The Solomons were always there. Traverse just wouldn’t have been Traverse without them. The funny thing, however, was that it could be really easy to overlook them. Their ambition never matched their activities, and they must have known it. Cotton had never bothered with them, not even him, who had singled out the overlooked threat of the Cad and inadvertently begun a war because of it. Truett Solomon, otherwise known as Cutty, was the current head of the clan, and Cotton had never worried about him. He was, as they say, mostly harmless, with the bark bigger than the bite. But in the new atmosphere of the looming war, he was suddenly king, and even he couldn’t appreciate it. With all of the factions, from Boy Benjamin to Lotus to Viper to the scores of others, some resident and other opportunistic intruders, that colored the battlefield Traverse would soon become, Cutty Solomon alone had the roots to withstand the storm, and roots would ensure survival, if not victory. Survival was all that really mattered. Survival was the credo of the Solomon clan. Survival was an unbelievable source of strength.
Lotus, whether he was aware of it or not, was dependent on the Solomons for his own survival, his unnaturally prolonged life both a product of his own ornate abilities and the support of successive Solomon generations, who saw in him a pawn. It didn’t matter if he was ever a danger to them. Benjamin Russ grew to power in part because he proved to be a useful challenge, and challenge was a natural extension of survival, and so his challenge was tolerated. Viper, why Viper had sprung out of nowhere, and that was another challenge in itself. The Solomons loved a good fight. They didn’t get it, very often, from the heroes, certainly not from the likes of Godsend. Only once, with Switchblade. Cotton had been there, and so had Cutty. Neither Cotton nor Cutty would have remembered seeing each other then, not with those circumstances. The death of a hero tended to distract everyone.
It happened in the days Cotton had been going soft, losing his ideals, in the days the murder of the Cad would have been an absurd suggestion, something Cotton would never have believed himself capable of. Switchblade would have been, oh yes. He didn’t get his name for nothing. He was a villain among heroes. More than once he had been treated as such. Cotton might have done the same if he’d been given the chance, but he never did. Switchblade sought him out, first for a conversation and then for a demonstration, which the visiting hero took in Cotton’s own backyard. Before that, Cotton had never heard of the Solomons. Cutty was still growing into his role, his uncle assuming leadership at the time. This was the time, in fact, that he earned that name, and it was no coincidence. He always enjoyed his share of bravado. He had believed he could take on Switchblade, who was so notorious for leaving his opponents run red with blood. Heroes didn’t do that. Cotton hadn’t believed Switchblade was a hero. He changed his mind even before the tragedy had played out.
The Solomons were engaged in one of their periodic efforts at consolidating power, Rancor being a chief target, through the services of Viper in his comparatively innocent days, before he revealed his own genius, before he revealed to Cotton his betrayal, before he led Cotton directly to the Cad, before he murdered Rancor. Viper had infiltrated the Solomons, an act in a pattern of behavior Cotton had never recognized, and brought help along with him. Having learned of this, Cutty’s uncle was prepared to eliminate the threat by encouraging an indiscriminant massacre within his own ranks. Switchblade’s partner, Manner, was included within those ranks, and she stood a real chance of losing her life, or blowing her cover, and Switchblade did not want to risk either one. He came to see Cotton so he could prevent it, and cut the Solomons down to size at the same time. He would have let the massacre carry on had Manner not lay prone within it.
So instead, he decided to open Cotton’s eyes. Cotton’s immediate interest was the involvement of Viper, who had been as much a thorn in his side as his master, the two constantly battling each other, almost as rivals from the start. Whatever Viper’s original motives had been, he had now long since abandoned them, for a single pursuit. He wanted a war so he could ruin the Eidolon once and for all, and every other hero of his kind. Switchblade had not been much different. He favored objectives over methods, because he prized the objectives above all. He did not want them lost amidst mindless details, which stood every bit to numb the mind as confuse the hero, which he’d perceived as Cotton’s problem. Had he known that he was sending the Eidolon on a path to self-imposed retirement, he might have tried harder, or fought to survive the fight with Cutty. Or perhaps let Cotton die that night.
Cotton had not wanted to listen, when he heard what Switchblade had to say, about his attitude and his direction. Switchblade had no love for Godsend, but Cotton would not let go of his faith, both in his partner and to the advantages of diversity in tactics. The more he listened, though, the more he found a new focus, a new need for determination. He began to believe in fatalism. Switchblade preached the gospel of compromise, that believing in the existence of good, even in evil, was giving in to evil itself. He didn’t believe in good, but rather that all men were inherently evil and that the only way to change this, and he believed change was possible if fought for, was to eliminate rather than accommodate the worst forces of evil. He had tried many times to kill Rancor himself, Rancor who had embodied so much of it, the excess that characterized it so well. In a way, Switchblade only described himself. His war was against himself, and he had made Cotton’s a personal war as well, if it had ever been anything else. Somehow, though, he had found out about Denny Hay, and he stressed that event most of all. He had called Cotton a coward.
Well, Cotton had decided then that he was not afraid, and so he took Switchblade’s challenge and joined him in his crusade against the Solomons, the rescue of Manner, whom Switchblade confessed he would be parting ways with afterward, because she had allowed herself to be compromised. He didn’t seemed phased by arguments that he had just recruited a compromised man. In his eyes, he should not have had to rescue her in the first place, because he did not respect his foes. He said to do so would have been to empower them, and that was the last thing he wanted, was in fact the very thing he fought against. He thought he would be salvaging an entire city by this single act, by taking on the Solomons, the overlooked threat. In Cotton’s later experience, such threats should almost have been left like that. They were less dangerous. To seek out a fight only made the fight worse. He didn’t understand that then. He was under the spell of a maniac, damned if he was going to break it.
Cotton had suggested a subtler approach to their infiltration, but Switchblade insisted it would be a waste of their time, so they invaded the Solomon stronghold with such bombast that they might as well have been invited, so little resistance being possible. Switchblade happened to like explosions as well. He took half the compound down in a single act, and countless lives. Whether Manner might have been lost was immaterial. In the panic, Viper blew his cover, and Cutty had to decide who he was going to fight, to save face. Cutty was already in his fifties, but was remarkably spry for his age, thanks to a lot of pent-up anticipation for a moment like this, where he could begin to prove himself. Switchblade had in fact walked right into a trap. Cutty had struck a deal with Viper, having realized who he was, and Manner was the bait. All he needed to do was decide if he was going to remain loyal to the deal, if he could trust Viper.
He didn’t have the chance to make the decision, because Viper disappeared soon enough, apparently not wanting a piece of this, though he left the rest of his men behind, to die as they pleased. Manner freed herself before Switchblade could for her, and they fought as if nothing was between them, with the Eidolon following their lead. Cutty found his man, stood his ground, and gave what he could, which wasn’t enough, but the confusion was. Between Viper’s men, the Solomon men, and the heroes, the heroes eventually became overwhelmed, first Manner, then Cotton. Switchblade spared him, at his own expense, felled by Cutty’s blade. With his dying breath, he implored Cotton to leave. The implication was that he wasn’t worthy after all.
The event left yet another mark on Cotton, one that scarred with his original heroic motivation, creating something he thought he could never escape. When he finally did, he learned the price was too great to accept. He became overwhelmed again. It seemed all his life he had been overwhelmed into submission, and it was because he had never known peace, not with himself and not with the world. He was restless, and he had thought he could put an end to it in Traverse, finally find himself. As he approached Cutty Solomon again, he wondered if he ever would. The significance of Solomon escaped him, at least until he saw him.
All he seemed to have gained from that day was a nickname and confidence from his clan. Cotton was unmoved. He wanted to know what went through the mind of such a man, if he’d ever given that day a second thought, if he’d known who he killed, if he cared. He wanted to know what Cutty hoped to gain from this war, what he thought survival alone would do for the Solomons. At first Cotton thought he was asleep, but then he realized that Cutty was dead, slumped in his chair, seated at a desk cluttered with strategies for survival. Well, it would have to be someone else’s job now.
“You’re probably wondering how he died,” a voice, low and uncomfortable, said from behind. “You don’t have to. I killed him.”
Cotton turned around and saw, in fragile yet breathtaking form, more elegant than he had ever been, Nick Sanders, the man once known as Silt, but now called Dust. “You,” he said.
“In the flesh,” Dust said. “So to speak. We have much to talk about.”
Cotton heard these words with trepidation, but he no longer let his fear control him. Switchblade had sought to engrain in him the culture of fear, had sought to use the birth of the Eidolon as motivation to steer Cotton back to an acceptable path. He might have been right about that, Cotton straying from the path, but he was wrong about Cotton, what he needed. What he had needed, all this time, was acceptance, not an irrational need to hide from the truth, or distort it, but to embrace it, to embrace reality for what it was and not what he made it to be. All this time he had been running from it, from himself. He could no longer afford to do that. He could no longer live in a world of his own conception. He had brought back the Eidolon, and he was going to make that count for something.
Dust suggested that there were still things he needed to face, and he believed it. He believed that this man, who had gone and come back again, had answers he needed, had something to give that would leave the world with something more than it had without him. Dust promised Cotton Colinaude the meaning of purpose.
No comments:
Post a Comment