Peter Birdsall
Prelude
Provoked by scents and shadows to a mad howling peak of frustration, he slammed his fists against the concave wall. And just as always before, his fists exploded against it, FSSSHHH, into twin clouds of inky vapor. He yanked back his arms, frowning at the stumps of his wrists and waggling his fingers peevishly as they re-coalesced. Another day, he groaned inwardly while glancing around his glassy cell, another dissolution.
His was no conventionally tiny cell. The confines were claustrophobic, yes (for a sphere has little “floor” as such), but also maddeningly airy – mockingly spacious, gently illuminated and high cornerless-curving. Nor could he be said to have languished there for any profound interval; certainly the time paled to insignificance when considered against the countless years of his existence.
Still, he was what he was: a being of unexpected entrances and of swift exits… a girdler of worlds and an ungirdler of unsuspecting girls… a compulsive ne plus ultra trickster. And this, for all its crystalline benevolence, was what it was: a prison. Its single featureless sweep of englobing barrier forced stillness and contemplation, made mock of passing time, turned action back upon itself… for one such as the prisoner, it was perfect torture. The agony of forced inactivity, of sensory deprivation, of inability to affect the world, not to mention the indignity of an all-too-keen awareness of just who it was who had put him here… it was sublimely intolerable.
Had I any hair, I’d be pulling it out! He slumped to the floor, cradling his affronted head in his reconstituted hands.
And it was in that moment, in that ignominious pose, that the faint sensation of salvation first tickled the back of his mind.
The telltale impression was so faint, the circumstances so unlikely, and the senser so inured to sensory deprivation that the hint was almost missed. When it did register, incredulity almost mounted into into unbelief and the sure result of an opportunity left unseized. Luckily, the prisoner was a creature of ego. The absurdly improbability of this being something other than a mistake or a random happenstance was the very thing that served to bolster in his mind the likelihood, indeed the certitude, that it therefore must mean impending rescue.
And belief brought resolution, and resolve brought action.
His head shot up. He sniffed at the air, a connoisseur’s instinctual gesture despite that he sought a sense trace far more rarified than any mere odor. He stood with resurgent dignity, strode back to the rising wall with renewed hauteur, and struck it with uncommon, precise purpose. He didn’t even flinch at the resultant disarming. In fact, he gave it a smart kick for good measure, then stood poised on the leg that remained to him, expectant… straining… staring… scenting.
At first his hyperextended senses registered nothing save for the usual vague play of light and shadow filtering through the walls of his cell, the infuriating suggestion of a world without whose details and particulars were completely obscured by the same barrier which utterly walled it off in turn from any affect of his own actions. All was business as maddening usual… except. There… there, on the very verge of perception. An echo. A flare. A sympathetic surge of a power akin to his own. Something out there was responding to his outbursts. He rapped on the wall again. And, a moment later, detected the same distant reaction.
The next question: was this some freak of so-called nature, some mere unconscious phenomenon? Was there any actual awareness out there that he might influence? How to find out? Struck by an inspiration, he tried multiple slaps in succession, trading several finger joints for a syncopated progression: DUM de da dum dum. Then he pressed his head as close to the wall as he dared and waited, as expectant as he dared be. A rote return would confirm nothing. Silence would be heartbreaking. The only reply that would be meaningful…. Dum DUM… was that.
The prisoner gasped, unsure for an instant whether he’d truly just “heard” his hopes affirmed, rather than succumbed to hallucinatory madness...
But NO, catching madness was for mortals, whereas he was madness. That had been a real, live impulse from without… and confirmation that it had been deliberately sent by a thinking, receiving, responding individual!
He knocked on the barrier several times more in, he hoped, an enticing manner… and sure enough, the continued replies mounted in strength, indicating that, out in the world, their originator had seen fit to investigate and was drawing closer. And as it did, proximity tickled additional eldritch senses. A trickle of impressions teased his otherwise insensate perception through the barrier of his cell wall, like strobes of light through a keyhole. They were disjoint, incomplete, impossible to seize upon… until the prisoner finally caught, amongst the unruly miscellany, the hint of an identity.
Sweet tuatha of my conjuring, you’ve brought to me my intercessors... whether they’re of a mind for it or no! The prisoner offered reflexive thanks to his own ancient ante-creators for that history between them and the progenitors of the approaching folk that had seen the mortal ancestors subjugated by his ancient kindred, body and soul. Could it be that the bonds of that olden geas yet endured? The prisoner’s self-assurance all but guaranteed it: Such as these were yoked by us ages past! They were our chattel, even as their dogs and flocks were theirs! How can it be other than that they yet remain so? Oh sublime serendipity!
Buoyed by a confidence bordering on mania, he wasted no time in putting his thesis to the test. He exercised the developing bond like an intangible muscle, making the smallest and most insignificant of coercions… and gloated inwardly when that bond flexed rather than broke. Mine.
Knowing now that he’d been granted license by the remnants of an ancient relationship, the prisoner threw wide the floodgates, absorbing a wealth of involuntarily yielded information on the other. He became aware for the first time that his intercessor-to-be was not alone. He could sense a slew of companions, practically smell them. He could even hear the faint echoes of their thought. There was a whole tribe of them. A “troupe”, as they considered themselves.
That works well enough, he thought with a smirk, my kind invented trooping.
Now the tests of of intelligibility gave way to those of mastery. And if these proved less of an overwhelming success than had his first incursion, still the prisoner’s confident elation was undiminished. He had, he was certain, enough to work with! He always did. For where he could not dominate, he bargained and cajoled and seduced. Where he could not make himself plainly understood, he painted pictures with hint and inference. What he could not know, predict, foresee… he stabbed at with the wild intuition of his kind.
Over the hours that followed, he gathered his flock (though not too close – it would not do to alert his captor to this all-important change in circumstance) and set the wheels of his plot into motion.
The scenario was far from ideal, the numerous unavoidable failings perhaps conferring upon it the undesirable characterization of a "long shot"... The line of communication that he had established was highly tenuous... The allegiance of his catspaws was uncertain... The scheme that he’d formulated was, of necessity, rudimentary at best. A lesser being might have despaired of his chances.
But the (for the nonce) prisoner was no lesser being. The monstrous ego that drove him inexorably forward was well-earned. He was a mythic maestro of mayhem, a dreaded catalyst for the unexpected, a self-acclaimed auteur of the impossible. The preposterousness of the circumstances, the ad hoc nature of his plot, the chaos sure to follow in the wake of its successful execution... all of this served only to increase its deliciousness. He savored the sweet taste of too-long leashed cleverness at last set afoot, even as his expectations rose to anticipate the ever-increasingly felt inevitability of its successfully borne fruit. Oh, but it had been FAR too long! He could feel the cruel encumbrance of his foul fetters dropping from him already.
I go, I go...