Mists of Everness

by John C. Wright

  “Well,” said Raven, “thank you for warning. One more question. Just curious, you know? Why some of you have human faces, others do not?”

  “Ah, well, Milord, wearing those hoods and masks all the time can get pretty sweaty and stuffy, if you take my meaning. Mosttimes, only the officers are allowed to show their faces; but you have to be careful your seam don’t come undone, or your sleeves and gloves fall off, and then what can ye do, save some flopping on your face?”

  “Eh? How do you zip up disguises without fingers?”

  “Ar! Ye are simple, ain’t ye! Our girls put the witch-mark tabs right where we can get at ’em with our teeth, see?” And he pulled at the lace of his throat to display a triangle of three white discolorations on his neck, like bruises the size and shape of fingerprints.

  “And where are charts showing secrets paths to Moon? In captain’s gear? In his pockets, eh?” Raven stepped forward.

  The Sun came up over the horizon like an enormous ball of gold, and a hot wind struck over the ship from the East. The Sun seemed many times the size of Earth’s Sun, and the sunrise was swifter than sunrise in the tropics.

  In the sudden light, Raven could see the captain shrinking back in fear, his muzzle wrinkled in a snarl. The captain turned and fled but stumbled on the gangway to the midships, raising mocking laughter from the crew.

  Raven turned and squinted up at the blue-white sky. Enormous gusts of wind began to toss the ship. Clouds turned dark and darker, and the air began to feel tense and close. The bow dipped into a high wave, sending spray along the deck. A violent crosswind then heeled the ship far to the starboard. The masts creaked alarmingly, and some selkie screamed in fear, while others hooted and laughed.

  The navigator grabbed the taffrail, shouting, “Luff the mizzen shrouds, ye lubbers! Get them canvass furled before we lose the mast! Hop to!”

  Seal-men on deck scurried to obey the orders.

  Raven raised his hand and the wind fell to a gentle breeze. He put his hand on the shoulder of the selkie who had shouted out orders during an emergency, the one who happened to look like the navigator at the moment.

  “Captain!” he said to the navigator, “last night I could not examine charts to find path to Moon since was no light. Is now light. I have waited. Which is way?”

  The navigator snarled. “Ar! Garn! That was a regular Mannannan trick, that was.”

  “The charts!”

  “Ha har! There be no charts! No map shows the sea-route to the Moon, and the seas between the stars be vaster than any sea of Earth! We cannot go to the forbidden sphere save what they calls us, and they call not for us too often, I tell ye sure! We come and go at their pleasure, not ours, for the Moon faces halfway toward earthly things, and half toward outer darks, and those what dwell there bow to strange gods, and have deals with them. Horrible deals. We hates them as much as they hates us!”

  “This, I find hard to believe.”

  “That’s as ye like, ye hulk. We have to bribe and bootlick the Eech-Uisge of Uhnuman to get ships. Do ye think we selkie could ever get ourselves together long enough to build a ship, with no bickering, no knife-work, and no tricky play? Har har! We’re lucky if we can pull together long enough to hold a tea party. ‘Twill be different once the Seal-King gets the Moly Wand; and all the crimes but his alone, his and his close pals, will come to light! Then, ’tis the very world we’ll be having for our own!”

  The name he had used: Eech-Uisge. It sent a thrill of horror down Raven’s spine, as if he remembered it from some dream. Images from dim memory came into his mind, clear and strong.

  “I can summon up the Moon, if you will sail me there,” Raven whispered. “Their cities and ports will lay undefended to your cannon.”

  “Are you such a magician then?”

  Raven pointed his finger at the navigator’s whiskered nose. “You want see lightning bolt very up close to inspect, yes?”

  “I see yer point, there! There! There! Put that finger away! But ’tis a right foolish idea to dream of us attacking them. I won’t hear of it … ,” whispered the navigator with thoughtful curiosity.

  “So I attack them, me. You? You can pick through rubble and loot survivors as you wish. Or not, as you wish. I don’t care. Who will know it is you if you are not caught? No trustworthy evidence, you are innocent, no? But I must sail to Moon! Must reach Uhnuman before the Eech-Uisge realize what Galen Waylock is!”

  The navigator squinted his big brown eyes and cocked his head sideways. “And what is this Waylock lad to ye?”

  Raven spoke in an eager voice. “You know Galen’s soul is linked with my wife’s? The girl Mannannan saw at Everness? That woman, she is such fool! She carried off the most powerful … Uh. I mean, of course, I love her very much, and must find her right away, before anyone else gets the … I mean, before she comes to harm. Since I love her so much, you know. Galen must know where stupid girl is! He must be able to find his soul. Is instinct.”

  The navigator whispered, “You call up the Moon, you got a deal, mate. We sail you straight to the docks of Uhnuman.”

  “No tricks! I keep my eye on you at all times!”

  “Har. Not to worry. I swear by the beard of Oberon, you’ll not find me pulling any tricks, at all, Ar. Har.”

  III

  Raven climbed up to the bow of the ship and stood with one leg on the bowsprit, which was carven in the shape of a bat-winged king.

  Raven chanted: “Sulva! Where fell sprites abide! Heave up your icy horns to me, your sterile plains, your lifeless sea, that I may journey to your hidden, farther side! I know the cause of your inconsistency, and why your light ebbs and fails; I know a planetary angel where sin prevails. Last to fall, lowest sphere of all, put shame aside; unhide yourself to me!”

  The Moon began to come over the brink of the world, enormous; mountains, valleys, and oceans, gray, stark white, and gray-black in the sunlight. Only half the lunar globe came over the rim; and the whole pock-marked, silent, blasted lunar landscape filled a third of the sky. The lunar ocean directly ahead seemed to be mingling its waters with the waves on the horizon. Streams of pale water and black water began to mingle in the waves below, amid the floating corpses of schools of poisoned fish.

  The Moon grew larger still, but began to set. Yet as she set, her globe widened and flattened, occupying half the horizon, then more than half. Then mountains on the edge of the Moon’s globe now were on the horizon ahead, and had swollen in Raven’s vision to such size that his eye could see no curve to the horizon.

  Blue sky faded into black, and a harsh and terrible hot Sun glared down amidst a nocturnal sky, and bright, unwinking stars gleamed down onto a lifeless, sunlit sea.

  The waves here were vast, like tidal waves, their slopes more peaked, their motions strange and swift, alien to the eye.

  “Is this Moon?” asked Raven in surprise, and shock, and awe.

  “Look behind, Milord,” said the navigator softly.

  Raven turned. Off the starboard stern, a silver-and-blue crescent, lovely with swirled cloud and green land, and crowned with sparkling arctic zones, hung above a glittering path of Earth-light scattered on the waves. Between horns of the crescent of the great blue globe, the cities of mankind glowed with many lights.

  IV

  The ship was burning.

  The iron monolith guarding the harbor shot out another beam of molten iron, which splashed across sails and planks. The cannons on the starboard fired, those that still had living gun crews, and a white cloud reached up skyward. Cannonballs rang against the rusted iron plates of the windowless tower.

  The bay was surrounded on two sides by basalt dikes and walls; before rose the great stepped pyramid, blind and windowless, from which the flocks of wyverns and bronze-winged harpies rose, shrieking, to harass the ship with vile droppings and vomitous gushes of smoking acid.

  The stepped pyramid loomed over the lifeless waters. On the crowns of pikes that bristled from its each battlement, writhing bodi
es dripped blood in streams down the pyramid, stinking red and brown waterfalls dropping into the bay.

  The landing party had successfully piled kegs of powder against the base of the portside tower, and Raven had ignited it with a lightning bolt; that tower had tilted drunkenly on its shattered base. The globes of poisonous glue which that tower had been firing fell short, and a green chlorinous mass now stretched along the tower’s base and side, a dripping web of steaming venom.

  Raven’s winds threw back the harpies and shrieking wyverns, but stream after stream of liquid metal spewed from the iron tower to starboard, propelled by some unearthly machine. Whenever Raven’s thunder rolled, the aim was spoiled; and the molten stream discharged at random, whenever the ship fired her cannon, the streams found her again, as if the unearthly gunners manning that machine aimed by hearing alone.

  Many of the selkie were jumping into the water to escape the fire. The navigator, standing next to Raven, shouted, “Call them cowards back, my Captain! The Eech-Uisge release the eels from underwater gates!”

  The deck heeled suddenly to starboard, and Raven grabbed at the rail. A selkie next to Raven, a marine with a musket, raised his spyglass. “The sea be frightened, Captain!” he called, putting the instrument to his eye. “The Eech-Uisge must be unleashing a new monster on us! Aha—!”

  And the marine turned to stone. The statue, look of horror frozen forever into his features, cracked through the railing next to Raven and fell into the sea.

  The navigator hissed. “Don’t look up! It be the Basilisk! Time to retreat, Captain, no matter what Raven says!”

  Raven was angry. He had been watching to see when the navigator would change his skin and slip away, but the Selkie had been too clever for him. Raven had not seen when the substitution had taken place. And it would be no use to ask the selkie, who now looked like the navigator, where the real captain was; he evidently thought Raven was.

  Raven leaned out over the rail. Sure enough, the stern window leading to the captain’s cabin had been shattered. He guessed the trunk holding the selkie-coats had been taken. But which of the scores of selkie in the water or with the landing party was his man?

  A few moments later, Raven was folding his parachute on the gray and ashy shoreline. Far behind him, the black ship of the selkie was burning to the waterline, and the screams of selkie on the surface, mauled by eels, hung in the calm air.

  Around him lay the craters, dust, and broken rock of the arid shores of the Moon. He had calmed the air to save the footprints in the sand.

  Behind him, lightning played continuously over the iron ziggurat and towers, and the stench of the hundreds of unseen monsters electrocuted and cooked within those windowless, metal walls, rose up to the black, lunar sky. Raven knew Galen was not in this strange fortress-city. Now that the futile attack had served Raven’s purpose, he saw no reason to allow the blind monsters to continue. This city was not Uhnuman, nor had Raven ever actually thought it was. For one thing, it was not on a plateau.

  There: one set of webbed seal-feet was deeper in imprint than the others, but the size of the stride did not indicate a tall man. It was a short man with a burden, perhaps the weight of the missing sea chest.

  The prints had other prints over them at places. They had been laid down first. Apparently the selkie—captain or navigator or whomever he was—had abandoned ship almost immediately when the battle was joined.

  Raven rushed after him, silent, swift, his black coat blending with harsh shadows and outcroppings of volcanic obsidian that twisted across the broken landscape. Raven moved quickly from rock to rock, crater to crater.

  For there was no time to lose. There was only one destination the selkie could be seeking; and Raven had to reach it first.

  Raven followed the selkie toward Galen.

  9

  The City of Torment

  I

  The tracks went over hard stone and were almost lost, but Raven saw where one drop of blood rested on the sharp edge of an obsidian outcropping. Closer, he saw a sandy depression beyond the outcropping.

  Lying on the sand was the sea chest. The selkie had cut his foot, tired of the burden, and opened it to get a new skin to wear.

  There were leather coats of white and black and red, from every clime, every race of man, strewn along the sand. Evidently this wealth of selkie-coats had been too much to carry.

  The selkie had no one to share these coats with, since he was convinced the Raven was hunting for the Moly Wand, he could not trust any of his fellows. The lure of absolute power over all of his kin drew him onward. Raven smiled at how well his plan was working.

  Then Raven saw the pelts and animal skins and feathered coats lying abandoned on the sand as well. And the only tracks leading away from the place were hoofprints.

  Raven frowned. It was an unexpected problem. He climbed to the top of the next rise and surveyed the rugged peaks, chasms, and cracks of the tortured landscape. He thought the selkie had actually made a poor choice; little of this ground was suitable for horses, and it should get more broken and hilly as they headed toward the mountains, where the plateau probably was. His eye picked out the likely path the selkie was following.

  And then he ran.

  Not long after, in the hills, he found the hoofprints again. They led into a canyon. Here, Raven found a pit the selkie had dug and filled up again. In the pit were folded a number of animal skins. No doubt the position of this hole was carefully marked on some treasure map the selkie carried. The selkie had taken his time, no doubt confident that he wasn’t being followed.

  Human footprints surrounded the site; here was the stone the selkie had used as a crude shovel. At one point the shovel had been abandoned, and the wide paw marks of a badger continued the digging. Raven found to his pleasure that this desert was not entirely void of life; here was a nest of poisonous insects, which the claw prints of an anteater circled. The selkie had stopped for a meal.

  Wolf tracks led away from the site. They were recent. He was not far ahead. Evidently the wolf had not been able to carry as many spare coats as the horse.

  II

  In the mountains, Raven almost lost the trail where the selkie turned into a goat. Then, at one place where the black peaks were cut with an enormous chasm, Raven came across what he had feared: the prints of a winged creature, a bat.

  The ground was soft here, and Raven could see the bat had made four trips, each time carrying a coat that dragged along the ground while the bat struggled to become airborne. At his guess, a seal-coat, a wolf-coat, a goat. And … what? A man? The selkie’s original skin? Something else?

  The goat was for climbing; and the blind bat, perhaps, to approach a city guarded by basilisks. The wolf was a good choice for finding a man among a city of stinking monsters; his scent would stand out. What was the other coat too precious to spare?

  The chasm was too wide for anything on feet to cross.

  Raven opened his parachute and summoned a whirlwind. Atop the next peak, he saw the plateau.

  The huge tableland had been thrust by some titanic volcanic convulsion in times far past high above all the surrounding peaks, and it loomed like a thunderhead. Even from here, Raven could see the black metal dome midmost in the plateau, ringed with windowless towers like broken teeth and with spidery, jagged minarets. Aqueducts on crooked metallic legs ran out from the dome toward the surrounding bunkers and towers.

  Raven found, by chance, the place where the bat had become a wolf again.

  He crept closer to the city, a mile away, then half a mile. He could smell the stench of blood, like the effluvia of many slaughterhouses. Faintly, in the distance, he heard a sound like the moaning and wailing of the wind. It was the sound of many voices, bellowing, shrieking, wailing, begging, moaning, sobbing. It was like the noise of a crowd in a stadium, a thousand voices, a thousand different pitches and tones of agony.

  The noise went on and on. At each moment a hundred voices fell silent or shouted themselves hoar
se, and a hundred new voices, shrill and deep, broke from soft weeping into loud screams.

  Then he came across a point where the wolf tracks showed the faintest double imprint. The selkie had been stepping backward in his own footsteps here. Which meant the selkie had heard the winds Raven had summoned to carry himself across the chasm to the plateau. The game knew now he was being hunted.

  Raven crawled on his stomach across a fractured jut of gray rock. In the distance was a pillar of iron, one of many dotting the plain around the city. Atop the pillar was looped fold on fold of sinuous length, which had its head raised, its cobra-hood spread, its rooster’s comb red and erect.

  Raven could see the pattern on the back of the snakelike hood; the monster had its swaying, feathered head turned away just at that moment. As the monster started to turn, Raven closed his eyes and scuttled quickly and silently back down the slope.

  He did not know quite what a basilisk looked like; but he had seen what had happened to the marine selkie back aboard the ship, and he thanked God and Saint Katherine he had not seen the creature.

  At that moment, the screams from the city died off. Choked sighs and horrid gagging noises echoed out across the blasted landscape for a moment. Then, oppressive silence fell.

  Raven felt as if an immense listening watchfulness, brooding and intent, had spread out from the black dome.

  He opened his eyes. He was in a gully between two black ridges. Framed between them, past the edge of the gully, rose the black, windowless dome in the distance, and Raven could see the corpses hanging from impaling poles atop every minaret.

  A slight rustle of motion disturbed a pebble nearby.

  He turned, sprang to his feet.

  The thing came suddenly over the rise to the right, cutlass in one hand and flintlock pistol in the other. He looked like a satyr with a wolf’s head. Raven realized that the selkie was wearing the gloves of the man-skin, the hood of the wolfskin, only the pantaloons of the goat; his jacket was some other black fabric. His goat’s hoof found swift purchase on the steep rock of the slope, and he came much faster than any man could run, and his wolf’s nostrils dilated as he scented Raven, and ran down the slope toward him.