Eye Spy, Part II. Daddy Issues.
“Yes, miss?” The guard is tall, blonde, with a handlebar mustache and an expression that seems chiseled out of disappointment.
“What? Oh – “
“Can I help you.” A monotone with a hint of ‘what now’.
How long have I been standing here?
Are my hands shaking?
“Could you tell Mister...um...Captain? Sir? Stargazer that Lola is here to see him? Please?”
Why is he looking at me? Is something wrong? My eye!?
“Lieutenant Stargazer, miss. Door to your immediate left.” He immediately returns two matching, unmarred brown eyes to paperwork stacked akimbo across his desk.
The door is not locked, of course it wouldn’t be – beyond is a plaster-walled space, twice as long as it is wide, with one privacy screen, one small table, one scarred wooden desk, two chairs, one human male, and nothing else.
“Mister Stargazer?”
No, the patch didn’t slip. This is a big office. Is he important? Is Lieutenant good?
“Greetings, child. Indeed. What can I do for you?” Tall. Light skin. Hawk nose. Predator’s eyes. Lips draw back in an imitation of a smile over teeth that belong on a man younger than the one standing behind the desk.
Why is he looking at me like that? Did I do something bad again? I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I won’t -
It’s not him. I’m here, not there. Here, not there.
Why is he looking at me like that?
“I am indeed Lieutenant Stargazer.” Deeper voice than the guard, accented with strained patience.
“Mister Quill told me you....you....were involved in the cases with – he said you'd know about – about Mort.”
“Mort…you say?”
“Mortimer.”
Don’t come closer don’t come closer.
“I guess we are starting with the wrong situations miss.” He gestures to the chair nearest here, across from his. “Please take a seat. And who is it that comes to my office and asks this.”
“Lola, sir. Lieutenant.”
“ Lola…my my…Lola of the Reids , in Mariner's huh?”
“Just Lola, sir. Yes, from Mariner's Hold.”
“My you have indeed grown up.”
He knows me?
“Yes, sir.”
“Well…now…Lola of the Reids. About your questions. Yes the name rings a bell. I've been involved with a lot of criminals and other data so my memory may not be as fresh as it used to be…but why is that you are asking?”
“I would - what....would you charge to share that with me. I am looking for information.”
“Charge? My my…you’re getting into something you shouldn't, aren't you? What kind of information you seek?”
Why does he smile like that? Stop it!
Why isn’t he saying anything?
Say something!
Oh – I mean me.
“I'm already up to my eyeball in it. It's too late to not be involved. I want to know what he is, how powerful his is, if he has any weaknesses. If anyone knows where he – lairs.”
“You sound like a hunter ready to go on a hunt miss…is this man currently reappeared? Why is that you need this information? To be clear, I can help you with the information you request...”
“He's watching me. Maybe right now. You are powerful? I heard you are.”
“Why he would do such thing? I am a man milady. I've seen a lot of things and in this experience some may call me a learned man, but I won't presume of power.”
“Oh.” A laugh that isn’t a laugh at all. “He's my father you see. I see. I saw. Mister Quill helped me see. I know now. I bet he's watching me, just to see me fall apart...”
The hawk-faced man stands, arms folded, lips pressed together. Perhaps amused.
“I can see him if I concentrate. I can see the room.”
Here, not there. Here...no, there.
The room with the skulls and the men and the big crystal ball. Somewhere in a corner lies a slimy heart from an outsider creature, decaying inside a crust of black blood. The men chant with their heads down. The thing grimaces because he can’t do otherwise. It’s the first time she remembers him smiling at her and its purely involuntary.
No, the second – the second time. There were no men the first there, not here – what is here anymore?
The chanting makes you sleepy, once you listen long enough.
The hawk-faced man puts a cool hand on one quivering shoulder.
DON’T TOUCH ME!
“Lola, miss. Try to calm down, fear and rage is the first enemy we have to face. If we lose to those and to ourselves then the enemy has already won…”
He removes his hand. Tears wet a youth-rounded right cheek. A sheen of diluted blood stains the left.
“If this man is your father…and it’s looking for you, it is indeed a dangerous situation.”
“I hate him.”
Large, steady hands pour water into a glass that is grasped in two much smaller ones. The room is silent but for sipping until the glass is nearly empty.
“Well, it’s hard to point out of the weakness of such man. I'd like to ask you first, to avoid repeating…what is what you know of him till now?”
More silence. When the explanation comes it starts in flat, rising as it goes, a shark at depth but angling toward prey at the surface.
“I didn't know anything until maybe a month ago. I was in the crypts here with a woman, helping her learn the corridors. Delia. Her name is Delia. It's not important.”
The man gives a measured nod and motions for her to continue.
“We went to that room that's always got mummies in it - and left - and there was an eyeball in the hall. Mages sometimes use them. An eyeball with wings. It watched us for a moment then flew away so I followed it. I was curious. It attacked me. I killed it and it exploded.”
A near-smirk fades to an arched eyebrow. He stands near the paper room divider, to the side of the desk, forcing the chair’s occupant to turn her head to see him. She doesn’t.
“Inside it was another eye. A glass one. With a brown iris.” The empty cup turns counterclockwise in slim fingers. “I was curious.”
It was sized perfectly. It matched perfectly. How could you not? How could you not want to know?
“So I took it to the Harpy and got a room and cleaned it and tested the magic and put it in.”
Faster.
“Divination. It's got divination on it.”
The man stands without fidgeting, without distraction. His eyes are slightly narrowed, looking down upon their target, as far above the surface as she is below it.
“Then I looked in the mirror and it was like I had an eye. A real eye. I could see through it. I could see through a glass eye. It felt wrong though. Bad. A little bad.”
“And you saw the same room you were in…or…?”
“So I wanted to know who was watching me so I looked into the mirror and started into the eye...my eye...left eye...and I was mad that someone was watching me so I looked back. Through the mirror. And I saw him. Watching me. I saw myself in a crystal ball. That made me sick. And a man with skeletal hands - him - glowing green eyes. Smirking. I didn't know who he was. Then the connection broke and I felt very stupid. So I covered the eye.”
“It’s been some time indeed.” It’s sympathy, perhaps, or patronization. Irrelevant, it dissipates, unnoticed.
“Then a week later I was in Center and I went out to the fire and there had been another eye flying around. Some people had already killed it. This pretty halfling lady with uncombed hair had the eye - another glass eye. Just like the one I have in here. She said she could show me how to make a scrying circle so we went to the beach. And she did. And I saw him again.”
Only now does he take out a notebook. The quill scratches like a cat at the door.
“He was watching me again. And there were men behind him, they looked human, and they had Corathite symbols on. They were chanting. The room had skulls and candles. It was big. He saw me watching him. I think it amuses him.”
Faster.
“Then he picked up a really big heart. It was purplely and too big to be human. He cut it with a dagger. It was glossy black, I remember that. And the blood was black. Not red. He squeezed the blood onto the crystal that I was in. That my image was in. Me? I don't know. It is confusing. And then they were chanting and closed his fingers....all bone - no flesh left....over the ball, and a hand came out of the sand and grabbed the eye. And then dead things came out of the surf.”
Faster! You can see the sun and the shadow of your dinner among the rays.
“So he turned your scrying into a conjuration device against you…” He frowns. “Interesting.”
“Then the glass eye exploded. We killed the dead things. I think they were maybe sailors, but mostly just bits of flesh stuck to bone. Then the eye exploded, under the sand. I gathered it up.”
“Is this the last you have learned of him?”
“No sir.”
“Then continue please.”
“I heard Mister Quill knows things about strange magic and medicine.”
He smirks at the mention of Quill. “That is a way of putting it. Yes.”
“So myself and my friends Neema and Eril-lyn went to see him. He liked that Neema and I are not squeamish around the dead. So he agreed to talk to us. I cast a protective circle around us in his office. I think I did. Maybe. And Neema and Eril-lyn helped. And then I showed him my eye. I tried to take it out back in Vehl when I first put it in you see. But it hurt as badly as if it were real. I couldn't. I couldn't yank it out. I almost passed out trying. He wanted to know about the man as well so he put me under hypnosis to see what we could find out.”
Her words are footsteps in the tower. They are her blanket pulled over her head, woven together in clumps and ragged at the edges, but keeping the truth off her skin. They are Binky, perched on the edge of her bed, whispering in her ear. They are the thing at the surface, flipping, thrashing, finally aware of what comes from below.
It looks delicious.
FASTER!
“I don't remember my life before I was a slave. I was very young. I thought maybe my parents were slaves who died. But they weren't. I walked back in time inside my head, past the wall...the place where memories stopped. He was behind it in a tower. He was a man then.”
The words slam into each other.
“He would invite people, travelers, in. Talk to them. Feed them. Drug them maybe, I don't know. Then cut their hearts out. I couldn't find my mother, she was never there. I walked around the halls, hiding, trying not to be seen...I don't know why I was alive at all. If I asked him about her I got beaten. One day he took a man down to the cutting room and I followed him.”
Her jaws open against her will. The surface is foamy with panic.
“And I saw him cutting, I could see better, I was afraid, I made a noise, he heard me and it must have messed something up. He got really mad and came over and – “
Teeth too old, too sharp to be her own close on the febrile struggles of memory.
Say it. SAY IT!
The man gliding over the rising words spots blood in the water. He dives, spearing prey onto blank parchment.
PLEASE NO PLEASE NO DADDY NO I WON’T DO IT AGAIN I’M SORRY PLEASE -
“He ate my eye. He ate it. He was mad. He said if I was going to ruin things I didn't need to see it again. I must have passed out.” Tears, clear and tears, red. “When I woke up, I was in the slaver's mines in a cart on the other side of the wall. And the shiny gnome helped me.”
The words are chewed out and they absorb any other sound. Then they pass, leaving only residual vitreous dripping from the memories of the listeners.
The quill is tucked inside the notebook, the book set on the table. The man frowns as if disapproval were a deity and he its Cherished Elder. The water jar is lifted from the small table, brought to the glass doing jerky pirouettes in her hands, poured.
She drinks.
He leans on the desk, facing her. While the hunter’s expression isn’t softened, the words are more carefully selected, pauses indicating a shuffling of the lexicon before a concept is verbalized.
“It was indeed something awful, alas in those tragedies and to learn what was of us before, it’s what makes us better. When we are able to defeat those memories, the path has started…as for your questions. This man, if we can call it like that…it’s been on the run for years. Mortissimer Bael, Mort Tallytee , the Toymaster, among many other aliases. This makes him as elusive and mysterious as he can be. He seems almost changing for each time I hear of him. A dangerous and pure evil foe nonetheless, yes.”
Listening is calming. She has no attachment to or preconception of his voice. It is what it is and sentence by sentence her breathing slows.
Tallytee. Horrible. What a horrible joke of a name. Not mine. Never.
“First. you must know that this…"man"…is also known as Father Strife. Have you heard of the "Sons of Strife"?
“Mister Quill said something about them. It was right after I - stopped screaming - and came back. I don't remember. Everything was too much then.”
Just by saying it, she’s there. Neema don’t let me go - Eril-lyn – The body is shelter, the smell only a fringe on the edge of her awareness. He is huge, and she can hide in the folds of the stiff arm and under the curve of the overfed belly, a child burying her head in a fort of cold flesh. How can HE be my father? Andy is wrong, wrong, wrong! I wasn’t made from love!
They’re trying to pry her out of the body’s unwitting embrace. Quill is more interested than helpful. Neema’s voice – her friend, calling for her to leave the tower and step back into the autopsy room – I’m here! I’m here…not there…and Neema holds her, not repulsed by her corpse protector, only concerned for her. Eril-lyn takes her hand. Dead things bother him more.
Elves.
The man speaks on, obvious. “Among his many abilities this Father strife seems to be a very capable social worker. He has founded this…"Sons of Strife" as his own "order" of chaos and destruction, a way to defy not only the society but the gods themselves. Their ranks are formed by the "corrupted views" of the dogma of the gods and he picks people who were in their former life servants of the gods to turn them into aberrations of the said dogma. So…we won't be facing him alone…and I want this to be very clear. In the past we had faced such ranks and each of those opponents has been formidable.”
We.
“Have you killed any.”
“Many of them, but most of the times death is not the final solution to a problem.”
“He can bring them back. Or make more.”
Oh, if he tries it would be most likely a new version of the same corrupted faith. And hearing of what you are saying now, it seems it’s now the cursed betrayer turn. We would be especially careful when dealing with an even more corrupt version of Corathites, if such is possible. The lairs we had fought have been dispersed thru the world…”
WE.
“I think I can find him. He can see me. But I can see him too. And I don't need a fancy ball.”
He smirks, his default smile – it looks natural on him. Here, there, it doesn’t matter. Anger sticks a boney finger into her brain. Not alone. Not alone in this fight.
To be continued.