Tainted Garden

by Jeff Stanley

  Lady Dersi!

  He staggered to his feet and headed for the mangled sphincter. Already new resin, secreted by the torn edges of the portal, had begun to solidify. No more than an hour, then.

  Beyond the portal lay a steaming pile of ravaged flesh. Only by the presence of curled hands and shattered rib bones could it be identified as having been human. The flesh was pulverized, the skull smashed to crumbling bits. Erekel? Dersi? The Gagash? He felt a surge of panic and knelt beside the remains. He poked through the charred mass with the tip of his sword, seeking some sign, some identifying feature.

  Nothing. Not even a scrap of clothing. Dersi had been clothed. Wouldn’t something have survived?

  He had to believe it, had to assume she still lived, still struggled to escape this horrid place. If he did not, if he chose to believe this steaming pile of refuse could be Dersi . . . He turned away from the possibility, rose, and firmed his grip on his sword.

  The wake of God’s passage was plain. Ragged tatters of ool-flesh hung like lace all around, and the flooring underfoot bore the scars of heavy footfalls and the scrape of metal. Splatters of blood dotted the hallway, which stretched ahead to an intersection choked with long, listless tentacles.

  Lhedri paused before entering the confluence, listening. Aside from the heave of ool-flesh and the wet slither of tentacles sliding against one another, no sounds came to him. Evidence of God’s passage trailed along the right-hand corridor. Lhedri followed, stepping warily. Overhead, the ool-flesh dripped, ragged and torn, seeming almost acid-burned. It stank of corruption. The few tentacles that lay across his path twitched as he approached and slithered away from him.

  Frowning, he reached overhead, brushing his fingertips across the nub-ended tendrils that hung down from the ceiling. They shivered at his touch, retreating into gum-lined pustules. The ceiling rippled as the flesh retracted, drawing away from him.

  What was happening? Touching the flesh with the tip of his sword brought no such reaction.

  An overwhelming sensation of urgency gripped him, a certainty that Lady Dersi needed him. A hot flush traveled through him, a tingling in his limbs that left him anxious, brimming with contained energy. Sweat poured from his body, a drenching wetness that soaked through his clothing and pooled in his boots. He wiped a hand across his brow and flicked sweat onto the walls. The ool-flesh sizzled where the droplets struck it.

  He passed through a section of hallway where the floor-plates had been ripped asunder. Yard-long spikes of hardened resin had slammed into the right-hand wall at about shoulder height. Farther along, a massive hump of ool-flesh had torn through the ceiling, flooding the corridor from wall to wall. But something, some caustic agent, had eaten a festering hole through the flesh. It hung now, lifeless and melting.

  The trail turned again, entering a wider concourse studded with niches in which men and women sat encrusted with resin and tangled with tentacles and cords. One such alcove lay barren save for dangling, dripping tendrils. Lhedri pushed on, coming across the lifeless figure of a petrified woman, her face set in terror. She lay among crumbled pieces of resin, her arms and legs twisted beneath her body. Lhedri knelt and studied her.

  He breathed a great sigh of relief. Not Dersi.

  A tremor wracked the corridor, dropping Lhedri to his knees. His sword clattered away across the floor. He held onto the wall for support as wave after wave of turbulence shook the passageway. Finally he stumbled to his feet and pressed onward, his footing uncertain. He snatched up his sword where it lay against the wall.

  Ripples passed through the ool-flesh festooning the walls. Thick arteries burst, gushing ichor that washed down the hall. Thick and sticky, it clung to his feet as he slogged through it. Tentacles broke free, writhing in fitful jerks. Everywhere the ool-flesh corrupted, began melting into thick slag. It bubbled, churned. Huge boils sprang from the flesh, swelling with fluid, laced with thin veins and capillaries. As Lhedri ran through the pitching corridor the boils exploded, showering him with rot.

  The corridor he followed ended in a mound of rotting flesh, its stench overpowering. Lhedri fell to his knees, wracked with nausea, and vomited. The mound heaved, heaved, swelling from within. Geysers thick with chunks of flesh exploded from the mass, and it collapsed. A wave of corruption tossed Lhedri down the hallway, tumbling him end over end before he crashed against a metal bulwark.

  His head swam, his vision dim. Propping himself up on his sword, he slogged through the ruin toward the corridor’s end, fighting sickness. Lhedri heard a scream from around the corner.

  A familiar scream.

  “Lady Dersi!” he cried, pushing forward.

  Chapter 46

  “Erekel! No! Erekel!” Dersi tugged on his bloody shirt. He hung, head downward, flaccid. A shower of blood fell onto the rotating sphere below. It hissed and spattered, sending up angry jags of lightning that licked along the underside of the twisted catwalk. Current flowed through the metal. Waves of dull pain shot through Dersi’s hands, traveling the length of her body. Tears dripped from her eyes to splatter on the catwalk. “No.”

  The catwalk shifted. Dersi jerked upward as the mass of twisted railing grated across the gangway with a harsh metal shriek. Wide-eyed, she lost her grip on Erekel’s shirt, the fabric tearing from spasming fingers. Erekel slipped, his slack body pitching downward. With a slow, agonizing groan, the pile slid toward the edge of the catwalk. A few loose pipes tumbled free. The howling winds of the maelstrom caught them, whipping them into walls with resounding clatters.

  Held only by one mangled leg, Erekel’s body rotated. Dersi stared down into his face, biting back a scream of pain, tears flowing freely. Wracking sobs now shook her body.

  Again the pile of debris shifted, its weight bearing it forward. Clamps and bolts snapped with tight pings. Dersi fell backward, crashing onto the canted grating of the catwalk. A vast tearing sound screamed through the immense chamber. The pile of wreckage shifted again.

  Dersi did not think. Her limbs trembled in fear and weakness, yet she edged closer, closer to the mangled remains of the railing. Closer still. Her hand stretched, reaching. Erekel’s unconscious form twisted in the contorted metal, limp.

  “No. Erekel, no,” she whispered. She felt the stinging bite of tears welling up in her eyes, the horrible agony of her flesh torn asunder. Her head throbbed. Her body shook. She ignored the pain, ignored it all, shoved it aside. She hooked her feet in a mass of bent tubing and moved closer, closer.

  Her fingers stretched out, briefly touching Erekel’s foot, tickling along his ankle. Heat flared up from below, a scorching wind that rushed by her with the fury of wind through lung-tunnels. Hot. Dry. Smelling of burnt flesh and burnt air.

  She could not reach him. She must reach him.

  Dersi slid across the catwalk, her flesh gouged by jagged spurs of metal that peeled up from the grating like thorns. She gritted her teeth and tried to ignore the pain.

  “Erekel! Erekel!” she called, her voice harsh and ravaged.

  He hung there, listless, unresponsive.

  Her fingers curled around the cuff of one pants leg, snagged in the material. She pulled, pulled. She felt the strain on her ankles as she put more and more of her weight on them. Metal dug into her feet, slicing them open.

  “Erekel!” she screamed. A gout of flames plumed below, hissing along the walls. She closed her eyes against the terrible heat. “Father!”

  She pulled on him, desperately tried to draw him higher. She was too weak, her strength depleted.

  He groaned. His eyes opened. “Dersi,” he said, as his gaze met hers. “No. Go. Go, Dersi.”

  “No, Father. No.” She bit her lip as a thorn of metal pierced one of her feet, driven through it like a nail, and bit into the other. “Come on.”

  His eyes pleaded with her. Let me go. Let me go.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, warding away the plea. “No! Damn you, Erekel! No!”

  His fingers reached up, touched hers. Weak. Trembling
. “Dersi, let me go. Let me go.”

  “No. Erekel—Father, I can’t!”

  His fingers played over hers, there on his ankle. Gentle. Blood-covered. Sticky. She looked into his face, saw him smile.

  “Dersi, I . . . I am proud. So . . . proud,” he said, and blood frothed from his lips.

  “No. No! Father!”

  He smiled. “Thank you . . . for that. Dersi. My daughter.” His fingers lingered, lingered on hers, lovingly.

  Tears spilled from her eyes, unquenched. “No.” She felt herself weakening.

  Erekel’s fingers clenched atop her own, squeezed. And then he pried her fingers away, one by one, as Dersi screamed and cried.

  “I love you . . . Dersi.” He fell, and the wreckage, dragged by his weight, shifted. It slid forward and over the edge.

  Dersi scrambled back, shrieking. As she struggled to her knees, the mangled railing snapped free and tumbled into the maelstrom. Erekel’s limp form lazily spun amid the wreckage. One arm flapped as if Erekel bid her a final farewell.

  Erekel.

  Her father.

  Through the gaps in the floor of the catwalk, Dersi watched the tangled mass spin through the air below, tumbling toward the maelstrom and its pulsing, spinning black heart. Metal crashed into the sphere. A tremendous discharge of lightning shot up. Jags of energy slammed into the underside of the catwalk. Metal exploded in gaping holes, sending long, misshapen spears outward in a deadly hail. Dersi, rocked back by the force of the explosion, tumbled along the catwalk toward the far end.

  With a sound like the dull grumblings of one of the ool’s stomachs, one of the sphere’s support struts tore free. The spinning ball dropped, spitting fire and lightning. The other struts twisted, wrenching at their moorings. A wave of concussive force seized Dersi and lifted her into the air. She opened her mouth to scream, but found the air sucked from her lungs as a consuming ball of fire wrapped around the sphere. Below her, the catwalk buckled, its center rising like the heaving bulk of a massive worm.

  “No!” The cry burst from the trembling figure of God, gripping the railing near the landing from which Dersi and Erekel had fled. Another figure emerged from the putrid mass of flesh at the entrance to the landing. The landing shook with the force of the explosion below. Fire rose to engulf it, a flood of roiling, devouring flame.

  And then Dersi crashed back downward. She slammed into the far landing. Her body bounced, and she felt her ribs snap. Helpless in the flood of concussive force, Dersi spun across the grating. She felt a tremendous impact on the small of her back as she plowed into the interface arch on the landing. Oblivion engulfed her, and she fell into darkness.

  Lhedri felt himself picked up as if by some mammoth, clenching hand and tossed through the air. He crashed into the wall above the wide entryway with enough force to spew the air from his lungs. Then he was falling, uncontrolled. His shoulder slammed into the landing. His sword skittered from his hand and caught on the low lip encircling the landing. He groaned, blinking his eyes to clear them, and stared down into a roiling mass of flame and lightning. His eyes widened. A consuming heat washed over him as the fireball swelled, approaching.

  Lhedri rose and leaped back into the corridor, tucking and rolling through melting ool-flesh, its stink sending waves of revulsion through him. A wall of flame shot up behind him, a fountain that rose, crackling, from the depths of the massive chamber. He felt the blast baking his skin, blistering. Again his body was picked up and heaved through the air. Pain exploded in his side as he smashed into a wall, spun, and bounced down the hallway.

  He lay in a pool of melting ool-flesh. It clung to him, its stench raising bile in his throat. Staring at the ceiling, he could not bring his mind into focus. He could hear nothing, just a vast blankness that told him he had been struck deaf. His fingers, exploring his head, found blood trickling from his ears.

  Dazed, unsure of his whereabouts or his purpose, he rose to his feet. His hand on the wall supported his shaky legs. He stared at where his hand met the ool-flesh sheathing the wall. It drew back from his touch, receding like ripples in a pond, bubbling, while all around him the tissue hung in diseased-looking tatters. Pieces of blackened tissue plopped to the floor, boiled, and melted into a stinking pool of liquid.

  His gaze wandered the length of the corridor. Everywhere the tissue blackened, shriveled, and finally melted, rotting. An incredible miasma of putrid odors hung like a pall in the air, the stench of death. He could not believe, could not believe, the extent of the devastation. Nor could he begin to understand its cause.

  A tickling sensation spiraled outward from his chest, a coolness against the blistered heat of his skin. He looked down. His clothing had been burned from his body. With tentative fingers he touched his chest, unbelieving of the sight that met his eyes. Blistered skin bubbled, expanding, then sloughed off to fall at his feet. Beneath that putrid layer lay new, healthy skin, unblemished, unmarked. Pain receded as if it had never been there, leaving only its memory.

  A moment later, as if plugs had been removed from his ears, his hearing flooded back. Sharp sounds, crashing metal and screams. The dull roar of flames. Crackling waves of energy. The hissing consumption of ool-flesh.

  And God’s voice, thundering.

  Lady Dersi! With strangely rekindled vigor, Lhedri ran down the corridor and emerged onto the blackened landing, facing outward. Before him, mounted on smoldering rods of metal, hung a smoking skeleton. Tatters of flesh clung stubbornly to the bones, black and dripping. The head was thrown back, its mouth opened wide. Its three arms were wrapped in melted metal rods, spread wide. One hand, the middle, seemed to have escaped most of the ravages of the flames; the flesh was pocked with seeping blisters. The arm thrust out from the chest, the hand cupped as if it held something, something precious.

  The Gagash.

  Beyond the smoking corpse, a twisted catwalk spanned a vast open space. Howling winds whipped upward, a gale-force updraft that hurled debris toward the ceiling far above. Objects rained down, crashing into the landing and the catwalk, and tumbled toward the spinning maelstrom below, where they were caught up and shot forth again.

  At the center of the catwalk, where it heaved upward like some immense worm, God sprawled, clinging to the railing with his mechanical arm. His metal half smoldered. Partially fused joints squealed in protest as he dragged the seared meat that was his organic half along the catwalk. Half his head had vanished, and a shrill, mechanical sound escaped his throat, rising over even the sounds of the maelstrom. His passage left a wide swath of oozing ruin on the catwalk’s grating.

  Lhedri followed God’s red gaze, at first seeing nothing that would attract his attention. Then, on the opposite landing, shadowed within the leaning bulk of an archway that danced with inner lights, he saw a humped form, still. A wisp of pale white hair and a delicate curl of a soft arm betrayed her: Lady Dersi.

  “Dersi!” His shout carried over even the cacophony of noise in the chamber, given strength through desperation.

  God turned at the sound of Lhedri’s voice, his mechanical eye blazing. His half-jaw gaped open, and a scream like the sound of clashing metal emerged. His clawed appendage slammed into the gangway, and he dragged his half-body forward, toward the opposite landing.

  And Lady Dersi.

  Lhedri did not think. He stepped around the crucified Gagash, toward the trembling walkway.

  Suddenly the entire world seemed to heave. Momentarily weightless, Lhedri felt his feet leave the solid floor of the landing. He scrambled, reaching out for something, anything, to anchor him. His hand brushed something brittle and dry, and he latched onto it, squeezing. His fingers dug through a thin crust, sinking into a soft, warm wetness, and he held on. His feet flew up, up, until only his tremulous anchor held him, head down, keeping him from flying away.

  His head barked against something, and he turned. The grinning, black-toothed skull of the Gagash stared back at him. He realized he held onto the middle forearm of the dead ma
n, the musculature sliding loose, unattached to bone.

  The sensation of weightlessness vanished, and Lhedri fell, jerking to a halt a few feet above the landing, hanging by his grip on the Gagash’s outstretched arm. His eyes swelled wider as he stared down through the metal grating, down through the burning shell of a vast spherical object, down through the howling winds that spun debris about like toys. Down through a massive hole in the ool, toward the surface of the world, below. Close. Closer than he had ever seen. He could see individual leaves on the trees, stones on the hillsides, the silver ripple of water washing along a streambed. He could see the ool’s feeder tentacles, corrupted, decaying, trailing across the landskin. And where the feeders dragged, they left in their wake corruption, consumption.

  The ool fell, dropping gently, like a billowing sheet of lace, toward the world, and the landskin that had spawned it.

  Lhedri hung from the Gagash’s charred arm, staring down at the approaching ground. He blinked, disbelieving the impossible, the imponderable. A virulence ran through the ool, a virulence capable of sending it spiraling to the ground. A virulence that spread at the merest touch of the feeder tentacles, poisoning the landskin below.

  “No! No!” The voice was cold, lifeless, utterly alien. Like sand scraping on metal, it rasped.

  Dazed by the death of his world, Lhedri raised his eyes and looked at God, who clung to the catwalk, his own gaze locked onto the swelling fragment of the world below. “No. It can’t be. No! You’re killing it! You’re killing it all. Santiago!”

  Lhedri dropped to the landing. God turned, his eye whirring as it focused on Lhedri.

  Chapter 47

  Dersi groaned, waking. Her head throbbed, her body ached. She felt something hard pressed against the small of her back, hard and cold and tingling. Warm stickiness bathed her face and torso, and the smell of coppery blood overrode even the powerful stench of burning flesh and ozone.

  She opened eyes, thick with congealing blood, swiping at her lids with her numb fingers. Pressing her back to the hard surface behind her, she stared out over the turbulent maelstrom that boiled and hissed and crashed below her. A cry of panic caught in her throat, a choking wad of revulsion.