by John Shirley
My muscles instinctively pulled taut at the idea of going with him, as though my whole body wanted to refuse. I had felt myself a knot of tension before, but after his proclamation I was a storm-pulled mooring. Concinnity’s hand squeezed mine. Instead of comfort, I felt only pain.
The children clustered in, making their nonsense sounds.
He looked at us all.
“The three of you. What are your names? And the children.”
Concinnity told him.
“The three of you love each other, yes? You perform your sacraments and make holy any union intended to be fruitful?” He looked at the children.
My pride got the better of the fear. “We perform our sacraments always.”
“You know what it is, then,” he said, tilting his head down to look at us through his bushy eyebrows. “To give and see your gift given, to take what has been taken before you. You know that delicate trust. The tiniest thread that can hold everything.”
At which point Gematra returned with our best carboy and a chrysoprase tazza.
With his considerable dignity, he placed the tazza in front of our guest and poured it full. The wine perfumed the air, that smell whose mood seems always to counteract your own.
Atiradarinsept gave us the most cursory nod and took the tazza in both hands, filling his nose with its smell then his belly with its liquid.
“Now then.”
~*~
The ice was the world’s tomb.
Hyperborean, or Earth years are vastly shorter than our own. It had taken only ten for the ice to overwhelm them, and ten of their years is barely a third of one for us. While ten of their years is a brief time in the span of history, it is ample time for a people to be broken by cachexy.
Bizarrely, they welcomed the ice in the beginning.
When glaciers blockaded trade routes, the enthusiasm waned.
A singular moment catalyzed their fear. A group of polar explorers became lost in the ice. Their markers vanished, landmarks shifted. Voices came to them in the wind. All signals of dementia, of course. But these things existed in their documents for anyone to see. Everyone saw. Not dementia, but truth.
After that, an increasing portion of industry was devoted to the problem. Each brief year brought further encroachment until finally their seasons held no respite from the marching walls of ice.
They huddled around fires, burning the last sticks of wood in their desperation. As you have done.
All were swallowed.
Near the very end, the cult made itself clear, hoping wide support could reverse the tide.
They had called themselves Phoebus for some time, and that is the name they used then. Presenting as burgraves of industry, luminaries of might and politics, they promised that worship of Bhinendrosz would cicatrize the world. Bhinendrosz had left them, though, millions of years previously, and his worship did little but encourage the worst excesses, assuring that humankind on Earth died with no remaining dignity.
My soldiers mined that city under the ice. Months we spent there, horripilated and pruinose, our refuse frozen in troughs and caves carved for the purpose. Some days the air warmed enough that our midden thawed to stink.
I consumed the lives of thousands in my search, I charted their relationships, learned the patterns of employment and dissolution as the end came, until finally I wormed my way into the trail of the Phoebus cult. Almost all of them were human or close to it. The one I found who was not, however, opened a chasm of time beneath me.
I dove through epochs. Their buildings becoming smaller, made of cruder material as I went, until the cult ruled over not humans but hairy men, then bird-like men, saurians. Still backwards I went, back to that great sacrifice, thirty million of our years ago, and still the one I investigated had lived.
The later humans of Earth believed many things about the sacrifice, but none guessed at its truth.
Yes, volcanoes choked the air with reechy clouds, much as the people believed. What they did not guess at were the inquinate gods of the abyssal sea, lashing apart clathrates with their operose pedicles. That clathrate boiled the seas and filled the entire air with irremedicable clouds. Even as all life on the planet ground to a valetudinarian parody, the beings of the Phoebus cult marched to the union of one mind, murdering themselves as they went, in order to exterminate every living thing in their path. A selected few cultists remained, encysted in deep caverns and untouched by the toxic air.
They sacrificed life itself to defeat their enemy. The lost gods of the Phoebus cult did not know its name, nor where it came from. It seemed to them to come from everything. You might call it entropy, or nihil. Perhaps even death, though death regularly brings new life and thus hardly seems applicable. They called it a demon, and the demon loricated itself in ice.
For millions of years the sacrifice kept their Earth warmed and proof against the demon. The early humans built great civilizations only to be toppled by an epoch of returning ice, reduced from cultures to creatures. They rose again with the help of the Phoebus cult, but were soon beset once more. It was then that Phoebus began burning the long-dead sacrifices of the world that had been, and that strategy, they felt, was unbeatable.
They thought so until the very end. The last of them now lies clutching her mummified flesh in perpetual horror.
And I have let that demon loose here. This strange winter you suffer, the winter that came while I was away. It is the only thing that could be taken from Earth. I was tasked to return with Mhu Thulan’s treasures. Winter is my victory.
Now then, I command you to imagine this scene.
My triumphal return in the dark of night, near-to-day compared to what I had become accustomed. My soldiers sent to their homes, my armor donned, I entered the chamber of the Intercessors.
At the zeugma pens I called for Heptanquirra. She came to me in delight, her junction awash to see me after the long absence. We embraced and traded affections.
I had to tell Intercessor Analepsis what happened to Earth; what was happening to Cykranosh. As I organized the story before her, I could feel her contractions through Heptanquirra, but Analepsis withheld all her fluids from me, leaving her mood unreadable. Her arms tapped the joins in my armor as though she wanted me to denude myself before her. Heptanquirra burbled soothingly to me, but there was no hiding her fear.
The Intercessor wrung the last words out of me, piercing my armor in a hundred places, bleeding me until the air hung thick not with the smell of her excretions, but only my blood and Heptanquirra’s fear.
Then there was the interpellation.
Everything became vast around me. Sounds went on, the taste of blood overwhelmed me, the tiny movements of the zeugma and the intercessor magnified.
Analepsis slashed Heptanquirra.
Pink flesh peeled back, I felt her muscles relax around me and then blood boiled from the wound. The zeugma’s sensory nodule fell onto my thigh. It rang the metal of my armor as beautifully as a musical instrument.
The Intercessor strode above me, Heptanquirra’s body releasing me to wet exposure. Her arms rose above her, Analepsis, the integuments stretching to reveal fine traceries of vessels under her skin. The zeugma dangled from her body.
Only then did Analepsis anoint me, her fluid black and angry. It burned my wounds and filled my head with rage-thoughts.
I drove my sword through her.
As I fled from the outer decretal chambers I felt her inside of me. No one was meant to know what I had done. She wanted me dead and silent.
Intercessor Analepsis intended to simply deny the truth of what returned with me, as though turning away from the threat would defeat it.
And I could not be certain, as I hastily dressed my wounds, whether the urge to kill her had come from me or her. For hours my thoughts chased and worried at the possibility that I had killed her, or worse, that I had not been in control of myself.
There was not much time to worry. Shortly after her death, the Intercessor’s chambers
filled with ice.
That ice has filled the government center.
It will cover our world.
But I know everything that the Phoebus cult knew, and if I can find the wizard Jelhrhelnuilgusehtnh, there is hope.
~*~
The words had scarcely left his mouth when his eyes rolled back. Pink-tinged foam dribbled from his mouth.
Gematra grabbed Concinnity and me by the hands and pulled us away, urging the children to follow.
“The poison took far too long,” he said, letting the winter cold in through the open door. “The strength of a madman, truly. Whether he intended to kill us or not, the children would not have survived the flight he commanded.”
“He came from the Interdiction,” Concinnity said. “I am certain. If we can reach the coast my cousin will take us beyond their reach.”
“But the story,” I said. “What if it’s true?”
Concinnity took my face in her hand, her skin almost hot after the icy rasp of the outdoors.
“Everyone knows the government lies to us,” she said. “We will have to find our own way.”
I looked back into the firelit room where Atiradarinsept, fourth Cicurator of the Magisterial Interdiction lay dead. I reassured myself that such a tale could not be true. Only lies would need such labored speech.
The Door from Earth
By Jesse Bullington
I
When Pipaluk, the chief engineer of Hiurapaluk’s Peril Containment Plant, together with twelve of her most well-armed and efficient underlings, came at flickering, artificial dusk to seek the infamous Professori, Laila, in her amphibechanical facility on the lower-most substreet of the city’s underlevel, they were surprised, as well as disappointed, to find her absent.
Their surprise was due to the fact that Professori Laila had made much to-do about her expedition not taking place for another fortnight; all of Pipaluk’s plots against the Professori had hinged on there being sufficient time to gain the rest of the Quorum’s approval before confronting the rabble-rousing academic. They were disappointed because their formidable warrant, with symbolic fiery font glowing on an antique digital tablet, was now useless; and there seemed to be no earthly prospect of wiping the smug expression from Laila’s hairy face, to say nothing of confiscating her domestic warrens for the use of the Engineers Guild.
Ingeniøri Pipaluk was especially disappointed, for Laila was her chief rival in the Quorum’s science bloc, and was acquiring altogether too much fame and prestige among the Voormis of Mhu Thulan, that ultimate peninsula of the Grænland subcontinent. Pipaluk had been glad to receive certain evidence corroborating her suspicions that Laila’s expedition through the Eibon Gate could be catastrophic, and not just in terms of heightening the Professori’s already-dangerous popularity.
This evidence suggested that Laila was not, in fact, a devotee of the state-god, Tsathoggua, whose worship was incalculably older than the Voormi race. No, it seemed that the Professori instead paid tribute to Tsathoggua’s paternal uncle, Hziulquoigmnzhah, with whom the true god of the Voormis had suffered a falling-out sometime in the previous millennium or three. This schism, which had something to do with the fall of Humanity, or perhaps the rise of the Voormis of Grænland and sundry other peoples in sundry different places, had resulted in the sealing of the Eibon Gate.
Walling up the entryway between the worlds of the benevolent, bat-furred toad-god Tsathoggua and that of the much-less-attractive demon prince Hziulquoigmnzhah seemed a surefire means of reaffirming Tsathoggua’s favour. The Quorum’s vote on this matter had been unanimous, and so the pit where the portal was located was closed off using a variety of fail-safes, and then the whole area was surrounded in a series of airlocks, cultural heritage be damned. Until Professori Laila started in with her insane theories of interstellar harmony and pan-theological unification, no one had given any thought to reopening the portal of ultratelluric metal that lay buried in ruins of black gneiss beneath Mhu Thulan’s capital city.
Pipaluk had suspected the worst as soon as she discovered the Professori’s new laboratory was directly adjacent to the outermost airlock housing the gate to Cykranosh that the warlock Eibon had used to escape Earth in ancient times, if the mytho-historical record was to be given credence. Alas, the Quorum had dragged its feet, despite Pipaluk’s warnings, and now it was too late - she would have given her musk glands to kick the Provost in the kanaaks for postponing his vote as long as he had.
Pipaluk’s subgineers bustled about Laila’s laboratory in their glistening salamander-suits and, behind a tarp, they discovered where the Professori and her team of graduate students, clone servitors, and formless spawn had hacked into the municipal pipe that made up one of the facility’s walls and plugged in their plasmaborers. The tunnel they had excavated led - surprise surprise - out of the lab, through a mega-support column, and directly into the first airlock bay, the dull-metal doors towering some thirty meters tall over Pipaluk’s team.
“Airlock initially opened, Aggusti Second,” the voice of one of the subgineers crackled in Pipaluk’s pulsing, yellow bio-helm. “Breached on average twice daily each day since.”
“Hymirbjarg,” Pipaluk cursed, and several of her underlings grinned to themselves to hear their normally unflappable superior use such strong language. “I trust this is sufficient?”
“Fall back, Ingeniøri,” Provost Ole answered over the Quorum channel. “We’ll hold an emergency meeting. Politibetjent Chief Malik is on his way up, so extract your team and - “
“Wha - shhhack?” Pipaluk held down the garble button she’d installed onto her com-panel as she addressed her subgineers on their private channel. “Right, we don’t have time to deal with more dawdling by those kanaaks. Ane and Nuka, with me. The rest, seal this airlock after us and don’t open it, no matter what. I trust you all remember what happens when you open airlocks, yes?”
They did. It had been Pipaluk’s team, after all, who designed the last batch of svataarsualiartartoq-suits for Mhu Thulan’s formless spawn commandos - space stations tended to lack many gaps for the polymorphous spawn to flow through, so infiltrating the interstellar strongholds of those Yig-worshipping Valusians and Ithaqua-kissing Gnophkehs necessitated finding another way to get the formless spawn inside. Spacesuits that matched the design of those used by the targeted station, save with opaque helmets, did the trick quite nicely - fill a few suits with the spawn, trigger a rescue beacon on the station’s frequency, and float the formless commandos through the void until they were retrieved by drones and taken inside the airlocks. Then, total havoc as the deadly children of Tsathoggua swept through the station, a sentient tidal wave of ichorous death.
“How will we get back, Ingeniøri?” subgineer Nuka asked, his voice cracking.
“Have some faith, son,” said Pipaluk. “We’ll recode the locks as we go. Things were built by your ancestors; think their primitive programming is beyond your skill?”
Nuka straightened his shoulders, his three-toed foot snapping up in salute. Through the faceshield of his bio-helm, Pipaluk could see the lad’s umber fur bristling straight out from his face in embarrassment. Good, he should feel like an idiot.
“ – stunt,” Provost Ole was saying as Pipaluk relaxed her finger on the garble button. “Is that clear?”
“Perfectly, sir,” said Pipaluk, and quit the channel altogether. “Right, let’s go.”
Nuka whined, long and low; Ane prayed, fast and loud; and the other subgineers all saluted as the ancient airlock opened into the deep.
II
There were three airlocks in total, and the trio had reached the control panel beside the second by the time the first had ground shut behind them. Before advancing any further, Pipaluk had Ane explore to the left and Nuka to the right - the Ingeniøri had been over the schematics a dozen times lest just such an emergency entry become necessary, but it never hurt to confirm what the blueprints had already told her.
“Dead end,” Nuka reported throug
h the bio-helm’s thrumming com-membrane. “Basalt. Dry. No cracks.”
“Same here,” Ane said, as she hiked back across the bay.
“Good,” said Pipaluk. “Everything matches up. The reports state that the Eibon Gate was interdimensional, so they were able to completely surround it. Basically, they built a giant basalt box around the thing, with only an airlock leading in or out. Around that, another stone box with an airlock, and then another. So, through this door is another bay and across that is the final airlock, which opens into the ruins where the Gate is. Professori Laila and her team are either in the bay beyond this door, working on the last airlock, or they’ve managed to breach it and gain the ruins, which could be bad. Very bad.”
“‘Bad’?” said Nuka. “‘Very bad’?”
“Depends,” said Pipaluk, hoping against hope that her quarry was still fiddling with the last airlock and not beyond it. “Even with the feeble half-lives they were capable of producing, back when this was all built, the fail-safes in the ruins should still be operational. So, in a best-case scenario, the fail-safes will have arrested the Professori’s advance. Worst-case scenario, Laila will have somehow gained the Gate.”
“Fail-safes?” Nuka whimpered. “Issi.”
“Act like you’ve got a quad,” Ane snorted, petting the slimy muzzle of her microwave spitter as she sidled up to Pipaluk. The weapon purred at the subgineer’s touch and Pipaluk made a mental note to invite Ane over for a soak in her breeding bath when they were safely home - the Ingeniøri’s whiskers needed a serious stroking and she had a feeling this was just the Voormi to give it to her. This wasn’t really the time for such concerns, admittedly, but stress always made Pipaluk’s glands overproduce.
“Remember,” Pipaluk said, as her fingers danced over the airlock’s panel, “we need to stop Laila at all costs. Alive to stand trial is preferable but by no means necessary. The main thing will be avoiding the fail-safes, if those idiots have opened the airlock, and the Professori’s formless spawn if they haven’t. We may already be too late, so from here on out, we move faster than fast, got it? Now, let’s get this heretic.”