ASSAILING THE GARDEN OF PLEASURE

ASSAILING THE GARDEN OF PLEASURE, by Daniel Ausema, audio by Karen Bovenmyer

To reach the master’s pleasure garden, adepts must follow the path precisely. Where it splits, adepts too must split themselves, must send their left halves down the winding left path and their right halves down the right path, which meanders in counterpoint. At the garden, the master will put his visitors back together. Or not, as he chooses.

I followed all the protocols, splitting the left off first, saying the words in a careful reverse, cutting short the vowels. As a person splits, it releases a great deal of magic energy, but I shielded myself from the raw power. I held a proper invitation, torn in two and clutched in each hand. I only recall the right-hand path, how it circled bushes and teased at new splits that always proved false; I avoided the fake trails and arrived at my appointed hour. No reason to fear the master’s whims.

Naiveté, your name is mine.

I reached the gardens, tasting wine in the air. The vintages I’d heard of! The delicacies the master was said to serve! Everything awaited me, all the pleasures I’d longed for.

I approached the master’s gazebo, saw my other half coming toward me, and suddenly the master laughed. A cruel laugh only those with real power know how to make.

I cocked my head at the sound—the right half of my head, at any rate, though I assume my left as well. And the next thing I knew, I was back outside the garden, where the trail splits. Melded to me was not my left side, but a shadow half.

I touched it with my own hand. The chest where my heart should be, the arm, the side of my head. My arm shook with every touch, and my fingers jerked away from the cool otherness that had taken my place.

Must be some mistake. I approached the fork in the path and spoke the words to split myself. The shadow would not leave. The path rejected me, us. I threw myself against the split, rushed at it as if to batter my way back to the garden. It held firm.

And my shadow half gripped me tight.

Late in the day, exhausted and bitter, I stumbled away, hiding my shadow beneath a cloak.

***

I was not an adept anymore. My shadow half was too clumsy to perform the gestures, the words slurred by my unreliable tongue. But what was I? Mere wastrel, well on my way toward beggardom.

Little hope for anything more.

There were far more beggars on the streets than I had ever realized, more people trudging about in hopes of a small job or anything to help them survive. Lost in the whirls of my studies, I had never taken note. I wandered the city, dodging the stately carriages, studying the beggars in morbid self-pity. Would I look like that man in another month? Like this old man in two years, my hair thin and my eyes hidden? How long for my clothes, not fancy but sturdy, to turn to rags?

As I watched a passerby give a coin to one beggar, I stopped short. She had thanked him, but as he turned away, the beggar’s right hand curled into an adept sign. I stared.

My heart raced as I went closer. Her right hand made the sign, just as I would have done. Her left? Hidden beneath a rough blanket. Or maybe simply not there.

In fact, a closer look made me think the master had replaced her left side with nothing at all. The blanket looked too empty, flat against the wall of the building.

I bowed to her. She didn’t look up at first, but when no coins fell into her lap, she lifted her head. I made an adept sign of greeting and showed my half-shadow face.

She started and stood halfway up. Tendrils of fog or something like it hovered around her left side, leaking out from beneath the disturbed blanket. “How did… When did…” She shook her head and slumped back down. “Still at it, is he?”

Still? So there were more? How many? Surely I should have seen other people like this before, if there were many. But as I thought of it, I realized how little I had seen of the city itself. How focused I had been on mastering the learning of an adept. I had tied myself so firmly to the master’s teachings, hoping to earn his praise, hoping to become a master myself.

We had to do something, to warn the other adepts, to get our other halves back. I opened my mouth to speak, but a shiver of magic touched the base of my neck. My words slurred, and I found myself saying something completely different. My thoughts of revenge grew foggy, and we spoke of other things.

As we talked, I realized that I’d known her, though only vaguely. Her name was Shale, and she’d been an acolyte of the master when I first joined three years earlier. It must have been shortly after that when the master split her. Her melded half had originally been more solid. Mist, she called it, but coalesced in the form of her missing half. Over the years it had gradually lost shape, so that she now tottered and slumped along as well as her solid half allowed.

A future I could look forward to with my shadow, no doubt. What did the master do with the other halves? I shuddered to imagine.

We soon moved in together. Not in any sort of romantic way, but working together we might survive better. She helped me navigate my numb left side, coached me to use my right more and to compensate when I had to rely on the left for part of any task. When begging brought in little food and that unpalatable, I chewed with my shadow side to fill my belly without tasting. When a job required two hands, I adjusted how I held objects, so my clumsy shadow fingers didn’t fail me.

Whenever I brought up the idea of storming the master’s garden, Shale brushed the matter aside, as if compelled to resist the idea.

“Past is past, child,” she said, as if I were more than a few years younger than her. But when those few years included as long on the streets as hers did, they aged a person fast. “The garden belongs to those with two halves, not us.”

But we each had two halves. Only, one was stuck in the garden already. My arguments swayed her not at all.

***

Deep in my chest of old adept gear, I found a few items worth pawning. Some books with diagrams of the gestures I could no longer perform. A fancy quill I’d never used even when I was copying down spell after spell. A disassembled flintlock pistol with some of its parts missing. Two bracelets, a matched pair, that adepts wear over their sleeves when they wish to dress up. The day I went to the gardens I’d looked for those bracelets, everywhere, without success. If I’d have found them, I’d only have one now to hock instead of both.

Well. You take your blessings where you can fool yourself into finding them.

The pawnshop owner wore a heavy cloak, even in her own shop. She took one look at my goods then stared hard at me. I fidgeted and tugged my hood lower.

“You’re one too, aren’t you?” Her voice had an odd timbre, a rough edge neither high nor low. She had to force the words out. “One of us?”

She pulled her hood back. At first I thought her a normal person. No half smoke body, no half shadow. But a closer look gave me pause. One eye was green and the other brown. And the left cheekbone lifted higher than the right. The more I looked, the clearer it was that this was two halves of different people. Each an adept? Must be.

I slumped down into a chair.

What kind of awful life that must be, to not only lose half yourself but to be imprisoned with another person. Had they known each other? Been friends? Enemies? I touched the left side of my own face, felt the cold absence of the shadow.

“How long has it been for you?”

“Only twelve days,” I answered, the number instantly at hand, because I never forgot it.

“So young,” she said. And then in a slightly different voice, “After our time.”

A more masculine voice. I looked again and noted the shadow of a beard on one side.

“Over four years, for us,” she said in her first voice. “Four years of exile from ourselves.”

Four years. I’d thought Shale’s three had nearly broken her, but these two appeared to be almost normal. Even growing more alike each other, perhaps. Good to find someone else who knew what it was like, though unlikely they’d be any more help trying to get back into the master’s garden than Shale was.

“How will any of us ever sneak in?”

I hadn’t meant to ask that out loud, but as soon as I did, my head ached as if regretting too much drink. An odd look crossed the pawnbroker’s face, the look two people give each other when they’re deciding whether to say something or not. Except with those two people smashed into a single face.

“Come back here tomorrow night,” she—they—said. “If you can manage, despite the curse, to find your way back. There are others who want to find a way in, as well.”

***

The pawnbroker wasn’t there the following night. A man with half a hound’s head—and body, I presumed—let me in. He didn’t say anything, but once I showed him the shadow clinging to me, he gestured for me to go in.

There were eight of us, including me. Most appeared much like me or Shale, bound to something light and largely formless. One had what appeared to be a tree, alive despite lacking any roots into the ground, growing beside her. Another had a thin layer of rock coating his side. No rock leg nor arm—he walked with a crutch, and the remaining rock showed the marks of an inexpertly wielded sculptor’s chisel.

The leader of the group, who called himself Schist, stood up to welcome me. He had nothing at all for his right half. Where his clothing didn’t cover his right side, the inside of his body was visible.

“Good to have another. If everyone cursed this way would assist us, then think what we might do!”

“Are there so many?” I asked.

“Too many,” the tree woman said.

How had I never suspected? Yet as soon as I wondered, I understood the answer. We adepts were a secretive lot, and our schooling less than regular anyway. A person absent could rise from any number of things, and I never would have questioned it. Never had questioned it.

Even thinking of joining the others now, I felt repulsed at the idea. Was it shame? Shock? Perhaps a touch of both, as well as the fact we never grew close to the other adepts, a situation the master no doubt cultivated. Surely the master’s hand played the biggest role in keeping us from warning anyone. The pawnbroker had named it a curse. As far as I had learned, there were no curses in our adept magic, but some twist of the master’s cruelty prevented us half-bodied former adepts from seeking out those still under his tutelage. And made any thought of working together, admitting our brokenness, turning against the master repulsive.

The tree woman was still speaking. “Even what’s here is too many. We must stop him.”

Schist nodded. “Right. So first, tell us what you remember of the master’s garden.”

 The garden. I hadn’t seen much of it. “There was a gazebo where the path reached the garden. That’s as far as I got. I think there was a path beyond it, between two trees.”

“Apple trees?”

I hadn’t seen any apples—wrong season. “I’m not sure. Maybe. That size, at least.” Other details? “The gazebo looked new. Or a new roof, anyway. And there was a rock wall behind it. No, not rocks, bricks.”

“Good. A new roof, that may be important. See what other details you come up with.”

After that, they spent the rest of the meeting planning to sneak into the master’s quarters here in town. The half-tree person was monitoring the current adepts, as well as the curse allowed them to, and knew when the next adept soiree would be. That would be the time to sneak in. At the end of the discussions, Schist led me to a painting of the pleasure garden, a faithful if somewhat nebulous representation.

“Anything that stands out as different from your memories?”

I pointed out a few things, and the stone-edged man sketched the differences on a separate paper with charcoal.

As we left the pawnshop, Schist put his only hand on my shadow shoulder. It made my stomach twist. “Join us for the raid, then, if you can manage to return. Perhaps we’ll find our way into the garden already, and you’ll be reunited so soon you’ll hardly remember this as a dream.”

***

The master’s quarters were known to us all, a modest suite of rooms among the faculty quarters where he used to teach. We’d all visited him there in our studies at one point or another, though always during the very limited hours he would be there. This time, we would arrive without the usual spells to grant us entry.

The pawnbroker joined us, though they kept checking their pocket watch and looking over their shoulder, as if they didn’t really want to be with us.

When we arrived at the door to the master’s suite, they strode to the front. “Certain he will be at the gardens now?” They addressed these words to Schist, in the tone of someone fulfilling a final safety check.

“Sure as we can be. We saw the invitations, saw the proper number of adepts make for the path of splitting.” Would someone new join our number after today? My stomach clenched at the thought.

The pawnbroker nodded and moved their arms. I gasped at how fluidly they moved through the stances. They might be two, but they’d found a way to work as one for some magic, at least.

The doors opened for us.

“Thank you,” Schist said.

The pawnbroker gave him a grudging shrug and left. “I don’t want to hear about it, remember,” they called back to us.

Schist made a face that was halfway between sarcastic and apologetic and led us inside. It looked like the last time I’d seen it, cluttered and yet with a sense that none of the clutter was junk. The old books and various items stashed in alcoves all had the tang of magic, a smell that only lingers for a brief time after use.

Around the corner I found a beautiful framed manuscript. It showed the moves of a famous, lost spell, cutting off before the spell’s ending. As all copies of the spell did. The original had been used to build many of the great castles of the city, castles that even the new warfare of cannons and musket guards could not topple. Maybe even the master’s garden had its origins in the original spell, for all anyone knew. But centuries of effort to recreate the lost second page had only led to failure and injury.

I was about to continue on deeper into the quarters when I paused. What if the secret into the garden was this fragment of the spell? Anyone versed in the arts would assume it was mere decoration. Anyone unversed wouldn’t know how to use it.

I called Schist over to see what he thought of my idea.

“Yeah, first thing we tried.” He patted my shoulder like I was a child. “As posted here, plus as many variations as we could think of. If these motions create his back entrance, they’re as lost as the original spell.”

So much for that. I kept wandering. Our plan was pretty vague—look around until some object sparks an idea, a sense of a possible connection. Our training prepared us for noting such things, but still it was a thin hope.

Nothing came to me until I entered the bedroom. The four-poster bed smelled of fresh wood, and the peak made by the posts…

“Come quick,” I called. Once they were there, I pointed at the bed. “Look at its shape. Doesn’t it remind you of the gazebo?”

“And new,” the rock-chiselled man said. “Just like you said the gazebo was.”

Schist gestured for everyone to touch the bed. “At once. We may not be able to perform a spell with one hand gone and the other touching the bed. But if we all picture it as one, it may take effect.”

Once we were touching, Schist tapped his toe to give us the beat, then all together we pictured the motions for a seeing spell. We would remain physically in the master’s quarters, but if it worked, we might at least see something along the paths to the pleasure gardens. Counting in my head, I imagined how my arms would have moved, pictured my fingers forming the shapes of the spell.

I saw nothing, only the mundane room around us. I reached the end, saw the disappointment in the faces of the others, was about to drop my hand. Just before I did, the room swam. I saw the gazebo, the brick walls, the garden. In our minds, we were there!

Now to find the other halves. My left side, what had it been doing? Serving as a mindless slave? Enjoying the garden, unaware of me? Imprisoned behind that brick wall? I felt myself drawn that way. I had no body there to walk toward it, yet my perspective veered that direction.

Veered and then kept racing straight at a blank space in the wall. Slammed right into it, and I might not have had a body, but I felt every bit of the pain of hitting the wall at such speed. Then the pain twisted. I felt it along the line where my right half of my body met the shadow half. A tearing, searing pain as if the shadow was pulling away from me.

Of course! The false half must leave so my real half could be rejoined. The pain was necessary and would no doubt be brief. There would be a flash of power, as the energy of splitting was used to put me back together. I gritted my teeth and prepared for it to end.

Instead, my hope was dashed by the sudden view of the master, a diaphanous image of him, laughing, with the bricks visible through him. Then I was flung back into the master’s quarters, stumbling away from the bed.

“It was a trap,” Schist gasped. “Get out of here, before he comes after us!”

Still stumbling with the pain of my shadow half, I fled. The others ran as well, and scattered once we reached the streets.

***

The fiery pain subsided but didn’t go away over the next days. I still had my shadow half, but the point where it joined my body felt inflamed, so tender that I feared it would fall away if I put any stress on the connection. When I could stand to, I searched out Schist. He was nowhere to be found. After a few days of trying to catch the next meeting of the group, I went to the pawn shop during regular hours and found the pawnbroker.

“They want nothing to do with you,” they told me. “Think you must have been part of a trap of some sort. Wouldn’t tell me any more.”

That I was to blame? I squeezed my hand around the pen someone had left in the pawn shop. It made sense from their perspective. I’d noted the new roof. I’d found the bed and suggested it. But I’d have to be a pretty low sort of person to let myself be split in two and still work for the one who’d done it to me.

I swallowed hard so my voice would obey me. “Well, tell them I’m no traitor to them, that I had nothing to do with it.”

The pawnbroker nodded, for all the good it would do.  I had little hope that I’d hear from any of them again. What I could do, though, was seek out others like us. Maybe where one raid had failed, another group would realize what we must do to succeed.

I had no luck in the next days, and Shale showed me little sympathy. “It’s what you get. I hate the master as much as anyone, but going against him is pointless.”

A few weeks later, though, she brought me some news. “I heard there’s a new one of us. They’re keeping him in the asylum.”

Not difficult to sneak into the asylum. They built it to keep people in, not out. I threw on a cloak and visited early in the morning, while the fog still filled the streets. A simple claim that I was here to visit a relative was enough to get me inside, and everyone knew where the new patient was locked up.

He raved, so had I known the noise was from him, I could have simply followed his voice. No adept I knew, this one, which surprised me. I had expected a new victim to be one of those adepts I at least knew by sight. A matted beard covered the good half of his face, and his hair was a pale flax, an unfamiliar color in this city. His skin sickly pale. His other half was a snarling, spitting animal too distorted to identify. A weasel of some sort, or maybe a terribly tortured hound. Its half of a head strained against the former adept and hissed at me. How did I not recognize him? Had he been learning from the master in some other setting? Or was he a student of another master who’d tried to sneak in? His lunacy made me doubt I’d learn the truth.

I tried, though. “I’ve seen the gardens. The path that splits. You saw it too, right?”

No answer, but his voice grew quiet, as if to hear me better.

“The gazebo. Was it still new when you saw it? Or do things age faster in the master’s garden? There were trees, their leaves dark green like holly. Others the red of autumn, though it wasn’t autumn here when I went.”

“Yellow,” he whispered. “And heavy with shriveled fruits.”

My heart raced. He was talking. What else might he tell me? “Yes, you saw it, too.”

“The path ran by the water, and fish in the water like clouds swimming and storming, schools of rain clouds gathered to punish me for daring the pleasure gardens.”

This sounded too much like a return to his insane ravings. How to get him back to the real things he’d seen, to the subject of the master? “But he took it away didn’t he? Just like he did to me.” I pulled the cloak aside so he could see my shadow half. Surely it would be the sign that he could trust me, tell me his secrets.

Instead it set him to his frenzy again. He thrashed and threw himself against the bars, and whatever words he tried to say didn’t make any sense to me.

I hurried out, back to the drudgery of doing nothing except surviving.

***

Several days later, the world crashed—crashed in the form of a letter sent to as many of the half-bodies as the pawnbrokers knew. A spell in the paper encouraged us to gather together before opening them all at once. At the pawnshop, we opened the letters all at once. Inside was a letter from the pawnbrokers, laid out so they wouldn’t have to tell us one by one or repeat themselves over and over.

“We received an odd object today that may concern us all. A young man—clearly a student, though he didn’t identify himself—brought what he claimed was an old chest of his uncle’s, one stuck shut. We see such claims often, and did as usual to keep an account of where he went. He struck us as frightened. The chest was not locked shut but sealed with magic, as we suspected. So we opened it.

“Inside were bones. To cut it short, half skeletons. A dozen half skulls, ribcages cut in half, leg and arm bones without matching sets.

“We have stayed away from most of the protests and plots in the past. But no more. These are our other halves. The master must pay.”

I threw my head back and wailed for my lost self. Our earlier attempt to reach the garden had been all about finding our other halves, reuniting and never looking back. What else the master did hadn’t mattered. Wouldn’t matter afterward, either. Revenge hadn’t even entered the equation, only restoring our bodies. I’d always had at the back of my mind that no matter what else, at least I could look forward to seeing my other half, to reuniting so we might form new, shared memories.

What did it mean that half of me was dead?

Certainly I’d known we might never be reunited, but to know it was dead, I was dead, to hear words like half a skull and know them as literal… I grabbed my head, real and shadow halves both, and rocked back and forth right there in the street.

The others talked as I grieved. “But why does he do it? What does it get him?”

As soon as I remembered my own splitting, the answer was obvious—the power released as he split us. He wanted that power, was desperate for it for some reason. And we naive fools were an easy source. We should have guessed that he would kill one of our halves, anyway, knowing what we did of the magic he had taught us. Our living halves, incomplete, yearning again to join with something it never could, would be a constant source of energy for years after we had been so split. The striving to find ourselves gave him a trickle of power to sustain him between the times when he split and destroyed one of us. I didn’t bother stopping my sobs to explain it, and the others eventually reached the same conclusion.

“So many of us, so many years,” someone else said, “he must have so much power to be untouchable.”

No one could answer that.

When I stopped the hysterics, I was still looking up at the sky. Through tears-streaked eyes, I saw clouds moving. Skudding. No, that wasn’t right. They were schooling, like fish.

The lunatic’s words came back to me. I peered more closely at the fish-clouds and saw that beyond them, where the sky ought to be, were hints of riotous color, garden flowers, red bricks, and the fresh color of new timber for a gazebo. It was all there, only separated by an adept motion that came into my head in a flash. One I could manage one-handed.

My tears dried at once. Not my anger, nor the emptiness of knowing my other half gone. Those were still with me, and a thousand emotions I couldn’t name. But the clouds above were a message—that I dare not give in to any of them.

At home, Shale was preparing to leave, an adept tool in her good hand and a hard look on her face. “I’m with the pawnbroker. This goes too far.”

“Good,” I said. “And I know the way.”

A frightened, full-bodied youth was in the pawnshop when we arrived. The student, no doubt. Even the sight of him brought up the habitual aversion to speaking, made my tongue try to speak other words.

The pawnbroker was telling some others how they and the student would go first, since they could perform the spells to take the split path. And once they found a way for us to come too, they’d open it wide. “In the meantime, share with each other any one handed spells you’ve learned or created. We’ll have to hope that together we have enough power to counter everything he’s stolen.”

A weak hope. One that frustrated even my guess at how to make our way to the gardens. But the youth, trembling, spoke up. “I don’t think he has as much power as you imagine.” When we all looked at him, he seemed to want to hide, and it took awhile for him to find his voice again. “It’s just, try to talk to me about this. Tell me that the master is dangerous. Tell me how he split you.”

We all stared at him in silence.

“You’ve felt it. Maybe before, maybe not until now. But you can’t, can’t get the words out. I mean, right? It’s hard to speak, you want to avoid me. He’s doing that.”

“So?”

“Do you realize the power it takes to create that? Not as much as he steals…but not much less. It costs him an awful lot to keep you away from him.”

My first thought was that it only showed how much power he had to spare, then, if he spent so much against us. Against us. I thought the words again, spoke them under my breath, then said out loud. “He’s frightened of us.”

All eyes turned to me.

“That’s why he does it. He needs the power for some reason, maybe to keep out some greater master. Maybe it’s an addiction to the surge of power he gets, even if he spends it all to protect himself until he can strike again. He’s desperate for it and willing to pay almost anything to keep his grip on whatever he can.”

The pawnbroker raised a clenched fist. “Exactly. Fear that we would unite, knowledge that what power he has will crumble if we can only make our way inside. So that’s what we must do now, before he spends greater power to force us apart. Be ready, and we will let you in as soon as we find the route.”

“We’re not waiting,” I said. Before anyone could argue, I added, “I think it’s good for some to go that way, if they can. Make it a two-pronged attack. But we can’t sit around hoping you’ll let us in. I’ve found the back way. It was told me by a lunatic, a split man like us who is joined to a wild animal.”

Schist was frowning at me. The tree woman, too, glancing between me and some of the others who’d been with us. Some of the people, though, clearly recognized the description I’d given of the madman.

“Some of you think you can’t trust me. That suits the master well, to keep us divided. Shale will speak for me, maybe. But it doesn’t matter. Believe me or not, you and I won’t be able to take the split path. So you can sit around waiting, or climb with me.”

There was a chance, if they truly mistrusted me, that they would rise up, keep me from even going myself. If I’d sabotaged the last time, I might beat the two taking the split path and warn the master. To keep them from having the time to think it through, I began walking toward the door.

“Come, the clouds await us, ready to turn into fishes. We’ll learn the one-handed spells along the way. And before the master suspects a thing, we’ll come dripping from his pond, overpower him, and take our revenge.”

Outside, the sky reached down to me, needing only a motion from my good hand to become a stairway. Flight after flight of airy steps promised a long and wearying journey. An army of broken, frightened, angry half-adepts followed behind me and began to climb. We created and tested one-armed spells as we went.

The Master, unknowing, awaited us—his doom—far above.

THE END

________________________________________

Daniel Ausema’s fiction and poetry have appeared in many publications, including Strange Horizons, Diabolical Plots, and Daily Science Fiction. His latest novel is The Silk Betrayal, published by Guardbridge Books, and he is the creator of the steampunk-fantasy Spire City series. He lives in Colorado at the foot of the Rockies.

Karen Bovenmyer earned an MFA in Creative Writing: Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine. She teaches and mentors students at Iowa State University and Western Technical College. She serves as the Assistant Editor of the Pseuodopod Horror Podcast Magazine. She is the 2016 recipient of the Horror Writers Association Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship. Her poems, short stories and novellas appear in more than 40 publications and her first novel, SWIFT FOR THE SUN, debuted from Dreamspinner Press in 2017.