Fantasy Gone Wrong

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  “It’s just a tale,” said Shaggyback.

  “It might not be,” the old woman said. “Better let me look before anyone else—I can see through any glamor. It won’t hurt me.”

  “Yes it will,” the elf said insistently. “Nothing with intelligence can resist the sight of it.”

  “Better let Hammertoes take the first look, then,” said someone in the crowd—at which point a scuffle broke out.

  “Stop that!” Shaggyback commanded. “He’s lying. Somebody had to put it in the bag. If it was put in, it can be taken out. Right, Mother?” He obviously hadn’t taken the hint about the Brotherhood of the Unseeing Eye.

  “It could be direly dangerous,” the sorceress opined gravely. “I’d need at least a forty percent share of the sale price—not for myself, you understand, but to keep my potion stocks up to strength, for the sake of the common good.”

  While the haggling went on, Umsonofer had time to think. He could see only one way out of his predicament that would leave his feet intact for the walk to the end of the world, so when the dwarfs had settled their dispute, he told the sorceress what the spellkey was. Then he shut his eyes, and waited.

  Fortunately, having such a tremendous advantage of numbers, the dwarfs hadn’t bothered to tie their prisoner up. More than once, in similar situations, Umsonofer had had to work himself free before he could even begin groping around for the chalice.

  The game of seek-and-find had never been unduly difficult, because no one had ever contrived to hide the doomsday device, or even release it in such a way that it fell into a deep hole or rolled into an inconveniently narrow gap. Even so, it was never pleasant rummaging among so many dead bodies—and it wasn’t just the chalice he had to find. He also had to find the bag in which to secure it. Even though he was only four miles away, he could hardly walk to the edge of the world with his eyes tightly shut—not, at least, if he hoped to come back safely from the brink.

  It took him ten minutes to locate the chalice, and another thirty to find the bag, put the chalice inside, and recite the spellkey to seal it again.

  By the time he opened his eyes again the only source of light was the red glow of the fire’s dwindling embers; the last of the candles the dwarfs had lit before proceeding to their fatal orgy had flickered out. Fortunately his long experience as a groper in the dark had taught Umsonofer to take such difficulties in his ample stride. He located more candles easily enough, and there was enough heat left in the embers to set one aglow. He had been anxious, when the dwarfs had begun to discuss cooking and eating him, that there might not be a crumb to eat in the house, but he found some bread and salted meat, and even a few potatoes—but he wasn’t about to start cooking in the midst of twenty reeking corpses when he was only four miles short of his goal.

  There had been a certain amount of fighting over the chalice, as there always was, but once the dwarfs had all had a chance to slake their uncanny thirst, the party had lost its zip. They had all had time to lie down and make themselves comfortable before passing away. The expressions on their faces were by no means blissful; their dreams had turned to nightmares before the end. Umsonofer was glad to close the door behind him.

  He had brought a candle out with him, mounted in a ray, but its light was very feeble. The clouds weren’t supposed to drift beyond the world’s limit, but the clouds presently in the sky had either lost their bearings or didn’t know the rule; the few stars visible through the gaps shed too little light to help him comfortably on his way. The building in which he’d been confined had been the hamlet’s communal blockhouse, but the shadows of several other sleeping huts were discernible in the gloom, as were two big barns and a couple of empty pigsties. He could have bedded himself down for the night easily enough, but he wasn’t sure that the chalice had killed every dwarf in the neighborhood. Besides, there might be worse things than bandit dwarfs around—things that could scent dead meat from miles away, once the breeze had carried it that far.

  In any case, his head was hurting too much to let him sleep.

  Umsonofer started walking as soon as he had figured out which way the edge of the world must lie. He used his left hand to protect the flame of his candle from the wind, and resisted the temptation to move so quickly that he would be in danger of tripping. He had to make every effort to avoid breaking his neck and leaving the chalice to be picked up by some greedy ghoul or inquisitive ogre, who might carry it back in toward the center. Eventually he found the bank of the stream he had jumped earlier, and followed its course toward the Big Drop.

  “Why me?” he asked himself, talking aloud in order to have the company of his voice. “Why, of all the elves in all the world, did I have to end up with this lousy job?”

  The questions were rhetorical—which was perhaps as well, given that Umsonofer was no philosopher. The simple answer was that somebody had to do it who knew how to keep his eyes tightly shut and his wits about him. When it came to not peeping, Umsonofer was a real champion; it wasn’t a talent that was useful for much else, but in this particular context it was invaluable—and Ladamesansmerci, the greatest elvish sorceress in the world, had spotted it. If only she hadn’t been 666 years old, the gratitude she’d expressed when he’d agreed to take on the mission would have been a good deal easier to bear.

  In daylight, even in his present wretched state, Umsonofer would have covered the four miles to the world’s edge in an hour. In the dark it took more than two. He never lost his footing, though, and—even more importantly—he managed to see the edge before accidentally stepping over it. His candle sputtered out immediately thereafter, but that didn’t matter. Although there were clouds massing in the sky behind him, the sky above the empty space that stretched away from the world’s rim was much clearer, and the sky directly in front of him was full of stars.

  Although he had an elf’s height, and had come to a stop no more than ten elvish paces from the world’s edge, Umsonofer couldn’t see whether the stars extended downward to form a vast sphere around the floating world—as orthodox opinion had it—or whether their realm came to a stop somewhere beneath the horizontal, giving way to a bottomless pit of darkness, as some minority believers asserted. He couldn’t tell, either, whether the world was a flat disk like a dinner plate or the flat top of an infinitely deep column. The temptation to take a look over the edge was easily resistible for an elf with his talent for not peeking.

  He took the bag containing the chalice out of his pack, and hurled it with all his might. It was a good throw; the bag sailed over the rim of the world and fell out of sight. Perhaps it would fall forever, and perhaps not. Umsonofer didn’t care about that, just as long as it never came back. In spite of his headache he felt a surge of relief and a sense of triumph as he turned on his heel to head back to civilization.

  Alas, the ground gave way beneath his feet as the edge of the world suffered yet another landslip, and he found himself falling, along with a slowly disintegrating mass of stony soil and tangled vegetable matter.

  At first he was lost in confusion, and the shadow of the world seemed to fill half the sky, but once Umsonofer had been falling for an hour or so—by which time panic had faded into numb acceptance of his destiny—he was able to determine a few mildly intriguing facts.

  The world was definitely not the flat top of a cylindrical column; it was a disk, albeit one that was much flatter on top than underneath, its nether surface being curved and exceedingly lumpy. Nor was the disk supported on any other structure or entity; it floated free, buoyed up against the force that had gripped Umsonofer by some mysterious counterforce. All this he could see by the light of the sun, which now seemed horizontal to his own position as it painstakingly made its way around the bottom of the world prior to rising again in the east.

  The stars did not form a perfect sphere around the world—or if they did, there was something else between the nether surface of the world and the downward stars, something that was considerably broader than the world. It looked li
ke a vast glowing mist, although he could not tell from his present height whether it glowed by its own light or merely reflected the light of the sun.

  As the world continued to dwindle in the sky, until it was no more than a coin-size black circle eclipsing a mere dozen stars, Umsonofer realized how tiny and insignificant a creature he was, and how small the world was by comparison with the universe that contained it. Although he had never been a philosopher, the idea that there might be more worlds than one, scattered upon the face of infinity like seeds on a freshly plowed field, seemed slightly more relevant, as well as more likely, than it ever had before.

  “Well,” he said philosophically, “I guess I’ll die a wiser elf than I’ve lived.”

  The stars were growing dimmer, though, because Umsonofer’s view was compromised by the slowly spreading detritus of the landslip. When he had started to fall, the ground that had given way had all been beneath him; but as the huge clod came apart, some of the particles were rising up around him—or, to be strictly accurate, appeared to do so because they were falling at a slightly lower speed than he was. He was gradually enveloped by a haze in which particles of dust mingled with what he first took for rain, although he eventually realized that it must be water from the stream he had followed to the world’s edge—which, Umsonofer realized now, had probably been a stupid thing to do.

  If he fell far enough—and he had, as yet, no particular reason to think that he might not fall forever—the debris falling with him might eventually become dense enough to blind him and choke him. In the meantime, he could probably obtain enough water to avoid dying of thirst, although hunger might be a different matter.

  “Well,” the elf said, trying desperately to find a bright side to his predicament, “at least I got rid of the human doomsday weapon. Elfkind is safe—along with dwarf-kind, trollkind, and all the rest—until the world falls apart completely. Which won’t be for tens of thousand of years, at the present rate of attrition. I’m a hero.”

  He still had some bread and salted meat in his pocket, so he was able to make a meal while he fell—and then, as his headache eased sufficiently, he was able to go to sleep.

  His dreams were pleasant enough—at least, that was the impression he had before he forgot them completely.

  As he emerged by degrees from sleep—without opening his eyes—Umsonofer’s first impression was that he must still be falling through empty space, but he found out quickly enough that he was lying on something solid, which felt like compacted earth. Evidently, Umsonofer thought—conscientiously applying his newfound wisdom—the philosophers who favored the idea that bodies falling in empty space did so with a constant and relatively gentle velocity were not the crazy dreamers that almost everyone assumed.

  He opened his eyes, but it was pitch-dark.

  “Hello?” he croaked. He had not intended to croak, but it took him some little while to moisten his mouth enough to call out more loudly. “Is anyone there?”

  There was a meager trickle of light as a feeble lantern was unshielded. “Shh!” said a voice. “The little ones are trying to sleep.”

  By the wan light of the lantern, Umsonofer saw a face looming out of the darkness a few feet from his own. He had never seen a human face before, except in cautionary works of art, but he had no difficulty recognizing this one for what it was—an adolescent human female—and he cried out in horror.

  “It’s all right,” a slightly peevish voice informed him. “You’re not in the afterworld, condemned to eternal torment for the genocidal crimes of your vile species. You’re in the Web, where all the world’s jumpers end up—in a burrow actually, a quarter of a mile or so from where the lump that came down with you ended up. Might make a nice burrow itself, that one, although we probably won’t need another for a long time to come, unless you’re the first of a whole crowd. The scavengers are picking over it at present—not much in the way of edible tubers, they reckon, but plenty of nice fat worms, and they’ll be able to fill their bottles and skins from the waterfall while they’re over that way.”

  Umsonofer’s eyes had adjusted to the light well enough to show him that they were in some sort of cave, thirty feet in diameter at its widest, with tunnel entrances at either end. Apart from the human adolescent there were half a dozen sleeping children lying to either side of him. He felt a pang of relief as he realized that they weren’t all human. One was an elf; three were dwarfs.

  “Don’t get many elf jumpers in these parts,” the human said. “Little Mindarofurk will be pleased to meet you, and so will Landameofurkh. I’m Isabel, by the way.”

  “I’m not a jumper,” Umsnofer said dully. “I fell.”

  “You’d be surprised how many say that,” Isabel told him. “It’s okay to change your mind on the way down; practically everybody does. Something to do with getting the world’s problems in perspective as you watch it shrink to insignificance, according to the oldster elves. I was born down here, of course, like all human folk for a dozen generations. And no, we’re not at war with elves and dwarfs. Down here, we all work together—have to, because of the spiders. If you loathe humans as much as some of your kind, you’re welcome to try your luck with the spiders, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Giants, are they?” Umsonofer asked.

  “Oh yes—but that’s not the half of it. Spiders can only eat liquid food, so if they catch you they truss your arms and legs up in swathes of silk and feed you all sorts of things to fatten you up, until they shoot you full of poison that dissolves your insides, so they can suck you slowly dry. They’re seriously nasty—and clever too. Hang on—here’s the oldsters coming back in a hurry. They’ve probably got one on their tail.”

  As she completed the last sentence more humans began to wriggle out of both tunnel entrances, in company with dwarfs. The sole elf came last of all, making up a party of nine. All the newcomers were dragging sacks made of some kind of silk, heavy with miscellaneous plunder.

  It was the elf who came to speak to Umsonofer. “I’m Landameofurkh,” she said. “Has Isabel told you where you are?”

  Umsonofer introduced himself. “Some kind of spider-web beneath the world,” he said. “More specifically, in a burrow excavated in one of the larger lumps of earth that’s recently fallen off our world’s edge.”

  “Right,” said Landameofurkh. “How are you feeling? Still want to die, or are you ready to take a second stab at life?”

  “I never did want to die,” Umsonofer told her. “I just came to the edge of the world to throw something off and got caught by a land. . . . ” The slip stuck in his throat as he saw, over Landameofurkh’s shoulder, one of the humans take the bag containing the poisoned chalice out of his silken sack.

  “Feels like a cup,” the human announced, palpating the chalice inside its container. “Can’t get the bag open, though. Some kind of elvish spellseal on it. Bag might be as useful as whatever’s inside, if we can get the trick of it. How about it, Landameofurkh?”

  It occurred to Umsonofer that the sensible thing to do was to keep quiet, and not let on that he knew anything about the mysterious bag—but Landameofurkh had seen the expression on his face, and he had already told her too much.

  “That’s what you threw off the edge?” the elf said to him. “Why?”

  “It’s a weapon,” he said, tersely. “Something too dangerous to look at. Fatal, in fact.”

  “That’s silly,” said the human who was holding the bag. “Who could possibly make a weapon that was fatal to anyone who looked at it?” He was presumably descended from humans who had jumped before the last of the Magic Wars; he’d never heard of the Brotherhood of the Unseeing Eye.

  “A blind man,” Umsonofer told him tersely. “Or a whole company of blind men.”

  “Is that man in the broad sense, or the narrow sense?” the human asked, although he must have known that when an elf said “man” he invariably meant “human.”

  “Don’t try to open it,” Umsonofer said. “If you have an
y sorcerers down here, don’t take it to them. Just let it be. In fact, if there’s a bottom side to this Webworld, just let me take it down there and drop it again.”

  “Human manufacture,” said the human softly, glancing sideways at the three other adult members of his species who were present, and then at Isabel. “Not so dangerous then, considering how the Wars eventually worked out. Are you disappointed to discover that it’s only the humans on the flying island who were exterminated?”

  “That’s not fair, Kasimir,” Landameofurkh objected. “Down here, we all work together. The only enemy we have is the spiders.

  “Absolutely,” Kasimir said. “And the only weapons we have are sticks and stones and a few blunt knives. So if this one will work on spiders, it might be useful, no matter how dangerous it is to elves, dwarfs, and the like.”

  “Humans too,” Umsonofer was quick to say, realizing the direction in which Kasimir’s thoughts were heading. “Humans made it, that’s true—but not until all hope of winning the war was lost. It wasn’t intended to turn the tide—it was intended to drag the other races down along with humans. Anyone who looks at it falls victim to it—anyone with the intelligence to be deluded by its glamor. It wouldn’t work against a spider, though, no matter how big.”

  Kasimir thought about it for a moment before saying: “You can’t know that. You can’t know that it kills humans, if you elves didn’t find it until the last human in the world was already dead—and you can’t know that it won’t kill the spiders down here, since we know far better than you how smart they are. But Landameofurkh’s right—down here, we all work together, so I don’t want you or anyone else endangered. We can test both questions at the same time, if you’ll tell me the spellkey. Three spiders chased us away from the fresh fall and they’re prowling around outside right now. One of us—one of us humans, that is—can take the bag to the burrow entrance, and open it there. If it kills the spiders, but not the man, we’ll finally have the means to turn the tide in this long losing battle of ours. If it kills the spiders and the man, someone with his eyes tight shut will have to put it back in the bag, and we’ll have to make careful plans for its future use. If it kills the man but not the spiders, then I’ll agree with you that it’s useless, and we’ll drop it off the bottom of the world—but we have to try. We got a lot more jumpers in the old days than we do nowadays, and we’ve been dying faster than our kids are born for twenty years and more.”