"Free—" began Freetrick.
"Feerborg," Bloodbyrn interrupted. "Wrothgrinn, maintain a civil tongue if you would keep it in your skull, for you stand in the shadow of his Malevolence Feerborg, the Ultimate Fiend."
"The Ultimate…FIEND?" In the pause between word two and word three, the Wrothgrinn scuttled forward. He loomed over them, his long, crooked back bent so Freetrick looked up into the lunatic face hanging almost vertically above his. Wrothgrinn had pale, tangled hair and a pair of enormous spectacles that made his eyes look huge and insectile. He also had terrible breath.
"
Hm
-mmm hmm."
Freetrick tried not cringe back as, with an audible popping of stressed vertebrae, the face ratcheted closer. A pair of pale, long-fingered hands framed Wrothgrinn's face, each with three lenses like jeweler's loops held in the spaces between the digits.
"
In
-teresting!" Glass and metal clinked together as the Life-twister peered through the lenses between his fingers, first with one, then another, then, overlapping hands, two at once.
With each change, Freetrick saw the man's right eye magnified larger.
"Um," Freetrick, his neck bent nearly double, tried to smile at the eye looking down on him: vast, cold, and unsympathetic. "Hello," he extended a hand upward, "nice to meet—"
The Life-twister reeled backward, shrieking, "Not my incorruptible flesh! Do not touch my FLESH!"
"Oh!Uh, sorry!" Freetrick said, "Are you, uh…" he tried to complete the sentence as Wrothgrinn examined his right hand through the lenses held in his left, "The Life-twister?"
The man drew himself up and stepped back in one smooth movement. Freetrick was reminded of a spider. "Yes! It is I, WR~ROTHGR~RINN!" Wrothgrinn thrust a hand into the air as he shouted his name, and a lightning bolt crashed across the ceiling. "They call me MAD, you know!" he shouted over the thunderclap, "but that is only because they fail to recognize my," he squealed, "GENIUS! Bwah Ha ha ha! But soon," Wrothgrinn's voice dropped to a whisper, then rose to a fanatic howl, "my day will come! And all of them will PAY!" Another bolt of artificial lightning.
"Really?" said Freetrick, removing his fingers from his ears, "Well. I'm, uh, sure they will really appreciate the, uh," his eyes flicked to iron bars over the pit in the floor. They shuddered as the creatures inside lunged against them. "…giant lizards you made."
"Giant lizards?" Wrothgrinn's eyes were wide with indignation behind his round spectacles, "Those conformist hack-works? Those COMMISIONS? Bah!"
He spun and kicked the bars over the pit. A taloned hand came up and barely missed removing his foot at the ankle. "They are for Strakhblargle," he explained, "and typical of the man. I ask you, fiend, HOW can an artist exercise his talents on such small-minded, such PEDESTRIAN orders? As if
I
had not made a hundred, a thousand, giant lizards in
my
long career."
Wrothgrinn grumbled as he rubbed at a dark stain on his smock. " Small-minded. Pedestrian! Might as well ask for ogres, or Tempest help me, WENDIGOS!"
"Oh," said Freetrick, wondering about Skrean social niceties. He was here to ask the Life-twister for a favor. Maybe he should show interest in the man's work? "Um, have you? Made a lot of giant lizards, I mean?"
Wrothgrinn nodded tiredly. "Giant lizards, giant bats, giant spiders. All dull, conventional!" He raised his fists, "
CLICHE
!" Lightning flashed again. "Even the giant chinchillas were but a variation on the same tired old themes, although" he winked, "they were the talk of the castle for weeks after they started
breeding
."
"I bet…they were," Freetrick said. "Were all of them work for Strakhblargle?"
"My lord," hissed Bloodbyrn, but Wrothgrinn was already answering.
"Oh not at all. My work is admired THROUGHOUT the Vile Halls!" Wrothgrinn nodded to himself."Yes, indeed. Why, just yesterday I was commissioned for…what was it?" He tapped a fingernail pensively against his teeth, "two thirteens of maggot men? Three?" He sighed elaborately, "not as if it matters. Maggot men are hardly Mad at all these days."
"My lord," said Bloodbyrn in a slightly louder voice, "did you not have some specific business to accomplish here?"
"Maggot men?" Wrothgrinn continued, "They have been done, I said. They are passé, I said, but do they listen?
Fools
!" He shook his head and stared gloomily at the cages quivering on the wall. "The talent, the GENIUS of one such as myself is wasted in this conservative milieu."
"Actually," said Freetrick, "I did have something I wanted to—"
"Yes, yes," Wrothgrinn waved his hands impatiently, "re-animating the assassin, of course. Your faceless servant was admirably specific in relaying my lord's instructions. But first, my lord, let me show you the truest works of my art."
Before Freetrick could protest, the Life-twister had slid across the floor, and was beckoning Freetrick and Bloodbyrn toward a squat, dark cage. "Closer, my lord, come closer, and you will see my greatest work to date. Yes, my GR~REATEST WORK!" One emaciated hand rested on the catch of its lid. "I! WR~ROTHGR~RINN! The last of the great Life-twisters! The man who has attached bat wings to octopuses, who has put eyes in places no eyes should go, and whose work with tentacles…" he inhaled rapturously through his nose, "
well
, my tentacles need no praise from me. They stand on their own merits."
Or sort of coil slimily around their own merits? Freetrick nodded and smiled.
"I have sinned against nature," Wrothgrinn sighed, "in so many ways, but those efforts were but PLAY, practice for this, my greatest work to date." His hand on the lid of the cage tightened. "Now, BR~RACE yourselves for a most disturbing sight. Are you braced?"
Freetrick looked at Bloodbyrn, who rolled her eyes.
"BEHOLD." Wrothgrinn lifted the lid. Freetrick closed his eyes.
"They are…oh they are
horrible
." Squeaked Bloodbyrn.
"They are ART!" Wrothgrinn insisted.
Freetrick opened his eyes. "They're…kittens," Freetrick reached down and stroked one of the tiny ginger cats. It rolled over and captured his hand in its tiny paws.
"My lord, stop that!" Bloodbyrn cried, backing away. "It is wrong, it is unbecoming, it is…" she shut her eyes tight and shuddered.
"Yes…" murmured Wrothgrinn. "A
perfect
reaction."
"Don't be silly, Bloodbyrn," said Freetrick, "they're just kittens." The one he was playing with went
miw.
A look of pain crossed Bloodbyrn's face. "They are abominations. Counter to everything the Kingdoms of Evil stand for. If someone were to see us—
you
, my lord playing with them, stroking them, " she struggled for words, "
fondling
them…my lord, they would lose any respect for your villainy."
Freetrick opened his mouth to reply, but Wrothgrinn interrupted, "there! You see? That is the sort of conventional, narrow-minded, philistine attitudes I must contend with! But
you
, my lord," a smile split his face as the Life-twister looked down at Freetrick, whose hand still covered the kitten, " a man of your worldly sophistication can appreciate the irony, the iconoclasm of my work."
"I…certainly can," said Freetrick, still eyeing Bloodbyrn. She was staring with horrified fascination at the cavorting kittens, shivering.
"You see," Wrothgrinn was explaining, his back bent over the cage like a sinister question mark, "how
large
their eyes are in comparison to their faces? Doesn't it just make you want to…
stroke
them?" Wrothgrinn straightened from the kittens, eyes wild, "to HOLD them? Yes, and even, oh dare I SUGGEST?" Overcome with emotion, the Life-twister raised his hands above his head, cackling madly as lightning flashed across the machines above him. "…to SNUGGLE them?!" Thunder boomed.
"Yeah," said Freetrick as the kitten batted at his hand with a tiny paw, "they're cute."
" 'Cute,'" said Wrothgrinn, hunching back over the cage, "cute? I confess I am unfamiliar with my lord's technical jargon."
"Cute," said Freetrick. "Like with big eyes and everything you were just talking about."
"Ah," Wrothgrinn nodded. "Around the lab we call it the Perverse Neaten-Induced Response. Oh, thrilling it is to discuss the matter with such an obvious connoisseur in the field."
"Perverse?" wondered Freetrick, "what would be the…uh, Appropriate Neotony-Induced Response?"
"To kill it," whispered Bloodbyrn feverishly, "with fire, if possible."
"Philistine," sniffed Wrothgrinn, "But, oh, I am so glad that YOU approve, my lord. Yes! I can feel it!" Up came the hands, "The blood of CREATIVITY!" and back down they came again, "
pumping
with renewed vigor through the coiled
labyrinth
of my viscera! To contemplate the new depths which my art may now plumb…" Wrothgrinn's neck twisted and his face was suddenly staring into Freetrick's "makes me quite
mad
with glee."
"No…problem," said Freetrick. But then as he remembered he was in Skrea. "You're not planning to give them bat wings or tentacles or anything, right?"
"Psh!" said Wrothgrinn dismissively. "Would I paint a mustache on a great portrait? No. Mark my words, my lord's finely-tuned avant-garde sensibilities will not be offended." Wrothgrinn looked back at his kittens, his eyes gleaming, his hands rubbing against each other. "I shall IMPROVE my creations! Their eyes shall be bigger, their fur fluffier, their little pink tongues..." He bent down to press his face against the grill lid of their cage, his voice hushed and intense, "…will be littler and pinker than you could
possibly
imagine."
There was a strangled squeak from Bloodbyrn. "My lord! Did we not come to this wretched place with some manner of goal in mind?" Her voice shook, "please?"
"Right," Freetrick extricated his hand from the kitten's attentions. "Wrothgrinn, can we see the assassin now?"
"Oh of course, of course!" With his habitual creepy speed, Wrothgrinn shut the lid on the cage of kittens, whirled, and strode across the laboratory floor. As he walked, one of his white hands reached out to snatch an enormous, sharp-tipped iron poker from a rack against a wall. The pole whirred through the air as he brought it around and jabbed it through the bars of the nearest animal cage. There was a hideous squall from whatever was in the cage, and a brief lunatic guffaw from Wrothgrinn as he held his hands above the dying animal and absorbed its death. Then, in a swirl of stained smock and a clattering of boots, he was back across the room.
"All is in readiness! Come, come! Into the meat locker." The Life-twister led them through a doorway in a canyon between the piles of cages and abstruse equipment. It opened onto a bare little room the size of a broom closet.
Freetrick opened his mouth to ask, then saw the
second
door. It was set into the opposite wall of the closet, solidly-built and black, with necromancer's mist clotting around its frame.
"Close the outer door!" Wrothgrinn snapped, "would you release all of my precious frigidity?" Bloodbyrn jumped and obeyed without so much as an ironically-raised eyebrow. Had those kittens really thrown her balance so far off kilter?
The Life-twister grasped the handle of the second door, pulled, and Freetrick felt as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice-water on him. Coldness spilled out of the meat locker like a viscous fluid, turning the air pale with condensed water.
"A
most
impressive kill," Wrothgrinn was saying as Freetrick and Bloodbyrn shivered, "And how daringly accomplished it. Impressive! Outré!" Wrothgrinn's long legs carried him to a wall of cabinets on one side of the cold room and began to run his hands over them.
"I wonder if I did the same thing you do in this room," said Freetrick, puffing his cheeks. "It got really cold and there was fog everywhere."
"Not entirely. A sudden drop of pressure would cool the room once, but my spells draw out the heat directly." Wrothgrinn's voice, Freetrick noticed, had lost most of its maniacal cackle. The Life-twister was all business now, his tone as frank and abrupt as a Rationalist physician's. Freetrick wondered which persona was the real man. "A Sangboise technique," he continued, "it works admirably as long as I keep the blood fresh…Aha!" Wrothgrinn's long fingers wrapped around the handle of a particular cabinet and pulled. A sort of bed slid out of the wall just below waist level. Freetrick recognized the Vainglorian assassin on the slab.
They drew closer.
"I took the liberty of repairing the gross damage," said Wrothgrinn. He was fussing with the corpse, rearranging its limbs, pressing on the chest, rubbing the skin on the forehead. "resurfacing of the trachea and cochleae, repairs to the skull." He flicked his fingers into the air and Freetrick could see black mist branching from their tips in infinitely diminishing tendrils. "My lord will note I did not waste time on the spinal injuries, or on the trauma to the occipital and parietal lobes. My understanding was my lord wanted a talking corpse, not, aha, a walking one."
"That was...thoughtful of you…uh…" Freetrick said, staring downward uneasily. "
Isn't
the corpse actually…moving around right now?"
"Hm?" Wrothgrinn ran a hand of over the body's twitching legs, "oh that. Just electrical stimulation, my lord. I run a current through all of my deceased pre-re-animation. It prevents cold shortening." He chuckled, "as we used to say in school, 'the only thing less useful than a revenant with rigor mortis is a lab assistant with a conscience.'"
Freetrick, who had never heard of electrical currents or cold-shortening, simply nodded and smiled. "Okay."
"Now, before we begin I must warn my lord that while it is my considered opinion that the injuries my lord so fiendishly dealt this Do-Gooder
should
not present this zombie with any speech impediments, occurring as they did to the back of the head, we must remember that every brain is different." He smiled gruesomely, "we should always be ready for surprises."