Chapter 10

A silver sedan with a battering ram on its grill and studded chrome rims pulled into the alley. It came to a stop between the angular shapes of small warehouses, all tagged up neglect, peeling stucco, sheet metal and sodium yellow lighting.

I got out of my Stallion and even with the stabbing pain in my ankle I shuffled at a quick pace, smoke billowing from the tree cig between my lips, bandages dotting my face.

Vinny got out of the sedan’s passenger seat holding a cardboard box big enough for a cake. Diamond sauntered out of the car after him. His grayish green muscles showed through an unbuttoned shirt, his hair mussed. A thick silver chain, diamond earrings and about six rings sparkled as a lantern post showered his path—this was actually dressed down for him. He approached at a casual pace while Vinny moved at a quick clip. My human friend’s eyebrows rose as he reached me:

“What happened to you?”

“We said 7 o'clock. I've been sitting here for 2 flogging hours.”

“Hey this machine thing isn't all that easy to find.”

The cords on Diamond's neck palpitated as he spoke: “It's a miracle I got it. I should charge you double for being a whiny piss.”

Vinny kept staring at my bandages. “So is that from... your job last night?”

“No. I fjeezed a rabid gnoll—of course it’s from the job.”

“Geez. Hope the pay was worth it.”

“Occupational hazards. You know. That the centrifuge?”

“Yeah.” Vinny glanced around the empty alley then popped the box open. I peered inside and saw the cylindrical machine that looked like a space age rotary phone’s base with several empty tube slots.

“How much?”

 Diamond stepped closer. “650.”

“You're killing me Diamond.”

“You either want it or you don't.”

“Yeah.” The word was muffled as I balanced the cig on my lips. I reached back into my pocket and pulled out a wad of cash, counted out, resentful at having to add bills of my own. “Here. I gotta dip into my own pocket now.”

The gold bills quivered on his palm, which was padded with thick hide and deep grooved skin a lighter shade of greenish gray than the backside of his hand. He eyed the burnt edges. “I don't know if you know this Hob, but there’s better things to smoke than cash.” Vinny’s laugh came out like a stifled bray. I just shrugged as the Orc counted. He stole a glance between bill shuffles. “So I hear you're with that squid fem’s gang now.”

I eyed Vinny like gossip much? “Nothing's official. I'm just helping her out here and there.”

“Well if there's ever anything you can do for me, let me know.”

“Yeah, sure.” Then with veiled soreness: “Actually, I was trying to run some business by you last night. Would have saved me a pain in the ass.”

“Should have picked a better time. You're still below cooze on the totem pole.”

“Was that your steady?”

“None of your flogging business.”

“Fair enough.” Exasperated, I took the box from Vinny, put it under my arm.

Diamond craned his neck slightly. “What are you gonna use that for anyway?”

“None of your flogging business, Dustin.” I grinned sardonically and walked back to my car.

When I came home the goblin was sitting on the couch in his thong underwear eating a stick of butter, the TV’s black and white image with a line of static writhing through it faintly lighting his face: some detective badge was in an exaggerated fistfight with an Orc goon, the exaggerated sound effects of punches ringing at their unconnecting swings.

“The flog you doing?”

“Eating.” His big tongue lapped shiny butter off his lips. “TV.”

“You can't just eat butter. You gotta put it on something.”

“Wha? Why?” He sat up and his walnut sized balls and what I guess you could call a dick bobbed in his thong.

“And put some flogging pants on!”

“They fall.”

The old pair of shorts I’d given him were pooled at the foot of the couch. “Well you gotta tie em’ with something, you know a belt or something—I gotta explain the world to you?”

I shook my conya and set the box down on the ironwood kitchen table, opened it. The centrifuge was roughly the size and shape of a large jelly mold. It had a cylinder with six slots for vials—kind of like a revolver, like my cannon. In the front center it had a knob and a few switches. A fairly simple but powerful machine.

Digging through the worn cabinets next to the fridge, I pulled a couple of bottles.

The clinking of vials and mixing tubes.

A clear liquid fizzing as I dropped a bluish powder into its flask.

Unrolling a piece of gauze, I took out the severed troll thumb with some tweezers and plopped it into the solution. My reflection warped on the round glass surface as I watched the troll thumb dissolve, turning the solution into a blotchy salmon soup.

I poured out this soupy concoction into six identical, thin vials, then slipped them into slots in the centrifuge. Turning its knob, hitting a switch, the machine’s tiny crystal engine lit up and it slowly began spinning, then sped up until its cylinder turned into a blur.  

“Screecher, come here.” I called over the TV shoot out, with no response. “Screecher. Screecher—Skreech!”

His steps had a lizard quality to them as he scurried into the kitchen. The TV went on playing its whizzing, pinging stylized gun noises mixing with its stentorian hero’s lines—Skreech seemed to have some kind of unspoken reverence, a superstition that if he turned the TV off it might not come back on. “Yeah boss?”

I waved for him to come closer, and he did, at this angle above him his overbite accentuated. “Hold still,” I said, then slowly pried the gauze mask off, while he stayed surprisingly still save for his heavy breathing and his wandering eyes. Some muscle striations showed through the fatty tissues smeared with abraded, congealed blood. “Your face. It looks like hamburger meat.” I held up a large vial filled with a hazy pink liquid, and used a dropper to suck it out in measures. “We're going to put that troll bastard’s corpse to good use. It’ll sting, nothing more than a hot pepper.” Taking the dropper in hand I began sprinkling some of the solution onto his skinless face.

“Ah!” He recoiled and I yanked on his neck.

“Hold still.”

“It hurtz!”

“You want a face again or not?”

He shrugged. “You say I goinner get tiger face.”

“You said that.” Truth was this homebrewed potion wasn't going to regenerate his skin perfectly. I'd used it on the gashes on my torso and while my flesh had healed the wounds had left scarring. Premium healing potions left no trace of the damage. But then again they cost a king’s ransom, and the formulas were kept secret, the ingredients guarded tighter than virgin princesses by the major alchemical corporations. So a janky potion made out of extracted troll cellular regeneration proteins would have to do. “All right. Here. Dab off the excess.” I handed him a wrinkled towel.

“Eh?”

“Wipe.”

His knobby hands scrubbed his face with the towel. “Wipe.”

“See. It’s already starting to work.”

“Can we playz Jabberwocky now?”

“I've got an even better game.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, here I'll show you.” I walked him over to the kitchen sink, one wooden cabinetry door below it missing, the other’s varnish long since eroded by moisture, waved at stacks of dishes and alchemy equipment haphazardly arranged in and around its scratched porcelain. Held up a pair of rubber gloves, a scrubber and a bottle of soap. “You know how to use these?”

“The doggers made us wash. That's not game!”

“Sure it is.” I stepped over to the counter and picked up a sand clock, tipped it so that the grains began falling. “If you wash them all squeaky clean before the sand runs out you get a prize.”

“What prize?”

“It's a surprise.”

“Really?”

“Boss never lies.”

“Nragh!!” His balled fists trembled with excitement.

My torso in my bedroom mirror, I examined the gashes where I had spread the potion. Not healed fully, but healed enough. Scars on scars.

I stared at the panoply of open books, scrolls, journals and crusty mugs on my desk and bookshelf, years of research that I knew I could bring to a final, complete culmination in one night’s fevered intellectual webbing, the feat so ripe with destiny unraveling potential that my nerves braced as if for the crash of an ocean wave.

No peace for the wicked, no rest for the good looking, and no pause for those who lust.

 Past ages always leave their mark. My gaze traced the library tower’s impressive reach into the sky, the lapiz trimmed white facade, filigree framing the crystalline windows, decorative crenellations, a platinum dragon sculpture its crown, all embodied knowledge, urbane, idealistic culture. The tower was a relic of the architecture from before the war, when Hybrid Earth’s population was on the cusp of 20 billion, a style that was known as the Platinum Millennium, the naive name given to the dawning era. 

And now, now there were muttering self-soiled beggars scattered on the tower lawn, and a planet inhabited by only 7 billion.

Still, passing under the library’s sculpted arch entrance, I felt I breathed more refined air. Finely carpeted building wings laden with books extended in three directions, and at their center was a large court filled with rows of identical dayah wood desks, tiny crystal lamps adorning each. This indoor plaza was an open central axis of the building, ringed with balconies so that you could peer up through 7 floors all the way to the glass dome. Something compelled my sight up and caught that there were various mirrors arranged in a corona along the central skylight, a reverent architectural nod to the Reflector faith in its heyday, so that in a sliver of space, for a sliver of time, it seemed that there was a library floor far above, with books and patrons all upside down, defiant of gravity, and this jerked me me into a nostalgic vertigo.

“You think we'll get caught?” I ask, my skin free of scars, taut with lingering adolescence, my hair swept studiously aside, draped in my House Horned Howler blazer, tie and all.

Emithy gazes up as she points, a lock of rose gold hair slipping over her elven ear. She points at a balcony several stories above, a couple of Dragontusk students shuffling along in their goth academia uniforms, the students, the bookshelves, the desks, the entire floor all upside down because of the library’s ensorcelled gravity. A librarian in a pristine robe filing books on another upside down floor we can see through the open axis. “We can see them, they can’t see us.” Emithy grins, thin, long lips tugging her face into brightness. 

We lope, get lost in the monolithic halls, on either side of us books as far as the eye can see, fading in any direction, as if in an endless mist, 1,000 civilizations’ accumulated knowledge, our steps light as feathers. Her skirted House Solarium uniform catches in the light breeze that our wind boosted sprint conjures up, her stockinged legs coltish. “Forbidden, forbidden the halls! Forbidden, forbidden we are!” She hollers in mockery of Groundskeeper Klenerby, taunts, then raises a deft musician’s finger to me. “I told you, I know how to hide behind sunlight.”

“Heh,” I cross my arms, tap my foot and my shadow echoes into many on the ground. “It’s my shadow work that got us inside in the first place, not to mention let’s you holler as you are.”

“Thick as thieves we are. A bloody good team we are.” She pulls a random tome from the endless book shelf, her lithe limbs poised, dancer like in even small gestures. The pulled book snaps to attention, mid air, the pages flip automatically under her gaze, flipping faster and faster until they’re a card shuffle. “Done. What an interesting people, the Azuthon Naga were. Are, if the star signs are true.” 

“Show off,” I say, a step behind, barely finishing a third of a book, a book half the size, in the same time, “turn off your meta mind and let’s see who wins then.”

“You act as if that’s somehow not an inherent part of me.” She takes a gliding step on polished marble, fingers running across book spines, until she spots one and plucks it with a flick of a wrist. “Besides, you worry too much.”

“Don’t you know...” My glare is satirically gloomy, “thieves always get caught.”

“Then... We have to make sure it’s worth it.” Her arms spread, long lantern sleeves bunching and thinning as her hands expertly weave a rune of command which shines and dissipates and only leaves a fading afterimage of its elegant curls and stave and she taps a floating book open. “The ‘Music of the Spheres’ by Bard Jaeh Vezimini.” And there in our midst, music enlivens the air, and solar motes spark in orchestral effulgence that turns neck to relishing goosebumps. And then the music softens, wanders, and our waking cube minds soften and open to that which was enchanted into the spell: that any who are engulfed in its music, will be engulfed not just to their nerves, but to their minds, so that their very thoughts will be in sync with the tune, with no rigor or stumbling searching of the third dimension’s imperfect thought births.

“Where...” I find myself intoning. “Is all this going, my dear old soul.”

“All I know is that you are not alone. Not when you have my sincerity.”

“My alacrity, my honesty, my devotion true.”

“Why I would be true, and I know that you would be too, if my skin were blue, if I had the horns of a demon.”

“The wings of angel, the furr hide furr of a werewolf.”

“The one eye of a cyclops.”

“Oh I would stillllll think you’re cute.”

“And that is why... I won’t hide, cannot keep on lying...”

“Not not not not not not not for much longer...”

“For the world is absurd, and so how can it see things true...”

“What we have is...”

Then the song becomes a dirge. Gargant pipes and organ, the mace on gong and drum, trumpets blast a ragnarok note, then all is silence. No clapping books, no glimmering star dust, but sol-blasted reality, bleached, books all back in shelves like beaten dogs, aligned to a trembling poise. There is a foggy light. A presence. One I have only felt from afar.

“Childe.” The presence takes shining form next to Emithy. A robed figure, features hard to discern in the rivulets of bright mana that surge all over it, save for sharp ears and long immaculate hair, a sight that fixes on her as if she is all that exists, and I am some kind of smudged stain on a wall. She gazes up, lustrous eyes already chided, knowing, and the robed figure intones. “You toy with the knowledge of the ages.”

“Sire...”

“You tread on the minds of eons. Make oaths idle words. Such a time, when that will be the way of even the best in this world, even of the eldar, such a time is coming. But it is not here yet.”

“Sire,” she says, hands clasped, ruffling her vest’s top button, “forgive me.”

“That is not what is at hand, childe. You will never need my forgiveness, not once, not should I live to see the sun dim and the earth dry.” And all at once the figure addressing her solidifies. It is Nosst Holcadron, her father, chancellor of Dragontusk University, scion of the Holcadron lineage. “My friend and I were merely studying... in an unorthodox way... We were only...”

“I know what you were doing.” His eyes fix on me. Even as an elf, his square face bears the wear of age,  skin turning to paper, wispy hair, but his eyes, his eyes are timeless, a color one cannot discern, for it is fixed but somehow evershifting, white, gray, blue, silver, all and none. His robe is regal, bearing wirework on the hems, hems and buttons in angular gold, unlike the swooping leaf designs of the wood elves, the dazzling opals of the lunars.

“Ser, it was my fault, my idea...” I begin, but he only considers me a moment, then turns, my words idle wind. In his hand materialize two small, sealed scrolls. He hands one to her.

“Take this to Solarium Tower.”

She unfurls the tiny scroll. “Three days work in the zero point field?”

“No student is above Dragontusk’s rules.”

“But Sire, this is just pointless drudgery. My mind can better serve the Academy. You know this.”

“Is that so? You have shown little command of that mind to deem it such.”

She considers me, trembles. “Then Tikhal will get the same?”

“That is not your concern.”

“You can’t—”

“You are dismissed, Solarion page.” He raises a hand, Emithy freezes in her stare, down to the last atom, then dissolves in a gold shimmer and is gone.  Then he fixes his lightyear gaze on me.