Gregor The Cripple

“Are there any dragons nearby, do you know?”

“I haven’t been here in years, but I would guess not. They’ve kept to themselves recently.”

“Oh.” Mildred nodded distractedly.

Gregor had a question of his own. “Why do you think you need me? I understand that you had enemies in your time, but nobody other than me knows that you still exist.”

“They always knew where to find me, no matter what I did. And some of them were undead, I think.” She shook her head. “I’m not going to count on them having given up.”

Even in the mud of Gregor’s mind, Mildred’s words struck a chord of familiarity. Undead pursuers with prescient knowledge? Hmm. Were these his enemies? Was this a sign that the Norn had taken him up on his bargain?

Mere chronosynchronicity does not divine intervention make, but it was something more to consider.

“I take it that your father’s influence kept you safe before you left.”

“I think so. I think they’ve been after me my whole life, but I just didn’t realise it until I was alone.” She paused, plodding alone morosely before continuing, close to tears. “He probably thinks they got to me. I left him a note, saying that I was going out beyond the village, then I never came home. I hope he didn’t spend too long looking.”

Gregor was in a curious position. For some reason he wanted to console her, but found himself utterly incapable. Though he was confident in his genius, in this area he was incompetent without recourse.

‘Relation,’ he had once heard, ‘is the essence of sympathy.’ So, not knowing what else to do, he went with that.

“I never had a father.” He stated simply. “I am told that I was a street orphan before my master found me.”

“At least you had someone.”

Gregor barked out a wheezing laugh. “Having a master in place of a father is far worse for a young boy than having neither, though I am glad that it happened to me. Witches take foundlings as daughter-apprentices. Wizards do no such thing. You cannot treat a son as a wizard or a wizard as a son if you wish to have either.”

Both kept silent after that as they walked the road to Apfeloch, mindful of the circumstances of the other.

They made their destination by sundown and sought lodgings. It was a decently large agrarian town that made business of the keeping of orchards and the harvesting of honey, which were apparently complimentary industries.

The traveler's lodge was decent, and they obtained a room with two cots on Gregor’s coin, because Mildred had none stamped by any recent government – the empire was rather strict about legal tender. She pledged to pay him back later, though he didn’t really care. After all, there was perhaps nowhere in the world that a wizard would find money hard to gain.

Gregor was subsequently ejected from the room so that Mildred might make use of the washbasin to clear seventy years of accumulated cave dust and grime.

So then, he found himself becoming numb in the corner of a strategically proximate bierhaus. The local vogue was evidently hot cider, and he quite enjoyed it.

The publican sat on a stool by the bar, and was loudly reading the day’s newspaper to a group of local men.

“Sine assassination precipitates conflict!” He announced, vocalising with emphasis the blocky heading atop the front page. “Golden queen promises trade trouble to meddling third parties; quote, ‘Those who seek to grow this conflict beyond its current nature as a local matter for their own gain shall find themselves economically burdened by their decision.’ End quote. Her statement comes just days after the devastating attack on Wurmburg!”

“Meddling?” Jeered one of the men. “She’s the one meddling!”

“’Bet the old tart started the whole thing ‘erself, jus’ to have an excuse to be more involved on the continent. ‘S an economic powerplay by ‘er, s’what I say!”

“Right! That business in Wurmburg’s prolly her too. Tryna’ make us more reliant on her exports.”

Evidently, none of them had devious enough a mind to suspect that the newspaper might be trying to direct public discontent in a certain direction for certain reasons.

It was then that one of the crowd turned to Gregor. “Oy, Wizzerd," he began, "you know anythin’ ‘bout this? Bein’ that you lot are worldly sorts ‘n all.”

“I hate politics." Gregor responded. "When a poltician wants something from a wizard, it’s never pleasant.” This was met with a murmur of ‘yeah’ and ‘sounds about right’.

He continued, “I try not to pay attention to these things, but I generally agree that the attack on Wurmburg was economically motivated. However, I suspect it was one of your immediate neighbours who would stand to gain from your future economic downturn, rather than the Queen across the sea.”

“How ‘ye figure that?”

“She has a reputation among people of my profession as being overly ethical and generally counterproductive to developments in the field of magical violence. She doesn’t seem like the sort to smartly start a conflict half-way around the world.”

One of the men snorted, “That’s just the ‘good queen’ mask she wears. She’s a politician, and all politicians are snakes, ‘can’t trust any of ‘em. Her inquisitors are on the continent now, too. Old hag’s up to something.”

Gregor grinned. “Once again, I agree with you in general. But my master knew her personally. He was the snake in this instance, and he knew first-hand how she liked to punish the wicked.”

At that moment, the night was cut by a shriek. It was male, but it came from the lodge.

With a snap, he was up in the air outside. Before gravity could make good its tyranny, he teleported again, arriving at the the lodge.

He found a half-clothed Mildred standing in their room grasping tight the handle of a shattered ceramic jug. At her feet writhed a man, bleeding and scalded.

***

Mildred was fine, the man was not.

“He’s human,” Gregor assessed, “and properly alive, but he is odd. He isn’t magical, but there’s magic about him, or in him, I think. This is irregular.”

“He’s not going to die, is he? I clonked him pretty hard." Worry creased her otherwise perfect face (in Gregor's opinion), "I’m fairly strong, and sometimes people die when I do that.”

The man was sitting there, staring at Gregor with wide eyes, his lips moving, mouthing ‘the wizard is here,’ over and over.

“Not immediately, but he’s dead soon either way, so it really doesn’t matter.”

Gregor turned to the man in question, who was restrained on the floor. The inkeeper had come to investigate the noise, but was scared away by a glare from the pissed-off wizard.

“Your options are ‘painfully’ or ‘quickly’. Speak.”

The man jittered as he shook his head, obviously terrified.

Gregor squatted down before the man and slapped him twice on the cheek, once playfully, once hard. “This isn’t a joke, I really will torture you to death.”

Mildred pursed her lips, looking quite uncomfortable, but didn’t speak up.

“What do you think would happen if one massive hand gripped you by your shoulders, and another by your feet, and then they both twisted in opposite directions? Do you want to find out? I do. We can find out together!” Gregor had a horrible, brutal grin as he telekinetically lifted the man. “Speak.” He commanded once more.

Mildred huffed and went to leave the room, looking quite uneasy.

The man shook his head again before she made the door, this time opening his mouth to show the ugly stump of a severed tongue, grunting and wailing.

“Are you literate? Can you write?”

A desperate nod.

“Will you?”

Another nod.

The wizard grinned more widely. “You should have just said so.”

Gregor dropped him with a thump, and thew a small vial of ink from the depths of his robe. “You’ll need to use your fingers, I hope you understand.”

The man nodded a third time, feeling one of his hands come free.

“Who is it? What is the name of my new enemy?”

Cautiously, as if unsure of the liberty of his movement, the man reached up to scratch the side of his head. He then tapped his temple four times and crumpled to the floor, dead.

Gregor was left staring at the corpse of his captive, fury mounting, blood thundering in his ears. His upper lip trembled as it pulled back into an angry sneer. Failure had found him once more.

Mildred noticed the air grow heavy. She took a step back from the wizard.

He could fix this.

“Tell me,“ He said, fixing her with a monocular glare, “you were willing to let me torture that man, how terrible of a thing would you tolerate?”

“I thought you were bluffing. I was bluffing.”

“I gouged out my own eye.” He delivered simply. It was a statement of demonstration.

“…Oh.” she uttered softly, slightly crestfallen, understanding that he had few limits in the realm of brutality. Strangely, it seemed that she pitied him, rather than hated him.

“I can still get answers. If you would chastise me, do it once I am successful.”

“But he’s dead?”

“Death is no impediment.” Gregor parroted the words of the lich.

Being so excellently educated, Gregor was naturally an adept necromancer. The practice was criminal almost everywhere, though that didn’t really concern him.

He began by pulling a stick of strange black wax from his hat. This he melted in a stump-born flame until only slightly viscous. Then, he drew it into a series of crude runes on the forehead of the corpse with a small brush. A pale green-grey luminescence issued from these as he forced his magic to worm through them.

The foul spellwork made him shiver. It was cold and slimy upon the mind.

As the vague spectre of a man gradually flickered into being abover the corpse, Mildred took a further step back, quite unsure of what she was seeing.

The ghost of the man, whom Gregor had now seanced, was jittering and twitching in response to its presence in an unnaturally corporeal environment.

As his face gained definition, it became clear that he was far more terrified now than before.

“I said that I would torture you to death.” Gregor intoned, still furious at his captive’s escape from life. “I never said that I would stop at death.”

“You don’t understand!” The ghost screamed, voice ethereal and multi-toned. “You’ve damned me now! I was just dead. Regular dead! Now I’m damned! You-.” The ghost disappeared, his illusory self disintegrating into a million motes of ephemera which evaporated to nothing.

The corpse on the floor made a sudden inhale, then spoke in a fleeting whisper. “My servants are not yours to touch, wizard.” The body then followed the ghost in disintegration.

Gregor stood still, eye burning a hole into the newly bare ground, his fury blunted by confusion. This magic was beyond his ken.

There was a fwump behind him. “Gregor, that was terrifying. Explain to me what the fuck just happened so I can stop being scared.” Mildred was sitting on her bed now, wide-eyed and pale.

“Well,” he began, still working things out as he went, “I’m not quite sure. When a person’s body ceases vital function, the soul loses its tether. Usually, it’s drawn to an afterlife, which is a kind of psychonautical epicentre existing in astral planescape.”

“Gregor.”

“Right, don’t bother with that. Point being, he died and I pulled him back as a ghost, but someone noticed. They reached out to shatter his soul right in front of us. He no longer exists in either body or soul. This is not an ability that belongs to mortal things.”

Mildred, though ignorant of the specifics, understood the general idea quite quickly. She licked her dry lips. “My enemy is quite dangerous.”

“You should not be alive.” Gregor affirmed.

At least, not without similarly powerful assistance, he thought to himself. “…Have you ever heard the term ‘Worldeater’ from your pursuers?”

She shook her head.

“What about ‘The Norn’?”

Mildred though for a moment. “Once.” She said.

It seemed that Gregor was the assistance.

***

Morning saw them out and away from Apfeloch on new horses, navigating not to the capital as Gregor had originally planned, but toward Mildred’s village.

At her hip hung Greta’s revolver, a modern contraption which fascinated her endlessly. Apparently she had developed a mind for mechanism under the education of her father and thus possessed a great interest in such things.

“It’s rather novel,” She said, fingering the action. “Though not quite as advanced as I would have thought. Seventy years’ progress should be a bit more impressive, I think.”

“It’s old. Modern militaries have probably scrapped or sold off all of their percussion guns by now. The science of money and violence has placed the ignition device with both the powder and projectile all in the same rigid capsule.”

She nodded. “Father said that would happen, it just makes more sense. Do you have gas-operated reciprocation yet?”

“What?” Just who was this girl’s father?

She hmmed to herself in thought. “Nevermind then.” Changing the topic abruptly, she cautiously turned to look at him. “You know, travelling with me seems to be fairly dangerous.”

Gregor raised his brow.

She continued. “Probably more dangerous than you were expecting... Are you alright with that? I’m honestly quite worried about you leaving. It kept me up last night. They know where to find me and they can apparently just disintegrate people.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t this bad back then.”

Gregor kept quiet, brow furrowed and head tilted in contemplation.

“I can, um, pay you more. More than just the healer, I mean.” Aware of Gregor’s apparent madness and significant interest in her body, she broached this subject quite nervously.

“Do not insult me. If I am in a room, nothing else in that room could reasonably be called dangerous. At all times, if I am present, I am the danger. Your pursuers are not greater than me.”

“You’ll stay?”

“If you die, I’ll never get to have sex with you.”

She made a feminine hmpf and leaned back in her saddle. Good enough, she supposed.

The issue resolved, she boldly decided to push her luck. “No more torture from now on, not without my permission. I’m not so naive to think that we can go without killing, but no more torture.”

Gregor snorted but remained otherwise silent. She took this as tacit acceptance.

Mildred had become Gregor’s priority. Through her, he could both obtain a healer and fulfill his bargain with the Norn. He also liked looking at her.

The two rode on.