FROM CHAPTER FIVE: WIZARD SLAYER

“Did Olghibi and Daid vex you, my pet?” she asked.

“What?” I cried, suddenly terrified. Some terrible thing had been done, and I could not deny it. She had spoken the name of a Keeper!

“Did Olghibi...”

“Katippa!” I cried, with a wild sweep of my arm through the air, “Do you not know that an ape must never know the name of a Keeper?”

“Really?”

“This has been so in every land in every age since men and apes dwelled together! This is forbidden knowledge, Katippa! You have made my soul unclean!”

I crouched down onto the floor, weeping. What horror wracked my soul, I could not tell. How could I ever hope to survive knowing what must not ever be known?

“But it is only Daid, he doesn’t do it all the time! Why most of the time, he sifts grain for his father down at..,”

“No more!” I screamed, pounding the ground with my fists, “Do you not know what a Keeper is to an ape?”

“What?” she asked, completely overwhelmed by my display of emotion. I then uttered a word I had never understood until that very moment.

“God,” I said, “the Keeper is God.”

“No!” cried Katippa, “God is kind and wonderful! In spite of what the priests of Aldla say!”

“I can not bear this knowledge!” I shouted, my heart twisting with every word.

“But Rungrin, the Keeper is no god! I don’t care what any of them say, there is only one God, Rungrin! I know it when I see the stars dancing in the night, or feel a refreshing breeze at the end of a long summer day! What men worship is fantasy, but there is only one single God behind it all, Rungrin, and this God created no love that it should go unanswered. This is a good and just God! Why, the Keepers are not such praiseworthy masters...”

“Enough! I don’t understand your gods! I am an ape! I know what my senses tell me and my heart confirms. These gods you humans invent are a baffling riddle, with an answer no one would care for! Again and again, humans concern themselves with matters of no consequence! Gods, bah!”

“But we all shall die, Rungrin! God is of great consequence then!”

“No, no! There is no consequence in dying at all! An ape lives and then dies. A soul lives and then is finished! Because I can speak, means not that I can argue! You can never teach an ape to understand your human things! I do not understand argument! You seek too much from my mind.”

“But Rungrin, you must admit, the Keeper is no god! The Keeper is Daid! I know the man!”

“So you know him...” I said, slowly, thinking of the hell I had been put through at this Keeper’s commands, “you can tell me where he goes to be alone?”

“Of course!” replied Katippa.

Thoughts came to me then that I was sure no ape had ever thought before. Mad thoughts!

“Where may I find him, human?”

When I called her human, Katippa no longer seemed my mistress. I no longer seemed to belong to these people. The Keeper’s spell had vanished!

“Sometimes he spends his afternoons playing with his Shrairevens board in the cellars of Gikstred.

”

“I’m going to kill him,” I said, the words drifting aimlessly from my stunned mouth and my shattered mind, “will he be there now?”

“Maybe,” said Katippa, growing pale and trembling. She knew I was no longer under her power. And I had spoken of killing someone. I had spoken, of my own free will, of killing someone.

“Katippa, don’t be afraid. I love you! You are my friend! I would never hurt you!”

“Never, Rungrin?”

“My life,” I said truly, “I would give for you.”

Katippa sagged to the floor, rolled up into a ball and wept.

“Thank you, Rungrin! I believe you. Please go, friend. Go and do what you please. You have been hurt by my words and I fear you are mad. But I know you would not hurt me. Do what you must, Rungrin!”

I slid off my chair and cast a worried glance at her, observing the state that she was in.

“Katippa, it will be alright.”

“Just go, Rungrin!”

“Keep my parrot with you until I return.”

Then I left. It had to be impossible, but I left. It had to be impossible, but I padded my way in darkness, with murder in my heart for a very Keeper!

Ahead of me I saw the cellars of Gikstred, a very bleak row of ale houses. Above, in those half toppled wrecks, in dank rooms, the dusty folk drank their strong, bitter brew. Below, in the cellars, the wicked and depraved indulged in more evil pastimes. The deeper you went into them, the more lost and solitary the people there became. Some practiced blood rites. Some paired off and indulged in sodomy. Some smoked the balm of the poppies or took other narcotics. Deeper still, in one or two very deep and forgotten cellars, lone occultists played games with demons and spirits on the Shrairevens boards.

I knew which ale houses sat over these deep pits, and I had little fear of anyone barring my way. The drinkers lay all fogged with drunkenness, and little cared if an ape passed among them. Their chief concern lay in pursuing inebriation to the fullest extent possible. I walked past them with ease and went down the stairs to the first level.

Here I saw a man molesting a goat and two other men in one corner writhing naked upon each other. They paid me no attention as I went to a ladder and climbed down into the second level.

Here, a sweet smelling smoke filled the air and one or two deathly thin people lay in hammocks, smoking pipes full of drugs. I had to pass through many rooms before I found the stairway to the next level. The entire time I spent on that level there came only stillness and silence from the inhabitants.

The third level seemed to be empty. I saw evidence of strange goings on here. Dust lay thick here, and someone had recently passed to the level below. I nearly tripped over a bowl filled with stale blood. Footprints led to a wall and none led back from it. Odd talismans hung from the roof. Not wanting to guess more, I followed the freshest footprints to the stairway that lead to the fourth level.

By his smell, I recognized the Keeper at once! How strange it struck me to see a man without dark robes on, and know that I looked at a Keeper. How strange to look upon an ordinary looking person and know him to be the mysterious figure that every ape held in awe. No ape had ever conceived to harm this kind of human before. And here I came, slipping behind him with my Carkknive. I listened as the Keeper babbled to demons from an invisible world. I watched him twist weird shaped stones in his hand and run his fingers over wooden pegs placed in the ornate game board. So rapt was he in his meditations, that I dared to brace his shoulder in one hand as the other stabbed the Keeper’s back! I leaned forward and glared into his utterly shocked face.

When I had finished the impossible deed, I stood back and stared at the man who lay in a pool of blood. My hair stood on end. Never before had an ape dared to kill a Keeper! I had done it. I had toppled the figure that loomed larger than anything in every ape’s life. I had rose up against those who could not be opposed by ape! I, Rungrin, had become the slaughterer of a Keeper! I would never fall under a Keeper’s spell again.

Up the stairs I went, and up and up. At last I had gained the street, and I hurried to return to Katippa to see if she still cried. But there suddenly appeared, in the street, a mob of armed apes, led by a Keeper. The Keeper held his jewel up to me and cried, “Stop, ape! We are rounding up every Bravo in the street!”

I stood still and let the Keeper get close to me. To my astonishment, the glow of the stone in the Keeper’s hand had dwindled to no more than a pretty glimmer for me. It had no longer any power over my soul.

When the Keeper came close enough, I suddenly lashed out with a blow that sent him sprawling to the ground. The apes hooted, in confusion, as I lifted the Keeper’s whip from him, and whipped a cowering swath through the midst of his apes. The Keeper lifted himself from the ground and cried, “Stop! I command you!”

“Go to hell!” I snarled, throwing my Carkknive. It was not made as a throwing weapon, but somehow it flew forth and stuck squarely in the Keeper’s chest. He shrieked in horror and sank down dead. I trembled inside. Now I had killed another Keeper-- and this one wore every mark of a Keeper. This one carried a stone and a whip and commanded a troop of apes. And I had just killed this Keeper, in a broad avenue, as apes looked on. But other eyes had been looking and voices began crying out from the towers.