by James Enge
Morlock had been shipwrecked, spent a large portion of the night swallowing seawater and a chunk of the morning vomiting it back up. His feet were lacerated sores bound in bloody rags, and if the Kaenish sun beat down on his pale shoulders much longer they would soon be bright indeed, but not happy.
“I’m well,” he said gruffly. “And you?”
“Well?” she said doubtfully. “Not happy? Not pretty? Not bright?”
“I’m as pretty as I’ll ever be,” Morlock replied (which was perfectly true, and nothing to brag about).
“You come with me,” she said, suddenly decisive. “Be happy. Be pretty and bright.”
Morlock was a young man. The woman was strangely attractive, if possibly insane, and she was offering him happiness, prettiness, and brightness. It seemed unlikely he would have a better offer that day.
“Then,” he said, and gestured at the road. When she didn’t seem to understand him he said, “I’ll come with you.”
“Oh!” she said, very excited. “Oh happy! Oh bright! Oh pretty pretty!” and reached out to touch him.
“Thanks,” he said, avoiding the touch of her hand and its curving clawlike nails. He had just realized why she talked so strangely—or at least why her speech was slurred. When she opened her mouth to cry oh he saw that there were thornlike protrusions growing from her tongue. It must have been agony for her to speak.
She took him to a nearby town. It was walled as most Kaenish towns were. (Civil war was also an art to the decadent Kaenish.) But the gates were wide open and the brutal images of the local god had been thrown down and smashed in the road. Above the open gateway was written, in the cuneiform that the Kaenish used, the name of the town and its fallen god: Thyläkotröx.
“No gate?” he asked, falling into her childish pattern of speech. “No god?”
“Bad god!” she said, scowling. “Not pretty or happy.”
“Or bright, I suppose.”
“No! And gate . . . why should not all be happy?”
“Eh,” said Morlock, who had always hoped that happiness was overrated.
They entered Thyläkotröx. The city showed signs of recent war: burned buildings, sections of the paved streets torn up, many dark brown patches on the pale street stones where blood had pooled. Whatever had overthrown the local god had not triumphed without a struggle: the citizens of Thyläkotröx (or some of them at least) had resisted. But peace had come to Thyläkotröx: stacks of notched weapons, axes especially, lay disused in the streets, dust settling down on them. People wandered the town, even more bemused than his guide. No shops were open; no business seemed to be taking place. The bitter internal war had been followed by an endless holiday in which everyone was happy and bright . . . if not exactly pretty. The smugly vacant look on their faces repelled Morlock.
The woman led Morlock to a public square where many people were milling about. A large branch was growing up out of a pale mound of shattered paving stones. The branch ended in a nimbus of long greenish-black thorns. People with anxious, troubled looks shouldered their way through the crowd and pressed their faces against the thorns. They stiffened suddenly and wandered off into the sunlit square, a dazed smile on their faces, no longer troubled but happy and bright.
The woman with thorns in her mouth smiled and gestured and made several sounds that might have been words. Morlock cautiously approached one of the thorns growing from the branch. The end was hollow and dripping some dark fluid. Morlock leaned in to examine the fluid, and a sharper needle-like thorn appeared in the hollow opening. Morlock leapt back just before it sprayed a cloud of dark mist at him.
“Happy now?” the woman behind him asked.
Morlock turned around and faced her. “As happy as I want to be,” he said soberly. If he hadn’t leapt back in time that muck might be running through his veins now.
The woman with the thorns in her mouth sighed, and Morlock thought she was about to say something about happy or bright. Instead, in seven syllables, she offered him his choice of three different sex acts, and she let him know it was a matter of some urgency.
Morlock was a young man, and he had been partnerless for some time; but as soon as he found himself considering the idea he reminded himself that her other orifices were also likely cluttered with thorns. He told her no, and continued telling her no until she wandered off, her face twisted with frustration. Her feelings were urgent, but she had no ability to concentrate. A few moments later he saw her asking a statue if it was happy and bright.
He walked back through the square, sightseeing in Thyläkotröx.
It was interesting, in a way. Clearly the local god had failed to protect its people. Perhaps something had come out of the sea, some plant that lived as a parasite on people. There were strange things in the ocean at the edge of the sky, swept in from the Sea of Worlds when the sun passed through the gate in the west each day. Or perhaps this plant parasite was the aftereffect of some disastrously miscalculated Kaenish magic, or a new form of Kaenish art, like killing your neighbor’s baby.
Morlock felt bad for the infected people. But they were, after all, Kaenish. If they were living their ordinary lives they would probably be engaged in plots to kill each other in various ostensibly esthetically pleasing ways, or planning raids on the east coast of the Wardlands, or just sitting around being Kaenish, which (in Morlock’s somewhat biased view) was bad enough. In any case, it was not his problem.
His first thought was to steal a shirt from someone too happy and bright to care. But then he realized that the clothing, perhaps the very air of the city, might be infected with spores of the parasite plants. Best to get out of town as quickly as he could, Morlock decided, and keep a close eye on his orifices for thornlike growths.
He was headed out of town at a brisk pace when he heard a buzzing voice call his name.
“Hey! You’re the one called Morlock, aren’t you? The vocate?”
Morlock halted and looked around. It was true he was a vocate, a full member of the Graith of Guardians who watched over the border of the Wardlands. It was also true that the Graith were hated in Kaen like nothing else. Fortunately the people standing near him seemed especially happy and bright, and also the voice had addressed him in the speech of the Wardlands, which the locals would be unlikely to understand. But he couldn’t see the speaker.
“Here I am. In front of you. Don’t you know me? I’m Zoyev. I was on board the Sammark with you.”
In front of Morlock was something he had taken for a badly trimmed ornamental thornbush. Looking closer, he saw that it was a man. Thorns were sprouting from all over his skin, and he appeared to be rooted to the ground. The final state of a man preyed on by the parasite plants?
“Zoyev,” Morlock replied, “if that’s who you are—”
“Why do you doubt it?”
“Your body is imprisoned by thorns, and there appears to be an abandoned wasp’s nest on your shoulder. These things did not happen overnight.”
The buzzing voice was silent for a while, and then it said, “I don’t know what body you mean. I seem to have many bodies. I—Oh, God Avenger, it must not have been a nightmare. It must have been true.”
“What?”
“I dreamed . . . I thought it was a dream. After the shipwreck . . . did the ship really burn underwater?”
“Yes. The Kaenish seem to have some sort of stuff which burns even when immersed.”
“Then it was true. It must have all been true. Morlock, when the ship broke up and sank, I was almost dragged down with it. Many of us were, struggling against the whirlpool pulling us down into the green orange murk. But I fought to the surface and swam away into the dark. I thought I was headed for the coast, but a current took me, dragging me . . . north I think. Up the coast. It was strong. I couldn’t fight it. In the end there was an undertow that dragged me under the surface. By the distant light of burning Sammark I saw . . . something there on the sea floor. A great mouth or womb with thorny lips. It . . . I think it ate
me. And I’m a part of it now, and I see through the eyes of the other bodies it has taken over . . .”
“I would help you if I could, Zoyev,” Morlock said quietly.
“You pity me, I see. But I hate you for being alive while I’m dead . . . and I hate myself for being dead while you’re alive. I wonder if this is what every ghost feels?”
“Zoyev,” Morlock asked, “is there really just one plant in this city . . . one parasite infecting all these people?”
“Yes . . . I think . . . I think it’s thinking about me . . . I’m forgetting what I knew, but remembering what the One knows. Yes, we came here, not so long ago. From somewhere else, a long journey in the dark. When we eat enough, we’ll expel seed pods. Then we won’t be alone. The One will then be the First One—first of many.”
Morlock did not like the sound of this. One plant, the size of a city, and not yet full-grown . . .
“I just realized something,” the buzzing voice said brightly. “I’m not Zoyev. I’m just a part of the One that has some of his undigested memories. Hm. I don’t like what I remember about you, Morlock. I think you’re a danger to the One.”
There was a sound on the street behind Morlock, and he turned. The woman he had met earlier was standing there, her face no longer so happy and bright. Then the woman with the thorns in her mouth bit Morlock on the shoulder and he was happy.
“But now you’re all right,” the buzzing voice remarked brightly.
The wound glowed with a spectrum of warm greenish pleasures. The greatest pleasure of all was to be free from pain: from his bleeding feet, from weakness and hunger, from the join in his crooked shoulders, from memories he hated and could never escape.
The thorns in the woman’s mouth were bright and fuming—burning from the latent fire in his blood—but she seemed to suffer no more from this than from the thorns themselves. She had already torn her clothes off, and she was clawing at the fastening of his trousers with fingers made clumsy by long thornlike nails. He was eyeing her pudenda with interest . . . the sharp thornlike hair there reminded him of something he had seen or heard of . . . it didn’t seem important compared to the happiness he felt . . .
Then he remembered, and it was important. The womb or mouth that had eaten Zoyev, the mouth of the One underwater on the coast.
He came back to himself with an effort and knocked the woman’s hands away. She shrieked something about happy joy and brightness, her face twisted, unpleasant, marked with pain, smoke drifting from her mouth. He ran away past the thorn-bound man up the street as fast as he could go to the open gate with the broken ratlike god of Thyläkotröx.
“If you’d done your job this never would have happened,” Morlock snarled at the smashed idol as he passed.
There was a scrubby wood of black trees with orange-pink leaves off to the side of the road. Remembering how much trouble the thorny woman had had in simply walking down the road, he thought he was safe from the One and its minions in the woods.
Of course, he reflected grimly (the dark ship of his awareness still afloat on the green-gold tide of false euphoria) it was only a matter of time until he was one of those minions himself. He was almost certainly infected, a thornlike parasite taking shape even now in his wounded shoulder.
The thought maddened him: that soon he would be enslaved by the One, the extension of its will. He swore he would make the One pay for the harm it had done (and would do) to him—revenge himself on the thing that had infected him.
Getting word to the Graith was obviously out of the question, and he could think of no way to alert the Kaenish kingdom . . . and wasn’t sure the Kaenish rulers would even care. They might decide that the One was an avatar of the Kaenish god of death and incorporate it into the pantheon.
No, it was up to Morlock himself to act. And, as he lay there, dozing in the shade of orange leaves, he realized there was one thing he could do.
Fyor-tirgan Shollumech ruled the largest part of the west coast of Kaen, facing the Narrow Sea. Unlike most of the Kaenish nobility, Shollumech took his religious responsibilities seriously, especially the duty of harming the Wardlands whenever possible. He had mounted three different invasions of the Wardlands, each of which had been circumvented by the Graith of Guardians using various ignoble tricks.
Shollumech had then settled on piracy, attacking the ships sailing up the Narrow Sea to Glenport. But the problem with piracy was that it was profitable, and Shollumech was uneasy about that. The Court of Heresiarchs had long forbidden any useful or beneficial activity involving the sea. The gods of Kaen were earthy gods.
When Shollumech’s alchemists had invented an agent which would burn in water, the Fyor-tirgan was delighted. He designed a catapult of enormous range and settled down to destroying ships that passed near the Kaenish coast. This was clearly in accord with the religious teachings of the Heresiarchs, as it profited nobody. Also, the burning ships and sailors were pleasing to watch, satisfying Shollumech’s impulses as an aesthete.
It was really beneath his dignity as Fyor-tirgan, but Shollumech enjoyed supervising the catapult shots himself. It was exciting to give the orders personally, and the view from the catapult tower was better than that from his own residence (where the windows looked away from the sea, as religion required).
And it was quite safe on the tower, nothing like taking part in a battle (a pleasure denied to one of his high rank). His nearest ally-enemy was the Tirgan of Thyläkotröx City, some distance to the north. Thyläkotröx had no catapults or siege equipment, and Shollumech knew for a fact that his own walls were unscalable. He didn’t even bother to have his local gods place a protection on the tower: the human sacrifices required would be prohibitively expensive, and there was obviously no need for it.
Shollumech was quite surprised, therefore, to see a half-naked man climb over the rim of the tower and jump down beside the catapult.
Esthetically speaking, the intruder did not impress. He was shirtless; he had unruly dark hair and gray glaring eyes. There was a great dark wound at the base of his neck, which had bled all over his chest, and his feet were bound in bloody charred bandages. There was something wrong with his shoulders—one was rather higher than the other. So unsightly! Shollumech could not abide anything approaching a hunchback. And the man’s fingers (and the blunt toes emerging from the ragged ends of the bandages) were simply covered with mortar dust. Shollumech realized that the man must have clawed handholds for himself in the ancient mortar of the tower walls. Such a grubby way to make one’s entrance into a stronghold. Effective, of course, but utility and beauty were never quite the same thing.
The man’s behavior was of a piece with his unpleasant appearance. Besides Shollumech himself, there were three soldiers and an alchemist next to the catapult. It was clearly a quasi-battle situation, but the intruder indulged in none of the usual courtesies: introductions, boasts, insults, challenges, etc. He simply reached out with one of his horrible long-fingered hands and broke the neck of the armed man nearest him. He slipped the fallen soldier’s sword out of its scabbard as the corpse fell past him and raised the blade to guard.
The alchemist, quite properly, did not engage in any fighting: his caste did not permit it. And Shollumech, too, refrained. Indeed, he almost felt as if he had better leave: it was not customary for anyone higher than the rank of yr-tirgan to be present at a battle.
But while Shollumech pondered this important esthetic question, the battle—if that’s what it was—was over. Shollumech’s soldiers, with a regrettable lack of propriety, had drawn their swords and attacked the intruder using the barest preliminary of threat-barks. The stranger kicked one of them against the wall, leaving a bloody smoking footprint on the fellow’s shining breastplate, and then turned to face the other. The duel was so brief as to not merit the name: there were no flourishes, no ceremonial sidesteps, no drama. The intruder simply put several holes in the soldier until he fell motionless beside his comrade with the broken neck.
By the
n the last soldier had recovered and charged upon the intruder, who dodged the fellow’s rush and turned to stab him in the back of the neck. He fell across his peers and lay there. Three men dead, and to so little esthetic effect! Really, Shollumech was disgusted with the intruder.
Now Shollumech drew his sole weapon: a poison-tipped dagger. It was meant for suicide if the occasion seemed to demand it—as it did, but at the moment he had an even more important task. He threw the dagger into the throat of his alchemist. The fellow looked at him gratefully (at least, Shollumech hoped it was grateful; truth be told, the dying face seemed a little hostile) and slumped with a certain grace to the stones.
Shollumech was engaged in the opening steps of the Dance of Justification when the intruder approached and slapped him on the side of the head with the flat of the bloody sword.
“Stop that prancing,” the intruder said in fairly good Kaenish (with a Wardic, almost a Dwarvish, accent).
“My religion requires it,” Shollumech replied, with as much dignity as he could muster.
The intruder said something inaesthetic and, as far as Shollumech knew, untrue about the requirements of Kaenish religion. “I want you to tell me about this fire-under-water stuff,” the intruder continued. “I don’t have a lot of time, and I can’t afford to be gentle. Will you tell me?”
“The soldiers might have told you,” Shollumech explained. “And the other man was my alchemist; he would have been your property at the end of the battle, so I had to kill him. He would have told you.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“I do not answer questions. I am the Fyor-tirgan Shollumech Kekklidas and I defy you to the death. Moreover, I have taken an oath by my right hand never to surrender the secret of my fire-in-water agent. May I know your name?”
The intruder stared at him for a few moments with his searing gray eyes and then said, “Why not? I am Morlock Ambrosius, vocate to the Graith of Guardians.”