by John Shirley
Too exhausted at present to conjure up another devourer, Avasquiddoc contented himself with a gnarled dagger carved from the jaw of a labyrinthodont. When he approached the master, however, he learned that the deed must go undone for the moment. A piebald smilodon stalked out of the shadows behind Varka Zhom’s slumped form and lounged at the master’s feet. The tawny beast chuffled amusedly at Avasquiddoc’s puny threat, its lambent amber eyes dancing with preternatural sentience.
Most likely, he could dispatch the tiger with a lesser spell, but this might awaken Varka Zhom. Conversely, killing the master would insure his own swift death on the saber-fangs of the great cat, and he lacked the confidence in his stolen arcana to believe he could destroy them both and emerge unscathed.
Varka Zhom was irretrievably incapacitated, and would remain so for some hours; better to take advantage of the unguarded library now, and use some newfound wizardry to destroy the master at his leisure. Snatching up the key from its place beside the library door, Avasquiddoc bounded up the winding tunnel to the uppermost floor, and the locked door of the master’s sanctum.
Avasquiddoc’s glee threatened to throttle him where he stood before the door, but he reined himself in and painstakingly unlocked it, disarming defensive contrivances both mechanical and thaumaturgical woven into its intricate bulk, and threw the portal wide.
Inside, a palpable miasma of bitter stench assailed his nostrils and soiled his palate. Smoky shadows swarmed the passageway with such implacable density that Avasquiddoc hesitated, fearful that they were another familiar, more subtly lethal than the tiger. He steeled himself against the risk by reminding himself of the esoteric treasure trove sure to lie within, and, laying one steadying hand against the cold fossil-wall, crept deeper into the sanctum.
Presently, he came into the deep cobalt glow of a weirdly smoldering lamp, which depended by a chain from the low ceiling. By its azure-shrouded light, Avasquiddoc could discern only a bewildering maze of shelves, trestle-tables and alchemical apparatus filling the chamber, between which ran narrow alleys along which one must needs move crabwise. Even so, Avasquiddoc’s every least movement provoked some calamitous avalanche.
Set into the far wall and sheathed in moldering, moth-eaten curtains were the doors to the balcony that projected from the apex of the tower. With both hands outstretched, Avasquiddoc fumbled around the perimeter of the cluttered sanctum to grasp the curtains and rip them open with a gasp of relief.
What the light revealed as it stormed the shadowy enclave stole his power to draw another breath for some time to come.
The sanctum was crowded with every conceivable description of conjuror’s equipage, stacked or piled haphazardly upon and around the maze of furniture, yet the center of the chamber was cleared to form a circular zone in which one item reared up alone. Only this object was not coated with fine, scholarly dust, and it was the only thing the apprentice did not recognize.
Avasquiddoc made his way to it with greater trepidation than he had in near-total darkness, for this, he intuited with much trembling and palpitations, was surely the repository of his master’s innermost arcana.
It stood only a little shorter than the apprentice himself, and was in shape a globe of apparently solid obsidian, inlaid with shimmering bands of platinum and silver, and etched with sinuously tangled glyphs of a wholly alien nature. Its water-smooth surface was broken around its equator by corrugations like the gills of some submarine leviathan, from which leaked wisps of noisome steam.
The globe rested in a cradle of age-blackened bronze, which was in turn bounded by concentric rings of the same odd glyphs painted on the floor. Avasquiddoc recoiled when he saw these last, for at first he mistook them for a carpet of writhing serpents, a last ring of defense round Varka Zhom’s ultimate treasure. Even in the mundane light of day, the symbols did indeed seem to move with a preternatural vigor most unbecoming in written characters, as if some invisible scribe were forever erasing and amending them.
The ebon glyphs frenziedly transformed themselves into ever more complex forms as he knelt before them, twisting and mingling and begetting offspring characters, so that the looming obsidian globe was the eye of a cyclonic storm of automatic writing.
How to dispel such an enchantment? Avasquiddoc wracked his ambition-mad brain for answers, but Squarvash-Yun had never encountered anything like this ward, and so in the end he experimented with a pitcher of ordinary water, spilling a cautious amount over the characters beneath his nose, and was gratified to see the whirling vortex of snaky characters lapse into stillness and fade.
Reaching out a palsied hand, he found the surface of the obsidian globe hot to the touch, and vibrating with pulsations like the unquiet gullet of some great sleeping sauropod. Streams of condensation wept from the seams of the metal bands encircling it, and a puff of acrid vapor escaped from the gills.
Avasquiddoc fought to put down his awe at the barely contained vitality of the unknowable artifact. Surely, this was the source of Varka Zhom’s knowledge, his power, and now it belonged to him.
But what was it? A scrying glass, perhaps, with which the sorcerer spied upon the tablets of cosmic wisdom which legend claimed lay about the divine idiot protoplasm of Ubbo-Sathla, in the infancy of the universe. Or perhaps it allowed the enlightened user to astrally project to the court of the Outer Gods and hearken unto the cacophonous madness in which the story of all that ever did or ever would occur in the universe was eternally blasted out in a stream of warring, unbearable piping by the larval servitors of the blind idiot gods who ruled all creation.
Consulting the uncannily absorbed memories of Squarvash-Yun, he decided it might be a necromantic prison, wherein Varka Zhom trapped the souls of demons or departed magi, and thereby pried out their secrets. Whatever it was, he had best work to possess its secrets in haste, before his master awakened and undid all his careful machinations.
Then, it seemed quite suddenly to Avasquiddoc, as if the face of the obsidian globe itself did open up like a maw more ravenous than that of the devourer, and swallow him whole.
~*~
For a time without measure, Avasquiddoc fell through darkness and heat and noxious vapors with only his own screams of unhinged terror for company. As his throat grew hoarse and raw with no perceptible terminus in sight and his fear gave way to curiosity, he left off his ululations and strove to explore his most unnatural predicament.
Of light there was none, yet air, though foul in extremis, was abundant enough. Roaring winds tore at his tunic, though he had no feeling in his bowels or inner ear of falling, and when he struggled against the rushing air with his extremities, he touched, then dragged himself down to embrace something that, though hardly of the earth he knew and pined for, was at least solid rock.
The moment he seized it, the rock seized him also, and Avasquiddoc plummeted out of the prison of wind, coming to rest upon a bed of volcanic stone, warped and contorted by the fury of the molten inner earth, and blacker still than the stygian abyss from which he’d lately escaped. After a suitable period of desperate rest, the lost apprentice hauled himself to his feet and began, haltingly, to make his way in the new world that had claimed him.
Whatever manner of place this was, yet his mind and body survived intact, so he might yet learn its secrets, and perhaps win his freedom. His spirits soared as the field of rock declined in a treacherous downward slope. The path to supreme gnosis was ever fraught with peril, or it would be crowded with fellow travelers. All alone in this hell in a bottle, the rash apprentice was certain he journeyed toward a pearl of such great price that Varka-Zhom himself had been too craven to seize it.
The pestilential mists swirled about him on all sides, obscuring all but a few paces in any direction. Avasquiddoc fumbled over the broken hinterland until he found a promontory of rock that rose up from the plunging slope like a looming raptor. Scaling it with much difficulty and no inconsiderable discomfort, he stood out on the edge of the aerie and willed his eyes to penetrate
the swirling cauldron of seething mist below.
It was as if he looked down into a vast crater forged by some falling trans-sidereal stone. The walls were chains of jagged peaks and slumbering volcanic fumaroles and kettles of scalding water, all jumbled like the waves of a heaving sea cast in blasted basalt and jagged obsidian spires.
Through the thinner corona of vapor doming the valley, he could just discern the mountain chain upon which he stood arching away to either side, only to meet on the other side, at a distance that could be crossed in a few hours.
But in this place, an hour’s measure was itself a matter of guessing, for there was no sun or moon by which to gauge the passage of time. The dim light seemed to be shed by the mist itself, which blotted out all semblance of a sky and bathed the grim demesne in eternal, murky twilight.
Below his perch, the mists thickened about the floor of the valley, rising up the sides like steam from a slowly smoldering concoction in one of Varka Zhom’s retorts. About the base of the basalt cliffs, he could see verdant jungle flora among the fractured rocks below, thickening into a dense arboreal zone where the slope softened.
Out of the floor of the valley far below, where the mists were thickest, there arose the ebon fingers of a cluster of cyclopean towers of the same basalt rock that he stood upon, though shaped into forms most unnatural, if not necessarily by the hands of men.
A moment more to contemplate, and Avasquiddoc might have discovered then and there where his reckless quest for gnosis had led him, and might or might not have sought to repent and turn back, but his choice was made for him when a hurtling rock struck him upon the temple, toppling him from his vantage point to the unforgiving slope below.
Head ringing, fighting oblivion, Avasquiddoc took shelter from further volleys of flying rocks, bones and less pleasant missiles. The air was rent by a cacophony of bestial hooting, howling and growling. The apprentice was set upon most savagely by a pack of shaggy troglodytes whom he noted, without a trace of relief, were at least familiar to him.
The despicable Voormis pack encircled Avasquiddoc and redoubled the ferocity of their attacks, though none closed in to subdue him when he made no resistance. Their loathsome visages, a brutish amalgam of the least lovely features of simian and canine, mocked his own otherworldly wisdom, for their animal assault so stirred up his brain that he could call no cantrips to mind to retaliate.
Hapless Avasquiddoc fled the hostile barrage in the only direction left open, descending the precipitous slope in a desperate gait that was more tumble than sprint, and finding a respite beneath the shroud of mist that canopied the emerald maze of the primordial jungle. So deranged and panicked was he by his rude reception that he stumbled blindly through the thickening stands of cycads and towering ferns, thinking only of reaching the towers he’d seen from above.
Wherever this place was, his senses told him he hadn’t left the earth, for the tortuous terrain had the unique traits of the Eiglophian Mountains, which he’d glimpsed from afar while traveling to Commoriom from Cerngoth. The degenerate Voormis still thrived in the shadowy warrens that honeycombed the skyscraping peaks of Mount Voormithadreth, despite the best efforts of men to scour the land clean of their repulsive scourge.
Plainly, he was still in Hyperborea, though the vegetation, to his trained herbalist’s eye, was of a cruder, more primitive sort, such as flourished in the strange days before men rose up from among the beasts to tame the land, and which lived on only in benighted corners of the continent that the gods, or their unspeakable thanes, claimed as their own. Perhaps this was some forbidden abode of the Other Gods, whom Varka Zhom had taken to spying upon to steal their secrets.
Yet where was the sun, or the moon? No slightest stirring of the air had he felt since he came to rest atop the valley’s mountainous border. Could it be that he, and this entire valley, were trapped inside the sphere in Varka Zhom’s sanctum? No, far better to imagine that this was all a dream.
Avasquiddoc had just caught a glimpse of the towers through the trees, when he tripped over an enormous root and sprawled in the road. Still sprawled on the ground, he strained to see the base of the citadel through the mists, which were thickest here.
The towers––twelve in number, pyramidal in shape––seemed to rise up out of the bubbling black water that filled the valley floor. A most formidable natural moat, the black lake was fed by the steaming runoff from the geysers and calderas above, and teemed with unseen life. Avasquiddoc quickly dismissed the notion of swimming it, and he could see no sign of a bridge.
Now charged with a task that required cleverness and patience, Avasquiddoc was in his element, and squatted in the middle of the jungle, scratching his head and cogitating so furiously, that he never took note of the root he had so recently tripped over, until it began to move.
When he did take notice of the obstacle, he dismissed it as a prodigiously thick vine or fallen log, and when it displayed unlooked-for ambulatory properties, slithering across the trail at a speed most disquieting for so large a specimen of vegetation, the apprentice was only passing interested, as it fell well out of the parameters of his embryonic schemes to traverse the lake.
He was left with no choice but to take notice when the obstacle reared up above him and revealed itself to be but the merest tapered tip of a monstrous serpent, longer even than the chore-list of Varka Zhom. The mailed head of the giant viper hove into view through the overgrowth––or, one might say, the heads, for a second, smaller, serpentine visage sneered down from above and behind the head of its giant cousin, which it rode as a kind of steed.
Most thunderstruck was Avasquiddoc as he met the malevolent golden eyes of the serpent-rider, seeming to fall into a trance as it became clear what Varka Zhom really did to the Citadel of the Ouroboros to earn his fame, and where he, Avasquiddoc, in his vanity and lust for power, had let himself be led.
As the enormous viper encircled Avasquiddoc, the apprentice did belatedly reclaim his wits and commence to scheme bold new schemes for extricating himself from his present dilemma, but they were none of them beyond the daydreaming stage when the serpent unhinged its jaw, swooped down and swallowed him whole.
~*~
When next the light met his eyes, Avasquiddoc had cause for both celebration and dismay, for while the problem of crossing the lake to the citadel had been resolved for him and he seemed to have gained a reprieve from the abominably prolonged ordeal of ophidian digestion, the circumstances of his arrival made it plain he was less than a welcome guest.
He awoke from his peristaltic slumber as the serpent regurgitated him out onto a floor of triangular flagstones, having been dosed with some explosively potent emetic, which Avasquiddoc had fed him while interred among the other contents of the serpent’s commodious stomach.
Before he had half recovered, he was rudely seized by hands which, to his grateful, tear-blurred eyes, were at least good, fleshy human limbs. Though they dragged him to his feet with the rough indifference of a headsman, he took comfort in their presence, for it meant that men could perform service here, and, after a fashion, learn. Varka Zhom must have some such arrangement with the serpentfolk, else why keep them alive, in this hermetic prison?
“It comes before it was sent for,” one of the serpent mages hissed in its native Aklo tongue, which Avasquiddoc had learned, along with so much else, from Squarvash-Yun.
“He has demanded much of us of late. Perhaps he favors us with more offerings.” The sardonic tone of the serpent’s sibilant speech told Avasquiddoc whom they meant.
The devious apprentice swiftly deduced his master’s gambit, and under any other circumstances, would have saluted its ruthless beauty. Varka Zhom fed his prisoners human sacrifices in the form of apprentices, in return for the serpentfolk’s oracles and arcana. Avasquiddoc’s ambition had only hastened his stumbling into this place. But he was not so shaken that he didn’t believe he could turn this dire tribulation to his own ends.
By now, he had regained sufficien
t sight to dimly see the array of serpent mages all about him: savants of the bygone ophidian race, clad in monastic robes made from the hides of their own saurian cousins, imprinted with the sigil of the Ouroboros in cracked, black mammal-blood. The thorny outgrowth of their scales, the palsied twitching of their talons and restive, painted tails, bluntly testified to their epochal decay.
They skulked in a great hall crowded with a metropolis of glass and metal apparatus such as would have stupefied the most puissant human alchemist. Great arcs of blue-white lightning shot from one great vessel to another, vivifying the superheated fluid with the primal energies of captive demons and stranger creatures, whose supernatural properties were harnessed to some incomprehensible experiment.
Only when he had taken all this in did he chance to look upon the human whose harsh yet reassuringly familiar hands had extricated him from the maw of the incontinent serpent.
Hands there were in great profusion, but little else, for the creature was some sort of homunculus. A veritable thicket of twisted human arms, far too many to count, sprouted from a wriggling serpentine body which had no eyes or other features, but only a silently gnashing mouth to feed itself. Human the abominable thing might once have been, but the perverse vipers had made of it a frightful, squirming engine, and a fit demonstration of the only capacity in which humans might serve them.
Flat on the moss-furred flagstones did he prostrate himself before the lords of the citadel, and his eloquent speech in the Aklo tongue stunned them to rapt silence, despite the lamentable shortness and rigidity of his tongue and snout.
“O illuminated first lords of Valusia and of Hyperborea,” said he, “I beseech thee, look upon me not as provender, nor as a sacrifice, but as a humble and intrepid scholar of the transmundane arts, even as yourselves, though my mastery is, as my race, in its infancy. I bow to you and pray you accept me as your devoted apprentice, and I will endeavor to teach you, in return, of the arts which I did learn from the greatest human sorcerers, which might edify and distract you, even in this most unworthy prison.”