Crap Kingdom (20 page)

25

IT WAS ASLEEP
and then it wasn’t anymore. It could still walk, but if you asked it what it was doing when it was walking, it couldn’t tell you because it didn’t know what what it was doing was called and also, it couldn’t speak, except for two words. And it would not have thought of that as speaking. It would have thought of that as its entire reason for being, what it was made of, what it lived for. So when the man, whom it could not have identified as a man, asked it a question, which it could not understand or identify as a question, the words poured out of its mouth automatically:

“SLOWWAVE TRUEPANTS!”

The man smiled and took the other standing man to one corner of the room and whispered about it and gestured to it. It had no idea what was going on, but it had just fulfilled its purpose, so it was deeply happy. Though it could not have identified the emotion as happiness, it noticed the difference from the way it had felt a moment before. To feel this way was better than to not feel this way.

The first man, the man who had initiated the fulfillment of its purpose, was gone now, and there was just the other man standing there across the room. It was sad the first man had gone, as it associated the first man with the happy feeling, though it could not have identified the emotion as sadness any more than it could have identified the first thing it felt as happiness. The other man waved for it. It did not know what this gesture meant. The other man was still for a second. Then the other man came across the room fast, and grabbed its arm, and pulled it up, and it was walking now, and the other man was holding its arm, pulling it along.

They went out of the room. As far as it had been concerned, that one room was the entire world. They were leaving the world as it knew it. The hallway they were walking down was a new world, and it greeted the new world with the wonder befitting such a discovery. They went through a door into a different room, so now there was a third world. The other man flung it onto a horizontal surface, and then the other man left, and it was alone, and then it could not see anything anymore. A minute or two later it fell asleep, though it had not been trying to fall asleep because it did not know what the act of sleeping was. In dreams its mind set to work creating fantastical worlds beyond the ones it knew, as dreaming minds will do. It dreamed of fourth and fifth and even sixth rooms. It dreamed of words besides the only two words in existence.

When it was awake again, in the third world, it could see that the other man was standing over it. He smiled, though it could not have identified the expression as a smile. The other man grabbed its arm again and pulled it out and down the hall and into yet another room (a fourth world, nothing like the one in its dreams!) and the other man left and again it was alone and then the room began to fill with a mist, and it could not have told you what mist was until the mist touched its skin and then it could, it could tell you what mist was and what skin was and that it was the mist being absorbed through its skin that was teaching it these things. Things it already knew but had forgotten.

He knew he was a man. And more important, he knew what man he was.

He was a soldier in the King’s Army, Right-Blooded Ghelm Division. He served at the pleasure of King Doondredge Anyettis-Krx and he would do so until he died the most noble death he could hope for, on the battlefield in the service of his king, and he wanted this death more than anything. He was Ghelm, he knew as the mist reached his nostrils, and he could picture the ceaseless work of the Ghelm as they approached their ultimate goal.

He could picture the Vapornauts, in their specially designed suits of armor, floating into the Vortex, fighting its mighty wind, and returning with an entire enslaved population from whatever world the Vortex, in its furious wisdom, had been a gateway to that day. From there the population would be led down to the Fields of Permanent War, where it would be driven up against older battle-hardened slave races, and this perpetual churning war game would eventually produce the unbeatable army that would conquer the All-Worlds. He could picture the king, watching from a clear spot in the base of the Executive Orb, where he lived with his trusted advisors and other royalty. The king was watching the new race being led, dazed and wind wrecked, out of the Vortex and down the hill toward the Fields without a stop for food or water or whatever nourishment these far-flung beings required. Now the Orb was floating, as the king had brilliantly designed it to do, over the War Fields, observing the perpetual bloodshed that would forge the force that would bring all known existence under the king’s command.

His next opportunity to achieve the glorious death he wanted more than anything would be right now, this morning, when the glorious Ghelm war wind bore down on the unsuspecting cretins of the nameless kingdom.

He was happier than he could ever remember being, though he had only eight hours of memories. He had been fitted for armor, and once it was given to him, he knew exactly how to put it on. Its crystalline chambers filled with nourishing mist, and his body was stronger, his reflexes were quicker, he was smarter and angrier and more eager to kill.

The thing that made him happiest of all was that he would be at the king’s side during the entire battle. He did not understand exactly why this was the case, but it was thrilling nonetheless, and he would hurl himself toward death harder because of it. If he did not die today, he would die in one of the numerous glorious battles that would follow this one as the king established his grip on the All-Worlds. He was sure of it. He couldn’t wait.

The king climbed on his Elgg. He climbed on an Elgg of his own. Men twice his age and with much more experience were riding in transports, and he was part of the Elgg cavalry next to the king himself. He had come a very long way since last night when he thought there were only two words in the world.

It was a war tide greatly to be feared, cresting the cloud layer, taking to the sky: seven Elgg-mounted squadrons, four hundred men in Vapornaut armor, foot soldiers in a dozen diamond troop transports, with three additional transports left empty to accept a slave population after the Ghelm’s inevitable triumph. The transports gleamed in the sun as they left the rocky surface of Ghelmghaad behind and reached open sky.

The cloud layer trailed away. At this distance the Wall was fully visible, a glow that faded in and out almost imperceptibly but never blinked out entirely. Soon it would. He knew that somehow he was instrumental in bringing down the Wall, and he was extremely proud. The king trusted him, and the king was the wisest and strongest man among the Ghelm and therefore the wisest and strongest man in the All-Worlds. The king’s Elgg dived first, and his Elgg followed suit without him having to tell it to. They nose-dived toward the top of the Wall’s dome, and even with the wind in his ears he heard the king yell the two words that still seemed, for some reason, like the center of his soul.

It was hard to tell, at this distance, if it had worked, but then the king’s Elgg dived without stopping and soon it breached the point where it would have collided with the Wall. It was done. The Wall was down.

Pitiful men and women and children, dirty and dressed in motley rags, looked up in awe. The smarter ones scrambled into their hovels and huts and lean-tos. Soon they would all be quite orderly indeed, packed into diamond transports, or, if they resisted—

Then they were gone. Just the way the Wall had blinked out of existence, all the people he could see running around were suddenly gone. The king pulled up hard on his Elgg and looked at him, at first in confusion and then in anger. Then the king returned his attention to the ground and directed his Elgg toward a large wooden structure in the center of town, a completely ramshackle thing, but certainly the only thing in the kingdom worthy of being called a building. It had some child’s idea of a castle mounted on the front of it.

The legions of Elgg-mounted men and the Vapornaut squadrons followed the king while the diamond transports landed all around the castle building, crushing crude structures that were now depopulated, presumably by treacherous magic.

He and the king closed in on the castle, the king’s rage somehow now transmuted into the speed and fury of his Elgg’s flight. It was flying at top speed when a blue ball of energy appeared around the castle building, deflecting the king and his Elgg. The Elgg was splattered, and the king went skipping across the top of the solid energy ball.

The man whose privilege it was to ride beside the king pulled up sharply and jumped down onto the surface of the ball. He ran along the top of it and dived. He grabbed his dazed majesty before the king could slide off the surface and fall the probably fatal distance to the ground. He looked up. The Vapornauts and Elgg calvary were circling, confused. What next? He looked down. His hand held the king by the wrist. The king was slowly regaining consciousness. His nose was bloody.

Looking out across the kingdom from this artificial perch on top of the castle’s new protective Wall, he could see the crow’s nests of three of the now-landed diamond transports, their spires miniature imitations of the one at the top of the Ghelm kingdom. The farthest one began to topple. Then the next one followed suit, then the closest one, as though they were being knocked over by a powerful beast. From the beast’s apparent path grew blue energy tendrils that shot up into the air and started grabbing Elgg-mounted men and Vapornauts out of the sky. The men who were merely ensnared and not immediately tossed miles away by the tendrils’ impressive power tried to fight back with maces and swords, but there was nothing to be done, as these tendrils were not biological: there was nothing to injure or cut or kill.

Seconds later, the enemy could at last be seen, running up the side of the energy sphere surrounding the castle building toward him and the king. The energy tendrils grew from his footsteps, each one springing immediately to glowing life and whipping up into the sky to fell another Elgg rider or Vapornaut. When the enemy crested the rim of the sphere, the warrior saw that he was little more than a boy, wearing no armor, holding no weapon. The short-sleeved garment covering his torso had letters across the front, reading:

ARROWVIEW HIGH SCHOOL THEATER DEPT

The words resonated with the Ghelm warrior on a deep and preconscious level. It was like these words had existed long before the two words his soul was built around.

He looked into the face of the boy enemy. The boy enemy stopped running and looked at him, puzzled. He would have pounced were he not puzzled himself, by the words on the enemy’s chest and by the look on his face.

The king sprang up, produced a diamond blade from the right wrist of his armor, and grabbed the Ghelm warrior, his own soldier, his right-hand man, who had come into being just this morning. The king put the blade to his throat. He faced the boy enemy.

“
Shut it off!
” the king yelled.

The boy enemy nodded, putting one hand up in the air in surrender and reaching down with the other hand. The enemy touched the surface of the blue energy sphere. The blade’s edge came off of his throat and flew toward the boy enemy’s raised hand. He turned around just in time to see his king fall through the surface of the still-intact sphere and hang there in a cocoon of blue energy. A second later, the sphere spat him out toward the sun. He flew past the troops who were being strangled by tendrils, and he and the boy enemy both watched as the king became a dot in the sky. An equally small dot, an Elgg that had escaped the tendril defense, flew perpendicular to the king, scooping him up and flying back in the direction of the Ghelm homeland.