怪女孩‧蛻變中

In the wastelands of Thyle there is a city called Karantica. Once mighty, it is now deserted. Lizards bask on the sun-baked plazas, undisturbed by the thread of human feet. Wild dogs fight and bleed and die in the great houses of that city, where every day was once filled with beauty and music and the high talk of great philosophers.

What happened to Karantica? What was the calamity that overcame the city? Some horrendous plague, was it? Some civil war that set great families once against the other. and in the process emptied the city of its inhabitants?

There are historians who believe both explanations are true but there is another explanation worthy of our attention. It has never been set down, until now, existing only in the form of rumors and gossips.

First let me explain that Karantica was in the time of greatness a city ruled over by priests, not potentates. Religion subdued its people, rather than the rule of civil war. The laws of the Gods of Karantica were cruel, no question; the judgments passed down through their intercedents in the priest class were often unspeakably vicious. Blindings and castrations were demanded for very minor offenses. Female felons who'd been condemned to death were often taken into the temple on the night before their executions, where – according tot he accounts of the celibate priests – the Gods sent monstrous creatures to violate them and tear at their flesh. Even children were not exempt from the judgments of Karantica's deities. They were regularly cooked alive in the bellies of iron dragons for inconsequential crimes.

Not everyone was happy with the cruelty of the Gods. Far from it.

When one Judge Phio opened his people's court in the filthy streets of Karantica's poorest district, the Myassa, he found people more than willing to hear his New Theory of the Law. Justice should not be cruel, he said. A civilized society – and what city in the Underland laid greater claim to being cultured than Karantica? – did not cook the flesh of a living child for the “crime” of stealing a fish from the fountains outside the Great Temple. The law, to be respected, needed to balance forcefulness with compassion. There was a better way to do just, Phio said. A human way.

The people of Karantica weren't stupid. They saw the sense in what he said. And words of his uncommon love of common sense quickly spread. Rather than take their disputes to the priest people instead began to present themselves to Phio for judgment, their numbers swelling so quickly in that a matter of weeks his little court was helplessly over-booked and he would often work from 6 in the morning to midnight, dispensing his particular brand of what he called “honest law.”

His presence did not go unnoticed, of course. The Priests had spies everywhere around the city, and word soon reached them of this man and his heretical vision of justice. The Priests, led by the most vicious of the great punishers, Thamut-ul-mire, met in secret conclave to determine what should be done to bring this problem to an end. It was only a matter of time, they agreed, before this Judge Phio's heresies spread and this courts began to proliferate. The answer's simple, said some of the older priests: Accuse Phio of taking the law of the Gods into mortal hands – which he is undeniably doing – and then have Thamut-ul-mire conceive of some public death for him so lingering and so horrible that nobody will ever try his tricks again.

“It won't work,” Thamut-ul-mire said quietly. “We'll make a martyr of him.”

“Well, what do you suggest?” one of the Elders asked.

“That we punish the people for listening to him,” Thamut-ul-mire replied.

“Punish the people? All the people?”

“Yes.”

The Elder laughed. “How do you suggest we do that? Have half of them flog the other half and then flog the floggers?”

“No, nothing so crude,” Thamut-ul-mire replied. “Fear is what we'll use to bring them back to us.”

“Fear of the Gods?”

Thamut-ul-mire shook his head. “Fear of that which is not the Gods,” he replied.

Three nights later, just after nightfall, three children – two brothers and their little sister –playing in an orchard close to the edge of the city were murdered under the pithik trees. Not just murdered, disassembled and disemboweled, their brains scooped out of the cups of their skulls and eaten, their tender innards unwound and left trailing in grass. What kind of man would do such a thing, people wanted to know. It was beyond comprehension.

Two nights later, seven more children were slaughtered, this time all of different families, in the streets of a well-heeled district occupied by merchants and their families. The deaths resembled in every way the deaths of the three children murdered in the orchard. The same brutal unknitting of the bodies, the same removing of the brains and the innards left trailing. This time, however, the miscreant was glimpsed as it shambled away from the scene of its depravities. It was not human; not remotely. A great reptilian beast that had apparently come into the city from the wilderness. It was a creature that the citizens of Karantica knew by name: a Sabbaticus. Word of its presence spread throughout the city. This was not just any scavenger. This was a beast out of the Testaments of Jidadia, the great religious book which the priests went to when they were seeking guidance as to how a certain miscreant needed to be judged. It fed on the thoughts of children and on the despair of their parents.

“This was what you have unleashed,” Thamut-ul-mire shouted from his pulpit the next day. “By following laws other than those brought to you by your priests – the laws of the Gods! – you have invited our once safe streets this abomination of the wilderness.

The thousand-strong congregation fell to its knees, some of the worshippers uttering cries of “Save us! Save us!” others simply letting out sobs that echoed around the dome of the Great Temple.

“I cannot save you against you own sin!” Thamut-ul-mire returned. “Only you can do that!”

“Tell us how!”

“There is a certain man in this city who has set his laws above those of the Gods. Perhaps if you turned your back on him, this creature, this Sabbaticus, would leave Karantica alone and return to the Wilderness from whence our corruptions called it!”

The crowd rose as one man, their sobs and their entreaties turning to howls for vengeance. They went through the city gathering weapons along the way, the crowd's numbers swelling as word of what had transpired at the Temple spread. In his makeshift courthouse in the Myassa, Judge Phio heard the roar of the mob as it approached. His supporters had already brought him warning, of course. He knew what would happen to him when the crowd kicked down the door and dragged him out. If he'd been quick and lucky perhaps he might have escaped, but where would he have gone? Karantica was the city where he'd been born and raised. He loved it with all his heart and its poor manipulated people.

Which has not to say that he was happy to die now. Not with so much work to do. But he was ready to face the consequences of what he'd done.

Judge Phio's death was not quick. The people of Karantica were expert from past stonings at the craft of keeping a man from perishing too quickly. For two hours and seven minutes Phio suffered in the sun, his left eye dashed from its socket, all broken, his robes soaked red from neck to hem. The blowflies and the blood-bees swarmed around him in their many thousands and settled on his ruined face until he was entirely black with them. At last, he dropped to his knees and minutes later fell forward. There was a curious silence then, and stillness, until a small boy, no more than 5 or 6, ran forward and gleefully proceeded to stamp on Phio's head. The rest of the crowd – many of whom were alive today thanks to the compassion of the man they had beneath their feet – escalated the fury of the tarantella.

When it was done – when the judge had breathed his last, every bone in his body shattered – they were not ashamed that they had killed their savior. After all, had he not brought the Sabbaticus out of the Wilderness. He deserved his death.

The Priests' spies returned to the Great Temple quickly with news of what had happened. They were paid off and sent on their way.

“Good,” said the Elder. “It's done. We have no more need of subterfuge.”

“What should we do about the men that killed the children?”

“Bury them alive, out in the Wilderness,” Thamut-ul-mire said. “I'll see it done. And I'll have priests with me to help do the job. We'll have no more dealings with paid assassins.”

It was so agreed. That night the two professionals who had been hired to kill the children, and with the aid of a little theatrics, throw the shadow of the beast on a wall here and there, and leave its tracks in the blood of the dead children, were abducted from their huts down by the river and taken out under cover of darkness into the windy wastes that lay all about Karantica. They were given shovels, and told to dig a single hole, large enough for two corpses. They knew they were digging their own graves, but they were too affraid of how Thamut-ul-mire might affect their lives after death to contradict his instructions. As helpless as the children whose lives they had taken, they did as they were instructed, digging their graves and then jumping down into the hole together. The priests then threw down on top of them the crude machinery of their deceptions: the puppets that had cast the flittering shadows of the Sabbaticus on the wall and the blocks of carved wood they'd used to create a trail in blood.

Finally, at Thamut-ul-mire's instruction, his fellow priests proceeded to bury the men. Only then, when the dirt began to patter down on their faces, did the murderers begin to voice their fear, sobbing and begging for mercy. None was forthcoming, of course; and after a time the sheer weight of dirt smothered them and they were silenced.

“Let's return to the Temple,” Thamut-ul-mire said. “This wind makes my teeth ache.”

He had no sooner speaking than the wind gusted, particularly hard and the flames in the priests' lamps went out, and the moon slipped behind a dust cloud that was looming in the East. In sudden murk, the priest heard the sound of something moving nearby and a foul stench stung their nostrils.

“What is that?” one of them said, his voice a veneer of unease.

“Some animal, heard the screams,” Thamut-ul-mire replied. “Come back to scavenge, no doubt.”

“What animal?” the priest replied.

“Who cares what animal?” the other said. “Let's be gone.”

The terrible cycle of deaths began that very night. Thirteen children died. Another 19 died the night after. Thirty-six the night after that. The grotesque sights that subsequent dawns presented left the people of the city in no doubt as to the identity of the murderers. The Sabbaticus wasn't satisfied with the death of Judge Phio.

The congregation came beating at the doors of the Great Temple, demanding answers from their priests. Why, if they had punished Phio for his crimes, had the Sabbaticus escalated its war against the innocents of Karantica? It wanted blood on blood on blood on blood.

Sealed up in the darkness of the Temple, the priests debated how they could possibly answer the question without touching upon the truth of the matter, which to them was all too clear: The wind had carried word of their deceits out into the Wilderness, and the Sabbaticus had come from the wastes to see what crimes were being done in its name and to prove that it could do worse. Why, it could even kill priests.

That very night, in fact, it came up through the tunnels that ran beneath the Temple and it broke the legendary rules of its nature. It killed grown men instead of children. And instead of eating their brains it ate that part that made them men.

When the doors of the Great Temple were finally opened and the massacre within discovered – 1,102 priests slaughtered – a great exodus from the city began.

Nobody stayed. Not a single soul.

What was the use? However, beautiful Karantica was – however fine its palaces and mansions, however exquisite its plazas and boulevards – it was a cursed city. Neither children nor priests were safe there.

Better the Wilderness than Karantica, people took to saying. And the saying spread and was never forgotten, even after the Sabbaticus had left the city and been tamed by Tom Requiem becoming in time part of the Infernal Parade's great entertainment.