That isn't right at all.
Rickman retreated to the mixing desk and turned a knob. The rhythm speeded up. The rodent-thing danced faster, legs pumping, an almost frantic jig. It sang, putting everything it had into it, as fervent as any tenor, screeching and wailing as if in pain. The whole room shook and vibrated and Rickman felt as if the top of his head might come off with the pressure. He dialed the distortion knob all the way back to the off position and finally, with another soft pop the mutant rodent vanished, its form being subsumed back into a swirling glowing mass as the plasma reformed in the dead center of the array. The ball of shimmering quicksilver hung there, quivering, as if daring him to try something else.
Rickman, while dismayed that his experiment had taken such a strange turn, was not too disappointed.
I'm onto something here. I'm really onto something.
He played with his dials and knobs, testing the boundaries of the plasma with multi-tracking, distortion, feedback and echo effects. He found that at the top range of power, with echo full on, the plasma was forced into an egg-like configuration, no longer silver but black and roiling, the surface covered in an oily sheen that cast a rainbow aurora around the room. With only the minutest twitch of the knobs things could be born from the egg—things that would dance—things that would sing, just for him.
After his disappointment with the rodent-thing, he was only slightly happier with his second creation. As before, the field boundary popped when he turned a knob just slightly too far.
This time the floor of the array was coated in several inches of gray slime that was already hardening and fusing into a solid, glass-like mass. There were things embedded in it—blood and hair and bones and eyes, all jumbled like a manic jigsaw, fused and running into one another as if assembled by a demented sculptor. It was only when he spotted the chipped and yellowed incisor that he realized what he was seeing.
He had no idea what to do next, but fortunately the decision was taken from him. Something rose up out of the glassy mass, slowly at first, then punching its way through the surface with a tinkle of broken glass that was clearly audible even above the vibration and hum. When Rickman looked closer, he saw it was a bone, hollow and holed in several places along its length—a bone that immediately started up a piping whistle, high and reedy, like a gull soaring and swooping though the room, keeping time with the thrum and beat from the array. The sound was not unpleasant—almost harmonious in fact, so Rickman decided to let things play on for a spell to see where they led.
More bones forced their way up through the slime, sending their high whistling voices to join the first, a flock of flautists that blended and merged until it was like an orchestrated choir, singing in time with Rickman's dream compositions.
But it's still not right.
Without hesitation he turned the echo knob sharply to the off position. Once again the plasma reformed into the shining quicksilver globe in the center of the array. The chamber fell silent. By small, almost miniscule stages, Rickman began to turn the knob again, taking care not to go too far, determined to prevent the plasma from popping this time.
He was rewarded for his patience.
A new black egg formed and quivered, an oily rainbow aura dancing over it. Ever so slowly it became two, a shimmering sheen running over their sleek black surface. They hummed to themselves, a high singing that was taken up and amplified by an answering whine from the enclosing array. As two eggs became four, the whole room rocked from side to side in rhythm as a drumbeat kicked in to force the tempo.
Better.
The dance had begun.
Four eggs became eight.
The air above Rickman filled with singing, filled with the rhythm of the dance.
His whole body shook, vibrating in time. His head swam, and it seemed as if walls of the room melted and ran. The scene receded into a great distance until it was little more than a pinpoint in a blanket of darkness, and he was alone, in a cathedral of emptiness where nothing existed save the dark and the pounding chant.
And then there was light.
He saw stars—vast swathes of gold and blue and silver, all dancing in great purple and red clouds that spun webs of grandeur across unending vistas. Shapes moved in and among the nebulae; dark, wispy shadows casting a pallor over whole galaxies at a time, shadows that capered and whirled as the dance grew ever more frenetic. He was buffeted, as if by a strong, surging tide, but as the beat grew ever stronger he cared little. He gave himself to it, lost in the dance, lost in the stars.
He did not know how long he wandered in that space between. He forgot himself, forgot everything but the dancing in the vastness where only rhythm mattered. He may even have been there yet had the hologram's boundary not collapsed with a shriek.
This time he had to hurry to dismiss the thing that the collapsing field left behind. It was the size of a grown man, but looked more like a hideous shrimp. The body was segmented and chitinous like that of a crustacean, but this was no marine creature—it had membranous wings, currently tucked tightly against its back, giving it a hunched appearance. There were no arms or hands to speak of, although Rickman counted four pairs of limbs. The pair the thing used as legs was more stout and thicker than the rest, each being tipped with three horny claws extended to balance its weight at the front, while a segmented tail completed the tripod behind it. The other appendages looked more flexible and nimble. It turned slightly and Rickman got a good look at its face. Instead of features, there was only a mound of ridged flesh, pale and greasy, like a mushroom towards the end of its cycle. A multitude of thin snake-like appendages wafted around its head, turning as one and looking straight at Rickman. They started to thrash—at first he thought it too was dancing in time to the beat of the music, but the walls of his array began to quake and the thing inside thrashed harder. Its wings unfolded, and the huge tail beat at the confinement of the boundary field. Rickman's plasma container wailed and screamed louder than any amplified feedback whine at the assault.
This isn't right at all.
He was forced to switch the machinery off completely, and even then the thing seemed reluctant to go, fighting and thrashing as it was torn into mere scraps of plasma that wafted gently in the air before finally winking out with another soft pop.
Rickman stood at the mixing desk, fingers gripping the edge of the box so tightly that his knuckles were white and his palms felt bruised and battered when he willed himself to let go and relax.
The music in his head took longer to fade than the pain in his hands. Once he had recovered his breath, the main thing that Rickman remembered was not the hideous prawn-like thing in the box, but the dance, and the time he had spent lost in the rhythm of the spheres. He wanted that again. He wanted it badly.
I'm close now.
He switched his machine back on. The holographic field sparked and buzzed and the array began to throb and vibrate. The plasma formed almost immediately and started to sing and dance even before Rickman turned the echo knob slowly clockwise.
A tear formed in reality, a black oily droplet appearing to hang in the air, a perfect black egg, already singing.
The walls of the room throbbed like a heartbeat. The black egg pulsed in time. The singing got louder, like a chorus of angels, far away, singing into a wind.
Rickman turned the knob a millimeter to the right.
The egg calved, and calved again.
Four eggs hung in a tight group, pulsing in time with the throbbing music that was getting steadily louder and more insistent as a distant drumbeat kicked in, hard and heavy. Colors danced and flowed across the sheer black surfaces; blues and greens and shimmering silvers on the eggs.
In the blink of an eye there were eight.
Rickman started to sway and hum along with the beat, singing under his breath, getting lost in the moment.
It's working.
Sixteen now, all perfect, all dancing.
The vibration grew louder still.
Thirty
-two now, and they had started to fill the array with dancing aurora of rainbow shimmering lights that pulsed and capered in time with the music.
It's really working.
Sixty-four, each a pearl of black light.
The colors filled the room, spilled out over the floor, crept around Rickman's feet, danced in his eyes, in his head, all though his body. He gave himself to it, willingly. The room filled with stars, and he danced among them.
A hundred and twenty eight eggs in the chamber now, and already calving into two hundred and fifty-six.
Rickman danced.
Rickman sang.
The eggs sang with him.
There were too many of them to count now. They spilled out of the array, filled the space in the room, their song raising higher, the beat and thrum of the music filling his head, the dancing rainbow colors filling his eyes with blue and green and gold and wonderment.
Rickman was at peace. He danced in empty spaces filled with oily, glistening eggs. They calved and spawned yet more eggs, then even more, until he swam in a swirling sea of eggs and colors and songs and dancing.
Lost—so lost that he did not even noticed when he was joined in the dance.
First came the rodent things, tails thumping, paws slapping, their voices raised high in a chant that called their gods to them. High and free, a whistling rose up, soaring as a myriad bone flutes came in on the beat and joined them. Membranous wings fluttered somewhere high above. Eggs calved, releasing even more of their number into the dance, and calved again, and again.
Rickman's room could no longer contain them.
They spilled out into the city.
Rickman went with them.
Born among the Bottomliners of waterless Dun Beach, while shutter and shatter barked under the Wormwood Stars, Xiao Gǔ, or Little Falcon, grew into something man-sized. At seventeen, before another round of yawns could wholly silence his might-get-out-of-this, he collected all the parts of his famished and pretty fed-up and weary, and looked at the beyond. Shoulders set to push at forward, he wandered from his tin-and-twine shack below the purpling sky. Walked or stumbled, dipped his oar in riverwide or sailed seas coastal, he moved, sun or suburbs, from light and spring to unmanageable blast of deepest night and back again. Climb or under fence, around the tilts of THAT and by shapes commissioned in carnivorous dreams, year slid into year as he lined-up miles of done and done.
In the Land of Seven Slow Rivers, Xiao Gǔ spent the morning of his 33rd birthday in the Temple of To-morrow’s Fire. The clouds in the skycanvas above were nightfall-gray and full of the thunders of the Laughing Furies.
The following night he found a room and a meal of course bread and uncommonly-spiced noodles in the House of a Thousand Injuries. Brewing around him in the smoke and shadows of the tavern room, dark whispers and glances darted. Ill at ease he went to bed in a common room he had to share with five hard and unpolished men. Flipping and flopping with heated notions of murderers lighting his thoughts, he dipped in and out of sleep as they snored and grunted.
Before the sun could splash light into the sky the next morning he rose, and smelling murder, knowing it to be en route, dressed quickly. Cat-stepping between five sinister characters while they were still fingering trouble in their dreams, he exited a window and fled, following the venturesome of southerly winds.
Moonscapes and no traffic, he moved. He rode the roads on his jade turtle with a golden shell, Màn Lùjìng, meaning Slow Path, whom he won in a game of mahjong with a very drunken trickster, to see what he could learn of the great, wide world. Over mountain and valley and along rivers reflecting the desires of the stars he travelled. He watched. Stumbled. He saw. Dealt with many hungers. He learned what there was to learn when it was offered, and with it tucked away, perhaps for future use, he traveled on.
For many days the land he traveled became tainted. Greens and new leaves stretching toward the waning light were touched by autumnal forces out of season. Gray mosses covered areas of bare rocks and boulders. Fungi the color of rust clawed in cracks and upon boughs. The lead-colored sky and its vulture-shadows pressed down, bring stinging winds, and periods of chilled rain. The wind changed and became blustery and chill, making Xiao Gǔ’s phoenix-kite buck, dip, and strain against the cord he had tethered to the back of his saddle.
Every inch forward was dulled, no sound or flash or beast or fowl stirred around him.
This land was an ocean of dying.
As a new day dawned with cloud-shaded gray-light pawing at the ground, he went through a stunted hollow of dread that disordered the heart, and coming out of it took a fork that lead around a bend crowned on each side with massive boulders. Before him stood a great lone hill in the dry wilderness. Xiao Gǔ gasped, the ghostly-land of shrubs and roots had been punished by decay, and dying grass and rocky soil rose to a distant peak where a shorn Cassia-tree stood. All the nearby hills and fields were green and bursting with fruit since it was the height of summer, but this desolate hill… all its breath and tranquility had been stripped from it.
“Has this desolate place offended the gods?” He had seen barren and found his intent crowned in rain, had strained to move his restlessness in the face of necessitates or greed, or when the river’s flow would not dent, but this tomb of dismal was a crime, it sapped all vigor.
In the horrible silence, Xiao Gǔ was surprised to see a shepherd standing on the hill when there were so many better places to feed a flock, so to discover the perplexing why, he turned Màn Lùjìng off the road and up the hill to where the shepherd stood. Two more surprises awaited him. First, the shepherd was a beautiful young woman dressed in heavily-soiled, tattered rags, and second, her grief was a plague, graying hand, eye, and expression. Taken aback, Xiao Gǔ asked what misery and bothers clung to her.
“Oh, Sir,” the woman moaned. “Fortune has forsaken me, and I am in need and ashamed. Since you are kind enough to ask I will tell you all. I am Cassilda, the youngest daughter of the King Who Once Wore Golden Silks across the Sea of Hali. I was married to the second-son of the Water Dragon King of Ponah Pei, Pàng Chen. Yet my husband ill-treated and disowned me. I complained to my father-in-law, but he loved his son blindly and did nothing. And when I grew insistent father and son became angry, and I was cast out and banished to this dismal curse of dead branches and silent dread. This is my prison… my tomb.”
“To tend this flock, on this barren hill when such rich fields stand so near?”
“These are the rain-sheep, the thunder-rams, and they must stay on the Hill of Sorrows where once the golden Cassia-tree knew no fever or scalding, until they are sent to slog through the mundane world of dust, removing the mortar between the fortunes of men and replacing it with ill luck when men fall into the Winter Sleep. This gives rise to despair and the destruction of dreams, and I am cursed by some foulsome spell to tend them.
“I am given no rest in my task . . . And no companion.”
On its way to darken some poor soul’s dreams one of her flock brushed against her. She shrunk from its touch.
“One by one, my flock must leave me and not return... and when the last has left this hill I will wither completely and my bones will be taken below to further stain this Palace of Ill.” When she had spoken, the pale child burst into tears and lost all control. She fell to her knees and her shoulders shook with futility.
Her anguish dizzied him. To endure he had sometimes been a thief of small things, mostly nourishment, but he could see no offense that should sentence her to this hell. “There must be some way I can aid you? Surely one so fair need not be dissected by melancholy and for-ever be chained to this gray damnation?”
“Thank you for your kindness, but I am for-ever bound here.”
He looked at her gloom and torment, and his anger a magnet seeking future, stepped forward. “I will not hear there is no remedy for your woe. Honor and simple kindness demand we find a path that will lead to liberty. All human sensitivities stand opposed to your plight. There
must be something I can do to help you? Would that I had wings and could fly away with you.” And there it was. “Come, and I will take you away from here. There is ample room on Màn Lùjìng’s saddle for another.”
“Alas good Sir, it cannot be. I am compelled to stay here by the will of my great and terrible father-in-law, the Water Dragon King.” More tears hammered her and her clothes constricted, as the pain of the woven-web of death bound her to the greywound of grieve she kneeled on. Her breath became shallow for a time. “The Sea of Hali is far from here; yet if you travel in that direction and go far enough, you may come it on your journey. I should like to give you a letter to bring to my father, but I do not know whether you would take it.”
“I will be glad to deliver the letter to your father. Yet the Sea of Hali is long and broad, and how am I to find your father’s kingdom? Is there a map? Can you speak of markers?”
“I am no guide. Of thorny paths and how many days and nights one would need to navigate to reach my father’s palace, I cannot say.” Her arm rose and she pointed. “On the southern shore of the sea stands another Cassia-tree, a twin to this one, which people call the Winter Tree. When you get there you must loosen your girdle and strike the gong which hangs from the branches of the tree three times in succession. Then the guardian who you must follow will appear. When you see my father, tell him in what need you found me, and that I long greatly for his help.”
Then she fetched out a letter from her breast and, placed it in a beautiful, but cracked porcelain teapot decorated with plum blossoms, and gave it to Xiao Gǔ. She bowed to him, looked toward the east and sighed, and, unexpectedly, tears came from the eyes of Xiao Gǔ as well. He took the letter and the pot and gently placed it in his saddle bag on the broad golden shell of his jade turtle, Màn Lùjìng.
The traveler turned and bowed to Cassilda, promising to return with aid from the Amber King in distant Carcosa. Clouds parted, a songbird settled on the Cassia-tree, and Cassilda smiled. With that, Xiao Gǔ took his leave, setting out now with a purpose.
A Mythos Grimmly Page 26