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Authors: John C. Wright

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The Face of the Beast

As the dark creature lumbered into the room, Meadow Mouse leapt from Peter’s chest to the pallet near his shoulder, whispering into Peter’s ear, “Say its name!”

“I don’t know its God-damned name!” Peter hissed back.

“We don’t recognize people by what they look like where I come from. Looks change.”

The monster stepped closer, its yellow eyes gleaming like mirrors in the gloom. Peter had heard that animals cannot tolerate to look a man in the eye, so he stared at the huge, black beast.

The creature straightened, throwing back its shoulders and raising its blood-stained chin. Its eyes were wiser and deeper than any human eyes and so filled with majesty and terror that it was Peter who had to struggle to keep from lowering his gaze, not the Beast. In some way he could not define, Peter had the sense that the creature looked like a beast, not because it came from a level below humanity, but from above.

And, as he looked, Peter’s stomach knotted with an old, old fear, and bile rose in the back of his throat. The creature’s fur stank of napalm and of burnt vegetation from some lush, rotten, and overripe dank jungle. Here, too, was the scent of burnt gunpowder, of gasoline, hot metal, human sweat, blood, and charred meat.

“I know you,” said Peter, for he recognized and remembered those smells; the knot of fear that slithered in his stomach came only at those times. “I know you …”

“Not many look into my naked face without panic,” the creature spoke in a purring voice, but the echoes of its voice from the wall sounded faintly as if thousands of distant men were screaming, some in triumph, some in terror. “But I see my claw marks still in you.” And it raised a great hooked talon to point at the scars and seams of surgery that twisted along Peter’s legs and belly.

“War,” said Peter. “You and I go way back. Stay the hell away from me.”

Suddenly Peter saw a wall of white brick circling his bed, and he smelled the smell of salt.

On the other side of the salt brick wall, he heard the Beast prowl, sniffing, and he heard the rasp of claws against the stones.

“Mortal man,” came the purr of the terrible voice, “your kind, throughout all time, has sacrificed your fine young men upon my altars. The arms and legs and eyes, the innocence, the hopes, and the lives of those young men they freely heap upon the bloody altarstone to me. You, too, have given me your blood, your legs. You have no hope ever to walk again. I am pleased with you. Ask of me a boon.”

“You work for the enemy,” said Peter. “Why should you offer me anything?”

The Beast said, “Listen,” and it rattled the massive links of the heavy chain it bore. Then it said, “The fallen archseraphim I serve is like all other monarchs. Each king and each republic who calls me forth lets slip my chain a little ways, and always promise to their folk to bind me up again when time is done, and wreath the land in olive leaves, not flames. No promise is more often forsworn. For each man to defend himself must sacrifice to me as well and loose me from my chain a little ways. One day the chain shall break, and I shall be as I once was when all men worshipped me, when no men dreamed of peace, and every stranger was an enemy. Even the angels will fear me on that day; for all the cosmos shall shake when the final horn-call sounds the battle of the end of time.” The voice of the Beast was melodic and beautiful, but the echoes from the wall were a thousand thin wails of the dying in pain.

“So what? What the hell is all that supposed to mean?” barked Peter.

Meadow Mouse whispered softly in his ear, “Ah, sir, it may not be my place to say, but I don’t think it’s such a good idea to talk with this creature …”

The Beast said, “Observe! Here is my meaning!”

The dream changed. Peter now lay on withered grass, fettered to the roots of a tall and leafless tree. The Beast’s chain was pinned to the crown of the tree, so that it could pace all the ground every way around it but could not approach the roots, lest its chain get tangled and snagged in the outflung branches and the Beast be brought up short.

“See where your weapon is,” snarled the Beast, pointing upward.

The chain was pinned between two branches at the crown of the tree by Mollner, the magic hammer. Mollner lay across the two branches, its haft threaded through a link in such a way that if the haft were dislodged, the chain would slip free.

“Call and the weapon will fall into your hand, mortal man,” said the Beast, “There will be power in your hand to slay your captors, perhaps, and to spill their blood upon the ground.”

“This is a trick of Azrael’s!”

“Indeed. But who is its victim, you or I? Why does he hide my eyes when he would speak with you? He thinks my might will serve his ends alone, he is a fool; for I am an impartial god, most equitable of humor, and accept sacrifice as well from those who hate as those who honor me.” Peter heard the faint scream of multitudes dying in pain behind the Beast’s voice as it spoke.

“That damned rod will paralyze my hands again!”

“Cowards’ hands, afraid to face the wages of war!” Now the Beast fell to all fours again and began to pace back and forth before and behind the tree, restless, as a lion in a cage paces. “Come! Will weak and whining words win your freedom from your foes? I will grant you this, that with my own hand I will slay the first man you engage in battle. And then …”

“Then?”

“I will wed you to one of my daughters. Hear me tell of them.

“One dresses in rags and is beaten and scarred, for her house has been burnt, and she has been raped by soldiers, and she saw the brains of her lovely babies dashed out against the breached walls of her city, while she wept for her lost husband, who lies in an unmarked grave in an unknown spot in foreign lands.

“The other daughter is dressed in gold, a crown of oak upon her head, and all the world waits upon her nod. Children of slain enemies are her slaves and pull her chariot. She holds an olive branch in one hand and a scepter of iron in the other, and none dare speak against her or disturb her peace.

“But these daughters are twins, and you will be wed to one of them if you unleash me, they are twins, and all kings fondly conceive they will wed the second when they open the gates to the temple of Janus, but most must wed the first.”

Now Meadow Mouse ran out toward the Beast, scampering quickly, his thin, high voice an angry squeak. “You were banished from our lands! Banished!”

The gigantic Beast snarled and rose up on its hind-paws as the mouse leapt at it, and the eyes of the Beast were like two balls of yellow fire, and its great claw shimmered like lightning; but even though this great Beast faced nothing but a small mouse, for some reason, there was fear in those terrible eyes and hesitation as the paw rose up …

Then the dream ended, and Peter was awake.

Peter lay in the bed, and his hands tingled. Slowly, he began to flex his fingers.

For a long time he lay there, breathing through his open mouth, eyes closed, letting the feelings of victory and relief wash through his body. His hands. He had his hands again.

Suddenly he realized he could scratch. With a great effort, Peter forced his arms to stay immobile at his side. How best to use this advantage? He might not have much time …

He looked around the room. Nothing had changed. Security camera overhead; small, barred window; wheeled cart of medical instruments, some on a top shelf, some on the bottom. And outside the door, the dull-eyed guard.

Call the hammer? Not likely. Not if he could do something else instead.

Peter crossed his middle and ring finger. Slowly he inched his wrist to the left so that it was pointed at the guard. “Apollo, Hyperion, Helion, Day!” Peter whispered, without moving his lips.

Immediately the glassy stare left the man’s face. He looked alive again, as if there were a soul behind those eyes.

But, aside from that, there was no other reaction.

“Hey, soldier, come here!” Peter called.

The guard turned his head, looked his way, looked away again. That was all.

Peter muttered, “Morpheus! Somnus! Hypnos! Take him out!”

But nothing happened.

Peter said, “Soldier, did I ever tell you I was in the Tet offensive? We had been in the field over a year, and it was all mud, blood, and dirty water. Hadn’t seen a warm meal or a cigarette in months. Orders came down we were suppose to cross twenty-five miles of bad terrain in two days to meet up with units from Khesanh. So there it was, four in the morning, and four hundred degrees at least, and the only thing you could hear was the water dripping off the leaves. Drip, drip, drip, sounding like footsteps …”

It took less than half an hour to get the guard down the corridor and at the door.

“ … our own fucking artillery shells. ‘Friendly fire,’ they call it. So Jefferson stands up with that idiotic flag he’s been carrying all this time and starts waving it over his head. Shouting. ‘Hey, we’re Americans.’ That sort of thing. As if anyone could hear him. Bang. Piece of shrapnel catches him in the head, and we drag him back down into the muddy water,’ cause we can’t tell if he’s alive or not. Ramirez gets the radio going just at this point …” Peter paused.

The guard asked, “So what happened?”

“You got a cigarette on you?”

The boy looked uncertain. “We’re not supposed to give you anything or hand you anything. Orders.” But he stepped in the room.

“What’s your name, soldier?”

Again the boy shrugged uncomfortably. “Can’t say. Orders. Don’t give you anything, don’t apologize, don’t give your name.”

“They tell you I was here without any trial? No arrest warrant? No nothing?”

Now the boy shrugged again, but, this time, with a look of blank indifference. “What do I care about that?” he said.

“It’s unconstitutional, soldier.”

“What do I care about that?” the boy said again.

“You swore to support and defend the Constitution,” said Peter softly.

The young man grinned as if Peter were a simpleminded child who still believed in Santa Claus. “Fuck that,” he said.

“I didn’t quite hear you, soldier,” said Peter, even more softly.

“This isn’t 1776 anymore, you know. This is the new millennium. Get with the program. We’re running things now. Some of the Pentagon, some of the Congress, they’re our boys now, and they make sure we get to do whatever the mission requires.”

“Your mission is attacking American civilians on American soil?”

“No. They’re just little people. Just in the way.”

All this time Peter had been hoping that Azrael had enchanted these people, like Wil had been enchanted, to make them do stuff they did not want to do. But no; it looked like these fellows knew what they were doing and were neck deep in it.

Why the hypnosis, then? Peter had a guess. His father had warned him what happened to mortal men when they saw too many things from the Other World, touched them, trafficked with them. People tended to forget and to be forgotten. Azrael might have enchanted his henchmen, done something to their minds, to allow them to work alongside supernatural monsters like Kelpie and Selkie, without forgetting their names and their lives.

Or he might have enchanted them to shut up and stand still when on guard duty, so that they would not say or do something accidentally to mess up Azrael’s plans.

The soldier was still chatting on about the little people. “Civilians get in the way, we can shoot ’em, gas ’em, burn ’em: no one is going to look into it. Not the papers, not the press. They get switched, if they do.”

“Switched?”

“Switched for one of our side. Skin ’em alive, throw the skins in the water. An hour later, someone who looks like him is walking around. Something.”

“So that’s your side, is it? You must be fucking proud to look in the mirror in the morning.”

The boy shrugged again. “The world turned out to be a weird, fucked-up place. UFO-type weird, you know? Voodoo weird. And there’re things in the water, coming. Nightmare things. Things people can’t fight. Invisible things.”

“You don’t know jack, soldier,” said Peter, grimacing. “My family’s been fighting against the night-world for centuries. We got it under control. We got—”

“You got nothing, old man!”

“You swore to them, didn’t you? Azrael and his crew.”

A hushed whisper. “We don’t say his name. The Warlock. He’s got the Power.”

“So. The U.S. government you swore to protect and defend when you put on that uniform has got one whup-ass monster-truck shitload of power too, seems to me.”

The boy snorted. Evidently that did not seem worth answering.

Peter said thoughtfully. “Now, let me get this straight. When you joined up, did you swear to fight for the flag of your country, or did you swear to cut and run when some freak in a pointy hat doing card tricks managed to give you the willies and turn your sissy-ass spine all yellow? You love your country, soldier?”

“Don’t make me laugh. What’s to love? Compared to what’s coming up out of the sea, this country is about as crippled and paralyzed and worthless as … well, as you, old man. Everything will be swept away when the Darkness covers all. But not me. No sir. I ain’t getting swept away. I’m a survivor. You either do or get done to in this life, you know? Victim or victor. And its not like anyone leaves this outfit alive. Everybody’s got to sleep sometime. That’s our motto.”

“Swell. Some motto.”

The other man shrugged. “What the heck. At least it’s easier to say than
semper fidelis.”

Peter would never have been able to kill a man in the uniform of his country—until now. The young man’s craven words, whether he knew it or not, had just put the signature on his death warrant.

“Well, you’re most likely right. Gotta go along to get along, I always say, and what’s this damn country ever done for me?” Peter tried to smile. It was certainly the worst acting job he had ever done in his life.

The idiot actually grinned at him. “Yeah, now you’re getting it, old man.”

“Hey, be a pal and adjust this baby-bottle thing over my head here. Just move it closer to my head so I can reach it.”

The young man nodded, slung his rifle, and stepped forward toward the bed. He reached out his hand …

BOOK: Mists of Everness (The War of the Dreaming)

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