The Fiend Beneath the Bed
Vagrant Story
Mithrigil Galtirglin
Callo does not speak with the gods. The living are fremescent; her gift is under her control when she is conscious, but in sleep, she is plagued by the white noise of dozens of repressions at a time. She has slept, or nearly, in the forest of Leá Monde, and the sound is the same. When a man crumbles to snowflies and regrets, Callo can still hear them. Who can discern the gods over something so close and so constant?
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Here follows the version of the story where they live rurally for as long as they can:
Outside Leá Monde, the Vagrant comes to them. He brings wine, and jewels, and the body of his quarry, already partly skinned. The wine, as promised, he gives to Callo, and most of the jewels as well. He also gives her the name of a town along the coast where she can find a man to cut these jewels to a size that she can sell without arousing suspicion. The wine she will have to be more careful with.
He leaves them, and they move south along the coastline. The boy is asleep when she carries him into the town in question. She goes to the smith immediately, and berths for the night on a rug by his hearth.
In the morning, he pares down the jewels, keeps a sum for himself that is not unreasonable (as she read his heart, and as she saw in him echoes of John's plight), and reminds them that they may not monger the jewels, not in this town. They continue south; the burden of food is heavier than that of jewels, but lightens as they go. It is perhaps a week before it runs out, and another two nights until they make it to the next town.
This is plenty of time for Callo to create a story. By now, she looks enough like what she is that she can't pretend to anything but; she and Joshua are refugees, and the bits of ruby and opal she sells are scrounged from corpses. It is believable enough to buy her and the boy clothes. When clean, the color of Joshua's hair is plainly familiar, unsettlingly so.
They dart from town to town. Kindly merchants entrust them to the rear of their carts. Stray farmers give them shelter and sometimes work. Joshua turns five, and then six, and Callo forgets at least one of her languages in favor of learning the common tongue for true.
When the Vagrant comes to them—to her, rather—they share the first of four bottles of wine. It is potent, ugly, noxious swill. The following morning, Joshua does not wake from his dreams, and his soul is also silent. He breathes; he sweats; he does not heed his name.
But Callo does not speak with the gods; she cannot call the Vagrant (or she can, but he cannot return so soon). It is a week before Joshua's fever breaks.
He speaks, in a voice not his own.
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Before all this, Callo was also prevented from sleeping by things external. In pursuit of her doctorates, by pills and tinctures; in pursuit of her calling, by the promise of grandeur; in adolescence, by the need to escape; in her extreme youth, by the ravings of ignorant siblings and callers. Callo ceased to cry at a very young age, somehow aware of what little it accomplished, at what great cost to her lungs.
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Here follows the version of the story where they live longest:
Outside Leá Monde, the Vagrant comes to them. He has abandoned half his weapons so that he may shoulder the body of his predecessor. Sydney is barely able to speak; the Vagrant cannot speak at all. So it is Sydney who steers them not south, but east, into the weald where the remains of the cult Müllenkamp have gathered, some three score, civilian yet with craft enough to hide. He reminds Callo that she is no longer of the cities, that her name is black with libel. The Vagrant, in his heart, attests to this.
They part, but not without Sydney's message and blessing, and are recognized upon their reception. Callo trades the cult news for shelter and sundries, though they welcome her gifts and her guidance as not payment, but asset. It is also revealed that Joshua has been given to the Dark, perhaps despite the wishes of his father. Joshua will remember everything.
Callo will forget.
The life of a nomad will accommodate her. She will have acumen, books and trinkets and bottles of old wine, and young people to help her bear these from stead to stead. The word of a fistful of notable deaths will stay the Cardinal's hounds, and the cult will grow numerous, slowly but surely, and peaceful enough without the Duke's agenda. Callo's knowledge will translate into wisdom, her gift of heart-scrying into a means of recruitment and indoctrination. It will suit her, and age will suit her, and even the accoutrements of an acolyte, yes, will suit her.
Sydney's visage will become Joshua just as well.
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In all of these tales, Callo will cease to be what she is. Her years of indenture to society will cease to benefit her; perhaps even to matter to her. According to some paths, she will accept this; on others, she will bemoan this fate and die wanting.
But there will always be that apt connection between the disruption of her sleep and the state of her waking world. In the one incarnation, it will be her confirmation that the boy's malady is not one of the flesh. In another incarnation, those voices will reveal whose flesh it is. She will screen truth from fallacy and diminish exaggerations. Her presence will rout all but the most capable and powerful of liars. She will win hearts, and accede to them, by hearing them, and in all tales she slowly loses the voice of her own, but perhaps this would have transpired even without the embrace of the Dark.
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Here follows the version of the story that convention and trope dub the most fulfilling:
Outside Leá Monde, the Vagrant comes to them. He brings wine, and jewels, and foresight in the form of Sydney. Those half-dead are given to remarkable prophecy, and Sydney retains the gift enough to serve as compass; west, over not land but sea. There is certain anonymity there, and languages that Callo speaks and reads. The mage possesses the Vagrant's limbs and power, envisages, and magicks the woman and child to a port.
Callo buys her passage with a jewel so large as to be a curiosity, but only that; she selects a captain who is, perhaps, a fool and a crook, but no braggart. They sail south without peril but not without question.
Romande is welcoming. Though Joshua is young enough to learn their language, or perhaps gifted in so doing, it is impossible to hide that the child is of Valendia. Toward that end, Callo takes the surname Johnsson; common enough, and true enough in retrospect. The southern lands are even less kind toward women, and Callo's circumstances even less forgiving. She markets herself as a clerk and accountant, and writes editorials anonymously. She frightens off suitors, what few there are, when her skin burns red instead of tan.
The Vagrant comes to point them south again, when Joshua is Callo's height. They obey, and again after that, but Johnsson has become them, the name on Callo's references and Joshua's applications. If she strains to appraise his soul, odds are it does not speak in the language of the North.
But the truth is that she must strain, to do so; the white noise of snowflies surrounds him. He sleeps as little as she does.
Joshua succeeds, according to the tenets of success as Callo knew them. His assumed name gains its prefixes and suffixes and fame, and by the time this happens no one thinks it a scandal that some hero in the north may have lost another son, that many years ago. Joshua remarks on the ancient world in language that challenges the modern one; he spins not prophecies, but justifications; he hums not revelations, but correlations. Callo is among those to remark at his discerning eye.
Yet when next the Vagrant comes to Callo, his shade betrays him; he does not see the past. He Hears it.
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When Callo was very small, she blamed her fitfulness of sleep on all manner of things; the clamor of the halls, the creaking of the pipes, the fiend beneath the bed. But she was, as stated, small, and that tiny frame was full to bursting with questions. And that left no space for the answers to emerge, for they were, of course, within as well.
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Here follows the version of the story that is most likely true:
The sun rises. Callo has not forgotten a word that John said, and many of those he did not say. The Duke is the boy's father, and Sydney meant to help him, and that is where the boy is safest. She takes heed of the sky and moves north, to the checkpoint assigned her, three days or more since. The proper authorities see to the boy. A different sort see to Callo.
It perplexes the VKP to hear tell of her presence in Valnain, in Osterturm, in Redhook and Bachlein. The body of a witch burns on the air, does it not?
But then, Joshua Bardorba reminds them; such a death may well have been incomplete.
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