Eight Black Offerings Read online

  Eight Black Offerings

  By Robert Lamb

  Copyright © 2014 by Robert Lamb

  Cover design by Bonnie Heath

  Cover art by Phon Promwisate/Shutterstock

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Robert Lamb

  www.rjlamb.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition, 2014

  “Manse of the Mathematician” first appeared in Polluto Magazine, edited by Victoria Hooper © 2013 by Robert Lamb.

  “My Curious Void” first appeared in Bite Me Robot Boy, edited by Adam Lowe © 2012 by Robert Lamb.

  “Children of IVA” first appeared in Polluto Magazine, edited by Victoria Hooper © 2011 by Robert Lamb.

  “Subway Mandala” first appeared in Polluto Magazine, edited by Victoria Hooper © 2012 by Robert Lamb.

  “TrasnGenesis” first appeared in Polluto Magazine, edited by Adam Lowe © 2011 by Robert Lamb.

  “God of Wounds” first appeared as “Foreskin” in Bite Me Robot Boy, edited by Adam Lowe © 2012 by Robert Lamb.

  “Murk” first appeared in Polluto Magazine, edited by Adam Lowe © 2008 by Robert Lamb.

  “The Brutes” © 2014 by Robert Lamb.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  1: Manse of the Mathematician

  2: A Curious Void

  3: The Children of IVA

  4: Subway Mandala

  5: TransGenesis

  6: God of Wounds

  7: Murk

  8: The Brutes

  Notes

  About the Author

  Prologue

  The gods of Thailand shimmer in the sun.

  Vishnu ascends on a Garuda’s golden wing while four-faced Phra Phrom gazes out from his glittering throne. The half-avian Kinnaree play their flutes, the people toil and these are our cycles in the sun -- the dance that keeps us floating above a sea of bitter night.

  But here is something we all know: There is one who hungers in the depths. The Thai know him as Phra Rahu, an Asura of darkness. His countenance is grim. His appetite is endless, for no meal can find the belly of this cleaved and fallen god. He hungers for the sun and his failed attempts to swallow it eclipse the world’s light.

  The dark finds us all, and so the people offer up prayers to Phra Rahu. They present him eight black offerings to ward against the night. Against pain. Against impermanence.

  So I give you eight offerings of my own – eight dark, disturbing, existential tales against the curses of our world.

  Manse of the Mathematician

  NOVEMBER 2: He doesn’t see me most of the time. I’m not a woman. I’m not a person. I’m at best a tool. A genderless instrument left to wander the stone hallways of this fortress, lost to the peripherals till the need for my skills arise.

  That's when the mathematician turns and looks through me with those grey-blue eyes.

  "Fetch your utensils," he mumbles through pale, pink lips. "The clinic. Twenty minutes."

  He towers over most of us, a thin man in his late 60s, seemingly hairless. I have never seen him agitated. I have never seen him smile.

  Today the last shipment of supplies entered the castle. Sacks of flour, pickle barrels and great wheels of cheese. A beautiful sight to behold. I thought I even glimpsed a cask of wine amid some lesser sundries.

  Once the items were inside, Marzell the mathematician ordered the men raise the drawbridge and pour cement into the gear houses. Then, brick by brick, they sealed the castle's lone exit to the outside world.

  Some of the prisoners wept.

  The soldiers whispered.

  Marzell turned his back and returned to his endless calculations.

  NOVEMBER 3: Before the war, Marzell was the golden child of imperial academia. At age nine, he solved Tannhäuser's Conjecture. At ten, he won the Crown's chess invitational. Conquest after conquest fell to his terrifying intellect. He laid waste to millennia-tested axioms and forged proofs that rewrote physics and skewed humanity's long-accepted place amid the stars. He thrived amid numbers, shunned the living and inhabited instead a world of pure abstraction.

  But the war came for Marzell the Mathematician just as it came for all of us. Thus his work here at the castle.

  When he commands it, I fetch my "utensils" and meet him in the room he calls his "clinic." It's just another windowless stone vault, of course. The castle if full of them, many partially collapsed. Who knows what purpose they served a hundred years ago?

  The clinic is empty save a single metal table and an electric lamp mounted on a wrought iron tripod. It looms behind me like some giant insect, humming as I unpack the items in my little leather bag: a cluster of sterile needles, gauze, bandages, a motor and the portable battery I use to power it. I have a booklet of designs as well, but I never bother with it here.

  Marzell always tells me what to etch.

  My specialty was always religious iconography. Crosses. Saints. Protective glyphs. That sort of thing. Business only picked up with the eruption of total war.

  One might argue that I marketed my self-taught tattoo skills rather shamelessly -- that I implied protective or even curative properties of my work. Indeed, that's exactly what the Home Guard charged when they swarmed my apartment. I can still see them now, dressed in their traditional scalloped black body armor, festooned with the golden iconography of empire and death. The booted skull. The savage tooth. The Eagle and the Sphere of Heaven.

  Those are all in my little design book as well, by the way. All the symbols we attach meaning to. I've yet to inscribe on my own flesh.

  After my arrest, I was sure they'd send me to the front. After all, the war effort grows dire. They no longer discriminate by age, gender or fitness. I resigned myself to death in some hellish latrine trench or out on the cratered no man's land beyond.

  Yet here I am in this mountain fortress, sleeping each night with a warm meal in my belly and a wool blanket pulled over my head.

  All while the world burns.

  A prisoner jumped from the battlements today. We scanned the wooded cliffs below but saw no sign of his remains.

  NOVEMBER 5: More of the same. Marzell commanded me to the clinic, and there he gave me a list of "edits." A Home Guard solider escorted three servants and one prisoner of war into the room. They were broken and silent. I'd worked on them before.

  One by one, they presented their canvas to me. On some, I merely altered existing numerals. Other times, I had to cross out lengthy equations and scrawl new ones in the flesh. I might needle Marzell's figures onto forearm one minute, then the tender flesh of a sternum or forehead the next. More and more he requests genital tattoos and for these he allows me to administer anesthetic.

  "The markings must be legible," he told me. "Do whatever's needed to steady the canvas."

  I do what I can to steady my hand as well. He gave no answer when I asked him for spirits. But that evening I returned to my room to find a bottle of bloodroot brandy by my cot. I ration it sparingly.

  NOVEMBER 7: We’ve barely begun this venture and already prisoners and servants alike walk the halls in varying stages of nudity and inscription. Per Marzell's command and upon pain of death, all marks must be visible at all times -- save during his sporadic periods of sleep.

  Bare-chested men and woman pass me in the halls, their ribs and sternum canvassed in numerical conjecture. Backs bear the scourge of innumerable proofs. Eve
n the Home Guard soldiers are not immune to Marzell's calculations. Still-bleeding calculus sleeves half the men's arms.

  Only the mathematician and I remain unmarked.

  He walks these halls in his grey robes, attended to by two soldiers at all times. As he happens on this prisoner or that, he commands new and perplexing Tableau vivants of his living game pieces.

  Today he arranged ten naked prisoners into a human pyramid, painstakingly calculating each person's flesh-writ numerical significance. He commanded several positioning changes before the structure met his specifications.

  He circled the pyramid, stood back and examined it from various vantage points. No one dared speak. At long last he made some notations in his dog-eared ledger and turned to leave without a word.

  NOVEMBER 11: Marzell lives in a world of abstraction -- a world I can scarcely fathom. But occasionally he speaks to himself and some of that I understand.

  "Numbers no more describe the universe than atoms describe the objects they compose," he mumbled today as I needled his numbers into a servant girl's back. "They are the universe inexhaustible."

  If that's so, is there an equation for heaven and hell?

  An equation for God?

  I inscribed three whole pages onto the weeping girl's back, blood obscuring my work on an inflamed canvas. She trembled despite the painkillers, and so did I despite my flask of bloodroot brandy.

  When I finished, Marzell studied the results -- commanded her dance and twirl for him in the glow of the humming clinic light. He made notations as always.

  Then he ordered a soldier to shoot her in the head.

  Just like that.

  He made the briefest of notations in his yellow ledger, then tucked it under his arm and left the soldier and me standing over her body. We both trembled in the chill, musty air.

  He holstered his weapon and told me to help him mop the floor. He made me carry her body up to the battlements and there I looked up at the night sky and hoped to see the stars. But there were none. Only grey clouds. In the distance I glimpsed the titanic shapes of airships, illuminated by the glow of a burning Imperial city.

  So far they've left us alone here. Perhaps they don't know the castle exists, much less that the world's greatest mathematician labors here to somehow turn the tide.

  I wonder how long it will last.

  I threw the dead girl's body over the side and watched it plummet down the cliffs to the wolves below.

  NOVEMBER 13: I've emptied the last of the brandy and so far can't seem to locate a replacement bottle. I don’t dare ask Marzell.

  No one questions my wanderings anymore. The soldiers keep to themselves and the cooks -- all marked by my needle -- assume I wander the storeroom for a reason. The remaining quantities of food are somewhat disconcerting.

  Marzell's tableaus grow increasingly debauched. He wanders with no less than four soldiers at all times these days, forcing random combinations of prisoners, servants and soldiers into varied acts of copulation, violence or performance art. All at gunpoint. All on pain of death.

  I say prisoners, servants and soldiers, but these classes no longer exist. We are only slavers and slaves now.

  Last night he brought everyone into the circular throne room. Seated upon a stool where once a golden chair may have stood, he orchestrated an orgy the likes of which Sade himself would have praised.

  Without the slightest visible sign of passion, the mathematician ordered varying and overlapping combinations of carnality. Where male slaves lacked the vigor to perform, he selected soldiers. Most stepped up to their carnal duties without question. Moans, grunts and the rhythmic slap of copulation rose up in a chorus. The throne room floor writhed as a sea of flesh and stank of sweat and honey.

  Marzell watched on without seeing, focusing instead on the interaction of their numerical properties. He scribbled endlessly in his yellow ledger and called me over to adjust the markings on no fewer than a dozen slaves and soldiers.

  My dreams afterward were strange. I can't bring myself to write them.

  NOVEMBER 17: The number of slaves dwindles. We suffered one suicide, two executions for insubordination and four more died during the orchestration of Marzell's cruel scenes. I helped drag them all to the battlements. The wolves howled in anticipation far below.

  The orgies occur nightly now, each more violent and depraved than the last. Two of the soldiers in particular, Volas and Thad, seem to revel in the mathematician's commands, as if their own violent and debased pasts were just rehearsals for this. They both still bleed with my inscriptions, the sting of which they seemed to relish.

  I don't watch anymore. At first I couldn't help but find some level of titillation in the proceedings, but no more. I avert my eyes and pinch my ears against the cries, at least until Marzell calls to me and bids me step forth to needle the flesh of slave and rapist alike.

  Sometimes I catch glances from Volas or Thad that chill me. In this cruel paradise of theirs, I alone am forbidden to them. I try to avoid them when not in Marzell's presence, just in case they grow bold.

  I've taken to walking the battlements in the evenings, past the stone angels crushing monsters underfoot. Swords drawn toward the heavens, blank eyes cast down to this lost mountain redoubt. I watch the fires on the horizon, listen to the wolves and wonder when the airships will close in on us.

  NOVEMBER 19: An entire day passes and Marzell has yet to emerge from his quarters. The mood is tense and uncertain. Volas and Thad pace the hallways in impotent longing. How long will they honor the will of an absent master? The other soldiers keep to the barracks, while blanket-wrapped slaves find what comfort they can.

  When night fell, I took to the battlements again and chanced a prayer before one of the stone angels. I begged for guidance. Despite my former trade in religious tattoos, I've never been a believer. But I've never felt this desperate.

  NOVEMBER 23: Marzell emerged from his quarters after four days of solitude. He seems paler, more emaciated -- less a creature of flesh and more a revenant imposed on this vile castle and its inhabitants. His robes are stained and wretched, his voice even slighter than before.

  He summoned his two loyal rapists. I saw him lean in close whisper to them at length. The blood drained from even Volas' cruel face at what those dry lips had to say.

  I know some revelation is at hand.

  Has he solved the Emperor's mathematical quandary? Is the empire saved? The war effort revitalized? Are we free to abandon this place, or has he merely devised some final and catastrophic means of reaching his answer?

  And to what end? He has revealed neither the Emperor's task, nor how these tableaus help to make the answer clear. All we know is that the entire war effort hinges on the answer.

  The soldiers whisper varying theories. Some speculate he seeks to break the enemy's code. Others assume the work relates to a devastating secret weapon -- a power that answers only to mathematical perfection. I even heard a slave whisper that Marzell practices numerological sorcery and seeks to free a demon from some ancient relic.

  But I don't think it matters anymore, least of all to Marzell. He sees the world in abstraction. He sees a mathematical universe spiraling off into void. Regardless of its import, he desires his elusive answer for its own sake.

  I went straight to the battlements and confessed all these worries to the stone angel. I asked her for guidance and protection, even as I glimpsed the faint glow of burning farms and villages in the distance.

  The absurdity isn't lost on me. Here I am, seeking deliverance from this secluded refuge. The world burns. The Empire may well have already fallen.

  Still I prayed for help.

  And impossibly, I heard the angel whisper in reply.

  "Bring the ledger to me tomorrow night," she said, "and I will save you."

  I rushed straight to my room, to this scribbled journal. I can't sleep. All I can think on are those words.

  NOVEMBER 29: Preparations have begun for Marzell's final tabl
eau. The soldiers drag the necessary items up from the castle's deep cellars: great lengths of black chain, barrels of oil, and three chests of field surgery equipment I didn't even know we had.

  His list of edits is exhaustive, and once more I butcher the hides of soldier and slave alike with my needle. I'm running out of canvas on most of them, forcing tattoos on even less ideal places: the soles of feet, faces, hands and freshly-shaven heads. The slaves especially eye me with loathing and hatred. I want to whisper to them, to tell them what the angel said and reassure them. But I can't risk it.

  Meanwhile, Marzell is never without his yellow ledger. If he's not writing in it, then it's tucked under his arm. So I waited for him to retire to his quarters.

  Early this evening he finally did.

  I followed him as he took his usual course through the halls, and then rushed ahead of through another route. As planned, I entered his quarters just ahead of the mathematician himself.

  The room reeked of neglect. Piss and shit overflowed both bedpans. Flakes of number-scrawled parchment littered the floor and various texts lay open throughout the room.

  I squeezed myself beneath the room's great double bed, waited and watched his loafers enter the room. The door shut behind them. I tried as best I could to see where he stowed his precious ledger, but it seemed he climbed into bed with it.

  As I waited for him to fall asleep, fairy tale predicaments ran through my head: the key in the sleeping witch's pocket, the sword in the napping giant's hand. I'd have to reenact these fitful moments of drama and ease the book from his vile hands.

  Would stealth even cut it, or would I have to assault him? Could I make it back to the battlements before the soldiers caught me? Or should I drown him in his foul slop bucket now?

  When I heard his snores, I knew it was time to find out.

  I crawled from beneath the old bed, careful not to stir the scraps of paper. A single lamp still burned in the room, giving life to all the absurd notations affixed to the walls and to the calculations writ in black ink across every available surface.