Grailstone Gambit

Then the pain ebbed, fading to a steady throb. Grant squinted around, trying to focus through a series of what seemed to be gauzy veils draped over his face. Finally, he realized he was surrounded by planes of pale gray smoke. He made a motion to touch his head, but he couldn’t move his arms. He sat tied to a heavy, wooden, straight-backed chair, arms and legs bound tightly by strips of rawhide. Glancing down at himself, he saw he wore only his T-shirt and jeans. Everything else, including his boots and socks, had been stripped from him.

The acrid fumes of the smoke seized his throat and dragged a cough from him. Lying on a far table were several long-stemmed clay pipes, the bowls discolored and smoldering. The place reeked of marijuana and overcooked meat, of stale and sweaty bodies.

The fact that he could even smell the stink of the room told him just how powerful the stench was. His nose had been broken three times in the past and always poorly reset. Unless an odor was extraordinarily fragrant or fearsomely repulsive, he couldn’t smell it; he was incapable of detecting subtle aromas unless they were literally right under his nose.

Grant coughed again, then cleared his throat.

“You may speak if you wish.”

The voice was a low, ghostly whisper, touched with a faint lisp. He remembered hearing the voice before, and he turned his head toward a shadowy figure looming on his right.

He felt a quiver of revulsion at the sight of Shuma and his enormous scaled belly bulging over his sweat pants. He glanced up into his face, expecting to see it twisted in a triumphant smirk. Instead, Shuma’s expression was vacant, his eyes hooded and distant as if they were focused on another scene entirely. His flaccid lips hung open, slick with saliva.

The voice spoke again and Shuma’s lips did not move. “Do you find your host revolting, Mr. Grant?”

Not responding to the question, Grant rumbled in his lionlike voice, “Who the hell are you?”

Shadows shifted behind Shuma’s bulk, and Grant caught a whistling, asthmatic wheeze. “I am the voice, the mind, the spirit behind the Survivalist Outland Brigade.”

Grant hawked up from deep in his throat and spit on the floor. “Bullshit.”

The voice tittered, sounding somewhat like an out-of-breath owl. “Why are you so sure?”

Straining against the rawhide bindings, Grant tried to peer around Shuma. “Let me see you.”

“All in good time, Mr. Grant…all in good time.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Oh, your spy—Wright was her name?—was most forthcoming about everyone and everything.”

Grant did not allow his sudden apprehension to show on his face or be heard in his voice. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

There was another breathy giggle. “Oh? What a pity…because I definitely know what she was talking about.”

The note of certainty, of complete confidence in the speaker’s voice sent a tingle of fear up Grant’s spine. He gusted out a weary sigh. “All right. But she wasn’t a spy.”

“She was here on an intelligence-gathering mission, correct?”

“More or less. We wanted to find out more about Shuma and this SOB of his.”

“Of his?” A mocking lilt touched the voice, but Grant detected an edge of anger there, as well.

“Who else?” He eyed Shuma surreptitiously, looking for a glimmer of intelligence in his eyes. They were covered by a dull sheen, the lids drooping.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asked.

“Nothing,” came the dismissive response. “That is, nothing that’s isn’t wrong with any other addict of jolt and various other opiates.”

Grant knew that jolt was a combination of various hallucinogens and narcotics, like heroin. To sample it once was to virtually ensure addiction.

He hesitated, started to ask a question, then closed his mouth, shaking his head.

“You were about to ask how a jolt-brain could command his own bowels, much less an army.”

Grant nodded. “Something like that, yes.”

“I command Shuma and he commands the SOB.”

“Which brings me back to my first question—who the hell are you?”

“My name would mean nothing to you…but if you must call me something, you may call me Esau.”

Grant inhaled a deep breath, held it, then released it slowly. “What are you?”

“I believe you have already guessed.”

When Grant declined to respond, he heard a shuffle of movement and a small figure stepped out from behind Shuma. At first Grant thought it was a crippled child, leaning as it did on a pair of crutches. But when the figure lurched closer he knew with a rise of nausea he was vastly mistaken.

Esau stood a little more than four feet tall, his emaciated body lost in a baggy flannel shirt and pants several sizes too large for him. An old extension cord cinched the waistband tight. The frayed cuffs of the trousers dragged on the floor, but Grant couldn’t see any sign of feet.

Esau’s face was dominated by a thick shelf of bone bulging above his huge eyes. The forehead rose like a marble wall, angling upward to join with the flat crown of his skull. A mat of thin gray hair covered it.

Grant struggled to keep his expression neutral, to disguise the fear swelling within him.

Esau’s small mouth twitched in a parody of a smile. “I revolt you more than Shuma, do I not?”

Grant didn’t respond for a few seconds, visually examining the blue-and-red mapwork of broken blood vessels spreading over Esau’s forehead. “Not exactly. I’ve come across your type a time or two.”

Esau’s smile widened in mock ingenuousness. “And what type is that, Mr. Grant?”

“Doomies,” he retorted matter-of-factly. “You’re a doomseer. I didn’t think there were many of you left.”

In the Outlands, people with enhanced psionic abilities were called doomseers or doomies, their mutant precognitive abilities feared and hated.

Most of the mutant strains spawned after the nuclear holocaust were extinct, either dying because of their twisted biologies, or hunted and exterminated during the early years of the unification program. Doomseers weren’t necessarily mutants, but norms with true telepathic abilities were rare in current times.

Extrasensory and precognitive perceptions were the most typical abilities possessed by mutants who appeared otherwise normal.

Esau uttered a scoffing, contemptuous laugh. “Hardly a doomseer. I can’t foretell the future any more accurately than you can.”

“Then what do you call yourself?”

Casting a sideways glance up at Shuma, Esau answered confidently, “A mastermind. I call myself a mastermind.”

Grant cocked his head in puzzlement. “A what?”

“I can master minds not my own…like Shuma’s here.”