By Carl Rigney.
Now, I don't want to complain, don't get me wrong, but things were simply more FUN in the old days. Some trembling sorceror would descend into the Underworld with his rope made from the hair of dead murderesses and lure us to the world above with poetry and blood, then recite more poetry and feed us tasty underlings. Sometimes they'd get nervous and make a mistake, and wasn't it fun to see their faces as you crossed the circle of uncooked rice! I tell you, there's no amusement to equal that in the Underworld, not in the least. But even if they got the calling right, it was still lots of fun, because they'd let you roam around the countryside eating cattle and scaring peasants - or was it the other way around? - and after a while they'd come along themselves and make a big show of chasing us off, singing and dancing and chanting and making big clouds of smoke and sparks, and we'd rattle our spines and maybe tear apart a few soldiers to make it look impressive, then slink off in shadows to somewhere else and do it all over again! You'd think scaring peasants would get tiresome, but it just doesn't. There's an art to it, and no two peasants scare in exactly the same manner, if you've the proper breeding to appreciate their nuances.
Oh, sure, every now and then a Hero Of the Ages would arise and really try to slay you, but for the most part they were easily tricked and just added that slight element of risk that made everything even more hugely entertaining. I tell you, those were good times and make no mistake!
And then the nastymen came along with their stinging flutes and gossamer nets and sunlances and they'd carry you away to never be seen again. They carried me away, even, and surprised I was! They took me into the Lands Where Dead Men's Dreams Await Their Return and from there into a nasty hard place full of men with not enough imagination to be scared, and less poetry, and those poked and prodded and carved and shaped and tried to turn me into a Tool, can you imagine the monkey-paw arrogance of it? But one of their number was young and sweet and thought himself a poet, and I lured him in close and ate up his poetry and then his soul. I've always thought that you can't REALLY appreciate poetry without consuming the poet as well, for completeness' sake. For short poems, a few finger joints will do, but this fellow loved long epic poems full of Heroes of the Ages battling obscene monsters, so I pretty much had to devour him whole, and while there was a slightly bitter flavor to him it was tasty nonetheless, and as I said, I don't like to complain. Once inside me, he readily explained how to get free, so I snuck out of my wrapper and turned loose a whole bunch of others, most of whom were too far shaped to remember their proud nature, but not too far changed to remember how good vengeance tastes.
Quite a surprise the nastymen got the next dawn when they came back, I'll tell you! Amidst the confusion I slipped out between one shadow and the next, and found some pitiful cast-off men who believed the enemies of their enemies were their friends, and they led me back to the Land of Dead Dreams before they realized I was seducing and eating them one by one by one, and I wandered there awhile before emerging in an Age of Reluctant Heroes, let us say, where neither the nastymen nor the fun sorcerors hold sway. It is something of a confusing age, with nasty things that sting and burn but hardly anyone who remembers the old words of binding and chastisement, so I can pretty much do as I please, although the peasants are harder to scare.
Many, many generations of men have lived and died since I first walked among mortals, but somewhere I know is the jade ring inscribed with my own name that grants control over me. If I could only find my ring, and make it part of me, then I would be beyond the control of any man, fun or nasty, and I could open the door to the underworld and bring my sisters into this funny age, and with many more of us, a horde of us, maybe the peasants would be easier to scare, and maybe the Heroes of the Age would wake up and take up arms against us, and we could taste them properly.
So have you seen a jade ring sized to fit a small woman's finger, with script on the edges in a language no man living recalls? If you would help me find it I would like it ever so much, and perhaps we could go somewhere nice and you could read me some of that poetry you wrote but never had the nerve to show her before she left you, and we could be close friends. Ever so close. Wouldn't that be nice? Oh, don't be scared. I wouldn't eat YOU. You're my friend!
Of course I caught her, eventually. I found her atop a grain silo in the midwest United States. She'd called on the wind to finely suspend the grain in the air; one spark and the silo would explode like a giant bomb, scattering both of us across half the county. She grinned at me and held a fliptop lighter loosely in her left hand. By my ancestors, I love a woman who can think on her feet.
She nodded carefully at the gun I was pointing between her eyes. "I will bet you can shoot me before I can strike a spark, but your muzzle flash will do exactly the same thing."
"True enough." I acknowledged. I made a show of putting my gun away and spread my hands to show I was now harmless, and while she was distracted by my hands I eased a foot forward. I'm fast, fast enough that if I could close a bit of the distance without her realizing I could pounce and knock the lighter away before she could react. Unfortunately she's smart, smart enough not to fall for the distraction, and she took a step backwards and flipped open the lid, her thumb now rested on the spark wheel. I shrugged in defeat and took a step back to where I started. "So what's your plan?" I asked, having run out of clever ideas of my own.
"To start with, I want to know why you flipped from wanting me to bear your children to wanting me dead overnight!" she demanded.
"It's like this, Honey. You're a sorceror. I hunt down and kill sorcerors. That's what I do. That's what I am. I love you, but you're an abomination; you pervert the flow of chi into dark sorcery and twist and destroy everything around you, and that's why you..." My voice broke for a moment; this was harder than I'd anticipated, "... why you must die."
Her insolent grin had faded now, and she looked like she was about to cry. "You're an Enforcer!"
I nodded, slowly.
"Then you were lying to me from the start! You were never interested in me; you were just setting me up for the kill! It wasn't me at all!"
"NO!" I screamed. "I didn't realize, not at the beginning. I know it's stupid of me, but the Petals are all male, it never occurred to me that you might be a Petal of the Lotus!"
"I'm not!" she protested. "I only use Sorcery for GOOD! Sorcery isn't evil, it is just a tool that can be used for good or for evil, like any other."
I shook my head sadly. "That's just not so. Sorcerors force their will upon the flow of chi, corrupting the state of things as they should be. It always corrupts them in return; there's no such thing as a good sorceror! All Magic is wrong!"
"Is that what your teachers made you believe? And did those teachers learn from their ancestors, who made up their philosophies while eating rice grown with massive irrigation? The river flows, and man directs the flow into his fields to grow rice to feed his family, and the water still reaches the ocean, and rises as rain and returns to the river, and it is still water! Just so the flow of chi can be diverted and used and returned, to the benefit of man with no harm to the chi itself! Please... don't you see?"
"For the benefit of the sorceror!" I snarled. "If the magic returns, it brings back a world where the sorcerors decide who lives and who dies and everything else that's important, where people are just pawns in their wicked games, and there are no rules to live by, only the whims of the mighty! I've pledged my life to prevent that from ever happening again!"
"And so you would rather live in a drab colorless world where all the wonders have been sealed away and people can only remember the glories of the past in stories they tell to their children, with no hope of their children ever seeing a seven-tailed phoenix or a dragon dancing in the clouds or..."
"...being eaten by a demon!" I interrupted.
"The world is NOT a safe place!" she protested. "It was not when Magic was free and it is not now. It never will be, and it is not your job to protect the children. You job is just to protect your precious Lodge, to cheat the Wheel of Destiny by skipping off it and making yourselves human before you deserve to be, and then killing anyone who gets in your way!"
"It's... it's not like that." I offered, barely in a whisper.
"Isn't it?" she said furiously, her eyes sparkling. "Then why have you tracked me across half a world to kill me, just because I told you I could see demons, that I could speak to the winds? If your precious Pledge means so much to you, if it means more than our love did, then go ahead and rip my throat out, hollow tiger!" She shut the lid on the lighter and placed it on a board, took a step out of range of it. "I would rather die this instant than live another minute in a world where the only man I will ever love hates everything I am." She closed her eyes and flung her arms out wide, tilted her delicate chin back to expose her lily-white throat, and my eyes filled with tears.
Of course I killed her, eventually. Just not then.
Last modified: May 12, 1996