by Michael Shea
“Here. This is your ration for the next day. Be sparing.” The Karbie thrust a wineskin between the bars, and returned to the little fire.
Hex used his entire ration that night. A little he splashed on the bars where he had puked. The rest he drank, numbing his thoughts, which kept bobbing horribly to the surface, till at last he passed out, hugging the deflated skin.
Morning brought an agony freshened and sharpened by sleep. In the freezing dawn he urinated from between the iron bars on to the dew-charged grass, then crouched in the middle of his cage, his throat a knot of thirst and his skin cringing from contact with the surrounding metal. Awareness of the misery of cold was intermittent, however, and came as a respite from his thoughts, which crystallized out of a welter of pain, and dissolved back into it, incessantly.
His rage at the dowager racked him. He imagined revenges, ladled upon her pinioned nakedness the orifice-seeking ants of Rasch, even as Smapp does to Grudjin in the Epic of Urkh, or infected her and watched her swell with the scabrous influx, at her every pore, of the Dismal Reverse Sweats. But the impotence of such revenge was in its turn as excruciating as his rage. Shame choked him, and led to the tortures of contemplating his astonishing gullibility and perfect pliancy as a tool in the she-monster’s crime-stained hand. His own guilty role in the dooming of the whores was but a thought away, and he considered that for a while. Thereafter he had his now-imminent fate, its horror and revulsion, to study, until his wrath at the dowager rekindled, and he fell to reviewing such subworld sexual monstrosities as the whore Zelt had put him in mind of the day before, searching for an appropriate punishment for the treacherous, withered ghoul.
He bestirred his soul to escape this treadmill of despair, charged himself to see the symmetry of justice in his situation. With a flourish he had sold three hundred people into hell; with a swagger he had personally arranged their transportation thither. He had used them as chattels. Now he was the same, boxed, as good as limbless already.
In the skinfarms he would have no movement, but there would be thoughts, memories, dreams, fantasies. A minimal life, but guaranteed at least against the horrors of an uncertain world. Hex tried to look on his future with acceptance.
But when the sun rose, and washed gold across the crests of the hills, he felt something like death, seeing the life ahead of him all too clearly: the incessant amputations, the stink of anaesthetic, the eventless decades amid the fetor of a thousand rooted neighbours, all too slack-jawed with skin-loss and ennui even to converse.
“What? Have you finished it?” The Karbie’s grainy voice brought Hex’s eyes up to where the giant face loomed at his cage bars. Save that his beard covered his cheekbones and rounded his orbits to join the brows, the Karbie’s features were manlike, with a fat, bibulous nose and a sarcastic mouth of bawdy flexibility. “You’ll get no more, my friend. That little lard-pot of Lady Poon’s drove us a stingy bargain. We can’t be stuffing you.”
“What’ll he care about eating?” the second Karbie down by the fire said. “In a few days his stomach’ll be rerouted. Listen, human, practise feeding like a flower—on sun and dew! You’ll have roots yourself by week’s end.” Both giants laughed.
“Honourable Karbie, listen to me,” Hex blurted to the one at the bars. “You’re throwing away money by selling me to the skinfarms. I’m an infra-magus, I hold seals in lore, cartography, and incantation. Think of what I’d bring as a slave-tutor on some rich estate—say in Ungullion!”
“Think, you say?” smiled the giant. “We have, be sure of it, thought more about the body-market than you’ve ever done. Alas, if the world were air, my friend…! But the fact is that a man with five seals, not just three, fetches twice as much on the meat market as he does on the slave! Melancholy, by the dark ones! But you’re bound for the farms.”
“Klar!” said the Karbie downslope. “What’s that?” He pointed across the hillsides to where—bright and distinct in the early sunlight—two bodies sped towards them across the grass. In its pearly wetness they left behind them two tracks of darker, trampled green. They must have been half a mile distant when Hex first focused on them, but such was their speed that within a scant two seconds of this, they had crossed an entire hillside and vanished within a nearer cleft.
When they reappeared, much closer, they were identifiable. They were a man running alongside a dust-devil—a miniature cyclone that raced across the slope despite the absence of either the wind or the dust to warrant such a phenomenon, Again they plunged out of view, and re-emerged yet nearer.
The man was not running, Hex realized. With madly pumping legs he was keeping a small, red object under his feet and this, in some impossible way, was his vehicle. As for the foggy spiral of wind that kept pace with him, it was not merely air and smoke, for some large form was suspended within its swirling mass. The speeding pair plunged into the last hollow between them and the watching trio. The Karbies had both drawn their huge broadswords, and Hex’s interlocutor now rejoined his partner by the fire. The racing pair burst upon the far side of the slope. The dancing man was Antil the Elliptical, atop his exercise globe. As for the little maelstrom of wind, the shape suspended within it was clearly a man’s.
“Look out! Stand aside!” shouted the wizard, waving an arm. “You’re blocking the goal!” Hex had freedom, in his bemusement, to think it odd that the Karbies stood aside at once, Both the wizard and the strangely purposive whirlwind leaned forward in their last uphill drive towards—it seemed unquestionable—Hex himself. As he watched, Hex noted dreamily behind them the faint, settling mist of the exploded dew. Antil, with a sudden rictus of triumph and exertion, leaned almost parallel to the ground as he and his competitor ploughed through the Karbies’ fire, whose burst coals were still rising like comets when the wizard’s hands struck the cage bars a fraction of a second before the freezing cyclonette hissed up and hung revolving with a frosty rush.
“I won! I won!” crowed Antil. The rheumy wizard was transported. He nimbled his sphere through a wide, careering joydance, circling the cage and the staring Karbies. Hex saw this only peripherally, because of the horror-trance the whirlwind held him in.
The man who hung inside its wheeling opacity was Slamp, the skinbroker, nude. Spread-eagled, upright, he had the pallor—the bloated, sodden fixity—of the long-drowned, but his eyes were open and his lips under the dandyish waxed moustache, moved in a mumble. Minute insectoid forms criss-crossed his body—they threaded his pulpy skin with their crowded paths, which latter connected every conceivable orifice—nostrils, ears, the undersides of his nails, the end of his sex—all were the trafficked tunnels of this swarm. Meanwhile, Hex perceived, this whirl of air was more than air. Its spumy substance displayed a jellylike, quasi-viscosity. Ropy features, roots or intestines, became apparent within it—all anchored in the broker’s flesh. By its fetid stench—an acrid, faecal smell—Hex had understood its provenance from the first.
“Avaunt now, friend, no nearer!” Wheeling with lazy jocularity, Antil coasted back to the cage with this cautionary remark to the whirlwind. “I won fair and square! Master Hex is mine now.” The wizard jumped off his ball and stood, arms akimbo, beaming at the ghastly turbulence.
There was a pause, during which Hex felt waves of icy, intense concentration wash over him, emanating from the poised vortex. In that moment Slamp’s eyes found and focused on Hex. In dread, Hex saw the swollen lips move more urgently under the waxed moustache; faintly, the bleached, sausage-fingered hands moved, still blackly acrawl. A choking gust of hate concluded the vaporous entity’s pause; it spun away, climbed the slope. Hex saw a last brilliant view of the spread-eagled, naked Slamp, and then the broker was snatched from sight below the hilltop. Hex heard a nearby concussion, winced and turned. One side of his cage had fallen away, and the wizard beckoned him forth.
He stood beside Antil, whose mild gaze was turned upon the Karbies. The giants remained downslope; their swords were drawn, but not held at ready. One of them now perform
ed a stiff courtesy to Antil.
“Good morning, lord wizard. We hope you don’t mean to take our cargo, sir—we’ve paid our whole capital for him, invested all we own.”
“You hope, sirrah?” The wizard spoke musingly, amazedly. “You hope, you say, O gross, towering, perambulant scum? Hope?” He turned to share an incredulous smile with Hex, who returned a nervous version of same. Antil looked sharply back at the Karbies. “You could do far better than to waste your hope on such futilities. Why not hope instead that you escape with your life from our visitor?” Antil pointed, and Hex and the Karbies alike jumped to see, not twelve feet up the slope, a lone vampire, who gave them an obsequious bow of greeting when he saw he had their attention.
Like most of his kind, he stood under five feet high, and wore ragged trousers of human skin which were supported by a single greasy shoulder strap that crossed his narrow, hairless chest diagonally. He had the typical, unimpressive face: a receding chin with an underslung, flabby-lipped mouth, a ratty snout of a nose and little dull eyes. His feet, bare, were deeply arched, with finger-long toes, and grasped the ground with handlike prehensility. “Good morning, gentle giants,” he said in the species’ snotty, wheedling voice. His bow had included Hex and the wizard, but his concern seemed solely with the Karbies. “May I speak with you for a moment, sirs?” The vampire advanced humbly as he asked this. Both giants crouched sword-ready. Hex saw something rise from the grass behind them a moment before they became aware of it. It was a second vampire who with one hooked claw plucked through the leftmost giant’s hamstring. Even as his stricken leg buckled, the hyper-alert titan, with a hop on his good leg, turned and brought his broadsword round with a booming whirr, sweeping low and halving the vampire at the rib cage with a meaty, split-melon noise of impact. Still hopping on one leg, he turned his back to his partner, and they divided the compass between them. Six more vampires had stood up from the lush grass, and were now circling the pair.
“By Nab!” exclaimed Antil to Hex. “It must be said—there’s strength in the old stumps yet!” He indicated his legs, with a headshake of admiration. “The challenge of it was half my motive. Of course I had a thought to you too, good Hex. You may well do a rare thing, given the chance. I felt that from the first.”
There were too many vampires standing too near, for all that the giants seemed to absorb the bloodsuckers totally; Hex could not concentrate on what the magician said. They circled the Karbies, feinting, shuffling sideways, feinting again.
One of the giants leapt forward to break through their encirclement. It was a powerful spring, marred only by the fact that his feet refused to leave the ground. He stayed upright only by driving his swordpoint against the earth, and scarcely re-elevated the weapon in time to impale a vampire that had launched itself towards his throat. The other Karbie found his good foot similarly rooted, and only kept his balance by occasional—and clearly agonizing—use of his crippled leg. The ring of vampires tightened.
“I recommend Ungullion,” Antil went on, after watching the deathdance a moment with Hex. “Get right out of the hills. Get down to the beach—it’s scarcely a league from here—and follow it south. South to Ungullion, that’s my advice.”
Two of the vampires feinted inward, then sideways, drawing the giants’ swordstrokes. The wounded one had trouble recovering from his sweep.
“Come now, sirs!” cried the vampire who had been first to appear.“You’re hacking and slicing at us—it’s brutal and cruel! We just want to get close and talk! You probably think we’re vampires—everyone does. It’s an accidental similarity in our appearances. We’re harmless Eripmavs, in actuality!”
“To Ungullion?” Hex asked in belated response, tearing his eyes an instant from the scene. The wizard was looking at him with the beginnings of displeasure. “Honoured Antil! You’ve saved my life, and I’ll do what you say, but must I go to Ungullion? Can’t I go back to Glorak Harbour?”
“Go back, you ask? Go back?!” The thin, raw nose grew subtly thinner—bladelike—with the wizard’s disapproval.
“Great magician!” boomed one of the Karbies. “We humbly beseech you to unroot our feet! A fighting chance is all we ask!”
Antil did not even turn his head. “Go back to Glorak Harbour, is it? Don’t you suppose that the Dowager Poon—assuming her not to have altered in some miraculous way since yesterday—would be a sufficiently dangerous enemy to share a city with? And don’t you think that if she were your enemy there—” and here Antil nodded towards the broken cage from which Hex had just stepped “—that she could make even Glorak too small, too close for your comfort? Mind you, I advise nothing. I do not tell you what to do!” The wizard grew even more irritated as he uttered these two denials, and then broke off to follow the struggle anew.
A vampire had just dived suicidally close to the wounded giant who, with expert wrist-action, brought his blade inward and clipped off the vampire’s forearm. The move was unfortunate. It unbalanced the Karbie, and brought him full-length to the ground. While he was struggling to his knees, a vampire charged his partner, then ducked the full swing of his warding blow. The blade came round and, just as the fallen giant was rising, his neck received it, and his head jumped from his shoulders. With a curse, the survivor began sweeping his sword as widely as he could, but immediately a vampire sprang on his unguardable back, reached round with one hooked claw, and plucked through his jugular. Unstrung, the Karbie knelt, and was overswarmed.
Antil had remounted his globe, and was performing lazy zigzags on it. Idly, as it seemed, he told Hex: “No, I’m no meddler—certainly not. But I must say, speaking in a general way, that for you the bolder thing, the worthier thing, seems to be travel—to keep trying your fortune. In any case, whether you go north or south, if I were you I’d take the coast from here. These hills are nowhere to be walking.”
Hex looked at the supine giants who—one still feebly struggling—were now blanketed by the dozen smaller forms. All of these lay face-down, seeming to kiss various parts of their victims. Antil was already moving away across the slope.
“Antil!” cried Hex. The wizard, though he did not pause in his mincing footwork, looked inquiringly back as he danced away. “Honoured Antil! What is this rare thing you say I might do?”
The wizard merely stared back a moment longer, then faced north and began to skim away in good earnest. Hex, with a last glance at his erstwhile captors, began to run downslope, eastward, towards the sea.
In his flight, in fear, Bramt Hex truly knew his heaviness, for he became a man of two parts. His fear was fleet. His fear was an athlete, swifter than a wolf. His flesh was something else again. His flesh jerked and wobbled, hung on his speedy fear like an anchor, a grotesque overcoat encumbering the wolf. Divided man, a quick will in a lagging frame, he fled. The dew-wet grass, like skinny, sweaty fingers, clutched at his heels as he bounded downslope.
But at length, surprisingly, his flight began to cure him of his fear. As he have in sight of the blue horizon and then—crest after descending crest—brought the sand-dunes and the beach itself into view, he grew amazed, and then intoxicated, with his own endurance. Sweat oiled every inch of him and his shoulders ached, but his legs—long, city-rambling legs that they were—never faltered, and his lungs supplied him with a tough, untiring ease. His life had made him fleshy, but not weak. And his luck—surely it thrived with similar vitality! He was alive and bounding through sunlight. He was neither sprawled bloodless in the grass, nor rooted at the ankles in a plasm-bed. And so he charged towards the weed-tufted dunes, gulping down the sea’s tang, and his surge through the undulant grass might have been that of a great, silver shimfin at play, bursting through the crests of waves.
On the beach he found a stout driftwood club, and strode south. Thus, simple was it to shrug off an old world and march towards anew. For could such intercession as Antil’s be anything less than a destiny-signpost—one of those vital clues that the daring earn by an initial risking of the unknown?
He was obligated to accept it promptly, gratefully. He blushed to have balked at the wizard’s advice. He’d hardly even thanked Antil for saving him!
Throughout the morning, he walked, crossing cove after cove, rounding small headlands just as smoothly as he might follow some character from line to line through his exploits in an old saga. An offshore breeze woke. Out to sea, he admired the blown-back spume of the waves—like windbroken smoke from the torches of messengers, who rushed in from mid-ocean, collapsing as they shouted their indecipherable tidings from the Deeps. Along the sand, silver traceries of Glowfish skeletons marked the last high tide. Banded Scoops crash-dived for fish just offshore while Glides, with their more scythe like wings, cut precision courses overhead, scanning the surf-line.
But midday, and weariness, brought new anxiety. The great emptiness of his future began to tell on him. Compared to the void he marched into, the city on which he had turned his back clamoured after him, full of known places of shelter, known lines of work where a man might in safe anonymity amass steerage, and make a delayed but much more secure departure southwards. Surely he would leave Glorak—the Academy was too dangerous to return to, even if he demeaned himself to crawl back after his bold renunciation. But how quickly could even the dowager discover him elsewhere in the city?
His more heroic alternative, meanwhile, looked gruelling. Klapp, a mid-sized fishing village, lay another day’s walk south. There, his doublet could be converted to sufficient cash to buy a cloak, a sword, and a wallet of loaves and cheeses. But thereafter? Two days’ walk to Wibbles Jut, and thence another week to Ungullion. Moreover, since he must expect to arrive there nearly destitute, he would have to lodge in the city’s poorest quarter—in the Tree-slums.
The sun had started sinking to the hills, and the sea took on a ruddiness suggesting blood. Hex jumped at every unexpected slap of wave to rock. These beaches, he reminded himself, were fairly safe in this season, but stripe-gilled crushers with tongue-lengths exceeding eight feet had been sighted hereabouts. He began to look for a place to sleep.