The Verse of Sibilant Shadows: A set of tales from the Irrational Worlds

by JM Guillen

  (—is the Arachniis, a parasite which devours the motes of force which bleed from the bounds. This one has been kept here for years, trapped by the cultists of Orahiel. The bound may yet breathe again, but not as long as such creatures feed from it. Upon the other side of that crevice, there lays a device—)

  The bound may yet breathe again.

  I had to admit, I hadn’t truly considered it possible, based upon what I had seen. But the truth was that this place should be a luminous, resounding orchestra of beauty and light, where the bound’s components flowed with ethereal grace. There ought to be a huge torrent of shimmering sunlight that poured through its core, dazzling enough to blind those that saw it.

  (—may be used to close the fissure. Without the Arachniis feeding upon it, the bound would recover in—)

  A device of some kind beyond the aperture? I peered into the fissure, thinking that, even if there were something within that would help heal the bound, stepping inside was surely death. My fingers found the edge of my collar, and I swore.

  I was dead no matter what.

  Perhaps my death could make a difference.

  If there were even a possibility that I could restore the spiraling beauty to this bound, that I could reawaken it so the bound might hold the Shroud back, countless lives would be saved.

  That wasn’t the only thing, however. It was a marvelous construct. A dim intellect lurked within it, a thing that called my name. I didn’t understand how this one bound fit into the whole, not truly, but it was a thing of wonder.

  To not at least try to repair it would be sacrilege.

  I took one last look at the High Rector and his servitors and gave them a profoundly rude gesture. Then I stepped into the darkened gateway, that breach between our world and another.

  The cold, high wind screamed my name.

  Then I was falling.

  16

  I hit the ground hard on a pile of crystalline shards, black and glossy and broken.

  “Fecking—!” I rolled, feeling quick flashes of scarlet pain as the shards sliced at my hip and knee. Instant rage boiled inside me at the pain, and I somewhat petulantly released it through the talisma, clearing a circle clear in the shattered detritus.

  “That’s right, rocks.” I noticed I had also sliced my hand as I pushed myself up to a seated position. “That’s what you paid for.” I looked around, squinting against the wind.

  All around me a sea of the slivered stone stood in jagged rows like a mouth of razors. The wind howled, cold and fierce. Above, the night sky roiled with mad, tilted stars that sought to burn away the world.

  “Well, Ysabel,” I muttered as I pushed myself to my feet. “You always wanted to get out of Calyptin Station…” I looked more carefully around me, my gaze coming to rest on the sky.

  Oh.

  I quickly shielded my eyes, instantly nauseous with vertigo, then blinked at the glassy, black crystals. They sprang from the stony ground in clusters of spears, all sharp angles and fierce—

  (—place between. Neither a world as I know it, nor any true time. A placeless place, where reason gives way to the darkened ramblings o—)

  I wandered into that strange twilight, the freezing wind stealing my breath. I turned around, realizing that I hadn’t yet seen that shadowed, flickering doorway I had stepped through.

  My heart fell to my feet. The gate back to Calyptin Station had vanished.

  “Perfection itself.”

  I scanned the ground outside my circle.

  “I’m not seeing any device of the ancients.” I spoke out loud, as if the strange, alien thoughts could hear me. “That’s why I’m here, right? To close the thing and save the bound?”

  But then, the thing had closed. Was that all it took? Walking through? Marooning myself to strangle on some eldritch, forgotten shore?

  I supposed that such a death might mean something. If the bound were now safe, then Calyptin Station could be safe as well.

  At the cost of dying here.

  “Good omen, Da.” I whispered the words. “I hope Teredon does you very well.” I hated that, after everything, the thought still made me weepy. In the end, his little girl still believed the old duffer and his crazy dreams.

  After a few moments of muttering into the wind about how ridiculous I was, I decided to have a peek around.

  If the collar was going to strangle me, I wanted a view.

  The shards that littered the place made the ground difficult to navigate once I passed the circle that my wrath had cleared. I turned to my left and walked, the ground rolling upward under my feet. I had no doubt that, if I needed, I could find the spot I had fallen in again, what with the cleared circle I’d made.

  Not that it mattered. The door to the bound was gone.

  I was contemplating what it might feel like to choke to death when I kicked something round and hard. It went bouncing off and rolled around a cluster of obsidian spikes taller than a three-floor house.

  “What’s this, then?” Intrigued, I went after it and picked it up—

  (—constructed by a powerful cabal of another world, it was borne here by a man of dark and unwavering eye. He was a man who didn’t know his own nature, who was more machine than spirit. Upon ignition, the device will wash away any foul glamour or sorceries that bend the world—)

  Just smaller than my clenched fist, the round object (dampening grenade) appeared to be made of metal and some firm, textured material I’d never encountered before. A raised, round section poked out of one end. It was red and had an indention just the size of my fingertip.

  A switch of some kind?

  (—sealing forever the fate of the Arachniis, she whom the Brethren named Ictithia. With her fell glamour tossed aside, the dark-eyed man left this dismal place—)

  “That…” I turned over the device in my hand. “That’s quite interesting.”

  It had belonged to a man from somewhere very far away, the whispers claimed. I listened as they whispered of a place of blinding, sterile light and brilliant, shiny counters and white, tiled floors.

  The man who’d possessed it had been fighting for his life and dropped this thing—this grenade, whatever that was—that would beckon reason itself to intrude upon this place of tilted rock and screaming stars.

  The creature he had been fighting was certainly the same one that the Brethren had summoned. If it had survived his vicious attack, it could lurk nearby.

  I raised my head to scout the area.

  Wind, rock, and a whole lot of nothing.

  Surely that monster is dead.

  It hadn’t come when called, after all! Perhaps that was the crank in the High Rector’s cogwheel: the gate itself was disrupting the bound, and the gate wouldn’t close until something passed through.

  “Not that this helps you, ’Bel.” I smirked. No one but Captain Argent had ever called me ’Bel. I found I liked it.

  Unfortunately, I expected to never see the roguish captain again.

  I swallowed and glanced to the side. If the creature (astral aberration) were dead…

  Where was the body?

  This was where they had fought. The disrupted crystals around the discarded, forgotten device (grenade) proved that much. If the Arachniis had died here, then its carcass should have left some remnant, even if scavengers had gotten her.

  What sort of scavengers would live in a place like this, though?

  I dumped the dampening grenade into my pocket and got to my feet, letting my curiosity lead me along.

  “I shouldn’t be doing this,” I told myself as I stepped around yet another cluster of obsidian shards. “I’m actively seeking vexation.”

  Not that I could come up with anything else I should be doing. Shelter wasn’t anywhere in sight, so I needed to pick a direction at random to seek it. This direction had as much a chance as any other. More so, I hoped.

  That frigid wind had only grown stronger, keening as it sliced over the giant obsidian shards until I was certain that the wi
nd actually bled.

  I huddled around myself, nearly doubled over as I stumbled along the path I’d set. I retained only the faintest hope that it led to shelter, but I still couldn’t stop my feet from moving.

  Otherwise, I would freeze to death.

  What a choice.

  At first I welcomed the larger crystal shards that towered over my head, looming over me, forming a tunnel of cold and black that, while no less bleak, at least offered some rudimentary shelter from that eternal wind.

  Swirling around the stone ground so that the shadows frolicked and gamboled, only the dimmest glimmer of light filtered into the tunnel from the mad stars I’d learned to ignore. They were disorienting to the point of vertigo. Several times I’d had to catch myself on the immense, obsidian-blade walls to keep from falling. My palms left faint crimson traces of my passage.

  Nonetheless, I ambled along, letting my feet and my curiosity lead me.

  Until I heard the voices.

  Frail voices whispered somewhere beyond the wind that screamed between the shards. They muttered words of spite and barbed flame betwixt oddly skittering clicks that came from everywhere at once. The sounds raked at my mind, blazing in the back of my memories.

  I whipped my head around this way and that trying to catch whomever spoke, but there was no one.

  “Hello?” I yelled. “Who’s there?”

  Sharp-footed shadows skittered over my skin, colder than ice. I jumped at the prickling sensation, and the hair on the back of my neck stood. I whirled.

  Nothing was there.

  “No.” I peered into the darkness.

  Something was there. Lots of somethings. But they weren’t quite…

  Real.

  Not in the way I was, anyway. It was if they were constructed of equal part dawndream and crawling horror.

  I felt them scrabbling around in the back of my head, thousands of barbed legs and gleaming carapaces. They hid in my dreams and memories, uncounted legions of vicious monstrosities. They crawled out of the shadows, out from under my bed, between the pages of my books. I could feel the shape of those spun filaments of horror: scaled arachnid mongrels with oddly curved, raised tails.

  They boiled out of a large, amorphous shape that sheltered just inside a cave-like opening in the craggy ground.

  I could feel their hunger pulsing at me from scores of different stomachs at once.

  (—had so little food in their short lives. Once their mother’s body was gone, there had been nothing to eat but each othe—)

  Their desire for flesh swirled and grew. They wanted more than that though. They wanted me. They wanted to drag me down into their web-strewn nest and explore my softness, my sweet secrets. They wanted—needed—

  (—to mate with me. They long to sink their myriad fangs deep within me while they take me so they can lay our eggs inside my sheltering, nourishing body. Our children will feast on me, my last act of motherhood, just as they had partaken of their mother’s flesh, though it had been dead and cold—)

  I screamed.

  They were coming, more of them than I could imagine. Just feeling them in my mind was more than I could possibly bear, just a whit away from driving me to madness as surely as those tainted by the Shroud.

  I turned and ran. I ran like a craven dog.

  I was not ashamed.

  I had the presence of mind to make considerations as I ran, however.

  It was difficult enough to not slice myself open as I sprinted past the frozen shards, but I somehow managed. As I darted past the broken, razored edges, I realized I only had one clear path.

  Back the way I came.

  It was the only path that made any sense. Were other caverns filled with more crawling seas of horror? If so, I couldn’t possibly stand between two groups of them.

  Had I been told when I woke this morning that I would soon choose between strangling to death and being eaten alive, I would have been skeptical.

  With the wide and wild sky bending and bobbing over my head, I ran back toward the small clearing I had created with my petulant wrath.

  That was possibly my only hope.

  I didn’t know how long the talisma would channel my temper, but I imagined that thoughts of Royce’s weasel face and the High Rector could keep me plenty outraged. The creatures were small; perhaps bursts from the talisma would injure them, maybe kill them.

  When I arrived back at my place of entry, I whirled to face them. In my secret heart, I hoped that they had quit their pursuit.

  No.

  They weren’t quite close enough for me to feel them carousing in my mind, but—

  (—is a place without logic. The Arachniis clouds the mind of their prey, which happened to the dark stranger who wandered here previously. Only through the craft of his cabal was he able to escape this place—)

  Escape. I had assumed I was stranded here.

  As the creatures scurried forward, a veritable sea of death, I reached into my pocket, finding the smooth device. I sneered at the creatures, my heart pounding. I let fury wash over me and then took one step forward, hand outstretched.

  The first few creatures were hurled backward, along with shards of the dark and jagged stone. The creatures behind them, insectine things that combined the worst of a spider and a skorpiin, hurried forward on wicked legs.

  That animal need, a combination of eternal hunger and dark lust, burned like a fire of filth at the heart of each of them.

  The second legacy wouldn’t be enough. If just a few of them got to me, I would be dead in moment—

  (—not kill me. They will only eat some of my flesh. My warmth will protect our eggs, the young of these younglings. They will swarm around me, keeping me alive as they deposited—)

  “Not today, I think.” I breathed the words, my eyes wide. Trembling, I took two steps back, almost dropping the device from my hand. I looked from the creatures to the sphere.

  I pushed the button.

  The abandoned device pulsed in my hand, thrumming like silent thunder. Around me, the air rippled, tasting sweeter.

  The creatures became more physical, somehow. More flesh and less phantasm.

  The howling and eternal wind stopped. But I didn’t have time to truly take note, as three things happened at once, each so vital that individually they demanded my full attention.

  A brilliant scarlet light flashed, and the clockwork gears in the collar around my neck burst and then collapsed into a fine, sand-like substance. Without the sorcery holding the thing together, it was a loose piece of leather hanging from my neck.

  “Piece of filth!” I quickly snatched it and hurled it into the darkness, a feral grin on my face.

  For a nonce, the creatures were the last thing on my mind. During that act the next two things came into my awareness. The first was a brilliant cold sensation burning through my right hand. As I hurled the collar, my eye caught just the shine of the silver in my mother’s ring as it melted into an amber liquid, dribbling onto the ground.

  “No!” Horror sliced through my chest as the talisma ran from my skin. Without it, the second legacy was out of my reach, or so my mother had said.

  Then, as the minds of a thousand hungry monsterlings began to whisper to me, I noticed the final event only a few steps from me.

  The flaming ribbon that hung between this world and Calyptin Station shone like a beacon in the night. As I gaped at it, I heard a large, echoing explosion from the other side. I could even see the room shake.

  “I don’t think that matters, overmuch.” I glanced back at the swarm of sickening horrors, and didn’t waste a nonce. “I have other concerns.”

  I leapt back through, just as that oddly trembling thunder sounded in the bound chamber again.

  The creeping foulness swarmed after me.

  17

  “—as many as possible!” The High Rector’s baritone boomed in scarcely concealed panic.

  I stepped in the center of the bound and noted that it had begun swirling again,
a development which made me unreasonably happy.

  “High Rector!” That was Riza, who, like the other Brethren, piled books into a cart. “The witching woman!”

  The High Rector turned toward me, along with the other cultists. They stared at me with a strange, wide-eyed wonder. The room shuddered with a distant explosion. Dust fell from the ceiling, and a stack of books toppled.

  Cannon fire? only a distant part of my mind mused.

  “This was not seen.” The Rector’s tone drizzled fear. “You have returned from the Dim Lands.”

  “I have.” I glanced behind me, into that empty place. “And I brought friends.”

  Then I released myself into the bound as I had before. Once more I slipped away into pure light and sound. There was no more Ysabel, any more than there was a sun or a moon or the singing stars between.

  I was the wind.

  “Vanished!” This from Riza who made warding signs, which I found laughable.

  “We need to leave, immediately.” The High Rector’s tone quavered slightly. “Who knows what the witch has wrought!”

  This time I held against the bound and its powerful currents, holding myself inside the chamber. I didn’t wash away to fair Tressia or Teredon or any other fantastical place. Instead, I watched as the torrent of many-legged horrors swarmed through the open fissure, ravenous, driven by a lust that no man had ever known. They washed forth, a tide of filth and horror.

  I wasn’t real; I wasn’t even truly in the room.

  However, the Arachniis young didn’t seem particular with their lust. The moment they cascaded into the chamber, they rushed eagerly toward the cultists, their legs clicking against the stone.

  “Rector!” Riza screamed, the word gilded with animalistic terror.

  The Arachniis flowed up her legs, their fist-sized carapaces glistened black in the wan light. They began devouring the fat on her legs and breasts before she made three steps. Some of them seemed to be chewing into her abdomen, and others disappeared beneath her grey skirts not to appear again.

  (—will incubate inside her sex for months, slipping into a long slumber—)

  I chose not to dwell on that. Instead, I shook the thought loose, realizing that no matter what otherworldly magics I had unleashed on the other side of that gate, the first legacy was still mine. I could still hear the wisps of melody behind the world and alien memories coursed through me.