In which Grit the Quill does not die alone.
_
Some fresh, hot Vim for you, on this frigid and frozen January day!
If you want to catch up on our poor hero's previous misadventures, you can find previous chapters of Vim here
Strange things are afoot on the Prince’s Mountain, and our mad eunuch scribe-turned-thief is in the thick of them.
I rewrote this chapter from scratch after losing the entire manuscript, and in so doing discovered a good many and interesting things about Vim and Grit the Quill and all the other denizens of this slightly horrible world of rust and sun. For all the anguish of the losing, the story was much improved by it.
Then, just as I was poised to publish this completely reinvented chapter, the original manuscript surfaced once more in this reality (having been hidden - black binder on shadowed, dark wood - in the bottom of a cabinet I use for the storage of batteries and open as little as possible because it smells like moldy cat vomit inside for entirely mysterious reasons for which I definitely do not blame anyone. Cough, cough, convincing cough.)
Obviously, I could not, in good conscience, ignore the karmic gift of its re-arrival and post what I had written without rereading the old.
It was an exercise that I highly recommend, if you happen to have access to a manuscript devouring (and regurgitating) pocket dimension.
...I like to think that resulting chapter combines all the best of both manuscripts.
My legs no longer hold me. I sit now, leaned against the door that I have found, though I cannot now recall the finding.
I do not know how it eluded my senses until now, for it juts from the mountain rock with no attempt at artifice or coy dissembly.
Perhaps, my eyes grow sharpened with approaching death, as men with mortal injuries commit great acts of strength they would never contemplate in bodies hale and a whole.
Words are carved deep into its face.
I do not know the tongue, but I look on their geometry and hear again the voice that rang inside my skull on that shore of bones.
This portal shall be our path inside.
"Our" is a foolish choice of word.
It shall be their path inside, for though I have discovered this doorway in the stone and deciphered the words engraved above its cold, steel face, I know that I will not pass through it.
Fever burns the remainder of my mind. The ruin of my body can barely move this pen for all its trembling. I dare not even look at the wounded arm.
I have read that in the Prince's wars, men would sever limbs to spare themselves infection, though even when they did, more died than could be saved. I can remember, if I strain, one-armed beggars in the rusted streets, when I was young enough to be a whole man myself, though I could have counted with a single hand the years that made my life.
Alas, I will never stand (or limp or crawl) among their company. The time for such strong medicine is long past.
I will open the door.
I must decipher, while I still possess a mind, the word of entry hidden in these glyphs.
It will be my gift to the others, though surely death awaits them on the other side.
Does that sound cruel? Death surely waits for us where we stand, in the arrows of the wolf catchers and the venomed axes of the charcoal burners' men. I give my Neorxenawanga the gift of moving forward. Perhaps, she will remember me, in the darkness of the Prince's Mountain.
A man remembers his dog, even many years later. So, I hope to be remembered, though the years may be but hours for my friends.
I have loved her as only I can. Any man may play the lover, but in the end, each loves also his own delight, and these two loves must always be at emnity, for love abides no rival.
Of all the beasts that we call men, the capon alone, who stands unfettered by the hungers of the flesh, may love without this evil.
For that, I thank my father's knife.
I must solve the riddle. That is what it is, I am sure. It fits the hubris of its maker to be so.
I will find the answer, and let my Neorxenawanga chase the death that she has chosen. It is a simple pattern. I must only live the day.
___
The voice grows very quiet, even as it screams.
I no longer hear the words.
I will die before I can accomplish whatever task it brought me here to do.
_
A hand gripped me. I thought it was at last the icy touch of death, but the fingers that pinned my arm and wrapped across my mouth were warm with life. I sunk my teeth into them, but if their owner gave a cry, my senses were too close to corpsely to register a sound.
I remember a blade, and greater pain along my rotting arm.
If there were words spoken, only the stones and my attacker heard them.
The fire has left my flesh.
Something else has supplanted it, a kind of humming power that pulls against my veins.
Blood cakes my lips, and paints the entirety of my stricken arm a vibrant crimson. Below new bandages, a line has been incised from elbow down through my poisoned wound and up across my palm. It ends, slightly askew, on the tip of my middle finger.
There is more blood than I thought my sickened body could contain.
The stars are very close. I can see them, through the clouds and mountain mist, and smell their distant fire.
I have not been moved far. I can see the stone on which I leaned to write of Paradise. No, I see my steps upon the ground. I came here in delirium myself, though I have no recollection. My attacker came upon me where I lay fallen.
Whatever they have done to me, they have not stayed to see it through, for there is no trace of stranger to be seen, and even their prints – where I can smell them – are hidden on hard stone.
___
___
Stave is very pale, but will let no one tend his wounds, not even Slightly.
I found him, face-down on the trail, surrounded by luparii.
I have felt madness many times – under my father's knife, taking my own blade to my master, when I first looked upon the mountain and hatched the thought that it might be despoiled – but I have never felt such a rushing thirst for blood as when I looked upon those men, and man-shaped things, laughing and beating my companion.
I have hated Stave, and may hate him still for all that has transpired, but he will die by no night bastard's hand.
How they failed to notice my approach, I do not know, for I think I ran along the stones that lined the cliff. My feet remember haste.
The ink I spread is tainted now with blood. In recollection, I see I had no weapon – all that I had carried beside my quill and ink and pages, I had left in our wet and filthy shelter, too weak to bear it along the cliffside trail I crawled to find a place to die, and have now sprinted down to kill.
I remember neither plan nor fear nor even thought.
My teeth were in their leader’s throat. His strangled cry was like the scribe's, or others I have heard, in dreams when the Mountain's lights would flicker in the window of my room. I have always had a view of it, I realize, in all the chambers where I lived, from the slavers' reeking pen to the lime-walled dormitory full of ink-stained youths. Now, those ghostly sparks flare all around us, and the black stone warms against my skin, yet I cannot help feel that I look still through some window far away.
That is how it seems also, when I try to cast my mind back to that cliffside battle, where I fought as I could not for myself or even Paradise, when the wolf catchers first came upon us, by the banks of the dwindling Fell.
All the blood I then failed to spill now incarnadines my hand and anoints each stone and rock along this cliffside charnel house. The air within my lungs is thick and red.
I do not know how I came to be in their midst. I cannot think I leapt, but the trail is hardly single file, and I know they were on both sides of me as I stood, legs astride Stave's fallen form, and seized the one that had been pressing him with questions and a knife.
Though my face is slick with other's blood, I can recall no sensation beyond the click of my teeth meeting in his throat, and the gurgling cry that mingled with the rest.
I see the fighting now, with that inner eye we call the mind's, but I watch it only – like the weeping child at the windowsill – while a thing that looks like me duels in my place.
Honest watches me across the fire, and I do not lower my eyes. If I let them wonder, they will seek my Paradise.
I have seen the way that men will look on women.
That is the gaze that I now feel burning within my eyes, though what made me a man was long ago fed to my father's pigs.
_
I remember now a single thought.
"Yes," I said, within my mind.
"Yes."
To what, I do not know.
___
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