The Man Without Hands

by Eric Malikyte

  “I’m sure you’re deceived by the slight resemblance our two species have with each other, but rest assured, I am not what you call human.” Kurt smiled deeply and retrieved the tattered grimoire from his jacket. “I know all about the city that you discovered below this mountain, a city that was constructed not by the hands of man, but by older things. I know that countless of your researchers have gone mad studying it, and one of them wrote this before he was devoured by a blackened wolf with seven pulsing eyes. This book has taught me a great many things.

  “There is an artifact down there that I will have before this night is through. If you stand in my way, I will kill you. It’s that simple.”

  “Then we will fight you to the last man!”

  Gunshots rang from both sides. Sal and Linda hit the floor while Kurt put up a barrier around all three of them. Their automatic weapons made little ripples in his barrier, like pebbles dancing on the surface of a pond—unable to break the surface.

  Kurt lifted his hands into the air. “Allow me to show you just how insignificant you all are!”

  Sal and Linda looked around themselves, confused or frightened. Flames covered his barrier around them all until everything looked green from inside. The flames grew hotter still, turning from green to a brilliant white that was only muted slightly by the dim blue of his barrier.

  He turned back to Sal and Linda. “You two better hold each other and keep low.”

  The soldiers stopped their shooting. No doubt to inspect the sphere of blinding white light that sat in the bullet-riddled corridor. Kurt stretched his stumps wide. This was one of the last techniques that he’d ever learned from the old man, Kiel’s father. The thought almost made him sick.

  “What the hell is it?” a soldier asked.

  “No idea.”

  “Think they’re still in there?”

  “What do you think, Sarge?”

  “I don’t know... Don’t shoot it, though, it could be some kind of explosive, or a gateway.”

  And then Kurt thrust his stumps into his barrier, forcing it to explode out in every direction.

  The white-hot flames turned the soldiers to ashes and the walls to molten plastic and stone. Wherever the voice had been coming from was now silent.

  Sal and Linda cowered, avoiding glowing globules of molten stone. Kurt rolled his eyes and created a tenuous barrier above them so they could proceed unimpeded.

  More soldiers were around the next corner, but these only ran for their lives—that same look of fear filling their eyes he’d seen in Linda’s before. They dropped their guns, screaming surrender, but it was too late. Kurt was upon them in less than a moment, cleaving each of them in two with a barrier sword. Their blood coated the walls and filled the hallway.

  Sal slipped and fell in it. He screamed and tried to get it off of himself.

  “Get a hold of your senses, fool!” Kurt said.

  Linda tried to comfort him, but he seemed to have lost all sense.

  “That’s as far as you go!”

  It was a familiar voice that screamed through the blood-filled corridor. A pot-bellied middle-aged man with immaculate gray hair. He was holding some sort of stick in his hand.

  “Is it?” Kurt said, grinning.

  “I will not let you unleash the evils in that place! My predecessor failed once to keep the Cult of the Spider out of this place, but I will not! This place is rigged to blow, all I have to do is press this—”

  Kurt didn’t even need to think about it. The blast he threw sliced the man’s hand off. He went down screaming, and Kurt was standing over him the very next moment.

  “Checkmate,” Kurt said as he cut the man’s throat open.

  Sal was still sobbing like a fool at the other end of the hallway.

  “I have a feeling we will find the way to the Dark Pyramid if we continue to go through those vaulted doors,” Kurt said. He dug his fingers into the man’s eye socket and ripped his eyeball out.

  Linda glared at him. “You’re a fucking monster. Those men probably had families, lives! And you just cut them down without even a single thought!”

  “He doesn’t think.” Sal shook his head. “At least not about us.”

  Linda nodded. “Can you stand?”

  Sal grunted, trying to wipe the blood off of his hands as he rose to his feet.

  “You’re not wrong, Linda,” Kurt said. “Perhaps I am a monster. But I’m a monster with a purpose, and that purpose is keeping you alive, so long as I get what I need.”

  “And what is that, I wonder?” Linda said. “Where does it stop? Will you not be satisfied until our entire planet is under the sway of some Eldritch abomination!”

  “If that’s what it takes, then yes.”

  Perhaps he was wrong about her. Her eyes had fear in them, yes, but there was nothing obedient about her. She would try to kill him before this was over.

  2

  Three more doors and they found the elevator. Kurt waved them into the metal cage. He gestured for Linda to take the sergeant’s security card and his still-dripping eyeball to gain access to the lower level. “Open the door.”

  Linda grimaced. “I don’t want that—”

  No, she wasn’t obedient at all. His eyes flashed with lightning as he pointed to the security terminal. “Do it. Now!”

  She swallowed her tongue, wincing as she received the man’s wet eyeball. Once Sal and Linda were inside, he retrieved the eye from Linda and tucked it into his coat pocket, thinking that he might need it later.

  The elevator whined, its gears creaking with each foot that they descended into the abyss below. Its walls were little more than a metal cage. For a time all they saw outside was excavated, jagged rock and ice.

  “I can’t believe you just did that,” Linda said eventually, glaring at him. “Damn you...”

  Sal was silent in the corner. He’d tried desperately to get the blood off of his hands, and even though his hands were now clean, he couldn’t stop wiping them on his pants and jacket.

  Kurt said nothing. Killing was nothing new to him. These weaker-minded creatures would never understand. This was a war for survival.

  Jagged rock and ice gave way to a massive, sparsely lit abyss, seemingly carven from within a large cavern beneath the Earth. It was not unlike Yce Ralakar. Within minutes, they were close enough to see down to the crude white lights that the soldiers had probably erected reflecting off of strange, green buildings which seemed not to conform to any style or shape he was accustomed to. They were mostly interconnected, creating structures which played tricks on his eyes, appearing simultaneously convex and concave in places.

  “Non-euclidean architecture,” Sal said, half-mad.

  “What?” Kurt said.

  “The buildings,” Sal said, chuckling.

  “I can’t look,” Linda said. “We shouldn’t be here.”

  And there, at the far edge of that alien city, was the thing the soldiers called the Dark Pyramid. It dwarfed the city many times over, easily coming within reach of the top of the cavern in which it rested.

  Linda shuddered when she saw it.

  Even from where they descended, the material that composed the thing looked like it was out of place, alien. As if its creators had fashioned it from the heart of a black hole. Kurt had never seen anything like it, not even on his own world. It seemed to drink deep the light from the electric spotlights spread throughout the city in a way that was most unnatural.

  The metal cage rattled when it hit the bottom of the track. The door opened on its own with a loud buzzing sound that echoed through the cavern beyond. Kurt was first to step out into what looked to be an ancient city street.

  There were symbols on the buildings. Each one had a strange blue tint to them, and pulsed with a glow not too dissimilar from the Olloketh crystals of Yce Ralakar. The symbols themselves looked vaguely familiar, almost like a derivative of the Sulekiel language...or, perhaps, it was the other way around.

  “I don’t like this p
lace,” Linda said. “We shouldn’t be here.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” Kurt said. “Does it upset your delicate sensibilities?”

  Linda swallowed deep and said nothing more.

  Sal’s eyes were wide with awe, despite the episode he’d just had. Kurt watched him come alive, taking in the scenery with a fearful reverence.

  Good.

  Then he would still be of use here.

  The buildings were laid out in a strange pattern, nothing at all like the way Masku or even Sulekiel cities were arranged. Their roads were twisting walkways that intersected with each building at sealed doors that were twice as tall as the tallest Masku or Sulekiel. The buildings seemed a range of every shape conceivable, some behaving as a typical rectangular building might and others that looked oblong, with strange angles excavated from the metal. Some of them appeared small at first, and grew in size when looked at from a different angle, as if they defied physical space and reality entirely.

  The metal that composed the buildings appeared to be smooth, but it was entirely different than the strange material of the pyramid in the distance. These buildings did not drink the light; they seemed to reflect the sparse lighting as Kurt expected them to.

  This was not a place where men dwelled.

  “This city must be over three hundred million years old,” Sal said, running his hands over one of the buildings, his breath running short from fatigue. “I’ve never seen anything like it. How is it possible? I remember reading that the North American plate is really young. This city should be deep within the Earth’s mantle.”

  “Come again?” Kurt said.

  “The Earth’s crust is separated into eight continental plates,” Sal said. Kurt saw mad light gleaming in his eyes. Seeing this alien city seemed to be giving him new life, restoring his stamina. “And those plates are constantly grinding against and subducting each other. Over the course of millions of years, a continental plate can be completely swallowed by the Earth’s mantle, being replaced by a new continental plate. In this way, the Earth is constantly resurfacing itself.”

  “If that’s the case, why would a place like this survive?” Linda asked.

  “That’s a good goddamn question,” Sal said. “The oldest continental remnants that we can detect within the Earth’s mantle only date back to two hundred million years ago. Anything older than that should have been turned to molten rock.”

  “My guess is that it has something to do with the pyramid,” Kurt said.

  Sal swallowed what he was going to say when he glanced at the pyramid. Perhaps his understanding of these immense properties of his Earth had been so greatly undermined that he would rather stop thinking of them at all?

  They walked through twisting paths for miles before they saw the great bridge that crossed a chasm whose depths betrayed no end. Linda and Sal had been limping for some time, despite the fact that he’d allowed them to rest several times already. He was growing tired of babysitting them. If he could have moved at top speed, he would have been able to clear that great city’s length in mere minutes.

  The expanse the bridge stretched across had to be as wide as the great canyons of Giridesh’s wastelands. Giant metallic statues stood weathered, but not rusted, at opposite sides of its entrance, bearing the impressions of some type of life not native to the Earth. Beings with bodies which seemed to be split in two sections, vaguely insect-like, with no head to speak of. Their limbs were tentacles, posed in such a way to give Kurt the impression they were reaching for the sky. The top of the statue’s body seemed to be rounded, with striations at the very tip of it, where a single eye was etched in the metal. Linda wouldn’t look at the statues for more than a brief glance, but Sal was studying them, sketching everything he saw in one of the notebooks he’d brought with him.

  They crossed the bridge. The city fell away, far behind them, until it seemed as though there was nothing but darkness to either side. A large triangular door stood at the end of the bridge, nearly three times Kurt’s own height. There were symbols etched along the relief of the sealed door. Lamps left by researchers pulsed and faded mere inches from the pyramid’s unnatural black walls. Above the door coiled a carving of something, a formless thing with a great triangle at the center of a mass of tendrils.

  The sight of the thing unsettled him somewhere in the pit of his stomach. A feeling he was not used to.

  “Strange,” Sal said, approaching the door. “I don’t think the researchers were able to get inside.”

  “Or they were smart enough to know not to open Pandora’s Box,” Linda said.

  Kurt created a small ball of fire in his hand and approached the door. And in that instant, the flames were sucked into the material of the door, and the triangle at the center of the carving above the door glowed, betraying a blueish light across the rest of its form.

  “Abaniel?” Kurt said.

  “What?” Sal looked puzzled.

  “It’s a type of material that absorbs Sulen on my world,” Kurt said. “We make shackles of it for criminals to keep them from being able to summon their power.”

  Linda looked at his scarred stumps. “Criminals like you?”

  Kurt said nothing.

  “So, am I to understand that if you go inside that place, that you’ll be completely powerless?” Linda’s eyes glowed; her expression could only be interpreted as murderous.

  “Perhaps,” Kurt said. “Unless the exterior is the only thing that is composed of abaniel. And in any case, I can still kill you by bludgeoning your skull in with my bare stumps, Masku, so do not think of betraying me.”

  She lowered her eyes. “Do that and you’ll lose the third artifact.”

  “Will I?” He smiled.

  Sal toyed with openings on the door, cradling his sketchbook in his other arm. “Curious. There’s a depression here that’s oddly disk-like, like a keyhole.”

  “Perhaps if we insert the other artifact it will open?” Kurt said.

  Sal quickly retrieved the metal slab from his pack and placed it within the circle. “Fuckin’ A.”

  The artifact clicked into place. They all stood back as it began to spin. The triangle doorway glowed with a strange, otherworldly light, and dissolved into darkness. An opening had been made. The spinning disk remained, floating in the air.

  “Grab it,” Kurt said.

  Sal hesitated at first, then retrieved the artifact and returned it to his pack.

  “Shall we?” Kurt asked, waving the Masku forward.

  They stepped into the darkness; Kurt walked through the doorway.

  His suspicions were wrong. The exterior wasn’t composed of abaniel. It was likely that that material only existed in his world. He could still feel his Sulen within him, as powerful as it had ever been. His aura lit up, bright enough to light their way. The walls drank at it, absorbing it. Much like the machines he remembered from his youth in the old Sulekiel Empire.

  Sparks danced and the wall itself came alive with strange light, revealing a space that looked strikingly organic, as though they were peering at the solidified insides of a being who had died eons ago. The corners of the walls were lined with odd, ribbed tubes which pulsed with an eerie violet light that congregated at the entrance of a triangle-shaped corridor. Those tubes, or tendrils, seemed to start at the doorway where they’d entered from.

  “Geiger, eat your heart out,” Sal said.

  “This place is wrong.” Linda held herself.

  “The carving that rests above the doorway.” Sal took out a flashlight and pointed the circle of light to the image of two tendrils twisting through the triangle-shaped hallway along the walls. “Two of the tendrils, or tentacles, follow a path in here. If we follow them, we may find the artifact.”

  “Or our deaths,” Linda said.

  “It’s so strange,” Sal said. His eyes were wild, sweat drenching his face.

  “What is?” Kurt asked.

  “Why a pyramid? We’ve seen lots of pyramids on Earth, and their
purpose has always baffled us. The man-made ones, anyway. What if early humans saw these buildings, things made by creatures long since extinct, and tried to imitate them?”

  The tendrils stretched on into the next corridor, which featured a mural sculpted into the stone. When the wall drank the light of Kurt’s aura, the mural seemed to come to life with color. It was...animating. The carving at the start of the hallway showed a great explosion with a mass of tendrils at the center. Symbols appeared at the bottom that Kurt could almost read.

  “Zhel’Azreth,” Kurt said, and the name made Sal and Linda shriek. “At least, that’s what I think it says. I can’t read the rest of the inscription.”

  “The fact that you can read any part of it is astounding,” Sal said, spittle flying from his mouth and catching in his beard, madness filling his voice.

  “And disturbing,” Linda said. “Don’t say that name again.”

  Kurt would have argued with her, or insulted her weak mind again, but somehow, he knew it was unwise for even himself to call on that name again.

  “Your language must have originated from this one,” Sal said.

  “Or they are sister languages,” Kurt said. “The Shar on my world speak a similar language when they telepathically link with us in battle.”

  “Interesting.” Sal inspected the next image in the mural.

  “Aren’t you unsettled in the least by all of this?” Linda asked. “This place shouldn’t exist. Our fossil record, all of our science comes crashing down on its head because of places like this, how can you be so calm!”

  “I’m terrified,” Sal said, and Kurt saw that he was shaking from more than just fatigue. “But—” He started chuckling. “—I can’t stop looking. Can’t stop drawing them. It’s like they’re at the edge of my mind, clawing their way in.”

  Linda fell silent again, backing away from Sal with a worried look in her eyes.

  The next image in the series featured three beings with an inscription beneath them. A serpent with thousands of eyes and arms alike, its tail curled between a mass of darkness that appeared to be consuming a star with clearly etched orbital paths of planets around it, and a mass of tendrils with a series of words featured at the center. Kurt could translate this one almost completely: From Zhel’Azreth came three, Zcenron the leviathan, Yog’Elios the black mass that consumes stars, and Abanozh the formless abyss, where all knowledge and light are swallowed.