010

They passed the night atop a scoured butte thirty feet in the sky. It felt like sleeping in the palm of a giant, safe above the dangers of the earth. The air had cooled as the sun set, and the dome of the sky was clear and full of stars Frank had never seen before. He watched a pale pink moon rise while the others slept, and then watched it again, hours later, when the second moon followed.

He couldn’t sleep. He told himself it was fear of Nanesh that kept him up, but Nanesh hadn’t so much as raised his voice at him, even after Frank spent three hours stricken with the Hangover. He’d claimed to be a man who kept his word, and Frank was starting to think maybe that was true. Maybe old Nanesh had a sense of honor, in his own strange way.

No, the real reason he couldn’t sleep was because he was afraid to dream. It was a difficult thing to admit; he hadn’t felt this way since he was a kid, up late watching monster movies. But this time, it wasn’t the threat of nightmares that scared him. It was the idea that his dreams might not be his own.

That brass key had triggered a vision in him that felt so natural it was indistinguishable from his true memories. He didn’t know how that happened, but he knew the Allflesh was involved. What was it doing inside him? Warping his brain? Rewriting his memories? The thought of it filled him with revulsion, like thinking about the tapeworm living in your guts.

He had tucked the key into his belt earlier and he retrieved it now, driven by a nagging compulsion. He wanted to rub its worn blade, test its miniscule heft. Just having it against his skin felt good, although he couldn’t explain why.

Nanesh had asked what it opened. He didn’t have an answer then, and he was no closer to an answer now. But he knew what he wanted it to unlock, what he hoped it would unlock.

The truth.

He dozed in fits throughout the night, never longer than ten or twenty minutes. Sometimes he thought he heard voices in the dark, the twins talking to each other in their sleep maybe. After some time, he realized it was Thune. He was chanting, the sound toneless and whispered, like a prayer. He always stopped at the first sign that someone was awake, and then resumed again when all was still and quiet. Frank didn’t understand the words but he found them grating, almost painful. Sometimes he thought he heard a second voice.

The twins were up before dawn. They fixed a breakfast of cold jerky and warm wine, Grizsix enjoying a triple portion for all her work, and they were on the move at first light. It seemed the terrain had grown more dangerous while they slept. By noon they’d survived two rockslides, a fall from a dangerous switchback, and outraced a stalking mountain cat that had been tracking them for miles.

Grizsix never wavered. The old girl was built for this, with a rough hide that could withstand the sun, twin tails for balancing on rocks, and toe-pads coated with a bio-adhesive film that allowed her to climb up walls and across sheer surfaces as easily as walking on flat grass. She was perfectly adapted to her environment. And watching her work, Frank realized he needed to adapt, too, if he hoped to survive this place.

Once on the move, Manesh took the lead. Although he was deferential to his brother in most things, he alone was in charge of Grizsix. He guided her through the most treacherous passes, at times using his psionic abilities to stabilize a foothold or hold back a slipping stone. And his unspoken bond with her meant he always knew when she was tired.

The agreement was that Frank would hop off now-and-then and travel on foot to give her spine a rest. In return, she’d agree not to buck him off when they were dangling thirty feet over a rocky gorge. Truth be told, it wasn’t the worst deal Frank had made in his career. And he didn’t have to pay Manesh ten percent of his pre-tax income to negotiate it.

Once they’d passed out of the mountainous region surrounding the valley, they entered a sparse grassland. The ground here was flat and smooth, and a shelf of yellow clouds gathered overhead, blunting the sun. It didn’t pour, despite the clouds, but Frank was hoping it would have. He wondered what color rain fell on a world like this.

After a few hours of easy loping, they passed into a coastal plain. Thune had explained they were on an island – the island of Uqmai, same as the city – and were nearing the sea. The wetlands were a relief from the cracked, dry valley, but the change of scenery brought with it a new host of challenges. Swarms of buzzing insects, mud pits half as tall as a man, serpents hiding in tall grass. Nowhere on Argos was safe, it seemed. The only constant was danger.

By early evening, they came to rest at a cool, clear stream. Here, Frank tried to win Grizsix’s favor by cleaning her wounds and dressing them with broad, flat leaves plucked from the white trees that grew along the banks. Thune directed him, explaining which leaves to pick, how long to soak them in the stream, how to milk their delicate stems for the medicinal liquid inside. But while Thune was happy to have him tend to others, he forbade Frank from touching his eye.

“I am alive with this dagger in me,” he said. “Of that, I am certain. But what happens should I remove it remains an uncertainty. And that I will not risk.”

“Aren’t you in pain?” Frank asked. He had wandered away from the stream, leaving the twins to finish tending to Grizsix. Thune was reluctant to talk in their presence, and there was much they needed to discuss.

“Tremendous pain,” Thune said flatly. “Unimaginable pain.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“I am practicing a mnemonic technique of intentional disassociation. It has served me well thus far.”

“Hurts me just looking at it.”

They crested a low hill covered in minty green grass with spots of searing fuchsia, the mark of an invasive mold, Thune explained. Again Frank marveled at the strange way Argos turned the mundane into something transcendent. Back home an overgrown hill like this would have been a forgettable sight, maybe even an eyesore. But here he was struck by the unnatural colors on display, by the contrast with the sky, by the way the grass bent velvet-smooth before the warm breeze like cat fur under a petting hand. The overall impression was of a place that was handmade, beautiful and volatile and dangerous, like all good art.

“It is not my eye I am worried about,” Thune said. “I am worried about thee.”

“I feel fine.”

“Please set me down. I would talk face-to-face.”

Frank placed Thune gently onto a patch of thick grass and then sat cross-legged in front of him.

“This threat is worse than I imagined,” he said. “Worse even than the threat of the godling. Mayhaps it is worse than the threat all of Argos poses to thee.”

“You’re talking about the Allflesh again?”

“Yes, that is precisely what I am talking about. I am still ignorant to its true nature. One can only guess at what fetid pit of despair birthed such a foul creature. But I know its intentions now. I have touched it.”

“Touched it?”

“With my mind.” Thune’s good eye was wide with terror. The severed head was never a pleasant sight, but it was especially unnerving now, stricken with fear.

Frank had the urge to reach into that eye and pluck out that fear. He had done the same to the twins, and knowing their greatest fear had forced him see them in a different light. They weren’t monsters, they were scared boys, lonely and afraid of a world where no one could protect them. He wondered what he might discover about Thune.

“Dost thou recall when I was first wounded by this damnable blade? My unconscious defenses reacted forcefully. Mayhaps thou didst experience this as a painful stimuli.”

“That rings a bell,” Frank said. Painful stimuli was one way to describe the psychic feedback that overcame him in the clearing. Car-battery-to-your-nuts-bad was another.

“Forgive me. I did not mean to injure thee. Lashing out as I did was a way to deter attackers. And it worked. If I hadn’t knocked those two wretched –”

“Easy,” Frank said. “Those are our friends now.”

“We would be dead. That is my point. But in lashing out as I did, I made contact with every mind in that clearing. I touched thee and the twins and the Allflesh.”

“What did you find?”

“The Allflesh hates thee.”

Frank felt something cold and wet slither up his spine. He brushed at his back unconsciously, like swatting a bug, but there was nothing there.

“Its hatred is deep and black. I have never before glimpsed an emotion so all-consuming, so malignant, and I have peered into many minds. I do not boast, Frank Farrell, when I tell thee that to attain the rank of master of the tenth order, my rank, a mentalist must explore no less than five thousand minds. And in all of my research, all of my practice, I have never once confronted a creature so evil.”

He lies. It was Sarge’s voice in Frank’s head, but whispering and sibilant, different than he was used to hearing.

“Why would it hate me?”

“Dost thou remember thy words to me, back in the temple, after the transformation?”

“What did I say?”

“It was talking to me,” Thune’s mouth was moving but the words were a perfect replica of Frank’s voice, “and then … then I think it tried to eat me.”

“How’d you do that?”

The conjurer has many voices. Trust none of them.

“Parlor tricks,” Thune said dismissively, returning to his own voice. “Forgive me, I have an affinity for the dramatic. But my point remains. The Allflesh tried to eat thee, and somehow thou didst manage to prevent that. But I believe it still wants to eat thee. Its every waking moment, its every thought, is consumed by this singular impulse. Something is stopping it, but I do not know what.”

“The tumor,” Frank said.

“What?”

“The tumor in my brain.” This was the first time he’d spoken about it with someone who wasn’t a doctor. It felt scary to acknowledge it, but also freeing. For a long time, he’d been afraid to admit what was wrong with him, both to others and to himself. But what did it matter here? What difference did a brain tumor make in a world where he was a fear-eating warrior who rode giant, psychic lizards and slaughtered armies of cannibal monkey-men?

“There is a tumor in thy brain?” Thune said. “How can one survive such a condition?”

“I have medicine that helps me. Or I did, back where I come from. But I need to take it every day for it to work.”

“And without this medicine?”

Frank shook his head.

“By Pthet,” Thune muttered. “We must get thee back home as quickly as we can.”

“That’s the plan.”

“I suspect thine instincts are correct. This tumor would explain things which before I had not been able to understand.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is something protecting thee from the Allflesh. It protected thee from me, as well, the first time we met. Like a lead veil draped over thy mind. It was difficult to penetrate. I know now this was due to latent psionic abilities, abilities that a layman such as thee should not possess. Those powers must be tied to the tumor.”

“My tumor made me psychic?”

“Stranger things have happened, Frank Farrell.”

“And these psionic abilities of mine … they’re what’s keeping the Allflesh from eating me?”

“Precisely. Like psychic armor. But we must be careful. These powers are a finite resource. And with every use of them, the psychic shield grows weaker.”

Psionic Reserve: 85/100

There is power in letting go.

Maybe Thune was right. He could almost convince himself he felt a change, a pressure behind his eyes perhaps, like a dam slowly leaking.

“And when it’s depleted?” he asked.

“Then, I fear, thou will succumb to the Allflesh.”

Succumb was a word the doctors liked to use, too. Frank didn’t care for it. It was too soft, too imprecise. He wasn’t succumbing to anything, he was being killed, slowly and irreversibly, by a tumor the size of walnut hidden between the lobes of his brain. Although now it seemed the tumor had some competition.

“Is there a way to build this shield back up, once I’ve used it.”

He fears only one thing.

“Yes, but it will require deep meditation. It is a complicated process, one I will have to guide thee through.”

“So let’s do it.”

“Not here. It is too dangerous. We shall try in Uqmai.”

You need no special powers to see it.

“Until then, do not use these abilities of yours. The risk is too great.”

“What if we run into trouble?”

“We shall have to lie low, bide our time until the moment is right. I will help as I can. But swear to me now, Frank Farrel, swear you will not use these strange powers.”

“Sure,” Frank said. “We’ll play it your way.”

He fears you.