by Michael Shea
Her agony was volcanic. She surged and crashed against the shaft walls like a stormy sea, her pincers tearing at the sizzling mess whence her howls erupted and her simmering eyes leaked out in red rivulets. We stood with broadswords drawn waiting for a safe moment to move in, but in the end we were spared that task, for after a few moments the poison seemed to reach some central nerve in her. She rose in the air, folding and unfolding spasmodically, crashed down on her back and writhed so mightily that the movement propelled her like a snake straight backward and launched her from the shaft-lip. We rushed to the lip and looked out. We learned then the obstacles that opposed our entry of this vast prison where the key to our freedom lay.
The tunnel issued from a stupendous wall of ragged bluffs, scarred by great landslides and stretching past vision to either side. The cliffs dropped sheer below us for nearly half a mile down to a zone of swampland, and all across the face of them the grey webbing spread, like a shroud crawling with grave-lice. For everywhere big multilegged shapes crouched in that dingy rigging, or ran along it with the incredible speed ants have on their own tiny scale. And other forms decorated the nasty weave—dangling bundles of webbing which stirred and twisted impotently against their anchorages. Vague though they were in their wrappings, we could see that many of these were winged things of a stature about twice that of a man, but the commonest food of the scorpion demons was themselves. Their cannibal struggles raged everywhere, including at a point not far beneath our feet, where our recent adversary, snagged in the web by her tail, offered little effective resistance to the greedy pincers of two of her confreres.
As for the swamp below us, it was apparently a kind of backwater off a river which, far to our right, flowed out from the foot of the cliffs, and divided the plain with a shallow valley. Across the valley, perhaps two leagues distant from us, a city of giant towers stood, stilt-supported platforms crowned with buildings. And, looking small as flies above a far off corpse, things numerous and fleet flew among the titanic structures.
But we gave most of our attention to the cliff that we had to descend. We could see that any rope we dropped would hang in striking range of a score of places in the webbing. We'd be picked off within ten minutes of our starting down. And when we'd brooded on this for a while, we discovered an added unpleasantness; the swamps we must cross once down were astir everywhere with the movement of submerged shapes. None broke the surface. All we could be sure of was that they were big—very big.
We sat down and rested. We were so discouraged, we couldn't speak a word. I discovered that my spear had fallen free from the demon's stinger, and that her venom had only slightly corroded its ironwood haft. I was about to exult in this luck, but then only smiled bitterly. We had so little to work with! Barnar spat vigorously out into the yellow air.
"I'd like to sweep that foulness off the rock, like cobwebs with a broom," he snarled.
"Too bad we didn't bring a broom," I sighed. "Do you think we could drop rocks big enough to break a path through the web?"
"How many do you think we could manage that were even as heavy as that demon, let alone heavier?"
This had already occurred to me. I sighed again. Then I had an idea.
When Barnar had heard me out, he sat meditating for a moment. "You know," he said, "its wildness may be the thing about it that will make it work. I mean, I don't think you can ease and creep your way into a realm like this. If you try, the first little entity will smell your uncertainty and hesitation. Horror and bad luck will converge on you. But if you barge in with all possible force, storm the gate . . . then maybe luck might just give way a few inches for you, and let you pass."
And so we started back up the shaft.
VIII
A long time after ascending—how can I know how long?—I counted off the first hundred paces of our second descent, measuring from the switching-yard gallery and down the main shaft's penultimate steepening. I found my mark and looked back toward the gallery. It was suddenly eerie that the sections of its walls and ceiling I could see should be stained with the lurid wash of the forge's light, braziers and many torches.
"All right!" I shouted. "Send it down!"
My voice woke the noise of the mighty windlass above, and it all felt even more like some ghostly resurrection of the mine's great, toilsome soul, so long in its grave. Dusty and smoke-stained as I was, it was not hard to feel like some reanimated Westforger—certainly, I was as far from the world of men as any ghost is.
But when the thing I had summoned rumbled into view and came easing down the tracks, my little whimsicality was badly jarred. No such conveyance as this had ever ridden these rails in the doomed city's heyday. Though one soon saw the two giant ore-carts that were its substructure, its embellishments made it look far more like some monstrous weapon than any kind of mining equipment, and of course it was a weapon.
We'd welded on a prow—an upswept scimitar forged from the smithy's stocks of sheet-iron and sharp as a well-honed axe-bit. We'd also welded two long horizontal vanes to the sides of both carts—these were shaped rather like an arrow's fletches and were also sharpened. Lastly, both carts had a pair of broad vanes that pivoted on pins set in the frontal segments of their boxes' rims. At present they resembled a beetle's wings half-folded over its back, but they could be pushed out to a much broader lateral spread, and locked in this position, from inside the carts.
When this huge, haftless spearhead had nosed down to my mark, I shouted: "Hold!" Barnar locked the windlass and appeared in the mouth of the shaft. When he reached me, he found me staring down the shaft ahead—rather glumly, I suppose.
"The buckling?" he asked after a moment.
"Yes," I said. It didn't bear much dwelling on. We had spent hours there fine-measuring by every trick we could think of, and the tracks at that point certainly seemed—throughout their contorted stretch—to have been bent perfectly in phase. At the speed we would be going when we got there, they had better be. Barnar nodded sadly, gazing where I did. He sighed.
"Oh well," he said.
I nodded. "Well put."
We went to our vehicle. I climbed into the fore-cart, and Barnar into the rear. We spent a moment adjusting ourselves in the shredded cable with which we had packed both carts for cushioning, and checking the operation of our folding vanes. Then we poked our heads up and looked at each other. Barnar had his shortsword in one hand.
"Well, old Ox," I smiled, "all I can say is, I just wish it was you riding up front. I still think it's nose-weight we should have."
"Tail-weight. But be comforted, Nifft. Either we'll enter that place safely, or we'll ram ourselves so far up its arse you won't even notice the difference."
"Well that's true enough. Yes indeedy. You realize of course, Barnar, that it is simply not possible that we're actually doing this?"
"I've come to the same comforting conclusion, old friend. Therefore let's away—an impossibility can only do us an unreal sort of harm, after all."
I nodded. He reached his sword over the cable holding us by the stern, and the blade whickered through it.
The slope plucked us down. The great iron mass seemed to ride a ramp of ice, so dreadfully smooth was its acceleration. The fetid gloom of the tunnel surged up against us like a foul throat swallowing us ravenously.
The racketing of the tracks rose to a howl, and in moments it had grown light enough to see the shoring's main beams, at their thirty-foot intervals, merging into one blurred, continuous wall.
All that lay in our power to do, in the way of navigational control, we had already done when we cut the cable, and nothing remained for us to do but—when it came time—to spread our vanes as we exited the shaft. The assumption that we would ever be called upon to perform this second task now appeared quite clearly to me as the most extravagant folly, based on a wild delusion conceived by a raving idiot. We would never reach the shaft-mouth! How could we have dreamed that we would attain this velocity? When we hit the buckling, we would quite sim
ply be thrown up against the roof of the shaft with enough force to wed carts with stone—and ourselves between—in an eternally indissoluble bond. Already we were leaving the tracks and resettling on them in long, giddy surges. The feeble subworld light seemed to be igniting, coming on like a flare, so swiftly did we drive toward its source. I saw the buckling just below. I pulled my head back in and lay down. I could not forbear shouting farewell to Barnar, though he could not have heard me over the shriek of the wheels. Then my body, in its cushiony coffin, was seized, lifted up, pulled down, and torqued into a tight spiral—all in the same fraction of an instant. For another half-instant I was floating, and then the wheels were roaring again, our speed unabated.
I sat back up. Before I had succeeded in believing what I saw—that we still swept down the track—I saw ahead the webbed tunnelmouth. It seemed to howl as it yawned at us, though its voice was actually the din of our own white-hot, fire-spitting wheels combined with the thunderstorm of echoes we trailed behind us. I lay back. As the carts erupted from the roaring corridor, and into the stunning silence of that sunken sky, I slammed open my top-vanes.
Then whips murdered the air all around us—the webbing, through which, despite its toughness, our plunge was as smooth as the arrow's first leap from the bow. We punched through something that made a horrible, wet cough, but did not slow us, and three scorpion legs flopped over the nose of my cart and hung there lifelessly. Then we were falling clear, and I raised my head again.
It gave me a kick in the pit of the stomach to see how steeply we plunged. The vanes had given us even less lift than the little we had projected. Though we would clear the heaps of landslide—rubble strewn along the base of the crag, I found it easy to form a vivid image of being driven like a tent stake thirty yards deep in the swamp muck. And then a vast hand seized us from behind, and slowed us in midair.
This was how it felt, and as I looked back it was no more than I expected to see, in such a world as this. What I saw, and Barnar too in the same moment, made us shout and cheer like madmen.
We trailed an immense, twisting banner of tangled silk, and a score of hell-shapes struggled in the undulating acres of this train of ours. It flapped and bellied, and let fall a many-legged thing which plummeted, scrambling for purchase on the oily air.
In the lurch and sway of our hobbled fall, we argued over which part of the black-scummed waters we were likeliest to hit, but in reality the particular spot seemed to matter little. Systems of grassy silt-bars made escape afoot possible from most points. Meanwhile the waters looked uniformly threatening. Almost everywhere they bulged and folded with sunken movements of a fearfully large scale.
But now our fall took on a frightening wobble, and a sudden burst of speed. The windstream had compacted the webbing behind us, twisting it in a knotted skein that offered far less drag against the air. Our plunge got fearfully steep, and the unclean waters swelled toward us. Scant hundreds of feet from impact, we saw an immense leech—it resembled nothing else so much—thrust sixty feet of its slime-smeared body-tube out of the swamp brew, open a round mouth-hole with a haggle-fanged rim, and chew—blindly, kissingly—at the sky. Others of its ilk sprouted almost simultaneously, concentrated in the immediate vicinity of our now imminent crash.
One of them in particular towered at what appeared to be our inevitable point of collision. It seemed to be tracking us, by what sense I don't know. Its mouth's groping centered ever more sharply on our line of approach. I couldn't determine whether or not its mouth could swallow us whole until the last instant, when I saw that it wouldn't quite manage it. Then we hit our greedy welcomer.
Perhaps these things had a single predatory response for all airborne entities because they were unacquainted with any especially massive ones—I can't say. Whatever the reason, this leech was the victim of a serious miscalculation. We clove his mouth and the first sixteen feet of him asunder before snagging with sufficient firmness in his blubbery plasticity to wrench his eighty-foot bulk clean out of the water, like a plucked root. We hit the swamp, laying the whole floundering length of him out across the bog behind us. He had greatly cushioned our impact. We swarmed out, snatching our bundled weapons, and thrashed thru shallow waters to a cluster of sodden hummocks that offered a broken path out to dry land.
As we fled, we heard behind us a vast threshing of waters, and shrill, agonized voices. The leeches were gathering round the tasty entanglement of web-demons that we had strung across the lagoons, and feeding on them with gusto.
So we fled inland, and at length we found a zone of dry ravines where we could crouch in safety. Here we took our first period of rest in this world—this world so hard merely to enter, let alone survive in. Our venture was begun, at least, and ourselves still both alive and free, no slight feat in itself.
But ah! what a drear hell it was we now had to venture through! What a maelstrom of relentless gorging, one creature upon another! The claws and jaws of the upper world are red enough—who denies it?—but the carnage has intermissions, periods of amiable association, zones of green peace and fructification. In the subworlds, the merciless seethe of appetites never simmers down. Even while the leeches still fed on the web-demons, squads of the winged beings we had distantly glimpsed round the city of platforms swept into view. Their bodies were manlike, though scaly and of thrice human stature, and their temperaments were, as it proved, playful. Flying in vast and flawlessly coordinated formations, they dropped lassoes on several of the leeches and hauled them ashore, where armies of their fellows assembled mountainous heaps of brush. On these the winged things, twittering volubly together, incinerated their huge, vermiform prey alive. Cooking was not the object. The leeches were burnt to ashes while the beings swarmed in the air above their pyres, clearly intoxicated by the greasy smoke to which the worms were transmuted by the flames. And as for the smell of this smoke, I earnestly beg whatever gods may be that my fate may never again set my nose athwart such a stench.
Dismal, eternal, remorseless gluttony. We came to see the hideous vitality of that place as a single obscene shape, its multiform jaws forever rooting in its own bleeding entrails—guzzling and growing strong upon itself.
We knew that by following the nearby river we should eventually find the sea. As the light is never truly full there, so the darkness rarely completely falls. We paused an indefinite time under the changeless sky, and then rose and made our way toward the river by the best-concealed route we could discern.
IX
We found the Demon-Sea. We reached it. At the time, though it was merely the threshold of our journey, we gaped at it as if it were the unimaginable peak of all Exploit simply to have attained its shores. Once we had come to ourselves somewhat, and recalled that next these waters must be entered, and plumbed, we were yet further awed. It was a moment for taking stock of ourselves.
The personal inventory this led us to was a sobering one. We had set out wearing light body-mail over heavy jerkins and doublets of leather. All three of these layers were now scorched in many places, and as ragged as old curtains in a house full of cats. We had one spear between us, and the head of this was half-melted. Barnar's sword lacked two feet of blade. He kept the remnant because one throws away not even the least asset down there. He still had his target-shield, but mine was now a fused and corroded lump under the carcass of a thing I had killed. Our bones were stark against our skins, our eyes were those of almost-ghosts, and our beards told us we had been at least a month en route. This was our only clue to a sane reckoning of time, in a world where horror, harm, and long, eerie calms flow past the traveler in endlessly unpredictable succession.
We sat down—fell, really, as if our legs had done their limit, and now forever renounced their task. The feeling of futility we had then was the heaviest weight I have ever felt upon my back. For a simple fact which we had known all along was now striking us with its full dreadfulness: having reached the sea, we must now turn either right or left, with no way of knowing which was the
correct direction.
If, indeed, there was a correct direction—if even Gildmirth the Privateer could have survived till now on the shore of this subearthly deep. The wrong turn meant a grim eternity of plodding, another of retracing our steps. Gildmirth's present nonexistence meant the same. And the Demon-Sea spread before us like the very image of infernal eternity to either side.
We had first sensed its nearness while still deep in the dunes of salt. When we got a tang of brine, we identified a deep susurration we had been hearing for some time as the big-breathing sound an ocean makes. The dunes steepened, and we kept to their crests, trampling their ridgelines into crumbling staircases, winding always higher. And then there was before us a narrow plateau of rock salt ending in white cliffs and, beyond these, crashing against their pallid feet, the subworld waters.
The essential horror of its aspect you could not at first identify. The sounds of it had an awesome musicality, and the prospect a barbarously rich coloration, which conspired to exalt and bewilder your senses. The shingle footing the cliffs was jet-black, seemingly composed of something like broken obsidian, and when the cream-and-jade surf pounced up it varnished their contrast to an ever-renewed brilliance. Moreover, a wealth of gaudy flotsam littered the beaches, so that the breakers made them flash every other color as well. The sea itself was bizarrely dappled, for though a gloomy cloud-cover vaulted it over to the limits of vision, this was abundantly rifted, and wherever it was broken it permitted avalanches of the reddish-gold light of sunset to pour onto the water. The clouds themselves were in many places caved in, and lay in foggy islands and ghostly ziggurats upon the green-black waves, and these misty monoliths had a bluish luminescence of their own lurking within them. Meanwhile the winds on those waters were strangely various, and everywhere wrenched them into a crazy-quilt of local turbulences.