We watched as the Barber held the shears to one side. The fire that leaked out of the exposed cross-section of the dragon’s head came out in tendrils and lines, and those tendrils and lines touched the metal, slower and more fluid than arcs of electricity, but conducting all the same.
The metal grew white hot, cooled far too rapidly as the tendrils grew hair-thin and disappeared, another reaching out to touch another part of the blades.
Drinking in power.
One foot still rested on a knee. He dropped it to the ground, used the scissors to push himself out of the throne and to a standing position.
As he did, the ambient light took on a different cast as it touched his face. Black veins crawled over and along a horizontal line that marked his face, like cancerous worms, and knots of the veins had replaced his eyes. More marks covered his flesh where the Library had nicked, burned, scraped and scratched him. Like maggots crawling through his flesh, but an oily black in texture and color.
The darkness of his expression was countered by the spread of Faysal’s ‘wings’, though the wings were more a fractal pattern than true bird wings. They reached further, and the light they emanated spread across the tower’s top.
I realized I was backing up, responding to an unconscious impulse, and made myself stop. A fractional movement of his head suggested he’d noticed.
He could see.
Damn it all.
Alright. Alright. Fuck. How were we even supposed to approach this?
He wasn’t going for the jugular. As the Barber, just the Barber, he’d chased, pursued without pausing, closing the distance. He had tricks available, using those shears.
Everything he’d done here had been different. Passive, standing back, laying traps, striking from oblique angles.
Like a practitioner.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Mags whispered under her breath.
“Mags,” I said.
“What?”
“Keep one of those goblins in reserve.”
“Okay?”
If the dragon cooks us, we might need more bodies, or a distraction. It’s a pawn we can place on the board, if we need to.
Johannes wasn’t moving. His shears were dangling from one fingertip. A twitch of the finger could have made them drop to the ground.
If that happened, if we could simply kick them over the edge, that would be something.
It wouldn’t happen.
He was letting us make the first move?
“You are not Johannes,” I said.
The sheer emptiness of this place meant my words didn’t resonate. My own voice sounded too quiet to me, even as I spoke in louder, confident tones.
“I reject your power and your claim to power. You’re a twisted creature belonging to some other long forgotten realm and time, you’re not something to be recognized or respected.“
I managed to inject a fair bit of vitriol into my voice.
The Barber didn’t move. Faysal’s wings continued to rotate in the background, shining past the stone pillars and railings that ringed the tower’s top, the shadows sliding endlessly to the left. The dragon’s smoke rose up in fine curls, from nostrils set too far apart, on a head split right down the center.
“You wear a human’s skin now, but even before that, you wore a form you drew from our heads. You’re wearing a mask under a mask. Your only power is the power we damn well give you.”
The opening salvo. My attack, for lack of a better term.
“Blake.”
It took me a full two seconds to identify the speaker. I almost thought it was one of my companions, my ability to intuit direction warped by the nature of sound, here. But, even as I dismissed that thought, I thought it might be Faysal, behind Johannes and the dragon.
No, I hadn’t really grasped that he might actually communicate with me. I was caught entirely off guard, even though I was staring directly at him.
Johannes. The Barber.
“You talk,” I said, stating the obvious.
“I could always communicate,” he said.
The shears snapped closed, opened, closed again.
Tk. Tk. Tch.
He tilted his head to one side, as if trying to read and interpret me. It wasn’t a comfortable position for a human. He righted his head, and hair fell across his face. He didn’t move it.
“You’re not Johannes,” I said, for the second time.
“I am,” he said, and he said the words with a confidence that matched and maybe even outstripped my own defiance. “I’m Johannes, and I’m something older.”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’d hoped to discredit, to attack him with words so I wouldn’t need to cross blades with him. If I could have upset his position here just a bit before everything unfolded, it could have made a difference. Maybe led to another thing, which could have led to another.
This started with unseating him from his position, destroying it. Except he now stood at the dead center of the roof, I’d pushed, in a manner of speaking, and he’d resisted my efforts altogether.
Theatrics mattered, and he had stage presence to spare.
“Blake,” he said. “Mags? Paige, Peter, Green Eyes. Listen to me. It’s Johannes.”
“I don’t believe you,” Mags said.
Good, I thought. I glanced at her, and her eyes met mine. I offered her a small nod.
“I’ve seen out their eyes,” the Barber said. “Their memories. Their experiences. I’ve seen how the world is put together, and what it is. The world is meant to be consumed. By resisting, we’re only making it worse. We’re a horse with a broken leg, and the best thing to do is put it out of its misery, because it only gets worse from here on out.”
“You don’t sound like Johannes at all,” Mags said. “He had faith. He was optimistic, even if I didn’t like how he did things, he believed in humanity. Establishing a system.”
Good. Keep up the attack.
“I did,” the Barber said. “It was only yesterday. Hours ago, even. I had hopes and dreams and even a bit of hunger for power, to give me a personal stake in it. And now?”
He spread his arms a little.
“I know better,” he said. His words, like ours, simply ended with each utterance. No bouncing echolocation, no warmth. They were sounds made with our lips, teeth, tongues and throats.
Every response we gave him, I was genuinely terrified that that would be the provocation he needed to come after us. To give the word to the dragon or Faysal.
“You said we’re a horse with a broken leg?” I asked. “Breaks heal. I think I’m speaking for most members of humanity when I say that I’d much rather be alive than gone.”
“Yet,” he said, “The end approaches in fits and starts. You might think that you want more existence, but if you truly felt it, if you believed it deep down inside, then that would tip the scales. If humanity was truly on the side of creation and progress, he-”
The shears pointed at the angel behind him.
“-he would be winning. He would be stronger than I am.”
Tch. The shears snapped closed as he lowered his arm. There was a languid nature to his movements that suggested that some of his internal makeup was a little bit demon as well.