by Michael Shea
"Westforge," he said. He got all the life the place must have had into the way he said it—the shanty-taverns, the sharpers, the whores, the nights of fierce music and lightly drawn blades. In twenty years a town doesn't take deep root, but it can get big and lively. And then had come the day when, up here in the hills, the miners had pushed their shaft that last yard too far. The very mountain core which it pierced had trembled, fractured, and plunged into the unsuspected abyss underlying it. The luckier of the miners, who were working higher up the shaft, made it back into the light of day, and saw the sun once more before they were taken. And then the outwelling horror had plunged like an avalanche out of the hills and down upon Westforge, where no warning had reached. And then human voices raised up a new and dreadful music from the streets of that city, and many danced there for long days and nights, clasped irresistibly in alien arms. Much of darkness and catastrophe was vomited up from Darkvent in those days, before one of the Elder League perceived the leakage, bestrode his winged slave, and came to seal the breach.
And now we approached the shaft. The sight of it was indefinably loathsome—it carried a crude shock, as if its raw stone had literally touched my naked eyeballs. Darkvent. A bottomless hole filled to the brim with shadow. A diseased mouth forever spewing its one black syllable of obscenity at the sunlight. Barnar and I dismounted and walked to its threshold.
It was like looking through a loophole in Time itself, for inside the shaft, all the handiwork of the Westforge miners lay untarnished, bright and whole despite its three generations of sleep. We looked disbelieving back down at the splintered bones of the city, and again at what lay within the shaft's ensorcellment, annexed therewith to the agelessness of the subworlds. There Westforge's craft and ingenuity survived, and testified to the vigor and hope it had once enjoyed.
I have heard of nothing resembling their methods of mining elsewhere. They had been great smiths, and had made their ore-carts of iron, with iron wheels. The wheels ran in a pair of steel troughs laid perfectly parallel and affixed to thousands of short wooden beams set into the earth, all lying crosswise to the parallel troughs. Heavy cables hauled the carts by means of big windlasses, one of which stood in clear view within. The tremendous weight this system could haul—swiftly and with scarcely any drag—was instantly obvious.
All that gleaming wrought steel, paralyzed and silent, all swallowed and sepulchred by forces against which the rarest works of human enterprise are like sand-forts on a stormy beach. How keenly we felt, at that portal, the lunatic futility of our own enterprise! Compared to all this impotent iron, what were our own poor tools? Two short-swords, two broadswords, two slings, two lances, two javelins, two shields. Granted, this was not all we had—heavens no! Charnall had also laid three spells on our bodies. One, the Wayfarer's Blessing, we felt only as a kind of blankness in gut and throat—we would need neither food nor drink while subject to it. The second was the Charm of Brisk Blood. This felt like a large dose of tonic weed. My muscles were as taut and jumpy as a pack of hungry rats, and my veins were so fat my arms felt like they were wrapped with snakes. In situations where mere fleetness and stamina mattered, this would be an undeniable asset. The third spell was the Life-Hook. This I experienced as a little sore spot in my heart, the kind of pang a large, old scar sometimes gives you—a flesh-memory of pain. The asset here was entirely our captors'.
A sensation of absolute aloneness touched both of us, in the same instant, it seemed, for we both turned to look behind us. And I almost laughed to see how alone we actually were, how far off from the shaft-mouth Kamin, Charnall, and the fifty soldiers of our guard had stationed themselves. Many of the soldiers, who were going to have to bivouac here to await our return, held even their eyes averted from Darkvent. Kamin sat tall in his saddle, his unease masked with disdain. Charnall sat slumped, avoiding our eyes.
Barnar grinned bitterly. "Are you all so modest?" he cried. "You stand so removed, gentlemen! Perhaps it's delicacy? You fear we'll snub you if you come forward to wish us luck?"
At this, Charnall dismounted and came forward with guilty haste, stumbling slightly. He was able to imagine our destination in far greater detail than the others and felt, I think, a generous dread for us, beyond his sense of his own danger. As he neared us it was his right hand he held extended, but then he faltered, and it was his left he ended by giving us, for on his right he wore the graven ring to which he had anchored the control of the Life-Hooks and the other two spells he had put on us. I could not forbear letting my gaze rest ironically an instant on the ring. He shrugged, smiling sadly, and I found I had to smile back.
"What clowns we are, Charnall," I told him, "with all our supposed wits. Do you believe we are actually doing this? I mean, if I'm not dreaming the whole thing, maybe you are."
"And if you are," Barnar put in, "feel free to take a break any time. Why overdo? You could just summarize the rest of the plot for us over a cozy breakfast."
"Nifft. Barnar. You do know that this whole idea . . . I mean that this whole approach to the problem was the farthest thing from my remotest . . . I mean let alone my even knowing who you were or that you were in town, or ever planning your—"
I clapped him on the shoulder, saying, "Peace, good wizardlet." The epithet made him smile ruefully. "You're too well aware, good Charnall, of what it means to enter the subworlds, ever to have hatched this scheme. Only an arrogant ignoramus like Kamin could seriously entertain it."
Charnall nodded, moodily twisting the control ring on his finger. "It's ridiculous," he said, "even callous perhaps, but I keep thinking that if only I could find more to like in the boy, all this wouldn't seem quite such an insane waste of . . ." He checked himself, mortified.
"Our lives," Barnar finished gently. Charnall nodded, but then angrily shook his head.
"No. There's Gildmirth. He is there. There's something about this legend—from the first I heard of it it struck me as truth, and even more than that, I could feel the man himself in it, feel a rare and vital personality behind the deeds reported of Gildmirth. I mean, for some reason, when I think about it, I actually feel hope, and if only you can find him, reach him . . ."
His own words had brought back to him the utter vagueness and improbability of the entire project. His shoulders sagged. I squeezed his arm consolingly and looked at Barnar, who nodded. Raising my arm in salute, I hailed Kamin: "So down we go after your brat, cattle-king! Go home and reflect that if you have any hope at all, it lies with two men whose freedom you have stolen, and whose fealty you have coerced. If you find any comfort in such an arrangement, you're welcome to it."
A soldier came forward with two lit torches and a bundle of several dozen more. As he neared the shaft, he made a sign against evil over his eyes, which he tried to hold downcast, sparing them the least glimpse of our destination.
Thrusting our two ridiculous little flames ahead of us, we stepped inside Darkvent. We felt a light shock of immersion, as in a very tenuous, oily medium. Being men, we felt no more of a transition than that, and received no hint of the hell of pain which the barrier-spell opposed to any of demon-kind who strove to pass through it in the other direction.
VII
The main shaft, with its steady downward pitch and its triple course of cart-tracks, remained unmistakable through a multitude of intersections with branch-shafts. It was a warm, gingery darkness that we walked through, with an elusive, sickish spice to it that you not only smelled and tasted, but also felt with your skin, like a breath of fever. And I could have sworn that in that darkness, the torchlight didn't fan out and attenuate—it stopped short, enveloping us in two eerily distinct bubbles of light outside of which the perfect blackness teemed with all the shadows the torches had not yet summoned into form. Meanwhile, within the light, the shadow-play made it seem that our passage called back the long-dead will of the Westforge miners to fugitive, fretful life. Crazily leaning carts appeared to lurch, struggle against the puddled gloom their wheels were mired in, crav
ing to roll again and bear ore. And, in the little maintenance-smithies inset at intervals in the shaft walls, the dropped sledges and toppled anvils twitched restively in the elastic nets of darkness constraining them, as if we'd set them dreaming of the meddlesome, relentless hands of the men who had made them. All this lay in a huge silence that our footfalls hacked at feebly, but could not break. It was an infested silence, wormy with almost-sounds—a great, black throat with the noise of an anguished multitude locked inside it.
An endless time passed, which nevertheless could not have been more than two hours. Just as our second pair of torches was burning out, we reached a broad gallery. It had served primarily as a switching-yard for ore-carts, dozens of which stood in the central maze of track, sidelined long ago for re-coupling to new cart-trains that had never rolled. These carts were unusual in being of two sizes. Among those of the by now familiar dimensions, there stood an equal number of more than twice this capacity. These giants were concentrated toward the gallery's farther side, where the shaft we had been following resumed its descent—resumed it at a markedly steeper angle, and with a bigger gauge of track, from which it was clear that the larger design of cart had been devoted strictly to working this more swiftly plunging segment of the shaft. In the gallery the giants had transferred their greedily heaped plunder to more manageable vessels for the long climb to the sunlight.
This place had been described to us. Here the mother vein had taken a sudden, steep downturn, while simultaneously thickening and complexifying to a fabulous richness. The Westforge engineers had hesitated only fractionally, then rushed down to pursue the vein at full gallop.
Boom times ensued. Several years of smooth progress and serene profits unrolled before the city, just as (if we'd been told rightly) four unflawed miles of this more cyclopean tunnelwork would now flow easily under our footsoles before we reached the next turning of the mine's fortunes, which was also a turning—a wrenching, really—of the shaft's course. We were told that it continued past this rupture for one more tortured mile, to end in a ragged edge above the subworld gulf. We crossed the gallery's switchyard and continued downward.
The riskier slope, the new giantism of carts and other equipment—this combination was subtly frightening, for in it you could read the city's state of spirit at that period. They were luck-drunk. The headlong grade revealed the dangerous exhilaration to which initial incredulity had yielded, while the unwieldy presumption of the machinery's new scale betrayed the tipsy acceleration of Westforge's appetite to possess its inordinate good fortune. Poor, luckless wretches! What haste they made to feast on the mountain's bowels, thereby, with precisely equal haste, delivering to demon-kind a very different feast—themselves.
The crossbeams of the tracks started to get slippery before we had pushed even a half mile beyond the gallery. Barnar took a nasty fall that snuffed his torch. As he got to his feet I interrupted his muttered blasphemies: "Look down ahead. Is it getting light?"
It was. At first it was scarcely light we saw—an oily pallor veining the dark, no more. But soon the features of the shaft before us began, unmistakably, to emerge, varnished with a glossy, jaundiced fulgor. Barnar took another fall, and then I took one worse than either of his, and suffered truly amazing pain when forced to use my elbow for an emergency anchor against the track's slimy beams.
"Barnar," I said between gasps, "beyond the collapse . . . It's bound to get steeper. . . . So we should just simply string out . . . a simple, stinking, putrid, slime-kissing, thrice-buggered cable . . . to go down along . . ."
I was proposing more toil than I knew. Even though we could all but count on finding supplemental lengths of cable on our way down, which our line could incorporate as we descended, still we gathered, cut, coiled and packed over two miles of it before proceeding, if only because we did not yet imagine how we could reach the subworld floor from the shaft, and for all we knew a simple line might serve the need. From our supply, and what we foraged, we pieced out our safety line behind us as we stepped—steady and methodical—deeper into the sulphuric haze in which tracks, crossties, timbers and walls were manifested with gradually increasing detail, all of them like objects emerging from smoke. Four torches later—for we kept them past our need of them, for the sake of their earthly familiarity—we reached the shaft's mortal wound, the catastrophic rupture Charnall had called "the buckling." Here commenced the shaft's terminal phase, for past this point its stony matrix had partially subsided into the subworld chasm, though it had stopped just short of following the rest of the mountain's core down to the demon-infected plains. The megalith still clung to its place in the architecture of the upper world, though it hung askew of its former placement. The discontinuity this produced in the shaft was dramatic. The tunnel was brutally torqued, its rocky walls having splintered while its shoring, though wrenched, had held. The tracks had also held together, though their bending had divorced them at some points from their crossbeams. They arched gracefully through a half-spiral, then plummeted down the nearly vertical drop that followed. Hereafter we fervently rejoiced in my foresight regarding the cable, for the shaft's terminal segment often opposed slopes of sixty and seventy degrees to our progress, while the febrile subworld light, which now filled the tunnel, seemed more than ever to have the property of lubricating whatever it lit.
And yet we all but forgot the hardship of the tricky path once we had seen a certain thing awaiting us below—or more exactly, once we had suddenly understood, and rightly interpreted, something we had been seeing for some time. It was at the center of our vision's limit, a ragged patch of yellow, criss-crossed with grey lines. And when, all at once, it became obvious that this was a patch of subworld sky framed by our tunnel's end, our rapt scrutiny had a new puzzle to pick at—the meaning of that disorderly grey network. Down we came, planting our feet with absentminded care while our eyes strained ahead to untangle this perplexing image.
But we had drawn quite near it before we comprehended its spatiality. At last it was clear that all the strands of the meshwork hung outside of the shaft, that somehow the whole crazy rigging was strung up in the open air just beyond our tunnel's ragged issue.
And then a warning was murmured to me. I was ahead of Barnar on the cable, and I heard from behind me that one fleet syllable of premonition, a throaty hum like that of a loosed bowstring. This touched my ears, and in scarcely the time it takes a hand to clench—which my rope-hand did—it was followed by a crushing blow laid across the backs of my knees. My legs shot out from under me as neat as ninepins. My grip on the cable held—it was my shoulder that nearly came apart while, for an instant, my body was stretched out on the air like a banner in a brisk wind. Well before I hit the ground, I understood that it would be far better for me if I did not hit the ground, and that if I must perforce do so, the less I tarried thereon the better, since it was clearly upon the ground that this trap was designed to throw me.
Actually, the line had robbed the trap of its full effectiveness. The blow I'd taken would have flung an unanchored victim right out to the shaft's ragged lip and left him sprawled on its dizziest salience above the webbed abyss. Instinctively I riveted my eyes on that menacing spot even while—finding I had no real alternative—I gave gravity her due and yielded to my body's stubborn determination to hit the ground, will-I nill-I.
Starbursts blotted my vision, yet still I held my eyes to their target. And while my stunned frame wallowed to get its legs beneath it; while returning vision dispelled the white obscurity that filled my eyeballs; while my right hand groped for its dropped lance—throughout all the harrowing micro-pulses of precious time which these accomplishments consumed, still I fought to see, exclusive of all else, that shaft-lip and any least thing that happened there. Unmonitored by me, my palm found the haft of my spear. Precisely then, as if the touch had summoned it, a scorpion as big as a battle-chariot swarmed into the shaft-mouth, and came avalanching towards us on a great splashing racket of rattly legs. My own legs weren't qu
ite under me yet, but Barnar's lance came plunging past my shoulder and planted its razor-edged steel a half-yard deep in the junction of her soft throat with the first of her glossy black thoracic plates.
For of course this thing was not pure scorpion. Most demons, having something of man in them, are just such hybrids as this which leered at us with an old woman's face obscenely socketed in the huge ribbed and jointed body. The shot had stopped her, by which I mean made her pause, no more. For she crouched perfectly poised, the dreadful, limber power of her legs undiminished. Cautiously, delicately, her bulky pincers nibbled at the shaft sprouting from her gorge. And though this brought tears of pain in thick streams from her eyes, it was a look of the purest lunatic glee that her face beamed on us. It was a jowled, flabby-mouthed face, the brow fantastically gnarled—nightmare-knotted—above her crazed red eyes. Her mouth gaped—displaying not teeth but black barbs—and she paid out an endless red tongue that dangled to her wounded throat and licked it caressingly. Then, in a gurgling whisper, she said: "I'm going to lick your face clean off your skull. Slowly, thoroughly, lick it entirely off. I'm going to sting you and bind you and scoop your loins hollow and lap out your brains. And then I'm going to make you again and start over."
It was just as she finished speaking that I made my cast. Almost casually her pincers rose, their movement perfectly timed to shield her face. Unluckily for her, I wasn't aiming at her face. Crouched for attack as she was, with her tail advanced in a strike-ready arc over her back, my target was positioned several feet above her head, and I didn't miss it. Skewered, her stinger's poison bulb dropped a black bucketful of her venom onto her face.