by Heide Goody
“You did this to me.”
The King smiled. “I wrote it so, if that’s what you mean.”
Rod swung about giddily, drunk.
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” said the King, smugly. “The word is written. The stage is set. Perhaps this is the major criticism of the piece. From the outset, the tragic destruction of your world – as of mine – is set in stone. It is the one promise the story makes. Your world must go to hell, all human endeavour must fail. In such a story, what is the point of a hero—” he spat the word “—such as you?”
Drunk, enraged by his surroundings and the King’s mocking words, Rod bunched his fists. The King grinned, chin jutting. Rod felt the tension in himself and the desire to lash out. If all the world was damned then there could at least be some satisfaction in smashing this undead loon’s face in.
He hesitated. Enough strength to knock out a god and then his soul would belong to the King in Crimson…
He laughed at himself. He had come so close to sealing the deal.
“What’s the point?” he said to the King, shaking his fists out, forcing himself to calm. “I’ll tell you. Even now, there’s always summat a feller can do, even when there’s nowt he can do.”
“What will hath a man when his course is fated?” continued the on-stage warrior. “Nay! Even in the face of gods and hell, even in the mouth of madness itself, a man must act, sire.”
“What he said,” smiled Rod.
The King in Crimson seemed unconcerned. “Then that’s your cue.”
On stage, the warrior adopted a melodramatic pose and rushed into the wings. Rod pushed past the King and hurried for the exit. He didn’t know if he was going to throw up or scream, but whichever it was, he would rather do it in the street.
Birmingham - 04:45am
The donkey train halted at a junction of containers. The priests of Nystar’s on-going chant was ramping up but, as far as Nina could judge, it was some way off from its final crescendo.
Pupfish looked along the avenues. “What do you reckon?”
Nina twitched her nose as she thought. “I reckon you heard her name wrong. No one is called Salty Boobstone.”
He glared at her. Up close in the glowing pre-dawn of Hell-on-Earth, his fish eyes were huge. No one glared like a samakha. “That is what you’re thinking about? Ggh!”
“I’m not dying with you thinking some stupid muda.”
“It was her stage name.”
“Porn name. And everyone knows porn names don’t work like that.”
“Oh? Ggh! You know something about the adult entertainment business?”
“Everyone knows your porn name is your first pet and the street you grew up on.”
“That’s not a thing!”
“That’s absolutely a thing!”
“Honey Mayfield. That’s mine. A proper porn name.”
“I never really had a pet.”
“No porn name for you, then.”
Nina moved forward. With almost no guidance, Donk followed close behind. They snaked through the yard, always trying to keep at least one row of containers between them and the priests.
“I had a pet ghadik crawler for a while,” said Pupfish thoughtfully. “Kept it in an old takeaway box with holes punched in the top.”
“What was it called?” she said.
“Damz’ian. Ggh! So, my porn name should be Damz’ian Daganau-Vei?”
Nina gave it some thought and tried to be charitable. “Hardly rolls off the tongue, does it?”
There was a scream behind them, anguished and inhuman. As Nina turned it was joined by more. She realised it was the donkeys.
“Bhul!”
The rear end of the train was out of sight around a corner. Like idiots, they had left it unguarded. Now the donkeys at the front were starting to panic.
“Lead them on!” she told Pupfish. “I’ll go!”
She pushed her way past swaying and agitated donkeys. Many yanked forward, others backwards, pulling each other about on the line of rope binding them together. The rope went taut and the whole line was dragged to the right. Stumbling beasts slammed into container walls. Nina was momentarily pinned into place by the tight, straining rope.
She crouched and slid under the rope. She jumped between two donkeys just as they were yanked backwards. Whatever had the rear of the train was reeling them in.
She ran to the corner and came onto a scene of savage violence. Priests of Nystar had stumbled upon the rear of the line and, maybe seeking an alternative post-ritual banquet to Nystar herd-beast, had leapt upon the rear donkeys. Head tentacles were wrapped around the animals. Slit-belly mouths slobbered and drooled over donkey flanks. The animals just in front of those that had been seized were jerking and yanking in a terrified frenzy to pull away.
And the noise…
Nina closed her mind to the noise. The flick knife was in her hand. The rope nearest to her was pulled so taut that the strands pinged apart like snapped guitar strings as she ran the blade against it. The freed donkeys shot forward, some nearly thrown to the ground. Then, like a runaway rollercoaster they whiplashed round the corner, the hindmost donkey almost flying, screaming as it went.
The priests of Nystar, angered by the interruption and the theft of most of their walking buffet, raised their voices in angry song and advanced on Nina. To the average human, the priests would be an utterly terrifying vision but, on a practical level, they really didn’t look like a credible threat. Their basic body shape was turnip, the fattest and most ungainly entrants in a giant vegetable parade. They had no eyes – or no apparent sensory organs of any sort – and no hands or claws or whatever. Yes, they had many legs, but they weren’t arranged in any meaningful way. Their legs weren’t a spider-like circle, or a neat arrangement like a team of horses. They were more like a bunch of abandoned bar stools.
Despite these physical failings, and Nina’s rock-solid fearlessness, the sight of several priests of Nystar trundling angrily towards her, head-tentacles flailing, compelled her to back away hurriedly. As she reached a corner, she pointed and twisted the wand. There were no magic words of activation – only a moment of mental application. A priest fell back, and a car-sized dent appeared in the container next to it. The wand’s blowback nearly snapped Nina’s wrist.
“Nyal-hu amh! Saheek bro amh!” the priests sang which, roughly translated, meant, ‘Why’d you have to come here and spoil everything?’
“Bhul-zhu, vangru dolot!” she yelled back, threw another wand bolt at them, and fled.
Nina thought she’d taken the same route as the fleeing donkeys, quickly realising this wasn’t the case. She turned into a dead end, doubled back before the priests could trap her and, from that point, took turnings at random. The priestly chanting was a helpful if ominous reminder of how close they were.
Nina slid between two containers that were, she hoped, too close together for the priests to follow and pushed herself into the open. She ran several steps before she realised where she was. Around her, upended containers and cross pieces formed the giant ritual circle of the priests of Nystar. More than a dozen of the interdimensional priests stood at key points in the circle. Their tentacles were raised high in quivering religious fervour, and Nina was unhelpfully put in mind of those inflatable wavy-arm dudes outside car showrooms and carpet shops. Spiritually speaking, things were hotting up. If these had been regular human nutjobs, a white-clad minister would already be telling the blind they could see and wheelchair users they could walk. Nina guessed nothing as inoffensively stupid was going on here. At the centre of the circle, she thought she could glimpse a twist in the air, a kink in the fabric of reality. She didn’t want to see what was going to come through that.
Priests in the circle were turning to regard her. Behind her, shuffling, grunting and singing indicated the ones behind were trying to get round to flank her.
She raised her hands in greeting. “San-shu chuman’n, het Nystar. Nehah unurl e’naan.�
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From their body language (if walking monster spheres could be said to have body language), Nina guessed they weren’t happy to have someone drop in on their special moment.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll come back another time…”
There was an anguished holler and a bang. A bunch of donkeys, set loose from one another, ran across the circle in wild panic. One bounced into a priest of Nystar, knocking them both in separate directions. Another ran straight into the space-time wrinkle in the circle centre. There was a noise Nina hoped never to hear again, and a graphic demonstration of what happened when a donkey-sized object leapt into a less-than-donkey-sized hole. The priests roared in outrage and charged at her.
“Ah, fuck it,” she spat and ran to the side, blasting with her wand as she went.
The wand was powerful, but the recoil was shocking. A single use sent a shudder through Nina’s arm, and she had to use both hands for fear of breaking bones. Nonetheless, when it struck one of the fat priests square, it delivered a body-bruising blow. If there had been a fraction of the number of priests, or an entire squad of wand-waving Ninas, it might have been a fair fight. But there were too many, and she could only manage a limited number of blasts as she sprinted for a way out.
The cargo container Stonehenge seemed to groan in protest, making metal-stressed moans each time she fired at the priests. The sounds were coming from overhead. She looked up at the nearest doorframe arrangement of three containers. The one across the top had the number 655 daubed on its side.
“The tree…”
“Nyal-hu amh!” sang an angry priest, closing in. Nina fired. The blast sent it rolling away like a misshapen bowling ball. Above her, the three-part configuration rocked and creaked. She had enchanted the wand but had caught the entire tree in the enchantment.
A wildly stupid but irresistible idea seized her. She retreated under the archway, facing the advancing priests, the tree’s container directly overhead.
“I was prepared to live and let live!” she called to them. She put her hand to the side container. It was rough with rust and flaked paint. The priests marched at her. “But you had to go and eat my donkeys!”
Nina waited for them to come closer still. She glanced up at the overhead container. Activating the wand was only a matter of willpower, so she turned her will to the container above her and gave a mental shove. The weird tree of Chippenham in the crosspiece container fired as a single giant wand. Nina heard the doors explode off the container. The sound was immediately eclipsed by the groan of a two-tonne cargo container trying to blast off like a rocket.
The horizontal force propelled it sideways, dragging the upright containers with it. The square archway teetered and began to collapse. Nina ran to get out from underneath. Priests, stubborn or oblivious or both, chased after her, even into the collapsing archway. The falling arch collided with the next container in the circle and slowly but inevitably tipped that one too. Nina retreated further as the containers came down on the priests.
Metal shrieked as more containers fell, but Nina didn’t stop to watch. She ran for her life, hoping the priests were sufficiently distracted by the carnage in their ritual circle. She could see the railway embankment beyond one wall of containers and made a simple decision to go in the opposite direction. She stumbled upon the main Dumping Ground exit without plan or expectation, and ran out into the road. There were no priests tailing her, but she heard the continuous screech of buckling containers as they fell.
Pupfish stood in the middle of the road. He had three donkeys with him.
“Three?” said Nina, dismayed.
“Man, what happened – ggh! – in there?” he asked. Clouds of dust billowed over the Dumping Ground, thrown up by the cargo catastrophe.
“What happened to the rest of my donkeys?” she demanded, her voice going shrill with anger.
“They got loose, innit,” he said. He pointed down the road. In the pale light, Nina could see half a dozen donkeys running away. They moved at a speedy trot, not looking like they were ever going to slow.
“Damn it all, Pupfish,” she huffed. She looked at the donkeys they had. “At least we’ve still got Donk. That’s clearly Mr Grey.”
She looked at Donk. He looked back at her with a directness and intelligence that surely no donkey could possess. From twenty-eight donkeys down to three.
“Donk, Dink and—” She waved her hand over the third donkey.
“Duncan,” said Pupfish.
“Yeah. Sure. Donk, Dink and Duncan.”
Nina took one last look back at the Dumping Ground and then stowed her wand by slotting it through one of the buttonholes of her coat. She turned to the road ahead and the uncertain journey back to the city centre and the Library.
04:51am
Morag paced the Library lobby. This wasn’t entirely due to impatience and nervous energy. Whatever damage Prudence had wrought on her way out into the world, it made any single standing position uncomfortable.
“Vivian says Mr Grey’s ritual won’t work,” she said.
“She said it was dangerous and theoretical,” said Omar.
“So, it will work?”
He attempted a shrug, but it was an effort.
“She said we couldn’t negotiate with the Venislarn too,” she said.
“That is correct. You marching off to the Cube and demanding satisfaction from Yo-Morgantus will not end well.”
“But she said we can’t negotiate with them because we can’t even understand their motives. That they’re unknowable.”
“That is also true.”
Morag wasn’t content to let that stand. Ideas were circling in her head. She was certain if she’d had an easier day, then she’d be able to grasp hold of them more easily. “We do understand some of their motives,” she said carefully.
“Oh?”
“Yo-Morgantus has a thing for gingers.”
“That’s hardly a searing insight.”
“He enjoys human degradation and naked ginger people—”
“And early Electric Light Orchestra,” added Chad.
“He does!” said Morag. “And as for Kaxeos. He literally owns a curry house and runs a fleet of taxis.”
“That’s not motivation,” said Omar.
“It’s his engagement with our world. Just as Daganau-Pysh owns a section of canal.”
“Even though he resides in the metaphysical deeps below.”
“But his children – both the true samakha and the half breeds we deal with – have made their home there. Same with Yoth Mammon. She might be a mile-wide flying mouth, but her children have embraced earth culture. They even play at being stockbrokers and other twattish things. The local Venislarn have gone native.”
“That does happen,” said Chad. “I spent that six months working for an agency in Los Angeles and I came back with an American accent and a coke habit.”
“Morag, you’re missing the point,” said Omar. “All those things may be true. But they’re just snippets. There’s layers of misunderstanding hidden away there. And half the things you mention are about their children who are, culturally if not genetically, fifty-percent human anyway. And, without sounding like Mrs Grey’s broken record, we have not seen the true gods yet. The deep ones, elder ones, outer ones – whatever you want to call them, because we don’t have the words for them – are going to turn up and we’ll either not notice or the first thing we’ll know is our brains leaking out through our ears and our shufas-gherr spiralling into a million drops of yeradi ’o.”
“No,” she replied firmly. “You’re missing the point. It doesn’t matter if we can’t understand the true Venislarn. Like flies trying to understand humans. But the fly understands the ways of the spider. And the spider understands the … I dunno, frog. Do frogs eat spiders? I don’t know what eats frogs.”
“Cats?” suggested Chad. “Sheep?”
“Point is, there’s a chain. We do know that Yo-Morgantus likes gingers and, thanks to the
nuclear missiles, gingers are suddenly in short supply.”
“Are we going to sell redheads to the Venislarn?” said Chad.
“We’re going to sell the Venislarn whatever they need,” said Morag. “And in exchange we’ll save what souls we can for as long as we can.”
“Save souls already in hell?” said Omar. He was amused rather than dismissive; Morag took that as a positive sign.
“We get them to … ringfence certain humans. Protect them.”
“Put us in a zoo?”
Morag shrugged. “Sure. Whatever. Cos hell is here, and we are going to be here for a long time and, no matter what happens, win or lose, we’ll wish we did something – anything! – to ease that suffering. There’s a post-hell existence awaiting us, and we might as well prepare.”
“Well, I’m in,” said Chad.
Morag looked at him. “I wasn’t necessarily inviting you.”
“Excuse me, Morag, but you’ve just described a doorstep advertising campaign, a conference roadshow. You are heading out into the great unknown on a sales mission. You need a team at your side. Not just a team but the ‘A Team’.” He spread his arms wide. “And I’m here to align your vision paradigm with the real-word sales matrix.”
Morag didn’t feel particularly enthused. She looked at Omar.
“Me?” he said. “I was planning on getting a cup of tea and dying slowly. You’re not going to get me to walk, and certainly not into the lairs of gods.”
There was a flash of light outside. Morag saw a silver Mercedes pull onto the paved area immediately outside the library. There was a uCab sticker on the driver’s door. All the uCab taxis in the city were controlled by the god Kaxeos, their drivers his slaves.
“That’s cool,” said Chad. “You said you weren’t walking anywhere and – sha-pow! – a taxi appears.”
“It’s smug,” said Omar. “If you were an all-knowing fire god, timing is not a challenge.”
“Taxi for three,” said Morag.
“Destination ‘deal with the gods’,” said Chad.