The Factions of Radasanth's Revolution

[Gum]

Friction ran the assassin's neck raw, Gum had lashed a rope around his unknown assailant's jugular and was tensing his wiry arms to drag the man towards a guardrail. The pair were deep beneath the ground; the attempted hit against Gum had occurred on the deserted platform of the poorly ventilated Radasanth City Central subway station. Oil lamp shadows and the haunting echo of the subterranean setting gave the encounter a sharp magnificence. Opposed to the lithe shaman, the would be assassin was thick and hairy. Quickly depriving the muscle man of his oxygen source proved the only way for the Xangu native to withstand the mismatch. With one hand still tugging on the noose, Gum slashed at the man's ankles with his primitive axe. The man stumbled and fell, over the rail he went. Gum tugged back on the rope. The rope went taut. Choking, dangling and gargling, the assassin's feet spasmed while his eyes bulged.

Click, clack, click, clack.

That cutting rhythm was the ominous approach of an iron-booted official. “I must leave,” Gum mouthed to himself before hopping over the guardrail to descend to the railway tracks below. The good fortune of having a fresh corpse to break his fall was not lost on the Xangu shaman, it was a cushioned landing. More than that, it softened the sound.

Out of line of sight of the law enforcement representative, Gum was able to take a moment to pillage the assassin's pockets. Nothing but a crumpled piece of a paper came out of them. It was a list. It had names, locations and times of day. They were difficult to read in the dim light, but the second to last name, location and time on the list was “Fordstein's Agent - City Central Subway - midnight.” It was then that the shaman began to understand he was a new player in a terrible game. “I understand now,” he thought to himself at the sight of the kill list. Senator Fordstein had disappeared from the shaman's life and in the politician's place came one face after another. Every anonymous intermediary handed over a crumpled paper with esoteric instructions. Those notes were just like the dead man's crumpled piece of paper. The other side were taking a shot at him.

But wait, there was one last item on the list; the address was labeled, "Castigar safe house" and had a black and red X marked next to it.

“I will leave this place.”

He challenged the hungry gape of the broad tunnel, its intimidating blackness was of no consequence to the desperate traveller. Gum's midnight shadow trailed the rails as he left the yolky light of the station platform behind. Owing to the tight cord around the nape, Gum decided to drag the deceased along with him. It would be highly beneficial for his continued survival to investigate the man who had tried to kill him. With scarce illumination, the grimy coal deposits on the subway's broad arched bricks were lost on him. Squeaking scurries cleared the way, the rats were afraid of him and he not of them. The train tracks took him nowhere else, only forward. No thunderous steam engines were on schedule at that hour, but the wise old shaman kept left regardless.

Beneath the checkered veneered of the Radasanthian Revolution brewed the gritty brutality of a secret street war. Those in the know had already given it a name, the Assassin War.

[Gum]

Fordstein dragged a heavy set of blackout curtains across his gaudy stained glass window and turned to face his guests as their meeting came into session. The city outside was falling asleep as the snakes and wolves of Fordstein's “Society” began to stir in a twilight of their own making. Backslapping congratulations spread around the room as the members of this secret organisation congratulated each other for their continuing ability to collude clandestinely. “Cheers,” was the word of the moment, and the sound that went with it was gluttony's refrain and poverty's lament: expensive alcohol in expensive glasses clanging together merrily.

The delicate thumb and forefinger of each hand, left and right, met the upturned twirl's of Senator Fordstein's ornate moustache. He pinched at them, perfecting their angles. The only thing older than the senator's garish mannerisms was his money. With the pale face of an aging agoraphobe, he looked at everybody present. He took a cursory roll call in the privacy of his sharp old mind. It was time for him to go around the room and welcome these deal makers and hand shakers.

“Welcome, old girl—pleasure to have you again!”

The first person he greeted was a well-manicured woman. When she spoke back, she was immediately and unnervingly genteel. “Yes, I'm glad I could make it. I'm glad we could all make it.” Behind her amiable charm hid the moral ambivalence of a well bred member of the ruling class.

Fordstein turned his attention to a fat foreigner, “Long journey, old bean?”

Ill health came with his excessive bulk; the man swept at his sweaty temples with a cloth handkerchief. “Yes, it was quite uncomfortable. I anticipate that we can attend to this business quickly. I have my own people to placate.” He had oily skin and a patterned complexion

The senator moved on to the next man, a person who he had much more to say to. “Dice, my dear felllow! My most trusted man on the streets! Tell me you're not putting profit before this unrest? I need you to restrict the flow, I really do. I must insist that you cut back on the flow of drugs into the slums.”

A wiry haired redhead, Dice; he was the only member of the society who had the misfortune of having his name mentioned at the table. The senator implored him to control the drug flow because he was the drug flow. Dice was the current commissioner for the combined interests of Radasanth's major crime families. He was unassuming in all aspects of life, and he was in possession of an imposing frame. His build took two takes to notice, he hid his strength beneath expensive suits. “I'll do what I can, boss. Money, money, money. Y'know what I mean?”

Fordstein glowered at the impudent outsider, “Tell me, old boy, what is it your people do to send a message? I'm sure I won't have to send a message though. Because I've just told you right here and right now. There's no need for a message I'm sure!”

And then Fordstein went from one outsider to another. The next face at the table was the proud leader of Radasanth's Chamber of Commerce. Unlike Dice, she didn't rise from poverty, she escaped the rigours of the upper middle class. Cheese was her family's business, and the cheese shop went from father to son. She was passed over. As her brother ran that business into the ground she grew to appreciate the common ineptitude of the male sex. “Don't look at me like that, old man.”

“Delightful!” Fordstein beamed at her chastising venom.

Together, the five members made up the Fordstein Society.

“I heard they just tried to clip your new boy, boss. That shaman from the jungle.” Dice had a lot of sources on the street.

Fordstein was alarmed, “And the outcome? Tell me.”

The words of the CoC leader cut into the conversation, “That Dheathain savage added another notch to his voodoo belt.” She continued uninterrupted, “But if he has already been compromised then how useful is he to us? Are we going to have to babysit him?”

The fat foreigner added his opinion to the pot, “It's important we keep him alive long enough to secure support from a new nation in the Xangu. And besides, it seems he won't need to be babysat.”

Fordstein pondered aloud, “Awfully peculiar, don't you think? How, oh how, could it be that—ALREADY—our enemies are trying to take my newest toy away from me? And do we know which terrible people are responsible for this unseemly behaviour?”

Silence.

Fordstein spoke again, “Well, ladies and gentlemen, that is positively unacceptable. Replace the help. We'll find a new meeting place.”

The group nodded back at him in chorus.

“I trust everybody at this table. I want you all to know that,” said the politician, he was a thoroughly convincing liar.

[Gum]

The light of dawn blurred into Gum's eyes at the end of the tunnel. The subterranean pitch had dilated his eyes. Shifting his shrinking pupils from left to right, the old shaman checked out the area for the patrolling presence of the city's zealous law enforcement. The sudden thudding clatter of an approaching freight train provided the ideal cover and Gum made a run for it, dragging the stiff corpse behind him. Gum flanked the thundering juggernaut as it rocked the city buildings, the steel grinding sparks of wheels and track showered the shaman as he stayed close to the magnificent machine. Jagged track ballast ripped and shredded his leather wrap moccasins, and then his weary soles began to seep claret onto the rough stones upon which he walked.

He ducked away from the long train of coal carrying wagons and into his target, a disused engine shed. Gum was familiar with the building, it was his regular hideout since taking up residency in the city. The shattered glass windows were lined with makeshift flowerpots. Pansies and petunias bloomed with anemic vigour from old oil cans and empty work boots. (UPCYCLED! BONUS!!!) But no matter what fertiliser he added to the soil, he struggled to get anything to grow the way it did back home. Imperial cutbacks brought the aging railway building under the category of unnecessary. Most of the equipment inside had been taken and used at the remaining rail yards. There was one thing left behind, however: the hollow husk of one of Radasanth's earliest steam powered locomotives. The Xangu native dropped the body of his would-be assassin off on the ground and left it behind, he climbed up the steps leading into the engineless machine. Inside it was positively homely, a thin mattress with a ratty blanket over it was pushed into a corner. An upturned vegetable crate made for an acceptable night stand. Gum's carved wooden figures of Oxxad and Atataratzu were placed purposefully next to the alarm clock Senator Fordstein had gifted him. His new life as an assassin required he adhere to the regiment of time. For the moment though, he had to reflect on the corpse on his doorstep and what to do next.

He collapsed on the bed.

~

Twelve hours of discomfort later and the troubled shaman awoke from his dawn slumber in the twilight of sunset. He'd slept the day away. Gum's first thought was of the corpse sitting unguarded in the engine shed. “Reckless,” he mouthed to himself silently. His second thought was to his nightmares. Visions of his homeland in ruins and the gods he served insisting that he must do his duty came to him while he slept. As a holyman of the Xangu basin, he could not ignore his dreams. They were as real as the rain clouds that had closed in since he slept.

“This man, as much as any person, deserves to have his soul saved.”

While his feet were still bloody, Gum walked out on the track ballast again and felt each foot sting and ache. Before he began the ceremony, he compared his feet to those of the dead man's. “A good match,” Gum said as he removed the man's boots and squeezed his own feet into the footwear.

Outside the steam engine shell he lived in were a series of railway sleepers that had been carved into the five figures of the Xangu Pantheon, they were propped up against the train's flaky painted exterior. The shaman dragged each totem out and placed them in a circle before laying the body of the dead assassin at the centre of the circle.

“I will send you home, friend.”

Gum's bleeding feet danced out a painful rhythm to the primal drums pounding in his head, the sound was pure imagination. Engine oil flew off the gravel beneath his feet and speckled his dark skinned calves. The old shaman span with increasing intensity until he was utterly entranced in the evening's anxious aura. He bent his knees to harsh right angles with each spinning jump. The dance carried Gum between the five points of the circle marked out in the engine shed interior.

The sun set beneath the horizon and Gum went with it. His spirit descended into the Underworld, leaving his body behind, quivering as it waited for the return of its conscious essence. As he went, Gum pulled the assassin's spirit down with him. In a moment, they were both in the grim darkness of Atataratzu's awful kingdom. Grotesque towers curved to acute points on a distant horizon, the choking air was bitter in the lungs and beneath the otherwordly traveller's spirits was a barren substrate even more dire than the Radasanth's railway's.

“Ha, you fucking got me, man,” said the spirit who quickly identified himself. “You got old fucken Motty Ginn. Fuck, you got me.”

“I did,” replied Gum, his two words came out evenly.

Motty Ginn looked at his macabre surroundings and said, “I didn't believe the fucking rumours, man. Fuck. You really are a fucking spooky fucking guy, shit.”

“The rumours?” asked the shaman under the endless watch of the Underworld's ghouls.

The newly dead assassin was strangely accepting of his environment, “Come on, dude. You know what they say about, you fucking savage.”

Gum stayed silent, confused.

“Come on. You fucking kill me and then you make me suck your dick in the fucking afterlife. Man, fuck you.”

Silence.

“Alright, alright. Shit. They say you're a fucking death god, man. They say you are the grim fucking reaper. They say you kill because hell wants the souls, and you take the souls to hell personally.”

“My reputation is undeserved,” Gum's denial was a signal of his misery towards his degenerative spiral. It was harder and harder to ignore.

“You fucking killed me, and now you've brought me here. Am I right, or am I fucking right?”

“I am doing what is needed for my people,” insisted Gum dismissively.

“Ha! Keep telling yourself that, buddy. How the fuck does being a fucking Fordstein Society hitman help your fucking jungle people?” old Motty Ginn knew more than Gum did.

“Society?” asked Gum, alarmed at his own ignorance.

“Yeagghh, Fordstein Society. See?”

“I met Mr. Fordstein, he is assisting me. But I have not heard of a related society.”

“Oh man, you're straight off the fucking boat, aren't you? You poor fucking bastard. I'll tell you what.”

Gum moved to sooth his victim, it was his obligation as a shaman to do so, “This is not hell. Do not be afraid. This is where you wait, and eventually you will move on to paradise. It will take you as long as is necessary to reconcile the pain you have caused other people.”

Ginn shot back, “Oh, man. I'm gonna be here for fucking ever, man. Fuck, man. Fuck.”

“If you feel your life was so bad, you can try again. Roll the dice, be born again.”

“You know what… but hey, listen, before you leave me with that fucking creepy thing.” Ginn looked over his shoulder to the approaching outline of Oxxad. The true death god was waiting for Gum to deliver the dead man's soul, “I'll clue ya in, okay?”

“Tell me,” asked the shaman with severe sincerity.

“Okay, these are the factions. The Imperialists, as in, the fucking government.”

“I am aware of them, of course.”

“But are you aware of the fucking Loyalists? They're like Imperialist vigilantes. The Loyalists support the government, but they're a fucking terrorist group. Most of the time they just fucking try to kill the Casties!”

“Casties?” wondered Gum.

“Castigars.”

“Of course.”

“Fucken Casties. Overly sentimental sad sacks. Entitled too. I fucking hate them,” Ginn was visibly upset at their name.

“Are you a Loyalist?”

“You figure it out.”

Silence.

“Anyway. So then there's the faction that you don't even know is pulling your fucking strings, man. The fucking Fordstein Society. They're fucking old blood lines, old money, old assholes. They're part of the Imperial government, but that cocksucker Fordstein wants it all for himself. The fuckers working with him are gonna be the first against the wall when he becomes king. They're too fucking arrogant to realise it though, man.”

“And me, if I work for Senator Fordstein, how do you see my fortunes unfolding?” the concern in Gum's voice, even through the Underworld's thickening lens, was apparent.

“You're fucken dead, man. Fucken dead. I hope you're fucking dead sooner rather than later. I could really do with a pal around here. I don't wanna end up getting fucked in the showers here, man.”

“Thank you for your help. I am sorry that I killed you. Please, I recommend reincarnation for you. You deserve another chance to prove your worth. You will not remember this in your new life, but your spirit will. I hope that you learn to hear it speak on the wind.”

“Oh, man, keep the fucking mumbo fucking jumbo to yourself, ya fucken kook.”

Oxxad stepped forward, coming out from the shadows. The death god's appearance was distant from the humans that worshiped him. His ribs gripped his torso from the outside, instead of the inside. The organs dangling from Oxxad's inexplicably open gut were numerous and unrecognisable to those familiar with human anatomy. Between the legs of Oxxad were the shredded remnants of both male and female genitalia, the mutilation had been carried out in a pattern of sorts; it seemed ritualistic. Both hands had digits numbering in the twenties, each finger crept like a spider's leg. From the base of his rear protruded a waving monkey's tail. Beneath the guts were the spindly legs holding Oxxad at his lofty height. He was the tallest being in the Underworld. Looking up at Oxxad's face was to look upon peeled lips and jagged teeth, his face was pulled tight over a deformed skull and his eyes were gone, but obsidian lumps had been shoved into the sockets instead. A flock of white doves circled his head. Beside Oxxad was a totem of rotting corpses, the freshly dead were stacked at the top and the old bones were slowly turning to dust at the bottom.

“Shaman Gum, how are you?” hissed the death god mockingly.

“Good, I am good,” replied the shaman nervously.

“Don't neglect your duties, friend. Hand over this man's soul and return home. You don't belong in this silly Radasanth place.”

“My duties to the Xangu Basin extend beyond its borders,” the shaman insisted he was right in spite of so many telling him he was wrong.

“If you inssssssissssssstttttt,” Oxxad hissed as he grabbed the Ginn's spirit with his long fingers.

“He is to be reborn, that is my advice.”

“He is not a Xangu native anyway, I don't want him. He'll be reborn, we'll send him back!”

Oxxad winked at Gum.

Then Gum was awake again, back in the real world and soaked in sweat. The dead body of the man at the centre of the ritual's circle was gone.

[Gum]

It was the next day, and events of consequence closed in as the time detailed on the crumpled note came closer.

Lithe and little, two boys rushed out of the echoey courtyard of their slum central tenement. They screamed, laughed and shit talked every step as they ran along Yarborough Street. A revolutionary mural, with paint still dripping, decorated the down and out neighbourhood. The first boy, Iray, spotted an empty paint can next to the brazen political graffiti and kicked it out in front of him as though it was a ball. His scruffy bowl cut flapped back in his own breeze of motion. His taller, neater friend, Rafan, yelled through his blocked nose, “To me, to me!” And Iray obliged and kicked the can to his friend. One, two, back and forth. They enjoyed their game as they continued a determined race through the shadier neighbourhoods of Radasanth.

Gum, the increasingly talented assassin, had positioned himself on the roof of the building opposite the purported Castigar safe house. Through his sun washed eyes, the hidden shaman squinted as Iray and Rafan came around the corner. Rafan ran up to the door of the supposed safe house and slashed a red line across it with a brush he seemed to produce from nowhere. His buddy came next, slashing across in the opposite direction with a black line. Together the two lines made an X.

Using his vertical advantage, Gum could see that there were two police officers watching the event. The uniformed duo watched the kids with mouths agape, almost merrily amazed that two punks would commit a crime right before them. The male officer mumbled, “What the fuck?” to his female colleague. But she was gone. Her right hand held tight to her helmet so it wouldn't fly off, and her left hand was loosening her baton from his waist. The male officer met his duty head on and rushed after them too.

“Hmm, that was very strange,” thought Gum to himself. “No, I understand,” he whispered aloud as it clicked, he was fairly certain what would happen next.

With the coppers gone from the scene, two men tattooed men sauntered from a dark alley and into the light. They were inked head to toe in poorly scribed Loyalist symbols. They broke into a dash and rushed towards the door of the alleged Castigar safe house. The first of the bald headed brutes banged erratically on the door while the second screamed as loud as he could, “Sanctuary!!! Sanctuary!!! We're friends of the old Castigars, we're allies! LET US IN!!! QUICKLY!!! The Loyalists are coming!!! The Loyalists are coming!!!”

Gum knotted his brow at the lies of the terrorists below. He wondered and worried what to do. If he was to stay loyal to Senator Fordstein, who had lied and used him, then both the Castigars and the Loyalists were his enemy. Why intervene? But on the other hand, if he did intervene, maybe the Castigars could offer him a way out of his obligations to this mysterious Fordstein Society whose debt he was regrettably in. Both men were armed with simple axes but wore no armour. It would be easy for Gum to enter the fray and dispatch of them before any Castigars inside the safe house opened the door.

Whatever he decided to do, Gum had certainly come to the conclusion that it was time to start understanding this conflict so he could best turn it to his advantage and eventually get the hell off the rain swept rock in the northern seas.

“Oh, to be back in the warmth of the Xangu Nation,” he whined the words sadly to himself.