by Adrian Cole
Humble Jeddo eyed the jar without any apparent interest. “Oh?”
“It was given to me by an illustrious but dying god, Neandak the Killer. You have heard of him and his appalling reputation?”
Humble Jeddo unleashed yet another loud belch. “Should I have?”
“He was the envy of his fellow gods. Handsome, indomitable, beloved of all the most desirable goddesses in the omniverse. I am not surprised that you have not heard of him, for the jealous gods have not only destroyed him, but they have purged his memory from the entire omniverse.”
“Strange then,” said Humble Jeddo, “that you recall him.”
Elfloq thought swiftly. “Into my unworthy hands was given the task of keeping his remains. In this very jar. Until now, only I have known of his existence.”
Humble Jeddo neither smiled nor scowled. “An interesting story. Show me the jar.”
Elfloq made a passable display of being reluctant to part with his estimable prize, but did so and the pedlar took the jar and studied its dark contents. After a few moments he gasped and set the jar down hard upon the table, which rocked under the impact. He sat back, eyes boggling with fear.
“What have you seen?” said Elfloq, wondering what in all the omniverse was really in the jar.
“You lied,” hissed Humble Jeddo.
Vulparoon had opened his sleepy eyes again and was looking at the jar, though he retained his indifference to it.
“I did?”
“That is not Neandak the Killer, if such a one exists. It is a bottled universe.”
“It is? I mean — yes, it is. I lied. You have seen through my bluff.”
“I did not ask so great a price for the restoration of the Gelder’s mind,” said Humble Jeddo, shaking visibly. “It is too much.”
“Whatever is it?” said Vulparoon, turning to Elfloq for the answer.
“I know very little,” said Elfloq defensively. “Perhaps the pedlar has the full tale.”
“Well?” insisted Vulparoon.
“I did not think such a thing possible. Some universes can be bottled, as you have seen. But most of my samples are simple, uncomplicated things, containing no more than basic, placid universes. But this!”
Vulparoon snatched up the jar impatiently and stared into it. But almost at once he put it down, his face suddenly ashen. “No!” he breathed. “I did not see —”
“What did you see?” said Elfloq, bursting with curiosity.
“Such a universe could not be put inside a mere jar,” gasped Vulparoon. “If so, then only by powers beyond imagination.”
“Precisely,” affirmed Humble Jeddo, who had never looked more humble. He stared at Elfloq with a new respect. “Can it be possible that you serve the powers who have done this?”
Elfloq said nothing, still wondering what in all the hells they had seen.
“The Dark Gods have done this,” said Vulparoon. The statement appeared to have afforded him some relief. Then his face clouded once more. “But why have they given the jar to you?” he asked Elfloq.
“Well,” mumbled Elfloq, for once quite lost. “I am their servant. I have always said so. I swore to Darquementi himself — here in Cloudway — just that.”
“Do you know what is in the jar?” said Humble Jeddo. “No, you could not, else you would not have offered it to me in exchange for the sanity of the Gelder.”
Elfloq could restrain himself no longer. “Very well, very well! I do not know what is in there!”
Vulparoon sighed and sat back. He did not understand what was happening, but he now questioned the security of his freedom.
Humble Jeddo pointed to the offending glass container. “Unless I am much mistaken, that jar contains no less a deity than Ybaggog himself. The Devourer of Universes.”
Elfloq shuddered. He stared. He gasped. He staggered backwards. “Pardon?”
“The Dark Destroyer. Confined to that very jar.”
Elfloq fought to restrain a titter of nervous amusement, but failed. This was ludicrous. “I — I must find our host. I must discover who left the jar here.” He turned to do just that but the shadows moved.
“Allow me to answer that for you. It was I.”
Elfloq fluttered back, almost into the vast lap of the pedlar. Out of the wavering light stepped the lean figure of the Voidal, an unfamiliar smile upon his face. “Well met,” he said.
Vulparoon choked and shrank into his seat, incapable of further movement as if smitten by a spell, while the pedlar testily thrust Elfloq from him. He stared nervously at the newcomer, his shirt of nightweb, his tall leather boots, his embodiment of shadow.
“Good evening,” the pedlar said. “If you have come with an explanation, please render it at once. I am in a hurry and must leave soon.”
“With the jar?” said the Voidal.
“I —”
“No power in the omniverse can open it, save that which locked it in there. It is harmless. Take it. But first, the trade.”
Humble Jeddo stared at the still sleeping Orgoom. “Restore him?”
“Why not? You have the jar.”
Elfloq, who had been gaping in open amazement at the dark man, could no longer contain himself. “Master, if Ybaggog is in the jar, why are you not inside the jar also?”
The Voidal laughed and lifted his arm. Everyone shrank back, but the dark man was simply holding a glass of wine, from which he now sipped. “Why should I confine myself? It was I who put Ybaggog in there.”
Elfloq bravely attempted to look as though he were not about to have a series of violent convulsions. The Asker had become as immobile as marble, face a carving in sheer terror. Humble Jeddo quivered, his mass unstable. Was this stranger who he thought he was?
“But where,” gurgled Elfloq, “is the Sword of Madness?” He looked fearfully at the ebon haft protruding from the Voidal’s scabbard.
“No longer embedded in my vitals, as you can see,” the Voidal smiled. “But a sliver of it is lodged in the unfortunate Gelder. It served him well in the hellish universe of Ybaggog, paradoxically preserving his reason there. But here it makes him mad. We must have it out. I have a use for it. Well, pedlar, where is your art? Do we have a bargain?”
Humble Jeddo hurriedly scooped up the jar and placed it in his trunk with all the others. He was not about to argue with the Voidal, for he had no doubt now that it was the very Fatecaster that stood before him. And he could be rid of the jar as soon as he quit Cloudway. He brought out a phial of bright green dust and a long, sharp instrument. “As your eminence commands. Though, permit me to say in my humble way, you have cheated yourself. I owe you much more than the restoration of the Gelder’s mind.”
“I think not,” said the Voidal. “Be content.”
At once the pedlar went to Orgoom and having removed the table from over him and pushed aside the chairs, he sprinkled the green dust over his chest, so that the Gelder breathed some of it in. “Now he will not wake until afterwards.” Humble Jeddo worked on, using the instrument to probe the blue skin and mumbling an odd incantation to himself. After a while he had located the embedded sliver of the Sword and he worked at it, perspiring profusely. It was like trying to remove a live worm that wriggled to avoid capture.
Vulparoon looked on as one in a dream, immobilised by terror. A reckoning, he knew, was coming. It hovered over him like a thick, oily cloud.
Elfloq was guardedly watching his master, who seemed to him to be changed. His manner, his sense of purpose, was more direct. Usually the stuff of his nightmares clung to him in waking life, hampering and confusing him. But here he appeared very direct, certain of himself. He turned his gaze upon the familiar, who flinched.
“So, little fellow, you are free of me?”
“Master, I meant only to do your will, as always —”
“By fleeing from the fight at the gate to Ybaggog?”
“I could not reach you —”
“As it happens, it is as well that you fled. Orgoom fell with me. I need
you both now.”
“For what, master?”
“You will learn soon enough. But you can begin by telling me what has happened since last we met. Since before the inn at Ulthar, where you were so careful to explain absolutely nothing.”
“I acted then under the will of the foul Weaver —”
A gasp from Humble Jeddo interrupted them and they turned. “I have it,” said the sweat-soaked pedlar and in a moment there came the tinkle of something metallic dropping on to the floor. Using the instrument with which he had extracted the sliver, Humble Jeddo delicately lifted it and placed it in the middle of the table. It gleamed fiercely, red as fire, ominous as thunder. Everyone studied it, but no one moved to touch it. There came a groan from the floor and seconds later Orgoom was sitting up, looking very vague and as dazed as one in the grip of a powerful soporific.
“He looks no saner than he was,” muttered Elfloq, but the Voidal lifted the Gelder and sat him on the table.
“Well, Gelder?”
Orgoom peered about him as if emerging from a thick mist. He shook his head. “Dreams,” he said. “Bad, bad dreams.”
“No longer,” said the Voidal. “You are in Cloudway.”
“What happened?” said Elfloq impetuously.
Orgoom’s face then did something that it had never done before. It broke into a ghastly smile and then the most unusual of sounds broke from the twisted mouth: he was laughing.
The Voidal was amused by the extraordinary show of mirth. “It is over, little fellow. For a time.”
Elfloq was hopping from one foot to another in impatience. “What is over? What happened?”
Orgoom saw him and scowled, but was soon laughing again. “Free! Free! Ubeggi no more!” he cried.
The Voidal smiled. “Not entirely free, Gelder. Free of the Weaver, but not of me. You serve me yet.”
Orgoom bowed. “Your slave,” he said, as though quite content.
“What has happened?” repeated Elfloq.
Orgoom pointed to the Voidal. “Destroyed Ubeggi. In Tyrandire. Called up all the wars of the Weaver. Welded them and flung them back, each by each. Too much evil. Too much pitch black power. Too many dead. Ubeggi weak. I called all Gelders. We saw Ubeggi on his belly.” He held up his sickles. “We cut and cut — and cut, until pieces too small.” He finished with a long sniff and spat with a surprising degree of venom.
Elfloq wrinkled up his face in a grimace of disgust, but even so was pleased to hear confirmation of the demise of the Weaver. “And what of Ybaggog? You were his prisoners? Did the Dark Gods destroy him also?”
The Voidal was shaking his head. “I have said. It was I who bottled him in his glass prison. The Dark Gods sought to imprison me, fearing that I would win again my forbidden powers. They made an error at last, so they are not infallible. They had the Sword of Madness lodged in me to secure me, but instead of enhancing the mad visions of Ybaggog, it broke them apart!”
“You — defied the Dark Gods?” Elfloq said incredulously. “You actually performed an act of your own will? Are you sure they are not behind it?”
The Voidal’s face clouded in the old anger and frustration. “I am not free of them yet. But in the mind of the Devourer I saw many visions that have been forbidden to me and I recovered many of the secrets that have been kept from me. I am no longer weak. Soon, I will be stronger still.”
Elfloq knew instinctively that his dark master was not exaggerating. There was a new steel about his mien, a strength of purpose that had not been present before. Fresh power clung to him, personal power that made the familiar uneasy. “Ybaggog imprisoned,” he murmured. “So the awesome darkness that was gathering itself has been dispersed.”
The Voidal turned on him, that growing power nowhere more evident than in the depth of his gaze. “What did you say? What darkness?”
Elfloq then spoke of the Council of Gossipers that he and Orgoom had attended and of the concern of that Council about the grim force that had been gathering itself for the potential annihilation of the omniverse. “The Council concluded,” said Elfloq, “in the light of much evidence (the best of which was provided by Orgoom and myself) that the Dark Gods were busy working against this nameless force, knowing that the gods of Light could never agree to combine their powers effectively against it. You, yourself, master, were being used as a means of thwarting this evil. But it seems that Ybaggog’s plan to swallow up the omniverse itself has failed.”
The Voidal thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Intriguing, Elfloq. But I fear you have created riddles, not solved them. As always, you bring priceless knowledge, though your reasoning is faulty.”
Elfloq looked pained, while Orgoom smirked.
“Consider,” went on the Voidal. “Ybaggog sought to devour the omniverse and bind it. Had the Dark Gods sought to use me to destroy Ybaggog, they would not have had him devour and imprison me. Insane and without power, I would have been useless to them trapped inside Ybaggog. And the Dark Gods must have wanted him alive, in order to contain me. But alive, he would have been able to continue his own mad destruction. So was he this evil power so feared by all the gods? I think not.”
Vulparoon broke his statuesque silence to speak softly. “Your own reasoning is at fault, dark man.”
The Voidal’s jade eyes fixed him icily. “How so?”
“You claim to have destroyed Ybaggog yourself. Perhaps the Dark Gods knew that the Sword of Madness would not contain you. Perhaps they knew it would turn against Ybaggog in your hands. Did they not have it fashioned by Thunderhammer? Have they not, after all, used you again?”
The Voidal studied him coldly, but remained calm. “Perhaps. They are devious.”
“And Ubeggi,” went on Vulparoon, his own confidence slowly returning like blood to cramped muscles as he tried to unravel the riddles. “The Dark Gods did not love him. You have destroyed him for them. By your will, you say. Possibly. But the Dark Gods certainly benefit from the passing of these vile beings. It suits them well. You are free of Ybaggog’s trap, but better that than his being loose.”
Elfloq and Orgoom looked horrified by the words of the Asker, for they prodded raw nerves. For a while no one said a word. Yet the Voidal’s frown disappeared as he lifted a bottle of wine and studied its red contents. “Well said, Asker. So you think I am yet a pawn?”
Vulparoon shrugged.
Humble Jeddo, who had been attempting during this last conversation to make himself as inconspicuous as possible (a hopeless task) coughed gently. “Kind sirs, if you have no further use for me —”
“One moment,” said the Voidal and the gross pedlar shrank a little further into his seat.
The Voidal sat across the table from Vulparoon. “Now, my scarlet friend, it is your turn to speak.”
Vulparoon’s colour drained from him and tears of fear oozed on to his cheeks. “I am absolved. I did my duty. I am free.”
The Voidal shook his head. “I may yet be a pawn, but you also obey the will of the Dark Gods. You are bound by their rules, their desires.”
“I did not summon you in Ulthar at my will! I was forced —”
“He lies!” snapped Elfloq. “He thought you would be trapped and that he would escape the penalty. He believed that Ybaggog would imprison you. He wanted that.”
“If I am yet the pawn of the Dark Gods,” said the Voidal quietly, “then I will be powerless to stop the course of events, a course that includes the payment of the fee for invoking me. You invoked me, Asker. You must pay.”
Vulparoon was incapable of speech or movement. Elfloq did not relish the thought of what might happen. Orgoom watched more in curiosity than anything else. Humble Jeddo found himself shivering, as if in an icy blast from his own private hell.
“However,” went on the Voidal, “I will make a bargain with you. Give me what I want and I will not seek to extract the penalty.”
For a moment Vulparoon did not understand. “You will spare me?”
“Give me what I want
. I do not seek to harm you. Nor shall I.”
“But the Dark Gods decide —”
“So you say. But I say otherwise. This will be the test. If you are not punished for invoking me, it will be proof that I have wrested much power from the Dark Gods. In this I will not serve them.”
Vulparoon shook uncontrollably. “What do you want of me?”
“Knowledge. I have learned more about the things I seek. But you must tell me all that you know.”
“I dare not speak.”
Elfloq flitted to the table and tugged at his master’s cloak. “Master! I recall something he said in Ulthar. I have a question for him.”
The Voidal scowled, but then nodded for the familiar to go on.
“Who is it that the Dark Gods answer to? Who do they serve?”
Vulparoon shook is if he had been slapped. “That mystery has not been revealed to me. I did not attain such heights within the Askers. But others know.”
“I think he lies, master.”
The Voidal glared at the Asker. “Is that true?”
“I cannot say.”
“You must answer.”
Some inner conflict worked at the Asker like fire and the veins stood out on his brow. Abruptly his hand shot out and reached for the metal splinter on the table. His fingers closed around it, but before they could press the metal into his flesh, Orgoom had flung himself forward. With a hiss of air, the Gelder brought down his sickle hand, as if to sever that of the Asker at the wrist. But the Voidal was faster. His own right hand shot out in a blur and Orgoom’s sickles were deflected by it. Vulparoon was flung back with a shriek of horror, the metal splinter again falling to the table. The sliver of madness had not had time to do its work.
The Voidal smiled grimly. Orgoom had jumped back, nonplussed. The dark man held up his black-gloved right hand. “Interesting. This is not the Oblivion Hand. I no longer bear that burden. This is my hand. It carries out my will. And it was my will that your own hand remained intact. More importantly I did not want to see you turned insane by the sliver of madness. That, of course, would have suited the Dark Gods. I could have let Orgoom try to cut off your hand to thwart them, but I fear that his blow would not have succeeded. His own hand would have disintegrated.”