SANITY LINE
Episode 06 - Carcosa
Vidcund could not recall a sight as alien as that with which he was faced.
He found himself standing as stoically as could be managed on the edge of a vast precipice. What had struck him immediately about the situation were the practical things, the sorts of things professionals like he and Drache looked for. He realized immediately that they must have been rather high up in terms of altitude, for the valley at the base of the cliff – which had a gentle, flowing terrain – seemed filled with fog. A roiling, unnatural fog it seemed, lapping at the edges of the ground – which must also have dropped off sharply at its edge – like waves on a lake.
Then, he had looked up, to get a sense of his cardinal directions… and god only knew how long he and Drache stood there in awestruck silence, considering the state of the sky. Someone had drawn a crude smear of sun-lit nebula in garish colour across the night sky, a bright backdrop, as starlight went, for hundreds of black dots. They were stars, they must have been, but dead stars, else stars so vibrant that they radiated in colours unseen by human eyes.
When their brains resolved the image of the two moons arcing ever lower toward the horizon, a wind stirred up that knocked them from their reverie. Dust was evoked from the ground – a strange, snowy ash, the passing of which brought with it a hint of the nose of brandy. The scent – suggestive and pregnant with memory, shook Drache, at least, out of it, and he looked suddenly to Vidcund, shifting his grip on his weapon uncomfortably.
“Where the hell are we?”
Vidcund looked back, and finally got around to closing his jaw. “You’re asking me?”
---
Actors retain a measure of their control only when they retain the memory that they are not really their character.
That thought – albeit malformed and in language much simpler – raced as an unending mantra through Maria Frost’s mind as she let her attendants dress her. Here, in the City by the Lake, nobody called her by that name. Nobody here cared who Maria Frost was.
But her name here – the name she reminded herself was nothing more than a mask – was power, a power as great as her anonymity. For none here, under the tattered yellow banners that lined the high street, had known who she was until she had compelled her Phantom by his Master’s Sign to eliminate Gloria Creena.
A mission at which he had failed. “… Tell me again what happened, Phantom.”
“Do you doubt my words, your grace?”
Maria turned, the high, brass-rebatoed lace collar of her gown shading her somewhat from the palid light of the rising suns. “I have no doubt you speak only the Truth, Phantom. I doubt merely that I recall everything I wish to know.”
The creature – Maria could never think of him as anything else, since he had spoken those words so fatal to her restful nature – bowed again. Scrapingly. The yellow sing featured prominently on the breast of his duster-jacket, betraying his new alliances and the means by which his will was subverted. A will no more free than her Own, Maria thought, though the price paid would be worth the goal if only her Phantom would complete his mission. “It grieves me to inform Your Majesty that my precious mission to kill Gloria Creena turned out to be unsuccessful. Yesterday, she and the balance of her god’s cult attacked a bastion of your people’s Agency Division in force. There were, as far as I am aware, no survivors.”
Maria bowed her head slightly so that her attendant could settle her brow with a circlet set with a large topaz at the centre of the brow. “Are you quite certain of that?”
“As certain as is reasonable.”
“Then who is stirring up this trail on the Ashen Shore?”
---
Vidcund had just about made peace with the sudden change of scenery by the time he got his first good look at the city. The sun had risen – two suns, though the unusual sky had already worn out its shock value – and his suit had changed considerably, now becoming a sort of a long jacket he seemed to wear over a gorget or curiass of silvery metal. The coat itself was marked out into a tight grid by lines of perpendicular black-on-black pinstriping. He found it dashing, though obviously entirely unsuitable for day to day wear, uniform code violations aside.
Drache, for his part, was fairing somewhat worse, now having donned some sort of hybrid banded-mail and scale armour, making him look like a fish’s dream of what a roman centurian would have looked like. These changes were all the more baffling for the fact that none of the rest of their equipment had changed in any way – Vidcund still held two presumably-functional pistols, which he had been careful to reload in case he had neglected to after the firefight with the large man in the night.
“The city looked a hell of a lot closer, didn’t it?”
Vidcund looked up from the lake of clouds – he had no other way of describing the phenomenon, and the term itself seemed sufficient. That was a lake of clouds. The lake of clouds, as far as he was concerned. The city they had seen, to which they were hiking across what he could only describe as a beach with ash for sand, had been the closer of two on the edge of the lake – and though it had looked somewhat more stricken (assuming he understood the unearthly architecture enough to recognize the scars of combat), the distance to the other had seemed sufficiently insurmountable that the pair had elected, on Vidcund’s unspoken determination, to pursue this one.
Though it loomed ever larger, it seemed to be determined to defy good and proper understandings of physics by not actually drawing any closer. It was a peculiar, dreaming effect, and Vidcund had had many such dreams in the past, though never so vivid. Fleeing something or advancing on something, without making any headway at all.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “It did.”
They trudged on. The going was like a walk in molasses in late fall. The ash was so light on the ground that you could sink ankle-deep into it, but then it seemed to billow and fly loose in their passing, in spite of all the weight it seemed to impart to each footfall.
Drache knew they both knew it, and so found something else to complain about. “There should have been a gate there for us, right? That’d make sense, right?”
Vidcund came to a dead stop. No, there had been no return gate, but the return gate had just been an assumption the both of them had made – mostly because they tended to think of the Gate as just a special kind of advanced doorway, and nobody ever worried about whether there would be a return doorway. “Sergeant, has anything else today made any kind of sense whatsoever?”
They came to a very sudden stop. Inexplicably, they seemed to find themselves transported. There had been no sensation – it was simply the fact of the matter that Därk became alarmed to find himself among the city’s spires. Drache, it seemed, was equally alarmed, because that submachine gun snapped up as rapidly as Därk would have liked to see it do were they under fire.
He had to admit, the temptation to reach for the hyper masculine security blanket of his own firearms was a sore temptation. “Okay. We might be in more trouble than I thought.”
“Yes. You are.”
---
It was easy to identify the intoxicating quality of her life here, of why this reality had proven so attractive. That addictive quality was why she had agreed to the worship of her new King. His promises, coming later, had cemented the deal, but it was originally this:
Here, in this city, on this world, she was a Queen. She had come from nothing; the poor daughter of a broken home, the mind-sundered victim of cultists of a God that promised glory and brought only decadence and decay. She held in her hands the ability to flatten Gloria and all her allies, to herald in a proper age of revival upon the Earth.
But that power came with responsibility, as she, indirectly, through her mastery of the Phantom, was responsible for bringing about the conditions whereby the King’s vibe could be introduced to the world, and whereby those who would disrupt it would meet swift demises.
She had gathered a small army of followers as she walked with the phantom, and now met these latest examples of the latter group where they stood at a crossroads, the throng pressing in before her, a wall of polite, noble swordsman with their masks. Masks were big here. The Phantom, beside her, was masked, and she herself wore an ornate piece of gilt work that gave her a hawkish façade.
“Yes,” she interjected between them. “You are.”
---
Vidcund squared his jaw somewhat, looking rather cooly to his left, toward the crowd and those who had gathered. Instinct filled him, rushing through him in a way that could only truly be explained by having been born for this very role.
Before he so much as had time crush the mint he had been nursing under his molars, he had taken in the fullness of the situation; the subtle shift in Drache’s posture that marked the centre of the woman’s chest as the present target of his weapon, the terrain down each of the three roads he still had access to, the precise number of the mob. The way the figure beside the apparently leader had rested his hand on the hilt of a sword as Vidcund turned, the way that same masked figure seemed to stare right through Vidcund, in spite of any real sight of his eyes behind his pallid mask.
For once, as a leader, he felt no need to speak. He had complete confidence not only in his own abilities, but in the power of Drache’s intuition, such that he knew Drache would follow his intent as faithfully as his explicit orders.
“Well,” he said slowly, swallowing the remnants of his confection. “I’d certainly hate for this little misadventure to turn violent.”
As if on cue, Drache shifted his aim slightly, and even as Vidcund lifted his left foot to begin what was sure to be quite the sprint, he watched a considerable portion of the lieutenant’s head be blown away by a well-placed round, even as the figure drew the blade he had been clutching and surged forward. Vidcund’s head throbbed at the impossibility, at the complete lack of blood as a considerable volume of white, pussy matter had gouged off of the side of the figure’s head.
He cleared leather himself as he was passing the corner of a building. He chose a turn, because, while he and Drache were merely two, and could keep formation, the mob would have to wheel about. Turns would cost them speed disproportionate to the speed it cost the Agents, and that might give our heroes the edge they needed to escape.
Escape where, he hadn’t the foggiest. But with no other options, he decided to trust his instincts. Blindly, though keenly aware of Drache’s position, he poured out the contents of his right-hand pistol’s magazine to discourage pursuit.
As he glanced again rounding the next corner – a left turn this time, he was pleased to see the mob trampling a few of his victims, who, unlike the Masked Man, seemed much more vulnerable. Drache must have noted it, too, for he no longer fired on that seeming-lieutenant, but instead sprayed high-velocity, leaden demise into the crowd.
Neither felt the need to waste breath on banter, but Vidcund could tell the jokes in his head. “I thought we weren’t going to cause any trouble,” Drache would have said. “This isn’t exactly a by the book approach.”
“Books were written for worlds with rules,” Vidcund would have replied.
They ran. Vidcund discarded his handgun – it was a pound or two less he’d have to carry, a pound or two less to tax his mortal lungs and slow him down. Drache, of course, was somewhat used to moving under load, but even so, he seemed to take the suggestion. He dropped the submachine gun when he had expended his final clip, and spent some time running backward at a fair rate while emptying his sidearm into the crowd as well, throwing the empty weapon at them in a final act of defiance.
Vidcund put out his hand to stop Drache just as the man turned around, and they found themselves staring out over a precipice – and with the realization that the cityscape in which they had been running had been just one rooftop in a much larger city than they had a concept of.
There was no time to be awestruck, though Drache was clearly captivated by the sight. Vidcund turned around, staring down this Queen in her yellow gown, as she dragged the mob to a halt seemingly by her will alone.
He had but a few seconds to come up with a plan.
---
Maria reached out to touch the Phantom’s shoulder, and as he stopped, the rest of the mob seemed to lose their will to fight. In fairness, their numbers were certainly diminished. These strangers were brighter than some, she realized. Previous adventurers in her world had focused their wrath almost exclusively on the Phantom when they realized the extent of his vitality.
This blonde one seemed to be the first one to figure out he could thin the herd.
The Phantom leaned his head over to her shoulder, and spoke silently, stilly in her ear. “His name is Vidcund Därk.”
“You have fought valiantly, Agent Därk,” she said, letting an imperious bit of tremolo into her voice. “As has your associate. But surely, mighty warriors such as yourselves now realize the hopelessness of your situation. If you submit, you will be spared.”
She could tell, at once, that Därk was not the type to yield. He took a defiant step backward, and she could see that the heels of his shoes slightly passed over the precipice. The beating of leathery wings filled the air, and as she looked, she could see her backup plan.
---
The strange flapping was distraction enough for Vidcund, who glanced over his shoulder. There were a pair of flying beings there, their great wings bearing them aloft. He found their form evocative of many things: of moles and bats and moldering flesh, of ravens and arthropods, but he was certain of nothing about them save that there was nothing about them of which once could be certain, at least not in form. To comprehend the perversions of Darwinian effort that had given them rise was to submit the mind to madness, and Vidcund found that, no matter how tempting such a perversion was, he could not be bent that way.
Too conditioned, and it was that conditioning again to which his mind fell. Agency had made a machine of him, it seemed. It was written, he told himself, and so must it be.
Before retort, before Drache’s helpless glance for orders could have changed to alarm, he had cleared leather, and a vital round drilled itself through his cohort, before a close cousin of the same punctured the floor of Vidcund’s jaw and the dome of his cranium.
There was, he thought, always a way out.
---
Maria’s mind seemed to skip several beats. She had to admire the artistry, the high drama, of such an act, but the almost careless way in which it was conducted unnerved her. Her followers, too, and the followers of the King which she served, had a flare for drama. They had no fear of death, but preferred to inflict it rather than suffer it, where possible, and when they did die, it was in ways so grand and ostentatious as to make whole cultures sit up and take notice – that, at least, was the idea.
The Phantom turned to her and tilted his head slightly. The damage to his masked face seemed to have already repaired itself. “I am sorry, Cassilda. I was unable to catch them.”
It took considerable force of will for Maria to remind herself that that was not, properly, her name. “That is… lamentable, Phantom. Do not let it happen again.”
---
He came out of it with a hypnagogic jerk, a sensation of a mighty fall for a great height, and in those few moments where the subconscious yet dominated the waking mind, he found himself thrashing against the glass confines in which he found himself, stirring up a devil of a storm of bubbles from the outflow valve of his mask as he churned the solution in which he hung suspended.
Time passed slowly. He woke fully, hands still braced against the glass in front of him as his feet braced against the ones behind, and in slow dawning of realization, Vidcund Understood. He understood the stars and the intuitive leadership and the strange feelings of proprioception.
He was Vidcund Därk. Sergeant Dräche was Vidcund Därk. He who had died in the strange city beyond the gate was Vidcund Därk, and the man who had died slowly in Dräche’s arms outside an apartment in downtown Kraterburg, his lungs filling with blood from a police officer’s revolver round, had been Vidcun Därk.
He was many. And Many, were dangerous.
Slowly, deliberately, he searched out among the stars in particular. He knew what each were doing, now, what they were up to, what they were seeing and feeling and smelling and tasting. For a brief, maddening moment, he was all of them at once.
And then, when he found the important one, he gave it his undivided attention.
---
“Right, everything will be proceeding on…”
Stamatia Dowd reacted with the barest of alarm as Vidcund Därk quite suddenly entered her office. He was dragging a Bluetooth headset out of his ear, and while he waited for her to hang up politely, she noticed several fragments of plastic spilling from his fist and onto the rug.
“Do you know what, Mister Justice, I’m afraid I’m going to have to call you back.” She hung up, and before she could ask, he answered.
“We need to have a little talk.”