The Smoke Monster VIII.

            The Fencer’s mind fled from the term but he couldn’t deny the haunted air of the smoke-bound valley.  This was a place of ghosts.  No longer entombed in the flow of avalanche debris he took full account of the lands beneath the Altherines and pondered the vast wisps of fleshy fog which clung to the ice like some sort of protoplasmic creature.  From here the stuff seemed solid, but his reason knew that if he went out there it would billow away according to its ephemeral whim.

            Pondering the smoke allowed him an indulgence; he didn't have to consider the ghost.  Bles, or Eral, or whatever they were, combined, faceted, together or separate, sparked that same distant superstition as the yellow-eyed spirit which had stalked him through the land.  Common wisdom said that all the apparitions and demons, specters, witches and ensorcelled monsters had been abjured by red-haired Sol those many years ago.  The Fencer kept an eye windward, searching for the distant hunger-cry as proof that a few horrors slipped through the cracks of the red demon legend and that he had the rare luck to face such a thing. 

            The further worry was that in some part Bles and the hungry spirit were joined or linked, and this proved far more fearsome than the failure of an old story.  She was both Bles and Eral, maybe both smoke and demon.  Perhaps every single servant and guardsman was her as well, sculpted from her hazy pool of flesh.  Always the smoke.

            "It's like her soul is resonating off the mountains," said the Trumpeter with wistful consideration, the sort which often spoke the heart of the strange things they witnessed.  "Her death-scream so loud it even now echoes as a kind of force, a certain magic.  Split apart and diverted many times she is a cacophony of characters."

            "Why?" asked the Fencer, considering their situation closely, looking for a way out from the clouded land.  The mountains were low but lead to unknown realms, places far from the southern cities from which they had set out, and the men had little in the way of provisions to survive such an adventure.  To return south, the way they came, would be to invite the full attentions of the deadly smoke out on the glacier and though his companion could dispel vast swaths of the stuff with his trumpet, even the Trumpeter didn't have enough hot air inside him to turn the course of a cloud.

            "Who are we to determine the tastes of those strange enough to wield magic?  Maybe she was bored?  Do you ever wish you were bored?"

            "I only have one wish," said the Fencer, focusing his most specific memory.

            "As do I, but there can be many embodiments, many words we must say and troubles to cause.  I think you have it," said the Trumpeter gleefully, "there, in your eye.  I see it."

            "Let's enjoy our clear skies while we can," said the Fencer, who prepared to ascend the slope where the smoke was born.

            Weak morning sun filtered down over them.  Their steaming breath soon had company as the wind turned unfavorably, bringing great storm heads of smoke, warm, smelling faintly of Bles's emblematic whalebone perfume, burnt, singed at the edges.  With the smoke came the presence.

            If the ladies of the land were the mind unbound then the hazy stuff was the body and the thing within, unseen mostly, yellow-eyed and frenzied, was the soul.  It stood forever at your back, just out of sight, always there, leaning over the shoulder to see what you saw and make your skin crawl.  The two men couldn't see it, but it was there. 

            How would it kill them?  The question posed itself inwardly, speaking fear to their more numinous selves, and they couldn't be sure if this was merely consequence of the danger they now faced or a notion seeded by the thing in the smoke, a sort of inception.  Their fear made them hold their artifacts tighter as a sort of reassurance.

            They met no howl, only a cathedral.

            Wide and clear, great spans of space opened up at the top of the rise.  A central tower laced with external arches and flying buttresses echoed into the sky, the masonry jagged, interlaced, built of baroque excess.  Various outlying devices framed the air all around with raised walkways and open galleries.  There could be no explanation other than the fantastic; these structures did not exist outside the smoke, but here, from within, it was certain that they dove out of the cloud into the red-tinged sky beyond.  Yet, like the garden from the night before, this was surely a thing of glamour, though, unlike the garden, it was wholly unknown to the Fencer.

            Entering became the only path forward.  Bubble-limbed terrors frothed to either side, falling towards them like a volcano's pyroclastic flow.  With few seconds to spare they ran ahead, into the building.

            Inside it was light.  What seemed of granite or concrete without was now an entire architecture of glass, beaming with bright afternoon on an icy plain.  There were no mountains about, or smoke, just frozen waves of ancient snow echoing the sun.  A white hawk followed smaller white birds, the chase leading around the vaulted building and out over infinity. 

            The interior was empty, then populated.  Eral stood amongst a menagerie of adventurers lounging on strange furnishing seemingly built of single, matte colors.  Familiar in their garb, the men themselves wore generalized flesh on hidden bones.  These were her trophies.

            "There is a place for you here," she said, voice twinkling, eyes like pin-points. 

            "You've already offered," said the Trumpeter, "do you think our position changed?"

            "I'd hardly say I knew you without change," she replied.  "You were my difficult guest and though you are quite hard on hospitality I would still have your company.  Every day will be different, each moment a new revelation.  This is an excitement I can promise."

            Outside the land changed to one of strange geometric vistas dropping off into a limitless horizon.

            "If you think I can believe that then you're more insane than I am!" exclaimed the Trumpeter.

            The Fencer was moving before the words were fully out of his companion's mouth.  While he was no great studier of women he knew that they never took well to being called crazy.  He circled in an arc, avoiding her gaze.  

            Eral gleamed with anger, the ghostly power which framed her being as such flexing itself out as light, a frostbite, skin-blackening, ray of cold freezing the air with its brilliance.  This struck out at the musician who was only saved by his instrument, which he flung up in defense.  The ray glanced off the silver trumpet and stove through the air right next to the Fencer. 

            Terrible cold, like Dhala's but worse, shuddered through the man.  Death's chill, the spaces between stars, the curiosity between these two similar yet divergent qualities was lost as she now saw the swordsman.

            Closing the distance in a few short strides she seemed unconcerned as he prepared the strike.  With both hands he brought the blade across the formless creature.  Her head came off, tumbling lightly to the ground.  There was blood.  The men, warriors and explorers coming to their host's aid, vanished.  The cathedral dwelling glimpsed into air, the sunlight lost, the smoke returned.

            Her head spoke.  "At least you could leave us the Seed."

            Her body stood there, poised and proper.  Then a confusion of inky back roiled from the open neck.  These tentacles of condensed smoke caught the Fencer unprepared, his instincts brought Dhala up in defense but the stuff spilled past the blade without care. 

            He was lifted up and an overwhelming smell--like bitter burnt seeds--insinuated itself into his sinuses.  A vision of loss, of a woman, something like Eral and something like Bles, standing before a mirror in a luxurious apartment, became his mind.  She was both: Erablys.  With a noise this vision blasted into quiet.

            Great black enfolding arms rushed away, leaving only a barely understood grey outline beyond, and numb pain within.  The Trumpeter came into view, his mouth working unheard.  Eventually the ringing in the swordsman's ears told him that a song had been played and that he was deafened by a note.

            Of Eral there was no sign and he made sure that the Prism Seed remained hidden in his boot, despite her grasping tendrils.  More out of spite he was determined to keep it from them.  It served no other purpose except the symbolic, a gesture towards dead Clea, whose journal had been the blueprint of this expedition and whose memory acted as a wind, pushing them along.  There was maybe no greater foolishness than that of sentiment.

            Subsequently the Trumpeter's voice arrived buzzing, fizzing, popping, but still comprehensible. 

            "I saw a lizard and a man-ape in the smoke!" yelled the musician through the broken ear static. 

            "We've seen a lot of things," said the Fencer as evenly as he could without shouting.

            "Oh good, you can hear me," smiled the Trumpeter, then let his face fall and gestured to the smoke now forming a thick dome around them.  "It's waiting for us."

            The swordsman nodded and retrieved his weapon from where the force of his friend's playing had knocked it from his grasp.  He recognized this ground from his first foray into the smoke. 

            A thin tumble of pebbles rested atop the flat remnants of structure, once the lady's keep, her undivided castle, from before the time of violence and Uplifting brought Sol and his ultimatum.  Whatever there had been, little was left, not even a ruin.  Not much for the mind to remember or for a ghost to haunt.  The old hidden foundations now lay exposed, stripped, like a skeleton.

            "I don't like this, these things which can't be killed," shivered the Fencer.  "Our only hope lies in staunching the source of the smoke, should that even be possible.  Whatever our goal we are blind to it."

            "That is our common trouble, now isn’t it Fencer?" lamented the Trumpeter.  He didn’t realize that giving them what they wanted, the Prism Seed, was also a positive end to the struggle.  Maybe he did, maybe he was as stubborn as the Fencer.

            Then the clouds ceased.  Sunlight caught the race of smoke down the mountain at a speed which surpassed the steady wind coming off the heights.  The stuff pooled high into the glacial basin and from the top of this cauldron a great many limbs protruded like the topography of an orgy.  At first these were indistinct, like cloud formations which charged the imagination, but soon these gained contrast and color, becoming pale flesh and animate.  By the time the first yellow eye blinked into existence they were running at full speed away from this composite creature.

            This was the grand confluence of body, soul and mind, once driven apart by wild magics let loose on that slope years ago, now brought together to hunt the future.  The cry of the evil spirit, a deep dark wanting peal, resonated off the mountains.

            Noon sun drifted through high altitude clouds, illuminating the source.  Smoke, most inky and black, coiled up from a place some hundreds of meters away.  It leaped up like feather stuck into the ground. 

            The thing behind them became very real, its form that of a woman, stripped of humanity, majestic, on the scale of the giant Zerimot but far more agile.  She clawed across the landscape in naked hunger, yellow eyes in shadow.  She was a consumer of things, of personalities, of stories, in that way many people are, but here magnified to enchanted excess.  If the two men had any doubt as to the solidity of this creature then the first footfall dismissed such misgivings. 

            Each step the apparition took matched a hundred of theirs and sounded as a thunderclap.  They were some dozen meters off from the locus, the boiling source of smoke, when she caught them. 

            Curled drapes of her hair fell across the men and they choked from the smoky curtains, drenched in whalebone perfume.  She lifted a hand.  There were scores of bodies within it, protruding.  These were rough memories, all she had left now that the crystalline grove had been shattered.  Down came the hand and though they dodged the resulting shockwave sent the two men flying, the Fencer hurtling close to the source.

            He could see it now, a lumpy thing lying in a bowl of grey glass, testament to the fires from lost days.  Glancing back, he witnessed the lady herself.  There was a struggle within, large forms twisting like unborn snowflies within semi-translucent pupae.  Only her hunger kept her together.  She lunged for the Trumpeter who was only just now recovered.

            She sighed with expectation, her mouth wide and horrible, each tooth a tombstone of some other traveler, her tongue black, inky.  The Fencer watched with hopeless curiosity.

            Her face went to chaos before the sound arrived as distant buzzing thunder though his still-ringing ears.  First there was a dimple on her face, a tiny corruption, but this expanded into a cone of force ripping through her smoke-flesh, tearing loose teeth and eye and ghostly bone.  Through the mists the sliver of the trumpet glinted.

            Short lived peace followed.  Her damaged parts drifted back to smoke and the umbilical cloud swelled.  A new head grew from the old, partially unformed, droopy, uncaringly ugly.  The Fencer turned to his task; his friend wouldn't last long.

            Erablys cried in her many voices as the swordsman made the last climb to the smoking form he had seen before.  There it was, the corpse.

            It stood some three meters tall, as best he could tell from the wrapped up bundle of bones and blackened flesh.  The head was huge and bestial, the limbs lanky, taloned with yellow bone.  He only caught glimpses of it because the smoke poured off so thick and heavy, and its smell of burnt perfume made his eyes water.

            Another trumpet blast caught his attention.  Again the instrument tore through the smoking flesh but she fell all the same on the player, shrouding the man, devouring him.

            With no time left he fought out the Prism Seed, it was what she wanted after all, what she had used to grow her crystalline grove, and focus herself and play her games with travelers.  Within this trap of light she kept them all, her playthings, like toys in a box, content that she had them, always. 

            The sneer he wore told of his next action.  The blade drove deep into the corpse and it twitched.  A hissing sound as the ancient fires snuffed.  The smoke stopped, and the wind did the rest.

            First her flesh grew more solid, more real, as she instinctively pulled her matter close, leaving behind the musician at rest on the slope.  Shrinking smaller, her features focused to clarity, the lady of the place, legendary Erablys, showed in majesty and then blew away with a whisper.

            The glacier cleared to a stark mirror of snow-polished Winter, reflecting cold brutish forces and silence.  Mute lightning flashed beneath the ice, the Lattice reclaiming the soul, a rare thing to witness.  In ages past a shaman would guide this end, but there were no more gods or shamans to tend such narrative.  The Fencer had only his eyes.

            Hope fled as he raced to the Trumpeter.  The man was still as death, uncharacteristically quiet.

            Noting the trumpet nearby, the Fencer picked it up and put it to his lips.  This had always been a curiosity for him, but only now was the jealous Trumpeter away from his charge.  He blew, producing a gasp which started weak but through some quality of the device gained a desperately searching finish as it explored the environs and resonated off the peaks.

            With a cough there were hands about the Fencer's throat.  They only loosened when he dropped the trumpet.  Taking his namesake up once more the Trumpeter staggered, heaving up smoke and taking in fresh air.

           

            Little was left to tell that Erablys had ever been ruler of the glacier, only a few bits of masonry on the northern mountain and keepsakes scattered where the twin castles once dreamed.  But these weren’t really hers, they were others’.  These trophies were the only real things in the land of smoke. 

            Picking through the leavings the Fencer realized this.  She had been impossible to grasp, physically, or with the simple eye, and maybe in life this was also the case with a sorceress, but it was certain in death.  Not content with singular existence she sought the best kind of company; herself.  What games mages play. 

            Bles, Eral, they had no voice in this.  There were no ghosts of ghosts to act as chorus to lives lived.  The travelers were alone with their understanding, as even Clea was dead.  In a way she haunted still, wherever they took her little green book.

            That night, as they camped one last time under the Altherines, the newly clear air revealing a wealth of stars, the Trumpeter read from Clea's journal.  For light they burned all the leathers and wooden artifacts left behind, the letters and journals and toy-box mementos.  No clouds insulated the night and with the warming smoke gone they wouldn't survive without destroying the past.  He read to take his mind off such destruction.

            At the same time the Fencer remembered this happening the eve before entering the haunted valley.  It was read to him then as now; he couldn't be bothered to learn the way of letters himself.  The green alchemist told of the entry, besetment and bargain done in this place.  She had no knowledge of what she was getting into, only the will to bluff her way through anything, with a few potions to aid the way.  These they had reclaimed from the lost vaults, not a one missing. 

            A prize of particular note was the Prism Seed, a thing which transmuted thoughts into captured light and vice versa.  Clea was no magician and couldn't predict the places Erablys took this technology, using what grace was left in her soul towards strange ends.  Instead of using the seed to regain her mind she cultivated it, producing the crystalline grove, becoming a greater kind of spirit.  The seed placed in his head wasn't the original, simply the fruit of such a garden.  Only the dead knew the fullness of this project.

            And that was the great mystery.  She could've taken the Fencer's memories from him through such an implant, but instead merely blocked his past.  To ascribe a single cause or goal would be a disservice to her genius, directed as it was towards byzantine games and schizophrenic identity plays.  She reveled in such drama.

            The two left at dawn, the fire burned low, producing a wide variety of smokes owing to the things fed it the night before.  Taking a few knives from the pile the Trumpeter scattered the remainder down the cliffs just to hear the noise they made.  Then, with nothing else to do, with the Prism Seed safely acquired, they left the nameless glacier on a weeklong trek towards the closest settlement.  Outside there would be hunting and with luck they would survive.

            If there was any reason to keep the Seed it was gone now.  The device was blank and they had not the Art to put it to any use.  Any wisdom it might've contained had been lost in the smoke, and now even the smoke was gone.    

            They met a woman with rugged dreams traveling north on the third day out.  After preventing the Fencer from killing her she said she was heading to plunder the ruins a witch left behind in a place of strange mists.  They told her not to bother; she went anyway.  For a moment the Fencer felt the pang of knowing a course but being unable to share such memory, and in his boot the Prism Seed reminded of lost magic and lost sense.    

The Smoke Monster VII.

            The smoke was thicker now, describing a burning city or the mist over the great sound where the village of the narwhal hunters once lay.  It had a familiar smell, burnt whalebone perfume, faint and heady, but there was also a cloying element, an oily, greasy taste of bad flesh. 

            He knew the smoke lived, or hungered at least, and at any moment it would swallow him into its vaporous organs where he would join the cloud in ambient communion.  But he now remembered the icy bay of his childhood and his flight from the village and knew he was never one who got along with the group.  He’d drive Dhala’s nightmare blade through himself before that could ever happen. 

            A grim smile worked its way across his face.  No evidence of his attackers remained; no white clad swordsmen, no Trumpeter, no trumpet.  Some stretch of reason made him consider that they had been lost in the smoke, but he knew better. 

The moon disk glowed dim red beyond the cloud.  Cold fire danced across the shattered crystal of the trees.  He stood where the grove once was and in the reflected light he felt he was being watched.

            Heedless, he went out in search of answers.  Leaving the Altherines wasn’t an option anymore, his demon demanded satisfaction, and if only he could find his way back to the source of the smoke, amongst those strange ruins on the slopes of that tired northern mountain, he might clear the air enough to find his reason for coming to this valley of illusions.

            Through curtains of vapor he wandered, marking the incline of the ground as best he could, laterally following the sheets of ice and broken granite marking the ascent.  Keeping the slope to his right he was certain to head northwards, to the source of the billowing stuff.  Then a shuffling of the rock sounded softly downhill and he leaped upon this noise knowing he had no more allies in this place.

            The blade rang off silver and he tumbled unbalanced by this unexpected resistance.  Only one kind of metal could ward off his sword’s atom edge.  With the smoke so thick and heavy he couldn’t see the other man as he scrambled towards him.  His hands took a hold of a long scarf which he pulled, bringing forth a choking Trumpeter.

            “You’re dead,” said the swordsman with sad finality.  The musician could only sputter as the Fencer waited for the man to turn blue.

            “How do I know you’re not just another manifestation of the smoke,” he said calmly after loosening his grip. 

            “It’s a classic conceit that you don’t,” responded the Trumpeter as he massaged his neck.  “I’d imagine the witches know this trope well as it seems to haunt their whole land.  Did you see their castles fade away?  Their men?”

            “There must be a source,” reasoned the swordsman, looking about.  “The smoke.  Something burns ups there, producing it.  I saw ruins on those slopes when I first went out to challenge the smoke monster.  The creature seemed so intangible then, so weak.  Now, it’s a potent spirit, the very air itself is its body.”

            “Oh,” said the Trumpeter as he recovered his instrument from where it had fallen.  He pointed at the device and the Fencer understood his meaning. 

            Sensing violence, the smoke rushed in with sudden frenzy, but with a single breath the trumpet let out a hollow, gusting sound more air than note.  The cloud-flesh of the thing gave way, tearing apart to show the conical passage of the Trumpeter’s expression.  Above, night sky showed clearly, pinpoint stars gleaming with cold precision.  Just as quickly the smoke heaved back into place, piling down like a crumbling tower. 

            Instinctively the two men ran.  A damned shriek followed.

            Thick curtains of smoke parted before them, touching the men with gauzy folds like those of a woman’s gown, fine and soft.  Instinctively they would reach out to part these seemingly tangible veils, but like dreams they fell apart with but a touch.  They couldn’t see each other but stayed close by sound, each relying on the noise of boot on stone or the crunch of ice.  Cries followed them through such obscurity.

            At last there was a curtain that was a curtain.  Shifting it aside revealed a cleared dome-like space within the smoke lit by a pale blue witchfire.  On the strangely flat slate ground rested a play of objects.

            These were the trophies once held in Bles’s palace vault.  Various primitive devices, iron swords, flint hatchets, obsidian arrows, whale bones etched with boxed-in characters, lay scattered about in a confusion. 

            Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, whatever grace left this area.  The witchfire doused and the smoke came pouring in and the crying thing behind them sounded louder than ever before.  Tired of running the Fencer whirled to face it but found the Trumpeter, who tugged incessantly for the man to continue on up the slope.

            “We’re close!” he shouted, even though it was quiet.  For some reason it seemed necessary in the smoke, as if the stuff would soak up the sound.

            Hesitating, on the thoughtful verge of violence and reason, the smoke behind them twisted like sinew into a tree, green and verdant.  A patch of likewise grass erupted up as well, shooting from the stones with energetic life.  Somewhere a careless bird sang.  These were his stranger dreams and he ran from them.

            Growth followed the men.  Gardens and flowerbeds ran alongside their steps, brooks and streams, unfrozen and fast, laughed after them.  But always the screams behind, as the birds and insects chirped on without consideration.

            More than just natural life sprang up.  Arches, freestanding windows, latticed stone screens, imagined architectures and scattered ruins.  Stained glass windows streamed sunlight from other days.  Here might be a couch or desk, there a pool full of golden fish, fragments of places and histories bobbed up out of the smoke only to be lost again as the men fled toward some nebulous goal always further up, unseen.

            The Fencer slowed and came to a stop. 

            “Don’t you dare,” threatened the Trumpeter after trotting back to join his companion.  “You can’t fall for this trick.”

            “Is there a trick?” asked the swordsman, looking about for the spirit’s yellow eyes.  “This feels more chaotic, like a madman’s day dream or a musician’s expression.”

            “And you wish me to drown out the colorful noise?” offered the musician.

            Just then another scream pierced the fog.

            “Please,” said the Fencer and the Trumpeter played.

            He took in two full lungs of air and shouted out with his instrument.  This single peal flensed away illusionary foliage and fragmentary structures, returning them to the smoke from which they were formed, leaving only bare rock and pulverized snow for a hundred meters or so.  The air cleared enough to see the mountain’s encore; untold tons of loose shale, granite, and slate spilling down in an avalanche.

            If the men had been wise, in that same way a book is wise or a lost magician knowledgeable, they might’ve realized the glacial past of the mountains.  At one time great sheets of ice clung to the slopes, remnants of even larger deposits.  Over the endless years they ground down the sides to come to rest in the central bowl of the place, forming the basin where the smoke pooled.  The slopes were loose collections of mountain skin just waiting to tumble.

            A grim clarity framed their race against the tide.  It seemed so slow at first, distant, objective, but this wave grew faster, louder, more immediate, deadly.  The Fencer broke out running as fast as he could, the Trumpeter not far behind.  Ahead was the shoulder slope from which smoke billowed eagerly into the night.  If only they could make it there, they would be safe. 

            As sure as Winter’s cold the rocks came, flowing like liquid.  They dodged the larger boulders and skidding pieces of shale, but each one avoided slowed their movement, exposing them to the full force of the rockfall.  The boulders, some tumbling, some skidding like a carriage wreck, bore down.  A particularly large one careened their way but the Fencer’s blade cut through the ancient stone, dividing the halves to either side.  He fought the wave but his blade could not best a mountain. 

            The last thing he saw was the Trumpeter swept away and down, off the edge of the cliff leading to the lower basin and the road.  Then the stones came and he lost sight of everything but the crushing weight of indifferent years.

            Awakening to a powerfully radiant morning the Fencer was terrified to realize he couldn’t move his arms and legs.  A terrible ache permeated his body.  He felt betrayed; there should be no more hells and he had no other word to describe the place he inhabited at that moment. 

            He was buried up to his neck in a flow of rock.  Cold Dhala lay flat against his chest and he shivered with this intimacy.  There was cause for thanks though, for this terrible weapon had saved his life. 

            Though his memory was a crash of noise and debris he remembered reaching the base of the smoke-bearing slope.  Caught up in the avalanche, he had braced the unbreakable weapon flat against this torso and used it as a shield to ward off the crushing stones.  Fortune played a part as well, as this was the only thing which could account for the way the blade had caught just right against the behemoth rock crushing his front or the fact that his legs screamed out in constant, though unbroken, pain. 

            In the frame of grey mountains and cloud-scattered sky a bit of smoke curled into a gauzy human form in the air before him.  Immediately he struggled, trying to free himself before this apparition full manifested. 

            Bles emerged, standing on air a few meters away, eyes like old stars, face shadowed by the northward sun.  Now he knew why his mind drifted when he contemplated her form; she was smoke, a ghost, holding more weight in the mind’s realm than on the cold Winter ground.

            “It all comes tumbling down,” she said with a voice like a drifting stream.  “For you and for me.”

            “Witch!” he said with such force that he grimaced with the pain of the effort.

            “Not anymore,” she said sadly, her whole body like a tear on glass.  “Once, this whole basin was my domain.  I kept a house on that hill up there and entertained certain energies with my dance of mystery.  Then a red thing arrived, hair trailing like bright spilled blood, he wore a garment, a puzzled tapestry, torn from the halls of some other peer of the Art.”

            “Sol,” said the Fencer, knowing this story. 

            “Sol and his Uplifting,” she said and flickered, becoming several beings in short succession.  There was no transition between them and in the stark light this ghost of faces was even more terrible.  There was Eral and there was the thing in the smoke, the white-themed servants, even the Trumpeter and the Fencer, before giving way to unnamed others whose tokens surely lay under the mountain’s fallen side. 

            “And you wouldn’t go with him?”

            “Why be a peer up there when I could be a goddess here?” smirked Eral.  “Have you ever been in a magic duel?  No?  Well, let me say it is a thing which lies at the very horizon of our possible existences.  A thousand million thoughts tangling together into a braided sequence of action and reaction.  I lost, as I imagine anyone would against him.”

            “I’d have a better time of this if you’d help me out,” said the Fencer, thinking she had grown comfortable with the conversation, but he was ignored.  Like all ghosts she lived the past. 

            “Then things grew hazy,” she mused.  “I drifted, dead, bound by the resounding echo of our conflict resonating amongst the peaks, part of me here, part of me there.  For some reason he left me like this, unable to play my games, split apart into the three aspects of being.  Part of me burned, and some parts played and other parts, the best, preyed.  Why would he leave me like this?”

            “Never expect reason from a sorcerer,” stated the Fencer as he stared into the sunlight sky.  Something in him smoldered at her words, his heart prime kindling for her aimless caprice.

            “Your girl came to me then,” she said, suddenly returned to the man she had at her mercy.  “Tales of my riches brought her here.  She was sorely disappointed.  Sol had redoubled my magics, transmuting all my art to fire, a terrible blasting fire.  So little is left, only my memories.  She came anyway, that little charlatan with her dyed green hair.”

            “Get out of my mind,” said the Fencer.

            “I can’t help it,” said the apparition sadly.  “I bleed this way and that, which is why I hired her to bring me the Prism Seed, promising those few treasures which survived.  A fine thing for capturing thoughts or focusing minds, that artifact.  It grew a whole forest, but that too is gone, though it is possible that some seeds may have survived.”

            The air went cold and the smoke, unseen from his current vantage, misted in from behind.  It awaited her command just behind him, an expression of her will made manifest by whatever magic was left to her wandering soul.  An old fear of ghosts and spirits returned to the Fencer, ancient culture memories of a time before the Uplifting and the vanishing of such things, mostly, from the icy planet’s face. 

            “Stay away, you don’t know what’s in my mind.”

            “I do,” she said, for the first time turning her attentions fully on the trapped man.  She drifted down.  Her curious touch was a numbing poison, faint traces of pain running along her caress.  He bit down on the finger, but this resulted in him coughing through a lung full of perfumed smoke.

            “You carry mysteries within, dancing stranger thoughts,” she whispered, her eyes points of light.  “Dreams and things which your experience, but cannot grasp.”

            “What do you know of it?” he asked, desperate, but also curious. 

            “I know because I am the intellect unbound.”

            Just then a terrible noise sounded.  The air, which had grown ever more smoky, cleared.  The Fencer’s neck twisted this way and that, blasted by the force of the trumpet’s voice.  The woman of smoke, so wispy, so fair, tore apart with a half-imagined scream, the shriek echoing more fully in his mind than against the encircling mountains. 

            The Trumpeter arrived, smiling, gleeful in having saved his companion.  This was why his face fell so low when the Fencer cursed him.  The conversation was over and the swordsman pondered what potential had been lost in that dead and dismembered spirit.   

The Smoke Monster VI.

            Memories tumbled back to the Fencer and he found himself again amongst the ruined world.  Scattered about were dead narwhals and dark icicles, green-haired witches and a Stranger of blue.  So much blood and death that he could smell it again, frozen solid upon the vast plains of Winter, permanent and forever like statues.  In this mind’s eye view he knew the buzzard future watched from up high, blue-white, the color of sky, waiting for the lone outcast to join the corpses.

            Spread out like the contents looted from some abandoned palace his past revealed itself in a confused mess.  Various rooms radiated from his current vantage point, places of memories, islands of being jumbled by the Riddle of Winter.  These rooms displayed hunters frozen with the blood of their kills, cold laboratories, violence and ice, all seen in the light of lost days. 

            Bright sky and dull clouds had framed their journey to this place, this moment, among the Altherines, old, tired mountains circling a dead glacier known to be inhabited by a sorceress in the days before the Uplifting.  Clea’s journal told of a mysterious client who paid in coin so ancient that they were just bald discs of metal, divorced from history.  This client tasked her to find a seed of crystal, like the one which the Fencer held in his hands as terrible screams played down into the dungeon, resonating with the bones of the earth.

            “I can’t decide if I’m safer in this cell than out of it,” shivered the Trumpeter through a mask of abject terror. 

            “No place to run in there,” reasoned the Fencer as he turned the cold bit of prism in his hands. 

            The thing had been the cause of his amnesia—more accurately described as a block.  It had done its job of transmuting his memory energies into cold and distracting him subtly when old companions and artifacts presented themselves.  It was almost certainly placed there by Bles, or maybe Eral, but any motive for this escaped his reason.  Maybe it was the scream, but he couldn’t make all the pieces fit, and for him that was an aggravating situation.

            “That was in your head?!” exclaimed the musician who had calmed enough from one hysteric that he could leap to the next.  “All this time the thing we were looking for was right there.  This is all your fault for making us climb that cliff near the southern castle.”

            “That was your idea, I remember now.”

            Both of them were avoiding the prospect of going up the stone steps leading to the source of the screams.  Hungry spirits evoked a cultural dread for the two men, and though they knew that the old beings of power had been banished or abjured by the red demon Sol in the Uplifting, they also knew that some things had fallen through the cracks and yet remained.

            “Let me out, there’s something I need,” said the Trumpeter.

            Freedom was easy to arrange.  With just a few swings Dhala cut the iron braces fixing the grate to the stone frame, causing the whole thing to fall outwards with a jarring clang. 

            “I’m going up,” said the Fencer.

            “But why?” asked the Trumpeter.  “We found what we came for and there are certainly tunnels down here which lead out to the glacier and freedom and away from our paired witches.”

            “It’s fine and well that we have the Prism Seed in hand but it was only an excuse.”

            “You can’t believe how thoroughly annoyed I am at being imprisoned over an ‘excuse.’”  The Trumpeter had that look in his eye which told of a less humorous kind of madness.  “Do you have any idea how much it galls me not to have my trumpet in hand and to be caged like a lunatic.”

            Drawing his sword punctuated the Fencer’s side of things.  Many times he had been on the verge of murdering the Trumpeter out on the wastes.  Once, when they had managed to slip through the various wandering bandits on the Gelsym plains, the musician had suddenly cried out with his instrument, just because he felt they were being unfair to the brigands.  This sort of thing happened quite often.  Yet this time it was he who was provoking trouble.

            They found the trumpet behind another vault, a thing of brass and old, almost melted iron.  Collected within were old swords with blades of bronze, rat-eaten hides which served as armor or warmth, bone needles, ivory combs, uncut gems, and old coins. 

            There was a difference to these spider web spoils.  Where Eral’s keepsakes were ornate, cultured, objects of fine make and precise quality, these trophies were coarser, primitive, rough, like the worn down mountains.  The trumpet’s sleek design stood out from the uncultured stuff.

            “Ah, there it is,” said the Trumpeter, reclaiming his namesake and giving it a good polish.  “We’re whole again.”

            They went up.  The Trumpeter decided that it was best to see what lay above, his instincts swinging wildly from cowardice to fanaticism.  It remained to be seen what mysteries the sisters had laid out for them.  Setting his face, making his eyes cold, the Fencer prepared to find out.

            Murder greeted them.

            They didn’t see a soul until they were in the grand hall, with its sweeping staircase and overlooking balconies.  From above various partygoers looked down.  Eral was there, Bles too.  Everyone’s eyes were on the body at the base of the stair.

            By the look of her clothes she had been another guest.  Decapitated, a splay of rich blood soaked the neck of a once-white dress and pooled on the rug.  In a cobweb nest in the corner her head waited.

            The crowd acted as if they had just now seen the thing.  A general gasp, hands over mouths, averted eyes, the drama all done its fullest.  These were rituals the Fencer couldn’t understand from his world where terrible death was common.

            “Who did this,” he asked calmly as the servants came in, laid a sheet over the body and fetched the head. 

            “You should know,” said Eral from her vantage at the top of the stair.  She didn’t seem frightened as the others did.  She bit her lip with obvious excitement.

            “Eral!”  The look Bles gave her sister silenced nothing.

            The Fencer wanted an answer which didn’t play this game of theirs.  Blood was a serious thing.

            “Fencer, you know more than you wish.”

            The Trumpeter had shooed away the servant and now displayed the head.  Green hair spilled from between his fingers like liquid silk, bloodied, spattered.  The Fencer remembered the face.

            “Clea,” he murmured, hand going to Dhala’s cold surety.

            “So you know her?” asked Bles with interest.

            “Perhaps you are from her lands?” added Eral, searching.

            The Fencer didn’t respond.  He had witnessed her death once before and thought, with that barest of reliefs, that he’d never have to see it again.  But here it was: the headless body, the pooling blood, plots and conspiracies.  A repetition of the world’s madness, of Winter’s Riddling hand writing in red.

            “No,” he said.  Much to their disappointment, he didn’t elaborate.

            “I don’t think he ever knew her, really,” said the Trumpeter with a shrug as he passed off the grizzly memory to the waiting servant. 

            Now the guests murmured general disapproval.  The fun was over and violence had found them even here, within the symbolic security of a castle.  Like a slowly moving wave of cool colors the guests made for the exit, giving wide berth to the tragedy on the floor.  With a single gesture Bles had the palace sealed.

            “I can’t let anyone leave,” she said, some small amusement in her voice.  “We have a murderer amongst us and I intend to find out who.”

            This excited the crowd.  It felt like a party again. 

            “I have my suspicions,” grinned Eral, eyeing the Fencer’s sword.  There seemed to be no doubt who killed the woman, who remained nameless.  Much was left unsaid.

            “Bles, I want some truth out of you,” said the Fencer, finally freeing his mind from those green eyes, that green hair. 

            The woman above drifted back from the balcony, off into the sprawling quarters of the upper levels.  Obviously she wished him to follow.  Soon most did, the crowd returning to clucking and hemming over the night’s excitement.  Under a sheet of white a red stain bloomed like a flower. 

            The Fencer took a step after her, a need to know, to demand knowledge, burned up within, but an arm caught him.  He had forgotten how strong the Trumpeter actually was.

            “No, no, no, no,” said the musician.  “It’s exactly what they want.  An old trick my mother used to play on my father; get mad and storm off, make him follow.”

            “Now that does make me angry,” said the Fencer, glaring down his friend who let go of his arm.  “For once you’re being sensible.”

            “No need to be mean,” said the Trumpeter, seriously offended. 

            Growing thoughtful, the swordsman knew he hadn’t long to deliberate.  Those sisters above would be back if he didn’t follow soon, their reasons unimaginable, their methods too.  They could conjure up the past, perhaps in relation to the Prism Seed, that mnemonic glass which could sublimate certain mental energies.  And then it was so much more clear; he was halfway up the stairs by the time the Trumpeter noticed.

            The musician followed in a protest.  They went by floors of smoke and gatherings of venal guests humming with civility.  Only once they passed the door which Bles had entered did the Trumpeter realize that other plans were being enacted.  At least, he hoped it was a plan.    

            The door below, that one strange, single door leading to the outside, was guarded by six white-liveried men with a look of the blade about them.  Up here, however, there were only guests and a few pale servants.  They were too busy socializing to care about the two coarse men walking into a wall.

            They stopped and the Fencer brought out his weapon.

            “What are you doing?” asked the musician.

            “There’s a jutting band of stone about five meters off the ground, right on the other side of this wall,” he replied, and then hesitated.  “It’s strange.  All the things we do, the destruction we cause, it doesn’t seem to matter to them, the sisters.  I have my sword, you your trumpet, you’re freed, a guard is dead, yet none of it leaves much of an impression in this place.”

            “I’m probably not the one to ask to put things together for you,” laughed the musician.

            Nodding, the Fencer swung Dhala in an arc and the stones tore like paper.  Four swings and they had a hole big enough for both to squeeze out onto the ledge and then leap down into the soft snow. 

            Shouts of excitement followed them into the night.  Murderer!  Barbarian!  The mystery was solved, for the crowd.  The Fencer paid no attention to the drama behind them as he chased the light.

            The smoke was up now, languid piles of the stuff drifting aimlessly.  Through this the ghostly copse of crystalline trees stood out like the moon in a rich fog.  It was a short run but the guards proved faster.  The pair found blades waiting for them.

            The first man lunged out of the smoke and at the Fencer’s heart.  With an upward parry the Fencer sheered the blade near the hilt and carried through the neck.  A second figure howled with his attack, heedless of Dhala he impaled himself on the weapon just so he could pin the swordsman with his saber.  He was dead before he hit the ground, but his work lasted, blood seeping from where he’s pricked the Fencer’s shoulder. 

            More attackers loomed into existence, entities unreal and expedient.  The Trumpeter vanished in the haze and so alone the Fencer would soon be overwhelmed.  The smoke grew anxious and trembled.

            Keeping the lighted trees in sight he continued the uphill struggle as he fought off strings of attackers, wary of the smoke, which at any time might strike.  The guards never wavered, never gave a hint of humanity.  They died only to bring the Fencer down, but seeing this tactic he changed his, avoiding as many as he could and slaying only those who insisted. 

            There was a terrible whine in the air by the time he reached the grove, owing to the Prism Seed in his boot sounding against the trees.  This resonance confirmed his guess; the lemur-men were had the right of things.  He brought up his icicle blade and then something moved behind him.

            He struck, turning with one fluid motion to face the Trumpeter’s shock-wide eyes.  The weapon passed neatly through the man, separating upper and lower, the trumpet clattered onto the ground and out of sight. 

            It was almost enough to stop him but his demon rose up hot and angry.  The first tree didn’t so much shatter as fracture and slide apart, panes of glass biting into the hard-packed snow.  In a fugue, the Fencer methodically destroyed each tree, each resounding tower of crystal, and he didn’t stop until all were broken.  Along the ground the jagged stuff hummed, cutting into the soles of his boots, but he showed no signs of care. 

            Instead, he let out a yell with all his frustration.  It cut through the fog.  A terrible scream joined him, as well as a chorus of hoots from the upper mountains.  Then, inexplicably, the sound of the trumpet sounded too, bouncing off the mountains in growing, burnished wonder. 

            The castle vanished, the dead men joined the smoke, and where the Trumpeter’s split body lay there was no blood, no body, only the illusion of knowledge.