by Jack Conner
“We’ll leave you now,” said a priest.
“I’ll take good care of him,” the young woman said.
“Enjoy the next hour or so, my child,” the second priest said. “Soon others will come for you. You and these brothers and sisters of yours shall be taken to walk the Road.”
“I’m Zassei,” said the girl, after the priests had withdrawn. Her eyes sparkled, and her blond hair smelled of flowers. Technically she wore a dress, but what it concealed Avery couldn’t quite tell. She took one of his hands and kissed it, then took the other. “Oh, I admire you and the other Travelers so much. I envy you. So brave! A pilgrim to Paradise.”
“Um ...”
She smiled and ran a hand down to his crotch, which she began to massage. Pushing her breasts against him, she purred, “Your paradise starts right now.”
“Ah ... excuse me.”
He shed himself of Zassei, found a staircase and retreated upstairs. Most of the bedrooms were occupied, but he found a study that seemed quiet. However, when he switched on the light he found a woman smoking a cigarette against the window. She was middle-aged and dowdy, but her bespectacled gaze seemed open enough.
“Not enjoying the party?” she asked, turning.
He closed the door behind him. He could still hear the music.
“I’m afraid not,” he said. Clearing his throat, he added, half bowing and using his alias, “I’m Huls Nocan, at your service.”
“Sola Ronztag, pleased to meet you.” She smiled faintly at his formality. “I take it you’re a brother of the Road.”
“I am. Who are those young men and women ... ah, entertaining our fellows?”
“Oh, they live here, in the Sphere of Reflection. An order of nuns and monks. I thought everyone had heard of them. The Sons of Hath and Daughters of Selith.”
“Nuns?”
“Yes, of course. Really, you didn’t know about them? It’s their duty to alleviate the aches and pains of those who’ve given themselves to the Road.”
“Ah.” Holy prostitutes. He should have known. A reward for the ultimate service. The Collossum were thorough, he had to give them that. Bribes both tangible and intangible.
She blew a stream of smoke out the window. Somewhere birds were chirping. “I personally don’t like ... I mean, I look forward to being rid of this flesh. Don’t you?”
“Oh. Absolutely.”
“Just think of it! We’ll get to journey beyond the stars, beyond the planes of the universe. Oh, it will be magical. We’ll dance with the gods in their own dimensions.”
“You make it sound ... nice.”
“Oh, it will be, Huls. All it takes is to leave this husk behind. If we can do that, we get eternity with the gods themselves.”
She indicated a bottle of wine that sat on the nearby desk. She may have disdained the carnal acts, but she was not a teetotaler. “Would you like to share?” she said.
Some time later, they heard the chimes. Feeling fortified from the wine, Avery emerged to see men and women buttoning clothes and pulling up pants; they streamed around him and down the stairs. He and Sola joined the tide and soon were among those gathered in the living area. An especially tall priest stood at the head of the room, and he commanded everyone’s attention. His grayish skin had the look of an octopus’s, but his teeth were sharp and triangular, and set in rows. He wore brilliant scarlet robes, and a tall scarlet-and-gold headdress mounted his head. The High Priest, Avery supposed.
When all the Spirits were present, the High Priest, if it was he, said, “It is time.”
The women from the order of Selith and men from the order of Hath said their farewells, squeezing hands and kissing cheeks, then departed, while the tall priest led the group outside, where half a dozen more priests waited, all in dark scarlet robes and carrying ceremonial staffs.
“The Road beckons,” called the High Priest, “and we are to take you to it. Know that we and Those we serve honor you and thank you, and we wish you joy in the Realm of Scintillate Light. Now come.”
The sacrifices fell in behind him as he led them through the grounds, toward the innermost wall, the wall that divided the Sphere of Reflection from the abode of the gods. The other priests accompanied them to the sides, unobtrusively, and Avery was reminded of shepherds leading their flocks to the slaughter. Before them he began to see, rising over the trees of the garden and the wall ahead, the marvelous towers and domes of the Great Temple. In moments he would be in the true lair of the Collossum.
Suddenly a bout a sickness came over him. He sagged against a tree and coughed wretchedly. He felt as if one of his lungs was about to rupture. His legs shook. His striations burned.
A priestess approached. “All you all right, my child?”
Avery offered her a nod. His face must be sheened with clammy sweat. “Just ... just catching my breath. Had a bit ... too much to drink.”
“Do you need to stay behind?”
He forced himself up. “No. No, I’m ready.”
He fell in with the others and continued on. The Collossum were waiting.
* * *
They passed through a beautiful archway and down a long tunnel, the passage from the world of men to the world of the divine. Avery suddenly felt nauseous—fear, he knew, not sickness, though he still felt shaky.
To his disappointment, the hall did not spill out into some fantastic courtyard, moat or garden. The tunnel merged directly into the corridors of the Temple. The wall that was the innermost ring of separation on the island doubled as outermost wall of the Temple. In effect, the Sphere of Reflection served as the buffer between the Temple and the outer world.
The halls soared, high and colorful, some purplish, some scarlet, some mottled to resemble the scales of fabulous fish. And over it all sounded the trickling and gurgling of water. The very floors seemed composed of water, and they were in a sense. Channels of the river had been artfully sewn into the fabric of the Temple so that streams gushed under the feet of any who walked its halls; the floors were glass, or something like glass. Looking down, Avery could clearly see the bubbling, electric waters of the Curlusc—could even see the occasional fish or other denizen of the river shoot by. The sacrifices murmured appreciatively.
At times they crossed over bridges with no glass underfoot, and strange fish and other things leapt and swam below. Some looked quite unwholesome, with tentacles growing through blind eyes, or eyes sprouting from grayish gums. One spat something at Avery, and the balustrade smoked where the gob had landed.
Deeper and deeper the priests led their herd, and Avery heard weird, rhythmic chanting susurrating off the walls, blending in the unmistakable noise of water ahead—churning, bubbling water. The halls seemed to twist and wind randomly, yet organically, as if they mapped out some otherworldly, living labyrinth, and Avery wondered if the tunnels shifted in time to the movement of the stars or perhaps some horrible gastronomical event. Weird smells began to assail him, and equally weird feelings and thoughts. The very floor under his feet seemed to shift and slide, and the walls began to pulse, flexing in and out like the throbbing of veins. All in my head, he thought. Somehow the presence of the Elders affects humans. Either that, or their presence actually twisted reality around them. He didn’t know which he preferred.
Without warning, a tall, vaguely shrimp-like being emerged from a side-hall, and the priests paused to let it pass. Its cilia and antennae waved majestically. The Journeyers gasped in wonder, Avery along with them. The priests resumed herding their group down the passages when it had gone. Other creatures skittered along the walls, even slumped along the ceilings; one being that resembled something like a puffer-fish made of diamond and smoke, but ten feet in diameter, actually bobbed through the air. The Journeyers murmured appreciatively. Avery knew that some of these were of the pre-human intelligent races that served the R’loth; others were beings they had created for their own purposes or brought as familiars from their own realm. He had been told that many other creature
s he couldn’t even see passed all around him, only tangentially connected to this plane but subservient to the R’loth; Layanna had told him they paid little attention to matters on this dimension but carried out errands for the R’loth on others. Either way, Avery (and he was sure the others) felt more and more like he was passing into the innards of an alien world. Only in their case it was the realm of the gods.
“Almost there,” the High Priest announced. “You’re about to set your feet on the Road.”
The sacrifices shot each other eager or apprehensive glances. Avery tried to appear excited.
“The Road!” Sola said, walking beside him. “Finally!”
“It will be glorious,” Avery said.
“The Journey will be exquisite,” declared a man to Avery’s other side. “We’ll hear the music of the Revered in Their own dimension. We will dance and sing and rejoice with Them forevermore.”
“We will bask in Their glow, and it will transform us.”
“It will be marvelous!”
“Glorious!
“Praise the Collossum!”
“Praise them,” Avery echoed, with a sideways look to Sola, whose eyes beamed in anticipation. He hated himself for allowing it.
She was so transfixed that she did not take notice when he seemed to realize his shoes were untied and stooped to lace them. The tide of sacrifices swept past, their eager feet taking them toward oblivion. As Avery pretended to tie his laces, he tugged on the slender object pressed against his foot, trapped by the shoe. Please don’t see this, he directed at the unseen beings around him.
A priest, the last one, paused over him. “We don’t have far to go,” said the fish-man. Iridescent purple scales climbed up his cheeks. “And, not to be indelicate, but you will not need shoes where you’re going. It is not that sort of Road.”
Avery chuckled nervously. “You’re right, of course. I guess I just want to look good for the Revered.”
“Their focus will not be on your shoes, I assure you.”
Avery glanced around, remembering Janx’s advice. The tide of sacrifices and priests was just vanishing around the corner, the patter of their footsteps echoing off the walls to merge with the sound of chanting and susurration. There were no other beings around, not that were visible.
“I’m ready,” Avery said.
“Excell—”
Avery shot up, the wooden knife gripped tightly in his fist, and plunged the sharp blade up through the underside of the priest’s jaw and into his brain. The priest’s eyes snapped wide, and he thrashed as blood spilled down the knife and trickled over Avery’s fingers. Avery had plunged the blade home so hard he had actually lifted the priest onto his tiptoes. Now he lowered the man and let go of the knife. Still thrashing, the priest fell back against the wall and slumped to the floor, where he wriggled and flopped not unlike a dying fish. His eyes bulged, and blood frothed at his lips. At last he lay still.
Thank you, Janx.
Panting, hardly believing he was capable of such cold-blooded murder, and of doing it so well, Avery tugged off the priest’s robe before the blood could ruin it. Without hesitation, he donned the clothing and yanked the knife free, not without some effort. It had become lodged. Wiping it off, he placed it in a pocket—hoping he wouldn’t need it again—then took up the priest’s staff. Finally he dragged the fellow to the nearest bridge and dumped the corpse into the churning waters. A horde of sharp-toothed fish set upon the body, and the waters quickly turned blue-black.
Nervously, Avery looked around to make sure he hadn’t been seen. He hadn’t, and there was no outcry from any other-dimensional beings. Huffing, he caught up with the tide of priests and sacrifices. With the cowl low over his face, he took up position at the end of the line and trailed along as the group continued on. He had the frantic, half-mad urge to scream at the Journeyers, “Run! Run for your lives, you fools! These people’s gods want to eat you!”
The sound of water gurgling ahead grew louder, as did the weird chants. Slowly the group approached a grandiose archway, gilded and glowing of gold. Strange lights bathed the entrance and flooded outward, rippling against the far walls.
This is it, Avery thought. The inner sanctum of the Collossum.
Suddenly his legs felt weak. His breaths came fast and shallow. With a start, he realized he was about to pass out.
No. I can do this. Summoning every last fleeting ounce of courage he possessed, he pushed on.
The priests ushered their flock through the archway and into a cavernous room. Once more Avery experienced the walls pulsing and the floors rippling under his feet, even more powerfully now. The sacrifices exclaimed ecstatically, and more than one dropped to his or her knees to kiss the flooded floor, soaking his or her clothes in the process. The priests made reverential gestures, then—as one—lifted their staffs in greeting or salutation to the occupants of the room. Avery, shrugging off the effects of the Elders’ presence, hastened to raise his staff, too. If the occupants of the room gave any acknowledgement, he didn’t see it.
They were busy.
The room, he saw after some reflection, was very similar to the cavern chamber of the Mnuthra in the nameless ngvandi city in the Borghese. But that chamber, he realized, had been the primitive, caveman version of this one. As that one had, so this chamber’s centerpiece was a great lake-like body of water, frothing and bubbling, electricity or something like it spitting off its surface, in this case water clearly derived from the Atomic River. And as before, magnificent beings seemed to occupy the lake—Avery could just barely see a suggestion of their outlines, vast and formless, rippling far below the surface of the water. Glowing with unearthly lights. The Elders. In a way, the water was their throne, and this was their Throne Room.
The body of water, or watery throne, or whatever it was—which was surely kept charged by constant sacrifices, as well as R’loth technology—stretched perhaps a hundred yards across and was perfectly round, its edges gilded, and water overlapping them to flood the chamber with about in an inch of water, which sucked and crackled around Avery’s feet, and soaked the hem of his robe. The room itself was magnificent. Elaborate bas-reliefs shown on the walls, mosaics blazed from the marble floors, ornate columns held up a domed glass roof with star-light seeping through it, every inch of the walls and archways adorned with some art or scroll-work. It was the equal or greater of any palace throne room Avery had ever heard of. So much alabaster, gold, ivory and marble, all shining, all resplendent, lit only by the otherworldly lights radiated by the Elders and by the starlight overhead—and by one other light source, as well. Much of it was cluttered by the strange familiars of the R’loth, who slithered and flopped across the wet ground or clung to the arching walls or floated through the air, some ghostly, some awful.
The bulk of the Collossum, about fifty of them, kneeled at equidistant points ringing the water. All in their human guises, they closed their eyes and chanted. As they did, strange and unearthly lights formed above the water, waving and swelling in rhythm to their words. Avery thought of the auroras at the world’s poles. Except that these were vaguely abhorrent and made him nauseous to look at, though he could not have said why.
An altar stood before each Collossum, a simple white block of stone. At some unseen signal, the priests began leading their charges around the room, directing one to lay on this altar, one to lay on that one. The Collossum never opened their eyes or stopped praying. They rocked slowly back and forth as they chanted. Avery saw that almost every so-called god was lithe and attractive, many blond. Layanna would fit in among them perfectly. Only a few bore the more average looks of Sartrand.
In fact, with a start, Avery saw Sartrand himself, kneeling before an altar like all the others. The Muugist did not see him, and Avery did not attempt to attract his attention.
Water sloshing about his feet, Avery continued about the circle, helping direct the misguided Travelers onto their final beds. He could not meet their eyes. Their faces were rapturous, expe
ctant, nervous. At any moment they would be transported to the realm of their gods, gods who were only represented on this plane by a mere shell. Among the last to be laid on her slab was Sola. Her face was flushed and serene, but there was a certain apprehension just below the surface. Avery had the urge to squeeze her hand, to reassure her, but he knew he could not. If she looked him in the face it would all be over.
When the sacrifices had all been laid down, the priests withdrew the remainder of the Travelers—less than ten—to the archway. From that point on, the gods ignored them, almost as if they were part of the statuary.
The Collossum continued chanting, their voices swelling and growing, echoing against the marble. The lights over the water began to change, to grow brighter and more violent—and also, somehow, more repugnant. Staring at the awful lights, feeling the water sizzle and hiss around his feet, Avery felt weak. Dizzy. The beings in the water emanated a terrible force, and it made him blink and shake his head. He saw several of the priests give in to it, tilting their faces up and spreading their palms before them, as if basking in the glow of the Elders. It only made Avery want to retch.
Finally the chanting and the lights reached a fever pitch. The men and women on the altars cried out, trembling either in fear or ecstasy, perhaps both. As one, the Collossum shifted. They brought over their other-selves. Fifty nightmarish forms, each different from the other, some huge and especially monstrous, some almost beautiful, surged forward and fell on the altars. With tentacle and pseudopod, with cilia and flanges, they rent and devoured the sacrifices, shoving them into the bulks of their other-selves and letting their acidic insides eat the humans up. Digest them. The men and women screamed and thrashed as the acids dissolved their flesh and bones, as their blood swirled around them and their eyeballs boiled in their sockets, as their cheeks sloughed away and their flesh drooled off their bones. Avery turned away, but it was too late. He had seen Sola screaming, thrashing, her skin peeling away from her skeleton. I am so sorry.