Chapter 60

“You once asked me a question,” Marcus said, the flickering embers of his candlelights throwing his hunched shadow across the walls of his cramped chambers at the edge of Fort Spearclaw. “At the time, I don’t think it was something I’d ever really thought about.”

It was strange. He felt nervous addressing his guest, like the very first time they’d met on the battlefield of ideas. Then, he’d fought alone, against an armada. It seemed right that he should face his once-foe here and now, alone.

In life, that would have probably been a good thing. Away from the prying eyes and the chittering of the crowds, maybe they could have spoken more amicably. Or, at the very least, disagreed with each other without coming to blows.

“You asked if I could look upon a sea of soldiers’ corpses and tell them their sacrifice was worth it. I’ll answer you plainly: no. The dead don’t write history.”

The irony of this situation was not lost on Marcus. As he leaned back in his wooden chair, rocking like a man well beyond his years, he pondered how fickle fate could be. The ratguards of Skeever had waddled up to him after the battle, during their ‘cleanup’ of the wounded on the field. They had seemed agitated and then, as they drew closer, Marcus saw that excitement permeated every pore of their filthy bodies. They practically shook, giddy as schoolgirls, as they opened the sack they carried in their claws and spilled its contents at Marcus’s feet.

When Marcus saw what they had just given him, he had simply stood motionless for perhaps a full minute.

They chittered amongst themselves, explaining that the stupid toad must have thought to wound the Shai-Alud by decapitating one of his own kind and waving it around during the battle.

But Marcus knew the truth. Skegga’s cocky determinism and mass-committal now made sense in the context: the oafish toad had thought this human head was Marcus’s.

And now here that head sat, in a bloody heap, almost unrecognizable were it not for its baby blue eyes that Marcus would know a hundred miles away. He had met such eyes with burning hate enough times to have a clear mental picture of the man who bore them.

“Somehow,” he said, looking into the rotted skull of Stephen Barenz. “The fact they couldn’t tell the difference between you and me is perfect. Just perfect – as elegant an encapsulation of their knowledge of variance within races as you or I could ever hope to see.”

Before him, sloping ever so slightly on a dusty chair, Barenz’s head sat and stared unblinkingly by way of response.

Marcus had very little notion of what wicked compulsion had compelled him to take the bloody thing and prop it up in front of him, and even less of an idea what had prompted him to pace the room as though he was about to engage the inanimate chunk of flesh in yet another one of their ‘debates’.

“How long ago was that?” he asked the head, shaking his own. “Seems like a lifetime. Maybe it was – maybe time dilation works differently here. Who am I to know how this world operates? I’m just a General, eh?”

The head of his rival stared back, unimpressed.

Marcus leaned back in his seat, sagging and wheezing like a deflated balloon – all energy seeping out from every weary pore of his sweating body.

“You would love this,” he said. “Seeing me doing exactly what you said ‘my kind’ do – making war and leading people astray. You know, when that Dwarf spoke to me, he reminded me of you, somewhat. So certain that your enemies are wrong. So ready to whip an entire nation into a frenzy because you think that, out of every scholar and philosopher in the history of the known world, you’re the one who has the right of it. You’ve figured out the universe, and you’re gonna make damn sure everybody knows it.”

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Again – no response. Marcus felt himself insulted. It was as though he actually believed the voice of Barenz – mocking and dripping with sarcasm – would emit from the drooping mouth of the head and rebuke him in death.

“But I can’t hate you,” Marcus said, closing his eyes to the sight of his dead opponent. “I never did, you know. To hate you would mean I would box you off, label you deviant, and then just be done listening to you. But I don’t think ideas should exist in a vacuum. I don’t think Echo Chambers are healthy for an intellectually curious society or for the promotion of critical thinking. And yet,” he laughed, almost maniacally, “Here I am, leading a movement with myself as figurehead, even as I know the only result will be chaos.”

He stood up and began pacing the four-walled chamber again, intent on delivering his thoughts to Barenz. On a few occasions as he spoke, he contemplated whether madness had finally overtaken him. Maybe some disease had finally gnawed away at his rational thoughts and was killing him slowly. He thought at one point that he might even be having a stroke.

But that would have been a far too easy way for him to go.

“I wonder how they did you in?” he mused, glancing sidelong at the unassuming head. “Treachery? Torture? Or just a quick and easy slash across the neck? The worst part is you died as a martyr, probably still believing everything you always believed. Never once questioning your place in this world or the place of others…”

Marcus sat down again, looking around him to make sure no skittering stalker was poking his snout where it didn’t belong.

“I’ll tell you something I think you’ll like,” he said. “The truth is: I wish I could be like you. I wish I could believe something so concretely – have it become such an inexorable part of myself that separating me from the idea would be like eviscerating an arm or a leg – and never once be forced to consider the flaws in my worldview. You and your Unifiers had it so easy, you just didn’t know it. Just like these rat-priests. Just like the Kobolds who crawl beneath Skegga’s feet. Or at least, who once crawled beneath them. Now, I have to give them something else to believe in.”

He watched the skull carefully, as though probing for any minute movement of its charred lashes. But all he saw were the maggots moving underneath its eyeballs.

“It would be so easy to say that it’s all guff,” he whispered into his clasped hands. “I wish I could say ‘to hell with it all!’ and decry every churchgoer and pulpit-preacher and alleyway End-Times screamer who are so fixed on their ideologies that they can’t see the suffering in front of them. But I can’t. I can’t make a monolith out of you no matter how much you’d do the same to me – to men like me who you saw as nothing more than stuck in the past. Maybe you had the right of it, there. After all, that’s now exactly what I am, even if it is what’s keeping me alive down here. Equally, we could see the irony in our current situation and say that I ‘won’ in the end. I have an army of rats that worship me, and you’ll soon be dead in the dirt. I honestly don’t know which one of us is the luckier man.”

Marcus was suddenly jolted by the sounds of the ratman war-horns blowing outside, signaling the movement of their combined forces. It would be a long march back to Fleapit, and then to the Black Gulch where the end of this horror would finally come.

“Maybe I’m growing sentimental,” Marcus said when the horns stopped their dolorous humming. “Maybe I just crave conversation with one of my own kind so much that I’m allowing you more concessions than I ever would were you alive. I wonder, would you do the same to me if our situations were reversed?”

Again, no answer from the head.

“Probably not,” Marcus finished. “But a man can dream that people change. We’re shaped by our experiences, after all. And I’m not the man I was when I stepped on that stage after you.”

He rose and made for the door, looking back over his shoulder at the vacant skull that he was about to leave behind. In truth, his heart felt heavy. The action of conversing with his old rival was purely symbolic – he knew that. Yet, equally, he felt that something of Steven was still there. Something that was demanding an answer.

“I will say that you were wrong about one thing,” he said, looking at the door like it would lead him towards a whole new plane of existence once he passed through its threshold. “Unity can be accomplished through war. I’m seeing the results of this every day. The real question is: is this the kind of unity we want?”

He decided to let the question hang. Somehow, no response was the most appropriate way to end his one-sided conversation with the last vestige of his past. For, this time, it was a question that neither man had the answer to.

Without another word, Marcus bowed and bid farewell to Steven Barenz, leaving the rotted skull of his foe shrouded in darkness forevermore.

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