“Thou shalt not harm any rabid chipmunk thou come across. Instead, please mark the location at which you saw the chipmunk and render that information to the God-Emperor Crowley or his Emissaries or demi-mages or even foot soldiers. But do not harm a rabid chipmunk on pain of death.”
—Source and date unknown
“What or who is Stimply?” Crowley muttered as he fed his salamanders the heads of dead rabid chipmunks. “That is the question. Or, one of the questions.” And would it even be a question next week? The landscape kept changing so rapidly.
Late afternoon. He was sick of the chipmunks being rabid, but Wretch said they had to be, and, anyway, they turned rabid as soon as Wretch got hold of them. But, then, he was sick of so many things.
Like, why the bloody hell they were still three or four days from reaching the edge of the forests around Prague, while other parts of his army were only two days away. One detached unit claimed to be six hours away. How had that happened? Logistics be damned—they’d planned this, and still gotten bogged down. The attenuated shitstains that called themselves the “resistance” hadn’t been bothered to put up much of one yet. It was as if Prague and its allies had decided to fall back to their precious wall for a last-ditch defense. Even Paris, from every report, was quiet.
It made Crowley suspicious, all this calm.
Just in case, Wretch had flapped out into the impending darkness, on another of his secret missions, aimed at making sure something more sinister wasn’t afoot. Crowley wished he would flap out more. Flap out and never return.
Even without Wretch around, Crowley was listless and feeling dangerous at the same time. He’d taken to distracting himself from his problems by viewing Verne and the Burrower through the All-Seeing Puddle.
He had to give Verne his due: The shrinking violet of an inventor was holding his own, just barely. That was a welcome surprise, given the delays getting to Prague.
Despite the relative calm, things had been in an uproar in and around the war elephant for days. Napoleon had not been found, and no amount of interrogation had revealed the slightest clue. Napoleon, when his pedestal was retracted, resided in a space no larger than a dumbwaiter, next to the kitchen. Thus, the cook and her staff had been vigorously put to the question. To no avail. No one had seen anything.
How in the holy hells had Napoleon gotten clear of them? Was it a plot or was Napoleon facedown in a ditch somewhere, shouting into the mud about the indignity of it all? Just fallen off and rolled into a ditch, where an elephant could have stepped on him and squashed him like a rotten melon. That would be unfortunate. Crowley found Napoleon hideous enough already.
Like a budding actor, Crowley cursed as would be expected, he raged, he made things burst into flame. It was easy enough to conjure up the right emotion—he had a throbbing eye from the apple a peasant had thrown at him during his speech in the village of Slap on the Cheek. He expected that meant the speech had gone badly, especially as Wretch had had to send out shock troops to secure their path from “new unrest,” as his familiar put it.
Wretch was still assessing the damage the speech had done overall, how far the news had traveled. As for the village, it would have to be renamed Flaming Cheeks or maybe just Ash.
But all the Sturm und Drang was just subterfuge. In actual fact, he didn’t much care that Napoleon the clown was gone. For one thing, it had given Wretch just one more thing to deal with, so that Crowley saw him less during the day.
Yet, despite not much missing Napoleon, Crowley kept hearing that word the general had used of late: “Chaos.” Each time with special emphasis as they reviewed the war map on the elephant’s lowest floor. It haunted Crowley, popped into his head unbidden like a depth charge.
For it had struck Crowley with particular force, as if he’d just woken up, that everything he’d done to impose order had, to varying degrees, resulted in the opposite. Rome. The continuing assault on the English wall. Even the garbage situation in Paris, or the vast waste of resources required to hold Spain against enemy insurgents. Was he fated to spread … chaos? Naturally, he rebelled against this conclusion. Such balderdash. Such nonsense. The Golden Sphere spread chaos, not him—his enemies, not him. But was that true?
When had he decided to invade England and attack Prague at the same time? Had he truly been so traumatized by the explosion? Had he taken Wretch’s word for who the culprits must be, without further investigation? Yes, he had. He had done those things.
This same Wretch who Napoleon had suggested stepped between him and death a moment before the explosion. And what of the vague recollections, dreamlike, of Wretch whispering in his ear during their nightly sessions?
The Golden Speck under magical glass was still there on his desk, bouncing around, trapped, unable to stop moving. Its movements weren’t random, but instead spelled out letters and words across the very air. It was how they communicated now, to avoid detection and because he couldn’t stand its nonstop patter.
Crowley knew Wretch would consider this the worst kind of treachery, but he had required the Speck’s aid in investigating the mystery of Wretch’s nightly visits.
He felt ancient thinking about it, thinking about what the Speck had observed, and thus it was that he had spent nearly an hour feeding rabid chipmunk faces to his marvelous salamanders. Abt and his engineers might be obstinate and disrespectful, but he had to admit it had taken them no time at all to jury-rig a setup in the elephant’s “attic” whereby he could climb a stepladder, stand above the magical moat, and pull aside a glass panel, revealing the Lovelies, as he’d taken to calling the salamanders.
With space on a lower rung of the ladder for a bucket of dead chipmunk parts—the leftovers that hadn’t been used to test Wretch’s theory about the connection between the Speck and the Golden Sphere.
The meat-loving white salamanders swam and cavorted and plunged beneath his gaze in ways he found mischievous and, dare he say it, charming. As he watched chipmunk faces and limbs disappear into their grateful maws.
It didn’t help him forget, but it did relieve his stress.
For what he had discovered required stress relief.
Every night, according to the Speck, Wretch stole into his chamber, then numbed him, before taking a very long tongue and punching a hole in Crowley’s head. Plunging the tongue like a sharpened pencil or needle into his brain. Doing the same by way of his hollow tentacles at various other places on his body.
Whereupon Wretch took the blood from Crowley’s body and then replaced it with his own blood. As the Speck described it, Wretch poised like a monstrous black mosquito, hugging Crowley to him, and punching down into the skull with a distinct splooshing sound. And for the next three hours, Wretch in a kind of trance, the transfer took place, Crowley’s old blood going god knew where.
It was a violation too profound to get over, ever. Adding to the insult was the glee with which the Speck related the spectacle and its unseemly humor that made it all the more difficult to listen to.
Once he had learned the truth, he had cut the connection with the Speck in that moment and reinforced the magical containment around the terrarium. He resolved that soon he would obliterate the Speck, no matter that this action would sever their only connection to the Golden Sphere.
But he could only feed salamanders for so long or they would grow fat and sluggish. He replaced the glass top to the salamander moat. He climbed down the stepladder and made his way to the kitchen.
The cooks were a frightened bunch at the moment, and not to be trusted with knives or rolling pins. But after he’d shooed them out, it was a relief to lean against a marble counter with his objective in one hand—a jar of juicy pickles. He meant to devour half the jar and save the rest for later. They had the tartness, a tad bitter, he would always associate with the grocery down the street from when he was a child.
Who or what was “Stimply”? The question came back to him as he feasted on a particularly spectacular pickle. Dreadnought-sized. The perfect balance of sweet and tart.
Putting a glass to the wall between their quarters, Crowley had listened the other night as Wretch talked to someone who he must be viewing through some Wretch equivalent of the All-Seeing Puddle.
“Are you Stimply yet?” Wretch had said.
A deep voice had replied, “Not yet. But soon. Practice makes perfect.”
The rest had faded into murmurs, as if the two were whispering.
Stimply. A secret agent? Another assassin?
Recently, he’d begun to regret killing his father here on Aurora. At the very least he could have trusted the man’s counsel, no matter how astute or unhelpful. For the fact was, Speck aside, he had no one to confide in, and hardly the privacy to confide in anyone anyway.
All of this had made the street tough, the fringe-person he had been before, in dirty hovels and attending seances conducted by charlatans, come back. That callow youth. He needed that hunger again, that ruthlessness. The way he’d taken a cricket bat to the table of the fake psychic, sent her customers screaming from the room.
Napoleon would say he was fighting a war on three fronts now: against England and the Czechs and Wretch. And as he must liberate the Czechs from the shackles of their independence, he must liberate himself from the shackles of dependence on Wretch.
Which meant making common cause with the Golden Sphere. For the moment. If it was possible.
He put the pickle jar down on the counter, meaning to put the top back on and return to his quarters.
But then an exceedingly strange thing happened.
Crowley felt a tickle, a kind of very rough tickle or itch. Across first the back of his neck, accompanied by a rising heat, while the tickle-itch spread to the front of his neck.
Then he was tumbling, with the odd weight of tumbling end over end and yet having no end. His face, impossibly, smacked against his chest, stubbing his nose, as he plummeted, and then there was the floor, well, too close, and his nose stubbed again, harder this time, followed by his chin, with a smack not at all like a tickle, and through his left eye he could see his headless body beginning to topple, spouting gouts of blood.
There was the horrifying shlump of his body catching up to his head as it plummeted to the floor beside him like a sack of human-shaped potatoes. A collision so great that his head bounced up and settled again, spinning once, twice, three times, before coming to an abrupt stop.
As his arm flailed out so it boxed his ear and on the recoil his right palm reached out to alight atop his cheek; he could feel the receding warmth in his fingers, could just see his own boxy thick thumb out of the corner of his eye. The weight of his own hand, the slickness of it, the roughness of it, but not being able to control it, like it had fallen asleep, made the panic set in, finally.
“Get it off me! Get it off me! Get it off me!”
Get me off me. Get me off me.
He was still trying to move his legs to run, wave his arms, but everything seemed tightly pressed against his body. Or rather his body wasn’t responding, as if he was paralyzed. Because it couldn’t. The heat was intolerable, and the depressing sight of his neck still spouting blood sideways, forming a spray and curling question mark while all he could do was watch.
“Chaos,” said Napoleon, a ghost a ghost a ghost.
In those final moments, Crowley’s life did not slip past his eyes. There was no vast summation of triumphs and failures.
No, as his eyes began to glaze over, as the heat was leeched away by cold, he was sliding down the chute from his room and out of the elephant. With indescribable euphoria, as if he were a child again. And the Golden Sphere, his good friend, was sliding with him, and Ruth Less, and Verne, and, yes, even Laudinum X. Why not?
“Wee!” shouted the Golden Sphere, lodged in front of Crowley like a beach ball, while Crowley clung to its comforting smoothness and Laudinum X behind Crowley screamed “Wee!” and Ruth Less mimicked “Wee!” and Verne, reluctantly, “Wee.” All of them going on the ride over and over again. So happy and carefree.
But not Wretch. Wretch was not there. Which is how he knew, as perhaps he had known from the first tickle, that it was Wretch who had murdered him.