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What to do about Bent? He’d healed me, sure, but I still didn’t trust him. How could I trust a man who, when the pendulum of his emotion swung a specific way, turned into an animal, heedlessly killing women and children. At times he sees the red mist and goes berserk. I didn’t witness it myself, him going crazy, but I was aware that it happened.
“How many did you kill?” I asked, referring to the innocent of Black Pots. It was late evening and I could hear the vibrating pulse of Smidgen’s snores outside the house. We all suffered the deep sleep of Smidgen’s untroubled mind and I envied him his simplicity. He was happy now we were together again. To his mind nothing else mattered: Hunger, Never, Turned, nothing.
Bent was stood at the foot of my cot and shrugged. Women and children had been slaughtered and he shrugged.
“Some of the Turned manoeuvred behind them, used them as shields. I am ashamed.”
The tone of his voice reminded me of the first time we met. There was humility in it tonight as back then and I understood that being bad troubled him. No, not troubled, it tortured him.
––––––––
I thought back to three weeks ago, when I was in the town of Buckbroke. My new friend, Smidgen, had followed me all the way from Misery and I really hadn’t minded the company. I’d stolen him a horse, same colour as mine only way bigger, almost unnaturally so, and he never questioned its sincerity once. Just seemed happy to have received a gift.
We rode into Buckbroke on an ominous night. Thunder rolled overhead and forked lightning highlighted the crooked rooftops of the town in spooky silver flashes, like it was revealing pieces of a picture one random flicker at a time.
A deluge of rainfall confused the picture further and, so heavy did it fall; I couldn’t see my extended arm waving back in front of me.
We hurried for the inn, bringing half a lake of water in with us, and the prevailing wind nearly took the door off the hinges as we opened it. The locals didn’t take kindly to Smidgen and in the name of solidarity he agreed to sleep in the leaking stables around the back of the hostelry. I took a lamp up the winding staircase to my room on the top floor.
I unlocked the door and rested the key and the lamp on a table just inside the room. The door clicked shut behind me when, out of the darkness, something dropped down from the ceiling, wrapped around my neck and hoisted me up into the rafters. A phenomenal band of pressure built up in seconds behind my eyes and I felt them bulge outwards. I kicked out with my legs, felt my foot strike the lamp, which fell off the table and rolled on the floor, dragging shadows around behind it. The grip around my throat tightened and I gurgled and spat. My legs still thrashed and both my hands jerked at the thing fixed solidly around my neck but it wouldn’t give. Then suddenly I was dropped and I landed heavily on my knees. I instinctively reached for my sword and pulled it free but whoever, whatever, was in the room with me knocked it from my hand and it sank blade first in the floor some way away.
“There’s no sport in killing, not when there’s no challenge,” said the thing and it stood the lamp back on the table.
I could see it now. Rather the shape of its outline as it stood by the lamp. It was garbed in black robes. Dressed like an assassin.
I rubbed at my painful throat and my ragged breathing burnt my lungs with every panicked and rushed inhale I took. “The Tracker sent you to kill me,” I reasoned, gasping for breath. “He sent you to kill me.”
“Yes. I know who you are and why you fled Never.”
“Get on and do it then,” I ordered. I wasn’t feeling brave and the lack of oxygen to my brain hadn’t damaged my senses either. Suffering the pain I was at the moment I would welcome death. “It was only a matter of time before a Turned bested me.” Defiant to the last. My flashy side applauded my vanity.
“And what if I kill you? Who’ll be next? There will be a next and another after that for it is a wheel that just keeps turning.”
“A Turned with a conscience,” I stated glibly. I was still panting. Trying to get as much air into my chest as possible. A flash of lightning outside and I saw more of my tormenter. His face was covered. He must really be ugly. “Which one of the damned are you?” I needed to know before he killed me.
“I am nothing now. I am undeserving of a name.”
“By all that is holy you are a miserable sod. Just take something heavy and hit me with it.”
“It’s easy to end life. I know for I’ve killed thousands. He turned me. Before then I’d a life. Before he broke my will and my back I’d a life and I’d been happy. What right had he to turn me? Yet he turns more and more suffer. I was a quiet man. I liked helping people. Now he’s made me a mad thing. A thing so proficient at killing, whole armies fall beneath me. He has to be stopped.”
––––––––
It was hard to look into a man’s heart and see the soul. To know, deep down, if he was genuinely good or bad. I would be first to admit that life wasn’t as clear-cut as black this or white that and we all, regardless of how white we considered ourselves, have to step into the black from time to time. I’d always suspected Bent of being a demon and the positive proof could be found in Black Pots amongst the burning buildings, the slaughtered Turned, and all the dead women and children caught up in the fracas of the titans. But what had pushed my dark cloud to kill women and children and then, days later, to heal sickening beasts? He was perhaps more a man of contradictions than any other I’d met in my life and that was the problem. That was what swayed my opinion of him from one extreme to the other, from one day to the next. One moment he was misunderstood but a good sort really and the next he was hard-core bad smelling evil.
When it came to Bent I was confused. Could I trust him?
At least I knew Bent’s bad side. What he was capable of. It was the ones who you couldn’t predict that worried me. They were the ones who wore masks. Not literally for often they would seem as angels.
I remembered a sweet old man from my childhood. He lived in a modest house built into the main wall of the Old Quarter. In all my years growing up I never saw the man raise a hand in anger, never heard him swear or saw him spit. He was a virtue to the city; a veritable example to the squalor that surrounded him that you didn’t have to live a life of thievery just because you didn’t have much and that you could be better than your surroundings. We, the children of the Old Quarters streets, never threw stones at him for not one of us wanted to pervert the ideology of his sentiments. There was so much corruption and angst surrounding us that the man stood as a relief amongst the drudgery. Most nights he had two lit candles in his window and sometimes three. Often for amusement we would bet on the candles, try to predict how many there would be, until one night I learnt of their purpose. Two candles meant he was open for business whilst three meant he had a special in, a virgin usually under the age of ten. The sweet old man was a pimp who traded in the lives of the lost children of Never. We, the children of the Old Quarter, threw stones at him a lot after that.
Bent was a different kind of monster to that old man. He had no pretensions. He didn’t parade as something he was not.
There was much I would never know about Bent, or understand; like what drove him, what fired him up, and what made him mad enough to cut a child to pieces.
But at least I knew he was a threat. Prudence determined that as long as there was doubt in my mind as to his loyalty it was better to keep him close than let him wander at will and scheme. Just as it told me that I should sway his past activities and judge him for his actions from this day forwards. And trust, if he were faithful, would be earned. He was evil but he was trying not to be. That had to be applauded. That he had good days and bad proved that he was more human than any of us, himself included, realised.
So I would trust Bent until either I forgot it was ever an issue or he betrayed me.
“We’ll kill Speritan tomorrow,” I said when Bent came to check on me.
“Savige will be pleased.”
“And then we’ll leave for Never.”
“Then it will end,” he stated.
And I wondered what exactly ‘it’ meant.