Birth of a Monster (24 page)

But at least that shack had windows,
and you’d feel a cool breeze from time to time. Not like this
place. No, here you just—

“I’m going out!” Crabs
roared.

Sharp Tooth, who had gotten his
nickname from a nasty bite he had given to a long-time tormentor,
practically severing the man’s nose from his face, looked at Crabs
warily.

“We were told to stay put,” Sharp Tooth
said.

“We were told to lay low!” Crabs
snapped back.

“They’s the same, ain’t they?” Sharp
Tooth queried.

Crabs looked around the room
menacingly. “I ain’t gonna starve in my own house, you hear? And,
what the heck—even in prison they feed you! I’m goin’!”

Crabs grabbed the large couch in front
of the main door and began to pull. In his weakened state, he
couldn’t get it to budge, but a fury soon overtook him, giving his
body a strength it shouldn’t have possessed.

He yanked the couch out of the way and
looked cockily at his timid comrades.

“I’ll go with,” Sharp Tooth
said.

“Stay the hell here!” Crabs said. “I’ll
take Chris.”

Chris had been with him when he had
gotten busted, and they had both made the decision to cooperate. It
didn’t take them long to figure out they had been sold out by their
underlings, most of whom were now holed up with them in this
fireplace.

But he was also pretty sure that these
underlings didn’t know that he and Chris had in turn set up Tats,
which had then caused Mr. Brass to get involved, which had then
caused things to really go haywire.

Now seemed as good a time as any to
have a little powwow with his fellow traitor and talk about whether
it might be a good idea to leave Sivingdel for good and never come
back. He had almost accumulated a million falons, though his
nightly binges on alcohol, Smokeless Green, and whores kept making
the pursuit of that number as futile as a dog chasing its tail.
Nonetheless, he could learn to tone it down a bit and stretch that
money out as long as he needed to.

He and his family in the junkyard had
often survived on two hundred falons a month.

The feeling of fresh air against his
face as he opened the door and stepped outside provided more
pleasure than any of his other vices could have if a night’s worth
had been concentrated into five seconds.

He closed his eyes and took a deep
breath.

“Ahhhhh,” he said slowly
exhaling.

He noticed Chris was being awfully
aloof, not commenting at all on the pleasure of fresh air after
nearly a week inside that sweaty furnace.

He opened his eyes, ready to tear into
him, when he saw the yard was full of police. One was standing
right in front of him.

“Crabs, is it?” the officer said,
grinning, eyeing the telltale tattoos on his neck.

Crabs felt a sharp knock against his
head. The pain was intense, but he was out cold before he could so
much as whimper.

Chapter 44

If a person had mistaken Eddie’s lithe
frame for just another one of the sinewy branches reaching out
horizontally into the air of the thick forest, he could not have
been justly excoriated. His dark brown clothes mirrored the color
of the tree, and if his body occasionally adjusted itself slightly,
the branches themselves could not boast plenary resilience against
the occasional gust of wind.

But if the observer had noticed that
from this one branch alone fell drops of some liquid matter, he may
have directed his attention singularly enough to see the sweat
falling from Eddie’s brow.

This was no grown man, but was a far
cry from the sniveling kid who had ran home from school with
bullies on his heels. This was a wiry young teenager, little
comprising his frame besides muscle and bone.

He didn’t see Tristan most days. The
aloof old man stopped in about once per month to monitor Eddie’s
progress and deliver food. Harsh though the old man was predisposed
to be, even his caviling nature found little to quibble about when
it came both to Eddie’s improvement and dedication.

He preferred to evaluate Eddie
unobserved, since he felt that is when any student is most likely
to surrender to the powerful instincts of indolence and
complacency. But watching the young student, even surreptitiously,
was like seeing a reflection of himself from centuries before.
There was clearly no physical or mental desire that could properly
be described as competing with the young student’s zeal to progress
in the arts of magic.

Eddie had begun with incantations
designed to enable him to root himself to objects. He would stand
on a thick tree branch for hours at a time in calm weather. Then,
in windy weather. Then, on a thin branch.

When Eddie stood twenty-four hours
without food or drink on a branch no wider than his fist several
hundred feet above ground in spite of several nasty wind gusts,
Tristan decided it was time to take him to the next
level.

Starting on a branch a few feet from
the ground, he instructed Eddie to lean forward while
simultaneously invoking the chant “Iksun,” the incantation for
balance.

Like a weightlifter who has accustomed
himself to a particular weight, but struggles when just ten to
twenty pounds are added, Eddie could lean forward no more than ten
to fifteen degrees without toppling over altogether.

His brain, clutching the invisible but
very present forces around him, struggled with the added weight the
same way the pectoral and tricep muscles quiver beneath a
theretofore unattempted load.

Day after day, his body felt lighter at
increasingly sharp angles until he finally achieved a full
horizontal pose, only his feet touching the branch. Tristan, never
one who believed in overindulging himself, much less anyone else,
could not help but heartily congratulate this student, who had
reached the goal much quicker in his training than Tristan had, not
that he parted with that secret.

Eddie’s next move would have surely
betrayed to even the laziest observer that this was no tree branch,
as he calmly adjusted his body into a hanging position, only the
bottoms of his feet touching the branch.

The sweat really began to pour now, as
his heart rate soared, since these exercises exerted his body as
much as his mind. He had reached his most stubborn roadblock so far
on what had otherwise been a seamless charge forward through every
exercise his master had given him.

When he had first achieved the ability
six months ago to hang vertically, he thought the next step would
be easy. Instead, it threatened to prove itself his triumphant
nemesis. This exercise was that of walking upside down.

The difficulty in conquering this
exercise lay in the cruel chasm separating the strength required to
hang from one foot versus two, and the lack of any means of a more
gradual transition between these two opposing cliff
walls.

But to walk upside down would first
require that he be able to hang from one foot. He had a strange
confidence that today would be the day. A furious determination
swept over him. He had been practicing from a low branch to soften
the impact of his countless falls, but today he decided that
perhaps the knowledge of the low price of failure was the very
reason for its perpetuation.

A hundred feet down was a long way to
fall, and while there was a branch or two he might be able to grasp
on the way down, the odds in favor of a fall being fatal were
rather high. Sweat pouring down his face, he slowly removed one
foot from the branch.

It felt as if a hundred pounds had just
been attached to his head. His body wanted to fall, but he flexed
his mind repeating “IKSUN! IKSUN! IKSUN!!” furiously.

His body held. He counted to five, and
put his other foot back a split second before he would have
otherwise gone crashing hopelessly to the ground.

“Impressive,” a voice
uttered.

Eddie quickly lifted his hands upwards
towards the branch and propelled himself on top of it more nimbly
than a monkey.

Tristan was there.

“A few more weeks, and I think you’ll
be walking underneath any surface you please.”

Tristan had gotten back from delivering
one of Eddie’s letters. They were several thousand miles to the
east of the events of Selegania, but Tristan had enchanted a
pholung and flew westward enough to turn over Eddie’s letters to an
international courier.

Though Tristan had not returned to
Selegania since having left it, he had been close enough to sense
that something radical and transformative was happening
there.

That is good. All truly
great wizards are thrust immediately into dangerous adversity upon
completion of their formal training. If they cannot survive that,
then they never possessed the inner qualities necessary to excel in
the craft.

“Thank you, master,” Eddie said, glad
for a brief respite. He could tell something was on Tristan’s mind,
but his powers of mindreading were far too weak to penetrate the
opaque medulla of Tristan’s soul.

Chapter 45

“Hear ye! Hear ye! The honorable
Governor Sehensberg has chosen to honor us with a few words on this
momentous occasion!”

The roaring crowd clapped mightily and
cheered with equal vigor. In the city square, stood a large gallows
that had been constructed in a mere twenty-four hours by
around-the-clock workers earning several times their normal hourly
pay, but the heightened pay rate seemed like a small sacrifice to
the most-grateful city government for their inestimably valuable
work of construction.

Twenty-seven doomed men stood atop the
gallows, all gagged so as to prevent any unseasonable outburst
during the governor’s speech. The gallows had been erected in a
triangular formation pointed towards the crowd, with the more
serious offenders placed towards the front so as to make more
public their ignominious demise.

The sound of the crowd dulled from a
frenzy to a low roar, then to a whisper, and then to silence as
their duly elected governor stood before them ready to deliver his
address.

With considerable gravitas, the
governor began, “Citizens . . . neighbors . . . friends . . .
.”

A pen would have made a clatter if it
had hit the ground.

“Today is a sad day. But, today is also
a happy day.

“Like the thrust of sunlight through a
dark cloud following a devastating hurricane, today’s justice
represents the next chapter following what has been undeniably a
blot on our community, our city, and our country.

“Today, the message shall be sent to
every knave that acts of terror and devastation will not make us
cower. They will not make us quiver.

“They will merely strengthen that
unique spirit and resolve that makes us proud to call ourselves
Rodalians!”

“Wuu-HU! HANG ‘EM!” said a particularly
loud voice amongst the otherwise polite applause.

The governor dignifiedly waited for the
restoration of silence.

“I want to make it clear that I deserve
little, if any, of the credit. The interim police chief, within
just twenty-four hours of my appointing him, hit the streets with
his men and rounded up the perpetrators of what has surely been the
worst series of violent crimes in our city’s history!”

Loud cheering and applause erupted,
while the governor briefly presented a stern-faced man with a thick
moustache that looked like it could deflect an arrow.

“Needless to say,” the governor
resumed, with a sly smile, “I plan on recommending him to permanent
elevation to city police chief.”

“YAHHHH!!” screamed one man amongst a
chorus of other jubilant outbursts.

“Chief Halden is no career paper
pusher. He’s a veteran officer of some of the most challenging
sections of this city, and he’s the right man for the
job!”

More jubilation.

“But though today we deliver justice to
the fallen, let us not forget that not all of the victims were
innocent, and it is with great sobriety that we should contemplate
the reality that a culture of corruption emboldens criminals to
carry out heinous crimes on such a grand scale.

“But we shall not dwell on the past. We
shall not further castigate those who have already paid the
ultimate price for their life of crime and corruption. We shall,
instead, look forward to a new chapter in Sivingdel’s
legacy.