Wichtig and Stehlen danced to Morgen’s plans, never seeing the bigger picture. They were fools.
“You’re the fool,” Stehlen whispered into his ear, “if you believe that.” She kissed his neck, lips soft and warm in a way Stehlen never was. Except in that puke-spattered alley.
“Your love is an anchor,” Bedeckt told her. “Wichtig is right: Emotion is manipulation.”
“Even I don’t believe that,” said Wichtig in the other ear. “Emotion is a strength I never dared.”
Fools, he thought without rancour.
The Geborene Geisteskranken could have them both.
The world rolled like it were mounted on horseback and Bedeckt saw Wichtig riding alongside him. Morgen sat before the Swordsman as he had when they left Neidrig back before they were all killed. The boy-god watched Bedeckt with wide, innocent eyes.
“Your eyes are a lie,” said Bedeckt.
“They weren’t,” said Morgen.
Bedeckt grunted. True enough.
“You couldn’t leave me to the Slaver,” said Morgen. “What makes you think you can turn your back on your friends?”
“I never did like you,” Bedeckt told the boy.
Morgen laughed and was gone.
Bedeckt, mounted on Arsehole, clung to the pommel like a drowning man clinging to driftwood. The world went mad and tried to drag him along with it.
“I am sane,” he told the world, ignoring the hallucinations cavorting about him in mad parody of distant memories.
Zukunft rode beside Bedeckt, her face pale with worry.
“How many of those whores did you fall in love with?” someone asked.
“All of them,” answered Bedeckt, not sure if he lied.
The ground smashed the air from Bedeckt, lit his world in sparks and fire. Arsehole looked down at him with disgust.
“You keep falling off your horse,” the damned horse said.
Black.
Zukunft knelt at his side, pounding on his chest like she meant to beat him into the mud beneath. She screamed and cried and wailed and he couldn’t understand any of it.
“Quiet, girl,” he said. “Let me rest.”
She slapped him hard and he tasted blood. “Get up, you old shite,” she yelled in his face, spittle flying. “Get the hells up and get on your gods-damned horse.” She punched his chest again, punctuating her words. “I can’t keep pushing your fat old arse into the damned saddle. Get the hells off the ground.”
“Stop screaming and let me rest.”
She slapped him again, snapping his head to one side. He blinked sharp tears. She was stronger than she looked.
“I knew you were going to abandon me,” she screamed, her perfect nose almost touching his flattened one. “I knew you were a liar, like the rest.” Zukunft collapsed on top of Bedeckt like a puppet with slashed strings. She punched him over and over and he let her. “Just another selfish bastard.”
Bedeckt hallucinated the decrepit Wahnvor Stellung church his father used to drag them to on days of worship. Hells of punishment and pain flickered around them, threatened to close in and steal Zukunft away.
“I’m sane,” Bedeckt said into Zukunft’s hair.
Old friends and betrayed comrades gathered to witness his fall, the utter failure of everything he was and believed.
“I’m sane, my beliefs don’t matter,” Bedeckt told them.
People he couldn’t even remember killing looked doubtful, nodded in recrimination at the world torn by his hallucinations. A different Afterdeath awaited this time. Somehow he knew it.
He knew it.
“My beliefs don’t—”
“Your mind is sick,” said Stehlen. “You will define your own hell. We all do.”
“No, I’m sane.”
But sanity wasn’t real. It was a myth, a delusion. In a mad world, in a reality governed by faith and belief and delusion, what was sanity?
It’s madness.
Bedeckt drowned in madness and oceans of the blood he’d spilled.
“If you die now,” said Stehlen, her narrow face pinched with concern, “you’ll be trapped for all eternity in this fever dream.”
Bedeckt reached his half-hand out to hold Zukunft and saw she’d bandaged it.
Going to have to stop thinking of it as my half hand.
He held her close, stroking her hair until she calmed and stopped hitting him.
“I can’t mount my horse with you lying atop me,” he said. “We need to get moving.”
She pulled back, examining him through tearful green eyes. “You have a plan?” she asked.
Bedeckt laughed, trying to ignore the madness of the sound. “No.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Natural philosophers have argued the shape of the world for a thousand generations. Some say it’s round, while others claim it’s flat. Vorstellung, that pompous windbag, says that if you walk west and cross the Basamortuan Desert, you will eventually find yourself on the far side of the Gezackt Mountains, and that if you cross them you’ll once return to the city-states. He’s a fool. The Basamortuan goes on forever; everyone knows this. Enter the desert and all you’ll find is death.
—Geschichts Verdreher - Historian/Philosopher