity. Suddenly he saw that there was someone inside the sarcophagus. It was like feeling an unexpected stab in the chest. Not even after death would he have a place to rest. The bitterness he felt after his discovery made him lose the scene from his mind. Pain pervaded everything. Gradually his consciousness dissipated until it finally faded away.
Upon awakening, he could hear the rattle of a wagon. A relentless sun blinded his eyes. He was lying inside the box between blankets and straw. He felt in his body the jolts of the road, amplified by his lacerating wounds. He saw that his torso was bandaged and sensed the healer’s expertise. He turned his head and saw him sitting on the davit. Noticing that his friend was moving, Benthel leaned over to check on him.
“Welcome to the world of the living!” he said.
“Where are we?”
“On the way to Orisar, crossing the last foothills of the Jaraz Mountains.”
“Have we left Eladur?”
“Three days ago. We had to get out of there in a hurry. You killed the great reader of lives.”
“Who? I don’t remember.”
“That old man who invited us to his house full of wind chimes.”
Jrig nodded his head.
“What did he do to you?” he asked as he remembered how he had gotten rid of his friend.
Benthel turned and straddled the davit with one eye on the road and one on his friend.
“When he grabbed my hand, he must have jabbed me in the wrist with some powerful sleeping substance. I still have the sting mark. Look!” He indicated showing him the forearm.
“You fell with fulmination.”
“And that despite the fact that my body is used to drugs. I think that’s why I recovered sooner than he expected. When I awoke, I found you in that big darkened room sitting on your heels on the floor, wounded and fast asleep. In front of you lay the old man, dead and disemboweled. You had stabbed him in the stomach and he had a deep gash in his chest from shoulder to belly.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“I assure you that you did. When word spread through town that you had taken out his main life-reader, people came out to lynch us. We had to flee in a hurry. Those sorcerers have the whole city under their control. I was only able to hire a couple of the porters who had come with us from Takorah,” he indicated, pointing them a little further down the road. “I had to pay them a fortune to help us.”
“I killed Tůmi,” it hurt him just to pronounce her name.
“Your wild bride?” Benthel replied quizzically. “No, I assure you that the one who was dead in front of you was that old fucker. What I don’t understand is how you got those wounds. They look like they were caused by the claws of a big cat.”
The pįołedů told him that, using his strange arts, Oglan’hazir had turned into some of the beings that inhabited his memory, who had either awakened in him his deepest feelings or his most primal instincts.
“It must have been just a dream,” the healer assured. “A trance that seemed very real to you.”
“How then do you explain these wounds?” he replied, uncovering his bandaged chest.
Benthel was speechless before his friend’s convincing argument.
“When I was in Belos,” he said very seriously, “I heard about doors that only the best sorcerers know how to open. Doors to leave this world and then re-enter through another place.”
“The old man took me by the arm,” Jrig remembered at that moment and sat up leaning on his elbow, “and made me go through a door.”
“I have also heard about substances, poisons, that transform people into deformed monsters.”
“He transformed himself into Pudu, the adur and Tůmi. Their bodies were perfect, just as I remembered them.”
“He had to read your mind to do that,” the healer said very seriously. “Perhaps he used hypnosis or the hallucinogenic power of those powders he threw at you on several occasions. He was the great reader of lives for a reason.”
“But how did he become them?”
“Perhaps you only saw them in your mind.”
“But then, how do you explain these wounds?” he insisted again.
“I really don’t know. He first used your passion for Pudu to subdue you. Then he tried to bend your killer instinct with the adur. When he failed, he turned to Tůmi and your feelings of guilt to control you. That’s when you killed him.”
“What did he want?”
“The same as everyone else. To turn you into his hitman. A fabulous weapon that could secretly leap from door to door across the length and breadth of this world. That would have given him extraordinary power.”
Jrig lay wearily back in the wagon.
“I’m still a broken doll to be used at will,” he muttered bitterly, “without my life having any value.”
“It does to me,” his friend consoled him. “Rest now.”
“What worries me is that disturbing door that has opened in my mind,” he said without Benthel being able to hear him. “I used to be a weapon with a will, now they can take away my will and turn me into just… an instrument.”
©May 2024, Dave Hangman
Dave Hangman is Spanish writer David Verdugo’s pseudonym. He has published stories in the anthology Superstition by Redwood Press, and in Cosmic Horror Monthly, After Dinner Conversation, The Lorelei Signal, East of the Web, Space and Time Magazine, Twenty-two Twenty-eight, The Dirty Spoon, Hyphen Punk, Havok, The Sprawl Mag, History Through Fiction, Tales from the Moonlit Path, and Bright Flash Literary Review. His story “Eternal Fall” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2022. He has received four honorable mentions in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future contests.
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