“I told you,” said the rodent. “Clear your mind.”
I looked behind me as I heard a man’s heavy tread on the iron rung of the pit wall.
“Clear your mind!” Maud commanded.
“Damn it, how’m I supposed to do that now?”
“Just do it!”
I heard my pursuers steadily descending after me. I faced forward. I breathed out. Then I breathed in—and it was like swallowing the contents of a toilet. I bent forward, clutching my throat, gagging.
“There’s no time for that!” said Maud. “Clear your mind!”
Panting, I forced myself to straighten. I forced myself to breathe more evenly. I forced myself not to think about the clank, clank, clank of the two men climbing down the iron rungs above me. I forced myself to stare into the dark and let the dark become my thoughts and think of nothing. And for a second, I did it. Just for a second, but it was enough for me to feel what Maud was talking about: the magic. It was a steady pulse of energy flowing from somewhere into my mind. I gasped at the strength of it—and lost hold of it. It snaked away like a live wire. But I tried again and found it quickly. And this time, once I found it, it was easier to keep the channel to the energy open. And as I did …
As I did, a swarm of colored lights came into view before me. The swarm was about twenty yards away, approaching swiftly through the air: a flying throng of sparkling reds and greens and yellows, blues and whites, dancing, rising and falling in the darkness as gnats rise and fall on currents of air.
“What is it?” I whispered—but the moment I spoke, the lights began to dim and wink out.
“Clear your—” Maud began to say.
“I know, I know.”
I steadied myself. I focused. The colored lights grew bright again: a Christmas cloud of them still rolling and tumbling toward me. I was aware of the clank of the rungs behind me. The guard and the executioner were about halfway down, only seconds away. But here was a revelation: as frightened as I was, I could make myself be not frightened, I could release the frightened part and keep my mind focused wholly on the colored lights.
I had never done that before—but I did it now. And the cloud of colored lights grew brighter, came closer. Now, by their glow, I could see the corridor ahead. A few feet away, it opened up into a much larger space that ran off a long way beneath an arched stone ceiling. A narrow, flat walkway stretched out through the oncoming glow-swarm until it faded into shadow and then into the invisible darkness beyond. On either side of the flat stretch, the stone slanted down into a broad gutter, each gutter a good eight feet wide at least. Both gutters were full of sewage, a thick, brown, fuming concoction of polluted liquid and solid waste. The liquid shifted and flowed, lapping at the slanted stone, bubbling and churning at the center as if it really were alive.
I stared. I realized I was going to have to walk along that path between the filth-choked gutters.
And just then, in a thrumming, whispering rush, the dancing lights surrounded me.
I let out a noise I’d never heard myself make before: a little breathless cry of wonder. They were people! The lights—they were small, flying people! Men and women, each about five inches long but perfectly formed. Each gave off a multicolored radiance of his own, and the glow of each blended with the others, and the glow of all together created the twinkling, rainbow cloud. The little people surrounded me, rose and spun and fell around me. They were naked. They were beautiful. And they had wings! Transparent, gossamer wings like the wings of a dragonfly. That’s what made that sound, that stuttering thrum as they swarmed.
“Fairies!” I breathed. “They’re fairies!”
“Don’t let their lights go out,” said Maud.
I could see her now too, lit by the fairy lights. Still clinging squirrel-like to the wall, her eerie woman’s face bright-eyed and anxious. I stood there with the cloud of fairies swirling around me. The mutant rodent gazing at me. The swordsman and the masked executioner chasing after me. This had to be some kind of brain damage, right?
“Let’s go,” said Maud.
My breath caught as she leapt off the wall—just like a squirrel—leapt through the air and landed on the corridor to scramble out onto the walkway up ahead of me. I could feel the cloud of fairies moving after her. I moved with them to stay within their light.
We entered the high-ceilinged hall and stepped onto the walkway between the steaming, shit-filled gutters. At first, I was so awestruck by the sight of the fairies it was easy to keep my focus on them. I could feel the magic energy flowing in and out of me from somewhere far away, powering the fairies as it passed through them as if they were bulbs on a circuit. The cloud of light and I moved as one, traveling briskly together along the narrow path.
Then there was a splash and a grunt behind me. I looked back over my shoulder and saw through the misty rainbow that the guard had reached the bottom of the ladder. He was standing in the thick puddle of crap that covered the passage there. He saw me, and he drew his sword with a metallic swish. His eyes glittered, and his lips went tight with determination. A moment later, the fearful masked figure of the executioner dropped down behind him, cursing at the mess around his feet.
“Never mind them!” Maud told me. “Keep the lights on!” Her voice was now coming from somewhere down the tunnel up ahead.
I faced forward and saw what she meant. While I was distracted, the fairies had grown dimmer. Their naked bodies were turning gray. Their thin wings were fighting frantically with the air.
All the same, I stole another quick glance back at the guard. He was still standing where he had been, watching me, sword in hand, fading into darkness as the fairy lights faded. He seemed reluctant to follow me onto the walkway.
Why? What’s down here?
The executioner shoved the guard in the back. “Come on, move!” he said.
Maud’s voice, hollow with distance, called to me again: “Ignore them! The fairies will protect you! Keep your mind clear!”
Breathing hard, I forced myself to look ahead. Scared as I was—of the guard, of the sword, of the executioner, of the endless night of torture that awaited me if they caught me, and the endless life of deformity after that—I had to use all my mental strength to concentrate. A frantic second passed and then another. I couldn’t focus. Then—yes!—I did it. My mind caught hold of the snaking wire of magic and held on. The fairies’ colored lights grew bright. Their thrumming buzz grew louder as their wings beat faster and they rose in the air and surrounded me.
In a cloud of rainbow light, I walked on.
Behind me, I could hear the executioner angrily urging the guard to chase me. I could hear the guard muttering, “All right. All right.” Their voices grew closer, but only slowly. Why were they so wary? What were they afraid of?
I couldn’t think about it. I had to focus on the magic. I had to keep the twinkling fairies bright, hovering in the air around me, lighting the great hall of the sewer.
Then, a splash. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of motion: something humped and enormous rising up out of the burbling shit in the gutter to my left. I gasped and swiveled to look. I heard the guard behind me let out a curse.
But whatever it was, it was gone. Only the ripples it had made remained, making the sewage lap against the slanting stone.
The fairy lights began to dim again. How was I supposed to focus now? I remembered what Maud had said: The fairies will protect you. But would they? From that? That thing that had just splashed in the sewage? It was big. I could tell even from that sidelong glimpse of it. It was really big.
I took a deep, shuddering breath, and as I let it out, I let my fear steam away into the surrounding shadows. Once more, the fairy lights grew brighter. I focused. I focused hard. The fairies will protect you. But in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help wondering: What would happen to me if I let the lights go out?
The grisly answer came almost at once.
Whatever had risen from the shit, the guard had gotten a better
look at it than I had. It had made him lose his nerve.
“Did you see that?” I heard him growl.
“Never mind! Go on! He’s escaping!” barked the executioner.
“Are you crazy? That thing will …”
But then his gruff voice pinwheeled up into a falsetto shriek of absolute terror. I couldn’t help myself. My focus broke. I spun.
I saw the beast arising. Living excrement. A soulless, breathing hulk of hungering shit. Its immense, vaguely human shape burst out of the sewage with a gurgling roar. It rose up like a wave, and like a wave it fell upon the guard even as he reeled back in horror. He tried to wield his sword against it, but the fear took the strength out of him. The blade glanced weakly off the fetid body of the beast and fell from the guard’s slack fingers. Then the creature poured itself over him.
As I gaped in horror, the fairy lights went dim. And thank God for that—thank God—because even what I saw was almost more than my imagination could bear. In the moment before the hall went black, I saw the Shit Thing swallow the guard. The next instant, it forced its way into him through every pore, both engulfing him and entering him so that his figure appeared dimly through the edge of its substance. His mouth was still open on a scream, but the scream was silenced by the influx of sewage. Sewage filled him. It bloated him. It burst from his eyes and tore through his belly and then—thank God, thank God—the light went out, and there was a terrible liquid explosion as everything was enveloped in blackness.
My mind was white with incandescent fear, but even in that fear, I realized the beast would have me next if I didn’t clear my mind, and fast. Somewhere I could hear Maud screaming the same thing to me, the same thought. And somehow—I truly don’t know how—but somehow, I managed to remake my mind into the blackness all around me and catch the invisible magic by the tail and hold on to it for dear life.
The fairy lights flickered on again. The little creatures thrummed their dragonfly wings and flew around me. In the rainbow glow, I saw the beast receding down the sloped stone into the gutter. All that was left behind on the walkway was a patch of pooled sewage and a few unspeakable remains of the guard and his fallen sword.
As for the executioner, he was not so scary now. He was running for his life full speed. I watched him by fairy light as he raced blindly for the narrow corridor beyond the sewer—the corridor that led back to the pit and the rung ladder. Then he was out of sight in the darkness.
I stood and gaped at the dreadful aftermath another moment, the cloud of sparkling lights surrounding me, the fritter of gossamer wings filling the air.
So that’s what happens if the lights go out, I thought.
Then I turned and started to move away.
IT WAS A long journey, a slow hour at least, and the death of the guard was not its only horror. There was more to come.
That thing—that Shit Thing—followed me the whole way. Or maybe there was more than one, maybe the sewers were full of them, I don’t know. But now and then, I saw it from the corner of my eyes. It bubbled up from the bubbling offal and splashed and grumbled and sank away again. Every time, I shuddered. Every time, the fairy lights dimmed. Every time, I forced myself to clear my mind again and seize hold of the magic current and keep the circuit open and the fairy lights on.
It was exhausting work. At first—after the guard was destroyed like that—the fear was so intense it kept me focused. What choice did I have? It was focus and walk and keep the fairy lights burning or literally be covered with shit and filled with shit and destroyed by shit from within. Still, you know, after a while, everything becomes normal, doesn’t it? Suffering, danger, slow death—it’s all just life in the end. So, after a while, as I walked on—on and on through the long tunnel with no end in sight—my mind began to wander, my attention began to flag. It happened so incrementally, so subtly, that I didn’t even notice that the sparks of light coming off the flittering fairies had begun to grow just a bit duller, then just a bit more. The little pink naked bodies surrounding me grew just a bit more and then a bit more gray.
Maud was running up ahead of me, sometimes within the reach of the glow and sometimes just beyond it off in the darkness. She hadn’t said a word to me in a long time. She didn’t want to break my concentration, I guess. And maybe she’d gotten into the routine of the journey too, maybe she was getting lost in her own thoughts too, because she didn’t notice the fairy lights dimming either.
But now, I looked ahead through the thrumming rainbow cloud, and I saw the mutant rodent had stopped. She was sitting like a rat sits, her front paws raised before her. She was looking back toward me with her creepily human face. I peered through the glow and saw that she had reached the end of the walkway. She was waiting for me there, waiting for me to catch up. A few yards beyond her, the gutters ended and there was a sort of stone alcove. And though the alcove was dark, I saw—or thought I saw—a faint misty glow of white light as if a sunbeam were falling into the darkness from a great height.
After the long trek through this stench and filth, I felt a thrill of hope—and only at the last second did I realize that my concentration, already slipping, was now utterly broken, not by my fear this time but by my excitement, my anticipation of escape. The fairy lights flickered—which finally drew my attention to them.
“Oh no!” I said.
And the beast attacked.
It came up so suddenly and was so huge that it overwhelmed me. Its gurgling roar, its ghastly stink, its hungry eyes, its awful presence—a mountainous, looming, living creature of liquid waste—blasted every thought right out of me. Any chance I might have had to regain my focus and relight the protective cloud of light was washed away in my fear of the rising shit wave.
I saw it was about to drop on me. The image of the guard’s horrific death filled my mind. I panicked. I ran.
The fairy lights went out, and the long hall was plunged into utter blackness.
Or no—not utter blackness. I could still see that dim beam of light shining down into the alcove at the end of the walkway. Ignoring the sting of my skinned knee, I ran for it with all the speed of fear.
The Shit Thing crashed down onto the walkway right behind me—right on the spot where I’d been standing half a second before. I heard its roar become a thick, gooey splash. I felt its thick blanket of stench envelop me. It had missed me on its first attack, but I heard, then felt, its living substance burbling and thrashing over the walkway, coming after me.
I screamed. I ran faster. It grabbed my ankle.
I was shocked by the strength of it, by the solidity of it when it had seemed to be made of nothing but offal and goo. It grabbed me like a giant’s hand. It roared like a giant as it seized hold in order to drag me backward into it. I reached out wildly in the darkness, reached out in wild despair for that faint misty beam of light.
My fingers touched the entry to the alcove. I grabbed hold of the edge of the wall with both hands.
Just as the Shit Thing strengthened its grip on my heel, I yanked myself forward with all my might. I broke the creature’s hold and went spilling forward into the alcove, falling onto my backside in the midst of the dim gray light from above.
I heard—I could not see—the beast receding. The smell faded, and I heard the liquid creature sinking back into the gutter with a disappointed groan.
I swallowed the copper vomit of fear and disgust. I raised my knees and rested on them, sitting on the hard stone, breathing fast. After a second or two—or an hour or two, I don’t really know—I noticed the silence around me. I fought to bring my breathing under control. I fought to focus again. I cleared my mind and—there!—the flow of magic came back into me. There was a slow flicker of color, a stuttering hum of wings. And then the cloud of fairy lights came back on again, the beautiful naked creatures orbiting my head.
In the multicolored glow, I saw Maud. She clung to the alcove wall, looking down on me. She had an expression on her face—how can I describe it? Disdain? Disappointment? Con
demnation? All of these. She looked as if she could not believe what a cowardly wimp I was.
“What’re you looking at me like that for?” I said.
She shook her head, disgusted.
“Because I screamed?” I said.
She averted her eyes.
“What? Did you see that thing?”
She sighed. “You better start climbing,” she squeaked. “It’s a long way.”
Disgruntled, I pushed my way to my feet, muttering under my breath. “It was a gigantic shit monster! It was gonna eat me! For Christ’s sake!” Maud didn’t speak again and didn’t look at me either. Stupid bizarro hamster. What does she know? I thought. I’d have said it aloud too, but she was the only ally I had. Still, she was making me feel like crap.
The sparkling fairies and I moved deeper into the alcove. The pale beam of light was brighter there. I tilted my head back, and my heart lifted a little. Way, way up above me, there was daylight, a little pinprick of white brightness. Rodent Girl was right about that anyway: it was a long climb.
I found the rungs on the wall and started up.
AFTER THE DUNGEON, AFTER THE DARKNESS, AFTER THE stench and the terror, it felt almost miraculous to climb out into the daylight and the open air. The moment my head and shoulders emerged from a narrow street sewer, the fairies dispersed like birds frightened by a gunshot. Off they flew in all directions, their little bodies vanishing in the distance. I didn’t even have a chance to tell them thanks.
I climbed out the rest of the way. I was in an empty alley formed by the stained walls of two shabby houses. Either way I looked, left or right, the alley opened onto streets lined with buildings. A green stenchy fog hung over me, giving the sky a sickly hue.
Maud came up after me. She scrambled up the wall to the level of my head.
“Where are we?” I asked her.
“The town of Eastrim,” she said.
“It smells weird,” I said. “It smells bad.”
“Come on. We have to hurry. Once the executioner sounds the alarm, they could close the city gates.”
Another Kingdom Page 11