The Sword of Retribution

Haldorn - Part 3

     By the time it was fully dark they were ready to leave.

     They saddled their horses, returned to the road and continued south towards the mountains, the cthillian gliding along beside them, its stride barely rippling the hem of its robes. To Thomas, riding about twenty feet behind, it looked like a crimson ghost with a bulbous, shiny wet head. It was unspeakably horrible and revolting, but he found that he couldn’t keep his eyes off it. There was some kind of gruesome attraction about the creature that made him keep looking back at it, something that refused to let him think about anything else.

     Why am I so fascinated by it? he wondered. Is it all the knowledge, the information, stored inside that repellent, alien head? The cthillians were said to be an incredibly ancient race. Although they had only arrived on Tharia a few thousand years before, their civilisation back on their own world was said to be millions of years old. Almost nothing was known about them as a race, but even if they were uninterested in exploration and discovery, they couldn’t help but have picked up a vast amount of knowledge in all that time. Information about the nature and history of the universe that humans couldn’t even dream of.

     Even as these thoughts passed through his head, he knew he’d put his finger on it precisely. He longed to pick its alien brains. Ask questions and get answers. Learn some of the things it knew. Would it share that knowledge with him, though? he wondered. Perhaps, if he asked the right way.

     He spent over half the night deep in thought, considering one possible strategy after another as they rode in silence. It mustn’t sound too contrived, he told himself. I won’t get any answer at all if I just blurt out a question. It must seem to arise as a natural part of the conversation, and then perhaps it’ll answer without thinking. To do that, though, I’ve first got to be in a conversation with it. What in the world can I talk to it about? What kind of subject is a slaver likely to find interesting?

     Nothing occurred to him, though, and the young wizard began to despair, thinking that any attempt to swap words with the creature was doomed to failure. Then, at around midnight, Derro, the red sun, emerged from behind a low bank of cloud off to their left, rippling in a heat haze as it dropped towards the horizon. To his surprise, he saw that the slaver was staring at it in a curiously intense way, its light reflected from the wide pupilled octopus eye on the side of its head facing him. It stopped walking for a moment, until Shaun’s horse had gone past, and then it stepped through the gap between Shaun and Lirenna to walk on the other side of the column, where it could see Derro better. Thomas was intrigued. Well, you wanted something to talk to it about, he thought to himself. You’ll never get a better opportunity.

     He swapped places with Jerry, who’d been riding in front of him, so that he was riding alongside the slaver. The creature was very tall, nearly seven feet tall, and its long, dark head was only a couple of feet below his own, giving him an unprecedentedly close look at the mottled and warty texture of its skin. He stared in fascination for a couple of minutes, savouring the opportunity to examine a living slaver so closely and a little afraid of attracting its attention. Something might happen at any time to destroy this moment, though. If he was going to risk speaking to it, he had to do it now before he lost an opportunity that might never come again.

     “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said, grasping the bull by the horns. “Derro, I mean. Magnificent.” In fact, he didn’t think the red sun was either beautiful or magnificent. He thought it was ugly and boring and a nuisance when he was trying to look at the stars, but he would have said that ogres were beautiful if it would have broken the ice with the slaver.

     The hideous, alien head turned to look up at him, and Thomas found himself being minutely examined by a pair of horrible octopus eyes. “Why do you say that, when you are so obviously lying?” said a telepathic voice in his head. “Are you mocking me?”

     Thomas’s guts tightened in sudden panic, and sweat broke out all over his body. “N-n-no!” he stammered. “I-I didn’t, I mean, I don’t...”

     “Do not speak to me of that about which you know nothing,” commanded the cthillian, its proboscis twitching to emphasise every word. “I will tolerate no disrespect from such as you.”

     Thomas called upon all the mental disciplines he’d been taught at the University and, after a great internal struggle, managed to calm down and find his voice again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I meant no disrespect. If I offended you, I apologise. I was just trying to make conversation, that’s all. Please forgive me, I won’t lie to you again, I promise.”

     “See that you don’t,” said the slaver sharply. “I may have to endure your company, but I will only tolerate so much. Forget your place once more and I will destroy you.”

     The creature then paid him no more attention, and looked straight ahead as it walked beside him, apparently having decided that the wizard didn’t merit a greater reprimand than that, for which Thomas was profoundly grateful.

     Thomas knew that he could simply let the moment pass. Return to his place in the column and forget about any further attempt to converse with it. The slaver evidently considered that a warning was enough, and any sensible person would leave it at that, glad to have gotten away with it. Only a madman would push his luck further. Unfortunately, though, Thomas was possessed by a demon. A demon that had plagued him all his life, driving him to go places and do things that had frequently put his life in extreme jeopardy. Its name was curiosity. Insatiable curiosity, and now it was exerting its influence again, compelling him to make one more attempt to talk to the creature, even though the saner part of his mind was screaming at him that what he was about to do was foolish in the extreme, and might even turn out to be suicidal.

     He took a swig from a water bottle to moisten his dry mouth, cleared his throat, and spoke as clearly and respectfully as he could. “Ambassador Ctharliwun,” he began, “I would consider it a privilege if you would allow me to talk to you. The opportunity for a human to converse with a member of the cthillian race is one that occurs so infrequently that I’d never forgive myself if I allowed it to pass without at least trying to take advantage of it.”

     The creature looked back at him, and for a moment he thought he’d blown it, that at any moment a bolt of pure mental power would blast him to oblivion, but then it spoke again. “It is only natural that you would want to converse with, and learn from, one of my kind,” it said. “What do you want to know?”