The Valley of Thunder

by Charles de Lint

  He felt a fog lifting from his mind.

  They have drugged you, the voice had said earlier. While they decide your fate.

  A man should decide his own fate. A man should stand against monsters such as the Dungeonmasters, no matter what the consequences were to himself. It was only that which separated him front his tormentors.

  Lord help him, what was he doing here, when he should be with his companions, striking back at the blackguards?

  Go back, the voice said once more.

  I will. Clive replied.

  His return was instantaneous.

  One minute he hovered in the fading ruin of the garden, the next he was inhabiting his body once more, cloaked in darkness. He had a brief sense of claustrophobia. brought on by the close measure of his flesh. After the freedom of floating free, his spirit felt trapped and heavy inside his skin. But that passed quickly as he tested his limbs, one by one, growing quickly used to their familiar fit.

  Are you still there? he asked the voice.

  There was no response. His mysterious benefactor was gone again, as inexplicably as it had come.

  Unable to thank him. Clive turned his attention to his present situation.

  He could sense no real change in his surroundings. The thick air still held him in its grip and he was still unable to make any real progress through it. But turning his head, he could see two pale smudges of dim light behind him. Though he could make out nothing of their features, the two shapes were indeed recognizably human.

  He swam slowly through the air, trying to reach them, pausing when he could at least hear their voices.

  They decide your fate.

  They belonged to two men—one with a deep, gruff voice, while that of the other was smoother—not quite effeminate, but somewhat womanly all the same.

  And they were indeed discussing his fate.

  They have drugged you.

  He tried to call out to them, not to vent his rage this time, but merely to let them know that they had not bowed him yet. The heads turned toward him.

  "You see?" said the one with the gruff voice. "He's as bad as the other. He'll never give in."

  The other? Clive thought. Did the man mean his brother, Neville?

  "That's precisely his value," the second man said, slightly lisping his soft C's and S's.

  "And when the weapon turns in your hand?" the first asked.

  The second laughed. "But that's the challenge, isn't it? Without personal risk, we become no better than the others. When we realize our victory, it will be because we, at least, were willing to risk all."

  It was no more than he'd supposed. Clive realized. It was all just some damnable game to them.

  "I'll show you risk!" he shouted at them.

  "So, you mean to send him back?" the first asked, as though Clive had never spoken. "There was never any question. I allowed you this experiment, precisely because I knew he would prevail."

  Experiment, is it? Clive thought.

  "Damn you!" he cried. "I won't rest until you're defeated—each and every one of you."

  He might as well have been shouting at the wind, for all the attention they paid him.

  "You were that sure of yourself?" the first said.

  The second shook his head. "I was sure of him," he said, indicating Clive.

  "Don't toy with me." the first said, his voice deepening with anger. "I'm not one of the bugs, to be moved about the board."

  "Of course not." the second replied. "But will you listen to reason now?"

  "Your reason."

  "Plain reason," the second said. "If we bicker among ourselves, we stand to lose it all."

  "The others agree with you? All of them?"

  Others? Clive thought. Speak on. Tell me all.

  "After this? Yes."

  The first sighed. "Then, return him. But the suits must go—his, and those of his companions. I don't know why Green allowed them to have them in the first place."

  "The suits are gone," the second agreed amiably.

  "And he must remember nothing of this."

  Remember nothing? Clive thought. Lord in heaven, how did they expect him to forget?

  "Absolutely," the second said.

  "See how he drinks in every word? If he remembers, he'll be insufferable."

  "I agree."

  "I will forget nothing!" Clive cried. "Do you hear me? I will remember every foul moment of what you've done to me."

  The two heads finally turned to face him.

  "Not likely." the second said. "I'll admit the process hasn't been perfected to a preciseness we'd elect—given time—but it will do the job it must. If you lose a few other memories in the procedure"—the figure shrugged—"well, so be it. I can guarantee it will be nothing you'd miss."

  The first laughed at that.

  Clive renewed his effort to get to them, but the dull glow that gave them shape was fading, until the darkness swallowed them and he was alone once more. Laboriously, he turned a full circle, seeking something, anything, but the black void continued on all sides.

  There came a sudden sharp pain in his left upper arm—a hornet's sting, magnified a dozen times—and then an inner darkness began to swallow him. as black as that which surrounded him. He fought the loss of consciousness.

  He would remember.

  He heard voices around him. He felt hands on him, but he could not move a limb.

  Then the black took him away.

  Five

  When next Clive was conscious, he was falling through the bright Haring azure once more. He could see the pinpoint specks that were his companions on all sides of him—each of them falling as helplessly as he was himself.

  He sensed a gap in his memory, as though time had sped by while he stood still. It was an odd sensation—a feeling of loss—but he couldn't define what it was that he had left behind.

  He must have lost consciousness for a moment, he thought, and little wonder. If he could only breathe...

  He remembered nothing of what he had experienced in the black void.

  Vertigo made his head spin. His stomach heaved with nausea. He had a raw ache in his head, as though he'd suffered a concussion. His upper left arm felt swollen, and was painful whenever he moved it. He fought for breath in the thick blue air. but the oxygen simply wasn't there to draw into his lungs.

  He peered downward, then realized he was no longer certain what was up. and what was down. He had the sense of falling, it was true, but in this place they could be falling sideways for all he knew.

  He needed air.

  Desperately.

  If he didn't breathe soon, he'd—

  There was a sudden jarring underfoot as his boots came into contact with something solid. His knees buckled and he collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. He put out his hands to break his fall, and they sank into what felt like deep grass. His eyes seemed welded shut, but he was too busy keeping down the contents of his stomach to pay any attention to his surroundings.

  His arms gave way then, and his face pressed up against the grass. Before he could even try to sit up, the blackness took him away.

  Clive was among the first to recover. He opened his eyes, feeling wretched, and cautiously sat up. The world did a slow spin, then settled around him.

  He and his companions appeared to have landed on a grassy plateau of some sort. Higher plateaus rose up behind them to meet a craggy sweep of tors; behind them, an immense mountain range almost blocked the sky. In front and below, the land gave way to a dense jungle of forest on the left, a wide sweeping expanse of veldt dotted with trees and shrubs to the right. Cutting between the two was a broad river that meandered off into the distance to where an outstretched peninsula of jungle cut it off from view.

  It still bewildered him that such vast lands could exist under the earth. Turning, he took stock of his companions and then realized that the white suit he had been wearing was gone and he was dressed once more as he had been when he had first entered the jungle.


  The Dungeonmasters must have taken the suits that Green had given them while they were falling through the last gateway. But at least they had all survived the crossing from the Dungeon's previous level to this one—Lord help them, it was the fifth now.

  As Clive regarded them, one by one, he realized again just what a motley assortment of companions they made.

  Obviously unaffected by his transition through the gateway, the cyborg Chang Guafe stood resolutely at the edge of the plateau, staring across the landscape of this new level. The metal workings of his skull plate and visage gleamed in the sunlight. His metallic eyes glowed slightly as they fed input into his brain, which was more computer than human flesh and blood.

  He reminded Clive of the clockwork toys that were so much the rage in his native London—a walking, talking simulacrum—but Clive didn't make the mistake of considering the cyborg to be any child's plaything. He'd proven himself far too dangerously capable to BE underestimated in such a fashion. And at least he had the shape of a human.

  Not like Shriek.

  She was a four-armed, four-legged monster. Her huge body was covered with spikelike hair that she could pull out and throw as a weapon, the hair apparently carrying some sort of chemical that she could vary at will, depending on the desired effect she wished to produce on the creature she was dealing with. But she was little more than a creature herself—a humanoid spider.

  Her face was the most disturbing, with its vestigial mandibles on either side of her lipless mouth, and her six multifaceted, ruby-colored eyes, scattered on the top half of her head like a child's cast-off marbles thrown hither-skither. coming to rest where they would. And. like a spider, she had a pair of spinnerets just below the base of her back.

  But under that alien visage was a being that Clive had come to realize had more heart than most men he knew.

  Finnbogg was easier to look upon, if only in comparison to Shriek. He was a dwarflike humanoid who seemed more closely related to the canine family than to humanity, with a volatile temperament that could have him fall in love, burst into tears, or fly into a lowering rage—all at a moment's notice. Squat, shaggy, and immensely strong, he claimed to be a native of a heavy planet where the biochemistry was enough like Earth's to allow him to breathe the same air and eat the same food as humans did. But he was still a monster.

  The rest of Clive's companions were human—though not necessarily fit company for a good Englishman.

  The Portuguese, Tomàs, was akin to the worst mags-man or garroter to be found in a London slum. He was swarthy and small, with dark, greasy hair. A wharf rat: alcoholic, dirty, and undoubtedly treacherous. His arrival in the Dungeon had rescued him as he walked the plank of the Pinta in the western Atlantic in 1492.

  The Indian, Sidi Bombay, had joined Clive's party on the first stages of their search for his brother—before they were foolish enough to investigate the shimmering gateway in the Sudd, and plunged from it into the madness of the Dungeon. Sidi was small in stature, too, but there his similarities with Tomàs ended. His skin was a dark mocha, his hair a midnight black. Experienced and clever, there was an enigmatic mystery about the small Indian that belied his apparently unguarded and cheerful manner.

  Disturbing for an entirely different reason was the presence of Annabelle Leigh. As Tomàs came from the past, she had arrived in the Dungeon from the year 1999, when her music-and-theater group, the Crackbelles, were performing in Piccadilly Circus on Halloween Eve. She was a gamine creature, brazenly showing off her feminine charms in her tight-fitting men's garb. Her black hair was shorn in jagged layers, with absolutely no consideration for fashion or style. Implanted in her forearm—giving her a disquieting kinship to the cyborg—was her Baalbec A-9, a kind of mechanical device powered by her own body heat. The controls for it lay under the bodice of her shirt.

  She was also Clive's descendant—his own many-times great-granddaughter, by way of the lover Clive had left Behind in England when he first left in search of his brother—Miss Annabella Leighton.

  It was disturbing enough to know that this gamine was related to him—that good English morals and mores could change so drastically in merely a century and a half—but what troubled Clive more was how, day by day, she came to look ever more like his own Annabella. For she had the same startling cornflower-blue eyes, the same pale skin suffused with a healthy pink flush, the same trim figure.

  It was too easy for him to look at her and see Annabella. He could imagine this descendant of theirs in a high-necked and -waisted bustle dress, with a light mantle overtop following the contours of the dress. Her hair would be long, tied up in a bun under a close-fitting hat. She would be carrying a parasol....

  When he let his mind travel so, ungentlemanly thoughts arose—immoral thoughts. For the love of Goa, she was of his own blood! he had to remind himself. And yet that resemblance... and to know that he would never return to his own Annabella....

  The only truly familiar face in the party—though by now, Clive was growing accustomed to them all, even the most alien—was that of his one-time batman, Quartermaster Sergeant Horace Hamilton Smythe.

  "Batman?" Annabelle had asked when she was made aware of Smythe's earlier position. "What's that make you, Clive-o? Robin?" That was only the first of many obscure references to fall from her lips that simply could not be translated satisfactorily to a man who had left the world a hundred and ten years before her birth.

  Clive and Smythe had been together for years, and Clive had reacted with great relief the morning that the Empress Philippe had left England's shores and Smythe had turned up aboard ship—disguised as a Mandarin.

  Smythe's gift was for makeup and mimicry. He had the ability to switch from a drawling fop to a rhyming slang-spouting cockney to a country bumpkin to a fast-talking pitchman—all at a moment's notice. Odder still, when he wasn't in character, Smythe was the most nondescript of individuals, virtually disappearing into the nearest background, be it a crowd, a jungle, or a drawing room.

  "Christ. Talk about your acid flashbacks."

  Annabelle regained Clive's attention as he tried to puzzle out what she meant.

  Guafe turned from where he stood, overlooking the view below their perch. "Yes," he said in his slightly metallic voice. "The disruption did have the hallucinogenic quality of a drug experience."

  Ah, Clive thought. Opiates.

  He glanced at Annabelle. looking quickly away when she stood and stretched, the unself-conscious movement accentuating every curve of her trim figure. She gazed thoughtfully around them.

  "I figure it was some kinda spatial portal." she said. "Like teleportation." At the mostly blank stares that drew, she added, "You know—not really connected physically?"

  "Again, I concur," the cyborg said.

  The others were slowly finding their way to their feet. Smythe joined Clive, tugging thoughtfully at his new beard.

  "Sir Neville appears to have eluded us again." he said.

  It was true, Clive realized. He'd been so disoriented by the experience in the gateway that the reason they had come here had been driven from his mind. He looked out now across the vast panorama of forest and veldt. Somewhere out there, his older twin Neville had made his escape. It was a disheartening view. An army could be hidden below and never seen.

  "Where will we begin to look?" he murmured.

  "Finnbogg thinks he could be anywhere," Finnbogg said. The dwarf had followed Clive's gaze with his own, absently brushing grass from his chest hair as he did. "Gale could drop littermate anywhere."

  "Look," Annabelle said. "I hate to rain on your parade, but don'tcha think it's about time we stopped running around after that asshole and just tried to get outta this place? I mean, enough's enough already. We're never gonna catch up to him. He's playing us for a bunch of no-minds."

  "There is no way back," Sidi said. The Indian gave her one of his quirky smiles. "The only way out is ahead."

  Annabelle shook her head. "Maybe. I say we put it to
a vote." More blank looks. "You know—everybody decides what they want to do, and whatever gig gets the most hands, that's the way we go."

  "I'm the leader of this company," Clive began when he understood what she was driving at.

  "Annabelle is right." Tomàs interrupted. "Anos. Whenever we follow you there is only more trouble."

  "At this point, I am content to follow," Guafe said.

  As am I. Shriek added. Her voice rang directly to their minds.

  "Finnbogg will…."

  The dwarf glanced at Annabelle and caught her frown. It was because of Finnbogg that she had lost her chance of leaving the Dungeon with Wrecked Fred and L'Claar. If he hadn't held her back for that last moment....

  "I think we should just split up." Annabelle said.

  "I can't leave you here alone," Clive said.

  "Oh, lighten up. You think I can't take care of myself?"

  How a woman of her obvious good blood could be so crass was beyond Clive's understanding.

  "I am responsible for you." he tried. "So long as—"

  "Screw that. I'm a big girl now, Clive-o, and the only person responsible for me's me—got that? So back off."

  A flush rose up Clive's neck and he took a step toward her. but then Smythe laid a hand on his arm.

  "What does your brother's journal say about this level, sah?" he asked.

  Sidi nodded. "That would be the wisest course. We must see what lies around us before choosing a destination." He smiled at both Clive and Annabelle. "Who knows? Our roads might well travel together for some distance farther."

  Annabelle sighed. "Okay. Check out the bloody Bible."

  "It is not a Bible." Clive replied.

  Every time he thought he was coming to turns with her brashness, she managed to shock him again.

  Do you even have the journal anymore? Shriek asked.

  Clive hadn't thought of that. With the switch in their clothing... But he patted his pocket and found the familiar outline of his brother's diary.

  "C'mon," Annabelle said. "Let's get to it. Read the book already."

  What I wouldn't give for some good, sturdy Englishmen who know their station, in exchange for this motley crew. Clive thought. But he took the journal from his jacket pocket and sat down with it. spreading it open on his lap. His companions gathered closer.