13. Circus Charlie (15)
13. Circus Charlie (15)
Mull was dead drunk, but he recognized the figure immediately. A nose three times the length of any normal man's, and that massive hump strapped to his back—impossible to forget.
"Wait... weren't you at the memorial hall's exhibition room last week—?"
"Heh heh. You remember."
Mull stared at him blankly for a moment, then pressed a hand to his forehead and burst out laughing. The image of that old man, pinned by his own hump and spinning on the floor like an overturned top, was still absurd enough to crack him up.
"Pfft—pffahaha, oh, my apologies. Just remembering that day... But what brings you here? If you're hoping to squeeze some compensation out of the theater, you're too late. The venue's already locked in as a preliminary site."
The old man shook his head.
"No. I only came because there's something I wanted to confirm with you."
"Confirm? What's there to confirm?"
Igor bared his pointed teeth in a grin and drew something from inside his coat.
Mull recognized it instantly: a copy of Bread and Circus, the issue from a few months back. The old man opened it and, with eerie precision, read aloud a single paragraph from one of Mull's own reviews.
"...The old saying holds true—a much-heralded feast often serves nothing. Watching a decrepit master thrash about, now so diminished that his mere presence at the festival embarrasses his colleagues, was painful. Were I to score the three works he presented that day, I would assign them 38, 33, and 21 points respectively. Without the slightest charity. This... is yours, isn't it?"
Mull could hear the quaver in the old man's voice. Excitement.
This was a dark alleyway, empty of passersby. The danger only now registered, and with it came a violent sobering.
"L-Listen here. I simply gave my honest assessment. Do you have a complaint?"
"No, hardly. Heh heh. Quite the opposite—I was impressed. The eyes of 'you people' who watch performances are truly remarkable."
You people? The critics?
That was when Mull heard it: a dry clacking sound, somewhere nearby. Like teeth chattering.
He glanced around, saw the old man stepping closer, and retreated a pace.
"Haha, w-well, I'm glad you were impressed. I-I mean, naturally, my reviews..."
"No, not the reviews. I said eyes."
The clacking came again. Mull realized it was coming from the old man himself.
But that made no sense. How do you chatter your teeth while speaking?
A chill of unease shot through him. He tried to back away, but his body refused to move—bound tight, as if wrapped in something. He looked down and sucked in a ragged gasp.
Dozens of writhing tentacles, thick and octopus-like, were coiled around him in a tangled mass. They extended from beneath the old man's feet.
A monster.
Mull tried to scream. But the tentacles had already slithered up his body and clamped his mouth shut.
"Mmmf!"
He thrashed and twisted, but the grip only tightened, pinning him in place.
The clacking came again.
The old man had closed the distance entirely, looming inches from Mull's face.
"You who were born with the Eye of Kirkeus. Won't you take a look at mine as well?"
The old man removed his tinted glasses.
Mull's eyes flew wide with horror. He understood at last where that chattering sound had been coming from.
The old man's bare eye sockets.
Where eyes should have been, mouths gaped instead. The clacking was the sound of the teeth mounted there, chattering with excitement.
The old man smiled, and the two mouths set in his eye sockets grinned back, baring teeth. That was the last thing Mull ever saw.
"Aaaaugh!"
Like a frog's tongue snapping toward prey, Igor's eyes shot forward, crimson flesh unfurling as they stretched—and bit clean into Mull's own eyes.
Crunch. Crack. Gnash, gnash.
The teeth tore skin, crushed bone, chewed and swallowed flesh.
Igor dropped Mull's corpse to the ground.
Another lens through which Kirkeus peered into the world had been removed. Igor's body now housed hundreds of pairs of Eyes of Kirkeus—the fruit of a decade spent hunting down and killing those born with the sight, stealing what was theirs.
Identifying someone who possessed the Eye of Kirkeus was, under normal circumstances, impossible. They bore no outward mark, no distinguishing feature. True, they were immune to Devolut, but that hardly helped—Igor could not very well travel the world shaking hands with billions of people one by one.
There was, however, one recurring phenomenon in their vicinity: the Curse Plague.
The Curse Plague was, at its root, a form of divine descent. When the Sleeping Chaos took up residence in a human body, Devolut spread through the host.
Ordinarily, receiving a god required a rite.
For Kirkeus, the rite was, naturally, a performance. And any act within that performance that resonated with him—namely, laughter—opened a channel to him.
Any student of theology knew that much.
But even if a performance was so magnificent that an entire audience roared with laughter in unison, that never once triggered an outbreak of the Curse Plague.
Kirkeus's power operated on a scale entirely different from the other Demon Gods. To summon him that way would require an audience of hundreds of thousands at minimum. And wholesome laughter or genuine emotional catharsis actually weakened the connection between this world and the Abyss.
That was precisely why Kirkeus was publicly known as a "harmless Demon God." Even when the proper rite was performed, nothing happened.
But when two specific conditions were met, everything changed.
The Eye of Kirkeus, and a monster circus.
The Eye of Kirkeus was a kind of window through which Kirkeus observed the world. Perform before someone who possessed those eyes, and the power of the rite increased dozens of times over.
A monster circus, meanwhile, fed Kirkeus's darkest appetites—mocking laughter, contemptuous laughter, scornful laughter. His satisfaction from such a performance was hundreds of times greater than from any ordinary show.
Combine those two, and the probability of a Curse Plague outbreak surged tens of thousands of times.
The performance didn't even need to be a formal monster circus. So long as it reduced someone to a public object of ridicule, provoking laughter laced with contempt and disdain from onlookers, it served Kirkeus perfectly well.
But tracking the source of a Curse Plague outbreak in search of the Eye of Kirkeus was hardly simple. You never knew when or where one would occur. Even once you arrived, singling out the person with the eyes was fiendishly difficult. And by the time you finally found them, they might already be dead—caught up in the very disaster their eyes had caused.
For years, Igor had chased rumors and scraps of intelligence, barely managing to secure a single pair of Eyes of Kirkeus. But about a decade ago, he stopped gathering information himself.
There was no need. People brought it to him willingly.
Christian Guide.
The rival publication to Bread and Circus, a periodical devoted exclusively to performance criticism. Every day, hundreds—thousands—of readers worldwide mailed in their scores. The magazine compiled them alongside the critics' scores and published rankings for attractions across the globe.
Over ten years ago, Igor made contact with one of its editors. In exchange for granting the man certain... wishes, Igor received internal data in return.
As it happened, the owner of the very first pair of eyes Igor had acquired was an avid reader of Christian Guide. Igor had his contact search for anyone who assigned the exact same scores to the same performances.
Possessing the Eye of Kirkeus didn't mean two people would feel the same way about the same show. A king who lived in daily splendor might dismiss a 50-point performance as trivial, while a boy in a remote village with no entertainment at all might find the same performance thrilling.
But the rise of Christian Guide gave the world a shared yardstick: the score. Or at least, those who subscribed to the magazine and mailed in their evaluations learned to express their judgments in numbers.
Kirkeus's spokesmen—the eye-bearers—showed an astonishing consistency. For any given performance, the scores they submitted were identical.
That didn't mean they all watched the same shows at the same time. But overlaps were frequent. Close enough. Enough for Igor. If one or two scores matched, or several clustered closely, all he had to do was pay a visit and confirm in person.
And so, for over a decade, he had hunted hundreds of eyes.
Men like Mull, however, couldn't be found through the usual channels. He hadn't written for Christian Guide—he contributed to Bread and Circus. That magazine favored flavorful description and subjective impressions over objective scoring. It didn't collect numerical ratings at all.
But a few months ago, Mull had slipped. He'd mentioned specific scores for the performances he'd seen. Igor had his friend at Christian Guide cross-reference the data, and for all three shows, the numbers matched those of Igor's previous prey.
He could have killed the man ten days ago. But a stray thought had made him postpone the hunt—a hunch, a hope. And Mull had served his purpose splendidly.
Igor drew a sheet of paper from the dead man's coat.
On it were recorded the scores Mull had assigned to the performances he'd attended during the Theater District Festival. Igor paid no attention to the florid metaphors and carefully chosen insults the critic had drafted to praise or savage each show. Only one thing interested him.
Clues for tracking the next pair of eyes.
"Khaaack—ptui!"
Igor hawked up a wad of phlegm. He spat it into his palm and worked his Devolut into it. The glob quivered like clay, and then blood, bone, and sinew knitted together, sprouting and twisting until it became a living creature.
It wobbled upright like a newly hatched chick and nuzzled against his hand, fawning.
"Skrawk!"
It looked less like a real bird and more like someone had scooped up a heap of slaughterhouse offal and tried to sculpt a bird from it. But the bulging eyeballs swiveled this way and that, and the neck and wings, though they creaked, did move.
"Here. Deliver this."
"Skraaawk!"
The bird took the papers in its beak and flew off toward the headquarters of Christian Guide.
No doubt the readers who'd attended the festival would be mailing in their reviews in droves—hoping to see their critiques in print, or to win a prize in the subscriber lottery, or to earn an invitation to the apprentice evaluator program.
Igor replaced his glasses and smirked.
"Christian, Christian... useful alive, and useful dead."
He gazed up at the moon and smiled.
In the moonlight, his long, hooked nose gleamed like a bird's beak. Like a crow's.