The Sword of Shadows

by Adrian Cole

  “No, I did not call you. Your hand of death will not reach for me!” cried the figure, pointing to the right hand of his adversary, believing it to be the Oblivion Hand. Shatterface pulled out the weapon that had been given to him. “Through the gate!” he screamed, swinging the blade. It sang with the hate of a thousand maddened voices, and the Voidal jerked backwards, no longer unmoved. He knew the sword intuitively to be the Sword of Madness, and he had every reason to fear it. So this was the answer to these riddles — the Dark Gods wanted the blade in him, for it would rob him of everything that he had won back from them. This was the fate they had planned. He pulled his own sword out from its scabbard, but it was a mere tool, cold steel without supernatural power.

  Shatterface saw this and laughed. He came forward with a cry. “Through the gate!” he shouted again. “Go to your appointed prison!”

  The Sword of Madness swung down, but the Voidal was nimble and slipped past its frightful bite. Elfloq took to the air, but could not move far away from the scene of the battle, gripped as he was in the spells of the priest. Snare watched the two swordsmen nervously, knowing that Ybaggog would soon be at the very portal. Beyond it now an immense mouth had opened, an Abyss into infinity, and from it issued the most overpowering stench, as of a thousand rotting hells.

  The Voidal was now no more than a few yards from the lip of the gate, and Shatterface knew that in a moment he would have his prize. He thrust forward and the Voidal’s sword shattered like glass into a thousand splinters. Shatterface prepared for the critical blow and as his blade came screaming in, a blur of movement from the left of the Voidal caught them unawares. Orgoom had lunged forward and his sickle fingers caught and turned the Sword of Madness, so that shrieking sparks flew into the air. Snare cried out in fury as Orgoom was flung to the very lip of the gate. A splinter of the Sword had lodged in the Gelder’s hide, and his eyes bulged as the evil in it seeped into him.

  “Vermin!” screamed Snare. “Traitor. Ubeggi will punish you —”

  But Orgoom was not interested in the hated Ubeggi. As he got to his knees like a drunkard, he saw beyond him the titanic maw of Ybaggog. The Voidal dragged him back from the immeasurable drop. “My thanks, Gelder, but you have chosen the wrong moment to announce your fealty.”

  Shatterface came on, pinning the Voidal to the very gate so that the wet blood smeared him. The shoggoths were seething forward like hounds after blood. Behind them Elfloq hovered, too afraid to help. He looked down at the rocky terrain, longing to flee across it. To his amazement he saw movement and presently figures there. Instantly he recognised Drath and the two travellers from the South, who were watching the terrible fight in horror.

  Elfloq flitted down. “You must save him!” he cried. “They mean to feed him to Ybaggog —”

  “You told us he would destroy the Devourer,” said Umatal, face seamed with horror at what he had seen.

  Drath was whispering to the shadows, and Elfloq abruptly saw to his disgust that the night was crawling with cats. All of Ulthar must have turned out, for there was a veritable tide of the creatures surrounding the hollow and the massed shoggoths. The familiar flew upwards. “What are these?”

  “That gate must be closed,” called Drath. “It is the shoggoths who hold it open. Whatever your master is supposed to be able to do, it is evidently no use against Ybaggog. I cannot destroy him, but the gate must be closed.”

  “Yes, yes!” burbled Elfloq. “An excellent idea. Excellent. How?”

  Drath turned to Umatal and Ibidin. “Between us, we must command our servants.” He indicated the cats.

  Umatal nodded. “Yes. Our servants — whatever the cost. Begin at once.”

  What then followed was meaningless to Elfloq, except that he knew the men were communicating in some strange way with the ocean of cats that now lapped at the hollow. They were weird creatures, these cats, with wolf-like eyes, and lean, sleek bodies, claws sharpened and oddly gleaming, souls burning with some secret inner fire fed by a god as dark as those that slept on the dreamworld of Ulthar. A hundred of these silent predators sprang from the night upon the last line of shoggoths, and the battle began. Claws tore and slashed like small swords, and the shoggoths swung and lumbered about cumbersomely, snatching up scores of the cats as they caught them, but for each one they crushed, a hundred more melted into being, until the hollow was boiling with sound and furious activity. Wave after wave of cats poured down from the hill as if a vent into a world of cats had been opened, and the shoggoths were ripped to the ground, overrun and slashed to shreds.

  Snare rushed forward, forgetting for a moment the coming of the Old One, and in a matter of minutes found himself knocked to his knees by a dozen screaming cats. They tore his cloak of flesh from his shoulders and dug into him, slashing for his eyes. His fists beat at them, but they cut at him and bit him, so that he tumbled and rolled almost to the feet of the Voidal.

  So much damage had the avalanche of cats done, that Shatterface himself felt the next rush of small bodies. A score of cats were on his back, trying to tear him down, but he willed himself forward. A shoggoth, its limbs severed and hanging from it in tatters, lumbered forward and fell through the gate, exploding as it dropped through space. Snare was trying to rise, but Orgoom swung an arm at him, ripping open his chest in bloody weals. The priest tried to shield himself, but the Gelder cut at him with terrible efficiency. Snare fell, his head and shoulders jutting through the gate. There, balanced upon the edge of nightmare, he screamed. Orgoom swung down his arm with the power of madness and sliced clean through Snare’s neck. The head plummeted out into the rising mouth of the Old One, and as it turned end over end, the mouth still gave vent to an extended scream.

  Orgoom rose just in time to witness disaster, for Shatterface was propelled forward, smashed by the tenacity of the cats that sought to drag him down, and the Voidal could not avoid the thrust of the Sword of Madness. It tore through his flesh and ripped into and through his middle, bursting out of his back, though there was no shower of blood. Orgoom knelt there in amazement as the dark man clutched the terrible sword, and it was then that the frightful screams began. Shatterface was pulled to the ground, covered by the cats, and they began ripping at him in a blur of talons.

  Elfloq flew as close to the gate as he dared and there saw the horror of what had happened. The Voidal’s face twisted and pulled as he cried out in pain and madness, the Sword doing its terrible work. It would not come loose. The hand of the Voidal could not free it — the Dark Gods would have their way. Back staggered the dark man, crashing into Orgoom, and in a moment, before Elfloq could swoop down, both had fallen outwards and were plunging far down into the maw beyond the gate. Ybaggog had claimed them.

  At once the darkness beyond the gate closed down, and the stones fell, leaving only a view of the dusty Mutterings and the memory of what had raged there. Elfloq flew up and away from the body of Shatterface, leaving the cats to pull from it the still-pulsing organs.

  * * * *

  Orgoom felt as though all the powers in the omniverse were alternately pulling and then squeezing his entire body so that it throbbed in agony as if it would burst and scatter itself before reforming and disappearing into itself. His general direction seemed to be down, although everything about him span so much that his senses had become disjointed. Fountains of stars vomited upwards and then spread outwards, curling and winking out. Gradually this maelstrom of light confined itself to his head, sinking into it, expanding, then dissolving into darkness. All that he was aware of then was the sickening sensation of spinning, but at least he was on the ground.

  Eventually he moved, discovering that the ground was spongy, a thick, brackish morass. Pale light splotched the scene around him, which was some unsightly dark plain, broken only by rounded humps of black rock, or possibly fungoid growth, he could not say which. The region stank like the worst sewers that he had ever experienced, its vapours almost tangible as they wove upwards.

  He sat up, trying to
scrape off some of the muck that had splattered him, and gazed about him. Either he was under some evil night sky, or he was in an enormous cavern of unprecedented proportions. There were shadows high above him, and as they seemed to be hanging, he guessed the latter, glad that he could make out no details. It was then that he recalled his fall through the gate — could he be inside Ybaggog? If so, then this around him was an enclosed universe. Such things existed.

  Before his mind could burst at contemplating this concept, he saw something stir near him. A body floated face down in the mire and several black shapes from under the mire were worrying at it, trying to drag it under. Before they could succeed, there were submarine bursting sounds, spreading the thick muck in low waves. In a moment the body was left alone. From its back protruded the point of a sword, which moaned softly to itself. This must be the Voidal, mused Orgoom, dead at last.

  The Gelder wondered if he had gone mad, for a sliver of the sword must still be lodged in him. Certainly there was nothing sane about this frightful zone. However, he had escaped the frightful Ubeggi, and had sworn to himself that he would serve Elfloq’s master. He scurried over the hump of rock and reached for the body. He tugged it ashore with his sickle hands, and it moved, dragging itself to its knees, not dead at all. Slowly, like a zombie, the dark man got to his feet, eyes shut, mouth slack. The Sword of Madness gave forth a howl of glee, and the face of the Voidal came alive. Those awful green eyes seemed to be looking out on an invisible and lunatic inner universe. The man began to snigger with obscene mirth so that Orgoom drew back in revulsion. The sounds went on interminably, until at last they subsided into a sequence of monotonous chuckles, meaningless and disquieting. Orgoom had no idea how to act.

  “Not stay,” he said, comforted by his own voice. The eyes of the Voidal looked at him, but there was no response in them. He had been reduced by the power of the Sword to complete madness. Orgoom turned away, trying to see a way across the empty mire, not knowing where he could go. Overhead he heard the squawks of something large and vile, but there was only the hint of a shadow in this dismal misty light. Shuddering, the Gelder moved on. Mechanically, behind him, the Voidal trudged in awkward pursuit, moved by some unknown force.

  Around him in the mire, Orgoom now saw a number of floating corpses, bleached white and partially overgrown with peculiar lumps that had their own strange light. They fed on the dead, for the corpses occasionally turned in the mire, mad faces glaring up at the moonless vaults above, while other corpses were not even remotely human. Yet other things swam in the black waters, keeping away from the sounds that Orgoom’s feet made as he splashed loudly on. By keeping as close as he could to the outcrops of rock, the Gelder was able to avoid deep water.

  Something dropped from the air and alighted on a hummock nearby. It was black and misshapen, half bird, half beast, and its curved beak opened in silence. Others flapped down, forming a half circle so that only one avenue was open to Orgoom. The Gelder looked along this, not wanting to be herded, but he could see now that the hummocks extended in a chain, like the radius of a wheel, to a point on the horizon. Something dark and ominous loomed there, embedded like a cliff or a high hill. Orgoom had no alternative but to go there — the grim visitors from the sky had made that clear.

  The Gelder leapt from one slippery hummock to another, gasping as a number of them flinched under his touch: they were not rocks. Behind him the Voidal came on, tugged by a force that Orgoom did not understand, and the flapping half-birds kept well back from the dark figure, as though one touch would bring death. Ahead of him, Orgoom could see the phosphorescent mass of the huge hill more clearly. It rose up from the midst of the morass, and at once the Gelder understood its importance. It was a living organ, pulsing and throbbing with life, here at the centre of Ybaggog’s vitals. Like a citadel, it towered, shimmering with eerie light, the air around it whispering like unseen life. The low rumble of its workings beat like the sound of blood through the terrain.

  As Orgoom came under the shadow of those vast walls of knotted flesh, he saw that near the uppermost heights, fronds were lowering quickly, tangled and knotted like the roots of a sprawling saprophyte forest. They rushed down towards the mire, and as they did so, a great wave of filth broke beneath them and out of the murky depths came a sudden rush of elongated yellow growths, groping blindly like fleshy fingers. In moments the two great masses of wriggling life had locked in the most frightful contest of strength, so that the mire heaved and spread waves outwards, and the citadel above shook. Great chunks of tendril and yellow flesh were flung out from the entangled mass and Orgoom stood his ground with difficulty. Above him he could see more of the repulsive blotched fronds dropping down to enjoin the battle, until at last they seemed to have beaten off the terrible threat from below. Like a disjointed, smashed hand, the yellow monster sank back into the muck.

  The growths from the ramparts withdrew upwards in silence, and soon all was still again. An abrupt movement beside him awakened Orgoom and he turned to see a diminutive being. It was naked, pale and shivering, its face torn by suffering and fear. Orgoom immediately brandished a sickled hand at it and it cowered so convincingly that the Gelder felt no threat from it.

  “Who are you?” he hissed at the shrunken creature.

  “I am No-Name. You must come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Up there. To the heart of Ybaggog. The City of the Screaming Eyes. I am your guide.”

  Orgoom looked behind him. The Voidal stood, eyes glazed, seeing nothing of this world, waiting. “Not safe,” Orgoom pointed to the waters where the yellow horror had sunk.

  “There is time before the next dream comes.”

  “What dream?”

  No-Name also pointed to the waters. “From the marshes come the Sendings of the Old Ones, Dreams sent by them to attack Ybaggog’s heart, for they wish to destroy him, whom they hate. Ybaggog is their master and will rule them all. He sends down powers of his own from above, the Eaters of Sleep, and they break up the Sendings. Come quickly.” He darted away and Orgoom followed, not wanting to, but even less liking the prospect of staying out here in the mire with the Dreams.

  No-Name found a path, a twisted and solidified artery that had once trailed out from the heart, and he and Orgoom walked along it and into an opening through a stone tangle of similar old veins. Behind them, the Voidal followed. They could hear the sword’s low laughter. For a long time they climbed in the darkness, and below them dropped a bottomless well, crossed and criss-crossed of veins and stretched fibres, some hard as stone, others glowing with fluid. Orgoom had to close his mind to the stench and the echoing sibilant sounds, the cold gusts of air and the suggestive throb of movement that confirmed his presence inside a living organ.

  At last they came out into the upper tiers. They gave forth a dim glow, and the Gelder saw that from the piles of living flesh yawned doorways and windows that had not been cut from it, but which had grown naturally, although they were distorted and set at strange angles. No-Name explained that the City of the Screaming Eyes was a place for the servants of the god, who went about his work here mindlessly, none knowing what purpose he served. “Ybaggog brings captives to the mire from the many universes outside himself,” said No-Name. “I go down and fetch some of them in. You and the other one are fortunate, for you have been chosen to be servants, too. Those who remain in the mires and the pits are no more than fodder. Soon you will have your own secret task to perform.”

  Orgoom could think of nothing to say, so he sat disconsolately on an outcrop of tissue. He realised that the bizarre citadel was apparently solid here in its centre, while its outer bastions were alive with the terrible Eaters of Sleep. It disturbed him to think of them and to know that he sat upon the living god. The Voidal lurched before him, an automaton. Orgoom had thought of trying to pull the Sword of Madness from him, but nothing would induce him to touch the haft that protruded from the dark man’s gut.

  Instead, Orgoom watched the comings
and goings of the remarkable citadel. From time to time a skulking figure would emerge from darkness and shuffle warily across the tilted plaza, always carrying some bundle. These figures all had the most frightful eyes, wide and staring as though they had looked on the ultimate vision of hell. They were mostly hybrids: some wriggled on short legs like lizards, others flopped, breathing through gills, while yet more hopped on elongated limbs and had arms like fronds. None of them retained more than a semblance of humanity, and Orgoom felt pity for them, for he had been transformed by the evilness of Ubeggi, though not so gruesomely as most of these nightmares. They went about their mad work silently, and the objects that they carried were even more strange than they were — Orgoom was sure that he saw living things squirming in those arms, and severed members of beasts. Whatever purpose they were at, only the deformed mind of Ybaggog knew it, and Orgoom was glad that he did not have to know.

  Presently a group of three beings arrived, entering the plaza from one of the twisted doorways. Their upper bodies were smooth-skinned and human, but their lower halves were segmented like the bloated bodies of huge maggots. They wriggled across the ground and came together, mouths working in silence, huge eyes staring vacantly. One of them swung something in a hand and another snatched it; in a few moments they had parted and wriggled off again on their grim errand, but in the brief minutes they had been here, Orgoom had seen enough of the object to know that it had been the head of Snare. Its eyes had been as wide and as alive as those of the others in this place.

  Orgoom made to question No-Name on this, but the little figure was scrambling to its feet as if in answer to some unheard call. “It is time for us to go. You are to be given your tasks.” He said no more, but went to another opening that was like the trap to a drain. Orgoom followed, the dark man plodding behind. Now they were going down a curling tunnel, where Orgoom guessed dark blood had once rushed. Set in the walls were orifices that opened and closed in silence, their function a mystery to the Gelder, though he kept well away from them. Across narrow spans the figures went, and Orgoom saw deep drops into darkness and heard the grinding and hammering of colossal organs deep below. It was like traversing the inside of a world, so vast and horizonless was its extent.