Oblivion Hand

by Adrian Cole

  It drifted up on silent legs to the Secondary Tiers, blotting out the lower, still encountering no living thing, ignoring the locks. Jundamar cursed with fear, for he had caught a brief glimpse of the substance of this remorseless flood. Dagwort, near at hand, muffled his own terrors and then withdrew discreetly, fleeing at last, knowing that the sorcerers were indeed doomed. Up into the Primary Tiers the black tide lapped, and those who were foolish enough to stray into the streets died horribly.

  Quar Mordo was watching in his optic mirror, and now, as the mass came into the dim light, he gasped. He thought at first it was a natural army of crawling horrors from the depths, some clawing crustacean force, but now he knew otherwise. From the caverns below the city had come an army of living hands. Countless, seething, rolling forward like the sea itself, it came on upward, groping blindly but with certain assurance. One for every hand I withered, Quar Mordo realised. Doors were being splintered aside on the Primary Tiers and the retainers of the Csarducts were dragged forth and grimly pulled to bloody pieces. Nothing could avail against the boiling waves of monsters.

  “They have turned our magic back upon us!” cried Quar Mordo.

  Now the first of the remorseless hands were swarming up the walls of the sorcerers’ towers so that there were six living, wriggling fingers of flesh pointing at the clothed moons, all alive with the rising army. Each of the sorcerers rushed up their spiral stairwells to the uppermost of their turrets and there made their defence, hurling spells and blasting rituals downwards. It was useless. The hands moved on in their thousands, easily climbing the rough mooncoral walls. Some were destroyed and fell away, but the numbers were immeasurable.

  As one, they smashed their way into the upper turrets of the six towers, battering down the doors, tearing apart the metal windows set against them, ripping away stone and mortar. Jundamar and the others all began a terrible shrieking. Terror clutched them icily and then turned to panic and ultimately madness as the fingers of the hands pointed. The six set up a maniacal laughing, eyes distending as each saw the carpet of hands closing in on them across their marbled floors. The laughter rose to a pitch that was drowned in pain as the first of the hands began grasping, tearing, rending.

  Elfloq listened. The tower had become deathly silent now that all his Master’s guardians were gone with him to dust. Yet he had heard a rising wind out in the city; it had sprung up from the ocean and now rose and rose, eddying about the seven towers, strengthening into a cyclone. “The wind,” Elfloq breathed, “is unnatural. I hear strange laughter within it—the mad shrieking of demons.”

  The Voidal shook his head patiently. “The last of the sorcerers shouts out his pain. Madness has claimed them, though it is only the beginning. Soon they will be no more.”

  Elfloq shuddered as though the wind had beaten a path through the stone of this tower. “Are we to flee, or will we succumb as well?”

  “We are safe enough. Come with me.” The Voidal then led the familiar up to a small room and out through a wooden door on to a tiny balcony that overlooked Quellermondel. Elfloq saw columns of shadow moving back down into the depths, but could not identify the things that made up the swiftly subsiding tide. He felt that it was better not to know.

  “Watch, Elfloq. The last of the dooms comes to Quellermondel. This is to be the end of the Csarduct Dynasty.”

  Elfloq looked across dizzying distances to where the sea was barely visible. What Gods walked behind the night there? He waited.

  Our revel within your splendid palace flares with brightness and extraordinary inventiveness,” smiled Hor Zar Argo, notable Csarduct Conquistador of the First House. He addressed his immediate commander, Dan Zar Enzo, lord of Quellermondel. “Yet it seems the lively fires within cannot match the formidable murmurings of the atmosphere without.”

  Dan Zar Enzo belched and gave a surly grunt, watching the garish antics of the orgy around him in the huge hall. “You swill words around your mouth as though tasting wine! I am a fighting man, Argo, and prefer simple words.”

  “Indeed, but it would seem one could build a totally new language about the whimsical nature of the climate of Moonwater. This world fascinates me. I could state, simply, that there is a storm brewing outside, but to do so, with respect, sire, would be to dismiss rudely what must surely be a unique phenomenon.”

  “Fires of the Bloodworld, Argo! You are more confusing than my wine!” Dan Zar Enzo belched once more, laughing emptily.

  “May I venture to suggest, sire, that you look—but briefly—at the storm? I assure you it is of a singularly ominous nature.”

  “Oh, very well. Cool air will not be unrewarding. Lead on,” growled the huge Csarduct. As he walked with Hor Zar Argo out into the lavish balcony of the upper palace, he was followed by a number of the Csarduct revellers; soon a company of them stood together, looking out over the shadow-clung city.

  “Storm?” said Dan Zar Enzo. “But there is no sound! An unfamiliar darkness, I grant, but all else is peace.”

  “I hear the sea,” said Hor Zar Argo. “And there were frightful gusts but a while ago.”

  “The sea is dark,” said another of the Csarduct lords. “Where are its shimmering lights?”

  “Where are the lights of the city?” said another. “All is pitch.”

  Dan Zar Enzo gazed up at the sorcerers’ towers. They were as black and lifeless as blasted trees. The huge warlord scowled. “All is not as it should be,” he conceded to Hor Zar Argo. He turned to one of the many ubiquitous guardsmen. “Alert the soldiery at once! Be ready to move at a word.” The guardsman bowed and vanished in an instant. Dan Zar Enzo leaned on the balustrade, staring out at the sprawling mooncoral city for a sign of movement. Now he heard the rush of the distant sea. One by one the seven aquamarine moons slipped out from their coy hiding places.

  “The work of your sorcerers?” asked one of the lords, though he drew back dubiously.

  Dan Zar Enzo pointed. “There. What transpires?”

  The sea was alive with movement, as though whipped by a tornado. It began to undulate like the back of a gigantic beast; waves built up and rushed in like wolves on the lowest of the mooncoral structures. Greater waves began to gather and heave forward from out of the ocean deeps. Vibrations shook the very palace as these huge waves thundered down on the city.

  “An undersea upheaval,” muttered Hor Zar Argo.

  “The sorcerers shall answer for this!” roared Dan Zar Enzo and turned. As he did so, the wind roared and gusted out of nothing like the rasping breath of a monstrous god, and all the doors to the festive chamber slammed shut, afterwards proving immovable. The Csarducts dragged out their killing swords and turned their attention to the city once more. The ocean had suddenly come awake and now surged forward and upward, shaking the foundations of the city, crashing inwards and creating huge fissures and splits in the walls of mooncoral. Towers began to splinter and crumble as the water rose. Out at sea the waves lifted themselves like questing beasts, thousands of feet high, as though all the oceans of Moonwater came to the affray, racing down on Quellermondel, hanging over it now like fists. The wind fumed and boiled and clouds closed for the last time over the moons.

  Living streamers of water reached up, licking like tongues at the Tiers, dragging them down. Dan Zar Enzo screamed as he saw the hideous faces that leered from out of the immeasurable walls of water. Up and ever up they rose, blotting the stars, as though all the gods of his private hells had come to crush him and his city. Millions of tons of water cascaded into the alleys and houses, towers and palaces. Like ants the populace were swirled out of their holes and sucked down into aquatic oblivion. To the howling Csarducts it seemed that their innards were gripped and squashed by huge fists of water. Moonwater had come to life and its ocean extracted a terrible revenge for the tyranny of the Csarducts. In the deepest of the deeps, secure from the maelstrom, the Orgae listened.

  One tower survived the cataclysm, and in it the two figures watched, one placidly, one in terror
. The Dark Gods had unleashed their awesome reckoning.

  “We are doomed!” wailed Elfloq, gripping the cloak of the dark man, but the latter remained still, watching the thunderous collapse of the city where avalanches of mooncoral plummeted down into the whirling chaos.

  “It will soon be done. Flee to the astral, Elfloq. There is time.”

  “But what of you? Surely you have the power to escape! I cannot desert you.”

  The Voidal turned a look of surprise on him. “No? But it is through me that this has come about,” he said, indicating the destruction that surged about them. “This was your world.”

  “Aye, but not by choice. I have lost my place in Quellermondel, but I have gained a greater prize! My will!”

  The Voidal nodded sadly. “Yes, your fate is yours to do with as you will from now on.”

  “But—you have smashed the power of the sorcerers! You, too, are free to quit this madness and be your own master.”

  The Voidal felt the shaking of the tower. Soon it would fall. “Free, Elfloq? Would that I was. But not yet, I think. Now—go! The tower will collapse.”

  Still Elfloq paused, almost ignoring the booming approach of the mighty wave army as it sought to finish its brutal work.

  “I will gladly accompany you and serve you if you wish it!” he shouted above the din.

  “Flee!” cried the Voidal as the towering water began to fall, like the sky dropping. Elfloq blinked out and the Voidal prepared himself for the darkness that he knew would immerse him. And the fresh nightmares.

  “Well met, little familiar,” he breathed as the waters came down. “Perhaps you shall serve me yet. Well met in hell.”

  Out in the limitless mists of the astral, Elfloq drifted. He felt the briefest of droplets of water, like the start of rain, and knew that Quellermondel had been reclaimed by its rightful heirs. But there was no sign of the Voidal. Not here. This would never be a sanctuary for one such as him.

  “But I will find you,” the familiar whispered to the mists. “And serve you well. Oh, yes.”

  And he set off at once, gripped by a determination that those who had known him would have appreciated.

  Chapter V

  URGE AND DEMIURGE

  Just as the omniverse is full of balladeers, informants. gossips, songsters and other purveyors of information, so it is liberally spiced with havens, sanctuaries and boltholes, and it is more often than not in such places that the tongues of the former group loosen most readily. In my own travels, especially those undertaken incognito, I have learned more in an hour in such diverse haunts as Cloudway (of which I shall speak more fully in due course) The Inn at the Edge, Mindsulk and High Crofels than an entire week in the administrative courts of any number of deities and their high priests.

  No matter what one’s station, one can always glean something of interest, of value even, in these sequestered places.

  Elfloq was a master at extracting information, and I doubt if there were many others who knew so many diffuse and curious agents and points of contact.

  Not all of them, of course, were reliable.

  —Salecco, sometimes named by his enemies, The Indiscreet

  Asylis has been variously described by both mortals and immortals as a squalid city, a den of iniquity, as a sprawling hovel fit only for criminals and as the repository of freaks, delinquents and indiscretions of nature. This is scarcely fair. Asylis is certainly of the proportions of a city, though no one has ever had the time or inclination to attempt to traverse its entire perimeters. The buildings, to be honest, are not pleasing to look upon, being ramshackle and crumpled together, almost as though the gods had taken the indeterminate whole and squeezed—this has led to the houses, inns and storeplaces being very narrow but tall, top-heavy like overhanging trees. As for iniquity—well, there is no more of that here than in any of the other towns and metropolises of the many dimensions of the omniverse. Certainly Asylis is not an evil place. Neither is there a predominance of freaks and hybrids here, although the place was (as the story goes) conceived as a home for those of the gods, demigods and lesser spirits who had at some time failed to maintain the high standards expected of such entities. They may be disgraced, but Asylis is no prison. All are free to come and go as they please, but few leave, preferring to remain in the company of their own kind.

  Having been constructed by gods (and admittedly tossed aside somewhat indifferently) Asylis sprawls in no positive dimension. Indeed, those that know how to use its labyrinthine alleys and crumbling gables can enter most of the dimensions from here. Reaching this place, however, is not so easy, and takes peculiar qualities.

  There is another realm of Asylis—a bizarre landscape that threads in sooty confusion from roof to roof, garret to garret, spire to spire, for among the tall chimneys and looming towers can be found a vast terrain, quite unlike any other. This remarkable haunt has its own guardian, or rather caretaker, for Loptoc the Gossip would never consider himself capable of even so much as a hint of violence. Verbally, that would be another matter, for it was his tongue that won him the stewardship of this smoke-pulsating domain. That flapping member has become an almost tangible companion to Loptoc, for he is ever to be found going about his endless chores, tending the flues and chimney pots of Asylis, discussing the vicissitudes of life with this invisible apprentice.

  It was thus, immersed in just such a dialogue, that Elfloq the familiar discovered the caretaker of the chimneys. Elfloq, popping into being from the astral, grimaced at the clinging stench of soot and smog, and quickly hid behind a tall brick chimney that seemed must surely topple at any moment. He watched Loptoc thrusting a lengthy rod downwards into the throat of another tall chimney, the fat legs of the caretaker waving about in sooty clouds, words tumbling around him as he leaned far over the brick lip to work.

  “Ho, Gossip!” called Elfloq. “Have you time to spare to exchange tales of the outside?” To offer such news to Loptoc was the equivalent of offering raw meat hocks to a ravenous carnivore. The caretaker emerged at once, his whiskered face bristling with cinders, though a crooked grin beamed through the grime.

  “Ha, the rapscallion has come to visit! He’s not been here for an age. Come to talk to me, has he? Talk then, talk. What tales does he bring? Whose private embarrassments has he been a-prying on?”

  “Tales enough to make your ears burn,” Elfloq laughed. “Terrible things are abroad. Empires are falling.”

  “Pah! How dull—he brings me nothing new. Empires fall every day. There are multitudes of empires out there, of men and gods. The stars teem with empires! In the end they all fall. And those who were once mighty—”

  Elfloq grunted, for Loptoc was evidencing all the familiar symptoms of a pending outburst of nostalgia—of how he had once been a proud and notable demiurge, serving under the mighty god, Hadro-Hadro, builder of a million worlds, and of how he, Loptoc, had sadly fallen victim to his own tongue (his own tongue, that should be his truest friend!) and had bungled so many of his creative chores that he had been severed from service and cast out by Hadro-Hadro to dwell here in Asylis, where there were many other such inept unfortunates. Loptoc was fond of narrating how no one appreciated the stresses and strains placed upon gods and demiurges. Mistakes were inevitable.

  Yes, mused Elfloq, he looks in the mood to babble it all once more, though my ears still ring from the last time I heard the entire recitation—aye, and of how he tripped over the coils of the same wriggling tongue here in Asylis, showing himself to be incapable of tactful silence and of being too attached to idle (nay, harmful) tittle-tattle, his tongue having bruised too many of Asylis’s inhabitants for their comfort. Then it had been up to the chimney world for Loptoc, an outcast among outcasts. It was a world where visitors were few and thus, though Loptoc would never admit such a thing, welcome.

  Elfloq had been in two minds whether to come here to Loptoc, but since the fall of Quellermondel and the untimely demise of his former master, he had spent far too long searching in
vain for the mysterious dark man who had brought about Moonwater’s debacle, the Voidal. Any port in a storm, he mused.

  “If my news is so boring,” said the familiar, “I’d best be on my way, having much business to attend to—”

  Loptoc’s grubby fingers pinched at Elfloq’s wrist and clamped. The demiurge managed a good-natured smile. “Nay, nay! He was ever impetuous! Let him come over to the heat. Let him warm himself. All news has some merit.”

  Loptoc wobbled off over the slates, more ape than man. He was no taller than Elfloq, though far stockier. He was in direct contrast to the buildings of Asylis, which had the appearance of being crushed inwards, for he had the build of a man who looked as if he had been squashed from above, as though an angry god had leaned on him a little harder than he had meant.

  The two beings squatted like gargoyles around a low-built chimney from which warm air rose in rippling hot currents. Both held out their hands to warm them, though for all its mist, smog and smoke, the rooftop world of Asylis was not cold.

  “So he has some news of interest?” said Loptoc, pulling at the strings of a little bag beside the chimney. Elfloq knew there would be victuals within, for Loptoc was expert at monkeying down the chimneys and acquiring things from the kitchens of inns and such like. The familiar was correct, and shortly was given a juicy piece of raw meat. He chewed it with relish and settled himself, peeping at the bag to see if there was wine within.

  “Empires may fall,” he told Loptoc, “but we like to be the first to know, do we not? I would not bring anyone history.”