The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (37 page)

“Indeed,” says Tsukue. “Only one eye…”

Dimly, he recalls his last North Korean ludus. As an environmental hazard, the match took place amongst twenty blind men with chainsaws. Political prisoners, eyes burned out with lye. The chugging Honda saws drowned out all sound and choked the air with smoke and gasoline vapor.

Balance whispers something to the technician, who relaxes into the chair and lets himself be restrained. Tsukue selects a tool like a notched melon baller. If Salazar’s vaunted immune system will cooperate, he observes, this should not delay the ludus at all.

***

A nerve is just a wire made of conductive organic cells. A conduit for binary electrical signals that aggregate to form the touch of a lover’s skin or the impulse to smash an enemy’s face.

Just as wires can be spliced together, severed nerves may be introduced to other nerves and new synaptic chains induced. While no mortal surgeon could manually join every nervous chain in a severed spinal cord, the doctors of the Pageant have found it quite easy to mesh them together with an enzyme derived from nameless Amazonian botanical products and animal donors like Salazar. Gradually over successive transplants, the surgeons have rebuilt Salazar’s skull with steel reinforcements and lead shielding, and made it into a module as easily plugged into a new network as any portable hard drive.

Replacing an eye in this improved cranium is as simple, then, as swapping out a burned out headlight. Before the local anesthetic has entirely worn off, Salazar begins to see through the technician’s eye.

At first, white flashes and stabs of neuralgic fire, but a psychoactive cocktail of neurotransmitters and mescaline induces a kaleidoscopic optical storm and then a disturbing razor clarity.

After the initial shock wears off, he insists the eye is working properly and takes up his swords, eager to enter the arena.

Only the hypnotist notices something furtive in his manner. After every transplant, he has warned Lord Sun to expect the Samurai to wither and die. The experience of a brain finding itself in a new body dwarfs even the upheaval caused by a massive stroke. The surgeons themselves predicted years of rehabilitation before he could perform even the most rudimentary physical routines. But always, the Samurai rose from his bed and took up his swords with new hands. Even if the brain could not always feel pain or recall itself, no matter if those strange hands had never hefted a weapon, he made them his own in less time than another man might break in a pair of shoes.

Though he is too stricken to betray any sign of it, the first things Salazar sees with his new eye make him try to claw it out.

He sees…

Ghosts—the dead serve the living—Lord Sun drinks with the dictator—parades of zombie military slaves, peasant serfs and at his side—

Her.

His hands claw at his face, but with his gauntlets on, he can’t get through the mesh screen joining his snarling demon mask with the brim of his helmet. He tosses his head as if the helmet is full of hornets, but after a shaky moment, the Samurai rolls his shoulders, bows his head and strides up the corridor toward the blinding lights and the flatulent blasting of a blind marching band.

***

Nothing in this life was his, but his body and his hatred.

With her, he lost even those.

An impromptu ludus resulting from an awkward ejection of a boorish houseguest. Her face, painted white geisha accessory, carved with tears at first sight of him. Red with blood shed defending her honor. Alone in a sea of howling mouths.

Always, he’d felt as if his nerves extended out of his body. All the world too bright, too loud, in need of a beating. At last he knew where his nerves ended.

Where his true, secret heart had always been.

With his master’s wife.

Lord Sun, bastard offspring of a Manchurian “Daughter of Joy” and an anonymous Japanese officer. Master of Hong Kong’s black market and a ferocious opponent of Nippon. Builder and destroyer of fortunes, with a stable of gladiators unequalled in the eastern hemisphere and a harem culled from the world’s nightclubs and brothels and nunneries with a zookeeper’s methodical thoroughness. All but forgotten among the graveyard of discarded human toys and trophies, the Lady Sun.

Assigned to guard her wing of the palace, Salazar did not see her again for the first year of his service. He stood watch outside her garden. He heard her sing. He fell in love with her before they had spoken, before he knew anything about her but that she was also American, and the father of Lord Sun’s only children.

Like the birth of a cold, sorrowful star in the void of Salazar’s heart, his love for her transmuted his nature. But almost before it was conceived, his new universe began to collapse under its own unstable gravity.

He could not resist her. She seduced him with horrors. Lord Sun was a cannibal who ate his own unborn children. She had become his lawful wife because she bore him two male heirs. When the boys came of age, he would make them fight to the death, and he would have his brain transplanted into the body of the victor.

They waited until his indenture to Lord Sun was paid off before he betrayed his master.

***

The Mongolian storms the arena like a minotaur on ketamine. Trainers remotely spike his adrenaline drip and drive him through the gate with cattle prods, dropping the portcullis behind him. With a seven-foot axe, he splits a peasant retainer to the waist, kicks the underfed kindling off the blade and basks in outrage. The audience of local Party elect shriek like electrified lab rats. In an imperial box fortified by ballistic glass, Lord Sun sits with their host and the other patrons and a group of bored, constipated old men who can only be Chinese dignitaries.

When the Samurai enters, the crowd settles into an unsettling hush, as if refrigerated narcotic gas has filled the vast underground arena. Like something frozen, limbs tightly coiled, he pads into the murkily lit center. Shivering, staggering. Stripped of poetry, of technique, he advances like a praying mantis intent upon mating.

Obscured behind a veil of chainmail, the Mongolian’s welcoming grin is almost audible as he beckons. Nearly twice the Samurai’s weight and with a good eighteen-inch height advantage, he is a bear to Samurai’s skinned rabbit.

A few desultory swings of his axe and jerky feints with a steel net fail to draw any notice from the Samurai. A fusillade of fireworks spray the field. A rocket vomiting green phosphorus sparks cuts between them. The Mongolian must expect the Samurai to be blinded, for he avalanches the smaller man.

This is where the battle typically becomes a dance, where the Samurai’s elegant minimalism seeks parity with the Mongolian’s barbaric onslaught, and a whole new art form is invented.

Even the Mongolian must realize that something is wrong. What he lacks in tactical skill, he more than compensates with his apparent knowledge of Samurai’s eye injury. Circling clockwise, trying to get outside the vaunted reach of Samurai’s infamous sword, he drives to get into Samurai’s blind spot.

Instead of his customary dual-wielding
nitoken
technique, the Samurai has forsaken his
daisho
, holds the 74cm katana close to his chest like a precious thing sure to be shattered. Samurai circles the Mongolian several times, then a bloodcurdling scream rips out of him and he flings himself, swinging the katana like a baseball bat, headfirst into the heel of the oncoming axe.

The audience leaps to its collective feet. Shock quickly sours into outrage. This isn’t what they came to see.

Samurai reels backwards and falls like a doll to the ground, still holding his sword in the same awkward two-handed grip. Mask split wide open, revealing a one-eyed, slack-jawed Asian face. Drooling, tripping his head off on ketamine administered directly into his surviving eye, the technician doesn’t even know he’s losing a fight. Arms flopping frenziedly, trying to drop the weapon glued to his gauntleted hands when the Mongolian tramples him. Katana snared in steel net and he’s slung into the air and slammed into a stone column but still he won’t, he can’t let go—

Irate Lord Sun calls his trainers, surgeons, hypnotist, security staff.

Message center.

Calls up security camera view of Salazar’s bunker on a laptop.

Red
.

The hypnotist calls back. He’s left the compound for the night, and when he left, everything was as it should have been—

The doors slam open to make way for a headless bodyguard. Screaming like sheep downwind from the slaughterhouse, patrons on their feet amid bodyguards and concubines.

Salazar slides into the box and moves through them like a gardener among windswept trees, artfully pruning limbs with his short sword. Through the boiling crowd he cuts a path to the front row and a phalanx of Triad soldiers backing Lord Sun into a corner. One of them tries to shoot down the glass. The bullets bounce off the walls until they hit one body or shatter and maim several.

One far more astute bodyguard, using two ceramic-silicon automatics the size of credit cards, pump sixty-eight .12 caliber rounds into Salazar. Half of them glance off his naked steel and bone cranium, trailing drug drip tubes and leaking exotic fluids. His new left eye is so dilated that it looks like a black coin, a mouth overflowing with the Dark.

The host disregards his own prohibition on firearms and draws a massive Glock with a laser sight, shaky with the prospect of firing a shot in anger. He shoots two of his own bodyguards before the survivors sweep him out of the box.

Salazar chops down the last Triad guards and lays bare his nemesis.

Here, some small demonstration of his humanity, of the tenderness that cost him everything, would vouchsafe him the role of hero in this confrontation. And if there were gods who cared not for morality plays but only fed greedily upon empty human trauma, then Salazar’s sacrifice would be accepted and miracles would abound.

Lord Sun, a sickly ancient, bald as an egg, blue veins bulging with sluggish blood, clutching his chest with one palpitating claw, takes out his phone with the other. A vile, boneless creature shucked out of its shell of mercenaries and unmasked at last for a coward, squirming behind the last living body left in the box.

Salazar does not act. Less a warrior in repose than a machine with its gears stripped, arm raised above the last one blocking Lord Sun, cowering against starred glass…

It’s her…

But how long has it been? How many fights, how many bodies, how many seasons of rehab and torture…

Ash-blonde hair and honey-gold eyes and her face unpainted unwrinkled uncreased by the sorrows that drove her mad…

She sobs and the musical sound of it undoes him.

“Ka… Ka… Ka… ren…” He reaches out to her. “Is… it is… you…?”

She lifts up a hand to take his. No, she holds out something.

She presses a button.

Salazar’s heart explodes.

***

Death is emptiness.

Death is the void.

Death is easy.

Where Salazar goes, the nothingness itself is alive. Emptiness infested with itself.

When you have nothing left, no
you
, no
I
, the Dark gets inside you and you remake yourself out of it until you’re at one with Nature’s other face. In the Dark, you become everything eating everything else, eating fucking killing dying in the Dark forever and ever.

In here, forever is a breath.

To keep from going mad, you make something. You build a memory palace and fashion the Dark into an infinity of gloomy rooms filled with shadowy impressions. You move from room to room to keep the lustful turgidity of darkness out. You unpack your memories and burn them for warmth, for light.

Until you only have one memory left.

***

Lord Sun’s wife leaves Hong Kong only twice annually, once to shop in Paris and for once the family trip to the seashore.

Lord Sun predictably abstains, but insists they get off the continent and buries them with extra security. A surge in threats from various Triad factions with the imminent handover of Hong Kong, so Salazar accompanies her and the boys to Brunei. He bought her a private island in the Maldives, but she won’t go. Just once a year, the children will at least see normal people, and play with children whose parents don’t aspire to be gods.

A terrorist bomb in the lobby of the Hilton Darussalam kills twenty-two, including the entire family party. None of Indonesia’s menagerie of Islamic terror groups step in to take credit for breaking the unprecedented truce, but it fits the profile of past bombings almost perfectly.

Even in the midst of such a devastating tragedy, Lord Sun is not without suspicions. Allowing for the possibility of his having lost his entire family—wife, sons—and several of his most trusted staff in a tragic accident, he cannot help but look to his enemies. Within hours, a team of private operators is dispatched to Indonesia to meet with the Royal Brunei Police Force, insurance investigators and the Sultan’s security staff, and repeat the same message: Deliver them.