by James Comins
"Bug," he whispered into the room. His voice was shallow and too small. A piping "yessir?" answered. "Bug, has anyone entered my laboratories?"
"No, your skekiness." The bug coughed. "Been just you an' me." A note of hesitation.
"How did the door open?"
"Uh, you mean the big door?"
SkekTek patted the surface behind him, and realized that the bug was expecting an answer. "Yes," he rasped, "this door."
"Um." The bug scuttled around its cage. "You opened it, sir. When you--"
"When?" said skekTek.
"Prob'ly wasn't quite a toll ago."
Memories. Stirred strangely, skekTek received a memory of orange light, purple light, brotherhood and sisterhood, feelings . . . bah, it was gone.
What had his current project been? A blind hand slapped at the ground and came up with the brassy object. Yes, that's what he'd . . . ugggh. Deep breaths. He'd been contemplating the materials that comprised this object, and dreaming of . . . of their practical applications. Yes.
Breathing, skekTek braced himself and stood. Breathing.
The brassy outer metal was called athertine. He knew this now. He had not known it before. Athertine was alloyed from copper, bismuth and the corrosive sap of the larantine tree. He knew how to make it. He did not know how to make it before. Before . . . before now, anyway. He knew how to reproduce athertine.
The pasty-colored material inside was called bonestone. It was made by melting the thick bones of tamtails in larantine sap and purifying. It possessed a variety of properties, including an ability to store and transfer the energies of Thra. The energies of the Dark Crystal.
SkekTek did not know what bonestone was, before. He now knew what bonestone was. A feathery hand clenched the capstan gear. His eyes trained on his hand, flicked to the open doorway. Then down.
There were words carved into the athertine surface, revealing the bonestone beneath. A dazzle of inspiration. SkekTek could read these words. They were childishly simple. Written in the old tongue.
"EXTREME DANGER. KEEP AWAY FROM LIGHT."
Holding up the brassy athertine-covered object, turning it over in his hand, he aimed the words carved in it at the Dark Crystak. A nearly infinite beam of purple light shone from the handle and across the laboratory floor. A curse of "point that someplace else!" whimpered from the steel cage.
Bonestone could store and direct the energy of the Dark Crystal far better than shattercite. Yes. It was clear. So clear now, quite clear, quite very clear. He could still outmaneuver that Chamberlain and his Slavemaster lackey. All he needed was a good source of larantine sap and tamtail bone, plus purifying agent.
Larantines grew in the Forest Depths. Some other Skeksi had gone there, he remembered, knew the region, and perhaps he--
The Hunter. What had that guard said? A friend of the Chamberlain. Maneuver carefully, skekTek. Don't let it come back to you. He'd get the guard to arrange it--yes, that was the way. And then infiltrate the kennels, and then the Emperor--yes. It was all going skekTek's way.
* * *
"I can only bring one person with me."
His skin, Loora saw, was strictly green from forehead to ankles, except along one hand and arm, where it faded to a healthier skin-brown. He was bald, and a purple bandanna was wrapped around his head, concealing his left eye like an eyepatch. As he moved, which he did patiently, deliberately, without any fidgeting, she glimpsed an empty socket behind the covering.
Half of his face was peeled away, creating a long, muscley smile of unnaturally exposed teeth. His damaged mouth pointed like a spearhead to a missing ear. One shoulder was white bone and yellow tendon, sunken in and knotted, a flesh landscape of hills and crooked valleys. The left arm was withered and was bound to his torso. It moved, creaking, as he moved. White ribs pushed through green skin, and white wrappings went up his slender body, holding in ribs beneath a large pale vest of pouches and pockets full of bandages and tinctures. An articulated wooden web-frame shaped like a leg, with thigh and calf and squeaky brass knee, stuck out from an angled men's skirt. Tall shoes.
Yrn's one open eye stared unblinking at Loora as she steadied herself. There was an awareness that she had met him before at the Spriton gathering, but the memory was shaky. She sat on a polished slice of root, and Aughra was there, and Uncle Embling.
"Is there no way to bring Loora and I to ur-Kalivath together?" Aughra grunted.
"The song that splits stone uses up my breath," said Yrn. His voice, despite the rotting of half his body, was very clear and warm to hear. "The stone will close behind me as I breathe. If I had months to practice, with poppets to try it out on, so that if something went wrong . . . but to get there on the first try? No, I'll need to be bound to the person, to limit how much I need to sing. I know my limitations."
Aughra sighed. "Inconvenient. Hmp! But perhaps it will save us time. Take Loora to ur-Kalivath. She will tell the Mystics everything. I will travel to the Castle of the Crystal and examine the Great Crystal with urNol. Much to be learned."
"These herbs," Uncle Embling said. "They--they won't be enough, will they? The boy--"
"Speak of it when fewer delicate ears are listening, Embling. No, they won't last forever, but they may sustain life for long enough. Hope. Hope is how the heart sustains itself. Let's prepare for our twin journeys, Loora. Are you willing to--?"
"Yes," Loora spat.
"Anger in your voice. Let it out! Don't let it boil."
"Not here," said Loora.
"Yes here! Why hide it? You'll be travelling to dangerous lands with Yrn. Better to let him see your feelings. A tricky song he'll be singing, don't want to interrupt it."
Loora squeezed her eyes shut and clawed her fingers and then let them unclench, placing them deliberately to either side of her. Uncle Embling, hunched slightly and bearing a wisp of white-black hair, staring with his too-large eyes; Aughra, her skull-nose still unsettling to Loora, her right eye forever held shut and the other two, left and forehead, buried under wrinkles; Yrn, his mind and body still, his one eye knowing.
"Cory. He never told me he was--he never said goodbye. He was being a jerk and if I--I might have--my scream woke up others--he was poisoned in that tree--I saved his life--he can't ever try out our globe. He never even saw it." She hated saying these things instead of holding them in, hated Aughra for making her say them. "Why are we all getting sick?" she asked. "It isn't even just Gelflings. The whole world is sick. My mother. Cory's father. The grand-Gelfs," she said. "Why did I have to be born when the world is poisoning us? Why couldn't this have gotten fixed already? Why haven't you solved it for us? You're the Mother Master!" she said. "You can summon rain and fog and you can marry the sky and land and you could probably spin the suns around the wrong way if you wanted to. How can this--why is this still happening? Why haven't you fixed this already?" she said and sighed hard. "Cory," she added.
Her anger seemed to spread to Aughra, but in a puff of emotion, the old woman instead bowed her head in sadness.
"I will show you something," Aughra said. The whiskers, the bold purple hair, and the deep lines faced Loora. All three eyes closed. Then, for the first time Loora could remember, all three eyes opened, snap.
Where the right eye should have been was an image. It was burned onto the eye, onto a black pupil spread so wide that the whole eye was permanently black.
The image was this:
Stars. Black night space. Void. In the center, a pillar of funneled light was so glorious and majestic that Loora herself shied from looking at it too closely. It was a light too beautiful to endure.
Drawn in, repelled, pulled, pushed, Loora found herself dissolving into the image. A tower of light, leading beyond infinity. She became aware of a circle of faces emerging, faces made of light, stretched and distorted and yet angelic, utterly alien, foreign, outworldly. The faces possessed the sort of intelligence that a Gelfling might never know nor believe in. Intelligence to be worshipped, intelligence to throw yo
urself prostrate before. Angels descending from a beam of light.
And below, competing against the light's brilliance, a crystal exposed to the stars. The Great Crystal. Violet, native, a portrait of Thra and its people.
Until the eye closed, replaced by folds of brown eyelid, Loora saw nothing else.
"Always I see it," Aughra whispered. "Eyes open? Eyes closed? Always the light of the Conjunction. The arrival from the stars. Down from the sky to our Crystal. That one perfect light, when our world joined with others through the light of our suns. Our world? Just one connection of a thousand connecting worlds. Thousand? Maybe a million. Is it the endworld, or only one of many? Hmp! I don't know." A thick sigh. "The light is blinding to me. Distracting. Once I knew only Thra, its vibrations, its ways, its people. Now there is always the knowledge of other worlds. So many others. Our Thra still important! But there is so much else out there. How can I be content? How can I attend to our simple ways? The stars . . ."
"So there might have been a way to save him," Loora said sullenly, "if you weren't so blind. That's what you're saying."
"Let out the anger," Aughra said. "Hold nothing in. No good packing feelings up."
"Only a few hours passed between the tree falling over and Cory doing the same," Uncle Embling creaked sympathetically. "You wouldn't have had much time anyway."
"Fine. Fine! Then let's save my mother--and Cory's father, the gardener. I can help Cory keep his promises to that woman who was going to shoot him, at least."
"Send you off as soon as Yrn is ready. First I'll tell you what to say to the ur-Mystics. Words very important. Meaning? More important!"
And Loora sat beside Yrn, not touching his broken dream-dead body, and memorized the words Aughra gave her.
* * *
"Your grandness," Rian said, stepping aside as the Chamberlain shuffled in through the open front doors of the castle.
A pair of sly satisfied eyes slid to look at him. Rian stood at attention just beside the Podling slaves who tended the door. He kept his eyes forward, staring through the Chamberlain in the vacant manner of distracted guards everywhere. The Chamberlain seemed to read his face for clues, and finding none, clumped off into the guts of the purple fortress. Then Rian was alone with the sniveling Podlings.
"Shouldn't speak to 'em," one of the slaves muttered. "Encourages 'em."
"Skeksis don't care whether you speak to them or not," the other Podling said. "I never said a word to them, and they still knew who I was and where I lived and what wheels to turn in Nander to convince the whole town to turn me in. I'm a herbal pharmacist. They said I'd been selling unlicensed medicine. Told them all the licenses were in order. They come in, have a look around. Pulled a box of sumpin' I'd never heard of from under a floorboard that was never loose. Asked where I'd got it. Said I hadn't. No one listened."
"Tell me the whole thing later--" said Rian.
"Tell 'im the whole thing later, says Scars here. He won't be back. Volunteer, he is, isn't he, and--"
Rian grabbed the Podling by the steel collar and lifted him. "You can say many things to me, Plantsprout, but don't you say I'm a volunteer. Open the door."
As he finally stalked out of the castle, Rian was pursued by some nasty words on the subject of "touchy, touchy." He declined to press the issue, or to point out that he'd released the collar's pudgy lock with his sharp squeeze, and tripped across the drawbridge into the night.
The Hunter could be found most often in his mobile outpost in the mouth of a captive cave-eater. They camped together on the ridge overlooking Skarith. While the metal hinge that held the cave-eater's mouth open was painted a tactical brownish-black, there were two spots where the paint had been worn away by a pair of long stalactite-incisors, and if you whistled, the cave-eater would stretch his mouth open a little more, and the starlight would glint off the exposed metal, and a sharp eye could see where the Hunter was camped.
Rian whistled. A grumble and a glint.
The climb up the cliff scrub involved a lot of strain to the thighs, plus several places where he had to trust his weight to a dried dead bit of tree, as well as two overhand climbs to a higher ledge. The cave-eater was staked down to the top of the ridge, a triangle peak grumbling softly to itself. Rian caught one of the stakes with a boot and pulled it free as he passed. Stony jaws remained pried apart on springs, however.
The Hunter dropped from the immobile upper lip of the cave-eater, landing in near silence. Four knives stayed dark, held in shadow.
* * *
"You're shaking."
She was, but it wasn't the green skin or torn mouth or the exposed ribs she was being tied to that was making her shake. Loora had found herself waiting for Cory to get ready, waiting for him to walk around the side of the huts to the landswimming pit to join her and Yrn on the next leg of their adventure. Then the unbelievable reality would return to her repeatedly, like the first verse of a round, and she was shaking.
Cory was gone from this world and would never return.
"Yrn? Can you see the future?" she asked.
"No one can see the future," the half-dead boy replied. His good iris seemed perfectly transparent, with a faint leaf-color lighting their inner depths.
"Cory could," said Loora.
Yrn didn't speak further. The three Spritons who were binding her to his body hummed in a way that made her flinch. Her wrists were knotted, and her ankles were crossed around his real leg, and she scowled and didn't want to be touched really, but there was work to be done, and she was willing to do it. Just grit your teeth and get the job done, Loora. It will be over soon.
Yrn smelled of medicine and open wounds and bandages. It was, somehow, a sweet smell, though not exactly pleasant.
"Ready?" said Yrn as the three Spritons tugged the bonds one last time and stepped away. Loora's face was pressed into the boy's good shoulder and her legs straddled his non-withered leg. The Spriton assistants wrapped gauze over her nose and mouth to keep dirt from getting in.
"As I'll ever be," she said, muffled, and they descended like a drowning boat into the soil.
"Take a deep breath. It will have to last," Yrn whispered as their shoulders plunged beneath the surface. She gulped like a river fish, and then it was darkness.
Inside the soil, there was no light, no Light Sickness to illuminate the space, and no real way to know where they were headed or how fast. There was, she felt, no way her breath would last all the way there--maybe they'd come up for air every few centrors? If not, this trip was going to end much worse than it started.
It seemed like they were staying almost still, or maybe they were tilting to face down into the soil.
Yrn's voice was very clear, pristine, almost feminine, but contained not a trace of self-doubt. It was a voice of absolute knowledge, and it said words in a language she had never heard, strains of foreign clipped syllables, building a tower of alien song, preparing a mechanical force, blocking off one direction after another, telling the earth to part ahead of them and push behind, his voice held their position like a bow and bolt, tensed, aiming toward here, closer to there, precise and angular, and--
A crescendo of song-syllables.
A keystone word falling into place.
Loora was barely able to control her shriek as the two of them shot into the soil at incredible speed. The soil peeled out of their way, groundworms bent their bodies abruptly, and air hissed down from the surface and surrounded them, creating an arrowhead of breathable air. Testing it briefly, Loora found it oven-hot but bearable.
After the initial acceleration, Loora relaxed and closed her eyes and endured the shot-fired speed. Yrn's skin was cold next to the steaming air. His blood seemed to pump reluctantly, as if half his heart wasn't willing. It gradually became clear that there would be no quick end to the journey, and she found her mind drifting.
Backtracking mentally, she tried to tease apart the feelings of the past day: captive, then flying alongside Cory down the cage's rope, when she
had first learned he'd gone blind. It was exciting, then. It hadn't seemed fatal, then. It seemed no more strange than the rest of Aughra's flurrious, furious daily life, then. Flying down after him, which stressed her wings, the way flying always did, especially when she dove after him and slowed him as he neared the ground, just before he hit. She became his guardian after that. She'd decided it. She needed to protect the poor flimsy daydreaming boy, keep him facing the right direction in life. He'd hardly acknowledged to him how far out of her way she'd gone to--
Yrn's song-voice started up again, this time booming unnaturally into the hard clay ahead. The sound became distorted, warping, as it ricocheted through the land, and Loora decided that it truly was alien, that the voice must come from that death-dream Aughra had mentioned, that it had come down that glorious beam of light at the Conjunction of the Suns in Aughra's blind eye and that it possessed some sort of strange commanding power. His voice was power, pure and unnatural, and it could, she imagined, order anything to do anything he wanted. What he wanted, it seemed, was for the increasingly solid base clay to liquefy--and she heard the slithery sound of clay soaking up water from miles around, and the arrowhead of air burned into an arrowhead of water and together air and water screamed past her shoulders as she plunged further down and farther away through the clay of Thra.
Her arms curled around the fraying, gummy cords of Yrn's neck.
Cory hadn't had the slightest idea that she was interested in his prophecies. He hadn't known that she'd listened to every word he'd said over that black water, hadn't known she was fascinated he had such vision. He didn't know she'd worked so hard to produce a shimmering globe to help him see, or that she'd gotten angry at Aughra for smashing the old one that he'd obviously really liked. She hadn't told Aughra she was angry, either. Nobody knew anything about how she felt. She didn't have time for feelings. She had work to do.
Yrn began inhaling with a slithering hiss, like an old man sipping hot lea-li tea. She could feel his broad chest and narrow, narrow waist expand with breath. The heat around her was starting to burn, to scald, but Yrn stared straight ahead, his head bent up to look into the diverging plummet of fanning stale dusty air and churning water. A hum came from his throat, followed by a single detonated syllable that sounded deeper than stone.