Jack

Cold iron bars chime loudly as the tall guard whacks them with his baton. He sneers nastily when Jack shrinks back to the other side of the cage. Barks to his companion:

"Not so fucking cocky now, eh?"

They share an unpleasant laugh.

Rusty cuffs bind Jack's hands, and he is shackled to the floor with heavy chains. For all their professed intellectual rigour, his captors seem in thrall to every kind of whimsical superstition. The room is hung with garlic and crucifixes, the guards' guns stocked with silver bullets. Cut into the floor all around his prison are a pair of shallow channels, one filled with hot pitch, the other with running water. Under other circumstances, Jack would surely laugh at the desperation of it.

Just now he's not in the mood for laughter.

Livid purple bruises disfigure the left side of his face, his arm is probably broken and his cherished feathered hat is long lost. And there's the iron, of course. The bloody iron.

Perhaps the magicians aren't as stupid as they look.

The trap was well-laid, no doubt of that. These lunatics may be -- undeniably are -- depressingly disconnected from the messy reality of the world, but they can engage with it when they have to. They have an eye for weakness, and just now Cocky St Jack is the weakest he has ever been.

"Good morning, low life."

Jack looks up wearily. This can't be good news. He recognizes the new arrival at once, but just about manages to appear calm and collected.

"Is it morning already? My but time flies when you're having fun. Good morning, then."

The man sets a carved wooden box on the floor beside Jack's cell and gazes down at him for a while before speaking.

"I've been looking forward to this moment for longer than you can imagine."

"Are you sure?" Trying to project the arrogant confidence he has only recently learned he is capable of not feeling. "I can imagine a very long time."

"I suppose you can at that. Not that imagination is even required. How old are you now, Jack? Four hundred years? Five hundred?"

"How ungentlemanly to ask. I am as old as I need to be, not a second more."

"Ha ha. I do believe you are. I trust you don't have any substantial plans for what little remains of your life?"

Jack shrugs.

"You'll be destined for disappointment if you do."

"That's the human condition, is it not? I don't suppose there's any point my asking what you hope to achieve by this little abduction?"

"On the contrary, I shall be delighted to share with you every detail of our plans, like a Republic serial villain."

"You certainly have the voice for it. Not to mention the dress sense..."

"Poor, Jack, very poor. I am disappointed. I've heard so much about your legendary wit."

"Well, you know legends."

"Yes. I think I do. That, after all, is what's at stake here."

Jack has no idea what that's supposed to mean, so he just smiles knowingly.

"Let me get to the point."

"Please."

"We don't like you, you know that. And by 'you' I mean your whole sorry underworld. Your ridiculous warring tribes, your petty feuds, your schemes and ruses, plots and counterplots. You offend us. You offend our sensibilities. You have no place in the grand scheme of things -- in our grand scheme. You are noise in the signal, Jack, a spanner in the works. You make a mess of everything. Frankly, you really piss us off."

"Why, thank you."

"And you hate us just as much. Of course you do. That is how it is, how it has always been. You've been around long enough to know how things work, and this is how."

"True enough. It is how things work. But--"

"But! Exactly." The man holds up his hand up, expression triumphant. "But."

But what? Jack tugs again at his iron shackles. This maniacal magician is even more exasperating to listen to than he expected.

"But: not for much longer."

There is something about the tone of the man's voice that makes Jack suddenly very afraid. Despite his recent acquaintance with failure, fright is an unfamiliar sensation, and an unwelcome one. He does his best to hide the alarm he feels, gazing up at his persecutor in the most carefree manner he can muster, but he sees at once that no-one is fooled.

"It has always been a given that our factions must both exist, like the poles of a magnet. We believed, as did you, that it would always be that way. You and your compatriots hated us, we hated you, but there were fundamental laws preventing either side from achieving any kind of permanent victory. No shadow without light, yes? No order without chaos. Yes? Locked in perpetual struggle, caught in the balance, doomed to play out the same battles forever in a world that could exist no other way. Yes?"

Just a whisper, now: "Yes."

"No! That was a fiction. A lie we told ourselves to justify not doing what needed to be done. There is no universal balance; at least, there need not be. Those laws are not fundamental. They can be changed. And they will!"

Jack is genuinely scared now. The man's fervour is infectious. Jack can almost see it flowing out of him in waves, an animating force to drive these terrible, hateful people.

"Soon, we will have the power to remake the world as it should be. You and your gutter filth will be swept away and this interminable conflict done with. And you, Cocky St Jack, are going to help us."

"No."

"It isn't a choice. It is simply a fact. You are here, and the future is ours. It's all just a matter of sacrifice."

"No."

But it is too late and he knows it. He doesn't recognize the device the man removes from the wooden box, but its purpose is clear enough. He stands there dumbly, no longer even struggling against the chains. He isn't equipped to process this turn of events, nothing has ever prepared him for it. How did it come to this?

The device is cumbersome, and takes longer to set up than Jack expects, and in the meantime he... flounders. Where are his famous last words, his swagger, his bravado in the face of oblivion? He is Cocky St Jack, sovereign lord of the greatest of all the low life nations, who has seen five centuries of wonderful strife and terrible joy and lived more lives than one memory can hold. Was all that for nothing but to bring him here?

He knows he should be fighting or cursing or singing or something...

...but when the end comes it finds him meek and alone, and then it is over.
Posted by matt at October 24, 2004 10:59 PM