The women who were supposedly less sane than others seemed frighteningly sane to Ted. He didn't want to make a scene out of wondering out loud what bright minds society was hiding in its darkest crevices, but he wanted to put a certain old cow back in her rightful place.
Naturally, the best way to do this was to make her unemployed. He had received the confirmation from the crown that it was all right if he took all the girls – if he was able to take care of them. He thought it could be a good idea to eventually have more than ten thousand cultists, just in case if something was to go wrong.
He examined the rooms the women were supposed to get healthier in. Everything was either in need of repair, dangerously dirty, or both, and all the girls looked like they could use a good meal, or three, or thirty. Ted gave one of them a cigarette and went outside with her to smoke and talk together.
She gave him a strange look. "I would rather save the cigarette, thank you, cor."
"Because you want to roll your own cigarettes with the other ladies? Loyalty?"
"No, because I might need to bribe the shadow people."
Ted gave her a whole box of cigarettes. "Is this enough for the shadow people?"
"Yes, I need them to be on my side to fight the red little people."
Then the woman let out an uneasy chuckle. "My mother died because of them."
Ted revisited his understanding of the sanity of the women. No, they were not sane. At all.
"The red people…right. We don't want them taking over the world," Ted said. "Will you please just let me light your cigarette?"
"Give me matches. They don't want us to have matches…cor."
Ted still intended to do a dirty trick to the annoying matriarch of the madhouse, but he was not sure at all whether the girls counted as willing sacrifices.
There had to be someone who had only been wrongly judged as crazy. Someone with original, creative thoughts. This was starting to look like more trouble than it was worth.
Ted smiled at the girl who saw shadow people and little red men.
"I'm going to take you out of this place," he told her, expecting some kind of a reaction.
"Good." Her expression did not change at all.
Ted did the paperwork, and the matriarch signed it without reading.
He left. He expected a shipment of lunatics to arrive soon.
Mad was at work. He did not seem bothered in the slightest by the fact that he had been a target of an assassination attempt. He was trying different combinations to the lock of the safe and was not too glad to be interrupted.
A click and a hiss. Ted had no idea if a safe should have let out a hiss like that.
Then it opened itself.
"Oh, boy, what a timing you had, Ted," Madorn said with a whistle.
He took out a bottle, very carefully, and examined the contents.
"It shares uncomfortably many properties with water," Madorn said. "I don't like this. There must be something we have overlooked. Perhaps another trip around the corners of the Great East is in order."
"Take a good look at it before we do anything drastic. In that place…we could easily get killed," Ted said and shook his head.
"Well, I will be doing that anyway. I have a feeling there might be a magical component involved. Such things are often hard to catch, so I hope you will be patient with this project."
Ted was then engaged with a shrieking madhouse matriarch who had just been robbed of her livelihood. She had arrived two hours earlier and, according to Eknie, had been letting out steam for the entire duration of her quite unwanted visit.
"You are a scumbag!" the woman spat at him. "Don't you realize?! Those women can't do on their own!"
Ted checked the papers Eknie had written for him. There were fifty and two ladies, most of whom suffered from conditions other than straight up madness.
"Thirty lived by themselves. Most of them had stable relationships, no history of violent behavior…they were functional members of society," Ted said as calmly as he could.
"They should not have been –"
Ted shot the woman in the face. He was not in the mood to be questioned at all. He wanted quality time, with Mad or with Eknie, even a cultist would have sufficed. Now he had a new body to bury.
That was when the sun god appeared in his mirror.
"WELL. I can deal with that. But you have to remember. LOW PROFILE."
The headache, the feeling of being controlled, it all came back and it was so horrible that Ted even considered eating lead. The intrusive light penetrated his brain, leaving nothing untouched, and he was unable to move, let alone end his misery right then and there.
Then he felt something rise within his own mind, a defiance, something that fought back.
He was cor Ted Tobias, not a hobbyist, not a coward, and definitely not a poor sod ready to end his own life.
"Eat her," he hissed at the mirror. "Eat the body, eat everyone who questions her disappearance. I am doing you a favor, MOTHER of WORMS, or I would try, but you make it so difficult."
The light disappeared, but something invisible now tore at the dead woman, hacking pieces away, eroding the corpse bit by bit.
Ted watched with a certain mild interest in the ways of the deity. Whatever they said about the sun god being difficult to work with, it did not mean that cooperation was impossible.
And Ted did have the satisfaction of having killed that horrible hag.
He smiled at the body, then at the mirror, and walked out in order to let the god eat in peace.
He was about to have a splendid evening, and no men, women or gods could stand between him and his goal.