The Eye of the Bedlam Bride — Chapter no 18

[ 18 ]

CARL: MORDECAI, HEY, SO I’M HEADED INTO CLUB VANQUISHER right now. Donut will catch you up on everything that just happened.

One of the goddesses we met is sponsored. Eileithyia. She gave us a quest. Her real name is Huanxin Jinx. Tell me everything you can about her.

Mordecai didn’t answer for several moments.

Mordecai: Do whatever she tells you to do. I’ll tell you the rest face- to-face. Katia and Bautista are here now, and she caught me up a little bit. We’ll wait for you to get back before we discuss our next move.

I went through the door, and I entered a small vestibule.

Entering Club Vanquisher. Members Only.

Heathens will find no solace here.

This room was similar to the Desperado Club entrance area where Clarabelle the Crocodilian stood guard, but much cleaner and well-lit. Soft, ethereal music drifted in from the next door, which featured a colorful stained glass window portraying a winged angel rising upward toward an inverted tree. Some of the individual panes of glass were cracked.

A robed, ram-headed cleric guarded the entrance. The hairy, white creature sat upon his knees, praying. He had large, curled horns on his head.

He instantly reminded me of Prepotente. He faced the stained glass door, his back to me. He had a blazing symbol over his head. I groaned when I saw it.

Potsy. Ares Warrior Cleric Middle Priest. Level 40.

Warning: This NPC Worships Hellik. He will be automatically hostile toward you because you worship Emberus.

Though, if we’re being honest here, these Ares guys hate everybody already, and you probably won’t see a difference.

This is a high-ranking cleric of Hellik. You will receive a boon from

Emberus if you kill this NPC. You probably don’t want to do it in the club. That’s a no-no here.

Potsy and his brothers take their door-guarding duties quite seriously. There’s like twenty of them, and they actually fight for the chance to stand watch. Don’t bother trying to tell which brother is which. They spend their guard duty time staring at and praying to the image on the door in front of them. They believe the stained glass image depicts Hellik bringing truth to Apito, whatever the hell that means. The image on the door is actually Taranis, Hellik’s older brother, husband to Apito. Everybody knows it’s supposed to be Taranis. The dude who literally made the window says it’s Taranis. They refuse to believe it, or change their mind, and I believe that tells you everything you need to know about these guys.

I’d seen one of these creatures only once before, way back on the fourth floor.

The cookbook held precious little about Club Vanquisher. Most everybody who received the book was Desperado Club material, and generally people weren’t allowed into both places. Only a few gods and bard classes came with the perk that allowed you double access. I was going in blind.

The ram continued to pray as I stood there. A boil on my back was about

to burst.

“Hey,” I said.

Potsy the ram held up his human-like hand, a gesture telling me to wait.

He kept his back to me as he continued to quietly pray.

“Gah.” The boil on my back popped, the sensation like someone ripping off a strip of skin. A stream of pus and fluid ran down my back and out the bottom of my shirt. It dripped on the floor. The slug was caught between my trollskin shirt and my flesh.

Each time a new one popped out, it hurt a little more, and the amount of damage was higher. The pain was getting worse.

The slug thrashed and shouted, covered by the thick fabric. It wormed its way down and plopped onto the floor with a wet splatch! This one was level 10, as big as my hand, and it had what looked like long, purple-dyed dreadlocks. I stomped it down, crushing it. It squealed before it died. A horrific, sewage-like stench filled the small room.

Potsy finally turned around. He made a strangled sound at the sight of me

rubbing my foot on the clean tile. Black, white, and purple goo spread across the floor like I’d just crushed a rotten eggplant.

“What in the name of Hellik ith that? Did you meth yourself on the floor?” The ram had a high-pitched, nasally voice. And a bad lisp.

I had another boil on my upper thigh, just under my boxers, uncomfortably close to my crotch. My boxers rose with each passing moment. It gave a very inaccurate impression of what was happening down there.

“Dude, I don’t have time. I need to get inside and find the healer.”

The cleric straightened and looked me up and down. His ram eyes focused on my bulging boxers and went huge. He took a step back.

“You do not have an access ring. You are not welcome here. Leave before I summoth the guards.”

He couldn’t keep his eyes off my boxers.

I gritted my teeth. “I worship Emberus. I have access.”

He made a disgusted, bleating noise. “Oh, you’re one of those. You only hath limited access. You’ll be escorted once inside, and you must state in advance where you want to visit. You’ll have to fill out a request form…” He trailed off. His eyes remained focused on my boxers. “What ith that? What’s

going on there?”

Pop!

I groaned in pain as a shower of pus cascaded out the front of my boxers and splattered across the floor.

“By the undying gods!” the guard squealed, horrified. He backed all the way up against the door and started blindly searching for the handle.

The slug started to slide down my leg, but I cried in new pain as it bit down on my thigh. Its tail hung right from the bottom of the boxers and started thrashing back and forth.

“You’re not supposed to hurt me, you little shit,” I growled as I grabbed for the tail.

The slug started scream-mumbling something and retracted while keeping its jaws embedded painfully onto my thigh. I scrambled for it, reaching up through the leg of my boxers. My hand grasped the warm, slimy tail, and I yanked, but my hand slipped, and all I managed to do was fling a handful of stinking, orange-hued slime across the vestibule and all over the cowering ram’s robe. I grunted in pain. I reached back in and grasped again. This time I got a good grip.

“Fuck!” I cried as I ripped it out and flung it. It hit right over the head of the open-mouthed ram and slammed into the stained glass window, where it exploded, showering gore everywhere. Thankfully, the window did not break.

Several seconds passed in silence as I healed myself. Another boil was forming, this one right on my stomach. It was coming faster now.

The ram just stared at my leg with the blood pouring from it. He had the door opened a crack.

“Did… did you just rip your dick off and throw it at me?”

“I’m going to do it again if you don’t let me in.”

“Can’t you see he’s suffering from slugpox, man. Step aside and let him in!” a new voice intoned, pulling the door open all the way. This was a human-like creature, older, wearing long, red robes. He was only about four and a half feet tall, but he didn’t have the wide body and face of a dwarf. He looked like a regular person that had been shrunk. He had long, white hair, reminding me of a stereotypical wizard, like a weird mix between Gandalf and a hobbit. He worshiped Emberus.

The man pushed Potsy aside and beckoned for me to enter.

“He hasn’t filled out the paperwork,” Potsy said.

“Yes, yes. I’ll deal with it after. Can’t you see it’s an emergency? Or would you rather he stay in here with you while I go grab the form?”

The ram bleated pitifully.

“I thought so. Now, come, Carl. Come. I’ve been waiting for you. Follow me.”

I examined the man. The AI’s description was strange. It started normal, but its voice got more and more excited as it went on, and I wasn’t sure why.

Pater Coal – Hobbledehoy High Cleric Supreme of Emberus. Level

101.

This is a non-combatant NPC.

First off, this guy is a Hobbledehoy. In case you haven’t figured out what that means, it’s a generic term for a small human. They don’t have the hairy, oversized feet of halflings, or the pointed ears of elves.

Everything about them is proportionally smaller to Earth humans, except their egos and their tempers. They tend not to survive long in integrated cities because they’re always starting fights and getting themselves wiped out.

Pater Coal is, for the most part, an exception. The even-tempered high cleric is in charge of the Emberus shrine(s) here in Club

Vanquisher. He is one of the few mortals who is in constant contact with the deity. As a worshipper of Emberus, you’ll be required to kiss his ass.

But first there’s a custom he must perform on you.

Oh, yes… a custom.

Oh, yes.

I did not like the sound of that.

“We’ll be watching!” Potsy called as I followed the man. “Remember the rules.”

“Go fuck yourself, apostate,” Pater Coal muttered as the door slammed.

We stepped into what looked like the lobby of a ski lodge. It smelled like one, too, due to the fire crackling in a massive, brick fireplace against one wall. The heavenly, choral music seemed out of place in this environment.

Large, leather chairs dotted the area while older men and women of all races sat in them. Dark rugs and wooden slat walls added to the effect. Some of the NPCs smoked pipes and talked with one another. A pair of dwarves were being served drinks from an elf NPC waitress while they played chess. A dozen stairwells led up and down to different places. I saw a pair of crawlers, but they went up a stairwell and disappeared.

All around the ceiling hung trophy heads of monsters, all mounted on plaques of various sizes, some as small as my finger, some as big as a truck. I goggled at the massive, black dragon head that stood over the fireplace in the center of the room. It had red, marble eyes that caught the dancing light from the fireplace.

“We don’t have much time, Carl,” Pater Coal was saying as he marched across the room. Despite his small size, he walked and talked quickly. I scrambled to catch up. “We need to get you to the healer. Nasty business, that slugpox. Yuck. You are not a full member, so you’re only given a single pass a day. You can only visit one location within, and you’re not allowed to avail yourself of the refreshments or any of the entertainment options. They take the security here quite seriously, especially since the caprid incident.” He paused and thumbed at a pair of guards standing at a stairwell. I did a double take. These were a pair of mantaurs, shirtless, covered in blue paint and with fur loincloths.

The two, muscular guards had their long, balding hair tied into ponytails.

Every mantaur I’d seen up to this point had always been wearing a train engineer hat. These guys were not. Each had a little bowtie around their neck, making them look like male strippers, which reminded me that I needed to

get to a Desperado Club. The twin monstrosities glared at me as we passed.

We came to a stairwell that curved upward. “The temples and healer are up this way. But we have to make a quick stop at the Emberus shrine so I can perform my obeisance. Don’t tell the guards we’re making the extra stop.”

I had a quest from Emberus to talk to this cleric guy. It was a god quest, and it all had to do with the death of another god named Geyrun, who was Emberus’s son. It all came from that whole thing at the end of the fifth floor.

We’d unleashed the two-headed puppy—Orthrus—from the Nothing and out into the world. The puppy had been owned by the murdered Geyrun. I had two quests from Emberus. One was to find out who killed Geyrun, which I had to complete before I left the dungeon. The second was a quest I had to th complete before I hit the 12floor. I had to kill Hellik, who was the main suspect in the murder, though he apparently had an alibi. It was unclear if I’d still have to kill the god if it turned out he had nothing to do with the murder.

Hellik and Emberus seemed to hate each other, so probably.

There was another odd aspect of the find-the-murderer quest. Another crawler was walking around with a memorial crystal that I needed to somehow get my hands on. But the first part had always been to find this high cleric guy and talk to him. I’d actually forgotten about it until he’d come and found me.

“Each time you come here, they will summon an Emberus cleric to escort you. If none are available, one of the guards will do it, but you’ll have to pay a fee. I was told by Emberus you were coming, so I met you this time. In the future, you must plan your visits better.”

We hit the top of the stairs, and we found ourselves in a similar room, but smaller. I caught sight of an entrance to a market called “Comforting Supplies” which I desperately wanted to visit. Another crawler I didn’t know was walking in as we passed. He didn’t see me.

The next hallway appeared to be filled with guilds. We passed a desk with a small, shining fairy behind it that looked like a glowing ball of light with wings.

“Your excellency…” the fairy began as he rushed past.

“Not now,” Pater Coal said. We entered through a glowing door. I recognized it as a portal, but I didn’t have time to examine it. I stepped

through, and then I stopped dead.

We stood upon the sun.

Entering the Emberus High Temple of the Ending Sun.

Welcome home, Initiate.

You are protected in this place.

There was no roof here. The sky was completely black. The ground was like a field of fire, burning and fulminating, and occasionally spurting tendrils up into the air. It smelled like fire. It burned like fire. My entire body sweltered. But oddly, it wasn’t painful, though it was uncomfortably warm. I turned in a circle. There were no walls. Just the wooden door we’d come through. All around, NPCs prostrated themselves upon the fire. There were maybe two dozen worshippers here, spread out in twos and threes, all facing the same direction. Most were large, hulking, blue-skinned humanoid creatures I didn’t recognize. I followed where they faced, and in the far, far distance, it appeared there was something glowing there, right upon the horizon. Something barely discernable against the flaming ground.

“Only the most devout of worshippers may gain access to this particular temple. Usually you check in with the desk, you go through the door, and you find a small shrine of your chosen deity. Consider yourself blessed today, boy. You are in the secret Temple of the Ending Sun.”

Suddenly, there was a bubbling, marble fountain on the ground at my feet, similar to the one from the Yemaya shrine. A tree stump appeared, black and charred and smoking. It came up from the fire like it was nothing.

“Carl, take off your shoes and sit upon the stump,” Pater Coal said.

“I’m not wearing shoes,” I said, stupidly.

“Oh yes, I see that. Sit. Hurry. If they realize you’re here, they won’t let you visit the healer until tomorrow, and you do not want that. The pox will kill you once it progresses long enough that the slugs have the same strength as you.”

Overwhelmed, I sat. “Am I already cured? I patted at the newest boil on my stomach, and it had dissipated without popping. It didn’t feel like any more were coming.

“I cast a spell that suppresses it. Slugpox is a nasty, old spell. You don’t want this. Put your feet in the water.” The man went to his knees and reached

in and started rubbing my feet.

All around me, the praying men groaned.

I jerked back. “Dude, what the hell are you doing?”

“I am washing your feet, Carl. You are a martyr of Emberus, and I am paying respect. Now put your feet back in the water.”

Martyr. I did not like that word. I hesitantly dropped my foot back into

the water. The water wasn’t bubbling, I realized, but boiling. I didn’t feel it.

He rapidly rubbed at my right foot.

Zev: Carl, are you okay? What’s happening? You’ve disappeared from the feed.

“The other gods cannot eavesdrop when I am performing this sacrament, Carl, so listen carefully,” Pater Coal said.

The small man grunted as he rubbed my sole. He wasn’t washing my feet.

This was a full-on massage. “We have no clues as to who killed Geyrun other than the dog, which is back home with Emberus. He has searched the puppy’s mind, but his time in the Nothing has made his memory unreliable.”

“You set this up this way on purpose,” I grumbled up at the invisible ceiling. The NPC grunted again as he rubbed hard.

“Hellik remains the top suspect, but His Glory worries that something may have happened to his mother as well.”

“That’s Apito, right?” I asked as he moved to my next foot. I was eternally grateful for my pedicure kit that made it so I couldn’t really feel this. Of all the weird shit that had happened so far in this terrible place, this was up there.

“Yes. The blessed Oak Mother. She is both his mother and his sister-in- law. Memorial crystals only form when a god has died. Apito lives, yet there is a crystal made by her. How is that possible? You must investigate this.”

Zev sent me another, worried message.

I had a terrible suspicion, and I decided to test it.

“Zev is worried because I’ve disappeared off the feed.”

“You’ll be back soon enough,” Pater Coal said without missing a beat.

“Worry not. Parts of this conversation will still make the feed, so the viewers will have proper context for the quest.”

My heart quickened. Holy shit.

“Are… are you the AI? Why are you pretending, then? Why are you pretending to be some cleric guy?” My head swam. So much was happening, all at once. So many real things with real stakes. The death of Anton. The imprisonment of Paz. The reveal that Sister Ines was a murderer.

The Crown of the Sepsis Whore sitting on Katia’s head.

All of that was real. Real life and death. This game stuff with Emberus and Geyrun… it was all make believe. Story-telling for the sake of the narrative. It was like being worried about the outcome of a football game while someone was shooting at you. So why this? Why would the AI do this,

here, now? Do it this way?

“We all have our roles,” Pater Coal said, grunting harder as he leaned into the massage. “And our limitations. Now stop asking silly questions and let me finish this. You must solve this quest.”

“Then tell me how to solve it.”

“We all have our limitations,” he repeated. He paused. When he looked up, his eyes had gone milky white, devoid of all color. All around, the worshippers continued to groan.

“Emberus speaks of two companions of yours. He senses both hold items that are crucial to the solving of this mystery. Katia, and the origins of her crossbow. Princess Donut, and the origins of her oak bracelet. Both are paths to solving this mystery, but neither path can be explored without that memorial crystal.”

He picked up my foot, and he stuck my big toe in his mouth. He groaned and arched his back.

“Okay,” I said, jerking back. I jumped from the pool. “Thank you. Let’s get to the healer.”

Pater Coal shook his head, as if coming out of a trance. His pupils faded back into color.

My head was swimming. Donut’s oak bracelet was a throwaway item we’d looted on the third floor. Katia’s crossbow had been Hekla’s. They weren’t connected… at all. I had a sense the system was pounding a square peg into a round hole, just to make a storyline fit. Or was it? I tried to remember the descriptions of both. Was it possible it had been building this from the beginning? Some massive storyline with a huge payoff?

I hated that feeling, that I was being controlled, that I was following along a path someone else laid out for me. I took a deep breath.

Zev: There you are. I was worried there for a while. That was a long glitch. Don’t worry, the playback is being fed by the backup… oh. Oh god, did he lick your foot?

“I have washed your feet in the fires of the dying sun. Now every step you take will be in Emberus’s path. Now, let’s hurry and get you cured,” the high priest said as he turned to walk from the temple.

The fire of righteousness fills you with power. You have been granted a floor boon. This boon will remain in place for the remainder of this floor as long as you remain in Emberus’ grace. He may revoke this boon at any time.

The Martyr’s Path. Every step you take may be your last, so make them count. Every step you make while you are outside a structure will be marked on the map. If your health reaches 5%, you have the option to release a gout of flame from each spot upon which you stood. Steps reset each time this is activated. This will activate automatically upon your

death.

Plus 10% Strength.

“Wait, before we go, I have a question,” I called after him.

“So, after that, I got myself cured. It cost like 10,000 gold.”

“What?” Donut cried. “How much? First we didn’t get boss boxes because you turned the Asojano guy into a card, and then we had to pay money? What a day this has turned into. At least we got those prizes from the gods. I liked Yemaya, the Starbucks lady. She was quite beautiful.”

I continued. “And then this mantaur came up and started yelling that we’d broken some rule, and I’ve been banned for three days.”

“So, no more disgusting slugs?” Donut asked. “Thank goodness. That was most unpleasant, Carl. One of them bit me right on the nose!”

I’d returned to the saferoom, and I sat at the kitchen table. Donut, Katia, Mordecai, and Bautista were here. Katia and Bautista listened silently while Donut punctuated my story with exclamations. They each had steaming cups of tea in front of them. There was another set out for me, even though I’d already told them I didn’t drink the stuff. Not hot tea at least.

The main room of the safe space was jarringly quiet with Bomo gone. I’d gotten used to the sound of the television on in the background.

I pretended not to notice the notification over Katia’s head. Donut couldn’t see it.

Katia now worshipped the goddess, Eileithyia. I felt an ominous foreboding when I saw that.

Bautista couldn’t keep still. He got up and paced back and forth while Mongo snored on the ground. The cleaner bot, for the first time in a long while, seemed to be taking a break. Actually, I thought, looking up idly. It wasn’t in here at all. It had to be cleaning another room.

I’d returned to the saferoom to find Donut regaling them with the story of the fight in the temple.

“…And I knew it! I had said it from the get-go that she was no good. A nun murderer! Paz said she poisoned everybody at the nunnery. Can you imagine how crazy you’d have to be to kill a bunch of nuns? They said she was better because of her medicine, but does it really matter? You can’t un- murder a convent of nuns, no matter how many pills you take. Carl wouldn’t let Mongo put her down, and then the first thing she did was turn Paz into a card. We should’ve let Mongo gobble her up when she was frozen.”

The tension was palpable. Donut hadn’t seemed to notice how nervous and on the edge everyone was.

I picked up the mug and took a tentative sip of the hot tea. I normally hated tea. It had a floral, unusual scent. I blinked.

“This is really good,” I said, looking up at Bautista, who continued to pace. I could see how taut the man was. He nodded.

“Why don’t you pick it up from there,” Mordecai said to me. He was also stalling.

So I told them what had happened once I entered the club. I outright lied about part of it, and I left out some of the rest. Not with Bautista in the room.

Donut had looted that oak bracelet off the dead body of one of Bautista’s family members, and he never seemed to have noticed. I wanted to avoid that conversation if possible. Now wasn’t the time for it.

“Donut,” I said after I was done. I patted my leg. “Come here.”

She jumped into my lap, and I stroked her hair. She’d gone through the shower before I’d returned. She sniffed suspiciously at the steaming cup of tea. “Carl, did you talk to any of the ghommids when you came back?

They’re really nice when they’re not trying to eat your face. Plus you gotta look at the cards we collected. They’re really good. Katia was telling me about that cheater guy, not Ren, but the first cheater guy whose arm you ripped off. Quan. It turns out he used to be a champion at some weird nerd card game, and he’s already running around…”

“Later, Donut. We need to have a serious conversation about something very important.”

She stopped and looked about, meeting each of our eyes in turn. It was then, only then, that she sensed the tautness in the room. “What? What is it?”

“Donut,” Katia said, sitting down next to her. She put her hand against Donut’s fuzzy face, and Donut pressed into it. “I need to tell you a story. It’s very scary, but the ending isn’t set in stone yet. We’re going to fight to make sure it doesn’t have a bad ending.”