by John Shirley
For a long while did they deliberate in silence. Then they hissed in unison and rattled their wattled throat-scales in the closest approximation to laughter of which serpentfolk were capable. “It considers itself our equal,” one rasped, and, “It would teach us,” sulked another, to fresh susurrations of venomous amusement.
“The greatest human sorcerer is but the greatest thief,” a blind serpent-mage wheezed. “Your magic is our science. Even as your rodent ancestors stole our eggs, you steal our knowledge, and cloud it in mysticism to hide your crimes. Odious scavengers, to the last specimen.”
Only by sheer will did Avasquiddoc reign in his overflowing vitriol. “O wise and enlightened ones, how then, did you come to repose in a bubble?”
“Your master stole the art of the Demesne from us, as ever your kind has stolen that which it could not beg. You would learn our arts?”
Avasquiddoc trembled, doubting that such an offer could be sincere, yet incapable of imagining that his destiny would have it otherwise. “I would, O terrible and secret masters! I would carry the light of your gnosis into the new world, and in your name, grind my own hated race beneath my heel. I would even kneel before the sublime majesty of your lord and creator, the lord of all that crawls, Yig.”
At the uncouth mention of the serpent god’s holy name, the magi coiled and reared and spat venom that sizzled upon the stones at his feet. Avasquiddoc feared he had pressed too far, too fast. The handservant groped for the frantically backpedaling apprentice, who tripped again over the prone body of the sickly giant viper.
One of the serpent magi advanced and loomed over the hominid blasphemer’s cowering form. By the elaborate runes and glyphs carved into its scales and the dazzling assortment of knives and cleavers hanging from its robes, he recognized it for a haruspex––a diviner of the future by the examination of fresh entrails.
The eager haruspex craned its emaciated neck and unsheathed a blood-rusted cleaver. “You have nothing to teach us by your unforked tongue, yet we could still learn much from you.”
Claws traced the serrated fangs of a scalpel under Avasquiddoc’s trembling chin, but he held himself as still as death. “I only came here to learn from you, O indomitable ones,” Avasquiddoc pleaded.
“It jests with us,” one bitterly aloof serpent mage sneered. “It parrots the words of that other warm-blooded worm who was our apprentice, in days not long gone, who made us this prison, by those arts which it stole from us. Does it truly believe that its race rose to its current height so quickly, where we toiled for hundreds of millions of years, because it was wiser than us?”
“O insurmountable masters, I make no such claim. As a lover of knowledge, I know well that all human knowledge flows from the primordial wisdom of your celebrated race, and for that gift, I and all true adepts do love thee.”
The regal serpent twisted itself into a seething knot. “Know, then, that we hate thee, for all men are a reminder of our greatest folly. For all that your miserable race has stolen from us, yea even the earth, every loss only rubs salt in the deep wound of our regret, for it was we who sowed the seed that hath grown into such as thee.
“When the world was younger, and Valusia was but a nest, the earth was ruled by others who raised from the slime all that walks or crawls or flies or swims to serve them as slaves, or as meat. Time had passed them by, but the science they left behind taught us to rule somewhat as they did, for a time. But in the passage of millions of years, we grew as degenerate, as decadent as they. We thought to raise up slaves of our own, the better to devote ourselves to the pure pursuit of knowledge. To this end, we did infect the first of your loathsome ancestors with a virus so terrible that only a few of our number ever knew it existed.
“It was a draught of pure thought, and changed your kind from lowly scavenging primates into something truly blasphemous, for nature never intended that your kind would be more than chattering monkeys. It changed you into men.”
The haruspex touched Avasquiddoc’s brow, and the great laboratory vanished.
He loped across a meadow surrounded by towering cycads. Great lizards wheeled in the amber sky on membranous wings, and a shadowy figure beckoned from the sable shadows of a liana-draped mangrove tree.
In his bestial reverie, he could form no thoughts, only the reflex of instinct and the onrushing panorama of infinite sensation, an ever-present joy in all things, a momentary hesitation at the presence of the strange figure, overcome almost instantly by the swelling hunger in its belly, redoubled at the sight of the ripe fruit in the figure’s outstretched talons.
Heedless of Avasquiddoc’s trepidation, the proto-human skulked up to the figure and snatched away the fruit from its scaled claw and devoured it on the run.
His blood went cold, but his brain burned with fever. He ran away, but he could not outrun the growing shadow of fear that rose up like smoke from the pyre in his slope-browed skull. The shadows became fearsome shapes in his mind; more terrible still, they became thoughts.
Realizing he was only one fleeting specimen of a race that was itself a short-lived offshoot of ignominious ancestry, the warm-blooded scavengers who picked the bones of the dinosaurs. Knowing, too, that one day he would die, as would his children and theirs, that one day, his entire race would be doomed, and the world would go on…
Avasquiddoc opened his eyes, and tears rolled down his sallow, sunken cheeks. The true nature of the vision was impossible to divine, for while serpentfolk are the authors of all deceit as well as the other sciences, to the apprentice, it had the veracity of a memory, albeit an ancestral one conjured out of his blood.
All the dreams of knowledge and power, all the achievements and disasters, all the wars and arts and religion of humankind, proceeded from that fateful serpent’s jape, when a stupid primate came loping out of the jungle for a piece of poisoned fruit.
“Humans grew wise, but would not be tamed. Because you had not won your wits by the rites of selection and mutation, you were cravenly bloody-minded, with a genius for slaughter that beggared even our most prescient warriors. We were helpless before the plague we’d sown in your despicable race, so when you began to use our own arts against us, we were demoralized, and sought only the peace of oblivion.
“Most of our kind perished from sheer apathy, but in places such as this, we carried on the struggle to resurrect that which had perished, to reclaim that which was stolen, and take back that which was rashly given.”
“Knowledge saves none,” the blind mage admonished, “for the pursuit of knowledge itself destroys, as it will one day destroy your race.” Its horny talons brushed the eternally self-devouring sigil of the Ouroboros painted in blood at its breast. Avasquiddoc thrilled for a moment to an echoing vibration of that flickering dream of his animal ancestors, who thought only of survival, and wanted for nothing.
“O Masters,” Avasquiddoc pleaded, “I would gladly work toward such an end, for the honor of learning at your side the lost arts of glorious, once-and-future Valusia.” In his mind, a bubble of memory surfaced and popped and disclosed some Cerngothic spell which might yet extricate him from this predicament, for it had been vouchsafed him by the Key and the Keeper of the Gate, who recognized no boundary to Its transdimensional peregrinations.
If only he had time to perform the ritual gestures to define the gate, if only he had learned Squarvash-Yun’s spells properly, instead of by the awful method he’d learned from ghoul-parchments unearthed from the necropolis of Ultima Thule. “I would undo all the ghastly injustices which my kind has perpetrated upon yours, and reset the cosmic balance in your favor.”
The serpent magi took this into consideration for several minutes, then finally, the haruspex spoke. “I think, pitiful rodent, that we could make you one of us…”
Even as Avasquiddoc made the White Sign and delineated a door, a serpent mage in a hooded cloak stepped forth and flung a blinding black powder into his face. He inhaled to scream, and then vanished.
~*~
When the constabulary of Commoriom finally felt emboldened by the prolonged silence within Varka Zhom’s shell-tower to investigate, they found much to drive all but the boldest out into the woods to collect kindling to burn the place down.
The heartiest of the watchmen discovered the master seated beside the gaping door to his inner sanctum in a posture of catatonic rigor, his baleful gaze fixed upon a point somewhere beyond infinity. Though he breathed yet, and his heart beat, he was left for dead where he sat, with a blackened bowl upon his lap that proved to be the putrefied, oddly elongated skull of a Cerngothic sorcerer. The crown of the skull had been expertly sawed off, then reattached by iron clamps, the eyesockets and nasal cavity stuffed up with corpse-tallow. The interior of the skull had been scraped to an immaculate polish, and in Varka Zhom’s petrified hand, there rested a spoon.
They could not know that the apprentice Avasquiddoc had used ghoulish sorcery to absorb the mind and memories of his erstwhile master as he devoured the contents of his skull. In this wise had he learned almost all that the miserly Squarvash-Yun knew, though he had not yet emptied the skull of its grisly victuals when he was swallowed up by the Oroboros Demesne.
Upon awakening to find Avasquiddoc gone and the circle disturbed, Varka Zhom had leapt at the chance to search his closet. The head he recognized as an artifact of ghoul magic, and he proceeded to bolt down what remained of the overripe memories of Squarvash-Yun. Only a few morsels had remained, but Varka Zhom greedily ate them, and marveled at the upwelling of knowledge that whelmed his senses.
New languages, lore and spells sprang whole into his brain, recreating as his own memory the last crumbs of Squarvash-Yun’s centuried life. At the climax of it, however, he discovered too late why Avasquiddoc hadn’t finished his ritual meal; for Squarvash-Yun’s last thoughts stole into Varka Zhom’s brain and became his own.
I am murdered… by Avasquiddoc, he thought another man’s final thoughts. I am… dead. Not having any familiarity with ghoul sorcery, the beleaguered constables were unable to disabuse him of his fateful mistake, and couldn’t be bothered to try.
Upstairs, they found a prodigy of a serpent writhing among the debris of Varka Zhom’s ransacked sanctum. The serpent’s frantic perambulations made it most difficult for them to catch, particularly when the constables who seized it realized that it was not a proper snake at all, and that it spoke––or rather, babbled.
The wriggling captive bore a disquieting likeness to the vanished apprentice, though from the neck down, it possessed the scaled black body of a water-viper.
It cried out incessantly amid its thrashings, though its diminished lungs scarcely gave it the voice to make itself heard, let alone to tell all the dreadful secrets it had learned, or to voice a warning.
Whatever they heard, the older and wiser of the two constables saw fit to silence it with the most readily available restraint. He took the creature’s tail and stuffed it into its mouth until it choked to death.
Daughter of the Elk Goddess
By John R. Fultz
In the valleys of southern Mhu Thulan the poppies bloomed wild and crimson. Above the hollows glided silvery fogs, bloated apparitions carrying the breath of winter. White mists haunted the sapphire lakes, whispering a promise of icy doom.
An advancing glacier had devoured the northern precincts of the Hyperborean continent, swallowing its cities one by one for centuries. Grinding walls of ice and freezing vapors had moved southward from frozen Polarion, entombing the jeweled ziggurats of Cerngoth, the marble wharves of Leqquan, and the onyx temples of Oggon-Zhai. Of all the cities north of the Eiglophian Mountains only Iqqua remained beyond the reach of the inexorable glacier. Surrounded by fertile vales alive with icy freshets and glassy meres, humble Iqqua remained a prosperous center of trade and culture, even as its winters grew colder each year, and the ice crawled inevitably toward its walls of polished basalt.
Outside the ramparts of Iqqua the scattered settlements of tribal chiefs watched over the wild lands in the name of Illubrius Vaal, the ninety-eighth king of the last northern city. Vaal was both the King of Iqqua and the High Chieftain of the Iqquan tribes. Each tribal chieftain brought to Vaal a yearly tribute, most often the pale hides of giant land-sloths hunted on the fields atop the glacier, the tawny furs of saber-toothed tigers, or the ivory tusks of the wooly mammoths that were the favored game of Iqquan hunters. The tribes who traded pelts, produce, and game in the city were generally poor folk with little else to bestow upon their king, and certainly nothing in the way of jewels, gold, or other precious materials. Yet King Vaal, already possessed of a legendary hoard, gladly accepted such earthly tributes.
On a bright spring day when the prophecy of eternal winter seemed far from the walls of Iqqua (though it was ever close at hand), a procession of soldiery from the black-walled city emerged from its iron gates. The caravan travelled due west toward a certain village known for the valor of its hunters and the loyalty of its chieftain. Among the forty tall warriors in copper chain mail and horned helmets came a band of twelve well-muscled slaves bearing two fanciful litters on their shoulders.
Six slaves carried each of these palanquins, and the foremost of the two flew the crimson flag of Uzuldaroum from its tiny turret. The second litter was like a miniscule house of white and purple silks, which sat lightly upon the shoulders of its bearers—as if it rode empty, or at least contained a personage of no great bulk. The simple, white-and-green flag of Iqqua rose from its peaked roof. At the head of the soldiers stalked their captain, a scarlet cloak billowing from the shoulders of his black iron breastplate. A great scimitar lay across his back, and his iron helm bore a lizardine crest with a pair of sparkling rubies to mark his rank.
In the nearby village of Uhng the tribal folk were mending ropes, smoking hocks of bear-meat, and crafting arrows for an impending hunt. The tribe’s most respected hunter dwelled in a modest hut set apart from the rest. His name was Atanequ, and today he spent the morning carving the second of two great mammoth tusks won during his last expedition. The first tusk he had carved into the likeness of his dead wife, Shwangi. This idol he had placed inside his empty hut as a tribute and reminder of his lost love.
The couple had been childless when the White Plague blew into the village on the night wind. The shaman of the tribe had worked his magic over Shwangi, sacrificed goats and a strong-legged ox to battle the spell of the plague, but in the end it was of no account. The frost gathered on Shwangi’s limbs, even as she sat shivering before Atanequ’s hearth-fire. Her breath had become cold blasts of crystalline frost. The chieftain could do nothing as he watched the sparkling rime spread across the limbs and body of his beloved one, just as the great glacier (which his tribe called Atuhlo the Ice Demon) was slowly spreading itself across Mhu Thulan. Eventually the white frost filled Shwangi’s open eyes, and she died a frozen effigy of her living self, along with six others who had caught the White Plague.
The villagers had burned all seven victims in a communal pyre fourteen days ago. Atanequ could still smell the ashes of his wife on the wind. It was a reek that would linger forevermore in his wide nostrils. When he slept at night he saw Shwangi’s dark, slim eyes looking at him free of frost, and he held her warm and living in his arms once again. Yet always he woke to the smell of her ashes on the wind, and even in the hides and walls of his domicile.
Now that Atanequ had carved Shwangi’s likeness in opalescent ivory and placed it at the center of his small house, it gave him some measure of comfort. But still he missed the girl who had stolen his heart and died before she could birth even a single child. Any woman of the tribe would be glad to take Atanequ as her husband, but the chieftain had chosen none of them yet. The wound in his heart was still too raw. So he carved ivory and kept his thoughts to himself.
The green-yellow hills cast long shadows across the village in the light of a golden afternoon. Somewhere beyond those hills the Ice Demon glacier stood blue and defiant in the naked sunlight. Atanequ was fini
shing the detail work on his latest creation when the procession from Iqqua topped a nearby ridge. The children of the huts ran and bellowed for their mothers. The chieftain had crafted a great war-club from the second mammoth tusk. He had also inscribed a litany of runes and sigils about the head of the ivory mace. For any other man such a heavy weapon would be useless, but the stature and strength of Atanequ was legendary among the Iqquan tribes. In his hands the tusk would be a bone-breaker, a stone-smasher, a thundering death-bolt for any man or beast that opposed him.
When the procession from Iqqua entered the village, men spoke with the lizard-helmed captain, then directed him toward the hut of Atanequ. As the chieftain sat carving the last sigils into his ivory mace the captain approached with his helm in the crook of an arm. The captain’s hair was as black as the folk of the village, his skin the same dusky shade, yet his oiled beard and the golden rings on his fingers spoke of city customs and wealth. He introduced himself as the Lord Oolzar Dalimgru, Captain of Iqqua’s 13th Legion. The captain already knew Atanequ—his fame as a hunter of beasts and climber of mountains was the talk of every tavern in Iqqua—and his name was a benediction on the lips of every villager who visited the city.
“It is said that Atanequ the Great Hunter once crossed the Eiglophian range in winter by virtue of a hidden pass,” said Captain Oolzar, “and that he has faced the cannibal Voormis who stalk the highlands. Men say that he alone has slain a hundred Voormis and hunted them in the depths of their haunted catacombs. Are you the same Atanequ who performed these deeds?”