by Will Elliott
The answer seemed pulled out of him. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Do you desire her?’
He looked at Aziel for a little while. ‘Yes.’
‘Tell me of this desire.’
‘What should I tell you?’
‘Tell me what you wish to do to her.’
‘No. I want nothing.’
She laughed softly. ‘You are afraid even to speak of it. Why? You have surely had such fear today as to make mere speech a trifle.’
‘I don’t know why.’
‘It is a private matter, of your kind, such business as this?’
Eric shifted on his feet, not wanting Shilen’s gaze on him, nor this talk. At the same time he wanted both those things equally strongly. ‘I want to protect her.’
‘That is not all you desire to do, Favoured one. Why do you not give in to this unspoken desire? If you are hungry and presented food, surely you eat? Say it, at least. Say what you wish to do to her. I shan’t hold your words as an oath to act.’
His face felt hot and fevered. He stepped closer to them both, tried to swallow, his mouth dry.
‘Show me what you wish to do,’ said Shilen. ‘I shall give you something else you desire, in exchange.’ She reached into a pocket in one of her skirt’s leather folds, then was holding in long slender fingers a black key. She studied his face as he stared, puzzled.
‘What would I want with that?’ he said.
‘A home is somewhere you choose. Did we not agree?’
He extended his hand. With warm fingers she pressed the key onto his palm, closed his fist around it. Her touch was as cold as its metal. ‘Tell me what you wish to do to her,’ Shilen whispered, running a hand through Aziel’s hair. ‘We have an agreement now. And tell me truly. I can see lies.’
His throat seemed to close up, but the words were drawn out of him. ‘I want to rip her clothes off.’
Shilen looked deep inside him and seemed to approve of what she saw there. ‘Then why not do it, Favoured one? You are the foremost of the Favoured. It is your right. Do it.’
Eric’s hands trembled as he kneeled by Aziel’s body. If a spell influenced him or not, he could not tell – but Shilen seemed at once a teacher to impress and a student to win over with daring deeds. He clutched Aziel’s dress about the neck, pulled it till the fabric ripped, revealing cream-white skin beneath, breasts that were larger now they were freed than they’d seemed when clothed. Aziel sighed but did not open her eyes. Shilen nodded, and his hands seemed to move on their own a long distance away: they tore the dress past her navel, ran a hand over her soft goose-pimpled skin, a fingertip nestling in her belly button. ‘Good,’ Shilen said, her own fingers still playing through Aziel’s hair. ‘Is that all you want with her?’
It was not all, but now he knew he was dreaming, and no harm could come from dreams. He took his own clothes off. His blood felt like a fevered liquid fire all through him as he ripped the dress away from her legs. He did not know at what point Aziel’s eyes opened but found them fixed on him, as full of fear as of desire. She did not seem to notice Shilen, still stroking her hair.
Just for a moment Aziel struggled to get up, said, ‘Am I dreaming?’
‘Of course you dream,’ Shilen told her. ‘You both dream.’
Eric hardly seemed in control of himself any more. It was a dream as he lowered himself onto her and pushed himself inside her. Aziel’s legs closed round behind his back and held him there.
‘It’s safe,’ said Shilen softly. ‘You dream, man-god’s daughter. Favoured one, this is yours to take.’
Aziel moaned, pushed herself up against him, grabbed his arms. Eric felt drunk, his arms full of powerful strength, his fists clenched upon the dusty stone to either side of her, sweat dripping from his face onto hers.
Sssss: more things moved outside their Invia roost, more ripples of deeper darkness shifted around in the gloom. Invia wings beat the air as the creatures, curious, flew down from their perch and came closer, forming a ring about them.
The darkness fell away and Shilen no longer crouched there. Dragons had come. Claws scraped and clicked on the bone-hard floor, disturbing the dust. Lengths of glimmering, rippling scaled skin slid past them and seemed to house them in a moving nest. Fierce ancient eyes, beautiful as gems and filled with savage wisdom, watched the Otherworlder fuck the man-god’s daughter.
Many dragons were about them now, some small, some large, scales of many gleaming colours. Eric felt as though he were one of them himself. For a brief time he saw himself through dragon eyes, and his limbs were dragon limbs, Aziel beneath him likewise a length of rippling scaled flesh, as joined to him (and as dear to him) as a limb he could control.
How long all this went on, Eric could never have known. Sometimes it was Aziel’s face below him, sometimes Siel’s, sometimes Shilen’s, but always it returned to Aziel. Sometimes she cried out and fought against him, pushing at his chest as someone struggling free of a nightmare. But more often she pulled him nearer, sucked at his neck, cried and moaned his name, said crude things he’d not have dreamed she could say.
When he came, stars burst behind his eyes. He seemed in that instant transformed into a blinding, separating burst of white light, to float above the whole scene, blasted into the air by pleasure and now glimpsing his own naked body still on top of hers, glistening with sweat and bright Invia blood he did not remember being spilled on him. He saw the dragons leaning their heads over to lick the blood off Eric’s and Aziel’s bodies, then watched them run back into the gloom as if they’d now learned all they needed to learn of humankind. Shilen was not there.
From high above, he looked down upon himself, pulling his clothes back on, running, weeping with shame for what he’d done. For it had been no dream and a part of him at least had known it all the while, and that part of him had not cared. He ran alone through the vast dark space, crying out in anguish now and then and not caring who or what things heard him. Then the storm of emotion passed and he was back within himself again, lost, with only faintly glowing Invia roosts in the distance, but without knowing which of them he’d come from.
There came into view a shape of bolder dark than the surrounding gloom, as dark as black on grey, a tall twisted ziggurat with many tiers, the black metal moving as if it were liquid. With jarring suddenness as he went near its motion ceased and did not resume. He came to a flat bed of grey stone laid in solid waves the shape of sand dunes. His hand felt for something in his pocket, and closed on the black key Shilen had given him. At the moment his fingers touched its cold metal, there appeared before him a little red wooden door.
He stared at it for a very long time, his eyes locked hard on the keyhole. There was no light gleaming through, as for instance from a sky on the other side. But it was the exact size and shape of the old door he remembered under the train bridge.
That door had been set in a graffiti-clad wall, next to a concrete bike path which ran past an unkempt urban park, home only to litter and the odd passed-out drunk or drug addict, resting like discarded syringes in the grass. Here, the door was set on the sheer side of a slab of stone twice a man’s height, with nothing else around it. Eric’s mouth was dry. Could this be real? Was it truly what it appeared? He took out the black key, but for some reason his hand refused to put it in the keyhole.
Shilen’s voice from close by made him jump. ‘For what do you wait, Favoured one?’ She stepped into view, crouched down beside the door and studied him. ‘The charm the man-god’s daughter wears, Vyin made for you. She stole it. Are you angry about that?’
‘No.’
‘It would have given you great power.’
‘I never asked for power. If the dragons gave me power, it wouldn’t really be mine. It would still be theirs.’
Her gaze upon him changed subtly, became more wary. ‘If not power, what then do you wish, Favoured one?’
He pointed at the little red door. ‘This. If it will take me home.’ Still he did not trust the sigh
t of it. He wanted too much for it to be real, had seen too many magic tricks to be certain the door was real.
Shilen said, ‘If I were to freely offer you great power, Favoured one, yours to use with no conditions, for whatever you desired … would you accept the gift?’
‘No.’
‘Only because you don’t believe the power I speak of shall truly be yours. Favoured one, do you realise I could compel you to do what I wished, had I the desire to control you?’
‘Then do it. Compel me.’
She sighed. ‘I won’t. As you wish then. Use the key, Favoured one.’ She rose and moved away from the door.
He fell to his knees before it, looked through the keyhole. The other side was dark. A patch of white light fell upon a wedge of the concrete bike path. It was real. His hands trembled as he stuffed in the key. Suddenly there were tears streaming down his face as he turned his wrist and pushed the door open. A burst of wind rushed at his back, skittering dust and litter from the path. He clawed at the dirt, pushed himself through on hands and knees.
‘Farewell,’ said Shilen, but he didn’t hear her.
5
OTHERWORLD AGAIN
Still on his knees he patted the ground around him, hardly daring to believe it was real. Yet here it was, the place memory had cast him back to too many times to count: the concrete bike path, an old liquor bottle half buried in the hard dirt next to it, which Case himself might well have drained of its contents and left there, neglected and forgotten by all the world. The door shut quietly behind him. He still had the black key, still had the choice to go back.
It was night. He may have sat on that very spot for a long time if it hadn’t occurred to him that the light he saw was moonlight. That in itself was miraculous: there was a proper sky above him again. He scrambled to his feet, ran past the graffiti-clad wall, over towards the newsagency side of the tunnel.
What he beheld seemed more magical than anything he’d seen in Levaal. The beautiful clouds were fat grey brush strokes over a bright gibbous moon, beaming its white light proudly down. Tears streamed down his face; his whole body shook. He didn’t know at all what the tears came from: grief, joy, gratitude? Also a peculiar anger directed he knew not where (at Shilen? Himself?). He sat in the moonlit gutter, staring up at the sky for a long while, the moon and the stars beyond it a sight too beautiful to look away from.
He barely noticed in all that time how quiet it was, how not a single car horn sounded. He did not reflect that no trains passed on the tracks just above him. And he barely thought about whatever it might be sending little shivers through the ground he sat on.
When the night’s chill broke through and the moment finally passed, he noticed the streetlights weren’t on. The moonlight was all. And now he heard the silence – the absence of background traffic.
The newsagency windows were broken. It had been before him the whole time, but only now he saw it. Part of its side wall had caved in. He took a few steps out onto the road, saw nothing in either direction except a piece of litter scraping across the bitumen, pushed by wind that quickly ceased. The silence, now that he’d heard it, pressed down on him and was total. He took a breath to call out but intuition was like a hand clasping over his mouth: shh …
Now in the distance, there was noise he could not identify. Two heavy thudding sounds, each sending a shiver through the ground he stood upon.
He went back through the train bridge, past the shut door. How loud it seemed, his shoes scuffing over the dirt. He paused, examined a patch of moonlit ground out the tunnel’s further side. Yes, he saw it now: there were familiar holes punched into the hard dirt.
He crouched, touching them. A dozen such holes, give or take, identical to Tormentor tracks. A strange coincidence? Surely none of those beasts could have possibly made these holes.
‘Let’s walk home from work,’ he murmured. Along the once-familiar street by the rail tracks, the houses and apartments had no lights on at all. There were broken windows and cavedin walls, just like the newsagency’s. There was a wide split in the bitumen road, which was so filled with potholes it could hardly be called a road any more. Eric was filled with an irrational sense that if he could just make it home to his apartment, everything would be OK. All this evidence of something horribly wrong would erase itself.
Dodging wide cracks he walked up the rise in the ground, and turned about at the top to look back at the city, but there were no lights at all. He heard a sound of something very large moving. Glass broke, metal squealed: he got the impression of a tank rolling over ruined streets, crushing cars as it went. The noise abruptly ceased. Wind rustled the overgrown grass of Case’s old park at the bottom of the street and swept through the shoulder-high weeds all along the path.
Eric turned again to head for home, but stopped dead, seeing further up the rise a shape looming in wait for him. It stood jagged against the moonlit sky, the spikes and points along its flanks curling like fingers beckoning. Its arms were long, each with five jagged finger-blades stretching down so they almost touched the ground. The Tormentor’s face was like features gouged and chipped out of glistening obsidian, tilted sideways on its neck and gazing, it seemed, right at him.
The backwards step Eric took was purely from surprise to find he was observed. What at another time might have been fear was instead cold anger at the violation this creature represented, imposing itself like this upon his homecoming. He took the gun from its holster, held it aloft, stepped towards the Tormentor. Slowly one of its hands rose; it seemed to be asking him not to shoot. A greater shock came when its mouth opened and a voice issued from it: ‘Waste,’ it said.
Eric was so amazed to hear it speak he laughed. ‘What? What did you say?’ Its flat stony eyes looked down from a metre above. ‘You said “waste”,’ Eric said. He was near enough now to reach out and touch it. ‘Do you mean I’d waste a bullet, if I shot you? What the fuck … why do you care if I waste my bullets? How do you even know what a bullet is, what a gun is? What the fuck are you even doing here?’
Its voice was like feet scraping on dirt. ‘Here you … will find … what kills … dragons.’
Eric pointed the gun at its face. He wanted to shoot but his hand seemed to lock. ‘What kills dragons?’ he said.
Its mouth did not move to shape the words which scraped out. ‘The haiyens have … no name for them … in your speech. The haiyens … must teach you … to live in a world … which they come to. Your flesh is … their clay. Your flesh is … their home. Your flesh … is them. They … collect … clay. Until the time they … as your kind … has now learned to do … become gods.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ Eric said. His hand holding the gun shook. ‘I miss my apartment. I just want to see my apartment.’
Distantly there came more sounds not unlike those he’d heard before: squealing metal as something was crushed. Something crumbling and falling with booming thuds to the ground, then quiet. The Tormentor tilted its head away from him, seeming to look into the distance behind him.
‘Why don’t you kill me?’ Eric asked it.
It did not move or answer. He stepped yet closer to it. A rage brewed deep and hot within him, one he didn’t understand at all. He held the gun to its head. ‘Why don’t you try to kill me? I’m right here. Do it.’
It didn’t move. Its wavering spikes all went still. ‘A high place … will give you … sight of them.’
He fired the gun. Its boom was unbelievably loud. Part of the Tormentor’s face flew off. A larger part slipped more slowly to the ground, carrying with it one of the creature’s eyes. Its body did not fall, still did not move. ‘What did you do to this world?’ Eric said.
Its voice still came: ‘This work, my kind … did not wreak. Nor man … nor dragon.’ One of its arms – shaking – slowly lifted, pointed to the top of the rise. ‘Go there. See. Learn why you must … set the dragons … free.’
Eric went to where it pointed. He turned back twice to see if the Torm
entor had toppled over yet, but it had not. Further along towards his apartment, along the same footpaths and roads he’d taken to walk home from the office – with a mind for microwave dinners, failed novels in progress, comic books newly purchased – buildings were mounds of detritus, piled like the rocks he and Case had walked through in the rubble plains. Cars were crushed flat, streetlight poles were knocked over, power lines a messy tangle. Slabs of road were tilted up. A dog appeared among the wreckage of a corner shop. It sniffed the air as if it had forgotten people altogether and could hardly believe its eyes now to see one. When Eric called to it, it ran away.
The path ahead was blocked by a pile of debris. He climbed it, slipping on loose slabs and boards, ignoring the now-familiar smell of death worming up from the pile’s depths. At that moment he gave up any hope of finding his apartment still standing – or perhaps he understood how pointless the quest was in the first place. Instead he headed up a hilly side-street not even vaguely resembling the road it had been in his memories. The homes to either side were destroyed; the corner street sign was unbelievably one of the few things undamaged. Pitt Street. The pizza place’s green and red sign poked out beneath wreckage. (A girl wearing glasses had asked him out, here on this spot. His mouth full of pizza, he’d stammered in his amazement by way of reply, which she took as rejection and fled, her face pointed down with embarrassment. He’d never seen her again.)
A gust of wind came to break the silence with its howl, the smell of smoke on its breath. From here he saw the city’s silhouetted skyline. The buildings’ lights were all out.
Something scuttled in the rubbish, too big to be a rat. It was the dog from before, hobbling along now with a strange limp. But then he saw it wasn’t the dog. Its head and forelegs moved on their own, being dragged along as if blown by bursts of wind. Eric had taken a few steps towards it but now he recoiled, the gun in his hand again. Something he could not see dragged the dog’s body through a gap in the rubble.