“The houses of Tsath are built of gold and silver. You could pick it up off the ground like trash.”
“Well, I could indeed, but if gold is trash to them, a man must get to thinking, what do they keep for treasure?”
Hull just looked intently at Roherty. The scarred scalphunter puffed at his pipe, lost in thought. He looked, more than anything, like a baby passing wind.
Hull nodded at his throat and shrugged until a pendant on a leather thong around his neck slipped out of his coat and dangled before him. A dull, blue-gray metal, it twisted on the thong and swayed unnervingly when Hull moved, as if drawn to something like a magnet to its own secret pole. “This metal fell from the stars, and there is only a little of it in all the world. Like calls to like, so they cast their idols of Yig and Tulu in it, and use these coins to be led to worship.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant. You know…” Roherty’s lively eye went vague and runny, like his slack one, as if he’d lost his thought, and searched for it in Hull’s impassive copper face. “Shiny stuff…”
Motionless, face streaming sweat, Hull poured all of his will out through his eyes. “You know what they prize above all things.”
Roherty blinked, then grinned wickedly. “I do, at that. Diamonds, but not just little trinket-stones. They use them to work their big medicine, and they’re so precious, they don’t keep them in the city. They keep them hid away in a place even they’re afraid to go to…down yonder, on this very river.”
Hull sagged with relief. “You seem to know more about it than I do.”
Roherty just stared at Hull, as if he was somehow being hoodwinked. He leaned forward and ripped the strange pendant from Hull’s neck. “You’ll lead me to it.”
“You don’t need us. That coin will lead you.”
“Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t. But I don’t plan to go in half-cocked. But what’s got me buffaloed is; how’ve they kept hidden for so long?”
“It is their way to cloud men’s minds, the better to lead them to their deaths. For as long as your kind have been conquering and taming the land above, they have moved among you as cowboys, driving their cattle to slaughter.”
Roherty pursed his lips and sprayed his contempt. “Bullshit! This is the United States of America, not the goddamned Congo! Someone must have known they were down here…”
“Someone has always known,” Hull calmly replied. “Even the Indians who have forgotten the old ways and embraced the cross know in their hearts that Hell is a very real, living place, just beneath their feet. But no one ever asked the Indian what he believed. No one ever asked for anything but his land and his life.”
“That’s right tragic,” Roherty said. “I humbly wish to apologize on behalf of my dastardly white ancestors for fuckin’ up your little Paradise. But this ol’ world is a pie-eating contest, old-timer, and Devil take the hindmost. You don’t finish yours quick enough, somebody’s apt to take it, and that’s just the way the Great Spirit wants it, or why else would it be so?”
Stickney, who was sitting up again, tried to engage Roherty in debate, but Private Parker clubbed his jewels with his rifle butt.
Roherty relit his pipe. “So these cowardly bushwhackers have been hunting white folks for sport since powder-wig days. Why’re they comin’ after your kinfolk, all of a sudden?”
Hull bridled at the claim of kinship with the Comanche, but he ironed the furrows out of his brow before he spoke. “K’n-Yan cut itself off from the outer world ages ago, and would have faded away, but for Malakai. He hungers to revive the most terrible of the Great Old ones of N’Kai: the one called He-Who-Sleeps-Beneath-Us, or Tsathoggua. Even his mad brothers in the Seven Cities would not suffer the terrible changes required to open the eye of the dreaming toad-god, but there are many all over America, who would give their blood and their children’s souls, to see the white man wiped away once and for all. To see his cities drowned in blood, they would give all they have left—”
“Don’t make no nevermind to me, if the redskins want to worship a toad, or the Man in the goddamn Moon. I don’t want their gods, just their loot.”
“Do you believe in God, Mr. Roherty?”
“What the hell kind of question is that? Course I do.”
“And yet you know you will pay in Hell for all the evil that you’ve done. Your God is something to comfort you in the darkness. But for the sake of your soul, He must not be real. There are beings beneath the earth, and under the sea, and in the dark between the stars, who are older than the earth, and yet alive, made of immortal star-stuff, but very real. What else could one call them, Mr. Roherty, but gods? What could one do, when facing their awful undying medicine, but kneel and pray to be spared?”
Tobin Roherty scratched at the scar that split his face, and shivered, shaking with nasty hilarity. “Oh, Lord, help me, I’m so scared! Boys, are you scared?”
Parker and Bledsoe had all but polished off the last of the expedition’s whiskey, and feared nothing.
Hull pressed on. “The man who led the Comanche bands down here has brought them to face the bottomless abyss where Tsathoggua sleeps. They will dance the Backward Path and sacrifice until he awakens. Indian Territory will catch fire with the new faith, and the nation will descend into a second civil war…against the land itself.”
“Well shit, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that mess,” said Roherty. “And thanks to your Uncle Tobin, neither will you.” He leapt up onto the prow of the galley and held out Hull’s coin on its plumbline. “Run us aground up yonder!”
The inky gloom of the riverine cavern had given way to a morbid red glow suffused with sulfurous steam. The air became sultry and stagnant, and steeped in a sour reek like mildew and mold.
Out of the crimson fog came a ragged shore strewn with massive boulders in staggered lines suggesting the collapsed pillars of some insanely vast structure.
Beyond the ruinous shore, a dim skyline of Cyclopean pyramids and toppled towers reached up to penetrate the distant roof of the grotto. This impossibly ancient city dwarfed its blue-lit neighbor Tsath, but it was also far more alien.
Hull finally relented to Stickney’s needling questions. “The men of Tsath settled in the caverns above because they were drawn to the ruins of an older race that rose and fell long before the great thunder lizards died out. It was on their plundered graves that K’n-Yan built their greatest inventions. Their dreaming engines spun matter out of pure energy, and stored souls could fly to new bodies or live forever in their crystal prisms. This is what you’re looking for, Roherty. But if we don’t go down to N’kai now, you’ll have no place above ground to spend your fortune.”
Roherty advanced on Hull with one of his own bowie knives, raised it as if to scalp the half-breed bounty hunter, making his lackeys laugh. He brushed back Hull’s hair and tsked at the ugly knots of scar tissue where his ears once were. “Someone beat me to it,” he sighed. He cut Hull’s bonds and gave him back his Navy revolver.
The galley lurched to a halt on the rocks. Nobody rushed to jump off. The y’m-bhi sat silently at their oars. “All ashore, you maggots!” Roherty shoved Hull over the gunwale, but he landed on his bootheels. Parker shoved the pack mules over the edge into the brackish black shallows, and Bledsoe dragged them out. Roherty kicked the Indian agent overboard, then jumped after and waded ashore.
The city of Yoth was indeed a wonder to behold, but only the highest of its crumbling basalt spires rose above the sunless jungle that had infested the abandoned hothouse grotto. Gargantuan white trees greater than redwoods loomed over them and blocked out all but thin rays of the lurid scarlet light. As they came nearer, they found that the jungle was a riotous plague of grotesque subterranean fungus.
Huge, drooping canopies of mutant mushrooms sprinkled clouds of spores like snow flurries from their pulsing gills as they trudged among the rubble of Yoth. They detoured around monstrous puffballs and undulating fields of slime mold, and curtains of quivering tendrils dangling t
o ensnare the blind white moth-things that swooped and ignited themselves on their torches. They wrapped bandanas over their faces to filter out the overpowering miasma of the fungal rainforest, which only worsened as they pressed closer to the city center.
“How much further?” Stickney tried not to whine, but he could barely breathe through his sodden handkerchief. “I’m near done in, but…I can manage…if I have to…”
“There is a well at the city’s center,” Hull said. “The stairs descend for almost a mile, to the temple over the Black Gulf.”
“But we’re not going there, are we?” Roherty called a halt and looked around the city with Hull’s weird coin out in one hand and a lost look, as if trying to recall a dream. “That one.” He pointed at a hexagonal tower that pierced the roof of the cavern, a mile in the opposite direction from the city center. “You play along, Hull, and maybe you’ll walk out of this a rich half-breed. What the hell is that?”
They had stopped in a broad, fractured plaza where a huge fault line had swallowed half of a pyramid. The eroded paving stones rippled and ranks of freestanding basalt columns tilted and fell over as something huge passed beneath them.
Parker was complaining about his rifle and angling for Roherty to give him Hull’s Sharps gun, when he stepped in something. “Tarnation! Boys, I do believe I jus’ struck oil!”
He lifted his boot off the octagonal paving stones, but a thick, viscous rope of black slime clung to it, stubbornly holding his boot fast to a crack in the ground. More of the stuff oozed out of the crack with the suet-slippery consistency of blood pudding.
“Help me out here, boys,” Parker said as the gusher streamed up his leg, “and I’ll cut you all in for a share.”
Bledsoe reached out to grab his friend. Hull said, “Wait,” but it was too late.
A torrent of glistening black slime exploded out of the crack. Flailing pseudopod clubs and flytrap tentacles wrapped Parker up and dragged back down into the crack, crushing him to pulp within itself as it went. The others could only try to shoot Parker dead before his howling, pulverized remains were sucked out of sight.
“Run,” Hull said.
Roherty climbed onto the base of a splintered obelisk and stuffed his pipe. Bledsoe and the mules turned tail without another thought, but Stickney stood rooted to the spot, even as he wet himself.
The paving stones split asunder and were flung like grenade shrapnel across the plaza. The ground subsided and gave way before them as the full bulk of the formless monstrosity burst into view.
A pulsating column of molten hunger rose up out of the fissure and bristled with trembling cilia, greedily scenting the air for the nearest prey.
Hull raised his revolver and fired into the quivering mass. It recoiled more in surprise than pain, but then sprouted hundreds of blunt, churning legs and flowed across the plaza after him like an enormous millipede.
Hull shouted, “Run!” once more at Stickney. He stood dead in the path of the oncoming monstrosity, but he did not raise his gun to it. Instead, he uttered a quavering whistle that seemed to start somewhere in his boots, but swiftly climbed right up out of hearing range. He could still feel it in his sinuses, and so, apparently, could the monster.
Rearing up and coiling back on itself in agitation like a mass of animate blubber or a vast, landlocked octopus, it writhed away from the hurtful sound, and hastened back respectfully when Hull stepped towards it.
“God damn,” Roherty said, “is there no godforsaken creature these redskins can’t tame?” He stood right beside a still paralyzed Stickney. The Indian Agent couldn’t see Roherty, but he saw the long, heavy barrel of Hull’s fifty-caliber buffalo rifle rise up and discharge a blast that ruptured Stickney’s right eardrum.
Hull’s head from the ears up turned into red confetti. The fount of gore sprayed the prostrate abomination, and provoked it to a berserker fury. A frothy black wave towered over Inigo Hull’s half-headless corpse even as the bounty hunter spun on its heel by dead reflex and drew on Tobin Roherty.
His twelve-shot Navy revolver hammered the paving stones before and beside the scarfaced scalphunter. It sparked twice more inside the collapsing tube of the black wave that swiftly and silently enveloped him, and then the formless monstrosity flattened Hull and swiftly digested him.
* * *
“Dear God,” Stickney moaned. “You shot him in the back, you…you…”
Roherty pointed the rifle at Stickney’s head. “Don’t make me waste a bullet on you, boy.”
To his everlasting shame, Stickney didn’t.
Roherty lit the fuse of a stick of dynamite off his pipe and tossed it at the raging black wave cresting again to come for them. “If you see any more of them noble savages about, Mr. Indian Agent, I hope you’ll politely ask them to direct you to the exit. You know how well kindness civilizes the savages.”
The dynamite went off inside the oncoming black wave, and was expelled in a clump of bubbles, but hardly slowed it down. Stickney climbed up onto a toppled obelisk and watched the black protoplasm chase Roherty off into the depths of the fungus jungle. Unnoticed, he lay against the stone until the booming of dynamite and the screams of animals and men had died down to a whisper of an echo.
No water, no food, no weapons. If Stickney stayed here, no doubt he would die before he got thirsty. He was the only survivor of the expedition who had not abandoned its mission.
The place Hull had been leading them to, if any of this was to be believed, was where the Comanche had gone with that man who had led them out from under his care. They were his responsibility. He could not kill this Malakai, or kill anyone, but he could try to stop it. He would do something, with or without the government’s help, for these poor, broken people he had fallen in love with in books, but had come to despise in the flesh. And he would almost certainly die, unknown, unremembered, miles beneath the surface of the earth. Or he could turn around, and go home…
But I don’t know the way home, he told himself, over and over. And I am so tired…and this is probably closer than home, anyway…
* * *
Hull could see only blue light, which bothered him, because he had no eyes. He could feel no warmth or cold, or anything else, for he had no hands or body with which to feel anything.
The only solution to the riddle was that he was the blue light. And yet, this was not the sky…and certainly not Heaven. And only then, did he remember…
He was fighting the K’n-Yan—foolish, for they risked nothing, and attacked him only for sport. One of them must have killed him, and this was a dream—
No, he sourly realized. The soothing azure light pulsed with a powerful mechanical rhythm, and as his ‘eyes’ adjusted, he saw waves in the boundless blue field that gave hints of others, swimming in this infinite sea.
The last thing he remembered was the whining chain-blade of a rotary dagger biting into his back when he shot the second of the three warriors who ambushed him. They must have killed him there, and somehow made him one of them.
Now, Malakai had finally won.
If he had simply died, it would be over. Malakai could keep coming back forever, but now so could he.
Hull reflected on all the other times he’d tracked, caught and killed the blue-eyed Indian. All the other times he’d believed he’d finished it. And all the other times that he’d missed him.
In 1883, the Gotha Silver Mine opened and soon became the rowdiest of the Colorado boomtowns. The miners worked its rich silver veins on a unique profit-sharing basis that shamed the other company towns. Three hundred and fifty men worked the Gotha mine until a series of suspicious cave-ins buried over half of them in three days. When too many miners never returned, the survivors went on strike, and there was a riot. In the morning after the riot the entire town had vanished overnight—miners, whores and families—leaving uneaten food on plates and unfinished drinks standing on the saloon bar. Not until he saw a Wanted poster for the company president, Adolf Gotha, did Hull suspect how g
ood Malakai was at the game. For in the end, that was all it was to the K’n-Yan medicine man.
In Tolerance, ten years ago, Hull thought he’d finally won. The buried town had rested on a honeycomb of tunnels that eventually led to the lost K’n-Yan city of Kyuss. After killing Malakai in the lava tubes and again in the half-abandoned ruin, the truth dawned on him. Captain Boyer was a brave officer and a decent man, and he’d brought dynamite. After all hope of escape was lost, they’d dropped the cavern roof on half the city, and the nauseous flood of blue mist gushing from the temples had been stopped. Malakai did not return again. Among the ruins, he’d found the map of gold and rubies set in the basalt floor of the central plaza, and learned that there were six other cities.
Now, he was an eternal part of their mad, empty game. It was his fate to chase Malakai until he became him. He had learned from the Union Army that one must embrace the worst of one’s enemy to defeat him, but one could only be half as cruel as an enemy and still win with honor. He had led Major Cawthorne and his men down here to use them, just as Malakai meant to use the Comanche to serve his own ends.
He could forsake the empty game. He could retreat into the mist and never take on a body. They couldn’t force him, could they? He could lie in wait until K’n-Yan and the white men and the Indians destroyed each other, and if the hunting then was still no good, he’d go back to sleep forever.
But the idea of existing in limbo without a body was worse than hell. Oblivion would be its own reward, but his sense of purpose was not a gland in his body. It still dug at him that he’d failed to stop Malakai for good. It ate at him that he’d worked for the men who exterminated his people, and he had never done anything to save them, out of a child’s spite at being cast out so long ago. He could barely remember, now, what that hate even felt like.
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