Lizard at Arms, and More- "From Whence He Came"

Author’s note: This is the final entry from the short story collection that is “Lizard at Arms, and More”.

Dressed in his sailor’s pants and flowing white shirt, a dark blue denim vest over top, the man known to the Midnight Suns as Mr. Striker lay on his cot in his private quarters on the condemned building’s fourth floor, his arms resting on the pillows under his head, his hands rubbing at the back of his head. He wondered, not for the first time, how much longer he could keep himself under control, how long he could remain free to roam the realms of Tamalaria.

Not long, I suspect, he thought dismally. Especially if the McNealy woman doesn’t keep her wits about her when she goes on these little trips of hers. But he could not begrudge Lain her trip to the Temple of Unaki. He had no room to begrudge her at all. Without her, he would still be stuck at Lake Prekka’s shores, as he had been for far too long before her arrival there.

Striker sat up on the edge of his cot and drew a cigarette from the crumpled pack on his night table, lit it, and took a deep drag on it. So long ago, this cycle started, he thought. And not since Asterion have I truly unleashed myself on the world. I have managed control since then. But how long will I last this time out? How long will she, for that matter?

Though he suspected Lain McNealy would live a decent lifespan if she were careful, the man known as Striker had very much to worry about external factors of danger to the woman. And he had nobody but himself to blame for that condition. He finished his cigarette and lay back down, closing his eyes and thinking back to when his peculiar cycle had begun, and specifically, about the part he played in the destruction of an entire city, many years before.

* * * *

In the realms of Tamalaria, there are several places where one does not travel alone or even in small numbers—not if one wishes to see their next birthday. That takes a while according to the Tamalarian calendar, with thirteen months to the year and thirty days to each of those months. Still, you couldn’t toss a stone without finding somebody who would do anything to see the next birthday coming along.

Among those places, the most well-known was without a doubt Mount Toane, a grand mountain in the eastern provinces known to be the habitat and breeding grounds of demons since the middle of the Third Age. Several city-states and townships had risen and fallen with Mount Toane in their politically accepted territories, but these had always tried to deny that the mountain was any of their responsibility. The only pseudo-political organization that ever tried to actually do anything about the creatures living and reproducing inside the guts of that darkened demesne was the Order of Oun.

But there were other dangerous places scattered throughout the realms of Tamalaria, make no mistake. Ancient ruins left abandoned, forgotten to the ravages of time. Castles and manors standing ramshackle and unkempt in tall grasslands and small woodlands. Spectral, haunted towns given wide berths by travelers, and to which the newest roads did not connect. Most of these places had residents of a sort, but seldom were they normal, sentient people. Rashum, the monsters of the realms of Tamalaria, usually lurked in these places, waiting for an unsuspecting adventurer or two to bumble along for dinner. Well, the Rashum’s dinner, because the adventurers are the dinner.

One such place in the Fifth Age was the town of Asterion, a city of ruins that, to the casual eye, appeared to be the remains of a burned out township. One could almost assume that fire had been the cause of the state of the town, but records from the end of the Fourth Age, also known as the Age of Mecha, would tell a different tale. In the center of the township, during the year 233, 4A, a revolutionary Gnome Engineer by the name of Simon Tilburn designed and created a weapon so advanced and destructive that the ramifications of creating such a weapon were astounding. His scientific curiosity getting the better of him, he had a bunker constructed deep beneath the laboratory he owned and operated in the center of town in which to house the weapon. He just had to create it, since he had figured out how to do so.

Gnomes’ racial curiosity often dominated their lives and actions. The only safeguard Tilburn made with regard to the weapon itself, aside from creating the bunker, was to create the weapon on a one-fourth scale, hopefully minimizing the devastation, should the weapon somehow be absconded either by the government of the city-state or thieves looking to turn a quick buck by selling off stolen weaponry.

Unfortunately for Tilburn, the weapon he designed worked, and all too well. The only fault he committed in its creation was neglecting to add in a power feed cutoff protocol. When the laboratory’s underground bunker suffered a power failure, the weapon, drawing power from the main switchboard, ignited. The last thing that Tilburn saw in his relatively well-lived life was a flash of white light.

What had once been a laboratory building above ground was a crater in the aftermath. The pressure of the explosion flung several tons of concrete, steel blast walls and tempered, heat-resistant glass in a circumference of death throughout the city. Only a handful of residents were spared, most of them living or working in the outlying regions of the city. Thirty-thousand plus civilians, security forces and officials were slain by the debris flung by the explosion. One-hundred and fourteen survivors, nearly half of them burned by the sheer heat wave that ripped through the city from the weapon’s detonation, started making their way to the next nearest known city, Sho-gre, of the Fiefdom of Lemago.

Of the survivors, forty-three died along the way during the twelve-day forced march, victims of the various rashum inhabiting the wilderness of the plains. A forty-fourth person, a slender young man whom none of the other survivors could claim to have known more than a very little at any time, disappeared from the group. Apparently taken victim by a group of monstrous fire beetles the survivors contended with during the twilight hours of their tenth day marching. The young man was forgotten entirely by the time the survivors reached the shelter of Sho-gre.

Unbeknownst to them, said young man had used the appearance of the rashum that evening to break away from their group. Off to the south he spirited himself, laughing merrily all the while. None of them suspected him of anything, and that, he supposed, was as it should be. He only found it sad that he would have to return to the place from whence he came soon, if only until he found another to attach himself to.

Dressed in the dark leathers and v-necked vest typical of a pirate, a black bandana tied back over his head, the eternally young man whistled between shining, metallic teeth as he made his way back towards his home haunt. He still had several days before he would be forcefully dragged by unseen hands to that place, so he resolved to be as joyful about the trip as he could afford to be.

In truth, this young man with the appearance of a human pirate was in point of fact an abomination, a hybrid of science and magic given human shape. Originally a demon spawned from the seventh ring of Hell and given the body of its summoner as a permanent host (thanks to some demonic trickery in the wording of his agreement with the human who summoned him), the creature had not been aware at first of the odd alterations which had already been made to the physical body of the man it now inhabited.

But those oddities quickly became apparent. Thinking back on it as he whistled, the young man started to skip a little along the benighted path. Only once did anything approach him out of a sense of predatory hostility, a pair of dire wolves with violence and dinner on their minds.

One look from the crazed eyes of the human-thing they blocked from the road ahead however, and they yelped and took flight as fast as their four legs each would carry them.

Lake Prekka, thought the young man who was, in fact, a demon. That’s where it all began. Stupid mortal. He really should have let himself just die. But faced with either death or incarceration at the hands of the Desanadron military forces back in the year 114, 4A, the bandit known as Theodore Remantose stumbled below decks as his crew fought with the boarding militia, several arrows piercing through his stomach and chest.

Drawing out an old tome pillaged from a seafront village along the northern coast of the continent, Remantose had turned through the pages until he found the incantation he had been seeking, and summoned forth a minor demon to bargain with in his quarters.

The demon, however, clever as any other, had tricked the man in the bargaining process. In exchange for getting him clear of his current circumstances, the human agreed to let the demon take his body for its own uses ‘for a time’. The demon took control then, the arrows flying from its host’s body as it healed over. Using a hatchet from the first mate’s cabin, the demon tore a hole in the bottom of the boat, releasing itself from the battle and possible death or imprisonment by swimming down and out into the lake, away from the sinking ship.

When the demon got its host body to the shore several hours later, the human’s soul rose up in an attempt to retake control. ‘You have had your time, and got me out. Now return to me my body,’ the voice of Remantose said within his own head.

‘Ah, I think not,’ the demon had replied. As the young man remembered this, he smiled broadly, once more displaying the shining metal teeth to the moonlight. ‘You agreed that I could have your body for a time, and that time, I have decided, is forever.’

Screaming protestations, the demon stuffed Remantose’s soul into the deepest, darkest place the demon could find. From then on, it had been enjoying itself.

However, there was one hitch to the demon’s plans, and it was this. As a minor demon of the seventh ring of Hell, it could only remain away from the place it was first summoned if it was bound to another mortal through service. Otherwise, the demon had to remain on the shores of Lake Prekka, specifically within only a few hundred yards of a piece of the old bulkhead of the sunken pirate’s ship. It had since then drifted up onto the shore, but the demon still found this restriction disturbing. Too heavy to carry and too vague to toy with, the demon had to satisfy itself with taking odd jobs for travelers who happened across his path.

But being demonic lent itself to the trouble of always wanting to cause wanton and rampant destruction among the mortals, and the worse the destruction, the more he enjoyed it. Hence his cutting the power to his employer’s bunker, causing the detonation of the weapon the Gnome had designed. “Too bad he slimmed it down,” the creature said to the darkness and the wind. “It would have been nice to see a bigger boom.”

The demon had been in the lab when it blew apart, but being of the strange nature that he was, he survived the blast. That is where the scientific alterations the pirate already had fashioned for himself came into play. Early in the Fourth Age, it was not uncommon for Alchemists to experiment with replacing portions of the body with machinery and other non-native elements. Remantose had several of these replacements when the demon was first contacted by him, many of them made for combat purposes.

The first and most obvious were the metal teeth, set in a complicated series of gears implanted in the jaws and a set of rubber gums. The second alteration was a layer of flesh which was actually entirely hairless, just under the outer epidermis. This flesh was placed using the ancient Alchemy art of Focus, and came from the bodies of several Rendermen, a particularly vicious type of man-like rashum whose bodies were entirely impervious to any kind of fire or wind. Furthermore, the Rendermen’s skins were extraordinarily tough, often likened unto a sort of bronze chain mail in terms of durability.

Third and most important to the demon’s concerns, however, was the inclusion of a hollow alcove implanted where the left calf should have been. In order to make up for this absence, whomever had made the alterations for Remantose had used pistons and steel mesh to replace and support the missing muscle tissue. The hollow, made of wood, was kept closed on a latch and could be sprung open by the pirate whenever he needed it to be. Useful for stashing hidden weapons and emergency funds, it was also waterproof, and aided in his swimming ability by giving him an extra buoyancy.

The demon used these little advantages whenever he could.

* * * *

“Well, here we are again, old friend,” the demon said to the bulkhead once again. This was not the end of the march he had been making when he parted from the survivors of the tragedy of Asterion, no. This was the end of yet another long forced march, one he’d made after getting yet another binding master killed. Once again no master, once again left to his own devices along the shore of Lake Prekka.

He had gone through a large number of such employers and masters in the time since the incident at Asterion. Always the story was essentially the same—he would be discovered by someone vacationing or passing through the region around the lake, and some idle small talk would be initiated. He would ingratiate himself with the man or woman, regardless of Race, and go with them back to their hometown to perform whatever labors were available to him. During these times, he would try to find work with somebody else, and sometimes he did, but the end result was always the same. The moment the first boss or master died, he would be forced to start heading back to the lake. If he did not, he would be dragged along the ground by an unseen force until he crashed headlong into the bulkhead.

The pain of the experience was excruciating, and he’d had to suffer through it three times. Healing took days, and he always felt a little less potent afterwards. At times, the mortal soul of Remantose would seem to surface, but the demon knew better. Some kind god had removed that man’s soul many years ago now, not long after the War of Vandross. The demon was entirely on his own in the altered body he’d stolen by trickery.

“Good thing I’m demonic,” he muttered aloud, laying back on the sand, eyes closed against the sunlight. “Otherwise this body would have rotted a long time ago.” But once again he was speaking to the wind, for no other company did he have. After the long trek back from Trapperstown, having barely returned in time to the beach to avoid a painful dragging, he had nothing on his hands but time to relax and think about the many wondrous ways he could ruin the lives of those around him, should another opportunity come along.

He would be given an opportunity sooner than he expected.

* * * *

The next morning, as the demon sat lazily on the beach, a fishing rod in hand, the line extended far out into the lake, he sensed eyes upon him. At first, he did nothing about it, but after a few minutes, his shoulders began to hunch up in apprehension. He could sense deep magic in the stare he was receiving, and he didn’t care for it in the least.

Setting the rod deep in the sand as not to lose it, he rose to his feet and cast his eyes about for the source of his disquiet.

Those same eyes quickly fell upon a pale but beautiful woman, dressed in a flowing black evening dress. To either side behind her stood a rotting, shambling corpse, each brandishing a rusted battle axe. Honey-brown hair flowed all the way down to her waist in the back, braided in a severe style the demon had not seen in several centuries. He had thought the style out of date, but here was a woman who wore it not only well, but with an almost regal air.

“Can I be of some help, miss,” he said to the woman, who was clearly the mistress of the undead creatures behind her.

“Perhaps,” she said. “I am late in getting back to the city of Desanadron, to my Headmaster. I note you have a boat.” She pointed to the small skiff that the demon had constructed several years earlier and never gotten around to actually using on the lake. “I am hoping you might be willing to row me across Lake Prekka, saving me the time of going around the lake.”

“What about them,” he asked, pointing to the zombies.

“They will make their way to me in due time, and if they do not, they can be easily replaced,” said the Necromancer woman.

The demon considered the offer. He was being asked to do a single task, which would not by his nature allow him to go with her farther than the other side of the lake before he had to return to the bulkhead. She’d mentioned a Headmaster, though. Is this woman in a guild of some sort? he wondered. If so, perhaps I can gain some more permanent employ.

“Well, miss, I would be more than happy to help, if in return you can help me.” The demon smiled aggressively.

“I’ll not bed you, if that’s what you’re after.” She raised her head slightly as if in indignation.

He waved his hands, dismissing the notion, though he would not have been averse to it. The woman was a looker, after all.

“I would not deign to suggest something so villainous, Miss, though I am a villain in truth and in nature,” he said. “No, I was going to make note that you mentioned a Headmaster. What guild, may I ask, do you pledge yourself to, and is there room for someone to join up in the ranks?”

The woman lowered her head a little, and even offered him a cold smile. She shook her head slightly, but kept smiling as she looked him square in the eyes.

“I will not mention the name of my guild, sir, but I would be happy to introduce you to my Headmaster and ask if you may be admitted into our ranks. We don’t exactly do a lot of publicity in our organization, due to its nature and circumstances. I trust you’ll understand.”

“I do, my lady.” The demon gave a mocking bow. If he could, he would dance with glee, for the woman’s offer was just what he needed to get away from the bulkhead, the wording just vague enough to allow him to go all the way to Desanadron. Should he get admitted into this guild of hers, though, he would still be bound to her, for she was his initial contact. He would have to take care to keep her alive and well. “Before we set off, for I assure you the skiff will carry the two of us well enough, I would know your name, Miss.”

The woman took a few steps toward the demon, and offered her hand in the dainty fashion of a lady of the court. “My name is Lain McNealy, sir. I am, as you have probably guessed, a Necromancer. And what, good sir, is your name?”

On this the demon had to think, because he had not as yet established for himself a new title by which to travel and work, but he had to be quick about it. Sometimes, he thought, it’s best to go with an old name, one that suits you forever. So, without a moment’s hesitation, he opted to give the woman his true name, the one that the pirate had invoked back in the early years of the Fourth Age.

“Striker, miss,” he said. “My name is Mr. Striker, and I am humbly at your service.” He gave her another sweeping bow, and made the skiff ready for launch.

When it was prepared, he helped the Necromancer on board, and together they began making their way across Lake Prekka. What sort of chaos awaits me, Striker thought as they glided along. What sort of mischief can I get up to with this woman’s guild, and will it be worth it?

Only time would tell.