Volume One: The Road Out
Chapter Five
Verse Three: A Time of War
"I must have misheard you," Harley said, "How is walking out to the Goblin and back going to convince Special Agent Bridger here of anything?"
"You named your van?" Bridger said with a raised eyebrow.
"It has been so long since I saw you this inexperienced," The Witch Doctor smiled, "Walking out to the Goblin will convince him, because I don't want you to use the door."
"He's going to climb out a window?" Bridger shook his head, "This isn't starting off very spicy.
"Get ready for a ghost pepper milkshake then Special Agent Saul Bridger," The Witch Doctor said, "Because you may have met Harley Night before today. But here on the road you're going to meet the Walker, and he's knock to knock you off your horse."
The witch Doctor then turned back to Harley and nodded, "Whenever you're ready."
Henrietta raised a hand, "Don't you break my windows."
Harley felt a fluttering in his stomach. He knew what the Witch Doctor wanted, and he'd done it before, just not on a whim. But he nodded and tried to give a confident smile. Then he looked at Henrietta and said, "Your window is safe. I'll make my own."
And with that Harley stepped forward and focused his mind on the Goblin and walked straight towards and, with only a slight involuntary flinch, through the wall of the diner. The strange part for Harley was that he never noticed the jump or whatever he ended up calling the moment of transition. He didn't hear a pop or a change in the sound. But after each successful seven league step, Harley simply found himself at his destination as though the departure point and the destination were actually side by side.
This time, he ended up standing at the rear bumper of the cricket van and theatrically tapped the rear window of the van for effect. Then he sighed in relief, before realizing that he had to do it again.
"Small steps. This is a habit now, a skill I've already learned, a song I know how to play without sheet music."
Harley settled on Marion as a focus, and stepped away from the Goblin, and into the diner with no steps in between; nearly bumping into a slack jawed Henrietta as he finished.
"Hi." He said to her, and she took a stumbling step back shaking her head. Harley looked over at Special Agent Bridger whose eyes had narrowed and was rubbing the bridge of his nose. Harley sat down at a booth beside the slumped form of Marion.
"So ladies and gentlemen," The Witch Doctor said, "Do we have your attention?"
* * *
Amy and Grub stood on a butte in Linwich Crossing looking down at the mining compound. Mung Bean whined and pawed the dirt.
"I agree with the mastiff," Amy said, "This is actually worse than Mrs. Trilby's house, I can feel the violence from here."
"You're picking up the magic quickly. Which bodes well for your ability to help your guy survive what's ahead." Grub said without turning to look at her, "So, were there any survivors?"
Amy stuck her tongue out at Grub and then leaned down to scratch behind Mung Bean's ear, wiping her hand with a handkerchief once she was done. She closed her eyes and reached out into the facility. Images of monstrous being with unravelled heads full of impossible and horrifying teeth and tendrils filled Amy's soul. Amy screamed and fell back into the dust. She tried to disengage, but the imagery was too strong and Amy found herself writhing on the ground as the coven was torn to pieces once more in her brain by the monstrosities with the impossible heads. In the aftermath, Amy watched as Lady Purge fled on foot, and watched as the Shepherd let her go.
Amy tried to right herself in her mind and pulled herself to her feet, and then froze, realizing that she had done so inside her vision. She turned to slowly face the Pale Shepherd as it loomed before her.
"You're going to kill me, and then I won't be around to keep Harley alive," She whispered, "And then the whole story's going to break."
The Pale Shepherd whispered to Amy with the voice of worms, "The story has an answer, and the story will go on. There is no death if you know the secret. Death is merely a change of clothes that one puts on as fashion changes. Death is change, and change kills death. And everything is new once more."
Amy wrenched herself out of the vision with all of the effort she could muster and found herself flat on her back in the arid sunshine, staring up at a cloudless sky.
"That looked less than fun," Grub noted, "But you did well, I definitely picked the right apprentice. How are you doing?"
Amy's eyes felt wet and she could feel blood trickling across her face, and touching her hand to her nose confirmed that she was bleed from both nostrils, "is any part of being a Wizard sexy? Or am I doomed to be dirty, grubby and dusty forevermore? This is not the life I wanted, lying in the dirt bleeding our my nose and crying."
"Those aren't tears." Grub answered.
Amy touched her the edge of her eye with her other hand and it came away sticky red with blood. Part of her wanted to shriek in disgust, part of her was weirdly proud of that blood, "Definitely not sexy. I'm going to have to settle for badass. Michelle Rodriguez and not Marilyn Monroe."
"Neither is a bad option. You know, I met Monroe? So, what's the word?" Grub said.
Amy picked herself up and wiped her face with a handkerchief and then a second one, stuffing both into her tote bag before answering, "The Pale Shepherd is active, like you were afraid had happened. He's using Falsenight's power to build himself an army, scary nasty things he calls midwives. He killed the whole the coven except Lady Purge, but he let her go. I don't know if it was for purpose or because he didn't care. And the Wendigo are getting restless, their trying to creep over the wall between the worlds. the Shadowlands are ready to explode. On a more local note, I can feel a group of freaks in suits heading towards what I'm pretty sure is Harley and his pet freak. And on top of that, I can feel the Wendigo heading in the same direction."
"In other words, we're at endgame- and your boy is nowhere near ready."
"He'll get there," Amy said, "I've got his back."
* * *
"And that's where these three are currently trapped, in the Shadowlands- inside the steaming guts of the story." the Witch Doctor continued, pointing to Marion, the Salt siblings. Bridger and Henrietta were staring in a kind of stunned awe at the Witch Doctor, occasionally looking at Harley as though he couldn't possibly exist. The Witch Doctor kept talking, "Stories are like fermentation. Hey. Have you ever had harkarl?"
"Never heard of it." Harley said.
"It's Greenland shark," Bridger offered, finding his voice, "They eat it in Iceland. But you can't eat it. It's poisonous. You could go blind."
"So, then everyone in Iceland is blind?" Henrietta asked.
"No." The Witch Doctor said, "Because the bury the shark on the beach and let it ferment."
"It rots." Bridger said flatly.
"It rots good." The Witch Doctor corrected, "What did think happens when something ferment? Microbes my friends. We are collaboration with microbes. They and things we couldn't and turn poisonous Greenland shark into delicious harkarl. Although people might dispute the delicious part."
"I'm trying to understand how a lesson in Icelandic cookery is relevant here." Bridger said.
"Stories are what happens when history ferments. For most of us people unfiltered reality is poisonous. Look at what happened to these three, dropping into the story without proper initiation. We have ferment reality into stories in order to add meaning. Take this for example. Imagine little apocalyptic preacher in a back water town. He gathers a group of followers who flout accepted convention. And preaches that the current power structure is corrupt and that end times are coming. Those in power kill him. The end. Right now it's a news report or a paragraph in a history text book. But depending on how we ferment the facts to generate meaning we either get the story of David Koresh of Waco, Texas; or we get the story of Jesus of Nazareth. It's all in how we let the story ferment."
"That's not stories. That's religion." Harley objected.
"You say potato and I say pomme de terre."
"That was French for potato," Bridger said.
"That's right. Calling something the same word in a different language doesn't change the meaning. The point here is that a war between two stories is a war between different ways of understanding your place in the world, different ways of assigning meaning. And people base their lives on how they assign meaning. Change the meaning and the world changes too. That's what's at stake here, what the world means! Which brings us to the subject of your other agents: The Men of Black, and White and their monarch: The Locust King."
* * *
Amy and Grub stared out at the hoard of pale figures, starved and wild looking with matted hair and teeth too long to be human as they moved like an army of cannibals across the scrub grass plains. Mung Bean growled low in the back of his throat.
Grub nodded," You're getting good at this awfully fast. You've got the knack kid."
"I really wish I had been wrong about this one." Amy added.
Grub pointed back towards the highway, and the three bone white vans sliding smoothly across the asphalt towards the decaying old diner where Amy could sense Harley was hiding, "We're going to play a little game of 'let's you and him fight'. Get these two groups to bump into each other and then sit back and watch the sparks fly."
"Why would they fight?" Amy asked, "The Wendigo are created by the Locust King, I thought?"
"No, they Wendigo are created by the Locust King's actions. They are not his creation, they're a by-product of his actions. And they're only concerned with sating their hunger, which is impossible. So they attack and devour everything."
"Just like the Locust King." Amy said.
"Oh yeah, the karma of the situation is pretty heavy. Either way, our best option is to drive them into each other and let them destroy and distract each other while we grab your guy and run."
"And if they spot us?"
"Then, to steal your phrase, things stop being sexy."
"It sounds better when I say it."
* * *
"And so," The Witch Doctor said, "The Locust King fled from death by stealing life from others. Every species driven to extinction by humans in the last ten thousand years is the result of the Locust King and his story. Every war of expansion and aggression perpetrated by one culture upon another in the last ten thousand years is the work of the Locust King and his story. Social Inequity in civilizations ancient and modern is an inevitable feature of the Locust King's story, necessary to the functioning of that story. The Black Plague, Cholera and small pox amongst many other diseases that spread due to overcrowding and poor sanitation are the unintended by-product of the Locust King's story. Global Climate Change, the Chernobyl Disaster, the Exxon Valdez Spill, the Bhopal disaster, Colonialism and the Imperialist repression of local cultures; all these things happened as people attempted to enact the story of the Locust King."
"I don't buy it. What I'm hearing is that every bad thing that humans do is the Locust King's fault. How does that work? We were saints before his story?"
"No, of course not. The idea is ridiculous. Humans are humans and have behaved in predictable ways for millennia. The Locust King's story did several things. First, it forced all cultures who enacted that story into an unwinnable game where they had to expand their culture constantly or collapse if they failed to keep expanding, making our actions more desperate. Second, it taught us that only our story was acceptable and that all other stories were heresy, making us intolerant. Third, the Locust King's story was built to exploit human behaviour to fuel the ambitions of those in power, compared with previous stories which were designed to exploit human behaviour to keep the tribe alive through multiple generations. Before the Locust King's story people were just as petty and just as mean and just as lazy, but the culture generated by our stories used human behaviour in a manner that did not turn us into weapons of mass destruction. Enacting the Locust King's story we are a plague upon the earth; unstoppable and remorseless, ravenous and insatiable. We were not better before the Locust King, but our stories were better."
"So the Locust King's story is evil?"
"Not evil, but driven by fear. The story has, in its attempt to out run death, turned all who follow that story suicidal. The Locust King's story is an attempt to live forever or taken the whole world with him. He has drawn his lieutenants to him with promises of eternal life, and if his story ends so do all of their long over-extended lives. They have built an empire hungry for more, one that will collapse if it is not continually fed more than it was the previous year. Originally they were beholden only to the Grey, but as the empire stretched it became impossible to meet the quota every year. They sought out other methods of power and eventually made a deal with Falsenight: the corrupted spawn of the Great Serpent. He provided them with his power and dramatically multiplied the results of their work, making it possible to meet quotas easily and quickly for the first time in centuries, but Falsenight demanded his own tribute and also neglected to tell them that his power was finite. They have nearly used all of the power they purchased from Falsenight and then they will unable to provide Falsenight with his tribute and they will be unable to meet their quotas to the Grey by a huge margin without Falsenight's power."
"In other words, all fall down."
"Yes."
"So they're even more desperate than usual?"
"Yes. The Roman empire expanded by offering land in newly conquered regions and Roman citizenship to foreigners who joined the legion. When Roman was unable to continue conquering, it was unable to pay its legions. You can see where this is going?"
"I hear what you're saying, yeah."
"Now when Rome grew weak and was unable to continue expanding, the Franks and the Goths and the Vandals and so forth began to devour it from all sides, and Rome itself fractured into the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. But that was small potatoes compared to what will happen now that the Hungry Empire spans the whole globe in a vast interconnected interdependent series of nations and sub empires. There is nobody who can fill the void, no successor who can supply the Grey with his quota or who can give Falsenight his required tribute."
"All fall down?"
"All fall down. The Locust King's story was doomed from the first time is was told, our challenge as his opposition is whether we can keep our own story alive through the collapse of the Locust King's Story. The death of his story may be the death of all of us."
"Now, you keep switching between stuff that sounds like it's part of the world you're calling the Shadowlands and stuff that sounds like part of the real world. How does that work?"
"The Shadowlands is a world of symbolism, here the symbols are more than real. But of course they are symbols and they symbolize things occurring in the Bonelands."
"Listening to all of this is exhausting. Fine, so what's the alternative? What am I fighting for as the storyteller? What's our alternative. Grass huts and bongo drums? Hunting with spears and high infant mortality?"
"You're trying to provoke me?"
"Sort of. I want to hear your best answer. I've been running for my life with my comatose best friend and two kids who's father killed their mother. I've been framed for kidnapping and murder of federal officers. I've fought a demon dog and an ancient god. I've walked through walls and summoned a mythical super club. I'm fighting for my life in support of a cause that nobody has explained to me. I don't even know that I'm the good guy! I just know that the other side is really nasty, but then so were those witches who were supposed to help me. So maybe it's not good guys versus bad guys, but rather bad guys versus worse guys, or even just bad guy number one versus bad guy number two."
"We are not the bad guys and we are not suggesting that you would have to return to an age of spears and high infant mortality, although if we fail to change the story in time that may be where we end up, if we survive at all. You know, you are a paranoid person."
"I'm just cautious. I think that's reasonable given what people have been saying to me. So what are you suggesting? What is your story."
"In a nutshell, the story of the tribe and the circle is a way to live that does not encourage or require humanity to expand like a plague of locusts across the land devouring everything it's path. It is the slow and small way. And admittedly, without the Locust King's explosive growth, humanity would not have achieved the kind of scientific and technological progress that it did in anywhere near the time frame that it did. The process would have been much much slower if it took place within the time frame of the tribe and the circle. But having achieved those things, our story does not require that we abandon them, well, not all of them. Certain technologies have been exhausted by the Locust King and his story, others we cannot afford to exhaust, others we cannot use and still live the story of the Tribe and Circle. But many technological wonders and scientific marvels are well within the bounds of our story. What our story provides is a story where we are not the enemy of the whole of the rest of the world, a story where we are not required to devour the world in order to live in it. The Locust King's story offers a terrible choice: feast with me and starve tomorrow or fight against me and die today. We are the alternative, let us all live to see many tomorrows."
"And who are 'we'?" Bridger asked.
"We're a mess at the moment, but let me bring you up to the point that Harley's reached now: The last Princess and the Kudavbin King, the Dreamwalker and the Storyteller, and the Old Ones, the Witches and Wizards. I'll leave the other bits for later. So..."
* * *
Amy and Grub watched and waited as Mung Bean slithered on his belly into position beside a substantial sandstone boulder on the side of the highway. The caravan of three white van rumbled uniformly along the road towards Mung Bean's position.
"If he misses his mark, this isn't going to turn out sexy for any of us." Amy whispered.
"How long have we been doing this?" Grub answered, "That dog is older than your granddad and deadlier than Chuck Norris. He won't miss his mark."
The front van drew even with Mung Bean's position and the huge dog opened its jaws and launched and deafening bark that rolled out like a pressure wave. The wave hit the lead van and spun it clockwise, blowing out three tires and leaving it perpendicular to the other two vans.
"Beauty!" Amy whispered.
"That'll stop them. Now we just let the Wendigo swarm over them." Grub said. Then he stopped and stared as the back doors of the middle van began emitting a thick oily black smoke.
Amy could feel the magic leaking out from the back of the van and looked to Grub for confirmation on what she was feeling, "Is that a witch?" She asked.
Grub nodded slowly, "I think so. But what's happening? Ambush or conspiracy or..."
The doors of the middle van abruptly screamed with the protest of sudden metal fatigue and fell from the hinges. The rear van attempted to swerve and caught the doors on a angle. The rear van lifted into the air briefly and then the doors lodged under the chassis of the van and the vehicle skidded to a halt in a shower of sparks.
A tiny woman leapt from the back of the middle van, her hands cuffed behind her. Huge black vulture wing composed of greasy smoke extended around the woman and lifted her over the mangled form of the rear van. The middle van plowed into the front van broad side style and the front van tilted and then tipped over in horrifying slow motion as the middle van hung, it's front axle suspended on front vehicle.
"Or it's an escape attempt." Amy finished, "That's Lady Purge isn't it?"
"Of course it's Lady Purge," Grub answered, "And we can't let the Wendigo get her. Of course it's Purge. It couldn't be somebody that I have a good relationship with could it?"
"You have a relationship with Lady Purge?" Amy asked.
"I have a relationship with Lady Purge the way Cuba has a relationship with the United States."
"Which one are you?"
"Depends on whose story you believe. How long do we have before the Wendigo arrive?" Grub asked.
Amy focused, "Maybe ten minutes, probably less."
"Fun fun fun. Let's go raise some hell."
"It's all glamour and paparazzi with you, isn't it?"
* * *
"There are four core laws intrinsic to the story of the Tribe and the Circle," The Witch Doctor said as he shoved a piece of peach cobbler into his mouth,, "No Kings, No Conquest, No One Right Way, Protect the Unborn Elders. No Kings means to accept no arbitrary authority in any form. No conquest means that you may not wipe out your enemy during a conflict. No one right way means that others may live in their own way as long as it is not destructive to the whole. Protect the unborn elders means to ensure that your actions do not damage the ability of future generations to live on the planet. These laws encourage diversity and sustainability which encourage that the story will survive to be retold generation after generation."
"There are no other laws?" Bridger asked with a raised eyebrow.
"There are many other laws, but these are all that is necessary to follow the path of the Tribe and the Circle. Different groups enacting our story can look so different culturally that you would not think we were connected, but that is the point. Difference creates diversity and diversity protects the story and the culture and the species."
"And what, the Locust King's story doesn't do any of that?" Harley asked.
"The Locust King's story is designed to protect one culture and one group, and as a result it devours everything that is not itself until it has eaten it's life support system. OUr story is designed to protect the the life support systems, sacrificing individuals and tribes and even species to protect the whole."
"This is sounding awfully hippie." Henrietta added.
"The hippies had no story, just vague ideals. They were utopian, and in fact Utopias are the mark of the Locust King. He's always trying to create a perfect system, and they just require humans to act like saints. That way, when they fail, because they're based on devouring the world to run from the inevitability of death, the Locust King can blame these flawed and corrupt people. His religions have practically turned cataloguing the sinful flawed nature of humanity into a sport. For a story to work, it cannot require people to be better than are normally. That's where hippies went wrong. Like battered wives hoping to make their husband better, they kept dreaming of a world where humans would suddenly transform into better higher beings. It doesn't work. The Locust King tried to turn himself into a god and it just made him into a monster."
* * *
Amy could feel the Wendigo closing in on their position. She could tell without seeing them, that the creatures had nearly broken through the wall between the Shadowlands. The impending swarm of fangs and claws made it hard to focus on the task at hand, although the bullets striking the van they leaned against for cover and the hum of Grub's Mystic shielding did help keep her on task.
"I'm sorry, I didn't get around to teaching you any combat magic!" Grub yelled back as he kept his hands up reinforcing a glowing red mystic shield and the Men of Black and White fired a relentless stream of bullets without ever bothering to reload their pistols.
"I think I can manage," Amy said raising a hand to point at one of the agents, "These freaks think in black and white, dichotomies you said. Absolutes, right? So let's teach them a little perspective!"
Amy closed her eyes reached out into the mind of on the men of black and white. She felt the connect and a wave of hate and fear washed over her as the connection formed. She held her focus and followed the waves of hate and fear back to the centre of the agent's consciousness, a world of high contrast memories and sharp angular ideologies that sat uncomfortably in the agent's self of identity. Floating inside the agents sense of self, Amy reach down and planted a seed, a connection to her own now expanded awareness of the many shades and nuances that the world held, infecting the agent with a broader perspective on the world. Amy then retreated back into herself and opened her eyes.
The agent she had connected to was writhing in his knees; clutching his head and clawing at his skull. In a state of obvious panic, the agent flung his sun glasses away and ripped out his ear piece. Amy noted blood spurting as the ear piece came out and wondered suddenly how it had been connected. The whole profile of the man began to shiver and then locusts began to crawl out from creases and cracks an out from under the folds of the suit. The locusts took flight and the suit began to crumple as the man inside began to wither away until there was nothing left but an empty mummified husk.
The other agents stared at their fallen comrade and pulled back as a unit behind the lead van, staying behind cover and not firing their pistols so often.
"You scared them with that move, kiddo." Grub remarked.
"I didn't think it would work that well or that horribly." Amy answered.
"Well you've bought us some time either way, and I have some questions for you." Grub said, turning to glare at Lady Purge as the witch's twisting smoke screen burned through her hand cuffs.
"I don't have anything to say to you." She answered.
"You'd better. What you and your coven tried to do demands an explanation. You were trying to steal Falsenight's cup!" Grub snarled, "That breaks the second law!"
"We didn't intend any conquest with the power from the cup!"
"It's impossible to use the cup without violating the second law. Drawing on the cup's power is an act of conquest, you can't use it safely, and you know it! What were you thinking?"
"Have you seen the signs? Are you blind Wizard? The Mother of Discord grows tired of our struggles. The Pale Shepherd marches on the land, and the Locust King is salting and burning the lands before him in an attempt to make one final tribute to the Grey. These are the end times! The story will break and we will not be included in the new story that Mystery gives to the Weaver! Desperate times and desperate measures!"
"Congratulations. You guys have done a great job thus far."
"Oh, and you've been blameless have you Caretaker? How many of the Tenebrati are left standing to hold the Mother back from her tantrum?"
"Two and a half and I've got another Apprentice lined up if we get out of this. So you really aught to be helping more."
"There are supposed to be seven!"
"Yes, there are. One turned traitor and the other four sacrificed themselves to stop the traitor, so that leaves me, the mastiff and my apprentice until I can recruit more."
"And you wonder why the other factions grow desperate, you old mongrel! I wish we'd never met."
"You always were a charmer Purge."
A scream of outrage and hunger erupted from a gentle hill above the combat zone. Amy looked up and saw some hundred or more Wendigo on the crest of the hill, fully through the wall between worlds.
"Things are about to get very ugly, drop your drama bombs some other time." She said as Grub and Purge continued to stare acidly at each other.
"She's sharper than you," Lady Purge notes, "How did even manage to initiate her?"
"Baptism by fire. Baptism by fire. She still needs a title though. The story hasn't given her one."
"I hope she lives long enough." Lady Purge said as the Wendigo began to pour down the hill like an avalanche.
* * *
"And then we ran out of gas and rolled to a stop here," Harley concluded.
"And out there, the world is breaking apart," The Witch Doctor said, "The illusion of normalcy is cracking and the symbols of the Shadowlands are pouring in. Book of revelations stuff, the end of days- because that's how the Locust King's story conceives of the end of its story. The King can't imagine a story beyond his own, and so as the endgame approaches, his world starts to crumble and shatter and look more and more apocalyptic. Of course, that makes it challenging for people who live in his world, which is most people these days."
Agent Bridger shook his head, "And it's up to these two guys and these kids to save the world?"
"Oh no, the world will end either way I think. I don't think the Locust King is going to manage to extend his story another generation. So it's up to these four to shepherd humanity into a new story so that humanity survives. But either way, this world dies."
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