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  Pages of Pain

  ( Planetscape - 1 )

  Troy Denning

  Pages of Pain

  ( Planescape ) Troy Denning

  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.

  The Thrasson balances the amphora on the street and slowly turns, his free hand on his sword and his eyes narrowed. It may be that he felt a chill beneath his armor, as though a ghost had embraced him, but he cannot be certa
in. So sudden and fleeting was the touch that even now he wonders if he imagined it The crowd swirls past, cursing him for a fool or a madman and keeping a watchful eye on his weapon hand. Though I stand less than a pace away, of course he cannot see me. Soon enough, he decides it was nothing more than a sudden case of armor itch. He takes up the amphora again and bulls his way back into the crowd. Already, I see a thousand hooked spines stabbing through his backplate.

  Do not call it revenge-never revenge. Even the gods deserve their pain, and the Thrasson shall bear it to them. Hall Of Marble

  After so many hours harrowing Sigil's teeming lanes, what does the Thrasson think when at last he plows through the crowd and sees the Blue Hall looming ahead? I know. The Lady of Pain always knows, and she will tell you:

  The Hall of Information looked exactly as twenty or more peevish direction-givers had said it would: an imposing monolith of pale blue marble, with a roof of black slate and three massive columns straddling a pair of gray entrance ramps. Inscribed on the capitals of the three pillars were the words "Cooperation," "Compliance," and "Control," an oddly ominous motto for what was purported to be a service bureau. A web of fracture lines laced the "Cooperation" post, which, despite a supporting cage of steel braces, appeared on the verge of collapse.

  Clutching his amphora in both arms and pushing through a torrent of drab-cloaked beings-human and otherwise – the Thrasson angled across Crystal Dew Avenue toward the ramp between "Compliance" and ''Control." The nearer he approached the hall, the less he agreed with the churls who had called it "an edifice of stately grandeur." Even a simple man of action could see that the building suffered from a clumsy attempt to substitute opulence for taste. The stark bands of the onyx corner boards made a mockery of the marble facade's soft swirls, while the turquoise window casings looked like the painted eyes of a common harlot. The door guards, with their crimson breastplates and rusty shoulder spikes, added just the splash of blood to make a vulgar mess of the whole thing.

  Jewel of the Infinite Planes indeed! Sigil so far had been a bitter disappointment to the Thrasson. So thick was the ginger air that it dragged over his face like cobwebs; just breathing the awful stuff filled his throat with a burning, acrid grit. In some wards, the avenues ran ankle-deep with swill, and in others, a man could hardly shove his way through the throngs that packed the streets. Everywhere, the constant drizzle stained the dreary building facades with runnels of yellow sulfur. Upon each sweltering breeze came a stench more rancid than the last, and nowhere did the clamor ebb for even a moment.

  The Thrasson had heard that Sigil was shaped like the inside of a floating wheel, and that if he looked straight up, he would see the roofs of distant buildings instead of sky. So far, he had seen nothing but a sick, brown haze. It was said that the city was the hub of the multiverse, that somewhere in its bounds lay a portal to each world in the infinite planes; to the Thrasson, it seemed that every one of those portals was the wrong end of a garbage chute. He wanted nothing more than to complete his task and be gone from the place.

  The Thrasson climbed the ramp and crossed the portico, unabashedly returning the stern glower of the guards. He would have welcomed a challenge, so anxious was he to vent his frustration. In addition to the difficulties of delivering the amphora, no one in the city seemed to know of him. He did not expect them to recognize him by sight, or anything so foolish, but it did seem reasonable to assume that by now his deeds would have been sung in even the lowliest gutter house of Sigil. Yet, when he introduced himself, he still had to recount his entire list of feats – at least those he could remember – and even after he described the felling of the Acherian Giant, most people simply turned away in indifference. The only ones interested in him were the thieves eyeing his heavy purse and the guides who, hearing the name of the one he wished to find, scurried away without naming a price.

  As the Thrasson neared the entrance, the sentries reached over and pushed open the doors. They gave no salutation or comment, and their faces betrayed no hint of either respect or disdain. They were simply holding the doors for a man burdened with a heavy amphora.

  That anonymous courtesy made the Thrasson's belly bum with indignity. Still, as it was the burden of fame to suffer ignorance in good grace, he paused long enough to utter a few sentences of thanks.

  "Bar that, pal," answered the tallest guard, a square-chinned fellow with a two-day growth of beard on his cheeks. "We'd do the same for any blood. Now get on with it." He jerked his head toward the entrance. "Madame Mok don't like us letting in drafts."

  The Thrasson stepped into a murky foyer of blue marble, where he found himself standing at the end of a serpentine visitors' queue. The line switched back and forth a dozen times until it finally stopped before a high, looming counter of black marble. The massive desk stood directly beneath a glowing chandelier of blue-green beryl crystals. It was flanked by a pair of silver, hand-shaped braziers, from which rose two plumes of pink, apple-sweet incense smoke.

  Behind the lofty counter sat a single bespectacled clerk, hunched over the bench and using quill and ink to scratch notes into a parchment ledger. From the wooly nap atop his head rose the double-curled horns of a bariaur, a sort of goatlike centaur that roamed many of the multiverse's planes. The Thrasson had already been surprised by the hundreds of bariaur pushing through Sign's packed streets; in his own plane, Arborea, the bariaur were an unsettled, carefree race who would sooner leap into a cesspool than enter a city. He found it difficult to believe that any of them actually abided in Sigil, much less worked inside a gloomy building like the Hall of Information.

  The Thrasson considered the line only a moment before deciding it was beneath him to wait. Scattered among the humans were frog-faced slaadi, dwarves both bearded and bald, a svelte trio of elves, even a lizardlike khaasta warrior, but he saw no sign of anyone who matched his own stature. Had he seen the shimmering feathers of an astral deva's seraphic wings, perhaps, or the smoking horns of a great baatezu lord, he might have waited. As matters stood, however, it seemed apparent that his business took precedence over that of anyone else in the foyer.

  The Thrasson pushed straight through the looped line, issuing stem yet polite commands for those ahead to stand aside. The humans obeyed, of course, though it surprised him to note how many of them looked taken aback. Even in Sigil, it should have been obvious from his bearing and fine armor that he was a man of renown, beloved of the gods and deserving of all respect

  When the Thrasson reached the khaasta, the reptilian suddenly raised its tail to block the way and craned its sinuous neck around to glare. The warrior's head was typically lacertilian: a flat wedge that was mostly snout, with a long, stupid grin and beady slit-pupiled eyes that betrayed no emotion at all.

  "You wait like the ressst of ussssss, berk."

  The Thrasson regarded the tail. The thickness of a human leg, it was armored in leathery scales and braided with the rippling sinews of a race not far removed from the brute. The appendage was no match for the star-forged blade in the Thrasson's scabbard, but he had no wish to punish the khaasta so severely. He threw one leg over the tail, then forced the scaly appendage downward until he had it trapped between his knees.

  "You would be wise to defer to your better."

  The khaasta's head began to bob in that angry lizard way, then its scaly hand dropped toward a broad manskin belt.

  The Thrasson snapped his hips forward, trapping the tail behind one knee and before the other, then scissored his legs. With a sharp pop, the appendage kinked and went limp. The reptilian roared and produced a stiletto from its belt sheath, but with its broken tail still trapped between the Thrasson's legs, it was helpless to spin and attack.

  At the head of the line, the old bariaur scowled and looked up from his ledger. "Here now! What's all this?" He peered over his spectacles at the growling khaasta. "People are working. If you can't be quiet, I'll ask you to leave."

  The khaasta quickly slipped his dagger out of sight. "Assssk me to
leave?" He pointed a single yellow talon at the Thrasson, who released his tail and continued to push toward the counter. "That berk'sss the one who'sss shoving ahead!"

  The bariaur studied the disheveled line, then turned his glower upon the advancing Thrasson. "We have procedures in this hall. You'll have to stand in line like everyone else."

  "Do you not know me, old sir?" The Thrasson hipped aside a scowling dwarf and continued forward. "Have you not heard of the slayer of the Hydra of Thrassos, the tamer of the Hebron Crocodile, the bane of Abudrian Dragons, the savior of the Virgins of Marmara…"

  He reached the counter, and the bariaur leaned over his desk to scowl down. at the Thrasson, who continued to list his feats: "… the champion of Ilyrian Kings, the killer of the Chalcedon Lion-"

  "No, I have not heard of you," the bariaur interrupted, "nor do I much care what you've done. If you can't comply with the rules, I'll have you removed."

  The clerk cast a meaningful glance toward the door. The two sentries now stood inside the foyer, glaring at the Thrasson as though they had expected trouble from him all along.

  "What'ssss of me tail?" complained the khaasta. "There'sss lawsss againssst the breaking of tailssss, there issss!"

  The sentries nodded, more to each other than the khaasta, then snapped their glaives to the advance guard and started forward. The crowd parted to let them through, and the bariaur scowled down at the Thrasson.

  "Is this true? Did you assault the reptilian?"

  "I caused him no serious injury." The Thrasson's tone was sharp, for it had been the khaasta who had wronged him. "He dared block my path, and even you must see that my concerns take precedence here."

  The bariaur arched his brow, then raised a hand to stop the two sentries. "Are you declaring an Emergency Priority?"

  "If it means I am entitled not to wait, then yes."

  The bariaur licked his lips, then clasped his hands on his desk and leaned on his elbows. "The proper procedure is to announce the Emergency Priority to the door guards, who will then certify that you have the proper funds and escort you to the front of the line, so as to create minimal disturbance and avoid unpleasant incidents such as the breaking of tails." The clerk made a sour face and glanced at the khaasta, then looked back to the Thrasson. "However, since you have already reached the counter, we will skip certification and proceed directly to collection. You may now present the fee."