Troy Denning - Pages of Pain

Pains Of The Mind

Black hair and ebony eyes, a cleft chin and sun-bronzed skin, he is no denizen of mine. He shoves his way through the teeming lanes of the Lower Ward, both arms wrapped around that enormous amphora he carries and no hand free for his sword. He wears the bronze armor of Thrassos, with no cape to protect against the acid haze that always hangs in this part of the city. From his belt dangles a purse, fat and naked, just daring some fingersmith to ply his trade. The gray-swaddled crowd swirls around him with scarcely a stare; with Abyssal fiends and celestial seraphim walking the streets, they have better things to heed than wide-eyed pilgrims too naive to hide their coin.

A clever disguise, but I know that Thrasson for a Hunter. Those ebony eyes can see through my thickest granite walls, and that long aquiline nose can smell a drop of blood at a hundred paces. Those ears-small and shaped like shells, in the human fashion those ugly little ears can hear a hiss of pain in the next ward. He has one of those long forked tongues that can taste the fear of those who have. looked upon my face. And if the Thrasson presses his hands to the cobblestones, he can feel the coldness of my passing. I know he can.

In Sigil, the Lady of Pain always knows. I hear all the lies whispered into all the tepid ears in the dark bedchambers of all the great manors. I see every hand that slips into an open pocket on every bustling street, and I feel the dagger that bums in the belly of every trusting fool who ever followed a glitter girl into a dark alley. No longer can I tell where Sigil begins and I end; no longer can I separate what I perceive from what the city is. I am Sigil.

(In a dreary room where sick men slake their secret fevers, a yellow-bruised girl climbs naked from the zombie pit. She opens her palm and walks the aisles and does not cringe when the hot hands caress her thighs. She lives the best way she can; in Sigil, the noblest act is to survive.)

I open my eyes, and the Lady of Pain is there-not just watching, but stalking the Hunter up the teeming street, with the clamor of forge hammers ringing in my ears and the stink of hot slag scorching my nostrils. She is tall and serene, a statuesque beauty of classic features, with sulfurous eyes and a cold, callous air. A halo of many-styled blades surrounds her head, some notched and pitted, others silver and gleaming, but all keen-edged and tainted with blood. The hem of her brocaded gown sweeps along the grimy cobblestones, but never soils.

My gray-swaddled denizens bustle by, blissfully unaware that she no, I that I walk among them. Only if my feet break touch with the ground will they notice me, and I am careful to keep my shoes on the street. Better for them to see the Lady of Pain when they have offended me, when they feel the fear eating their.bellies and hear the death gods calling their names.

Whenever my denizens brush against me, tiny white welts rise on their skin. Before my eyes, these blisters swell into thumb-shaped pods. They begin to grow more slowly, then sprout dozens of hooked spines. As the crowd mills about, the barbs catch hold of anything they touch, and the husks pass to fresh carriers. They continue to enlarge and soon latch onto someone new, then someone else after that, and it is not long before a sea of bulging pods is spreading steadily outward around me.

My denizens continue to bustle about their business. They cannot see the pods, nor feel the extra weight, nor even smell the fetid reek that clings to their bodies. Only I perceive the husks, slowly swelling and turning emerald and gold and ruby and jet; only I see them oozing yellow ichor and starting to throb like hearts.

Thus are the four Pains spread through the multiverse- agony, anguish, misery, and despair-to ripen and burst and bring low the mighty and the meek alike. From whence they come, I do not remember. It may be that I create them myself, or that they rise from some hidden place deeper and blacker than the bottom layer of the Abyss, where smoke hangs thick as rock and death is the sweetest memory. I can only say there is a void in my chest where I once had a heart, and from this emptiness springs all the suffering in the multiverse.

At first, the Pains are like a kiss, hot and breathy and welcome. They reach out with long cajoling fingers and make my bones hum with delight. I warm to the touch and, though I know what must follow, yearn for more. My flesh tingles and flushes and shudders, and the more my ecstasy builds, the more the void pours forth. It fills me to glutting, sates me with honeyed rapture until bliss rolls half a turn and becomes sweet agony. Then my body nettles with a blistering itch no ointment can heal. And the greater my woe, the more scalding the anguish that seethes from the empty well inside. I boil in my own sick regret, and I cannot staunch the flow. It billows up in white plumes and blanches my bones with sorrow; I bum with the shame of a thousand evils I cannot recall, and still the well pours forth. It fills me as fire fills a forge, until I must burst or scour myself clean on the swarming streets of Sigil.

They are a gift, these Pains.

(A bottle of Arborea's best in one hand and a chain of Ossan pearls in the other, a jolly merchant home early flings open his door to see his young wife lying cold and blue on the floor, her child clinging to her breast and wailing for a reason. There is no reason; only life and suffering and then a terrible lingering emptiness, and, hard as I try, I cannot see beyond that)

Pain can force fathers to forsake their daughters and heroes to betray their kingdoms. It can change the hearts of tyrants, or subdue the lands of proud and vicious warriors. It is pain that makes wives hate husbands and immortals beg for death, and only pain that can shackle whole planes to the will of a single lord.

And so the gods send their Hunters; they thirst for the Pains as flames thirst for tinder. The wicked ones would make a weapon of suffering; they would spread it among their enemies and brandish it over the heads of their comrades. And worse would the good ones do; they would drive torment from the multiverse altogether-destroy misery if they could-and end forever all suffering and despair.

Frauds and fools, every one and the good ones more than the bad. Like quicksilver, pain slips from the hand that would grasp it and divides before the blow that would cleave it. Without the Pains, the multiverse can endure no more than wind can blow without the air. Suffering breeds strength from weakness, it heralds new births, it guides all beings through life. The dead soar to oblivion on black wings of anguish, and even pleasure springs from the same well as agony. To shun pain is to lie stillborn forever.

(A child, wishing he could swim once more in brown waters, lies slick with sweat and speckled in pink, his stiff legs withering to useless sticks. I have hugged him to my breast; the Pains have rooted and sprouted unseen and unfelt, and now they have burst It is not right, and it is not wrong; it is life.)

At a crossroads, the Hunter stops and turns his head right, then left. He is looking through walls with those ebony eyes, searching for what has already found him. I take him in my arms and press myself close. A hundred blisters sprout beneath his armor, and still I hold the Thrasson tight as a lover; I hold him tight so the pods will root deep, deep down in his soul and not rub off.

His body tenses.

That huge amphora slips through his arms and nearly crashes to the street. He cries out and drops to his heels. He catches it, and gives out a long breathy sigh, as though smashing that jar would be worse than dying.

Perhaps it would. There is a golden net inside, god-enchanted just to catch me.