A Triumph of Souls

  So the city died, its inhabitants shunned by surrounding communities. Those who lived long enough to flee were denied sanctuary by their terrified neighbors. They wandered aimlessly, perishing in ditches that lined the sides of roads or beneath trees that could provide welcoming shade but were unable to mourn. Everyone who had come in contact with the Drounge died: the resigned elderly and the disbelieving young, the healthy laborers and the children who could not comprehend. They expired, and so did those who had been in contact with them. Those few who had seen the Drounge and remarked on its passage died differently, slaughtered by their panicked neighbors in a frenzy of ignorance and fear. Eventually, even the plague perished, exhausted by its own capacity for destruction.

  And the Drounge moved on.

  Nothing could stand in its way, and the perceptive got out of it. Those that were incapable of movement prepared themselves as best they were able, and expired as readily as those living things that could. The Drounge handed down no judgments, passed no resolutions, essayed no assessments.

  Only solid rock barred its way or altered its course. Water it passed through as freely as it moved through air, sliding with damned grace into lake or pond and advancing by means of repeated humping motions. As on land, so it was beneath the surface of waves large and small.

  Water plants withered and collapsed to the muddy bottom. The shells of unfortunate mollusks bled calcium until they deteriorated beyond usefulness. Abscesses appeared on the sensitive skin of amphibians, and the gills of passing fish swelled up until suffocation brought on a slow and painful death. Wading birds that ate the dead and dying fell from the sky as if shot, their eyes glazed, their intestines rotting. Emerging on the far shore, the Drounge left behind a body of water as devastated as any town or field. As always, in the aftermath of its passing, only the patient insects prospered.

  The Drounge continued to move northward.

  Eventually it reached a region it might have called home, had it possessed any thought of so removed a notion. For the first time in a long, long while it was able to advance without killing anything. Not because it had suddenly become any less lethal, the essence of itself any less virulent, but because there was so little life in its new surroundings to slaughter. It could not kill what did not live.

  Dimly, through its persistent but restricted vision, it took note of rocks bare of bushes, of a soil so sterile it would not support the hardiest of weeds. An amazing place, as barren of life as the far side of the sky. But as if to ensure it could not relax, an occasional wandering or lost creature would materialize, only to make casual contact and die to remind the Drounge of the homicidal actuality that was itself.

  Not many: just enough. A flowering grass that had somehow managed to establish itself in a shady crack in the blasted ground encountered the passing Drounge. Moments later its petals had dropped off, to skitter away in the detached grasp of a passing breeze. Then the stems bent, bowed by a sudden systemic affliction. The tiny stockade of glistening green blades yellowed and split. Within minutes the miniature oasis was no more, a flavescent smudge of decay against the sickly, pallid earth.

  Where the snake had come from or how it had survived for as long as it had in that blasted land none could say. Heavy with eggs, it sought a place to lay. Searching for the shade of a boulder, it found instead the passing Drounge. Immediately, it began to cough, and to twist violently. The forked tongue flicked spasmodically. One long muscle, the snake writhed and coiled as if trying to choke itself. Eggs began to spew uncontrollably from the ventral orifice. Deposited exposed to the pitiless, blistering sunlight, they soon dried out, the desiccated life within never to see the light of day.

  But for the most part the Drounge killed far less than usual, caused no havoc, induced no mass destruction. Apart from the few isolated encounters with weed and reptile, it lurched onward, enjoying an unusual period of grace and isolation. For a change, the only pain in its vicinity was its own.

  It came eventually to a region of strange rock formations, peculiar spires and precipitates that contained the aspect but not the actuality of life. Composed entirely of inanimate minerals, they were immune and indifferent to the Drounge’s presence. To its left rose a range of high mountains, their peaks ascending toward the clouds. Both would entail a detour, a delay in the march that knew no end, and to which the Drounge was wholly committed despite its lack of a purpose.

  But between massif and hillocks lay an open plain, rising slightly as it approached the first foothills. It was almost perfectly flat, unadorned by plant life and devoid of rocky impediments. Offering an unobstructed route north, it was the path and direction the Drounge chose.

  How long it had toiled forward over the arid plain before it once more encountered life it did not know. Time had no meaning for it, day being no different from night, summer accompanying the same suffering as winter. What life was doing in that place of desolation the Drounge could not imagine. It did not matter. It kept moving forward, always advancing, compelled to alter its chosen course to avoid solid stone but nothing else.

  In some deep, buried, half-hidden part of itself it screamed at the creatures to change direction, to move out of the way, to do something to avoid contact. Having no lips, no palate, no tongue and no mouth, it could not shout a warning. It could only hope. But as had ever been the case with the Drounge, hope was a mostly forgotten component of its existence. What mattered, what was important, was that it keep moving, advancing, progressing. Why, it did not know. “Why” was a concept it could not afford.

  At first it thought it would miss the creatures. They were highly active, agile, and traveling across the plain perpendicularly to the Drounge’s course. If it had slowed down, if they had slowed down, contact could have been avoided. But they showed no inclination to accelerate or moderate their pace, and the Drounge could not. Catastrophe accompanied the Drounge the way remoras shadowed a shark.

  Even so, a sliver of apathetic hope remained as it slid past first one, then another of the energetic vertebrates without making contact. They were an odd lot, the Drounge thought sluggishly. Paradoxical at best, mismatched at worst. A third member of the party trooped past without brushing against it or glancing in its lurching, pitching direction.

  And then the fourth hesitated, reaching out as if feeling of the air in front of it, and grabbed a protruding wad of the Drounge’s putrefying flesh just above one oculus.

  Corruption spurted from the Drounge’s fragile epidermis, surging forward to coagulate around the creature’s fingers and wrist. Its eyes bugged and it gasped in agony as the relic residue of a thousand diseases and pestilences, of a million tumors and ulcerations, shot briefly through its flesh. Cinched by solidifying putridity to the left side of the Drounge, the luckless biped found itself dragged helplessly forward.

  This was an unusual but not unprecedented occurrence. The Drounge knew exactly what would happen. Attached to its humping, gelatinous body, the trapped creature would find itself hauled along until the timeless poisons in the Drounge’s system began to affect it the same way they affected every living thing. It would regain its freedom only when its pinioned limb rotted off at the wrist. Then the rest of the body would atrophy and die, most likely rotted away from within by the extreme contact it had made with the Drounge.

  Instead of fleeing at the highest speed of which they were capable, the unfortunate’s companions whirled and returned, rushing to catch up to him. Rushing to their own deaths, the Drounge reflected. No matter, no shame, no difference. It continued on its way, oblivious to their futile and soon-to-be-fatal efforts. Make contact with their friend or with it, and they too would die. Such had been the affliction of the Drounge’s existence, and such would it always be.

  Two of them stumbled and dodged about as if no longer in control of their own bodies. They were trying to react to something they could not see. Only the third now stared directly at the indefatigably advancing Drounge, peering into its seeping, pustulant optics, plainly sensi
ble not only of its presence but of its bearing and appearance. Recognition, the Drounge knew, meant nothing. A minuscule part of it hoped the creature would keep its distance. The greater part of it was indifferent. After having induced tens of thousands of deaths, one or two more were of less significance to it than raindrops were to the sea.

  At first it thought that the aware creature was digging into its own back, a pain the Drounge could have empathized with. Then it saw that the biped’s own flesh remained inviolate. It was reaching into an artificial object that relied for motility on its organic host. Still avoiding contact with the advancing Drounge while making loud vocalizations to its companions, it withdrew from the sizable, lumpy object one that was smaller still.

  Unlike the article that had given it birth, this small sac of treated and cured vacular material fit comfortably in its owner’s palm. It had the shape of an onion, many thousands of which the Drounge had killed during its passage through formerly lush farmlands far, far to the south. Removing the tapered end of the sac, the vigorous biped proceeded to squeeze the bulb shape slightly. A small bit of thick, viscous paste oozed from the interior. Pale pink in color, it smelled sharply of rain-swept willow and other growing things.

  Pacing the Drounge, the creature reached out and dabbed the bit of sticky mucilage on the spot where its companion’s limb had become adhered. For a while nothing happened. The biped continued to trot alongside the lacerated flank of the Drounge, uttering comforting vocalizations to its entrapped friend, while the rest of its companions kept their distance.

  Then something touched the Drounge.

  This in itself was a most remarkable happenstance. Nothing touched the Drounge. It was the one that did all the touching; the imparting of death, the conveyance of misery, the transmission of suffering. So astonishing was the sensation that for the first time in living memory it reduced its habitual gait, slowing slightly the better to focus on what had occurred while simultaneously trying to analyze it.

  It was not pain. Supreme among all living things on the subject of affliction, the Drounge was intimately familiar with agony in every conceivable, possible variance and permutation. This was something else. Something new and extraordinary. Unable to understand what had taken place, even in the abstract, it could only continue on its way, its direction and purpose temporarily muted but not swayed.

  Instead of fading away, the phenomenon expanded its influence, until a portion of the Drounge the size of a pillow was fully involved. Within this segregated section of self, unprecedented processes were at work. Never having in its entire existence encountered or experienced anything like it before, the Drounge was at a loss to give a name to what was happening. It was not frightened. That which bears the burden of annihilation does not fear. But it was puzzled, if not a little confused.

  Part of it, albeit a very small part, was changing. Metamorphosing in a most matchless and extreme fashion. It took place so rapidly that the Drounge was unable to react, nor did it quite know how to do so. Some sort of response seemed called for, but it could not begin to know exactly what.

  The portion of itself that had engaged the creature foolish enough to initiate physical contact withdrew. Freed, the unfortunate dropped away from the Drounge’s flank, falling to the ground while clutching its formerly impacted upper member. By now that limb should have been diseased beyond recognition, should be little more than a stick upon which a multitude of afflictions had worked their foul dissipation. Moreover, the general infection that was the Drounge ought to have spread to and throughout the creature’s entire slight, vulnerable body, reducing it to a corrupted mass of dead and decaying tissue.

  Nothing of the sort had happened. With the application of the soft paste, all that the Drounge had inflicted had been countered. The individual limb as well as the rest of its owner had been miraculously restored to health. Climbing to its feet, the smaller biped held its formerly impacted appendage and stared down its length as if examining an unexpected apparition. It manifested no evidence of damage and its expression was absent of anguish.

  To the Drounge this amounted to nothing more than an incident. A striking incident, to be sure. One without precedent. But in the long lexicon of its existence merely a footnote, a quip of fate, a momentary interruption in its everlasting painful passage through reality. The quartet of creatures whose path it had ephemerally encountered fell behind; their identities unknown, their insignificant purposes in life restored. The spot on its side where the second biped had daubed the bit of odd ointment tingled, but that was all. No harm had come to the Drounge. How could anything injure that which carried upon and within itself all the world’s hurt?

  A small flurry of movement caused it to look back, a gesture that required an effort no less painful than simply moving forward. It could not believe what it was seeing. Apparently indifferent to the damage that had almost been done to its friend, the taller of the two bipeds with which the Drounge had experienced contact was running. Not away from the northward path as would have been sensible, but directly toward the methodically advancing, only intermittently visible organism. The absurd, demented creature was chasing after the Drounge instead of racing at maximum speed in the opposite direction!

  Self-evidently it was deranged. What could unsettle a sentient being so, the Drounge could not imagine. It did not increase its pace, nor did it slow down. Whatever mad, lunatic purpose motivated the biped was beyond the Drounge’s ability to affect or understand. It did not matter. In the scheme of things, it made no difference whether the crazed creature lived or died.

  It halted abruptly before reaching the stoically retreating Drounge. That, at least, was a rational decision. Perhaps the creature, momentarily maddened, had suddenly come back to its senses. One of its upper, absurdly spindly limbs was upraised. As the Drounge ignored it, the creature brought this member forward. Propelled through the air by this slight physical action, something flew from the end of the appendage. Idly, the Drounge identified it as the onion-shaped object the creature had been carrying earlier.

  The bulb-shape struck the Drounge in the middle of its back. Humping implacably forward, it treated the barely perceptible impact with the same indifference it treated all such contacts. Whenever something touched it, it was invariably the other that suffered.

  On impact, the bulb burst, spilling its contents. The thick, pale unguent spread slowly across the curving bulk of the Drounge. Still its presence was ignored.

  Until it started to sink in.

  The tingling sensation the Drounge had heretofore experienced only at one small place on its left side started to penetrate deeply. It was not unpleasant. On the contrary, the Drounge would have found it pleasurable had it possessed a means for describing such a sensation. In the absence of applicable referents it could only struggle with physical feelings that were entirely new. As a novelty, the effects of the expanding emollient were exhilarating. They could not last, of course. Within moments they would be subsumed within and overwhelmed by the raging internal dissipation and disease that constituted the Drounge’s customary state of existence.

  Proceeding with its advance, the Drounge waited for this to happen. It did not. Instead, the effects of the free-flowing, penetrating balm continued to spread. A strange feeling came over the Drounge, quite unlike anything it had ever felt before. It was as if its whole body had been caught up in something as wonderful as it was unexpected, though it possessed no more referents for wonderful than it did for pleasurable. It was changing.

  For the first time in millennia, the Drounge stopped.

  The singular tingling sensation now dominated every corner of its being, penetrating to the farthest reaches of self, replacing eternal agony and perpetual discomfort with—something else. This was not a small thing; not an incident, not an insignificant transient episode. Its very shape was changing, twisting and buckling with neoteric forces it did not understand. Could not understand, because it had no experience of them.

  With a l
ast convulsive, wrenching sensation of dislocation, the unforeseen metamorphosis achieved final resolution. The Drounge stood as before, inviolate and untouched. Only, something was different. It took even the Drounge a moment to realize what that was.

  It was no longer in pain.

  The absence of agony was so extraordinary a sensation that the Drounge was momentarily paralyzed. It was all gone, all of it—all the suffering, all the disease and decay, all the everlasting affliction that had combined to comprise its physical and mental existence. In its place was something the Drounge could not put a name to: a calmness and tranquillity that were shocking in their unfamiliarity. And something else. For not only had it changed internally, its appearance was radically altered as well. With a new inner individuality had come a new shell, a fresh and unspoiled outer self, courtesy of the tingling unguent that had affected a transformation far beyond what even its wielder could have envisioned.

  Elation swept through the Drounge at its unexpected epiphany. Never having felt itself trapped, it hardly knew how to react to being free. Exhilaration was a sensation with which it had never before had to come to terms. Uncertain, tentative, it could only try.

  As the tiny cluster of astonished, fragile creatures it had come close to killing looked on in wonder, the enormous butterfly that had materialized before their eyes spread six-foot wings of prismatic emerald and opalescent crimson and rose from the bleached desert floor, haltingly at first but with increasing confidence, into a cloudless and welcoming clear blue sky.

  XX

  Let me have another look at that hand.”

  Simna wordlessly raised the arm by which he had been attached to the lumbering horror. Rotting flesh had been miraculously renewed, nerves sutured, skin regrown, the bleeding stopped. With the impossible butterfly vanishing into the distance and his restored limb hanging healthy and normal from the end of his shoulder, his attention kept switching back and forth between wonders.