“If you find piles of dead leaves on your property, you must rake them and throw them out. Whether they move uncanny or not. Better yet, burn them. Take the ashes and toss them to the four corners of the Earth while cursing their name forever.”
—Doodle in the margins of Crowley’s “rules and orders” notebook, a decree never issued
Crowley had learned to smile a lot and to be in jovial good humor, even when his humors were roiling and pitch-black. He stretched a crude rictus out of necessity because how else could he preserve the facade of control with his underlings?
Yet, still, Wretch had decapitated Crowley thrice more, each time Crowley’s grin growing wider whether bucketed or free-form on the floor. Crowley was becoming quite addicted to the cut, tumble, and roll of his own head. So long as it was followed by resurrection.
“Why, Wretch, what a temper you have. What a temper. You should control that temper if you mean to rule the world.”
Or Wretch’s master did. For Crowley was more than ever convinced that Wretch did not act on his own.
“I am magic, Wretch,” Crowley whispered to Wretch as Wretch punched another small hole in the back of his head to drain his brain fluid and replace it with “the good stuff,” as Crowley now called it. The “stuff” that meant he wouldn’t fade.
That it looked like grape jelly mixed with tomato sauce and balsamic vinegar and smelled like the vapors from a sulfur lake full of bloat bodies until it gurgled inside his brainpan was beside the point.
“Shush, Crowley,” Wretch would say, like a man interrupted while concentrating on reading the paper on the loo.
Wretch would take the aspect of a giant mosquito for the bloodfest, which Crowley thought rude, given Wretch knew his Lord Emperor was mosquitophobic. Especially the loathsome look of their mouth-parts.
But, still, Crowley wouldn’t shush or hush as the giant mosquito drilled into him.
“I’m magic. I’m so much magic it cannot be contained. It shines from my eyes and my ears and my mouth. Why, it would shine from my arse and armpits, if my arse and armpits were still my own.”
“I’ve contained you just fine, in a container known as your skull-head,” Wretch said. “Now shut up.”
True, Wretch liked to keep him wondering in a bucket for a time after decapitation, as if to allow Crowley to reflect upon his faults. Like how he missed being able to scratch his ba … earlobes.
“Deep down, you love your lord Crowley,” Crowley said. “You must. Or you wouldn’t keep bringing me back after my insolence at addressing my servant so. You must need me.”
“Perhaps even with my infinite patience, I will tire of dealing with you, Crowley,” Wretch warned.
“Did you know, by the way, that a woodpecker’s tongue loops all around its brain? Napoleon taught me that. You remember Napoleon? The head on a stick you let escape.”
Wretch just grunted in reply, concentrating on pumping “good stuff” back into Crowley’s brain.
Mornings with the war report here inside the giant elephant had been awkward at first for Crowley. Was Wretch emperor now? Was Crowley still the One? And what about this rot-shuffling ex-emperor Charlemagne employed as a general?
Which is perhaps why even Wretch had seen the wisdom of constructing a bigger throne in the elephant’s war room, upon which Crowley could now rest his foreign body, with Charlemagne (aka Dead Leaves) to one side, Wretch on the other. Speck under glass on a dais beside him.
Surely that was clear? Who was in charge? The one in the middle. Although given the cramped space, it was more like an office chair on wheels with a high back, so he could also use it with his desk and he did wish the water closet wasn’t so close. Claustrophobia, an itch to get outside, was unbearable at times. And yet all that lay outside was more ’orrible forest.
Old Charlemagne, Charlie Mange, raised from the dead, Dead Leaves walking, Crowley had gotten used to. In front of the others, Wretch behaved as before: genuflecting familiar. It was only alone that Crowley need worry. Chums. That was it—he felt Wretch and Charlie Mange were becoming chums on the sly, and it made him jealous, perversely enough.
Especially worrisome: the “secret language” Wretch and Charlie Mange used, the old, old tongue that Crowley couldn’t understand at all, and which gave Mange a fluency and richness of expression that was disconcerting next to the tetchy blurtings of Olde Germanic Crowley could glean when the frump addressed his Emperor.
For, usually, Charlie Mange grunted in reply to anything other than Wretch’s direct questions, ancient wrong-wright that he was, not even a recent blood-and-guts job, like the ones Crowley made. Clearly inferior from ages spent seeping into a bog or fen. Crowley could never remember the difference, or the distance.
And contrary to myth, you couldn’t instantly “magic” yourself into knowing languages, no matter how “magic” you were. So he was left, once more, in the dark.
“Old bucket punch,” Crowley said, slapping Charlie Mange on the shoulder that morning, only seventy miles from Prague. A little disconcerted that Mange-Lad was so tall. “Old tickety-tockety … thing … raised from a lake for so little reason. How aren’t you this morning?”
“Thou hast touch-ed my shoulder. Again-eth. Lord Crowley.”
“Indeedeth I haveth, Lord Charlie Mange.”
“My nameth is Charlemagne.”
“Indeed-eth it be-eth, Charlie Mange.”
“Enough,” muttered Wretch. “Enough.”
The glower of Mange’s red, infernal eyes. Perhaps Crowley was finally getting under the Mange’s icky skin.
He liked to slap Charlie Mange on the shoulder because it tended to knock a bathtub’s worth of rotting leaves off old Charlie and temporarily change his clumsy anti-sashay to something even less coordinated. Put an exclamation point on how Wretch could raise the dead, but not restore them to much more than a creepoholic moth-mess wreck. Not to mention that Crowley liked to remind himself that he had a body himself, and wasn’t just a head.
The tingle in his fingers registering in his brain was a bloody big relief. Even if it always now brought to mind the traitor Napoleon. If only Crowley had given the cultured oaf a body, perhaps he wouldn’t have fled. Perhaps they could’ve both plotted against Wretch.
Sour taste of might’ve-beens.
Also, though, the shoulder push gave Crowley some idea of how fast his spells of degeneration were acting upon the Mange. Answer thus far: not fast enough. But he daren’t make them stronger for fear of Wretch detecting his treachery.
“And you, my dear Wretch—you’ve yet to give me a report on Ruth Less.”
All he’d heard so far was that the monster assassin had come back with a garbled story about death piggies and death muffins or some such nonsense—and people who smelled bad (big surprise, that) and comet men.
“Because it’s none of your business. My lord.”
“Pray tell, humor me a while anyway.”
Humorless git. Who had in this moment undertaken to appear like a human made of jiggling black rice pudding, the rice bits instead too many Wretch-ed eyes and the head itself bereft of any eyes at all! Making it unclear exactly where to look. Given Wretch had not provided himself a mouth. Was it in the back? Perhaps instead of his arse? Where also resided tiny, diaphanous wings.
Crowley really didn’t want to know.
Wretch sighed. “Ruth Less is already back from tracking Jonathan Lambshead, and is now deployed to Prague to seek out the Golden Sphere.”
Yet another sacrifice, Crowley believed, to the Cult of the Search for the Golden Sphere. Some days he thought the Golden Sphere existed only in his head and Wretch’s head, a bond as thick as blood or even the “good stuff.”
“So Lambshead is dead? Excellent!” That, at least, would be real progress.
“No, not yet,” Wretch snapped, irritated. Again, from whence came the words … who knew?
“Oh. Not dead. Yet. Captured and tortured, then, I imagine?”
“Noo.”
“Horribly mutilated by Ruth Less’s attack?”
“Um, noo.”
“Inconvenienced, at least? Paper cut? Tripped on a banana peel and fell on face?”
“Shut up.”
”Stole his nose? Called him a wanker from afar?”
“Shut up shut up shut up.”
Wretch composed himself, which meant some of his black-rice-pudding aspect fell away into a smoother texture. The smell of maggots faded, too.
“I mean, if it pleases my lord, we now know where the young Lambshead is and he will be our captive soon. He is within our grasp!”
“I’ve heard that before about various things,” as Crowley gestured to the demi-mage he had christened No-Name to step forward.
The other demi-mages jammed in there were looking anywhere but at his royal personage.
Oh, how they hated it when the parents argued!
No-Name, thus dubbed because should he perish the name could easily be applied to the next punter, had the report from the scouts sent to sneak ahead under cover of darkness. There was much the All-Seeing Puddle could not discern, after all.
Or at all, some days.
“Everywhere they fall back, my lieges, my liege, my emperor, my emperors,” No-Name said, with Charlie Mange breathing down his neck.
No-Name was a strapping young demi-mage, full of vim and vigor. The sight of him strutting about so peacock-ish even though dead-alive filled Crowley with suppressed bile. To be so loutishly limber in his body in front of one who was a head attached to another body seemed like a not-so-subtle kind of insubordination.
“You hear that, Charlie? Nothing for you to do yet. Just stand there and look pretty.”
Slapping him on the shoulder again. Watch the fall leaves fall off, destroying his shoulder once again. Why, the throne room would soon resemble a forest floor in the autumn. Messy and filthy with mushrooms.
“Everywhere the enemy appears in disarray, my Emperor.” Did Crowley imagine No-Name had actually clicked his heels, something even Crowley’s original body could not do? “And we have taken many bridges without conflict. Where we do meet the enemy, they are small in number and—”
“And signs of the Republic?” Crowley asked, butting in because he feared Wretch would speak first and wrest the spotlight from him.
“Not many, my Emperor. A few bivouacs abandoned in favor of sanctuary behind the Prague wall. Signs of logistical support, their usual military advisers, but it would not appear they are trying to sneak an army into Prague ahead of our advance.”
That supported what little the All-Seeing Puddle had told them. It also supported what Wretch had found on his all-night flybys. Of late, Wretch had applied some infernal camouflage, so that to all he flew over, he appeared only like a dark cloud, an inky bit of sky.
A raspy, torn-at nothing.
A steaming pile of crap in the sky that Crowley would love nothing better than to see plummet to the ground and smashed into a million little frayed pieces.
But: “Beautiful!” Crowley said to No-Name. “The Hierarchs of Tophet have nothing on us.”
“Cannibalism is just God preying on man,” Wretch said in jaunty reply, as if the latter half of a call-and-response Crowley had not known he was part of.
“Pray tell, wise Wretch, my familiar, overly familiar, and loyal servant who commands me in defiance of the natural order … what does that mean?” Crowley asked.
“Learn to be happy. Learn to be happy no matter what, my lord,” Wretch said through clenched fangs.
Crowley nodded as if in agreement, let it go.
He could not tell if the simmering rage boiling within him that he suppressed only by biting his tongue until it bled obscured the meaning.
So, instead, Crowley closed his eyes a brief moment, no matter how odd that might look to those gathered, and reached out to his precious, beautiful salamanders, cooling his wrath in their floating circumlocutions of the war elephant. Round the loop once, twice, thrice. He’d found linking his mind to theirs was very soothing, and Wretch had yet to detect the link. Perhaps because, in the end, it was harmless, not nefarious.
Nor did Wretch have enough respect for Crowley’s friendship with the Speck, which might still bear fruit. Although the Speck remained very, very rude.
“Almost time to check in with Paris, my lord,” Wretch said, unable to look Crowley in the eye whenever he said “my lord.” As if he’d just found a bit of poo lurking underneath his shoe … if only he would wear shoes.
Both Crowley and Wretch had learned to leave out that which was unsettling or unsettled. At least they agreed upon that. Not good for demi-mage morale. Which meant no reports from Verne, for Crowley found it un-uplifting, positively plummetous, that Laudinum X (surely not Verne!) had found a way to make the wall and its environs invisible to the All-Seeing Puddle-Eye. Or, perhaps, the magical wall itself had done that. Regardless, insubordination seemed imminent, should they survive Bill the Eel.
Paris was different, and he still experienced problems with the All-Seeing Puddle. It was a bit like trying to see through dirty water in a drain after a storm.
He could make out Miss Eiffel Tower and Comte de Lautréamont, but he couldn’t really see what they were doing or the expressions on their faces, and on the whole the entire enterprise was more like listening to the radio than anything else.
Frustrating. He would have liked to better see the rabid chipmunks that inhabited the human-sized Eiffel Tower. A genius stroke on his part, to animate the otherwise clunky ET. Harness the energy of the chipmunk in general, the frenetic motion. But even better, these were undead rabid chipmunks, to put the fire of urgency in Miss ET’s … belly? Well, not belly, but the metaphorical equivalent. Viewing platform? Middle landing?
Latrine, as Crowley had taken to calling Lautréamont, stood impassive at ET’s side. He was good at being impassive. Looked a bit in his dark clothes like a blackened coatrack that had suffered some kind of fire disaster.
Latrine was the author of the scandalous classic Maldoror, or as Crowley called it now, “Mal-odor,” given the author’s nickname. The book had spoken to Crowley when he’d encountered it as a youth—its bizarre and violent visions a soothing balm. In homage, he’d made Latrine wear shoes that were actually creatures with sharp fangs that could devour his feet. Some of the less trustworthy demi-mages had been forced to wear them, too. That they might become rather stumpy should they betray him. There were at least a few things Wretch still gave him the latitude to order on his own.
“The garbage has stop’d,” Miss ET reported. “We have stop’d the garbage. It is no longer being generated in such vast quantities.”
Crowley’d given her the female equivalent of his own voice, which was less useful and more disconcerting than he’d imagined.
“Our mecha-crocodiles are beginning to make headway in cleaning up the streets.”
“And what pray tell did you do to accomplish this feat?”
ET stopped short. Even through the murk in his All-Seeing Puddle bowl, he could sense the hesitation.
“Nothing, my lord,” ET finally said. “Nothing at all. It must be that the glorious policies you put in place before have finally borne fruit.”
“Yes, must be,” Crowley said, preoccupied, putting his feet up on the desk and making the All-Seeing Puddle jounce a tad. “Yet, just in case,” he added, “I suggest you devote your time to breaking up the largest piles that remain.”
“Yes, my lord,” ET said.
“How do you like your shoes, Latrine?”
A pause, then in a silky voice, “I love them, Lord Crowley. I love them as much as I care for my own immortal soul. Most unique. It is energizing to stare down and have your shoes stare back up at you. I wake each morning thankful for this … honor.”
“Anything else? Anything at all I should know about?”
ET hesitated, then said, “No, my lord. All is well.”
“Not … chaotic?”
“Busy is perhaps the word, my lord,” ET said.
Was it, though? Something about this lull worried at Crowley, and what worried at Crowley just as much was that Wretch seemed unworried. Much more than his little problem with Wretch grated on him. So much more.
For example: when Wretch tossed Crowley’s head in a cupboard in the war elephant’s kitchen and went off for a time, only to let Crowley out as if there had been no moment when Wretch had needed his Lord Emperor to be in the dark.
Yet, there had been that one instance Wretch was agitated and stashed him in a closet instead, and Crowley had peered through a crack of light during that dire cupboard time.
What had Crowley seen?
Just Wretch talking in strangled-cat writhings and high-pitched shrieks … to a seemingly unlimited number of other Wretches, glimpsed through a hovering hole torn in the air. They seemed to be communicating across a vast distance, the other Wretches in their cling-limbed geckolike closeness hugging one another. At first they sounded like owls slaughtering field mice. Then, as they became less coherent and farther away, the hole smaller, they sounded more like field mice slaughtering crickets.
Until: no hole and no Wretches.
Huzzah! The aftermath in which Wretch curled up and wept hot bitter tears cheered Crowley no end.
Huzzah! Wretch was no mastermind. Wretch was intermediary. Wretch, too, was being acted upon, and, perhaps, in his actions upon Crowley’s person, acting out.
Not to mention acting a part.
When the demi-mages had left. When Charlie Mange had shuffled out to be sequestered once more during their travel in a moldy trough next to the blessed circle of salamanders. When there was no one in the throne room but Crowley and Wretch.
That’s when Crowley let loose with the torrent of choice curse words. Those he’d heard sailors use and those he’d heard used applied to him by alchemists as he crushed them and stole their research.
A kind of magic spell, in that it altered the mind of the soul against which they were directed. But also, underneath it, what John Dee had taught him: how to hide a spell. How to hide a binding spell in a torrent. How every third or fourth or fifth word counted. How it took longer to work than a normal spell, but, still, in time, it might do the trick.
In this case, all he dared was wild magic, nothing targeted. Just enough to unbalance Wretch, to make him more hesitant, more doubting of himself. Building on what he’d glimpsed from the cupboard.
“That’s who you are, Wretch,” Crowley said. “You’re just a shitty bag of bones that lonely goes off in the night to eat lice and fleas off the carcasses of dead animals. You’re just the thing people fear when the Great Terrors aren’t on offer.”
Wretch became huge and shadowy like smoke and dragons, reached out with his suddenly elongated, sharp curved tail, and decapitated Crowley again.
Napoleon’s voice, from everywhere and nowhere: “We are both in the same boat and it has sprung a leak.” A standard hallucination. He would be haunted by the old general until he died for good and all, he knew.
The topple-tumble.
The fall.
The cold-floor bruise.
The roll and glide.