Ten Evenings
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(8/1/03 1:16 am)
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The Flower Cult
This is a long story, and some of the violence is nasty and graphic. The narration is clumsy, excessive use of the protagonist's name, etc. Some of the ideas are over described, some under. Theres quite a few problems with the whole thing, but I liked it enough to share. It hasnt been picked over very well, so theres probably a bunch of grammatical and spelling errors, but I think itll pass. Hope you enjoy.
The Flower Cult
He had been through many names, and the name of the time was Moure. It worked fine. Losing his given name wasn’t too bad, and sometimes, he almost forgot it.
A thief… the world hated thieves. All his memories of work were a blade through cloth, barking dogs, hitting the mud and playing dead, things like that. Not too tough a life, but not for the average person. He had done this for so long, he couldn’t remember anything else, couldn’t remember his childhood, couldn’t remember what the day really looked like. Eventually he had come around to murder. Political assassinations and art crimes; he never killed anyone for their own money. Nothing in that, no fun at all. No satisfaction with a job well done.
People knew him, knew his face, knew his way. Moure couldn’t go back to Kaladim -the miners had long ago put a price on him. He used the masks, and stayed in the dark. Nobody knew him from anyone, except those he allowed to know and see him, and he enjoyed not being seen. There was no reason for him to be seen, anyway. He missed Kaladim sometimes, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that now. The memories of his family and old friends faded day by day… he had his new friends now. Nyago, Lexxis, Futsau, other people he had met in seedy areas like Nektulos and the Bazaar. They were his new family.
The masks helped him through. A lot of people used them, but he needed them. They weren’t a toy to get through a bad stretch of territory, they were like oxygen. He had many, for many different places. If there was a place, there was probably a mask for it. He had a piece of oily silk that made him an Erudite, and a thick dog’s collar of hemp that made him a half elf. There were tales of a veil of black glass, or a faceplate of tiny, intertwined machines, but he hadn’t seen them yet. Moure had more masks than most, but not as many as some.
The gulls cried, and he looked at the sea surrounding Odus. He had gotten here weeks ago, his friend Nyago waving him off. They had had a good time experimenting with different poisons the night before, and had gotten drunk as lords. He longed to see her and his other comrades again, after this mission. He sighed, longing to be back in Freeport, or the Bazaar. He missed people on these long trips, and it wasn’t easy to make new short term friends when you were posing as a pirate in search of employment.
Some months ago, he had been hired to kill a pirate named Liilen. He was supposed to be an enchanter gone rogue, with a cultish crew and fanatical bodyguards. An opposing group of sea fairers had put out the contract, written in seawater and blood. Gnomes who fancied themselves pirates, no less.
Moure chuckled at the thought of them, and though of the corpse with its extremities severed, then reattached backwards. The thread had been too thin, really, and when he would try to prop it up, it would fall apart with a thud and he would have to start again. After awhile, though, he got it to lean against a wall, waiting to be found. His first experience with a gnome. Fitting that it had a little humor to it.
He didn’t know why he did these things, but he did them. Time and inclination lead towards a body sewn back together in a different way, a message written in blood on a wall, a scene so horrific the investigators vomited on arrival. He had sewn bodies to one another, chopped up animals and people like jigsaw puzzles, made murals of their organs, reinserted living, bound children into their dead mothers eviscerated abdomens, draped their corpses in blasphemous and perverted poses, everything. He got a feeling of accomplishment from the crimes, a sense of well being, like he was doing what he was meant to do.
He somehow felt that since he killed these people, they took on a different meaning for others. A man was just a man, till he was a murder victim. An average woman, made memorable and loved by her slaughter. Point of view, changed by circumstance.
He was sure someone out there appreciated him.
He had killed a young human woman, and cut her body into perfect slices with a dwarvish mining saw. He placed the different cross sections of her on a series of bookcases, a breakdown of what she was, stored and displayed alongside the wisdom of dead poets and scholars. He had kissed a slice of her head that had a little cheek, and pocketed a book of high elf poetry before leaving.
He had come across a wood elf druid once, murdered him quickly, then sat with the body in front of him. Pondering what to do with it, he was staring at the tree that the druid had been sitting under, and it occurred: smear blood on every leaf, and no body. He drained the body, disposed of it in a nearby river, and had spent the next two days or so dabbing blood on each single leaf. The effect only gave the impression of autumn, but on closer inspection, the reality of the situation could be seen.
His favorite had been a pair of young high elf lovers. He had come across them during an intimate moment on the edge of the Lesser Faydark, and had cut their throats quickly. Washing the blood from their skin, and disrobing them, he cut the two of them in half at the waist. He sewed the lower halves together, and positioned his little monster in a double cross legged way, both pairs of legs sitting on the soft ground, leaning into each other. The other halves he also sew together with twine, stiching their mouths into the utmost terror, and removed their eyes. He made them hold hands, and thought the whole effect was rather sweet. This chunk he had hung from a crosspole, with the legs hunkered down nearby. He left them there, wondering who would find them first.
Moure sat thinking of his lovers, not feeling the wind on his face, not smelling the salt and fish in the air. The Barren Coast was on fire in sunset. Oranges, reds, pinks on the horizon, blues and whites above. A pattern for heaven. He watched the pipers for a while, then went back up the beach to go to sleep, his heart heavy.
As he sat down on the thin blanket that served as a mat, he thought of all that he had done… he knew he would be punished. The thought didn’t frighten him, really.
He dreamt:
He was in a cool, wet forest. The blue night sky shone through the dark shadows of trees around him, the call of birds and the hum of moths. Crickets.
A blur of white, then nothing. Moure stared, straining to see what it was. It was coming closer, moving like a hummingbird: jerk, stop, jerk, stop. Then, he could see her: a small woman wearing a white robe, with a huge mask on. It was a demon’s face, stylized and ornate. Blacks, reds, whites, laquered horns and thick fangs. Her small hands and sandaled feet looked out of place, covered in black dirt and pine needles. She had a long quad braid of deep pitch hair, and her shiny robe had faint, spare, gray markings on it in a natural pattern. Apprehension and a nervous unease flowed through him. He wondered who she was, and why she couldn’t see him.
She seemed to sniff the air, stopping, then smearing herself with such speed Moure wondered how he would keep up with her. Then, he was floating along, right there. He kept in sight of her, zipping through the woods. She sped through the forest, and came to a small campground: a tent, a fire.
Suddenly, she was inside, her hands around the traveler’s throat. She held on, slightly hissing and crying with effort, as he gargled and clawed at her face of sharp edges and bladed curves. She snapped her neck back, the mask flipping to the top of her head: a round, pretty face. All black eyes, no whites, almond shaped. Small nose and mouth. She smiled, and it was nothing but filed points. A tiny maw of fangs.
She chuffed, and ropes boiled out of her mouth, like a spider’s web. The coils flew around the traveler, binding him in an intricate pattern, her using her hands and feet to pull lengths and tie knots. Her limbs moved in a rhythm all around him, working with the animated ropes. He was hogtied, a bundle in the tent. Moure was horrified how quickly she had done it. If she got ahold of someone, there was no escape. She dragged him outside.
His moans and pleadings were muffled, and she sat him next to the dying fire. She leaned down, and put her mouth on his arms, his legs, his neck. Never biting with her sharp teeth, she more just mouthed him. Eventually, he stopped struggling. Dead, nothing left. A leaf that burned up, a wind that quieted.
She sniffed at the air, looking around. Suddenly, she seemed to realize that Moure was there, and turned full towards him. She jerked her neck, and the mask fell back into place. Terror welled up in him, his chest tightened. She pounced, all screams and fingers and slick tusks.
Coughing and choking in fear, he sat up in bed. Gulls called, the ocean making its eternal sound. An Erudian morning. He wiped his brow, shaking from the aftershock of the dream. He had never seen anything like the rope woman, and hoped he never did.
A thought nagged as he was dressing for the day: dragon horn knife on one side, a scimitar of northern lights on the other, a cape of hidden fire, a vest of living slime. "A dream within a dream," someone had once said. He felt like everything was half-seen, images swimming up from nothing, only to disappear before they could be understood.
He knew where Lileen was today, and he planned to go apply for a job, to become a crew member. His ship, the Mary Who Cries, would be in dock today. He would walk up, walk in, kill him during any sort of interview, and pitch overboard before anyone noticed. It was a simple plan, but it would work.
On the way down the beach, Moure tried to remember how he had gotten into this business. It had something to do with a drowning, with an accidental poisoning maybe. He couldn’t remember, and shook his head to clear it of distractions. He had an act to put on.
The Mary Who Cries sat, swaying with the tide. The smell of ale and hardtack was everywhere, mixing with the fishy odor of the waves. Erudite men moved to and fro, moving boxes, casting menial spells, yelling orders at each other. The pipers darted between their legs and around their ankles, always on the hunt. Moure stopped a distance away, and took his Mask of Obtenebration from his sack: a veil of greasy silk. He put it on, feeling his skin change color, his stature grow larger, his armor changing shape and style.
As soon as he stepped on the ship, everything was different.
The gulls stopped crying, the yells of the men fell silent, the wind died. In its place, Moure could hear the water lapping on the sides of the boat, and a distant hum. Muffled voices moaned in reverse, languages he’d never heard before. His own breathing seemed thin and distant, as if from the bottom of a well. His brain slowed down, confused.
The sunlight was gone: everything was a thick blue fog. He could see distant shapes, but they weren’t boats. Figures seemed to twist and distort in the sky, and he looked up. They looked hanged, but they moved, writhing on invisible strings.
Moure closed his eyes, trying to regain control of his senses. Even the smell of salt and fish was gone. Flowers, faint. It was everywhere. Every flower he had ever smelled was there, subtle. Shaking his head wasn’t working. He was stuck here. The thought of turning back occurred to him, but the drive to finish the job was stronger. He would make it, but a ball of fear had appeared in his stomach.
Curiously, the ship wasn’t swaying. It seemed fixed in place, and his footsteps forward onto the deck made a hollow noise, as if there was nothing under him. He looked around for the people he had seen bustling on the ship earlier, but there was no one. A few barrels and coils of rope were lying around, but they looked more like props than well-used tools. He still heard the muffled voices, but couldn’t tell which direction they were coming from… He walked directly forward, to the starboard side of the deck. The fog was so thick he couldn’t even see it yet.
A man stood with his back to Moure, of medium height and build. His high hood suggested an Erudite, and he stood straight, leaning his hips against the deck. He was muttering something, and his hands moved in front of him…
“A, b, c, d… e, f, g, h…”
There was no rhyme to his voice, no singing of the song children used to learn the common alphabet. He spoke flatly, as if reciting figures to an accountant. His voice was high, his tone that of a diplomat.
“I, j, k, l…”
The man was wearing the fanciest clothes Moure had ever seen. Rich purple velvet, trimmed with Stonebrunt snow leopard fur. Gold and platinum thread in thick ties and ropes, jewels hanging like water drops from the neck seam of his cloak. Leather boots, kid skin maybe, butter colored and soft. Everything looked lived in, but fabulously expensive.
“Excuse me, sir. I’m looking for Liilen. I want to work for him,” Moure said in what he hoped was a natural tone. Just those few words seemed to take his entire lungs. He suddenly realized he was exhausted. His eyes blurred, his arms dangled at his sides. His legs had the pleasant feeling of tiredness, as if after a day of hard work. He longed to lean on the deck with the man.
The man stopped reciting, and turned slowly around. Moure gasped a little at the jewelry and opulence of his clothing again, the beautiful necklaces, the black, watered silk of his pants. The dwarf looked from his feet up, stopping at his face.
“I’m looking at something that’s not real. Its an illusion,” Moure thought. A fake. It couldn’t be.
A handsome, dark face, typical Erudite features. But the whole thing seemed to be distorting, trying to break free of its form. A cheek would shift, stretching slightly towards an ear. It would squiggle, alive, trying to break free, then snap back into place. A nostril would enlarge somewhat, then return to normal. His lips would sneer then smile, frown and scream. It didn’t seem that there was something under his skin, but more like a projected image on a wall that was being deliberately bended. His face was a thin canvas, and there was someone grabbing bits of it and jerking them around. Every movement was quick, and it was all happening at the same time. Moure’s eyes hurt, but his mind seemed to be breaking. It was hard to look at without screaming in terror or falling to your knees in submission.
He had no eyes, just empty sockets. They didn’t seem to be moving unnaturally, so the dwarf focused on them, trying to glean some expression.
“A job! A job, hahaha! You want a job on the Mary? She burns, mate. You don’t want a job on this ship.”
His hand gestured a little over Moure’s shoulder. Before he turned, he could see a strip of light blue in the man’s hand.
A corkscrew column of fire was suddenly screaming and rumbling on the deck, a few yards from Moure. The burning gasses hissed too fast, too loud.
“She burns.”
As soon as Moure turned back towards the dandy, the sound of the fire stopped. The erudite was playing with the strip of blue in his hand, stretching it like his face stretched. It seemed to be a flat braid of threads, with a wispy, frayed end. Moure was starting to feel sick, as well as tired. The ship still didn’t sway, but he was feeling drugged.
There were tattoos on the man’s hands, black vines and flowers. He wore long sleeves, hiding anything that might be on his arms, but as Moure watched, the pattern seemed to be moving along on the skin, like there was a wind gently nudging it. The effect was nauseating, and the rogue’s stomach turned even more.
The erudite looked at Moure with his hollow sockets. He seemed to pause, to think before he spoke:
“Well, maybe we could use another. Liilen has a way of going through them. Maybe another.”
He looked down at the strip of blue for a moment, then threw it into the air. It seemed to dissipate, like it was never there at all. He began walking slowly towards the back of the ship, to the cabin.
“Go down below, and there will be someone to guide you. They will take you to Liilen.”
The cabin door opened, and the sound of the ocean poured out. Moure was surprised, hed almost forgotten he was on a docked ship. The sound was surprising, and drowned out the voices and the hum. The sea roared at him from the darkness, and the fear got a little stronger.
“In there? Liilen is in there?” Moure asked, hoping he wouldn’t have to step through the threshold.
“Hahaha! Yes, deary, in there. Now, go, go!” the erudite laughed, pushing Moure inside.
A glimpse of the blurry figures twisting in the dark blue sky, the laughing, twisting face of the man, and then he had nothing but a sense of falling and the constant rumble of the ocean.
Moure didn’t remember hitting the water, but when he got up, his body hurt. He was standing in the shallows. Water spread in every direction. The sky was clear, the sun was warm. He looked down at the turquoise carpet, and saw small, colorful fish darting around his legs. He stared, fascinated by their flimsy looking bodies, their fins like gossamer.
Someone cleared their throat.
He looked up, suddenly scared again. A dwarf, a normal looking dwarf in sailors clothes and goggles. His graying beard and stout body were comforting and familiar, he held himself like a dwarf… it was good to see after nothing but erudites for weeks.
“Let me introduce myself, friend. I am Buther, and Ill be takin you where you need to go. You’re Moure, right? Good, who I was lookin’ for. Please, come this way,” the dwarf offered.
Buther walked off in a seemingly arbitrary direction. Moure followed him, sloshing through the warm salt water. Fish scattered, and as he looked up, Moure noticed some albatrosses sailing in circles. It was the biggest shallow he had ever seen, and suspected that it wasn’t real. It was an enchantment, maybe, or something else.
They waded on, in a foot of water. The depth never changed, and it was constant white sand on the bottom. Moure saw several species of fish as he went, each more beautiful than the last. When he looked up, the only landmark was Buther’s back in front of him. Endless sea stretched in every direction.
After an indeterminate amount of time, Buther began to speak. At first, Moure couldn’t tell if Buther was speaking to him, or the fish, or what. Eventually, the words turned to the immediate situation.
“Any man who’s lookin’ for Liilen finds him. He makes sure of that, he does. Yessir, he makes sure of that.”
Buther paused, and sighed, looking forward.
“I was a young man when I got into this business. Thought it was somethin’ it wasn’t. I was… tricked. Deceived.”
Moure watched the back of his head, waiting for something, anything to happen. His hand crept to his side, ready to draw. His head still swam from the weird experience of the ship, and he didn’t have the first clue what to expect.
“Were approachin’ our stop, mate. Wont be long. What did you think of Neiji? Fancy, aint he?”
“Neiji? The erudite? Strange fellow.”
“Yeah, hes Liilen’s liaison. Ole Squiggly, we call him. Never could figure out what the hell was wrong with his face, he never talks about it. Looks like an enchanter’s illusion gone bad, in my opinion. I seem a lot of things that hurt the eye, and a lot more things that hurt the mind, but I never get used to his face. Its like talkin’ with a devil.
“Were comin’ up now, son,” Buther said, then stopped.
He stooped, looking at the water. Moure looked down, saw nothing any different than the white sand they seemed to have been puffing up for hours now… Buther reached down into the water, scaring a few fish away. He swept around in the grit, exposing a dark, thick line just underneath the surface.
He stood straight, and tapped the line with his foot. A door, dark wood with steel hinges, slid up into the air in front of them. Moure gaped, and Buther indicated the gleaming surface.
“Knock three times, please.”
Moure didn’t move immediately. He was wary of being pushed through this door by Buther as he had been pushed through by Neiji earlier. He went around to the other side. Nothing over there, just the same surface. It was of average thickness, and from what he could tell, was standing up in the soft sand and water by itself.
“Liilens through there?”
“Yessir, right through.”
Moure stepped up to the unlikely portal, wary of Buther’s movements. He could see him from the corner of his eye, but the older dwarf just seemed a little tired from the walk, and a little bored. His body language didn’t express any hostility.
Moure turned his head to get a full look, hand held up to the dark surface. Buther was just standing there, eyes half closed. His face looked a little sad, his posture weary. Moure saw the tattoos on his hands, the twisting, ornate vines and blossoms. They swayed, rippling under the coarse hair on his hands.
Moure knocked once, twice, three times. It didn’t make any special sound, just knuckles on wood. With no room behind it to reverberate the sound, it was like rapping a plank.
Buther sighed and vanished, and the door swung open, spilling humid, fragrant air…
A room full of flowers. Moure couldn’t see the walls, could barely make out a path inside. The smell wasn’t thick, but it was sweet. A hundred different scents, pleasantly playing at his nose. Pots hung from the ceiling, vines crawled up each other, a hundred types of leaves jostled for position. Orchids, man eaters, honeysuckles, roses, devils paintbrush, snap dragons, germaniums, violets, lilies, daffodils, peonies, tulips, sunflower, bleeding hearts, magnolias, morning glories, hibiscus, carnations, birds of paradise, dandelions, clover, daises, irises, more flowers than Moure had ever seen in one place. At first, everything was a chaos of petals and leaves and stems, jarring, unbelievable.
His eyes started to pick out details. It wasn’t a large room; in fact, it seemed like a room below a ship deck. There was no visible light source, just the impression of indirect sunshine. There was a table, a chair, and a path through the foliage to it.
“Sit down, Moure,” said a voice from nowhere, everywhere. It sounded like a pebble dropped into a stone goblet at the end of a stone corridor; faint, dusty, dull. It was a voice that didn’t sound like a voice, more like a small of a forgotten dream, a bad, hazy memory. Moure’s skin crawled, rippling down his arms and back.
“Have a seat, welcome to my ship. You’ve come for a job, I take it,” the voice choked, full of dry straw and old, sour dirt. Moure nodded, and sat down at the empty table.
A white circle, the diameter of Moure’s wrist, appeared in the air. No noise, no movement. Just a white circle. The circle changed, and he could see that it was spinning. Eventually, he could see that objects were twirling in the air in front of him… They slowed, slowed, slowed.
Teeth. A circle of teeth, human, dwarf, troll, dark elf, spinning in a lazy ring a few feet in the air, pointed outwards. Moure stared, wanting nothing more in the world to bolt from the table, tipping over plants as he went, and break through the door back to the ocean. He looked around, but couldn’t see the door anymore. He was surrounded by flowers, they seemed to have shifted to hide the path out. There was nothing but flowers, the table, and the teeth.
“Well, well have to take a look at your qualifications, then. Lets see: a murderer, a thief, and sent here to kill me. How about that? That wont do at all,” the voice chuckled. It seemed to be coming from the circle of teeth now.
“I… I-I-Im just here for w-w-work. Nothing else,” Moure stammered. He looked down at the table. He wasn’t looking at someone’s face, but he had to avert his eyes.
A glass had appeared on the table. A dusty brandy glass, with something inside… a dead centipede. A dried bug in a cup, with a ring of spinning teeth above it. Moure resigned himself to the fact that he had fallen into Hell. Here he was, being played with by the devils, forever.
Liilen laughed again, a sound like a spade striking stone. A lazy bee wobbled over the table, its slight buzzing an accompaniment to the horrid sound of Moure’s tormenter.
“Tell me, Moure. Do you believe what you see before you? Are you really in a room of flowers? Are you speaking to anyone at all?”
“I don’t know anymore,” sighed the dwarf in an erudite’s skin.
“The nature of perception has been a question of the philosophers since we became aware of ourselves. Does seeing a beautiful girl make the girl real? Do you look at the pretty ones more than the homely ones? Average people are less noticed, one could say. Maybe that makes them less there. If we aren’t acknowledged by others, what’s to say we aren’t so much ignored, just not as tangible? Do you understand?”
“Yes, I think I do,” Moure ventured.
"There’s a thousand things going on on this table that you can’t see. And, maybe just because you can’t see them physically, they don’t have much impact on you, and your life. Now, these things could be invisible, by my magic. I could be leaning my elbow on it, knife in hand. Or they could be microscopic, tiny animals living their tiny lives. One could float up, enter your body, and you could be dead of plague in a week.
“So maybe these things really could have an impact on you? We ignore the uninteresting, the tiresome, the boring, the unimportant. But its only our perception that makes what we see these ways. Everything is happening, right now, all at once. We only need to pay a bit more attention, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps.”
“Would you like to stay here with me, Moure? Study how perception affects reality
with me? Forever?”
Moure looked at the centipede, shaking. He didn’t want to be like Buther or Neiji. He didn’t want a tattoo, he didn’t want to know anything else. He just wanted out.
“No… please,” the barest whisper.
“Then I will set you free.”
The door suddenly came back into view, slamming open. The girl with the mask and ropes rushed inside the room, screaming her hate. The coils were already rushing out from under her tusked, false face, alive like snakes. Her hands were hooked, speeding towards Moure’s throat.
Moure closed his eyes, and smelled the perfume of honeysuckle, no longer afraid.
Nyago poked at the drooling, babbling body in front of her. Moure had been out of it for at least fifteen minutes, but she wasn’t worried. Mind Melt worked that way.
They had been experimenting with different poisons for a while now, and he had accidentally cut himself with a dosed blade. His eyes rolled back, he fell over, and almost immediately started gibbering about the ocean, gnomes, someone named Liilen, flowers, and so on. He made amusing gurgling and whimpering noises along the way, and eventually she had prepared a clean bowl of water for him, and sat down to wait.
She knew he would come out of it soon, and she was already thinking up ways to never let him live this down. Nyago sat cross-legged, waiting.
His whispering turned into a sigh, and Moure opened his eyes.
A few of you may have noticed that I almost directly lifted the centipede in a cup thing from the book Ikoru, or maybe it was Ikuro. Whichever, it was a great image, and I thought it was really nice in this story as a representation of Liilen. In retrospect, the Buther sequence was overdone, and the dialogue makes me twitch when I read it, but I wanted to add a bit of normalcy to Liilen's crew, and I thought it made a nice respite from the weirdness of Neiji and the flower room. I hope you liked the story, and Im interested in the opinions you post here. Thanks!
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