Chapter 8
In Which I Might Be Warming Up to the Sorcerer despite Him Being an Absolute Bastard with Terrible Fashion Sense, because the Shittiness of His Behaviour Makes the Occasional Non-Shitty Action Stand Out in an Almost Heroic Light, and Also, I Definitely Had a Sexual Awakening in that Interrogation Chamber.
How you survived to adulthood is a mystery,” said the sharp-faced man, as the construct hand-delivered me to the castle gate. I didn’t have the energy to respond, instead choosing to black out again.
I awoke cradled in a soft material. Groggily, I snaked my head out.
This room, lit by fog-dimmed light, and furnished only by the cot beneath me, looked familiar.
I’d woken here before, on that first morning.
And the nest of fabric . . . of course, the corpse clothing!
Someone had washed them, thankfully, as they lacked the former bloodstain.
Shuffling my wings experimentally brought no pain, though extending the right one did produce a twinge. Tucking them back in, I gaped my beak in a yawn. Nothing demanded my immediate attention, so squirming further into the nested clothes, I retracted my neck and closed my eyes.
Upon my next waking, the door was open, with a dead rat deposited on the floor. Something, likely a construct, had torn its head off.
“Now what’s with all this pampering?” I squawked in wonder, shaking my feathers and hopping off the cot to eat.
After hollowing the rat and preening thoroughly to remove the flecks of flung meat from my golden-brown feathers, I waddled out to find the sorcerer.
The click of my talons against the stone made for a lonely noise. Since the mad sorcerer was a creature of habit, I knew the route to take: right, left, left again, hopping down that spiral staircase, right, and here we go. The crackle of the fireplace from the wood-carving room confirmed my guess.
Gritting my beak, I pushed from the stone in a burst of noisy flapping, and swept through the doorway, flaring my wings to slow before touching down on a stack of wood.
“You’ve gotten better at landing,” the mad sorcerer noted.
He sat weaving cut saplings around a bleached-white core, forming the messy approximation of a limb.
Behind him, neatly piled, lay more of the smooth white branches—no, bones.
He had a stack of bones. Human bones, I corrected, spotting the cracked ruin of a skull.
It was oddly poignant, watching the construction of an enemy I’d fought for years, their secrets bared to me so casually.
All the constructs I’d seen hacked apart in the aftermath of battles had been wood throughout—but a fleshy, unnatural wood that flowed seamlessly into teeth and fingers.
There must be a merging process between the bone and branch, one that imbued them with demonic half-life and connected their senses to Merulo’s eye.
Finishing one limb, the sorcerer moved to another. He reached behind him to pluck one, then two long bones from the stack, then twined a thin, flexible strip of wood around the joint, connecting them. I grew less content to watch.
Probably shouldn’t ask. It wouldn’t lead to anything good.
“Why did you save me?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure you hate me, so it doesn’t make much sense.”
The mad sorcerer sniffed. “Because you are a pathetic jester. You’ll suffer far more alive than you would dead.”
Okay, so I really shouldn’t have asked. I sighed, shuffling on my talons, then sighed again.
At my third sigh, Merulo looked up from the half-formed leg with a grimace. “What?”
“Don’t you want to know the circumstances of how I got shot?”
“Not particularly.” The flicker of firelight shadowed his hollow cheeks, making him look even more sickly. I wondered at the lack of muscle on his arms, given he seemed to spend a good amount of time manipulating weighty blocks of wood.
“Okay, so there’s this elf named Glenda,” I said, and then, in a quickening spill of words, told him everything about our second-to-last encounter, the one that culminated in my sword bashing her skull.
I told him about our friendship, about my Fear, about attempting to put ‘the moves’ on her, the crying, how I’d left her crumpled on her side, skinny limbs askew in the dirt.
And how that led to the unexpected violence of our reunion.
The sorcerer, for his part, seemed to listen as he worked, and waited until I had exhausted my torrent before putting the woven leg aside and turning to consider me.
“So this . . . harassment.” The sorcerer gestured broadly. “It’s a pattern for you.”
Of course that’s what he’d focus on. “In no way did I harass her,” I sputtered.
“And I didn’t harass you either, that was—that was a bodily reaction under circumstances outside of my control.
In fact,” I continued, gaining confidence, “some would say it was you who harassed me, with those tight chains and getting all up in my space till I was hot and ready to pop. Oh yes, I definitely feel like the victim of, what’s the word for it, inexcusable sexual harassment. ”
“Are you done?” Merulo said calmly. I didn’t trust the change that came over his face.
“Yes,” I said, puffing out my vulture chest.
“Alright. I am going to kill you now.”
“Ah, I can’t win!” I shrieked, sinking into a quivering bundle of feathers. An unexpected reprieve to my Fear had come in the form of utter exhaustion. “I can’t ever win! The world is out to get me, so go ahead. If it isn’t you, it’ll be something else tomorrow.”
Squeezing my beady eyes shut, I waited for a blow that never fell.
Instead, I heard the steady scrape of metal on wood.
When I felt brave enough for a peek, I saw that Merulo had pulled a knife from the depths of his robes and was carving at a minuscule stick, the construct limb lying forgotten at his feet.
Some time passed, me watching and him whittling, before he spoke.
“The world is not ‘out to get you,’ Cameron. On the contrary, it’s given you wealth, affluence, a comely physique”—the sorcerer smirked—“though not anymore, vulture boy.” He raised a hand to silence my protests.
“You were given rank, without any merit or demonstrable talent, born into an undeserved social standing. One of the fair folk selected you for companionship, despite their noted disdain for humans. A prophecy inexplicably singled you out among millions, bringing the chance for a more significant death than most men dare to dream of, which would certainly have been followed by fame and folk songs of your ‘heroic sacrifice.’” He imbued the words with the maximum amount of disgust. “And, when you chose to renounce that fate, assistance came from a former enemy, who gifted you a transformation that excused you from this prophecy, allowing you a free and undisturbed existence. At what point”—slashing at the twig in his hand with strokes that threatened to split it, his voice rose to a shout—“has the world ever been against you?”
“Oh fuck off, you turned me into a vulture,” I muttered, though the ‘former enemy’ part did stick out as hopeful phrasing. It raised my spirits a touch; if the mad sorcerer wasn’t an enemy, perhaps another sort of relationship wasn’t out of the question.
In response, more frenzied whittling. I had never seen a man carve wood with so much fury. If he kept up this pace, I wondered how fast he could make a chair.
“There!” Merulo exclaimed, startling me. He brandished the carved splinter and, bringing the jagged thing to his lips, whispered to it like a lover. The wooden needle blossomed, its head puffing into an intricate net, until it resembled a key without teeth.
Grinning, the sorcerer beckoned me closer. “Come here, little birdy.” Obviously, I stayed put. “Come of your own free will, or I will make you come.”
It should be held endlessly in my favour that I did not comment on the innuendo.
Reluctantly, I hopped from the stack of wood and waddled across the room, stopping by his stool.
The sorcerer patted his lap. I cocked my head in disbelief, before launching with a single flap and settling onto his bony knees, carefully, so as not to pierce his robe with my claws.
“You,” the mad sorcerer began, placing a gangly hand across my back, “have become shockingly disrespectful of late. Without fear of me, and with no thought of consequences.” In his other hand, he raised the carved needle. “This, my carrioneating wretch, is a consequence.”
“My lord . . .” I widened my pebbly eyes in my best puppy-dog impression—then shrieked as he jabbed quick as a viper, the needle sinking into my chest.
Oddly, I felt no pain. Looking down, my beak open in horror, I saw the needle’s elaborate head protruding from my feathers, the remainder buried in my flesh. Something hung sparkling from the hateful thing. A translucent chain, of which Merulo held the other end.
“Now,” said the sorcerer, with malevolent glee. “I am expecting visitors. Why doesn’t my pet join me? You can perch on my shoulder.”
“Sure thing. Only problem, are you going to grow broader shoulders with magic, or . . . ? My lord, I’m a big bird and there’s a surface area issue with—AH!”
Ice stabbed out from the embedded needle, cold ruptures of pain that chilled me to the bones. ‘Consequences,’ the mad sorcerer mouthed.
Fighting back a few choice curses, I launched myself onto his shoulder.
As I’d tried to explain, I didn’t fit, and after some scrambling and flapping, mussing of his robe, and grunts of frustration from both of us, Merulo shoved me off.
“Just . . . just follow behind me, alright?” he said, flustered.
“And stay mute. If you attempt to provide any assistance to the knights we are to meet, I will end your life with one twist of this chain. That is not an idle threat.”