Jericho

by Crushric

Chapter 27 — Courses

Huh.

It was the first thing I thought. A bit less dramatic than I’d been hoping for. Really, I’d been expecting something dark, hardcore, and terrible to happen to me, but no. Of course, knowing me, that just meant that what was really going to happen would be worse. As it was, I could feel a sensation of falling, but falling very slowly, as if the air around me had the consistency of water, and I had a lead statue of a flamboyant pirate in my gut.

“And do you know what they say about it?” I heard a male voice ask. I wanted to say I’d assume it was a dead pony who’d eaten far too many berries before a jealous cherry killed him, but my mouth didn’t work.

“Just legends,” another stallion said. His voice sounding a bit stronger, like he was in command of whomever was speaking. “You said you just found it somewhere. Where?”

“Well,” a mare spoke up, “we found it in a junkyard, up by the ruins of Caydin. Some old coot had originally found it, but when we got there, it seemed he’d been dead long enough for all his pet cats to eat him.”

Ah, cats. They were such lovely animals. Just like hamsters. Hamsters, I’d like to remind you, are known for eating their babies and raping their children. Much like how lions killed the cubs of lionesses, because that was literally the only way for a lion to get his groove on with a momma lioness. Nature was so fascinating.

“And so you brought this to me?” Second Voice asked dryly.

First Voice replied, “You recall the nightmare after we discovered the mirror pool. You of all people should know that myths and legends are no less a threat just because they’re stories you tell your kids.”

“Agreed,” Lady said. “This mirror is supposed to be the gateway to a horrible other world. Like ours, but from which only monsters come and go.”

Second Voice let out a breath. “I’ve got the threat of living nightmares pouring in from across the border and ending all life on the continent; unruly conquests in the Northlands; an unruly governor in Marzipolis whom I need to make disappear; I am this close to having to enforce martial law just so that folks don’t kill each other for a loaf of bread; I got the King of Teutons breathing down my neck, refusing to help me, and when I offered to marry his daughter, he only got offended, because that’s not a thing in his country, arranged marriages; and you’re trying to bother me with some junked mirror you found?”

He sighed. “Looks, guys and gals, I love you all like family and the realm would be nowhere without you, but really? A mirror to another world? This is starting to sound mad, even from you guys. And unless I can just knock on it, say ‘I wish for a solution to my problems’, and get one from this, we’re gonna have to put this thing on the backburner while we work with more practical options. And… there’s something behind me, isn’t there?”

At that moment, I felt my right arm spasm, as if it were frantically trying to clutch its tendrils deeper into my body. It felt like I had the world’s angriest kitty stapled to my shoulder. With a sudden jolt, something flung me forwards.

I landed on what felt like the bottomside of bathroom rug, all rubbery with little circular patterns. As I groaned, my eye still shut, my body laying on the ground, I could hear Second Voice, now much closer, shout, “Geremiah’s blood!” All around, though, I heard a plethora of voices gasping and muttering prayers.

My body felt all wrong. It felt as if I’d been locked in a freezer for days, taken out, partially thawed, and then beaten half to death by dwarves wearing eyepatches. There was also a part of my spine that felt as if it’d been cut opened and raped by a bull. Judging by the sore agony, it was probably a Tuesday morning.

“What day is today?” I asked.

“I… did he try to speak?” someone said.

“I said, what day is it?”

“It’s, uh, it’s Tuesday,” another answered.

“Thanks,” I groaned. “I bloody well knew it. Tuesdays hate me.” With a grunt, I forced my good eye open. Sure enough, there was that stuff that looked like the underside of a bathroom rug. Grumbling rather loudly about how I was going to murder Stronghold with a rusty coat hanger up his penis so that I could slowly watch him die of tetanus for what he’d done, I put my hooves out in order to push myself up and…

Huh, I thought for the second time.

I pushed upwards, trying to gain leverage upwards. Their feel and manner of articulation were different. It was like… it was like all the bones and muscles had been replaced. The left one felt weird, but the right arm seemed almost relaxed, like it was back to normal. Even where the arms hooked to my shoulders felt different, felt broader, more spaced apart. I was struck the suddenly image of me as a mannequin being manipulated by strings made of cheese, my proportions stretched out and exaggerated to better allow for easier control of limbs.

Raising myself partly on my arms, I looked down at what should have been my hooves, and were now C-like hands, their palms splayed out on the rubber, their spidery digit splayed out like a snake’s jaw as it tries trying to eat a banjo. What had once been fur was now skin, like C’s; only thing was, my skin was a light tannish-beige color, like the reflection of sun-filtered dust off distant gold.

Something on sides of my head—Ears! a voice inside me said. They’re your ears!—suddenly experienced a sensation like rat tails dragging over them, sending chill bumps down my spine, a spine which very much wasn’t like the spine I’d grown so used it. In fact, nothing of my body like like it was were it was supposed to be, Absolutely noth—wait, no, my penis. That certainly felt to be in about the right place. Yay. Glad to see there were some universal constants.

Then I noticed the thin locks of hair around the edges of my vision. It took me a moment to notice that it wasn’t just hair, it was my hair, and a further moment for it to click that I didn’t remember having hair so long that it must have stretched just past the base of my head. There was also the further thought that the hair I could see looked slightly wavy, which was a good reason why I kept my mane short. There was no telling what I’d look like with long hair. And long wavy hair was for little bitches, no offense to any badass little bitches out there.

So I tried to stand, and when I did, my right leg bent upwards, curling up to my breast, the hoof… the foot at its end setting its ball down on the ground. I had never made a motion quite like that before, but already it was as if my new body was working for me, like the motions I’d been used to had unionized, but this new body was willing to work for half their wages and didn’t have unions to trouble me with.

With all the thoughtless thought of standing up in my old flesh, my new body stood up and rose my head up to a dizzying height. Looking down at this ludicrously long body and the two legs upon which it stood, I said, “Well, it appears as if I’ve become C.” It was a strange feeling, sensing all of the tiny, minuscule little motions that the body performed every second, little muscle movements, to keep itself standing still. They were probably the same things that went on in my normal body, but that my mind had simply learned to tune out over the decades.

This other side of the doorway suddenly reminded me of a module for the game Dunkelheit und Drachen. It was like one of those modules where you’re only allowed to play as a certain race, and if you’re not of that race, you have to roll a new character as that race. I had the sudden thought that I’d been forced to reroll a character, but had cheated and just changed the race on my character sheet from “unicorn” to “skinwalker”. And, for some reason, I was sure I’d changed my sex from “male” to “Yes, please!”

“E-excuse me?” Lady asked, and my neck pivoted to let me see the mare. Or not a mare. Her face had all the features I could recognize, emotions I could. But her body, the vaguely hourglass space of her above the legs, was like that of a feminine C. She was she much shorter than I, looking up at me with bespectacled eyes.

Speaking of eyes, my eye was drawn to her chest. There were these bulbous, certainly cancerous lumps on her chest that I couldn’t stop staring at. I just wanted to jack a knife to them and pop them like balloons.

I watched myself raise an arm, and extend a hand out to her. Four digits on the appendage curled up into a ball, a fist, as if saying “Well, screw this shit!” while one long finger remained outstretched. It did this purely on instinct, the thought that I wanted to poke her.

“Um… hello to you, too,” she stammered, the whitish-peach skin of her face going red as I poked the cancerous lumps. Moving my hands and fingers around it, I checked for lumps. Since I had doubts that something this cancerous had any feeling left, I was sure she didn’t mind. In fact, she didn’t say anything; she just stood there with this stunned, horrified look on her face, and silence equaled consent. I even squeezed when I didn’t find any apparent hard cancers. They were much softer than I’d’ve expected, since tumors were often rather thick.

“How long do you have to live?” I asked.

“Wh-whaat?” she stammered.

I poked them again. “Those cancerous lumps. Surely, you must be too sick to even stand. I commend you on your willpower, ma’am. Were I so infected with cancer, I would surely be bedridden and crippled. You have my respects, warrior.”

She pushed her glasses, a baffled look on her countenance. “Well, I, uh…”

I suddenly became aware of the distant, soft humming of machinery. In that moment, I realized just how sterile, bright, and white this room was, and just how many faces likes those of C’s race were staring at me, male and female. Most all of them were clean, pristine, and wearing white coats with black shirts underneath, except for one such skinwalker in a black suit. Their skin was all a similar whitish-pink to that of the first lady.

Then what I was wearing occurred to me. There was the old, trusty but old, hat on my head that had absorbed so much sun that its color was dying, and been washed of so much dark blood that you almost couldn’t tell it had been whitening. My body was clad in a worn, but not entirely dirty, leather duster, with thong-straps and pockets abound, a knife or two hidden away under it, and with several stitches all over from where it’d been gashed opened and I’d had to manually repair it. Further down, and I saw faded blue jeans so worn and sunbleached from use that they were starting to turn white. And brown leather boots with steel toes, oddly, which I hadn’t been wearing before. In short, I was all worn, hardy, traveling, fighting gear, and they were all clean, well-kept, civilized-looking folk.

So, either this was about to turn into a high school drama where I teach these clean kids to dance good with my phunky-phresh urban style, or it was the setup of a really bad porn novel.

I blinked and said, “Lab coats. You’re wearing lab coats.” To me, my voice sounded astonished, and I could easily fancy that they heard it, too. “Then you, warrior,” I said, looking at the cancer-fight lady. “You must be a priestess here, for this must be a temple of technology. And technology here must be good, for science never really took off before people invented the stylish lab coat.”

“May I?” Second Voice said, putting a hand on the priestess’ shoulder. She stepped back, and the skinwalker took a place before me. Of us, I was the taller one. I looked into his amber eyes, looked over his short black hair, and had the queerest sense of déjà vu. “Son, do you know where you are?”

“Yes,” I said, sounding a bit like a tribal trying to explain his vast knowledge of socioeconomics to a civilized idiot. “I am through the portal, within a temple of technology, in a place populated by unfamiliar creatures the likes of which my flesh would appear to be emulating. Although your skin is a more pallid complexion than mine own, so mayhap I was slightly charred when I arrived through the doorway.”

Hey, is it just me, or do you sound different? Like, your word choice is all odd. Is it possible that a part of your brain got scrambled when you got this new body?

“You have a name?” he asked, and I shrugged. Ooh, shrugging was weird with this skeletal structure. “Well, my name is King Charles Elkington.”

My first thought was a dull recognition that his first name was French, said almost like shahl. The second thought came out more of an explosion, and it came out aloud. “Elkington!”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“No, no, no, you do not understand!” I tried to take a breath and slow down, but the thoughts were coming out too fast. “Stronghold remarked that beyond the doorway was like Fiddler’s Green, a purgatorium, a place where there are like those from my side of the doorway.” He took a step back as I clasped my hands to his shoulder, the new sensation of grabbing someone with fingers nearly destroying my chain of thought. “Elkington, you are here.”

“I-I am,” he said back. There was a look in his eye like a rabbit being tied up by the farmer who liked to rape fluffy things.

“And you have not yet met a terrible fate on my side of the doorway!” I laughed. “On my side, you are still alive and well, and the only one in any possible position to kill you would be myself, whom you hate with perfect hatred now that your first enemy is dead, even though now we are on shaky but vaguely allied terms!”

The skinwalking Elkington’s face didn’t change. He continued taking calm breaths.

“And when Stronghold went through… Heaven’s blood, he means to go to Sleepy Oaks to retrieve the mare long dead through my side of the gate… long dead in my world.”

“Mare?”

I nodded. “Yes. A female of the species, as is called in Equestrian. I know not what the male and female of your species are named.”

“Man, men for male. Woman, women for female,” he offered hesitantly. “That’s what they hight.”

“Hight?” I asked.

“Are called,” he offered after a moment’s thought.

“Yes, as in heißen,” I muttered, and the man blinked hard at that. “Like, ‘I hight Elkington’. Is this correct?”

“Yes, but that language. Did you just speak Teutonic?”

I tried to take a step to the side, to get around him, but I thought about it too much. This resulted in me falling to the ground. “I do not know how to walk,” I announced. “I thought about it too much. I would apologize, but I am not sure about anything anymore. Please, Duke Elkington of Songnam, you must help me find a certain mare—woman, a certain woman before Stronghold finds her; it is the only way I can get back the dark text which brought me here, the only way to return, and the only way to make sure that Stronghold brings no harm to your realm!”

From where I lay, I looked over and saw the mirror that I’d entered through, the one that had been behind the wooden door back on my side. It looked dead. Really, due to how much the universe hated me, the only way to get the door to opened back up was to get Calêrhos back from Stronghold.

“Hear me, please, I beg,” I called out to Elkington-man as I tried to figure out how to get off my back and back onto those two legs of mine. “Elkington, you must lend me your hand, you must help me track down this woman before this Stronghold gets her, or all is lost! I want what he stole from me, and I want my left eye back, and I can’t let him win. In my world, the mare Blackout was located in the small town of Sleepy Oaks, and I don’t know if—”

“Sleepy Oaks?” he asked, a horrified look on his face, like he’d just seen pictures of his mother vigorously mastrubating. Vigorously. Elkington looked around to the techpriests. “By the Founding Fathers, this is a lot to handle in what was supposed to be a short checkup.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Well, I was scheduled to receive healing for my wounded flesh today; that was when a lunatic obsessed with legends of your realm stole the book I’d fairly pilfered from the Royal Archives, and used it to penetrate into this world, forcing me to follow in order to retrieve him before he incited far too much harm.” I blinked. “Wait. That look of horror on your countenance. The fact that you don’t know me by name. And, does the name ‘Devil’s Backbone’ strum any familiar chords?”

The look on Elkington’s face said it all.

“The Backbone lives yet, doesn’t he?”

Elkington hesitated, looked around, then nodded. “Codename DB, the Devil’s Backbone; he is alive, representing a clear and present danger to my kingdom.”

I threw my head back and laughed, banging my head against the ground. It couldn’t be helped; it was just so funny.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, as if reading my mind, which I hoped he wasn’t. I had to kill all mind readers on general principle of mind-rape.

“Oh, Ellie,” I said, trying to hold back the laughs. “Where I’m from, after you declared your undying hatred of me, you hired me to go out and kill the DB. And kill him I did.” I pointed to my eye. “Where do you think I lost my eye?” I snickered. “Hey, I don’t suppose you’re still brutally obsessed with some Celestia lady, are you?”

Elkington blinked. “Celestia? My secretary of education?”

“Yeah, her,” I went on. “Where I’m from, Princess Celestia is the immortal goddess of the sun, or so everyone believes, and you’re an almost fanatic follower of her because you’re head-over-heels for the broad.” I tried to get a grip on my body’s laugher. God, even the shape and size of the lungs felt different. Bigger and longer, even. Like I simply had far more air per breath wherewith to laugh.

“And…” Elkington hesitated, looking around to his techpriests. “And just where are you from? The land you are from, that is.”

I smiled. “Elkington, I come from somewhere far beyond.”

Elkington stared at me. “Are you dancing?” he asked.

“No,” I replied. Although in truth, it could have been called that. As I twisted, jostled and moved my legs beneath me, trying to get a feel of what they could and could not do, I might have looked like dancing.

Duke-come-King Elkington was sitting behind a large wooden desk decorated with all manner of things. He had vague bags under his eyes, little splotches of blackness like some angry women had tried to gouge his eyes out with mascara, but he never once seemed to slightly nod off or so much as yawn. Here in this big office, I suppose that was something.

All I knew about this place was that Elkington had led me to a lift, like the one that had taken me to DB’s lair way back when, and it had gone up until it felt as if my stomach was trying to buy new property down by my gonads. Elkington had an office on the the fourth floor, and behind his desk, I could see a city at night, lamplight keeping dark streets bright as an utterly alien moon watched over.

I made it back to Ellie’s desk and collapsed into the chair opposite his side of the desk. “Why does the moon look so different?”

He glanced over his shoulder. “Different?”

“Yes, there’s no mare in it. There’s a mare in the moon where I am from. Which is to say, the various maria on the moon greatly resemble the head of a mare, the female of my species.” I shrugged. “Of course, other cultures see it as other things, like as a rabbit.” I pointed, really digging the pointing features of hands. “That moon looks sort of like a red grinning face. And I don’t trust that murderous look in its eye.”

“It is the Nightmare Moon,” Elkington said simply.

Uncreative? Sure. And pigs would dance on two legs under the unswotel Nightmare Moon of Winterfulth came the voice of Proud in my head, as that Carolean had said to me back in Caval.

Elkington went on. “For nar a week in Winterfulth, the Nightmare Moon rises. You shouldn’t stare at it; staring thereat long enough, ’tis said, will drive a man mad.” Winterfulth, I thought. Yes, that was that weird name for October, right? “It’s the lingering curse of Black Erelith, ever since the old witch was burned at the stake nar a thousand years ago.”

“Hmm,” I hummed, nodding. “So, it seems to me that while people here are sort of the same, Elkington is Elkington, for example, the actual world itself, its events, its history, its wording, mayhap even geography, are all wrong.” I leaned back in my chair. Promptly, because I didn’t know what I was doing, the chair fell down. I opted to remain sitting in the fallen chair as I asked, “So, Elkington, how’d you become a king? You’re a duke where I’m from.”

Hey, your word-choice is getting back to normal. I just noticed that. That’s good.

“Conquest,” Elkington remarked evenly as I jostled out of the chair. “When I was a boy, Evesland was hardly more than a ragged collection of freeholds and petty feudal realms, from the Northlands down to Free Marches. I took the throne of Songnam when I was only fifteen. It began when I created the Caroleans to safeguard my nation; the bloodshed began when I discovered that my neighbor, the Lord Paramount of Rhone, was going to marry his princess daughter off to a noble cousin of mine that I’d kicked out of Songnam for being greedy and selfish, which would have given the Lord Paramount of Rhone a reason to attack me, to burn Songnam.”

He pulled out a bottle of wine and a glass from under his desk and poured himself a glass. “Leading the Caroleans myself, I attacked first. One thing led to another, foreign nobles conspired against me, angry neighbors, poverty, and so…” He shrugged. “Now all of the great noble houses of Evesland are gone, and I wear the iron crown of Geremiah, as bestowed upon me by the Congress. People have never been freer and richer than they are today, especially considering that I was the only lord in Evesland to adopt a constitution, the only one to implement social welfare systems, the only one to abolish noble privileges. Really, though, I simply got the idea from looking across the sea, to the Rike.”

Setting the chair back up and now with a thorough knowledge of what this bastardy body was capable of doing to chairs, I sat down. “That sounds like Reich, but with a hard K for an ending instead of the catlike hiss I’m used to. In my where, I come from a place known as the Reich.”

“I figured something as much,” he commented. “From the color of your skin, I can tell you’re a Teuton. They have that tannish-gold look that drives all the girls wild here. And… What’s wrong? What’s with that look on your face?”

It was just a simple, quick thought, really. People in this where are like skinwalker copies of those in my where. Then: But it appears that this where is without my influence, amongst other things; this would explain how Blackout might still be alive, and belike even Glasses, Cards’ friend whom I killed. That lead to the logical conclusion. Which means that somewhere out there, likely in this very city, Cherry Berry is still alive!

Glancing over my shoulder to the door out of this massive office, I was sure that Cherry was about to come in, because somehow her new job was Elkington’s secretary or something. Nobody came in.

“Um, stranger?” Elkington prodded.

“Yes, so,” I said quickly, and took a deep, nasal breath. “Just give me some corn products, because those demonic explosive runes that DB used stop working when exposed to corn products, and I’ll go kill him for you, same as last time. And I’ll do it as I wait for Stronghold to get to the little hamlet of Sleepy Oaks. Because I’m just nice, nice like getting your head bashed in by a bag of carrots. Which I once did to a stallion, since he was a clown, and you can’t trust a sad clown. No sweat. The Backbone was just a lone creep out in the swamp, anyways.”

“I get the feeling that the Devil’s Backbone of your side of the looking glass isn’t that of mine.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked, running my cold fingers across my snazzy new countenance. The sensations and sensitivity of these new digits were intense; just touching things was like its own drug.

“The Devil’s Backbone was the Warchief of the Seven Tribes of Light.” He sipped at his wine. “Three years ago, the Caroleans and I defeated his invading horde at the Battle of Bryan’s Breach. He vanished after that. And for years, things have been getting worse in the realm. Strings of natural disasters, an ancient evil prophecy or two going off, a number of local crop failures, some civil unrest because many folks are still a bit irked at having been conquered.” He shrugged. “Manpower is stretched pretty thin trying to keep order and distribute aide across the realm. Then, when out of the dark morass of the western mires comes back the Devil’s Backbone with a small army of demons and other creatures of the dark.”

Elkington sighed. “The Teutonic King, when I mentioned this all to him, was ready to mobilize troop and resources to help us, then I pissed him off.” He hand a circular gesture with a hand as he leaned back. “In many coastal cities, a downright majority of people have converted to the Rike’s religion; and due to my freedom of worship policy, those priests have moved inland, too. Songnam only has a small following, though I myself am not one. So, when a young girl in one of these cities gets accused of witchcraft, and they’re ready to burn her alive, I logically step in to prevent the death of an innocent girl for some silly reason. Now, the Confessionists are angry at me, and the Rike’s King sides with them, and wants to extradite the witch to burn her, which I won’t allow, because I have morals.”

I tried not to roll my eyes. Of course the Confessionists were right. And, you know, it wasn’t as if my job back in the Reich had involved tracking down witches and other supernatural things, since that would be silly—oh, wait. That totally had been my job. Reasons like this were why King Elkington was a total pansy. Much like sentient hats.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t pretend to understand the geopolitical structure of a world I know nothing about, but I know I heard you wishing for a solution to your problems.” I patted myself on the chest. “As it happens, I’m a professional problem solver. A killer of evil creatures the world over. And while the Devil’s Backbone of my world was more-or-less just a corrupting figure out in a swamp spreading enervation out and doing evil with you as you planned to find a way to doublecross, betray, and then defeat him, I’m pretty sure I can kill him all the same. Because, as someone once told me: When going up against a bigger, stronger opponent, kick them in the nuts. If they have no nuts, well then you can totally just stab them a lot. Stabbing. Solves. Everything. Just like fire. So, stabbing someone while on fire probably cures cancer. I don’t know.”

Elkington made a sound like lettuce. He looked about as confused as a cow who’s just discovered her favorite food is horseradish.

I slammed a hand on his desk. More new feelings. “Elkington, I’m on the case like being hit with a mace. Just point me in the direction of Sleepy Oaks and its hundred or so people, and I’ll save the day, get what I want, get back to my where, and we can all live happily ever after. Except for all the people I kill. But they weren’t really people anyways, which is why they’re dead, and I’m not.”

“On the one hand,” Elkington went on, “you’re a weird stranger from another world with a weird knowledge of this world that isn’t entirely accurate, you stated yourself that you don’t know your body, I have no evidence that I can trust you or that you’re not actually an elder thing come to reap the souls of the living, and there’s an endless list of why I shouldn’t let you go do that, most of them on the grounds that doing so would make no practical sense. And on the other…”

I smiled. “And on the other hand, this is the part where you tell me that, despite all of that, you trust me, and will help me out in any way, right? I’ve seen this sort of thing before in comic books. You’ll doubt me, but then you’ll help me. I’ll save the day, come back, and you’ll say something like, ‘I doubted you, stranger, but I was wrong. Thank God I was wrong!’ I’ll be a big hero, and I’ll return back to my where. Go on! I always love this part of the story.”

“I’m afraid that is not correct,” he said in a calm voice. “This is the part of the story where the good king temporarily detains the mad stranger with the Mark of Kane until the good king can make sure the one with the dark mark isn’t a demon in disguise.”

“Mark of Kane?” I asked, standing up. My hands twitched, grasping at the air. They wanted to hold a weapon, but I wasn’t even sure how to hold my sword with hands.

“The thing on your lower back that’s almost a tramp stamp,” he said with a flick of the wrist. “Don’t think that I don’t recognize it. And after talking with you, I’ve come to give credence to that old myth.” The doors far behind me opened, and I heard the thunder of bootfalls. “Please, I don’t mean to offend you, but I’ve come to be very cautious. If I am mistaken, and I hope I am, no harm will come to you, and I’ll send you on your way. I am the good guy, after all. But if it turns out you are the Marked One.” He gestured to the chair. “Please, take a seat.”

I remained standing. “In other words, welcome to prison. Population: You.”

“Sir,” a gruff voice said from behind me. It was the kind of tone that Selena would have added an I prithee to. “I’m gonna have to ask you to please sit down.”

“How long will this all take?” I asked evenly.

“Mayhap a week,” Elkington said. “Nar some blood tests, DNA tests, chromosome tests, skins tests of the mark. Need to also get the court wizard to look you over.”

My eye twitched, and my hands kept shaking, wanted to grasp something that could kill. I didn’t think I would have a week to waste. “Do I have the right to a strip search? And a guarantee that you don’t stick your spindly man-fingers up my ass? Because I know about cavity searches in my world, and that last thing I want is fingers anywhere near, on, or in my genitals.” Wait. Is Kane the Equestrian pronunciation of the name Kain? And Kainsmal is one of our words for cutie mark, so… “And for that matter, just how in God’s name did you see my Kainsmal?”

“Sir,” the gruff voice came again, the tone itself a threat.

“Elkington, we might not see eye-to-eye in either of our wheres,” I pleaded, “but you’re making a huge mistake!”

“Sir.” More violent. Like the emotional disposition of a salmon who caught salmonella from a Neighponese sushi bar.

“Elkington!” I said, my right art suddenly throbbing with heat. The man just sat there, an almost smug look on his face, like that of a stallion… of a man who’s just successful destroyed rap music. God, where was Octavia and her cello when you needed her to play an evil theme?

“Sir!”

I spun around, fire in my eyes. “Would you just shut up and let me alone!” I barked. In that very instant as the men—all six wearing spiffy longcoats and hats of blue, all with strange sticks pointed at me that I instantly took for some sort of crossbow—flinched back, my right arm twisted, its hand digging into my bag.

The fingers, both seeming of my will and their own reckoning, curled around something large and heavy, something which my palm could feel and told me was some sort of worn wooden grip made perfectly for a hand.

My right hand came out of the bag, fingers perfectly placed and wrapped around, almost lovingly, the massive thing that was the rightmost of the two heavenly weapons. The sensory data from the hand was beautiful enough almost to not make me want to almost not uncertainly cry. Words came into my head for the parts of the weapon for which I had no exact name, all provided to me by the hand.

“He’s got a gun!” I heard one of the men shout, but it was distant, muffled, as if in a dream.

Each man seemed almost frozen in time as I stuck the barrel of the weapon up to the nearest man’s forehead. My thumb reached up, pulled back on the little lever, the hammer, and cocked the weapon with a pleasant click that just screamed “Kiss your ass goodbye.” The pointer finger, index finger, curled back on the weapon’s trigger.

The sound wasn’t like a crack. Wasn’t like a pop or a bang or a snap or a crunch. It was like the in-your-ear sound of an artillery cannon—the big stationary ones of the Reich’s great ironclads. Everyone in the building must have heard it clear as day.

There had once been a head there, I thought dully about the man now crumpled to the ground. And then, as the hand cocked back the hammer and aimed at another man: Hey, does this mean I can punch people with my right arm now? Click. Fire. The round impacted the second man in the chest. Instantly, his chest caved in, like the side of a barrel hit by a sledgehammer.

I cocked, shot, and killed four more times.

Then it was over. There was a blistering stinging sensation in my wrist, but I ignored it as I stared out at the carnage, more than I could have rightly caused with a sword. The metal slugs from inside the… from inside of the gun didn’t stab into you like arrows did. They destroyed men; in neatly one side, and it tore everything side of them out the other in an explosion of gore. It was, without a doubt, the single most inhumane, savage, and deadly weapon that I had ever seen.

And I loved it for that reason, if the smile on my face didn’t already give that away.

“That was awesome,” I croaked out, my knees feeling weak, my wrist burning. Finally, I looked down at the wrist. The gun was lying on the floor, its barrel smoking. Looking at the inflammation, sensing the pain, I realized that I’d broken my wrist. The recoil of the gun had just pulverized my wrist.

I swing not with the hoof. He who swings with the hoof has forgotten the face of his father. I swing with my mind, the oddly calm voice of my father said in the back of my head. Adjusted for hands, and adjusted for shooting a gun instead of swinging, that part of the old warrior’s creed actually explained a lot. My wrist had broken because I had allowed my hand to aim and shoot. I had forgotten the face of my father.

So I picked up the gun with my good hand, set it in the bad, and turned to Elkington. His face was as expressionless as dead sea lion covered in cream cheese. “King Elkington,” I said. “I’m not going to lie, but that was totally awesome, killing those men, and it gives me some whacky flashbacks to the Songnam Slaughter of my world.” I put my hands on my hips and smiled. Quickly, I flinched my right hand away and shook it, making little hissing noises as I felt C’s arm do its creepy healing thing. “So, here’s how it’s going to work, my friend. You will tell me where Sleepy Oaks is. You don’t have to help me get there, just tell me where it is and how to get there. A map would be dandy. Then I’ll go there—and you won’t impede me at all. I’ll save the day, and you’re going to feel guilty about all six of those men you led to the slaughter because of some crackpot theory you had about me. Are we clear?”

He looked up at me from his desk with an unreadable expression. After a long moment, he gritted his teeth and grunted, “Crystal.”

I smiled at him, baring as many of my teeth as I could. They were weird teeth, ones I wasn’t entirely used to, but so long as I didn’t think about every little movement of my tongue and mouth, I could speak just fine. New mouth and new teeth to fit in it, you see. “Elkington, I do declare that you’ve just made what may be the preeminent decision of your life.”

I sing of hearth, I sing of light, I sing of sweetly frosted things, but anight dream I of darks wings. And song of fire, song of blood, brings he to me a champion strong.

That little singsong of Snechta’s, the one from her Voixson, ran through my head as I walked through the dark tunnel, a torch in hand. Elkington had given me a map, shown me where things were, cursed my name, then led me to the tunnels under this city here of Songnam. I recalled that, in my where, these tunnels had been built by the diamond dogs that Elkington employed, and I wondered if that meant diamond dogs lived in this world, too. Of course, I also wondered if it was possible to weaponize angry ex girlfriends, but that didn’t get me anywhere.

No, what did get me somewhere was just following the path Elkington had noted for me on a little map of the underground he’d given me. I didn’t ask why he wanted me to go this route, but since us adventurers are compulsively drawn to absurdly spacious sewers, I couldn’t ask him. Now, as I opened the large grate and stepped out into the night, I think I had an understanding why.

Here from the ditches by the sides of great weald, I could see, a little ways away, Songnam. Unlike in my where, this Songnam was protected by massive wall of stone, with guards patrolling and marching along. But more importantly, on the rocky alcove above the huge sewer grate which was still a bit small for my tall body, I could see words written in a faintly glowing paint.

“WE KNOW, MARKED OF KANE. VOUS VOIS.”

I looked around, seeing if I could see anyone watching me. If Elkington had meant to try to creep me out into being on my best behavior, he could go screw himself with a cheese grater. A more pressing matter regarded the so-called Mark of Kane on my back, what it was, and how it might screw me over somehow. More immediately, where was I?

Around me in this place that was part ditch, part dumping grounds, I could see all manner of rusted steel things which I had no words for. There was a large wooden box with insect-like antennae in one place, its front side composed mostly of thick glass which had long ago shattered. As I observed the little nest within it, I wondered if this was some kind of wildly silly oven designed for the hands of men.

Holding the torch, bathing in its heat and flickering orange glow, I trudged through the ditch, just observing all the trash. Like an old, faded newspaper with the frontlines “Olympia Fallen”, the graying, barely identifiable cover photo depicting a split image. The image on the left was of a great, Hellenish-looking sort of building that was probably some sort of government center. Weirdly, with the age of it, it looked as if the building was resting on a floating island above the clouds. The picture of the right appeared to be off the same building, only it was smashed, ruined, and in pieces on the ground; around it was an entire city, smoking and burning, smashed and broken like the first building was. None of the words on the page were even remotely legible.

So I slogged through, wondering if it was possible to kill the woman Cherry Berry in some sort of really extravagant way that I couldn’t do in my where. Maybe I could cut off parts of her, cauterize the wounds, and make her watch as I took those parts of her body and whittled them down into likenesses of my face. Not that I could whittle, of course. But, for her, I would learn.

Ah, and there it was. A slope shallow enough for me to climb out off and get out of this trash. But before I got to the slope, I paused. On the far end of the the ditch—which was starting to look more like some great trench—there was a cave. Or, well, it looked like a cave of junk and stone mixed with a little outdoor cantina, with a little makeshift awning above the entrance.

“Come on, ya piece a shit,” the man inside was saying to a small box with antennae. It wasn’t like that big oven thing; too small, not enough glass. “Why won’tcha work for Daddy?” he asked it as I walked through the tiny creek at the trench’s center over to the little cave. The man, his eyes yellow, his hair an off-blue hue, turned to face me. He was wearing a leather-and-felt coat that had seen more wear but less love than my duster. “Eh? Oh, why hello there, brotha! Who are you? I hight Filmrock, but what hight you?

I stopped. “I’m just a traveler. What’s that thing you’ve got there?”

“Hmm? This old thing, brotha?” He shook the little box in his hands, hands which were wearing gloves that were missing bits and scraps. “It’s nar a regular ol’ livebox, is all.”

Finding a good place for it, I set the torch off to the side where it wouldn’t burn anything down, then walked under the awning of the cave. “Is the livebox broken?”

“Aye, the damn thing’s a bust, brotha. ’Twas workin’ fine until a few minutes ago when it just brast. It’s bursten before, but I’ve usually fixed it with some shaking.”

I held out my hands. “May I see it?”

He shrugged, setting the livebox upon the little counter that acted partially as a wall between the cave proper and the outdoor part under the awning. Why a little cave in a trench would have a barcounter, I didn’t know. “Sure,” he said. “Knock yourself out. We’re within spokespan of the broadcaster, so I dunno why it ain’t working.”

“Like a dwarf trying to play king of the icy hill,” I said, looking the livebox over.

“Aye, somfing as that, brotha,” he chuckled.

I poked at the box’s antenna, straightening bits of them. The part I deemed to be the front had a number of buttons and a large central dial, sort of like a combination lock. I played with the dial before going over to the back, opening a little back panel. Inside were number of little thick, rubbery colored strings that reminded me of blast fuses, which reminded me of my sixth-year birthday party, and the resulting country ordinance forbidding me to ever celebrate my birthday ever again.

“So, what’s a gunslinger like you doing here?” the stranger asked.

I looked up. “I am a gunslinger?”

He gestured his finger at me. “Well, you’re wearing those low, crisscrossing bandoliers filled to the brim with bullets on your hips and crisscrossed ones over your chest.” The man slapped his thigh. “And the low, low way you’re carrying those revolvers. You look like a desperado, brotha. Shit, I bet your guns actually work, too!”

Inside the livebox were three little glass tubes filled with a weird assortments of colored string and metal. As I looked into the box, I noticed that all but one the colored strings were anchored at both ends. There was a little place, a little tab, that looked like it’d accept the free end of the string.

“Really, brotha, the only thing you’re missing now’s a horse.”

I connected the string to tab, and instantly the livebox roared with sound. Gasping, I tossed the box onto the counter and flinched away.

“Bloody brilliant, brotha!” Filmrock cheered, clapping his hands. “You’re a fuckin’ miracle, thank the Fathers.”

The livebox, I realized, wasn’t just exploding with sounds. It was playing music. The only thing is, when I’d looked inside the livebox, there’d been no place for a record, not even the compact ones we used in the Reich. But the song and music played. Or, at least, the song and music was fading out.

“Hey,” the male voice from the livebox announced, “that was Songs of Bygone Days, and you’re listening to Livebox Free Evesland. I’m your host, the lovable Big Bag-a-Wolf, and now for the news.”

I looked up at Filmrock. “The hell kind of sorcery is this livebox?”

But Filmrock ignored me, fixated upon his livebox.

“Reports are coming in today from Songnam that some weird shit’s been going down. Apparently, King Elkington’s got a problem on his hands that he ain’t up for telling us about. A few hours ago, it seems, the entire White Halls building up on Capital Causeway had some sort of shooting. People heard the six or seven shots, and then some bodies in tarps got taken from the top floor. This, of course, is following the reports that Elkington was seen with a weird-looking Teuton, which was further following up our earlier report on those shady things Elkington was importing into Songnam this morning from the ruins of Caydin.

“Look, King Elkington,” Big Bag-a-wolf said in a lower, more passionate voice, like a man trying to reason with a bag of feral carrots, “I know you’re trying to do what you think is best, but this sudden rash of shady shit that’s been going on lately has gotta stop. It’s scaring people.”

His tone shifted back to the charismatic explosion of earlier. “Well, that’s my impassioned plea for the day. From the LFE to Y-O-U, this has been your host, Big Bag-a-Wolf, with Livebox Free Evesland. And now, some tunes!”

The lifebox seamlessly switched from him to one of those old-timey-sounding songs. Slow, low audio quality, and a bit dull. I recalled that last time I heard one of these was when I was walking the streets of Songnam with Lightning Dust, just before I’d met that conjoined twin zebra who was working with black magic. What’s more, I distinctly remembered that Lightning Dust had called this kind of stuff “pop music”, and stated her love of it.

I looked up from my thoughts to Filmrock and demanded, “What kind of black sorcery is this livebox?”

“Sorcery?” He laughed. “You’re a funny bloke, brotha.”

“I mean it.” With a finger, I poked the livebox. “There is no record within this contraption, yet it conjures up song and voice from far beyond. I know not how it functions; and with no visible means of discerning, I must conclude your infernal contraption is the work of the Devil’s machinations.”

The man looked at me. “Brotha, what’s with the arcane words? Ya tryin’ to sound fancy, or what?”

“I must destroy things I don’t understand!” I shouted. “It is my way!”

“Shit,” he laughed. “You really are a thing straight outta the old Wild West, huh, brotha?”

I glared at the livebox, making sure that it didn’t move. If it moved, I’d shoot it dead. You couldn’t trust the work of the Devil. But the livebox just sat there. Menacingly. Clearly because it knew its time was short, the livebox let out a sharp, crackling whine that would not have gone well at all with cheese. I held my hands near the guns at my hips, glaring at the livebox.

“Huh,” a distant-sounding but clearly masculine voice said through the livebox. “Thanks for fixing this thing, muppet,” it said. “I’ve been trying to say hi to you, mate, but the arm o’ mine doesn’t exactly possess a mouth; this has to do for now.”

“I know of your evil, livebox!” I spat. “Attempt not to corrupt me with your evil.”

“Evil? Well, that’s a funny way to speak to your old friend C.”

I blinked. “C?”

“Sí,” it… he chirped. “I hight C. I’ve been looking for a little conduit to step in and see what’s to see, and thanks to you, now I got me one. So, just stand there, please. In this place, I can bounce from signal to receptory well enough, so that’s how I directly going from my side to here.” The livebox crackled with weird sounds that made me suddenly want to learn how to play volleyball. Then a white little light flashed before the livebox, like frozen lightning, only worse.

Before my very eye, I watched flesh take form before the livebox. Arms and head came first, then the midsection, and then the legs. He fell down onto the ground beneath the awning. He looked up at me, and ours eyes met.

Then C looked down at himself with what I could only think of as horror on his long face. He raised an arm, let it fall. He did it again with the other arm, letting it fall to the dirt. C looked right straight at me and said four words in an almost amused voice that was more nasal than his normal one, fours words that seemed to very neatly explain his current predicament to me.

“I am a horse.”

“I am a horse,” C said again. “Brilliant!”

I blinked. Just looking at him, a part of me felt sick. Sick like a lizard who’s just eaten a parliament of owls. Did you know that owls came in parliaments? That was some hot stuff right there. “The hell’s a horse?”

C whinnied, moving his long, long neck around. It was bulbous and muscular. Looking at him even more, I realized what he looked like: C looked now like some horrible artist’s cartoon version of a pony, hellish, ill-proportioned, far too huge, arms and legs far too long, the hooves at the end angled weirdly so that they didn’t end at the end of limbs quite like a pony’s was supposed to. He arched his brows at me as I looked over his brownish-blond-gold fur, his long hair that ran down his neck, like he was some kind of mustang. He was like a pony, but all wrong!

When C stood up and got off his haunches, the massive thing that was once a skinwalker was about a foot shorter than me at the withers, which still made him bigger than any pony should rationally be, even those affected with gigantism. Elkington had measured and weighed my new body: I’d clocked in at a dizzying two-hundred-eight centimeters, or about six feet ten inches; and this body, lean as it seemed… well… I didn’t want to think about my new weight, because it made me feel like a fatty-fat-fat-fat compared to the weight I’d been as a pony. It was a credit to the skinwalker’s skeletal system that it could hold so much weight without looking or feeling bulky at all. But the point was, C’s withers stood at about six feet, with was still massive.

“I am a horse,” C said for the third time, still in that vaguely nasal voice.

“Huh,” Filmrock said. I’d forgotten he’d been standing there. “Well, ain’t that precious? A talking horse that came out of the livebox.” The man collapsed to the ground.

Reaching down, I checked his vitals. Or what I figured were his vitals, going off my knowledge of ponies. “Aaand he’s dead,” I announced. “Fantastic.”

C performed a weird half-dance, half-trot in place. “Horse!”

“Hey, now that he’s dead,” I said, “do you know what this means?”

“What?”

“We get to loot his body and place and steal all his worldly possessions.”

“Yes, a horse that steals!” He stuck out a foreleg—because it was more like a leg than a pony’s arm—and just weirdly smacked it into the ground. The man… horse… whatever… did it at least four more times before I asked what he was doing. “Horse things. I am representing, mate. But, I can’t make any clop sounds on this rock. Do you think the dead bloke has a coconut lying around?”

I looked at C. “Why doesn’t the arm you gave me let me punch ponies? And how did you get here? And why am I nowhere near as freaked out as I should be?

“In order: I don’t know. Because I can interface with technology from my side of the door; I’m not really here, just my avatar, which is a horse, it seems. And I don’t know.”

“Avatar? What’s that?”

“It’s a metaphysical representation of oneself in a place other than where one can go,” he explained in a horse-like manner. “My arm got some weird vibes, so I checked it out, and it seemed like you’d somehow found and entered Calêrhos. I merely hooked into the door, found a device capable of transmitting myself, and came out through the livebox. Very simple magic to an elder thing such as myself; I grew up with such bits all around me.”

I looted the little place as C continued to dance in place and whinny. There were various bits of paper money that were labeled as “bucks” that I pocketed, totaling to about twelve bucks. Nothing else of value was here.

“So,” C said to me as I finished. “What were you doing?”

“I was going to stop a stallion from taking his wife out of this world and into my world, getting back the book Calêrhos from him, which mean that right now, I am going to walk to the town of Sleepy Oaks.”

The horse looked at me his terrible, unblinking eyes. C’s tongue slithered out of its preposterously long face, doubled back, crawled up his face, and licked his eyeball before slithering back into his mouth. “Can I help?” he asked.

I leaned against the barcounter. “Honestly? I don’t know. I just have no idea about anything anywhere. Really. Ask me my sexual orientation, and I’ll tell you that I don’t know.

He narrowed his terrible, unblinking eyes. “Hey, here’s what. Horses are fast; if you agree to let me ride you back in the real world, I’ll agree to be your trusty stead in this one.”

“Wait. ‘Real world?’ What does that mean?”

C put a hoof on my face, and I recoiled. “Oh, it’s just my way of seeing it, because I’m even more unkillable here, since my real body is still on the other side of the mirror. It has nothing to do with us being on level seventeen of Calêrhos.”

Rubbing my cheek where he’d touched me, I asked, “Why do you sound so different? Not just slightly in voice, but in wording?”

He shook his muzzle. “Look, mate, it’s been a long day for me, and I may or may not have devoured the living souls and tongues of some Equestrians today. And eating one’s tongue is how I learn one’s speech and mannerism, and so their manner of speech has influenced mine now.” He did that thing he called ‘representing’ again. “What? don’t look at me like that. They attacked me first because I frightened them, and I logically responded by ripping their living bodies limb-from-limb as I tore their faces and tongues off, ate them, and then devoured their souls while they screamed. There’s nothing uncivilized about that.”

I just stared into those infernal eyes.

“It went a little something like this,” he said, and leapt over the counter. Now he stood above Filmrock. With a horrible, throaty squeal of murderous intent that sucked in air rather than expelled it, C’s long head split in half. Out came several insectoid arms, black with chitin. They lashed out at Filmrock, slicing his body into bloody, gory pieces which black tentacles from further in the face grabbed and dragged back into his face.

When he was done, it was only by sheer virtue of having not had anything to drink today that I didn’t piss myself. His face sewed itself shut, just like his smile had when first I’d seen C. “Okay, fine,” he sighed. “If you let me ride you back in our world, I promise never to do that thing I just did to you or anyone you care about, plus you can still ride me here.” I continued to gape. He rolled his terrible, unblinking eyes. His body undulated, and out from his flesh formed what looked like a leather saddle and reins, like those a pony would use for a Höllenhund or a mammoth. “Here. I made this from his clothes… and maybe his body, but who knows?”

Nothing. I just stared.

“Please?”

Slowly, and very weakly, I nodded. “I… okay.”

He smiled. “I am a horse!” And then: “It is, frankly, one of my back goals to literally ride every animal on this planet at least once, including the pony. You’ve helped suppress my urge to kill for another day, mate.”

C struck a pose like a boastful pony. “Up on my back, friend. Quick, quick! Take my reins; I’ve always wanted to do this! Ride upon my back and I’ll take you to a magical land of adventure and… and stuff!”

“That sounds pretty much exactly like what a pedophile would say,” I said, crossing my arms and giving him a suspicious glare.

He looked at me like a water bottle looks at the ocean. “Boy, trust me, compared to how old I am, you’re still an infant.”

“That doesn’t ease my concerns at all. In fact, I think it makes them worse.”

“Obey me, or else!”

With all the slowness of a baby trying to figure out how best to kill himself with a lemon, a block of cheese, and a dead parrot, I stepped up the saddle’s side and onto the horse. It was like riding a Höllenhund, except all wrong. This was like the cannibal’s version of riding an animal. I was pretty sure that I’d never again be able to think of the concept of “riding” in the contexts of a pony as something sexual anymore; it was purely this.

I grabbed the reins as best I could with hands after I picked my torch back up. As I would for a Höllenhund, I indicated with the reins for C to move. “Hiya,” I called out in a weak voice, and C slowly ambled out of the trench and up the slope.

Taking out my map, I tried to figure out where I was. As I figured out what to do, I informed C the Horse. Here we were, a small distance away from Songnam, by a place hight “Junktown”. Sleepy Oaks was a distance away. Really, it had never occurred to me just how far Songnam was from Sleepy Oaks; that riverboat captain of the S.S. SSSSS must have been a speed demon to have gotten us to the city so fast when we’d gone.

There were a number of interesting-looking places between Songnam and Sleepy Oaks. “The Drawers” and “Ruins of Olympia/New Pegasus”, for example. According to the map, too, I’d have to pass near or through them on the road to Sleepy Oaks.

When I gave C the distance, he remarked that, on horseback, we could make there in short number days, which struck me as weird for some reason. Like, as weird as a pony-come-man riding a skinwalker-come-horse. Because my life was weird. Everything was so surreal right now that I honestly expected to start seeing some melting clocks around here, like that picture I saw in the Songnam museum with that mare who penned the Mare-Do-Well comics. Only this time, the clocks would come to life, turn into crows, and my penis would suddenly have an eyeball on its tip which demanded of me to use it to spy on mice in their mouseholes because this new body was flexible enough to do that.

“Well, here we go,” I said, checking my hat and bandoliers. I need a haircut; long hair doesn’t do me, and I still can’t remember ever having long curls like these. Me no likey. Indicating with the reins, I spurred C to move with a “Hiya!”

“I am still a horse,” C expertly concluded.