by D. P. Prior
Shader took a step towards the monster, but froze as it raised its head and let out an anticipatory sigh, shifting its bulk to get a better look at him.
‘So,’ it gurgled, ‘you followed me, little man. You realize you are mine. An agreement was reached.’
‘Agreement? What agreement?’
‘Oh, of course, you weren’t present. Nevertheless, a deal’s a deal. If you have a grievance, address it to Dr Cadman.’
‘Cadman?’
‘What’s up, honey, don’t you recognize me? Don’t you remember my touch?’
Shader stiffened at the memory of the demon’s noxious belches, its tentacles cutting into his flesh, its undulating bulk smothering him.
‘The Dweller.’ His voice quavered, and the demon closed in like a shark scenting blood. Shader scrabbled about for time. ‘Cadman sent you?’
‘My lips are sealed.’ The Dweller gave a sickly grin. ‘You were promised to me, and believe me, it’s better all round if you come quietly. By the way, how do you like my new look?’ It lifted up the apron of flab covering its loins and wobbled it about. ‘Come on, my darling. Give us a hug.’
The Luminaries backed away and Shader felt hands tugging at him, but he shrugged them off. Ice formed in his veins as he watched the Dweller in fascinated horror. His guts churned in revulsion. He wanted so desperately to scream, to turn and run, but he was rooted to the spot as the creature lumbered towards him. The Dweller’s tongue ran across its lips, thick ropes of drool oozing down its cheeks. It belched and held its belly, lifted the flab to reveal a flaccid maggot between its legs. With one hand, it began to rub there until the maggot starting to swell at an alarming rate.
The air shimmered and a cowled figure appeared between Shader and the Dweller. It held out a shortsword with intricate letters etched into the blade. Shader recognized it instantly, as if it had cut through the fog of his amnesia.
‘Archon,’ the Dweller snarled. ‘My master will trap you here.’
Ignoring it, the cowled figure lifted its head towards Shader, bright light effusing from the hood and dazzling him.
‘Take back my sword, Deacon Shader,’ the Archon said in a voice like the wind. ‘It learns from experience. It will prove stronger this time. Aid is on its way, drawn to the gladius. I cannot stay. This place is poison to…’
The gladius started to fall as the figure faded from view.
Snatching the hilt, Shader thrust the tip towards the Dweller and golden light flared around the blade. The demon howled and dropped to its knees, frantically burrowing into the cave floor. Its fat backside wobbled and strained, and then squeezed into the hole with a plop. Earth and rock fell back behind it, covering its escape. Sounds of its underground digging thumped up through the cave floor for a few moments and then all was quiet.
Milo, Tajen, and Narcus crept forward and stood over the crumpled husk of Jarmin’s body.
‘How can this be?’ Milo asked.
Tajen placed a hand on his shoulder, his eyes distant, frown-lines like gouges between his eyebrows. ‘Now do you see?’ he said. ‘We have not arrived. We are still running the race.’
The glow from Narcus’s skin was noticeably dimmer. Fine tremors rippled through his limbs as he reached for Tajen’s hand and pulled him close. ‘What is happening, Tajen? Where are we?’
‘Besides Jarmin and Shader,’ Tajen said, ‘no soul has entered this so-called Araboth for centuries. As for that thing, that Dweller…’
Shader relaxed his grip on the sword and its light died. ‘I faced it on Earth, just before I came here,’ he said. ‘I suspect this is its natural abode.’
‘But why should it appear now?’ asked Milo, his bronze tan dissolving in the sweat beading his skin.
Shader shrugged. ‘I remember it smothering me. There was a flash and then I was here with no idea of who I was. Something happened at the moment of my death.’
Tajen knelt beside Jarmin’s body. ‘What is it about you two,’ he said, ‘that attracted the beast?’
Shader struggled to think as the Luminary closed Jarmin’s eyes. ‘It sensed something in me. Presumably the same thing that drew it to Jarmin.’
Take back my sword, the cowled man had said. The Dweller had referred to him as the Archon. More than ever, Shader was convinced he was dreaming, trapped in a nightmare of his own imaginings. The inklings of an explanation were starting to form in his mind. ‘I had a piece of an ancient artefact,’ he said to Tajen. ‘Is it possible Jarmin once possessed another?’
‘What artefact?’ demanded Tajen, turning from the corpse and standing. ‘Describe it to me.’
Shader bent down and traced the outline of the serpent statue on the dust of the cave floor.
Tajen nodded. ‘Eingana, one of the three beings who fell from the Void. She who is forever pursued by her brother, the Demiurgos. Maybe that’s what drew you here. Jarmin too. You’d both touched her power. It is like a scent, drawing the attention of the Demiurgos. But the demon…’
‘I think it may have been wounded when it tried to consume me back in the templum,’ Shader said. ‘Perhaps the power of the sword and statue combined…’ Shader tailed off. Tajen’s mouth was hanging open as if he’d realized what he was saying. And then the penny dropped. Eingana, the Archon, and their brother, the Demiurgos. Shader had learnt something of the old myths from Aristodeus. Picture language, he’d called it. Metaphysics. If the Demiurgos existed, and if he’d drawn them here, then this could only be…
Shader met Tajen’s eyes. The Luminary stared blankly back at him, his mouth working, but no words coming out.
‘What must we do?’ Milo asked.
As if in answer, an aperture of green light appeared in the cave wall and a young boy stepped out, freckled face streaked with grime, mousy hair matted and plastered to his scalp.
‘Sammy!’ Shader cried in disbelief.
‘Quickly,’ the boy said. ‘Follow me.’
Shader glanced at Tajen, who managed a shrug and a nod. ‘There is no other action open to us,’ the Luminary said. ‘Act in faith and perhaps we shall all yet be saved.’
The Luminaries huddled together, their eyes flitting from Tajen to Shader and the boy. Shader didn’t think it seemed right leaving them here, but Sammy continued to tug at him.
The cave began to tremble, a sound like an earthquake coming from the depths. Cracks ran across the floor, spewing forth rock-dust and acrid fumes. Distant laughter rumbled and a voice echoed from the depths.
‘I have your scent now. Run as fast as you can and despair.’
The glow fell from the bodies of the Luminaries. They looked to Shader more like the damned than the saved: hunched and twisted, flesh rough and grey like over-cooked meat. Tajen’s eyes were wide and brimming with tears. He looked like a man who’d been proven right and wished he hadn’t been.
‘Go now, while you still can. We are not in Araboth.’ He took in his fellow Luminaries who were babbling incoherently, their skin blistering and hanging from them in strips. ‘We are in the Abyss, the realm of the Demiurgos. We have all been deceived.’
Reaching out a hand towards Tajen, Shader allowed Sammy to drag him away as the Luminary’s body erupted with buboes and pustules. Laughter reverberated around his skull. Nothing was real—maybe not even the Luminaries, he realized with terrible clarity. Perhaps they’d been present because that’s what he’d expected to see in Araboth. But how could he be sure? There was no point to any of this. No hope.
He lurched sideways, almost fell, but Sammy continued to pull him towards the aperture. Body limp, mind blank with despair, Shader stum bled and tripped, green light closing around him. The cackling ceased as if a door had been closed on it, leaving only silence in its wake.
THE LACUNAE
Huntsman’s spirit hovered over the Void, feeling its pull and at the same time repelled by the ghostly web covering its mouth. He was reminded of the trapdoor spiders of Sahul lurking beneath their covers of soil and vegetation, trip lines
set to warn of approaching prey. He felt the revulsion of the gods far away beneath the Homestead, their bodies pressed close to his in order to lend their strength to his spirit. He was gazing upon the abode of the dark god who had ravished Eingana and sired their father, the Cynocephalus. Huntsman shuddered, and a ripple passed through the light that formed his spirit-body. One touch of the misty strands and he would be trapped for ever, and yet Sammy had been granted the power to enter the Abyss. The thought of the boy ensnared for eternity by the Demiurgos had led to his attempt to follow, but now he was close he knew there was little he could do other than watch and hope.
A tunnel of green light opened on the edge of the web, but a tendril of dark stuff lashed out and struck it, sending green sparks into the mist where they were devoured. Two figures tumbled out and started to drift back towards the Abyss. Huntsman sped as close as he dared, the mist suddenly warm and inviting, promising to catch him and spare his spirit from oblivion. He could see Sammy now, hand in hand with Shader, struggling away from the Void like swimmers against the tide.
The Abyss bulged and shook, and for an instant Huntsman could see the enormous face of a bald man with a white beard, eyes dark-ringed, lips curled into a grimace.
Aristodeus.
The Abyss sagged and the philosopher’s face was dragged back into its darkness, but not before he mouthed a silent word. The sword in Shader’s hand blazed with the light of a thousand stars.
Sammy and Shader sped towards a rupture in the blackness before them.
‘No,’ Huntsman called. ‘This way. You will be lost.’
Sammy saw him and then looked past Huntsman to the Void, where splotches of inky blackness were hurled into space by the tendrils at the edge of the Abyss. The boy and the knight gaped with horror and then passed into the rupture.
The patches of Void stuff poured after them, holes in the darkness of space, pools of nothingness. Huntsman was about to follow when Aristodeus’s voice sounded in his head. It was wracked with strain and torment.
‘Fly, my friend. You can do nothing to help them. They are pursued by Lacunae—the empty spaces. The Demiurgos is grasping the power of the Void.’
‘But what about you?’ Huntsman said.
The voice grew fainter, as if walls had suddenly been thrown up around it. ‘I have done what I can—a word that should not be uttered. Would that it were enough. Do not concern yourself with me. I will prevail. It is Shader who needs you. Help him.’
Silence fell and Huntsman felt suddenly like a creator god surveying the bare matter of the cosmos and considering what he could make to drive back the darkness. His head began to hurt with the magnitude of the emptiness before him. Infinite blackness in every direction, the Void yawning even blacker below, and above there was just the glimmer of two distant stars, not the usual spray of lights that he could see from Sahul.
For an instant, golden light surged from the tear Sammy and Shader had passed into, but then even that died as the split closed like a healed wound. Huntsman offered a prayer to Sahul in the hope that she would draw them home, and then returned with a heavy heart to his body in the caves beneath the Homestead.
***
Shader could see Sammy was ailing fast. Every step took them into a new realm, each jarringly different and disorienting. They stood at a junction overlooking kaleidoscopic vistas that never settled long enough for the eyes to focus. They shouldn’t have made it. The Abyss had them in its pull, but then came that word, soundless yet with the force of thunder, and the sword had responded. Shader both knew the word and didn’t. It was familiar, but not yet. A memory waiting to be retrieved, or a glimpse of something to come. Somehow it was beyond speech, beyond his ability to decipher.
‘Sammy, fix your gaze on me,’ Shader found himself shouting, and then realized that all was silent.
When the boy dragged his eyes away from the shifting landscapes Shader saw only fear and uncertainty; the sort of fear you’d expect from a child, and yet he could sense something different about Sammy, the unveiling of depths he’d hitherto not suspected.
‘I’m sorry, Deacon,’ Sammy said, eyes flooding with tears. ‘I don’t know the way.’
Shader pulled the boy into a hug and Sammy nestled his head into his chest, trembling as he sobbed.
‘No one could know the way in this,’ Shader said. ‘It took someone special to find me at all, and for that you will always have my thanks.’
Sammy looked up, rubbing the tears away with the back of his hand. ‘I did OK?’
‘More than OK,’ Shader lifted Sammy’s chin and looked deep into his eyes. ‘It’s good to have friends I can rely on.’
Sammy smiled at that, but there was still the hint of a frown tugging at his face.
‘Don’t worry about your sister, Sammy. She’s safe; she made it to the templum.’
‘Are you OK with her?’ Sammy pulled away.
‘Always,’ Shader said. It was more the case of was she OK with him? ‘Come. You got me out of the Abyss; the least I can do is get you home, right?’
‘Right.’
As they resumed their passage through the planes, Shader turned his attention to the fleeting skies of gold, purple, black, and crimson. He shivered at a blast of icy air that immediately gave way to searing heat and then muggy humidity. They were assailed by sleet and rain on the one step, lightning, snow, or calm on the next. Shader had just grown used to travelling without delay to wherever he imagined, but in this jumble of worlds he had no idea where to go, and try as he might to visualize a destination back home, nothing happened. Perhaps the ability to travel instantaneously had been just another deception of the Demiurgos, no more real than Araboth.
The sword’s light was the only constant in the chaos of worlds, and Shader held firmly to its hilt, following its pull like a diviner looking for water.
‘We can rest a while, if you like,’ Shader said, placing a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder.
Sammy slapped it away and sucked in his top lip. ‘We mustn’t stop. The Archon says monsters are coming.’
‘The Archon?’
Sammy waved him to silence and led him into yet another world, this time atop a scorched volcano, the air thick with noxious fumes. One step more and they were submerged in viscous golden fluid; yet another and they stood in green fields beneath a mauve sky.
Suddenly the air was rent with black holes, chaotic shapes of emptiness that appeared from nowhere and swarmed towards them. Shader dragged Sammy backwards into a realm of metal bathed in silver light. The patches of nothingness swooped after them, closing in on Shader like flies drawn to sugar. He swiped at one with the gladius, but the sword refused to strike. Shader pushed Sammy behind him and swayed out of the way of a cluster of empty blobs.
‘Don’t let them touch you,’ Sammy cried. ‘The Archon says they are Lacunae, the stuff of the Void.’
Shader could imagine what that meant.
The Lacunae quivered as one and then split, each shape becoming two holes in the fabric of the worlds. They raced towards Shader in a pincer movement, causing him to flee into another world, shoving Sammy before him.
They stood upon a narrow ledge over an infinite drop. Above them fire filled the sky and a fierce wind was gusting. Sammy teetered on the edge, but Shader grabbed him and helped him to shuffle sideways into a forest made of tar. Cobalt skies broke through the oily foliage and dark mist swirled from a staff that had been thrust into the earth—centuries ago judging by the creepers and vines that wound about it.
The Lacunae blinked into view one at a time and continued their relentless stalking of Shader. This time it was Sammy who pulled them into another world and Shader immediately realized their doom. They were backed up against a sheer cliff face with only the narrowest of passes before them. The Lacunae slipped through the gaps between the worlds and began to merge together, forming an impassable wall of emptiness. As they floated towards the pair, Shader stepped in front of Sammy determined to at least c
harge the Lacunae in the hope that his destruction would put an end to their pursuit. Before he could take a step, the gladius purred in his hand and white fire flared along the blade, streaking into the sky. The trail of flame bent and twisted as if searching for something and then arced behind Shader and struck the cliff. A green glow sprang up in answer, spiralling upon the rock until it formed an opening. A huge man emerged, black-skinned and with the head of a serpent. Shader raised the sword to strike, but Sammy pulled at his shoulder.
‘No, don’t. It’s Mamba.’
‘Quick, Sssammy,’ the snake-man opened his arms and the boy leapt into his embrace. The green portal was already starting to close. ‘Ssso sssorry.’ He gave Shader a pitying look as he stepped back inside the aperture with the boy. ‘No time for a sssecond trip.’
Shader nodded as the opening vanished. Steeling himself for the touch of oblivion, he turned to face the advancing wall of blackness.
‘Focus, Shader,’ said a voice in his head that reminded him of the crunch of brown autumn leaves beneath the feet. ‘You’ll get only one chance. This is the best I can do.’
An image formed behind his eyes—a body lying in a pool of its own blood.
‘Focus. Shut your eyes and concentrate on my sword with your whole being.’
The wall of emptiness was so close now Shader could feel his skin crawling, the dread of annihilation twisting a knot in his stomach.
Gripping the sword with both hands, he raised it before his face and, taking a deep breath that was likely to be his last, closed his eyes. He felt the gladius throbbing, attuned himself to it, and let his awareness of all else fall beneath an obscuring cloud of darkness.
The roar of a million stars exploding tore him apart.
In an instant it was over, and Shader was shocked to find he still held the sword. Even with his eyes closed, the blade’s incandescence was blinding. He gasped for breath and blinked until his vision returned.
The dead body came into sharp focus at the end of a tunnel through the cliff face. It was armoured beneath a black coat and a white tabard with the red Nousian Monas. Blue fingers clutched a longsword in one hand, and a broad-brimmed hat lay crumpled beside the head. Black hair framed the gaunt face like a dark halo; the eyes were white and vacant. The body faded away and the cliff grew once more solid and impassable. Shader glanced over his shoulder. The wall of nothingness was still there, a hair’s breadth away.