It felt good to be back on the True Path once more, the angel once again in her rightful place at Brother Fist’s side.
The door closed behind Scylla. Brother Fist touched a stud on the control pad on his chair arm, locking it after her. Bolts thudded back into place, sealing it tight. Marchey flinched at the sound.
“Come, sit down, my dear Dr. Marchey,” Fist called, beckoning him closer. He smiled. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” Fist spoke softly, a clotted, wheezing, tubercular rattle to his voice. His tone was arch, ironic.
Marchey looked around, choosing the seat farthest from the wasted figure in the oversized chair. He lowered himself into it reluctantly, gaze averted from his host.
Once he was sitting down he surreptitiously took in his surroundings. The cubby was quite large, the space broken up by foamstone dividers. Fist sat at its center, on one side of him an elaborate, slightly archaic comp, on the other screens displaying views from all over Ananke. The cubby’s walls were lined with bookshelves packed full of antique bound books and permem cubes. A few choice art objects were scattered about the room, some grotesque, some quite beautiful.
But for the surveillance screens, it could have passed for a professor’s study, modest and comfortable. Two other things spoiled the effect. One was the nauseating reek that permeated the air, making it smell like a carrion eater’s lair.
Then there was the room’s owner and occupant.
Marchey had to psych himself up to taking a long hard look at the man who’d had him kidnapped. He raised his eyes hesitantly, pulse pounding with trepidation.
Brother Fist looked like his nearest relative was Sister Death. He was a skeleton draped with loose saffron skin, raised from the grave and infused with some sort of awful unlife. His black cassock hung on him like a shroud. His cheeks were gaunt and sunken, his mouth a thin-lipped, liverish slash, his teeth white and sharp. His eyes were jaundiced, feverishly bright, and were fixed on Marchey with a greedy, crazed intensity.
But it was not his physical appearance alone that sent flight-response adrenaline pumping through Marchey’s system, turning his heart into a clenched fist and making his skin prickle with cold sweat.
The primitive human animal in him scented a rabid sickness that the civilized physician in him would try to identify with meaningless labels like psychopath, egopathy or sociopath. Words created to describe monsters but falling far short of capturing their dark essence, just as a word like bomb cannot convey a millionth of the horror of one going off on a crowded sidewalk.
Such creatures can be nearly impossible to identify because of their ability to hide themselves, like fatally venomous chameleons. Clever lurking things, discovered only when someone accidentally stumbles across a cellar floored with human bones or a storage locker stacked full of severed heads. He seemed like an okay guy, the neighbors say afterward. Pretty much kept to himself.
But when guile and pretense are discarded, there is no mistaking that it is a thing only nominally human, born of woman but reared in hell and suckled on poison. It is revealed as a cold-blooded and savage thing of unspeakable drives and an absolute disdain for any life other than its own.
Brother Fist laughed, a hacking, mirthless sound that sent a shudder of revulsion up Marchey’s spine. “Do I frighten you, Doctor?” he asked, carious yellow eyes bright and cunning.
Marchey bit down on his first reply. Shitless.
“Aren’t you, um, trying to?” he asked in as close to a normal voice as he could muster.
Brother Fist’s smile made Marchey think of the gleeful, grinning rictus sardonicus worn by skeletal, scythe-wielding Plague in medieval art.
“Perhaps a little. I so wanted us to get off on the right foot. I may be unwell, but I am undiminished. I have power. Over this place, and now over you.” He gestured as if to take in all of Ananke. “This place is mine, created in my image. I have made it into a crucible, my dear doctor. I am at its center. I am its center. I am its maker and master, flame and furnace. Tell me, do you know what a crucible is?”
“Yes,” Marchey said, the words seeming to come out of his mouth on their own. “It’s a vessel for smelting ore.”
A nod. “Excellent. The crucible is a means of reducing excess and impurity, creating something useful. I am the smelter. I am the furnace. In my crucible all that does not serve my purposes is burned away. Individuality is cauterized. Autonomy is immolated. Love is cremated. Trust is boiled away. Hope chars to the blackest ash…”
Marchey watched those awful yellow eyes glaze as the old man intoned his lunatic litany in a rustling hypnotic monotone. Everything but the old man’s eyes and voice seemed to fade away.
“The smelter’s art lies in heating the crucible to the proper degree. Razing the human psyche until only fear and faith remain. Until they are fused into one. Fear and faith guarantee perfect, unquestioning service. From the crucible emerges a material fit to be beaten into a tool.”
Brother Fist’s gaze turned outward again, fixed on Marchey. He felt it bite into him, sharp and paralyzing as a viper’s fang. That black knife-slash mouth twisted into a sinister smile. “You’ve had a chance to sightsee, Doctor. What do you think of my crucible?”
Marchey licked his swollen lips, tasting blood. The man’s virulent madness seemed to infect the very air he breathed like some deadly biowar virotoxin, suffocating him, shriveling his wits and will. He squirmed in his chair uneasily, but could not find the strength to look away.
Unaware of what he was doing, he slowly reached up to touch the silver metal pin on his chest as if to find some reminder of his own identity. The emblem was still there, dangling on a bloodstained scrap of his slashed tunic. Metal touched metal with a faint click.
It was almost as if a circuit closed inside him. The sense of who and what he was flowed through him again. With it came the memory of a one-eyed child this man had condemned to die out of a cynical contempt for human life. Out of cold, raw cruelty.
“I think it sucks,” he heard himself say. He blinked and sat up straighter, returning anger making him clamp his hands on the arms of his chair. “I think someone should jam some of what you’ve been dishing out right back down your fucking throat.”
Brother Fist lolled back, eyes hooded and smirking. “Perhaps you are correct,” he agreed softly.
“Damn right I am.”
“You sound so certain. Are you volunteering to be the hand of justice, Doctor?”
Marchey stared at him, imagining his silver hands on Fist’s scrawny wattled neck. They tightened on the arms of his chair, strong enough to snap Fist’s spine like a twig.
“Think of all the pain and suffering that would be averted.”
He already was. Killing Fist would be like curing a disease.
“Come on, Doctor,” he wheedled, lifting his chin and stroking his neck in invitation. “Do what is right. Take the matter in hand. Expunge the suffering. Balance the scales.”
Marchey stared at his tormentor, but remained where he was. Cold sweat crawled down his sides.
Fist smiled with hateful pleasure. “I thought not. You won’t raise a hand against me. Your righteous indignation is a joke. I find it quite hilarious, but do you?”
Marchey looked away, feeling ill. Fist continued to taunt him, making him feel sicker with every word.
“You can’t forget yourself. You are sworn to preserve life, not take it. To heal rather than hurt. You’ve pledged your life to an oath. One that has mocked you for years. That mocks you now, even as I do.”