Swords v. Cthulhu

by Jesse Bullington

  The gate —

  — knew what had been —

  — knew what would be —

  The gate knew, and Elspeth curled her hand around Feymal’s grip. In that instant, the gate vomited them into the flooded lower chambers of Lowenhold Prison.

  The air was cold as contempt, illuminated by the lingering gate. It shifted, no longer a doorway, but as great a beast as they had seen in the many worlds they had visited. Golden, malignant globs of light whirled in a storm of barely contained chaos. It did not advance, but stood as watchman, streaming its foul light into the drowned catacombs of the prison’s basement. The water gleamed with a slick sheen, while the star-stone caverns emitted all the colors of the night sky. Deeper within the stone sparked colors Elspeth could not name. The colors resembled planets in miniature, worlds she could scoop out and hold but never actually reach. As she watched these worlds, everything she had known about the outer world was blotted from her mind; the prison was the only thing she knew, the prison and its prisoner. No sister, she thought, there was never such a thing. The prison was all — the prison and its singular, solitary prisoner.

  Ghostsign and Nanrin did not move, the water lapping at their hips. Every pathway angled further down, the water growing deeper against the tunnel walls. Elspeth wanted to call out for her sister — even as she knew there was no such person — and a bellow from within the prison’s bowels forestalled her. Every wall quaked with the roar, fissures marking the stone as though the ancient assembly would at last give way. The gate trembled as if with laughter.

  “Did you dream this place?” Ghostsign whispered to Elspeth.

  When had she not? She eased her grip on Feymal to unroll the scroll. Its aged face now showed the prison, a path mapped in gleaming gold. It snaked to the left, curving downward and around, leading them through the loops and whorls of star-stone that confined the great beast.

  Say his name, the dark man rasped in Elspeth’s ear.

  “He needs no courting,” Elspeth murmured, wading through the water and into the mouth of the first corridor, Feymal still sheathed. The dark man did not leave her side, as loyal as a hound as the trio moved ever downward. Since time immemorial, he whispered; now is my time, no messenger, me.

  The gate also followed them, sending ripples of light down the corridor as the women advanced. They said nothing, Nanrin’s hands curled into tense fists, Ghostsign already having drawn her sword. Elspeth held only the map as they went down and down, feeling the weight of that ancient and amber eye upon her. He watched in his underwater prison, not asleep nor quite awake, and it was no surprise to her when, from beneath the prison walls and into the corridor burst great lengths of tentacles and suckered limbs. Not even this place could entirely restrict him, even in his dreaming.

  The water bubbled and burst, fiercely green limbs striking the women to their knees. As neatly as the Great Old One took them down, he did nothing to maim them. Still Elspeth did not draw Feymal, but dived into the blackened waters, swimming through drowned corridors until she came to the massive chamber fashioned to hold this creature of the stars.

  He was awful and beautiful all in the same instant, extraordinary and enraged, chained within a submerged star-stone cell. Eternities of thrashing monster had worn the outer stone walls thin, but still had not broken them. He strained at the chains holding him and loosed a fresh bellow at the sight of Elspeth pushing herself to her feet in the chest-deep waters of the entrance. She drew Feymal, and the massive god flinched. Feymal glowed with the light of the stars, inundating the chamber with a staggering brightness it had not known for eons.

  Within this clear, clean light, Elspeth watched planets move through the walls, planets the god-beast might have once taken in hand and traveled to…

  The idea of anything beyond this room was absurd, the prison the whole of the world, and Elspeth turned, seeking the dark man who had brought them here. What game did he play with these worlds, taunting the shackled god with worlds that did not exist. The prison was the whole of the world, the whole of the univ —

  Say his name, the dark man hissed.

  Elspeth said nothing; it was the imprisoned horror who shrieked a name within its dreaming, a name that clawed its fiery path into Elspeth’s heart: Nyarlathotep. Elspeth felt the power of that name.

  “Nyarlathotep.”

  She spoke the name three times, and as before, the name engulfed and pervaded Feymal. As though the sword had been given new purpose, it lunged and took Elspeth with it. But not toward the chained behemoth — it was Nyarlathotep that Feymal sought. Within her hands, Feymal was the living, vengeant stars, the thing the imprisoned god knew best, having been confined within the same star-stone for so very long.

  Crafty as he was, Nyarlathotep could not outdance Feymal. There was no place to hide within the chamber, so brightly did the room glow with the light of every star that had ever been. And when, in the end, Feymal pierced Nyarlathotep’s battered form, it was a new sun’s heat and flying sand that coalesced around him; it was the sudden and swift prison of a far-distant pyramid — standing as proof that other places existed, that the prison was not the whole of the world.

  “Not the whole of the world,” Elspeth said, as she sagged to her knees.

  This fact remembered, it pervaded every bit of the chamber and the two figures it still held; the walls screamed with planets, comets, the naked universe spread before them for the taking. At the sight, the Great Old One rammed himself into the side of his cage and at last spilled free through cracked star-stone. He stretched in his freedom, and punched countless tentacles into countless planets.

  And the gate — the knowing gate — spilled itself over him, through him, to carry him into the stars and away. Elspeth stared at the churning waters, the false memory of a sister creeping back into her thoughts. Later, when she had found a fire and a loaf of bread, she might allow herself to long for it — but not now, not as she searched every waterlogged chamber of the prison. Not as she found every room and corridor empty of even Ghostsign and Nanrin.

  Had they existed at all? An unfamiliar ache engulfed Elspeth’s heart as though they had, but she could not say. Standing within the ancient chamber of star-stone, Elspeth recalled Basher spreading her wings across the sky, and so spread her own arms, reaching for the planets within the walls. Nine glowing orbs slid into her hand, as heavy and sure as Feymal in the other, and then —

  how they loved to journey — this alone was truth

  — they were gone, and the certain darkness claimed Lowenhold’s empty walls once more.

  The Argonaut

  Carlos Orsi

  How I became a stowaway in the cargo hold of Beldur Reis’ corsair ship, sleeping on the old, rotting shelves once used to transport slaves, eating rats raw, and drinking rainwater that passed through cracks in the deck above, has no bearing on what follows. Suffice it to say that I was there when they attacked a Maltese vessel, which needs must remain nameless. The battle occurred at night, in the rain, by the blaze of torches and flashes of lightning. I don’t know why cunning old Captain Beldur decided to engage under such conditions. Perhaps he was compelled by what I found later.

  The blasts, the clangs, the screams — all that I heard, as expected. I smelled smoke and gunpowder, scorched flesh and fresh blood, all the scents of battle any man with naval experience might anticipate. What I had not expected was what came after the fighting died down — silence. Deep, disturbing human silence. I could hear the rain pelting the deck. I even imagined I could listen to the spilt blood running, slowly mixing with raindrops in rivulets. I heard some small fires crackling.

  But there were no voices. No cries or shouts or cheers, no songs, no roars. Not even footsteps. I waited, keeping myself awake all through the night. First, the rain stopped, and the thunder. Then the thin moonbeams that filtered through knotholes in the planks above started to fade, replaced by caustic, razor-sharp slivers of sunlight. It was time for breakfast, the first rat of the day
, but I didn’t know what to do. There was no perceptible sign of human life on the deck over my head.

  The ship started to heel. Ever so gently at first.

  Beldur’s vessel had been a slave ship before circumstances forced the captain to become a corsair for the Pasha in Tripoli, so the upper shelf of the cargo hold where I hid was poorly insulated and leaky — human cargo has a higher tolerance for unwholesome humidity than spices and wine casks. And things trickled down, of course, so there was always one or two feet of black, stinking water pooled at the very bottom of the hold. Now, as the ship moved in the ominous silence of the morning, I heard its splash. It unnerved me, that small, dark pond. It seemed almost pregnant.

  I climbed down from the old slaves’ compartment, dropping into the hold proper. I landed close to the pond, my unshod feet slipping on the slimy planks. From there I moved among the crates, peeking inside them to see assorted pieces of iron, silver, and bronze, exquisite pottery, jars of scented oil sealed with wax — one of them cracked, exhaling an enticing perfume — and a few smaller boxes containing jewels and gold. For a moment, the silence of the ship felt welcome — if everybody else was dead, everything here would be mine. The thought produced a taut smile, but the pleasure did not last. In my heart I knew that until I found myself free of the ship and whatever had befallen her, I was no better off than before, with but torn breeches and an ancient cutlass to my name.

  I climbed the stairs out of the hold, quietly as I could, and took a deep breath. Maybe I should wait longer? A full day, perhaps two, before I risked exposing myself? Old Beldur knew me from long ago, and if he still lived, I was sure I would be even less welcome on his ship than a random stowaway. But the silence, insistent, stubborn, was too much to bear…

  I opened the trapdoor, slowly at first, but what I saw made me throw caution to the four winds, and I jumped up onto the deck.

  It was empty. And clean. I don’t know if the word “clean” conveys the whole truth. No, it obviously doesn’t. There wasn’t anything above the deck, on the deck, even lodged between the planks — no smirch of blood or oil caught in the wood. Nothing. The rough, dull planks had become polished, and ground as smooth as the lens of a spyglass. I could see a shadowy reflection of myself slither on the deck’s surface as I moved upon the strangely flattened, glazed boards. There was no one in sight, and no barrels nor baskets nor any of the other countless objects that clutter a working vessel, nor any part of the ship itself much above the height of a man — incredibly, the ropes, the sails, and even the masts themselves were all gone, leaving only short, planed stumps where they had stood. What bits of metal remained, like some cleats, were smoothed and sanded so finely that it was painful to look at them in broad daylight.

  I went to the aftcastle, for unlike the masts, it remained. The cabin’s door was missing from its hinges and nowhere to be seen, and there was nothing inside the quarters. No maps. Not the captain’s table. Not even the captain’s bunk. The bulkheads had become wooden mirrors, weirdly reflecting and distorting my image, just like the deck. I recalled words quoted by some Christian I’d met years before —“things dimly seen, as in a glass, darkly”— and shuddered. The distortion made the image ripple and crimp. For a moment it seemed that there was someone else behind me. I turned quickly, but there was nobody.

  Leaving the cabin, I finally directed my attention to the other ship — a massive, shadowy presence that loomed by our side. I recognized the design and the pennons. It was a vessel of the Knights Hospitaller of Malta, probably on its way to Spain. Grappling hooks kept both ships tied to one another. This explained the heeling, a movement that was getting more noticeable at every minute, despite the empty, becalmed sea.

  The hooks and chains keeping the vessels moored together were highly polished, shining like sterling silver. There was not a soul in sight, but the Maltese ship still had its masts, sails, and ropes. Perhaps there were people there, too, despite the silence — always the silence, broken only by the creaking of the wood and the rustling of something I thought was the wind — but the air wasn’t moving.

  Whatever force had cleansed the corsair’s deck had also removed the ropes and nets the pirates must have used to board the Maltese vessel, so I had no choice but to cross over by dangling from the thickest of the taut chains and pulling myself along, hand over hand. It was a nauseating experience, every link of the chain a burnished mirror that disfigured my reflection and lanced my eyes with shards of sunlight as I tried to keep my gaze off the dizzying drop to the sea below.

  Having sails and masts, the other ship also had shadow and shade on its deck. It was only when I hauled myself over the rail and found myself cooling under a flapping sail that I noticed how the intense morning sun had stung me during my investigation of Beldur’s ship. It had been my first exposure after too many dark days in the slaves’ hold.

  I also realized how thirsty I was. And hungry. These sudden, mundane concerns got the better of me, and I started scouting the vessel in search of food and fresh water, ignoring much of everything else: I hardly took notice of the corpses sprawled across the deck, the blood caked on every surface. Whatever strange event had cleansed Beldur’s ship hadn’t worked on this vessel of the Christian Knights of Saint John.

  Stepping into the dim coolness of the aftcastle’s cabin, I discovered a jug of wine and a large bowl of grapes and pomegranates, most of them still fresh. The officers of the Order had lived well, I surmised, peering out the door at their hacked bodies… bodies that begin to stir as I drooled pomegranate juice and redder wine. As I gawped in the doorway, two of the mutilated corpses, for dead men they surely were, began to rise and move… shambling… walking… away.

  The unholy scene left me numb. It was as if an icy fist had closed over my entire body. For a moment I felt an absurd, trite relief that the pair of dead knights hadn’t come after me but instead moved away down the deck. Not for a moment did I doubt that they were dead. My stomach had clamped. I couldn’t eat any more, pomegranate seeds spilling from my slack mouth. There were more corpses on the deck, but as I watched them closely, they didn’t move.

  Should I race for the chains and try to climb back to Beldur’s ship before I was seen? What if the dead men changed course and saw me? Or others began to move? Should I hide? Where? Questions flew like arrows through my mind, but my only palpable physical reaction was to draw my cutlass from my rope belt, gripping it so hard my knuckles went as white as the dead men’s flesh. When I heard a woman scream, I jumped.

  At the far end of the deck, the revived knights, in their shredded black cassocks and ripped chain mail, were looming over a slight figure I hadn’t seen before… and as I watched the pair descend upon her, I heard the unmistakable wet thud of steel cleaving flesh.

  Intent as they were on their quarry, the knights did not hear me approach. The tip of my cutlass slid into the back of the closest knight’s neck, gliding through a rip in his mail. There was no spurt of blood, but the head fell forward, now attached to the body by nothing more than leather-like skin and a strip of tendon. He collapsed.

  I had a quick glimpse of the woman, white-skinned, bloodied, splayed on the deck, and then the other knight was right on top of me.

  There was a grayish-green tint to his skin, and he moved with unnerving precision and silence. He held a longsword and knew how to make good work of it. My situation was dire: you cannot safely parry a longsword with a cutlass, so I ducked once, stepping back, and ducked again as he pressed his attack, the sword whipping over my head. As he raised the heavy weapon for another swing, I darted under his raised arm, driving the cutlass into his midsection with all my might.

  My blade scraped along the edge of his mail instead of pushing through, and he did not even grunt… but the force knocked him backward, and I jumped right in. He tried to bring the sword down on me, but he was still off balance and I got hold of his wrist. Pulling myself forward, I pressed the cutlass into his face and used my full weight to punch the steel
through his cheek. The skull broke and split like a rotten pomegranate. For an instant, I thought that the battle was surely mine — but then darkness shot out of the ruined face.

  The darkness was a tangle of tentacles and tendrils, all black and viscous, fluid but nonetheless solid… or was it? As it brushed my skin, I felt the darkness for what it was: the absence of light, pure and simple, a devouring emptiness that could never be satisfied. It clung to me, strips of nothingness around my arms, grabbing my head, covering my mouth just as I locked my jaw tight, trying to force itself in past my pursed lips. It immobilized the arm that held the cutlass, and all I could do was to roll on the deck, wrestling impotently against the spreading darkness that stretched up toward my nose, ears, and eyes…

  I felt dozens of pinpricks across my limbs and face, as if the oozing pitch were growing thorns as we fought; thorns, or teeth. And then eyes were staring back at me, rounded, darker patches of midnight, coalescing like blisters on its mass, moving, rolling, dissolving, and reforming. My breath had turned sour in my chest, the pressure of the thing prying my lips apart. I felt dizzy and tired. A mass of tendrils on my face smothered me even as they tried to squirm inside my mouth, while others encircled my neck, crawling up toward my ears. Then I felt chill, a heart-numbing cold that I believed was the touch of death… and was free.

  The darkness had recoiled, and melting quickly into a gray haze, dissipated in the still air. The corpse remained motionless, its face open in halves as some carnivorous flower, a yellow mist flowing slowly from the gap. The pale girl was standing in front of me. “Shoggoths cannot stand a virgin’s touch, that’s why they need the corpses,” she told me, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “You did a good job bringing that one out. Now get up. I’ll need you to get to my husband.”

  She was tall, with ash-blond hair and hazel eyes, and wore nothing but a loincloth and a seashell anklet. In other circumstances I might’ve considered her beautiful, desirable, but at that moment all I could think about was her sweetly familiar smell — I knew that scent, but from where? This sudden preoccupation drove away even my puzzlement as to the fact that she seemed quite unharmed, despite the longswords I had seen bite bloody gashes into her milk white skin before I could reach her attackers.