by Adrian Cole
The dreaming mind of the Spydron writhed ceaselessly as it contemplated the ageless struggle of the spiderlings and ratlings, which harried each other about the extremities of their domains in the neutral middle regions. Yet, as always with the introverted Spydron, the products of its own creativity grew insipid and dull. Hence its recourse to the abductions.
The fruits of these practices had made their niches and crannies in the middle terraces and corridors of the castle, cringing away in constant confusion and terror from the perpetual forays of the two warring armies. In time, they, too, succumbed to the rigours of mutation, and became debased and stunted, parodies of the evolutionary process to which they had once belonged. And the name of their lord was Misery.
Grabulic, the thin-faced, silver-haired Songster, woke from a slumber that had plunged him into a stellar gulf so deep that he dreamed space itself had swallowed him. He woke, though the darkness around him taught him nothing about his environment.
The vague memory of splendid drunken revelry in the court of some debased, hedonistic monarch of Phaedrabile stirred sluggishly. Was this, then, the way he had been repaid for the rendering of the lost art, the Songs of Life and Death? Had he been cast into a remote dungeon for those shameless Songs (many of which, admittedly, made crude jest of the gods)? His memory had been all but wiped clean by the escapades of countless years of imbibing at numerous courts. But a piece of dream gleamed for a moment, the vision of a long strand of web, but it vanished. He reached out and clasped the instrument of his art, the many-stringed wooden frame that sang with him. It was enough to comfort him. Darkness and Grabulic were old acquaintances, and on occasion they had been close friends. He shifted in the rank dirt and dust, waiting.
“Art thou, awake, enemy?” grated a voice from so close to his ear that he started.
“Who calls me enemy?” he replied in an octave higher than was usual. “Never call me enemy! Have you not seen my face? Do you not know me? Am I not Grabulic, whose famous Songs are for all the creatures of the omniverse? Grabulic, who calls no man enemy?”
“Awake, then!” came the growl. At this a crackle on the air presaged the brief flicker of a primitive torch. In its green glow, Grabulic saw a hunched, stunted creature bending over him, gazing with eyes that were not eyes. They were two round, white orbs, evidently blind, yet the manling seemed to be studying him.
“Gods of the Abyss, what manner of creature are you?” cried the Songster, with little regard for discretion (a trait for which he was not noted).
A peculiar sound that may have been a laugh escaped the lips of the manling. “You’ll know that soon enough. Come! To linger here is to invite the ratlings to feed. And there is nothing that lives they do not call enemy!” This time the creature emitted a gargling sound that was indeed meant as laughter, though Grabulic did not feel encouraged to enjoin his companion.
The Songster was now able to see something of his remarkable surroundings. He had not woken in a dungeon as he had imagined, but saw instead that he sat in some subterranean corridor, which wound its serpentine way through the stone to his left and right, dank and unsavoury as a sewer, sheer-sided and ovoid, like the burrow of some colossal worm. He saw why the manling was so hunched, for the ceiling of this tunnel was but a few feet high. As the Songster got to his feet, the manling hobbled ahead on stocky legs, holding aloft his sputtering torch.
“Say! Where is this miserable domain?” said Grabulic, sensing that the gargoyle was for the moment an ally.
Its white orbs turned back to him. “You trespass in the castle of the Spydron, unfortunate traveller. You are the first to do so for a long, long time,” it croaked.
Grabulic’s expression at once altered to match the colour of his silver hair. “Gods of Chaos and Madness! The Spydron? But it’s a myth, its castle a place of pure legend!”
“Nay, ‘tis the rest of creation that has become myth for you,” the manling cackled. “Touch the stone. It is real enough, eh?”
Grabulic was about to utter an obscene retort, when the little figure ahead abruptly stood upright, its squat nose sniffing the air in the manner of a questing beast, more rodent than man.
“They come! Their stench is unmistakable. Hurry, traveller, or you’ll dream no more of anything.” The manling turned and rushed on ahead, and as he did so the torch guttered, almost out. Grabulic followed, crouched low, clutching his beloved instrument. Behind him now he could hear a strange pattering that grew rapidly in volume, and the cold sweat of dread began to break out on his brow. It was the running of the ratlings, hastening to the feast. Grabulic looked back down the tunnel, and in the dim light saw the first of the horrors come squealing into view, teeth gleaming. Whiskered noses high, the horde rushed on like a wave, tails white and bleached, thrust up in the hunt. But the eyes were the most fearful aspect of the ratlings, for they were round and seemingly sightless, like the manlings, but they were the bright crimson of blood.
Grabulic took but a single glance before the light went out. He bumped into the dwarf, who was scuttling up a crude series of holes in the stonework.
“Climb for your life! Quickly!” cried the manling, and the Songster needed no second bidding. Already he imagined he could feel the sharp nips of a hundred teeth in his scrawny legs. The manling had climbed above the tunnel and through an invisible hole, while the squealing below had assumed frightful proportions. Grabulic thrust himself up and through the hole and at once something clanged down, shutting off the ghastly sounds of pursuit. Another ball of green light ignited, a new torch in the manling’s fist.
“It will hold them until one of their underlords comes to force it open. With luck and the Spydron willing, we’ll be safe by then. Come!”
Grabulic immediately followed the figure, having no wish to be left to the vicissitudes of this dreadful place, particularly if it truly was the castle of the heretofore mythical Spydron. What manner of nightmare had he been pitched into?
Turning through corridors and wriggling up tiny stairwells of black stone that wormed up into the heart of the castle, the two figures hurried on fearfully. From time to time the manling stopped, sniffing for a hint of pursuit or to learn if any other revolting denizens of this place had been awakened by the rapid flight. At last, high on the middle terrace, he drew Grabulic on all fours through yet another of the burrows and they came out into an open area, though it was neither high-roofed nor bright. No sun ever shed light within this nocturnal realm. The walls and floor were heavy with table-like fungi, grey and daunting, the air trembling with spores. Other life stirred in this alien plantation, for in the shuddering torch-glow Grabulic could discern a score of diminutive manlings, each as stooped and bent as his erstwhile protector.
They were atavistic and beast-like, their apparently blind eyes questing, their gnarled limbs like wood, grained with vessels and corded muscle. Their skins looked mildewed, their hides toughened by this inhospitable environment. Thick, tousled hair tumbled in ringlets down their broad shoulders, and black beards spilled out on to shaggy chests. They spoke in grunts, brief, guttural and rude. Beyond them Grabulic could see a few women with children clutched to them, hiding behind the trunks of the thick fungi. The Songster sensed that he was not welcome.
“What has Mnam-Mnam brought from the lower reaches? A ratling spy is it? Some new monster cunningly wrought so that it may breach our defences?” growled a stocky, muscular dwarf, thrusting its hideous face close to that of the Songster.
“I think not, brother Kulkurakk. ‘Tis but another traveller, caught up in the cruel web of the Spydron, tugged here by the same foul sorcery that sucked in our own ancestors,” vouched Grabulic’s companion.
The huge white orbs of Kulkurakk came close to those of the Songster. “It has been long since any such came! What proof have you of this? Show it at once, lest we commit you to the embrace of the catacombs.”
Grabulic shuddered. “Noble sir!” he cried, swallowing, but the burly Kulkurakk snorted in derision.
/> “Hah! ‘Noble’ he calls me! Your eyes may look intact, but their sight is not! ‘Noble’! What is there in all this vile world of the castle that is noble?”
“Your pardon, I did not mean to mock you,” blurted Grabulic.
“Nay, I see that. Oh yes, I see! We all see, in both light and dark, though the manner of our doing so is by no method known to you, I’ll wager, if you are truly an outsider. Our kind has festered here in the castle for many an age. Necessity has bred us a strange sight of our own, as it has with the other monsters of this lair of madness.”
“I am no offspring of this castle,” insisted Grabulic. “Let me show you my own peculiar gift. There is no other Songster who can give you such diverse joy as I, and no other instrument that can speak to you with the silver tongue of Layola. Here, within this musical device, is said to be imprisoned the Lady Layola, one time Songstress of the lost world of Gnardril, held now within by an eternal spell.” He lifted his stringed frame, and the dwarf people all stared at it, fearing for a moment that it might be a grim talisman, forged through sorcery by an enemy within the castle.
Kulkurakk looked most suspiciously at the instrument and the others drew back.
“A trick!” someone cried, and there was muttered agreement.
“Sorcery,” breathed Kulkurakk. “You are on a demon’s mission.”
“Brother Kulkurakk,” said a voice. A wizened oldster had come forward, bent even more than his fellows, his own burden that of time. His hair was pure white, a white beard trailing in the dust at his feet. He used fungoid sticks to wriggle to Kulkurakk’s side. “I have seen the like of this before,” he said hoarsely.
“You recognise it?” said Grabulic eagerly, holding it under the old one’s very nose.
“Indeed! But I have not heard its melodies for a lifetime: perhaps it was even in a former life, for this one has been as endless as the vaults of the stars that none of us shall see again. Play for us, stranger, that we can recall the existence outside this prison in which the Spydron has encased us.”
Grabulic looked to Kulkurakk for instruction and the dwarf nodded sourly. So the Songster began to play, and the mellow notes of his instrument chimed and rippled through those sombre shadow-vaults of the middle terrace. His voice was sweet, painfully sweet, evocative of a universe and a time that had no relationship to the nightmare and despair of the castle. He sang of things of beauty, of light and of love, and the stone hearts of the dwarves were melted. He sang of the fishers of the fire seas of far Mnurgh and of the sea-waifs from the sulphur pools of Gennarus and of the sleek willow-folk of Wendlewarren, and of their tragic loves. And as he sang, the notes of the Lady Layola soared in perfect harmony with him, as if the instrument embodied the very lost love of which he sang, his own forlorn passion, locked away, so close yet so unreachable.
Even grim Kulkurakk felt a current of emotion stirring and flowing through him like magic, so that as the Songster ended his last song, the dwarf clasped his arm fervently. “You are no spawn of the castle! By all the old gods, you are indeed from some other place! A place we knew must exist, but which we can only reach in our dreams!”
Grabulic looked at them as they shuffled closer, eager to look upon his instrument, his beautiful Layola. “So you are prisoners in this place?” he said.
Kulkurakk grunted. “Hah! Not prisoners, no, for we have the freedom of the castle, though there are places we dare not venture. The castle is our world, its dimensions our entire universe, for there is no way through its walls. It is all we have known. In dreams we touch the places of which you sing. So we are both free and enslaved at the same moment.”
Grabulic set down his instrument and considered the dwarf’s words gravely. The others were nodding sadly: through the echoing cavern passed a wave of deep melancholy.
“Have you no means of escape?” he asked them, for it had come to him that their predicament mirrored his own, and that he, too, was therefore incarcerated.
“None,” affirmed Kulkurakk.
“But—is there no god you can pray to?”
“Gods! Pah, they deserted us long, long ago! There are no gods here, unless you call the Spydron a god. What god would come to this misbegotten realm?”
“You have no demons, no elementals, no Werespawn you can call on for supernatural aid?” said Grabulic, his concern for his own plight mounting.
But Kulkurakk shook his head at each. “None.”
“No sorcerers, no masters of arcane lore? No one who can wield cantrips or conjurations or hurl spells? No adepts?” Grabulic’s voice had become a wail.
Again the reply to his questions was a solemn negative. Gloomy silence hung over them all. Grabulic looked dejected beyond words.
Presently the old manling with the long beard came forward again, sniffing at the Songster like a hound. “Our memories are bereft of such things as you mention, traveller,” he croaked. “But what of yours? Perhaps you have some deity to which you can appeal for succour? Can you not urge it to find an aperture in the walls of the castle?”
Grabulic scratched at his silver locks. “I fear that I have been so wayward in my journeyings and so erratic in my obeisance to the gods, that none of them would turn a whisker in my direction.”
“Yet there must be gods with which you are familiar?” growled Kulkurakk.
“Well,” blustered Grabulic, “that is so. But they are gods of another dimension than this. The walls of this castle must be inordinately thick. Surely no god would hear my invocations! I am no wizard, no priest.”
“Nevertheless,” said Kulkurakk, “you must try! We shall bring you food and drink and give you such luxuries as there are in this sinkhole. And then you will begin. You must call upon every god you can remember until you solicit a response.”
Grabulic paled. “But—but—surely none will hear me!”
Kulkurakk stood close to him, features grim. “They must! Play to them! Your songs and your music would charm stone! Your gods will hear you.”
This brought an optimistic if ragged cheer from the gathered ranks of the manlings.
“And if I do not?” gulped Grabulic.
Kulkurakk deliberated silently, but then an expression of satisfaction moulded itself out of his bellicose features. “If you fail us, Songster, then we will feed you to the Many Mouths in the black orifice of the Wall-that-Hungers.”
A cry went up at this, for the manlings were loath to lose someone as gifted as Grabulic, and one who could so touch their heartstrings with every movement of his fingers along his instrument. But Kulkurakk growled and thrust out his chin in defiance of their complaints.
“Hear me, you fools! This traveller weaves magic in his songs, yes! He sings of wonders and of lost places that we all long for. Yet we cannot reach them! To be reminded of them will be like having a flaming brand searing our hides! If this Songster cannot take us to the places of which he sings, then let us have none of him and his impossible promises! For, consider this: he may well be a trick of the Spydron, sent here to torment us!”
Grabulic anxiously awaited another outcry of defiance from the manlings, but they began to nod soberly, then mutter, then call out that Kulkurakk was wise, was far seeing, and was right. The latter turned to Grabulic, orbs wide.
“So be it! Find a god to aid us, or you feed the Many Mouths!”
Thereafter Grabulic, who could not protest his case as he was outnumbered vastly by the gathered manlings (and who was blessed with not one iota of courage or fighting skill when it came to matters of conflict) was led by the eerie torchlight along low tunnels to a small chamber, lined with old hides and scarcely tall enough to accommodate him, and was then brought water and slices of thin meat. He would have preferred the sting of wine to dent his fears, but the manlings knew of no such commodity; as for the meat, it was tough and salty, yet he made no attempt to ascertain from what creature it had been hacked. After he had been allowed to rest and to gather what he could of his palpitating wits, he was again visited by K
ulkurakk.
“Do you need anything to aid you?” he said.
“Without powders, alembics, pestles, skillets, grimoires and all the paraphernalia of even the humblest wizard, I am more or less impotent—”
“Enough! You have your instrument, your voice. Begin! And do not cease until you have called upon every god and every other manner of power you spoke of.” So saying, the gruff dwarf disappeared, closing the thick door, while from outside Grabulic’s cell could be heard the shufflings of many manling guards.
Grabulic had but a tiny green brand to see by. He scowled at it, deep in thought. This was a dreadful pass he had come to. He reflected upon the many gods that he could name: Aabun, Aacrol the Lurid, Aberboomeroth—to list them alone would take an infinity. But his past and his sins had sealed a particular fate to him, unbeknown to the manlings (and indeed to all but Grabulic) namely that by his jesting at the expense of the gods in his Songs, and also by his errant tenets and faith in many of them (whom he alternately praised and rejected to suit himself) they had combined to deny him a single favour, so that it was his lot to be a man without a god. However, he felt that if he had explained this to the impetuous Kulkurakk, his journey to the ominous-sounding Many Mouths would have been significantly accelerated.
At this moment, three sets of white orbs peered in at him from a grille set in the black door, to see, doubtless, why he had not begun his rituals. At once he started an incoherent incantation, calling out loud the names of Fnobollion, Regurjaj, Ctelpotl the Slitherer, Numm of the Hundred Wills, Hoi-Hoi the Soul Gatherer and many more, not a few of which were entirely his own invention. The white orbs withdrew in amazement and no less in trepidation. Thereafter Grabulic was not disturbed; occasionally, though, he called out the name of some nether world divinity. As had been promised to him, none of the gods saw fit to acknowledge his appeals for aid. If the Spydron heard him, it remained immobile and insensate as stone.