I know this whole chapter has been heavy going, and I don't much like it myself, but this is what happens when a story takes too long to write – incidents that started out pretty light and airy gain more and more weight until they become almost immovable. And I don't doubt parts of it are pretty hard to follow. I am pleased, though, that this section isn't as bad as it was a few revisions back. I may revise this again if my mental functions revive sufficiently, but for now, here it is.

Rayman © UbiSoft Entertainment, though the guy in my story bears no resemblance to whatever it is they've been doing with the character lately.

Chapter 12: Quest, Part 3

Hurrying through the hall, he was gasping, permeated with a horror he could scarcely comprehend. That crazy old man's ravings... like being dropped down a bottomless hole, and he was still falling.

"You think because you hate him he don't own you?"

Tears were gathering behind his eyes, a huge weight of tears, seeping into him from nowhere, threatening to fill and shatter him the way freezing water will explode its glass container.

And he halted, so furious he could hardly see what was in front of him. Tears. Yes, a pitiable figure he was, weeping while he tore villages apart.

Being a pirate. The absurdity of it. How could anyone be a pirate? How could anyone take a life of predation for granted? Yet he must spend the rest of his life feeding on the bodies of the innocent, so that his own people would be safe from predators like himself.

How in the name of the world's two blazing hands could he have ended up like this?

"You chose the evil side." No. No, no I did not!

Then what did you choose?

Beaten in the war to save his planet, desperate to keep from losing everything, he had chosen a different kind of defeat. Now the only battle he could fight was with himself, to hold steady, to endure an intolerable situation, to distract Anaconda from his planet. But he wasn't that strong. He was slipping, even with the deathlike grip of the Guardian always on him, keeping him in line, pressing him against those spinning sawblades.

Anaconda was going to win. Piranha was clinging to a cliff, without a foothold, watching his defeat thunder towards him like an avalanche; and when it came, Anaconda's faint, supercilious smile would be the last thing, as he was swept into the chasm, that he would ever see.

A fierce impulse swept over him, not for the first time – oh, stop thinking, for the love of all the gods just stop thinking and fight, short-circuit the whole damned losing game! Finally to let go, to charge through the hall shooting wildly, smashing everything that moved, guilty or innocent, firing and firing and firing until they had no choice but to gun him down – Firing what?

A sharp pang went through him. What he'd instinctively thought of firing wasn't a weapon, not bullets or a blast gun. He closed his fists; the tears crept closer.

He was at a junction where several corridors came together in a star formation. Through all of them, sporadic foot traffic passed, an oversized freak show: huge, clumsy-jointed metal robots, clicking and clunking and faintly wheezing with internal machinery; the lumbering chunks of raw steak that were the human pirates, in their absurd metal-trimmed getups, swinging those hands the size of babies at the end of redundant, bulging arms. All that massive meat, all those clanking metal parts, all that superfluous solidity, with no purpose but to smash and crush and ruin the lives of inoffensive beings.

Him too... Once a creature of energy, a being more akin to air and light than to metal and flesh, he was now as dark and as solid, as heavy and as mechanical as they were. He could feel his body congealing, thickening, coarsening–

And abruptly, the perspective of the hallway altered, as if he were suddenly seeing through the wrong end of a telescope. For a startled moment, he stared up at lumbering mountains. He was tiny, shrinking, a mote, an insect, about to be crushed–

He shook his head furiously, shaking the mad vision out of it. But he was panting now, his chest a tight knot, he couldn't get air. His black eyes dilated.

He forced in a breath, and took a step backwards, his fists clutched against his chest. What was going on? What was the matter with him?

Then he grasped what it was. Panic.

He darted glances to the left, the right. He planted his feet hard, fiercely in place. He –

No, he couldn't. No more. He fled.

He was crouching behind a wall of crates, the big wooden barrels and boxes that were piled in haphazard stacks along many of the ship's corridors. He held still, his eyes half-shut, taking long, slow breaths.

On the other side of the boxes he could hear the traffic in the hall, the loathed clumping of metallic feet and the gruff human voices. He huddled into the little space behind the boxes as though it were a tiny universe of its own, out of reach of the toxic world of Anaconda and the Guardian, of enemy and friend, love and hate, of the straitjacket of duty whether forced on him or self-imposed.

Once again, the vast forests of his home surrounded him. Eyes, faces, peeked out at him between the leaves. So many different faces, all familiar, all radiant, smiling at him with playful affection, with friendship, with love. His eyes burned. Friendship with Piranha, the idea was obscene. But they reached for him, those hands, those faces, those eyes; some were dead, he knew that, but they smiled at him as though he weren't to blame. He shrank back, he melted into the bushes, he dissolved; his disembodied gaze still clinging to those faces, yearning uselessly out of a black vacuum.

Nearby, a harsh sound, a scrabbling. The forest collapsed. Something was squeezing in between the boxes. He lurched to his feet, ready to fight.

And staggered back. A blinding light flared in the dark space, there was the hiss of heavy electric discharge. The Guardian stepped out from behind the boxes, a sizzling, lethal ball of golden energy in his white-gloved hand, rage and hatred filling his clear eyes like smoke, as a forest fire blackens a cloudless sky.

"You think you can quit?" he roared; and raised that fist.

Piranha's hands flew up to block his face, he cowered back against the wooden crates, bracing for the blow.

Silence. Slowly he lowered his hands.

In the dim light, a grey outline, bent and frail. The old slave.

Piranha stared at him.

The slave strode forward, pushing his papery-skinned face close to Piranha's nose, looking mockingly into Piranha's black eyes.

"Get away from me," Piranha whispered.

"You didn't let me finish before. You should never interrupt a prophecy."

Convulsively, Piranha seized him by the trunk, picked him up bodily and heaved him aside, then lunged towards the exit. The old man smacked up against the boxes and fell to the floor. He coughed, chuckled; then began to talk. At the sound of his voice Piranha froze. He stood still facing the exit, not looking back at the slave.

"Kid ... You make me laugh. You're the most evil thing I've ever seen on this ship. Never met anybody truly evil but you. You nitwit! The dumbest pirate knows he's innocent – blames his boss, his fate, his victim, anything! The Boss himself never doubts that every whim he has is right. But you, no! You can't think that way, can you? Pitiful liar, can't you manage to delude even yourself? How you gonna blame anybody else for your crimes?"

A puzzled frown crept into Piranha's face. His eyes flicked back towards the old man, then he turned resolutely away.

"Scared, you damned fool? More scared of the bad in you, or the good? Let me tell you, boy, you'll go on being a liar and a fraud and a cheat till you decide to take things into your own hands. Maybe you'll get that through your head one of these days."

Now Piranha turned to look at him. "No," he growled hoarsely. "It already happened. I made a decision, long ago. Right or wrong, everything that's happened since then flows out of that moment – everything that's happened, everything that will happen. Nothing can be done about it now."

Bone by bone, the old man was pushing himself arthritically up into a sitting position. He gave a soft, sarcastic laugh. "Tragic! Victim of your own decision? Pah! Who isn't? And ain't we all victims of that very first decision, that set this whole ship going? All victims, all slaves, all criminals. But, my fine gentleman pirate, not one boss on this ship since the very first, has ever managed to be such a hypocrite."

Piranha stood motionless by the exit. The old slave abruptly sat up straight, baring his few teeth in a demented leer. "Yes! That's it! That's who you are, lost hero. Like the first, who started it all! Too good, oh, far too good to be a pirate – but not too good to send pirates off to die for you in battle. Hate to look at slaves, don't ya? But you'll profit from the capture and sale of them! Hah, victim of your own decision! Didn't decide so badly for yourself after all, did you!"

Piranha blinked, stunned by the utter unfairness of such a statement.

The slave continued, grinning vindictively. "As you repeat the sins of the first, so will you meet the fate! Yes, of course!" He paused. His hateful grin melted down into a complacent little smile, and he sighed. "The prophecy is complete."

Piranha eyed him in silence.

Silent himself at last, the old man met his gaze. Piranha felt a shock – such intransigent, even crazed certainty in those yellowed eyes. Then the slave curled up against the wall, turning his face pointedly away. Piranha was dismissed.

Squeezing out from behind the pile of crates, Piranha stood in the corridor, a trifle shaky. He looked back at the pile. No sound, no sign of the old man. For a few moments, Piranha didn't stir, his gaze travelling absently around the corridor.

Then he shook himself out of his trance. Abruptly he lunged down the hall and slammed through the door to the stairway.

"Watch out, Bubo – guess who's paying us a visit?" The pirate nudged Bubo, who turned to look down the corridor. Yes, there he was, the First Mate, the plumes of his black hat swept back by the speed of his walk, the hat itself concealing most of his face. But though his expression wasn't visible, the rapid, forward-bent ferocity of his walk didn't augur well for the conversation about to take place.

Bubo sighed. It was almost lunch time, too. He turned toward Piranha and waited for the glare that would take hold of him any moment now.

However, Piranha strode up to the three pirates on guard at the entrance to the old section without looking any one of them in the eye. Without a word, not slowing his pace, he took hold of Bubo's loose shirt sleeve and continued walking. Confusedly the big pirate followed him.

Piranha dragged him through the corridor into the old section, unlocked the door of an empty cabin and pulled him inside. He practically shoved Bubo into a chair by the table and hopped onto the other one himself. Then for the first time he pushed his hat back and looked straight into Bubo's face.

"Who made this ship?" Piranha demanded.

Bubo gaped at him. "What?"

Piranha stared back with eyes black and unfathomable as space itself. "You know anything about the history of this ship, Bubo?"

"The history? You mean... uh–"

"How it got started? What kind of beings started it? Men or robots?"

Bubo straightened uneasily in his chair. "Eh... nobody really knows anything about that... just a lot of wild tales..."

Piranha shot him a sharp look. "You do know, then."

Bubo winced. "No. Just rumors. The officers... the robots... they don't like it being talked about. And you know pirates, they can't tell a story without fancying it up so much its own mother wouldn't recognize it."

Piranha didn't seem to have heard. "Bubo. Who started it all? Did this ship once belong to humans? Did robot pirates steal it from them? Or were the humans pirates themselves? Did they make the robots? Look, I'm not trying to trap you or get you into trouble. I'm just trying to understand what –" He paused. "What I've been told."

The pirate shifted again in his chair. "Piranha, the ship breeds rumors like rats, and they scatter into cracks and disappear like bugs. Who knows what's true? Me, I think this was always a robot ship. You look at the way whole sections are built, they probably weren't even airtight at one time. But nothing stops the stories. You hear things like – this ship used to be a travelling city, not a pirate vessel. Maybe a city of robots, maybe of men. Some say humans did create the robots. Or at least they created Anaconda. You hear that Anaconda was the first robot and he made the others. Or he was the last robot the humans made, and he enslaved the humans that made him. They say he had human slaves build this ship and he's been collecting slaves ever since. They say he lives on slaves, he eats their energy. Gets energy from torturing them."

Piranha was regarding him with those opaque eyes, showing no response. Bubo looked back at him with a touch of defiance. "That's what they say. They also say that Anaconda can blast apart walls just by glaring at them, and he can melt down a robot or set a human on fire with the twitch of a finger. Pirates believe anything – and the exact opposite ten minutes later. You know, I talked to a servo-robot one time who fixes the robots when they're broken, and he whispered to me – Anaconda ain't got no special powers at all. Not even the built-in weapons some of the robots have. He's armoured, he's smart, he's strong, but that's it. You think anybody will buy that?"

"I want to know what you think, Bubo. How would robots become pirates?"

"Ah, who knows? Who cares? It makes me laugh – Some stupid robot officer yells at some dumb human pirate, and you'll hear men muttering for days how there couldn't even be any of these ungrateful robots if it wasn't for us. Yeah, right, if it wasn't for us mighty men. I dunno, I never met a man who'd know how to patch together something like Anaconda, or even a bartender. And more important... who owns who around here?"

Piranha was gazing at the floor now, absently. "The robots don't like the past being talked about."

"Men have been beaten for doing that. Sometimes beaten to death. For stirring up mutiny. Even though they don't know what they're talking about."

Piranha looked at him vaguely, his thoughts obviously somewhere else.

"Piranha," Bubo added, "What I'm trying to tell you is not to trust what you hear. Did you know that you can blast apart a robot just by looking at him?"

Piranha raised an eyebrow.

"And you can pick up a guy like me and throw him through a metal bulkhead like it's made of glass. The pirates are pretty impressed with you, you know." He grinned apologetically at Piranha's grimace of disgust.

Piranha jumped to his feet and paced quickly about the room for a few moments. Then he halted, and his eyes turned with sudden, startling intensity to look at the pirate. "Bubo. You ever see an old slave, calls himself the pirate soothsayer?"

Bubo gave a gasp of comprehension. Then he chuckled, relaxing back into his chair. "Oh, him. You've been talking to that crackpot! Hell's airlocks, Piranha, he's loopy, around the bend, long gone! He'll go babbling on about evil pirates all day if you let him."

"Why does anybody let him? Why's he allowed to run loose?"

Bubo shrugged. "Ah, he's harmless enough, and lots of the pirates think he's good for a laugh. He's been on the ship a long, long time – probably does know a thing or two, the old lunatic. But don't listen to him, he'll have you tied up in knots if you do."

Unexpectedly, Piranha's lips curled back in a bitter grin. "Knots? More like, he'll complete the unravelling," he said, and darted out of the room.

Bubo stared after him in perplexity.

Bursting from the elevator onto the mess hall floor at the height of mealtime, chaotic with crowds of pirates coming and going from the eating rooms, and slaves frantically rushing about with huge multi-tiered carts laden with food, Piranha ambushed the first slave that crossed his path – a pale, angular, middle-aged male human. The slave went even more pale as the first mate seized him by the arm, but let go of the cart he was pushing and followed passively as Piranha towed him firmly down the hall and through the door into the stairway that few but Piranha himself ever used.

Piranha halted, standing a couple of steps above the slave so that they were at eye level. The man was glancing around the dimly lit stairwell, shivering a little, his dark eyes wide.

"What's your name?"

"D-Dalala."

"Do you know that old slave who says he's the pirate soothsayer?"

Startled, Dalala stopped shivering. "What, Old Fungus?"

"Tell me about him."

"There–there's not much to tell, sir. He's been on the ship practically forever. They can't sell him, he's too old and crazy. He's a trustie, has the run of the ship. He doesn't work anymore, lives on little bits of food from slaves that do work. He talks a lot. That's all I know."

"Does he tell the truth?"

The slave shifted uneasily. "I – I have no idea, sir. But some say he got the gift of prophecy from too much–" Abruptly he stopped talking.

"Go on," Piranha growled.

Dalala whispered reluctantly, "From – from too much torture, sir. With the training prod, sir."

"Training prod?"

"The – the electric stick, sir. You know, what they train slaves with."

Piranha looked at him, wrinkling his forehead. The slave added hastily, "Not blaming the pirates, First Mate, sir. He might have been trained by another slave. Most likely."

Piranha let go of Dalala's arm. "Okay," he said, quietly. "Go back to work."

But before the slave could take a step, Piranha snatched his arm again. "Wait. Do you know about the robots? How they turned pirate?"

The slave turned wide eyes on him. "What?"

"How they got this ship? Did they take it over from humans?"

"T-take over? N-no, no, it's not true."

"What's not true?"

"The-the old stories, crazy old stories – the robots didn't overthrow their masters. The robots have always been the masters."

"Overthrow? Human masters?"

The slave twitched nervously, sweat breaking out on his face. Piranha gripped his arm. "Who were the first pirates? Robots, or humans? How'd it all start? And why?"

The slave opened his mouth helplessly. He couldn't unlock his gaze from Piranha's, only looked at him piteously and said nothing.

Irritably, Piranha released him at last and gestured at him to leave. Without a word, Dalala hurried up the stairs and back into the corridor.

Piranha pressed his fists over his eyes. Out of the sickening swirl of confusion whirling round him, something was about to explode.

Striding through the corridor, he felt it all scorch through him like electricity – hatred, savagery, everything he'd ever seen on a pirate's face – greed, avid cruelty – he could feel it descend on him palpably like another spirit, another body taking possession of his, a tall black metal body – and it pulsated through him, he could maim, kill, he could thrust in a knife and twist it, he could burn, loot, pillage, he could tear a baby apart, he could fasten a captive's body to the device he knew so well, he could use the girl the way Anaconda had intended — Everything that had ever been done to him or his, anything he'd ever seen done by anyone around him, no matter how he'd resisted it at the time, anything that had ever paralyzed him with horror – with ferocity he could seize it and thrust it away from himself, with fierce satisfaction he could use it to impale, avenge, punish –

And he fetched up against a wall. He held still there, pressing himself sideways against the metal bulkhead.

Yes, violence, a simple act of desperation. Like he'd tried a while ago in the bar. Very simple, to take the torment inflicted on you and thrust it onto somebody else. Quick, easy, and after a bit, sickening. Then to relieve the sickness, do it again, and go on doing it over and over again, while you spun into an ever-descending spiral, an addiction, an accumulating madness. Was that how you became a pirate, a true pirate?

Surely he'd have become one himself long ago if not for that faint tether binding him back to his home planet, forcing him to continue to be the pirates' victims in the same moment that he was arranging their victimization.

Didn't he have a right to go mad? Maybe he already had, maybe he already was crazy.

He was the most evil thing on the ship, after all. The old man had said. He was evil because he knew he was evil? Like the first? The first? Anaconda? Is that what he meant? Did anything that old savage said mean anything at all?

That old slave, that self-righteous fraud, no better than Piranha himself – shunting his misery onto others with violent words.

Though ... what he was doing was perhaps a little more crafty. Attacking with mockery. Mocking the tormentors, mocking the torment itself. Not quite as self-righteous as thrusting a knife through somebody. You have to take yourself pretty damn seriously to do that.

Piranha turned his back to the wall, leaning against it, and looked at the passersby. What could be more alien to him than these creatures, human or robot? An amorphous enemy, like some mythical being with thousands of faceless heads. The personal struggle he contended with hour by hour had nothing to do with their world, their preoccupations, their ambitions. It was a dramatic world that surrounded him, however. Anaconda, Hacker, Blargh when he was alive, Bubo, all the rest, all caught up in one deadly game or another, some life-or-death struggle, each one with his chosen enemies, each one with his strategy, each one fiercely determined to do others in, come out on top, squelch somebody, get the most of something, or just avoid being killed... Even the slaves were in the fray, like Elly, who hardly even knew how to smile, she was so oppressed by sheer desperation to survive. Utter struggle, utter seriousness.

Oh, but of course he was caught up in it. Hadn't – Rayman made a deal? Bent on preserving his planet, wasn't that the deal he had made? To be willing to pay any price; and to make anyone else, any innocent from any planet, pay any price? Could it get any more serious?

That old slave in his long life had been through it all, and had stepped aside from it, to mock it. ... And Piranha knew, his body knew to the core, the kind of thing he had stepped aside from. He knew how much power the mere sight of an instrument of torture could finally take on in one's eyes, in one's nerves. He knew what degradation the waiting, waiting for the next moment could finally bring you to. He knew how it was to have your soul torn out, to be left empty, and ... afterwards, to have to fill in the gaping space. What you stuffed in there, haphazardly, was never going to be as clean and tidy as what was there before. And you would never be sure, in the end, whether you'd been praying to the gods or cursing all the demons of hell... or whether you'd ever again believe there was any difference between them.

Piranha closed his eyes. Anaconda had won. He'd won not only the battle to take Rayman's planet, but the war. He'd been waging a war to crush Rayman, to defeat him completely, and he'd won. That was his victory: finally to cause Rayman to lose not a fight, but himself – to take all the spirit, the lightness, the joy of life, even the joy of battle out of him, and drag him down to Anaconda's own detached, disconnected, lifeless mechanical level. Which would be – Piranha. Could Rayman ever have imagined being so deadly serious, so – well, dead?

And there was Anaconda, still striving to crush Piranha's spirit, to humiliate him into obedience, to stifle every last twitch of independence. As if Piranha himself wasn't busily engaged, day by day, minute by minute, breath by breath, in suppressing himself into something more robotic than the robots. Dreading every moment of consciousness, fleeing every thought, fighting off every memory, every emotion. What could Anaconda possibly could do to him to equal that?

Piranha stood still, his hands pressed behind him against the wall, looking out into the corridor but seeing nothing. He was scarcely breathing.

Then, suddenly, he fell back, black-gloved hands shielding his eyes, and began to laugh. It wasn't pleasant laughter, it was choked and difficult, verging on tears; but, oblivious to the startled glances of the passing crew, he leaned against the wall, hiding his face, and laughed painfully, helplessly, for a long time.

At last the laughter slowed, stopped. He held motionless for a while, hands still covering his face, still on the edge of tears. Then he straightened up and looked around.

He wiped his face. There was an odd light in his eyes.

All right. He was Piranha: a slave, though of slightly higher caste, to the conqueror of his people. He still didn't see any other possibility. But – for the first time since he had been captured on his planet, perhaps even before that – he felt within himself the stirring of a little hope. It was a terrible thing, broken and painful, far more painful than despair, and he was more than halfway resisting it himself. But it was alive.

He took a long breath. He wasn't Rayman, thank the gods. It was unbearable to think of Rayman, the Guardian, defiled and compromised by a thousand ugly, evil, unavoidable actions. All that was good enough for Piranha, created to survive in hell – there was nothing pure or noble or heroic about him.

But – he was nobody's puppet. If he was going to live in hell, he was damned if he'd consent to be absorbed by it. And he was damned, damned, damned if he'd go on having to be forced into action, weeping and whining, by the dead ghost of an idealized, impossibly spotless hero who could have no feeling for the likes of him anyway but contempt.

There were things he did care about. He would take his own actions, for his own reasons, and he would face up to the consequences himself.

And it dawned on him that the war wasn't over yet, after all. No, the battle was still going on. Wasn't Anaconda still trying to crush him? He didn't think he'd won. Piranha's dark eyes brightened a little, he flexed his fists.

He couldn't fight his enemy directly. He must follow implicitly all the rules he'd agreed to. But that didn't mean he was defeated. He was still alive, wasn't he? He took another deep breath, and almost staggered with the sudden flood of relief that swept over him.

He leaned back against the wall, tears in his eyes. Tears of relief. It was true. He didn't have to be forced into anything. Not by Anaconda, not by the Guardian either. He was in a situation that couldn't be anything but painful, but – no, he would never be anyone's slave. He belonged to himself.

The tears overflowed for a moment. Rayman was dead, safely dead, uncorrupted, free. He could rest, he wasn't needed. He could rest. Piranha wiped his eyes.

He straightened up, looking around. He felt very odd – as though he'd just arrived, been dumped here unceremoniously from some other existence. Though he couldn't see why he should feel that way. Nothing had really changed.

Yes, something had changed. He had ceased to be a pawn. He was about to become once more a player.

Darkly, he smiled.