Nightlord: Orb (2 page)

Basement, Too

Ever tried to break out of the basement of your subconscious mind?  It’s not easy.  I wonder if coma patients ever go through this sort of thing.

I’ve been scavenging a bit among the trash and litter of the city landscape.  Some wire and some remnants of old tires make pretty good sandals; my feet feel better about running, at least.  I’ve also found a few bits of metal—a length of rusty pipe and a jagged bit of something.  I used a broken piece of concrete to scrape the jagged metal into a serviceable shiv.  Nothing to wear, yet, but I keep hoping to find something—an old trash bag would do.  I don’t like running around naked, not even in my imagination.

I’m doing less running and more searching.  This is the junkpile of my mind, presumably the place everything goes when I stop paying attention to it.  Somewhere down here are bright things, good things.  There have to be.  Didn’t I call up a butler?  A teacher?  A warrior spirit?  There have to be more aspects to my personality than the dark and terrible things pursuing me.

Don’t there?

Are they buried under masses of evil thoughts and ugly feelings, unable to join with me?  Or are they already
part
of me?  Could I be the sole representation of all the good pieces of my self?  I certainly don’t feel like everything good, noble, and righteous.  If this is all I have in the way of decent bits, it does not encourage me to think of myself as a good person.

I keep searching.  Occasionally, I crush smaller things if they get too close.  If it fits under a foot and sniffs around in range, I stomp it into the ground.  Interestingly, these things crush like a sand sculpture.  They resist being crushed, at first, then crunch underfoot.  The bodies turn to powder and blow away.  I’m not sure if that means they’re insignificant, utterly annihilated, or simply re-forming elsewhere.

Here’s another thought.  If I’m facing my mental demons—admittedly, tiny ones—and occasionally crushing one into nonexistence, does this count as psychotherapy?  Maybe I
am
crazy, and fighting my inner demons is how I get more sane—by asserting my conscious dominance over my subconscious fears and baser urges.  Or, maybe I’m destroying pieces of my mind and
going
crazy.

Is there a psychiatric doctor in the house?

Basement, Still

Today I found an unusual structure.

Wait, back up again.  When I say, “today,” I mean I found it recently.  I have no idea how long I’ve been running, scavenging, searching, and intermittently slaying.  I can’t regard the progress of time by the days; there are no days, only darkness.  I can’t even count days by the times I sleep; I don’t sleep here, even when I try.  For all I know, this whole experience is only an instant out in the physical world.  By the same token, my personal psychodrama could be dragging on slowly while centuries pass.

So let’s just say I found an unusual structure.

The thing is a giant head.  It puts me in mind of a Greek statue of Hercules I once saw in a museum, only this one is huge, masonry, and buried up to the jaw.  Fitted stones interlock to form the thing, and what I can see of it is about forty feet tall.  There was no door to be found, but I managed to climb up and wiggle in through an ear.  The entire space was empty, hollow; I’m still not sure what holds it all together.  Far up, the holes of the eyes are like windows, letting in a faint trace of light from one of the trash-fires outside.  I had the place to myself.

For the first time in forever, I had someplace to sit down and really rest.  I did.  It was really quite nice.  I don’t recall the last time I enjoyed sitting down so much.

Naturally, this acted like a magnet on everything unpleasant.  Or like a dinner bell.

I felt a bit rested when the first of them showed up.  They were mostly small things, like mutated crabs and scorpions.  They scrambled in through the ears, two, three, four at a time.  I got to my feet and started stomping; it was either that or try climbing to the eyes, and the flapping sounds outside told me the harpies were back.  There was also the crimson light of fiery hatred shining in through the eyes; she has her uses, I suppose.

The problem with a space with limited entrances is the limited exits.  Anything hard to get into is hard to get out of.  Point for future reference.  You’d think I’d know better than to try and maintain a fixed address by now.  All it does is let everything know where to find me.

Things crunched under my tire-sandals as I danced around—sort of a cross between ballet and clog-dancing.  I made sure stomping anything with a stinger was a priority; I didn’t want to crush something and get stung by a neighbor.  That helped, but I still had to whack a couple of crablike things with the pipe to dislodge them from my toes.  That hurt, but it was better than letting them stay.

How many?   I don’t know.  A few hundred?  A thousand, maybe?  I was busy doing the Panicked Pogo Stick Stomp and I didn’t keep count.

Finally, when I settled down again, I evaluated at the carnage.  Black powder was everywhere, slowly sinking into the floor and vanishing.  I wondered what it meant.

Then a harpy dive-bombed one of the eye openings and sent in a shit-missile.  It splattered everywhere and I could hear the raucous laughter outside.

Wrath—
Ira
—is one of the sins.  I remember that.  At that moment, though, I didn’t much care.

I wriggled out through an ear and stood there, eyeballing the circling flock of foul-smelling things.  The distorted faces of women I have cared about sneered and screeched at me.  The one with Tort’s face dove at me, talons out.

That’s not Tort
, I realized. 
That’s some monster that’s using her face—that
dares
to use her face.

Instead of ducking, I dealt that face a two-handed blow with my length of pipe.  The harpy came to an abrupt halt in mid-swoop and fell to the ground, stunned.  I hit it again, cracking the skull, before I stepped on its throat and put my makeshift knife into its left eye.

It shuddered and quit, crumbling to a fine, black powder.

Everything else scattered.  The flaming figure went out; the handsome man faded back into the shadows, and the other harpies screamed and shrieked as they flapped away, shedding greasy feathers. I watched them go, wondering.

Is that all it takes?  To make the choice?  To stand instead of flee?  To be brave instead of cowardly?  Or is it a case where finally getting angry was the right thing to do?

Yoda would be so disappointed in me.  Malcolm X might not.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I crawled back into my head to rest and think.

I’m living in an extended phantasmagoria of psychological metaphors.  I know that, because I can follow along my personal timeline, point by point, for how I got here.  I grabbed a demonic spirit with my tendrils and gave it a free ride into my being.

Important note:  never try to eat a demon’s soul.  They aren’t food; they’re competition.  Trying to pull a demon’s essence in through one’s soul-devouring tendrils works entirely
too
well.  They treat it like an open door and come right in.  This is not considered an optimal outcome by anyone except the demon, who will then fight you for the driver’s seat at the very least.

Within the structure of my mental creations, there’s one real way out of this basement: stairs up to a trapdoor in the floor of my mental study.  My mental study, of course, is a conscious construct for where my personal concept of self is supposed to be.  It’s kind of like the bridge on a ship.  Everything is controlled from there.  Or, if not controlled, at least that’s where the central coordination happens.

If I’m going to get out of here, I need to find the stairs, force the door, and somehow manage to defeat a double or triple dose of my own darker nature.  My Evil Twin is already much stronger than any of my own inner demons should be—or, perhaps, it’s a more cohesive and organized bundle of them.  It can also call up all of my own inner darkness through a process of affinity or correspondence.  That’s what got me dragged down here in the first place.

I don’t know if killing off his potential allies is, in the long term, a good thing for my sanity or not.  But if I’m going to stand a chance of breaking out and beating him, I have to cut down on his reinforcements.

I’ve been hunted long enough.

In My Head

If I were trying to run from things, I would abandon this position and keep moving.  As it is, I’ve decided to stay.  The unpleasant things come to me and I kill them.  They crumble and blow away, or the dusty remains diffuse into the ground.  I don’t think I’ve seen any of those again.  I know I haven’t seen the Tort-harpy again; the rest of them seem more cautious about approaching.  The handsome fellow is hanging around, but he doesn’t crawl in after me.  The fiery figure merely looks in through one or the other of the head’s eyes once in a while.  As for the ghost of my unborn son, it sort of floats around outside the head without actually doing anything—aside from being a reminder.

I’m scavenging materials and my equipment has improved.  I now have a spear to go with my club and my knife.  If I can find some decent lengths of wire, I think I’ll have a serviceable bow.  Then we’ll see how much longer the harpies keep dropping crap on me.  Maybe I’ll even figure out a way to kill a giant, fiery hatred.  The thought pleases me greatly.

The ruins have also provided some other goodies, most notably the remains of clothing.  Being naked annoys me, but sometimes I’m stuck with it.  Not anymore!  I’m at the height of homeless haute couture.

I’ve also had a chance to sit and experiment with spells.

In my headspace, up there among the conscious portions of my brain, I can build a spell and watch it work in a sort of conceptual virtual reality.  I can even cast spells in my mental study to affect things in my mental study—my memory-searching spell leaps to mind.  With sufficient effort, I can even cast spells on my body without leaving my headspace.  It therefore seems reasonable I can cast spells down here in the basement, too.

Yes and no.

Fundamentally, magic is the art of using one’s will to alter the world.  In low-magic environments, such as, for example, Brooklyn, this has minimal effect; there simply isn’t enough magic to allow reality to be altered in any macro-scale fashion.  Microscopic or quantum scale?  Maybe.

As an aside—and I may have mentioned this before—I wonder if magic is less of an energy and more of a quality.  High-magic universes may simply be more susceptible to alterations by an act of will rather than containing a mysterious “magical energy.”  Psychologically, we may treat it as another form of energy in order to focus the will and define the change.  Or magic could be an energy like any other, with a spectrum rotated ninety degrees from all the existing ones.  Frankly, I’m not sure how to tell the difference between quantum instability and additional spectra.  At least, not from where I’m sitting.

Here in my lower brain, there does appear to be magic.  At least, I can alter some things by an act of will.  The usual patterns of spells, however, appear to be ineffective.  I draw diagrams and they seem dead.  I chant and the words fall flat.  I gesture and there are no trails of power following my fingers.  It’s like there is no magic to work with.

On the other hand, since I was without functional spell-based tools, I eventually fell back on the most primitive of methods: staring and concentrating.

I should have tried that first.  It’s my mind, after all, and I’m concentrating on some small portion of it in here.  In hindsight, it’s obvious.  I can, to a limited extent, choose what to think.  So what I have to deal with inside my own head is, fundamentally, mine.  As for how much conscious control I can exert over unconscious elements… well, that’s another story.

While I can’t simply gesture a staircase into existence as I did in my study, I can generate small-but-useful effects.  My makeshift clothes are clean, as am I.  My steel-belted radial sandals have changed shape; they fit my feet like slip-on shoes.  Rags have turned into socks.  My weapons are, by slow stages, transforming into better shapes and materials.

And, perhaps most interesting, I can see things through my eyes.

It’s not easy, but if I sit still and quiet my thoughts, I get flashes of vision.  Sometimes it’s in the shadowless monochrome of a vampire’s dark vision; sometimes it’s in vibrant, almost painful color.  While I can’t hold the visions for more than a few seconds at a time, these glimpses tell me things.  Not all of them are things I like.

The Black Copy seems to enjoy being in a healthy body.  He’s been having tons of sex, and not just with Tort and Lissette.  I’ve had repeated glimpses of Malana and/or Malena, and single instances of at least a dozen others.  I don’t know if he’s that charming or if it’s hard to argue with the person they think of as their king.

Hmm.  That’s my body he’s using.  If he’s sired any children, technically they’re
my
children.  Awkward.

There are also a number of non-repeating faces who are having a much less pleasant time.  Generally, they’re busy dying in agony.  I can’t always tell what the circumstances are, though.  Many of them are obvious; being cut in two isn’t ambiguous.  Others are being ripped apart with bare hands—well, taloned hands; the fingernails are like steel blades—or are being subjected to a variety of unpleasant and usually-bloody circumstances.  Maybe they’re criminals being fed to the King; maybe they’re people who had the bad luck to cross him when he was in a bad mood.  Maybe they’re random snacks.

A number of other scenes have crossed my vision.  I’ve seen several cities.  What might be the grand hall is better furnished.  There seem to be more knights.  We have a sizable army.  There are also flashes of smoke and fire and molten metal.  Things like that.

As far as I can tell, though, he hasn’t laid eyes on Bronze.  That makes me wonder if I’ve seen her down here.  I
think
I have, but it’s dark out there and it was both long ago and far away.

Is she in my mind, looking for me?  Can she be here?  Firebrand is psychic, or telepathic, or something, and I haven’t heard from it.  Bronze is less psychic and more a part of me.  For all I know, she can go anywhere she wants, either physically or otherwise.

I miss her.