by F. G. Cottam
She emerged instead from this furious, elemental challenge into light and calm on an ocean on Endrimor and the fabled port city of Salabra glistened and preened well within distance of guns with an effective range of close to eight miles. The command was given, the guns were trained and the bombardment started, the steel flanks of the ship shuddering with the careening force of shells propelled towards their defenceless target.
The War Cabinet should never have been told about the shadow world. The secret should have been maintained among the few. Whose decision it had been to share the knowledge generally was a detail lost to time. There had been no cabinet minutes taken. The shared brotherhood of crisis, the camaraderie, had probably been to blame, McGuire thought. But telling men as vain as Lloyd George and belligerent as Churchill about the real cause of the war and the ancient enemy responsible for provoking it was simply foolish.
The first salvos shrieked through alien air. The city in the distance shuddered. The tars raised a spontaneous cheer that thrilled through the ship. Round after round tore through the vacant sky, the shells so enormous that their trajectory could be followed by the naked eye almost on to their target. And the man who had not been McGuire but someone else in that far-off time, studied the golden city they should have been destroying and had his first inkling that all was not as it should have been with their surprise assault.
The more he studied Salabra, the less clearly defined it looked. None of the shells were exploding there. The city in the distance seemed to swallow them. He swallowed himself, saliva acrid with the cordite he was inhaling as it belched forth from the gun barrels. And he realized with a sick lurch in the pit of his stomach that they were looking at a mirage, the illusion of a target.
Sulphur filled his nostrils and his senses reeled. The steel floor juddered under him. The metal sang. Beneath their hull the sea had begun to boil. A sailor passed him along the deck stiff-legged in his blues, walking only from memory, voyaged in his unblinking eyes to some destination from which he would never return. The barrage had stopped. McGuire, who was not then McGuire, looked about him through the thinning mist of their fire. Crewmen no longer toiled over martial tasks. They moved routinely but with the spasmodic stiffness now of marionettes about their purpose.
Escape became his sole imperative. He fingered the stolen charm worn around his neck as a precaution. He knew where they were now and, knowing, realized there was no way back for the great battle cruiser or its company. The illusion of land had become entirely absent, he saw. There was no stretch of coastline at the horizon. Salabra no longer glittered. The port city gleaming proudly in their gun sights had never been there to destroy. They were stranded in a waste of simmering ocean. They were adrift on the Miasmic Sea, that wilderness of enchanted water from which no sailor was ever freed.
He needed to get away. The command to abandon ship would never come aboard Incomparable. The captain and his senior officers on the bridge were spellbound, no longer capable of issuing commands. But it was every man for himself nevertheless. He muttered the incantation taught him by the Dowager Countess of Sarth, reciting the words as a dying man might mutter his last, beseeching prayer.
They executed the Turk who had baited the trap. Now it was clear that he had been turned by Endrimor and told God knew what beguiling lie about the reward that would be his in whatever afterlife they had inspired him to believe in. McGuire attended the execution. Its subject died with a smile, the light of anticipation only leaving his hopeful eyes in the moment of death.
That came with the drop and an audible snap of the neck that was no consolation to those gathered in secrecy to witness the event. The loss of the ship was a small thing in the context of the losses inflicted by the war, but the manner of that loss was hard to take. It was difficult to see the fate of Incomparable as other than the shadow world’s ghastly joke.
‘You violated the peace of a tranquil world with a vast weapon of war. Why on earth was the attack sanctioned?’
The words were spoken from behind him. The narcissistic boy had returned to gloat. McGuire clutched the pier railings, the metal chill against his palms, his cane propped against his leg, a cold winter coming on and feeling every day of his considerable age. ‘The tranquil world you speak of provoked the war that brought that weapon into being.’
‘You are a liar.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I was one of Professor Stuart Grayling’s students. I won’t be going back. He perpetuates the Great Lie, as you do. I won’t go back to Cambridge to be peddled myths about our history.’
‘Dray told you about the Miasmic Sea?’
From behind him came only silence.
‘What do you think happened to Incomparable?’
‘She sank in a squall.’
McGuire laughed.
‘What’s funny?’
‘I wish she had sunk in a squall, young man. But she did not. She toils still through the water, a vast and rusting hulk, her crew somewhat weathered and threadbare by now, I should think, shuffling as wooden as mannequins through their endless servitude.’
‘That’s insane.’
‘You’re an educated young man. You’ll have heard of the siren song and the legend of the Flying Dutchman. Those myths originated somewhere. They were not dreamed out of nothing. You are right that what I suggest is insane. But Endrimor is a place where madness thrives. And you meddle with the shadow world at your peril.’
‘Are you a man fit to speak of peril?’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Dray said you imperilled your soul when you evoked magic that was not yours to use. He says that doing so has guaranteed you a long life, the span a sorcerer might enjoy, but there will be a reckoning when you die and you have not the means to pay it.’
McGuire released his grip on the pier railings and picked up his cane, aware of the tremor in his right hand as he did so. He tucked the elderly weapon under his arm, resisting the temptation to unsheath the steel and turn and run this impertinent boy through, just to silence his gloating. He felt angry. The truth was provocative as well as painful. But he did not turn. He would not now willingly take another life. He had taken enough of them already.
‘Where are you going?’
The light had gone out of the day. Darkness came earlier each afternoon; the nights were growing longer. ‘I’m sick of hearing you parrot Dray’s platitudes. I’m going home. I suggest you do the same. You might be able to shrug free of whatever enchantment they’ve worked on you. You’ll come to a sorry end if you can’t.’
‘You won’t see out the winter.’
McGuire stopped walking. Still he did not turn. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Jakob Slee did.’
‘Then it is very likely true,’ said McGuire. ‘My, what company you’ve been keeping. There is no hope for you at all.’
Martin looked at his watch with a curse mouthed silently because the bloody thing had stopped again. It had not worked properly since his return from the shadow world and he did not share the precise gift he had witnessed there of knowing the hour to the second without reference to a timepiece.
The sea was orange under the descending sun. He breathed deeply of the cool, salty air and looked down, leaning over the railings, at the water rippling beneath where he stood. His watch was justifiably expensive and had functioned perfectly until his return from his recent other-worldly experience. He would send it back to his dad, who would get it repaired or serviced or whatever was done to restore complex mechanical objects. His dad was good at sorting out problems like that.
The sea was deepening to the colour of blood. Martin began to hum. He was unaware that he was doing this, so he was unaware of the tune he was humming. It was the old prog rock anthem he now listened to all the time on his iPod, the King Crimson track ‘The Court of the Crimson King’.
There was something strange about the motion of the water below. The waves seemed to be moving backwards, like the mirror image
of waves, in rebellious folds of brine that mocked normality and made Martin queasy at their perverse rhythmic retreat. He felt nausea swell in his stomach. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. He put his head on the top rail to cool his brow and gasped as bile rose, gushing into his throat. It scalded his nostrils, dripping from his nose on to the boards between his feet. He opened his mouth, leaned out and puked copiously into the sea.
A party waited to greet us when we arrived in Endrimor, and we were greeted in the most furious and hostile manner. Their warriors are tall and strong and, though I record this truth grudgingly, entirely without fear. Their size enables greater reach with a weapon than any among my own party possessed. They have the advantage in cut and thrust.
We also discovered them most skilled in swordsmanship, and with the battleaxe too, and the bow. Most advantageous to them in the fray, the quality they possess above all else, is their hatred of us. They fight with a fierce and gleeful loathing for everything of our world, which they seek only to destroy.
We matched them in strength, and in truth more, for they outnumbered us. But a company of thirteen cannot defeat the armed might of an entire kingdom. Left to the choice I would have fought as outlaws fight, as the terrier worries at the belly of the wolf when the wolf is distracted and its natural malice thereby for the moment diminished. My intent was to lie low and forage, and wait and watch and learn our enemy and how to pass among them while I planned the particulars of the strike. We were not there for the many blows of battle but for the one public and symbolic blow that would end a singular and loathsome life.
The cross is only the start, the alchemist Brandt had cautioned. The pass is the significant thing. The pass follows the cross and if you cannot pass, you will die in the shadow world, go to an unmarked grave there, exiled, obscure and unlamented.
You must copy their speech and manner and dress. You must eat and sleep and live as they do. You must learn even to think as they do to the point where it is as natural to you as your own instinct. You must do all of this, while never forgetting the secret of who you are and the one reason why you are there. Do thus or you will fail.
But I go before myself in the telling of the tale. I have never retreated in the field, but must do so now in my account. Unfamiliar with the construction of stories, I have neglected to detail the particulars of our arrival. The tale is straightforward enough, though. It requires no great craft or imagination to render my truthful recalling of real events. And my memory of what took place is as sharp as was the edge of my sword in that long-ago time.
The clear weather held through the second night and the brisk wind made our progress swift. Fog was sighted by our Hanover pilot as it began to get light and we found our voyage had delivered us amid a cluster of islands so numerous as to be beyond counting. We anchored shortly after dawn in a thick, befuddling layer of this enveloping greyness. Our horses were delivered on to the deck and we groomed and saddled them as they fed from their feeding bags, then we mounted and a gangway was dropped, splashing into the tide.
‘North,’ our captain said. His voice was no more than a murmur as he held the bridle of my horse and raised his eyes to mine in the grey gloom. ‘It lies straight ahead of you. When the sand turns to grass under the hooves of your mount, when the mist thins, you are there, sire. Go and may good fortune go with you.’
We clattered down the gangway and thundered over the sand. The mist thinned and I felt the firming of the ground under my mount as the very air changed in scent and texture with sudden strangeness, and I sensed our deliverance into an alien land. Then I saw the glimmer of armour between trees in early light and heard the snort of steeds: a war party positioned to guard against this rude breach of their world.
That welcoming fight was ferocious. We could let none of them live beyond the moment to warn generally of our arrival. Dead men would be missed, but the dead spread word less quickly than the living. Reluctant to die, our foes were not shy of killing. The clash of arms was a furious clamour amid the trees of that small wood, sparks struck with the collision of steel on steel as blade and mace ball struck breastplate and helm. Horses whinnied and cried and bled in pumping gouts of purple where they were cut. The maimed cried out in pain and panic. I myself cleaved two men almost in half in their saddles as the tide turned and battle descended into slaughter.
We duly killed them all. We did so with the loss of four most excellent men of mine own company. Before slaying the last of them, a warrior grievously wounded, I listened for a while to his speech to learn something of the tone and temper of their language. The sounds seemed sympathetic to the tongue, not a difficult dialect to mimic and learn, I thought, as he cursed us until I wearied of his no doubt blasphemous wrath and performed the clean thrust that silenced him forever.
We burned their bodies on a fierce pyre to disguise as best we could the method of their violent end. But as the flesh melted off their bones, the wounds could still clearly be seen where they had been hacked in places to the marrow by our blows. Our own dead we took away with us.
Brandt had told me very little about the shadow world but did inform me of the whereabouts of the city state from which the land was ruled. There I would find the Court of the Crimson King. And in that treacherous labyrinth of magick and flattery, I would discover too Hieronymus Slee. The city was called Salabra. In relation to the gateway of entry, this city is located 200 leagues to the south. We laid-up until darkness fell and then headed north. We had our dead to bury, a language to master, a disguise to effect before we were discovered and outmanned, and then overwhelmed and slain.
By then we numbered only nine, but the mood among the nine survivors was defiant. We had won a battle and with victory came elation. I did not revel in this myself but was happy to feel its spread among the men I led. It lightened the hooves of the horses under us. It made insignificant the pain of our wounds.
We found a stream where the water appeared clean and untainted and we drank deeply of it and filled the light cask that was all we carried for the purpose, for we had brought with us nothing but the weapons we were armed with and the commitment in our hearts.
We saw no living person, only the odd corpse of men and women crucified at the wayside for the crows to pick over. They were nailed to their crosses upside down. Most curious were the parchments pinned above their pale, blood-drained feet. They bore characters writ bold but of course, we could not read them.
We saw no living thing but woodland birds and squirrels and some scavenging forest creatures, in appearance somewhere between foxes and wild dogs. We shot with bow and cleaned and then cooked various items of game on the spit once we made camp when night had fallen. The dog creatures were both fishy and tough. The birds and squirrels were succulent, their flesh tender and sweet.
The strangeness of the shadow world announced itself at night. Then it truly stirred, roused into a dark life it was a mercy and a curse at the same time to be denied the sight of.
It was on that first night we heard the great avian monsters wheeling through the black skies above us. The wind from their beating wings stirred the grass and stank most foully. Their cries were a ragged, piercing sound, a noise fit for hell itself that woke a sleeping man with a rude start of terror and confusion from his rest. The further north we progressed, the greater the profusion, it seemed, of these flying beasts. Yet it was weeks before I saw one.
What settlements we saw over those first weeks were heavily fortified. We travelled warily and stayed well wide of them. They were scant in number. Sentinels were not posted. At least, we never saw any and I do not believe we were seen. I came to believe that the fortifications were made not as a precaution against mortal enemies but against those great night creatures of which we were becoming more aware the more desolate the land around us became.
We scavenged and stole over those weeks to live but killed no one and destroyed nothing on our quiet northern progress. We had no wish to encourage pursuit. The land was bountiful enoug
h to support life. The population of the shadow world seemed very thinly spread. Even after the affliction of the Great Pestilence, England was more populous.
It made me wonder whether envy might have been the urge that prompted the alchemist Slee in his foul industry. This land did not thrive in people in the way ours did before the plague, and the executions, though plentiful enough, could not themselves account for the lack. It was strange. But not as strange as what was to follow.
Towards the end of the second month, I allowed myself the belief that we had not been followed. We had put substantial distance between ourselves and the gateway through which we had entered Endrimor. I did not know what conclusion had been reached by our enemies about the battle fought there and the charred bodies we had left behind, but there seemed no general panic abroad, and I was sure I would have sensed even the stealthiest pursuit.
We still numbered nine. We had grown accustomed to the country. We had waited long enough for any general alarm to desist. We could achieve nothing more without the language. We needed a trade route, a crossroads. We required some place from which an educated man could be taken and used. I would befriend him and encourage him to talk on the promise of his eventual freedom. When I had learned their language fluently from him, I would kill him. I might do this with reluctance, but we could not imperil our mission and I knew that God would forgive the lie.
We duly discovered our crossroads. I dispatched four men to carry out the abduction. Their ambush did not go well. The caravan they attacked was guarded more heavily than my party supposed. There was an armed escort of four horses and more men concealed in the rear wagon of their train.
Only two of my patrol returned, one mortally wounded and with only hours of life left to him. They brought with them, bound, a native who transpired to be of affluence and education and great and surprising cultural accomplishment. But their hostage was a woman. And to complicate matters, Eleanor Bloor was youthful and comely. I knew the moment I laid eyes on her that I would never be able to do her violent harm.