Gregor The Cripple

Gregor sat in the seat of his newly stolen wagon, the reigns clutched hard in his still-stained hand and his brow drawn low and firm. Before him trotted two tethered horses, and behind him lay his precious cargo. Further behind lay a town aflame, not very aflame, not yet, but more aflame than was otherwise usual.

Here as in Sine, Gregor had once again been a little too liberal with the fire. It probably wouldn't turn out to be quite so bad, at least in the terms of wider outcomes.

Even though it was certainly a bigger fire this time, and would go on to touch its tongues of flame to many more things than at Sine, he doubted very much that the burning of a little town would cause any kind of war. Probably. With luck, the firefighters might not yet have joined the strike, or if they had, they weren't actually intending to withhold their services from the blazing homes of the needy.

Guided by a bright moon and aided by night-empty roads, the pair travelled away from this newest incident at a decent clip, deciding to move along before the locals figured out who to blame – not that Mildred had played much of an active role in the decision-making.

Beneath the comfort of Gregor's cloak, she was curled in the back of the wagon atop a bed of empty sacks, suffering in ill comfort from the jostling and rocking inherent to wagon-travel, but being much more comfortable than she would have been atop a saddle, because saddles, it must be known, are a very abdominally taxing type of chair, and are not at all suited to seat someone with less abdomen than usual.

According to her own testimony, the pain was 'manageable'. In Gregor's own experience of pain, whatever level of pain she was translating into 'manageable' probably wouldn't let her sleep for a while, so neither would he, which was fine. He had a busy mind. There were things in his head that wouldn't sleep either.

Among these was the matter of the letter, which examination proved had just been a lure to the trap. The paper was without message, and served only as a delivery vector for some strange sort of curse Gregor couldn't quite decipher, being either entirely a novel creation or the product of a lineage of magical practice too old to know, or both. Regardless, it shed little light on the matter of the ruse.

He and Mildred had met with enemies, certainly, but were they the enemy? It was likely, but… not definite. The matter of the murder-suicide muddied things considerably.

Clearly, not all of them had been on the same page, but it was impossible to say for sure that these pages had belonged to different books entirely. For instance, a number of the men might have been traitors to the golden crown, the others being loyal, with it simply being the case that the traitors were the ones in charge, or perhaps it might be the case that they were all loyal, and were simply acting under false orders which they believed to be genuine, or maybe they were all traitors with varying degrees of commitment, or some other such unclear thing.

The possibility of some or all of them being impostors was also high, being that the letter, if real, would have been the only way to verify any of their claimed identities.

Perhaps the spy was legitimate, and the inquisitors false, and they had provided him with the letter and the instructions to deliver it, or they real and he false, or perhaps all three were a mixture of traitor and impostor.

…Or perhaps, it must also be considered, there hadn't been any traitors or impostors at all, and neither had their orders been false in any way.

Gregor could not discard the possibility that Mildred's aunt had unsavoury motives.

However, as grave as these concerns were, they were not the primary object of Gregor's attention. It was something else. Something in his pocket. Just one little thing that burned a hole in his mind, stealing his notice, intruding into all his thoughts, bleeding into his every concern for the suffering of Mildred and of the fight and his consideration of the Enemy's ways and means and their possible future efforts to overcome his protection of her, who he suddenly realised was the only other person he had ever actually cared for.

Gregor had raided the study of the town doctor to gain all the things might need for Mildred's repair – clean bandages of linen and boiled cotton and high-proof spirits for cleaning and blanched thread and needle for sealing the breach, and in hopes of finding a clotting agent, Gregor had also helped himself to the doctor's chest of alchemy and medicine.

He found what he was looking for, but not only what he was looking for. Alongside his sought-after styptic, he came away with a little vial that bore the name 'laudanum'.

The old menace was back. After so long a separation, Gregor had finally come once more into contact with opium.

It was the best thing he had ever felt, bar nothing. Better than sex, better than violence, greater of a comfort than wine, and of more utility to a creature in pain than any other medicine.

All his pressing thoughts – the things he ought to be thinking – began to lose their posture of prominence in his mind, bleeding mass and momentum gradually to the lapping waves of an unavoidable urge.

Wouldn't it be nice if he had some, just a little? Just little enough to stay sharp, but more than enough to dim the pain – a pain which only felt worse and worse in the knowledge that he did not need to feel it; that it was an optional pain to suffer.

And he certainly was suffering, though his initial agony was now the least of his worries.

Time had turned the stump-ache into a casual thing. Almost a year after the inciting incident, it still throbbed a little, but was by far the easiest to endure of his several great pains, minor enough now that a normal person could probably suffer it and remain functional. The others, however, were fresher, and greater for their freshness either for reasons of having not yet healed, or having not existed long enough for Gregor's mind to become numb to their notice.

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A little laudanum, and it would all go away, and if the suffering ceased, how much better would he feel? How much more capable would he become? Mildred would be safer, and his enemies would be deader, which was broadly everything that he currently wanted.

The downsides were there – he hadn't forgotten the past, but if he only took a little… why not? Gregor was Gregor. It would be fine.

Noticing that Mildred's dried blood still covered his hand, Gregor slowly reached into his robe to withdraw the vial. He pulled it out, half-full, sloshing with the motion of the road, and noticed for the first time that the label said 'TOXIQUE' at the bottom, which sounded about right.

He knew why not. There was other blood on his hand and it would never wash away. All his previous failures had left a stain.

Experience told him that if he started again, it wasn't likely he'd ever stop at 'just a little', and after that, anything could happen. Greta and Dieter could happen, or Barbara and that ugly fellow with the forgettable name could die to a misunderstanding, or a war could begin. Maybe he'd even lose an eye. All these were things that opium had wrought, so Gregor knew why not.

It was the corrupting force that had made all his failures possible, and so he had to avoid it. He couldn't risk failing again. Not just for his own sake, not simply because he couldn't permit further failure on his own account – his ego was no longer his bottom line. Rather, Gregor could not allow the risk because if anything happened, it would happen to Mildred.

This latest fight had already produced an unacceptable outcome; what else might have happened if his mind was addled?

Opium would be disastrous. It was the key to the door of failure. The such only key, so far as Gregor was concerned, because failure had been unfathomable prior to its use.

Could that have been… orchestrated?

It was a very sober notion. He thought further. Might even this renewed contact with opium be an attempt to induce in him the possibility of failure? An effort by the enemy to corrupt his abilities? Enfeeble him? Might this be the true attempt on Mildred's life, with the spy and the inquisitors with their cursed letter just serving as catalyst for the real hidden danger?

Gregor couldn't say, he wasn't even sure if the Worldeater had that capacity, but the possibility was reason enough. And regarding the terrible pain, suffering is not without value. Gregor knew that he would very certainly be lesser in the present for having avoided it in the past. And, precisely because suffering was now optional, there was a great and arrogant pleasure to be found in enduring it.

But then came another thought – he was no longer the only one suffering.

The question of his own use was decided, but what of Mildred? She was currently in far greater agony, and had far less experience in handling it, and was thus far more in need of reprieve than he. Could he deny her that?

It was an entirely palatable thing for Gregor to choose agony for himself, but to choose it for Mildred – to have the option to alleviate her suffering, but to decide against it? That was another thing entirely. Mildred's pain arose from his deficiency in protecting her, as so was just as much a failure as death would be, though not an ultimate, instant kind of failure, with strict conditions for winning and losing, but a slow, cumulative defeat.

Each moment of her agony was an opposing pound on the scales that weighed his worth, because he didn't imagine he'd be worth much if Mildred was doomed to lived a life worse than death by his faulty protection. Surely, he would have then failed more severely than if she had just died.

Thus, he couldn't choose to let her suffer. It would make him incompetent and worthless, obviously, but that meant doing her with laudanum.

It was entirely possibly to use responsibly, and the pitfalls of opium could certainly be avoided, but was he really willing to risk giving Mildred a brief taste of that divine pleasure? What if her pain never really went away, just as it had stayed with him, or if she suffered some other agony in the future? In those cases, she would be given cause to seek relief, and she would know perfectly well where to find it. She might develop a taste, just as he had.

And what if that was the goal in all of this? What if the opium scheme truly did exist outside Gregor's head, and the actual end goal was to inspire a moment of weakness in Mildred's far future?

Gregor had a strange choice to make.

***

Watching as the world bobbed by, Mildred was having a wonderful time.

On account of being shot and whatnot, she hadn't been feeling very well at all, but then Gregor gave her a particularly brilliant potion to drink and she'd turned all warm and fuzzy and the cart had stopped being uncomfortable and scratchy and bumpy and the horrible evil pain in her hole had turned into a hot kind of a throb which was very interesting to feel and she felt almost like she was floating. The world bobbed by with the up-and-down motion of the ocean and Mildred felt more content than ever before, which was odd because she'd just been shot.

It was dark, but she was warm. It was cold, but she was warm. She might have died, but she was in a charming mood. It was a very spectacular potion indeed. She was also drunk, being that she'd been trying very hard to become drunk while Gregor was working on her hole.

Here, she stopped her thinking to work on giggling, and then worked on resuming her thinking once the giggling was accomplished.

It wasn't really like being drunk at all. It was a different thing entirely. Like she was taking a nap with her eyes open and all the world was her dream, or something. Dreams were probably like this. And Gregor had stopped her from drinking too much on account of it being a bad idea to vomit and retch with fresh stitches in your beautiful lady muscles, so it couldn't be that she was just very drunk, which was also a different kind of thing entirely.

"Mildred," came the voice of Gregor, captaining their fair vessel from his seat at the helm. "You should try to sleep."

"I am asleep." She mumbled, because she was, or she might as well be.

"Really?" He asked, sounding very impressed. "That's very impressive."

"Mhm. Goodnight Gregor." Mildred replied, deciding to stare up at the stars until it became true.

"Goodnight Mildred," she thought she heard, though it may have just been part of the dream.