Tak

The Master of Castle Nagra - Part 3

     He turned his attention back to the crystal ball and mentally summoned the spirit living within it, no longer burdened by any feeling of compassion or pity towards it. Creatures like pucks deserved no pity. They deserved everything they got.

     His new opinion of it was confirmed when the spirit revealed itself to him. He could sense how loathsomely evil it was, how it used the crystal itself to watch and gloat over all the sufferings of the world. He could sense also that it had no desire to be free. It was happy, if such a word could be used to describe such a monstrous intelligence. It wanted to stay just where it was, where everything that went on everywhere in the world was visible to it. It was the ultimate couch potato, and had long since forgotten whatever existence it had had before.

     As Tak's mind made contact with it, he was momentarily aware of what the spirit was seeing, and in his mind's eye a scene took shape. A tribe of shologs had captured a merchant caravan foolishly taking a shortcut through their territory and was busily torturing the crew, a pastime the humanoid race enjoyed almost as much as warfare. There was no sound, so he couldn't hear the screams or the desperate pleading of men driven past the point of sanity, but the visual scene was enough to drive him reeling away from the orb in horror. There was still a connection between him and the spirit of the crystal, though, and he sensed it laughing derisively at him, amused by his squeamishness.

     "You, you monster!" cried Tak in outrage, striding back to the orb on its pedestal. "You take pleasure in watching scenes like that? That's your idea of entertainment? Why I ought to..." He picked up the orb, and for one mad moment he meant to throw it to the stone floor, smash it to pieces. Sanity returned just in time, however, and he returned it gently to its pedestal. Destroying the orb would not end the suffering of the men he'd seen in it, and he suspected he was going to need the orb too much to risk damaging it. Taking a deep breath, therefore, he looked into it again and issued a mental command for the spirit to turn its gaze elsewhere.

     He'd lost all desire to look upon his old home again, because the spirit would be seeing it as well. He felt it would be a desecration of his childhood memories to expose the scenes where they'd taken place to the demon's gaze. He commanded the spirit to look upon the town of Aldervale, therefore, to see what was going on there.

     The spirit was unwilling to leave the scene of torture, however, and Tak had to use all his willpower to tear its gaze away, all the while trying not to see what was happening before his horrified eyes. It was a long, hard struggle, the spirit fought him every inch of the way, but in the end it relented and the silently screaming men faded from view to be replaced by a placid scene of rural tranquility.

     The town was just as he remembered it. Farmers and traders walked the streets, some riding carts laden with goods and produce, some in groups discussing matters of small importance. Oil lamps glowed inside some of the thatched cottages and horses were tied up at hitching posts outside the tavern. The bare earth street was muddy, it had rained overnight, but no-one seemed to mind and even the women he saw paid no attention to the mud plastering their boots and legs.

     Tak thought about Lyssa, the girl Philip had brought to the castle and whom Tak had returned to her family. The street scene faded, and he saw the living room of a house; the room he'd seen during his visit to cure the girl's father. Lyssa was there, sitting upright on one of the chairs, looking unhappy. She had a cotton shirt in her hands and was darning a hole in the elbow, but she kept glancing anxiously towards the door as if something bad were happening on the other side of it. Emotions were warring on her face. At one point she rose from her seat and took one step forward, before changing her mind and sitting again, looking fearful and ashamed. Clearly something was going on in the next room and Tak had a pretty good idea what it was.