CHAPTER 4 : MAN-CHILD
Sparhawk stared in disbelief at the blurry outline the mirror in the dark room was showing him. It was him, that much he knew. The form raised it's hand when he did, it turned when he did; when he sat down, it sat down. But it was all wrong. It was that of a little boy. Maybe nine, ten. The form he was looking at would not be out of place on Talen, Kurik's illegitimate son. A spike of sorrow speared his heart at the thought of his dead friend, but now was not the time.
Strangely, the next thought that popped into his mind was that Ehlana was going to be furious. Yes, he had killed Azash, relegating the fact that he would be killed in the process as unimportant. That was how the Pandion Knights were. They got things done. But then he'd ended up not getting killed. And he was also apparently a child now. All this after his wife expressly advised him against this venture. Oh, the things that befell men when they failed to listen to their wives.
And where was he? The room he was in was far too small to be the main chamber of Azash's temple. Say about a thousand times too small. And besides, shouldn't the explosion from destroying Bhelliom, which miraculously did not kill him, have wrecked the temple. Blasted it to smithereens? Shouldn't there be open sky above him, or at least a lot of rubble, if he'd been buried? Instead there was this tiny, grimy room with most of the furniture blasted to pieces, except for the mirror, which was strangely convenient, and a bundle of rags, that now that he thought about it, had a shape that was becoming increasingly recognizable.
He walked to it, rather unsteadily, getting accustomed to this newer, lighter, younger body. So much was different! Yes he was nowhere near as big or strong as he used to be, but the feeling! The feeling of...Sparhawk did not know what to call it. His back felt like his father had just taken the cane to it, yes, but that was about it. None of the aches. No familiar pulling sensation at his chest from the old scars that peppered it. This was going to take some getting used to.
He came beside the rags and knelt, feeling around. Yes, it was a human body. Yes it was most definitely dead, but it was still warm to the touch. Not long gone, then. The features were too dark to make out with any certainty. A stray thought entered Sparhawk's head and his blood chilled. Was this one of his companions? No, it wasn't possible, Aphrael had teleported them all out. Otha? No, the King of Zemochs was fat beyond measure, fattened by the years and riches that Azash had bestowed on him as reward for his worship of the Elder God. Like inhumanly fat.
Azash himself then? Sparhawk felt his pulse quicken and his head pound at the possibility. He remembered what Sephrenia had said to the God when they had confronted the Seeker. Oh impotent Godling, cover in Zemoch and gnaw in regret for the pleasures you were forever denied...Ah, yes the Younger Gods had emasculated him. He didn't know the general shape and size of Azash, but there was one way to be sure. Suppressing his disgust, he rooted around within the man's clothes, tattered, but of fine quality. He let out a sigh. Not Azash then.
Sparhawk scratched his head in confusion. What was going on here? He had woken up in an unfamiliar body, by an unfamiliar body, in an unfamiliar place. It as then that he had a rather fine idea. Something he should have had in the first place. He bowed his head and he called out to Aphrael. Well, prayed really. And something was wrong. Very, very wrong. Sparhawk's eyes shot open. He couldn't feel the child-Goddess at all. Aphrael, the child Goddess of Styricum, who had guided them on this quest, providing them strength to see it to its end, he couldn't feel her at all. That was not possible.
The Church Knights, the four militant Orders, out of necessity, so long ago, they had been given leave to consort with the Gods of Styricum, to be schooled in the mystic Styric arts so that they could stand against Azash and his hordes of Zemochs. Well, the Zemochs themselves didn't need magic to be dealt with. Azash and his foul creatures, really.
Styric magic was essentially a supplication to a certain Styric God of choice, who would then fuel the spell. Even when your prayers were unanswered, say if you appealed to Aphrael, the child-Goddess, with a curse of death, you were bound to have your Spell fail, but you could feel the Divinity, though technically the church denied the existence of any other God but the Elene God.
And now, Sparhawk couldn't feel her. Aphrael. Flute. His future child. He couldn't feel her. There was just this emptiness...
He could feel a growing panic inside him. Before it threatened to overwhelm him, he crushed it ruthlessly with all his training. Alright, he couldn't feel Aphrael. He could allow himself to contemplate the why later. Now what?
He stumbled around in the dark, his eyes still fuzzy, groping at the walls, and he finally came to what felt like a wooden door. Kneeling, he pressed his ear against it, straining to hear anything on the other side. He needn't have bothered, for a veritable sea of sounds flooded his ear. The thumping of shoes. A female voice, moaning, in pain or pleasure, he couldn't tell. A cat, meowing. A strange rhythmic clicking. He fell back and immediately the sound ceased. But the light that shone in the little gap underneath the door showed no disturbances, no shadows as would be the case had someone or something been on the other side. And the sound had stopped far too abruptly. He lightly touched his ear to the door and once again was assaulted by the menagerie of sounds. He lifted his head. Silence. Touch. Noise. Was there magic at play here? Were distant sounds being amplified? Anyhow, it didn't seem like anyone was on the other side of the door if the light was anything to go by and he decided to risk it.
He felt around for something that could open the door, some kind of latch or handle and his hand rested on something metallic, round and smooth. A handle? He pulled, pushed but to no avail. The door wouldn't budge. The strange, round handle seemed a little loose though, so he gave it a bit of a jiggle and found that it turned. A click sounded and the door opened, light flooding the room, temporarily blinding Sparhawk. He blinked, trying to get his eyes to adjust, ears alert for anything unusual.
As his eyes finally focused, he noticed that they were still a bit blurry. Had he hit his head or something. he shook his head, trying to clear them, but they stayed that way. He squinted and it improved. A growing horror dawned on Sparhawk. Was he short sighted?
To a knight, his body was a weapon, his tools of the trade. Sparhawk was already thrown off balance by the fact that he was now a kid, but the eyes were nearly the final straw. His terror threatened to break free of the box into which he had shoved it, but he clamped down brutally, recalling Sephrenia's words. "If you be but brave Sparhawk, not even the gates of Hell can prevail against you" Well, time to test that.
He turned, the light now better illuminating the room and walked to the mirror. There was a lot of broken furniture in the room, strewn about, as if a tornado had just ripped through. He went to the mirror mounted on the wall and he gasped. He was a child all right, but this wasn't him. The boy who stared back at Sparhawk bore no resemblance to him except for the dark hair. A green eyed face on a body that was too thin stared out at him, mouth agape, dressed in strange clothes that were two sizes too big. He had a red angry scar on his forehead, nearly hidden by his shock of hair.
Who was he? Or even worse, what was he? Was he some sort of undead, a spirit forced into a dead child's body? The church knight quailed at the implications that might have for his immortal soul. He put a hand to his neck, feeling for a pulse and sighed in relief when he found one. Not undead, then? But what? This was a stranger's body. Maybe he'd been de-aged and altered? But magic of that magnitude...it would take an elder God to make something this stable.
He turned and stumbled over to the body to see if he recognized the body in the light. No. A total stranger. The features seemed Elenic enough though. That was a comfort. Maybe he was still on Elenia. But then he was sure that Aphrael would be able to reach him if that were the case. The clothes were a dead ringer for a footpad of some sort. Dark. Shadowy. A not so well to do footpad, if you counted how grimy they were. Or a sorcerer, perhaps? Azash's chosen did love their dark robes.
None of this made any sense and Sparhawk's head was beginning to hurt. He decided to figure out what this was all about on a later day and figure out how to get out of there, for now. He hadn't the foggiest idea where he was, so he was going to have to wing it. Creeping to the open door, he squinted this way and that, and not seeing any amorphous blobs come his way he crept to a set of stairs that led downward, ears straining to make up for his less than stellar vision.
The lamps on the wall were of some strange design, one that Sparhawk had not seen before. They glowed from within with no discernible flame. Filing away the increasing strangeness, he went down the stairs, creaky, creaky stairs, wincing with every step. They led onto a corridor, similar to the one from which he had just descended. He peered over the railing. Just a couple of flights till the ground.
He successfully negotiated the stairs and found himself in a small chamber of sorts, one wall full of little boxes. The boxes had plaques with writing on them and Sparhawk was surprised to see that he understood the script. It was a little rough, a little more boxy, but it was definitely Elenic! Convinced more than ever he was somehow in Elenia, hundreds of leagues away from Zemoch where he had been engaged in a deathmatch with Azash, he walked over to the boxes, studying them.
Strange names they had on them. Psmith Smith. Freddie Threepwood. Schizophrenix Nuttercase. None he recognized. And none he could place to any one region on the Eosian continent. Baffled, by this, Sparhawk opened one of the boxes and parchment came spilling out. No it wasn't quite parchment. Sparhawk bent down to pick it up and was amazed at it's softness. This was nothing like rough parchment, but it very clearly served the same function, judging by the script on it. He opened a couple more boxes and they all had the strange parchment in them. Was this some kind of tiny library?
He paged through a few of them and was baffled once again. He couldn't make head or tail out of it. There were Angus Mc Callister's tight Hollyhocks, with pictures of flowers. A picture of what appeared to be a man on a metal contraption, with some kind of glass helmet, feeling, according to the contents, very manly indeed. Sparhawk turned to the next one and coloured. It was a picture of a nearly naked women wearing very little. And so on and so forth.
He tried to make sense of these, but just couldn't. If he had to hazard a guess, it looked like people advertising their goods or services, but to do that on parchment...The cost! He opened up a few more boxes and some of them had letters in them addressed to the names on the boxes. Oh. This was a receptacle for messages then. Fascinating, but Sparhawk had other things on his mind, so he stowed the letters in his shirt, a rather roomy shirt it was and examined the door. His head was beginning to hurt something fierce.
The door was a bit more solid than the one in the room Sparhawk had woken up in, but it had the same round handle and it opened with a click when turned. Sparhawk peeked outside. And gaped.
The air was thick and clogged, somewhat like the streets of Cimmura, but there was none of that sewage reek that he had so come to associate with cities. And this had to be one. There were huge buildings of a foreign architecture, quite boxy, Sparhawk felt, all around him. Not one of them seemed to consist of only a single story. Three at the minimum. And they were all fitted with glass! Glass! Sparhawk's mind boggled at the sheer cost of such an undertaking.
On the roads, which seemed to be made of some grey material, zoomed strange contraptions, some similar to the one he had seen on the flyer, some with four wheels and people inside them. And on two raised platforms on either side of the road, people walked. They were dressed strangely to Sparhawk's eye, wearing clothing of a fashion he had not seen anywhere, yet somehow familiar and not one of them paid heed to him. Looking down at himself he could understand why. He was dressed somewhat similarly.
Sparhawk's head was pounding now, and he grimaced, but he decided to make himself scarce. There was a dead body in the room upstairs, and in his professional experience, those tended to smell, which tended to attract people, which tended to lead to complications. He slipped in among the walkers and took a few steps before he had to lean against a wall. His head was really killing him.
He gritted his teeth and took a few more steps, but ended up falling on his bum after colliding into somebody. he looked up blearily, to see a blue blob, before his head exploded with pain and everything went black.
A/N: I need a suitably seedy region of london for Schizophrenix's residence to be located. As my knowledge of London amounts to zilch, reader suggestions are highly appreciated (read: desperately needed)
