Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning - Short Fictions and Disturbances

Once, long ago, there had been lovers, but that had been in the dawn days of the Dukedom. Now, in the dusk of the world, with all pleasures available freely (but what we attain with no effort we cannot value), and with no need to deal with any issues of succession (for even the notion that another would one day succeed the Duke bordered upon blasphemy), there were no more lovers, just as there were no challenges. He felt as if he were asleep while his eyes were open and his lips spoke, but there was nothing to wake him.

The day after it had occurred to the Duke that he was now a monster was the Day of Strange Blossoms, celebrated by the wearing of flowers brought to the Ducal Palace from every world and every plane. It was a day that all in the Ducal Palace, which covered a continent, were traditionally merry, and in which they cast off their cares and darknesses, but the Duke was not happy.

‘How can you be made happy?’ asked the information beetle on his shoulder, there to relay his master’s whims and desires to a hundred hundred worlds. ‘Give the word, Your Grace, and empires will rise and fall to make you smile. Stars will flame novae for your entertainment.’

‘Perhaps I need a heart,’ said the Duke.

‘I shall have a hundred hundred hearts immediately plucked, ripped, torn, incised, sliced and otherwise removed from the chests of ten thousand perfect specimens of humanity,’ said the information beetle. ‘How do you wish them prepared? Shall I alert the chefs or the taxidermists, the surgeons or the sculptors?’

‘I need to care about something,’ said the Duke. ‘I need to value life. I need to wake.’

The beetle chittered and chirrupped on his shoulder; it could access the wisdom of ten thousand worlds, but it could not advise its master when he was in this mood, so it said nothing. It relayed its concern to its predecessors, the older information beetles and scarabs, now sleeping in ornate boxes on a hundred hundred worlds, and the scarabs consulted among themselves with regret, because, in the vastness of time, even this had happened before, and they were prepared to deal with it.

A long-forgotten subroutine from the morning of the worlds was set into motion. The Duke was performing the final ritual of the Day of Strange Blossoms with no expression on his thin face, a man seeing his world as it was and valuing it not at all, when a small winged creature fluttered out from the blossom in which she had been hiding.

‘Your Grace,’ she whispered. ‘My mistress needs you. Please. You are her only hope.’

‘Your mistress?’ asked the Duke.

‘The creature comes from Beyond,’ clicked the beetle on his shoulder. ‘From one of the places that does not acknowledge the Ducal Overlordship, from the lands beyond life and death, between being and unbeing. It must have hidden itself inside an imported offworld orchid blossom. Its words are a trap, or a snare. I shall have it destroyed.’

‘No,’ said the Duke. ‘Let it be.’ He did something he had not done for many years, and stroked the beetle with a thin white finger. Its green eyes turned black and it chittered into perfect silence.

He cupped the tiny thing in his hands, and walked back to his quarters, while she told him of her wise and noble Queen, and of the giants, each more beautiful than the last, and each more huge and dangerous and more monstrous, who kept her Queen a captive.

And as she spoke, the Duke remembered the days when a lad from the stars had come to World to seek his fortune (for in those days there were fortunes everywhere, just waiting to be found); and in remembering he discovered that his youth was less distant than he had thought. His information beetle lay quiescent upon his shoulder.

‘Why did she send you to me?’ he asked the little creature. But, her task accomplished, she would speak no more, and in moments she vanished, as instantly and as permanently as a star that had been extinguished upon Ducal order.

He entered his private quarters, and placed the deactivated information beetle in its case beside his bed. In his study, he had his servants bring him a long black case. He opened it himself, and, with a touch, he activated his master advisor. It shook itself, then wriggled up and about his shoulders in viper form, its serpent tail forking into the neural plug at the base of his neck.

The Duke told the serpent what he intended to do.

‘This is not wise,’ said the master advisor, the intelligence and advice of every Ducal advisor in memory available to it, after a moment’s examination of precedent.

‘I seek adventure, not wisdom,’ said the Duke. A ghost of a smile began to play at the edges of his lips; the first smile that his servants had seen in longer than they could remember.

‘Then, if you will not be dissuaded, take a battle-steed,’ said the advisor. It was good advice. The Duke deactivated his master advisor and he sent for the key to the battle-steeds’ stable. The key had not been played in a thousand years: its strings were dusty.

There had once been six battle-steeds, one for each of the Lords and Ladies of the Evening. They were brilliant, beautiful, unstoppable, and when the Duke had been forced, with regret, to terminate the career of each of the Rulers of the Evening, he had declined to destroy their battle-steeds, instead placing them where they could be of no danger to the worlds.

The Duke took the key and played an opening arpeggio. The gate opened, and an ink-black, jet-black, coal-black battle-steed strutted out with feline grace. It raised its head and stared at the world with proud eyes.

‘Where do we go?’ asked the battle-steed. ‘What do we fight?’

‘We go Beyond,’ said the Duke. ‘And as to whom we shall fight . . . well, that remains to be seen.’

‘I can take you anywhere,’ said the battle-steed. ‘And I will kill those who try to hurt you.’

The Duke clambered onto the battle-steed’s back, the cold metal yielding as live flesh between his thighs, and he urged it forward.

A leap and it was racing through the froth and flux of Underspace: together they were tumbling through the madness between the worlds. The Duke laughed, then, where no man could hear him, as they travelled together through Underspace, travelling forever in the Undertime (that is not reckoned against the seconds of a person’s life).

‘This feels like a trap, of some kind,’ said the battle-steed, as the space beneath galaxies evaporated about them.

‘Yes,’ said the Duke. ‘I am sure that it is.’

‘I have heard of this Queen,’ said the battle-steed, ‘or of something like her. She lives between life and death, and calls warriors and heroes and poets and dreamers to their doom.’

‘That sounds right,’ said the Duke.

‘And when we return to real-space, I would expect an ambush,’ said the battle-steed.

‘That sounds more than probable,’ said the Duke, as they reached their destination, and erupted out of Underspace back into existence.

The guardians of the palace were as beautiful as the messenger had warned him, and as ferocious, and they were waiting.

‘What are you doing?’ they called, as they came in for the assault. ‘Do you know that strangers are forbidden here? Stay with us. Let us love you. We will devour you with our love.’

‘I have come to rescue your Queen,’ he told them.

‘Rescue the Queen?’ they laughed. ‘She will have your head on a plate before she looks at you. Many people have come to save her, over the years. Their heads sit on golden plates in her palace. Yours will simply be the freshest.’

There were men who looked like fallen angels and women who looked like demons risen. There were people so beautiful that they would have been all that the Duke had ever desired, had they been human, and they pressed close to him, skin to carapace and flesh against armour, so they could feel the coldness of him, and he could feel the warmth of them.