In Yana, the Touch of Undying

by Michael Shea

  “I said it yesterday, and today I feel even surer, Sarf,” he announced. “Banniple once had an instructor comment on this map, and his impression—I think—was that Yana actually lay well south of Kurl, and it was only because of the Borborg you had to go through Kurl at all.”

  “What help is that? I don’t want to go through Kurl either, but I’ll do it sooner than go path-hunting in that swamp.”

  “ ‘Unlovely truth, hence hag!’ as the poet said. We should go, I guess? It looks like we’ll be there by dark.”

  They broke up and buried their exiguous fire in the event incensed rustics pursued them. In moments they were on the road, a foot-track, really, though well worn for so sparsely populated a region. The breeze now blew offshore, and brought them, as if it had for weeks, the stench of the great Borborg Marsh, which lay just inland of this range of hills, and stretched unbroken a hundred leagues both north and south. Kurl was one of the region’s few portals of easy penetration inland. The same volcanic holocaust that had buried Kurl had bridged the Borborg. The mountains had shed their molten stone to both sides, and while eastward it had sealed the great city a mile deep and sizzled into the ocean, to the west it had cauterized and paved miles of the bog. As if remembering that incendiary day, the rising sun now minutely pricked out a glassy dazzle from those dark igneous slopes.

  “Think of the stench and steam!” Hex said. “I mean when—”

  “Wait! Stop! You two, there!”

  They turned, grasping their swordhilts. They saw a gaunt, grey man gee-ing his mount—a crop-eared azle—towards them. Flight seemed pointless. They saw no weapons on him, nor could they outrun the azle if he lashed it on. He ambled on, though, and they watched him come. His profuse silver muttonchops revealed only the hedged-in essentials of a face: bright black-eyes—not quite in phase—which crooked brows gave a sharp-peaked look. These lurked close to a high-ridged, drooping nose that overhung a narrow mouth.

  “You, my friend,” he told Hex as he came up, “have my cap on your head. It’s been mine these hundred years and more, and is mine now. You’ll have to give it back to me.”

  It was disorienting to return the stranger’s strabismal gaze. When Hex focused on one eye, the face looked mordantly amused; but shifting focus, he found it more dazed and bilious, a vindictive codger’s. His voice fit neither of these faces, being cool and easy, and firm as a younger man’s. As soon as the man had got near, Hex had sensed power in him, knowledge in abeyance. He bowed.

  “Sir, I won’t deny this could be yours, for, frankly, I found it. But can I be sure it’s yours?” With a flourish he doffed and examined it. In shade and wear it matched with the worn leather of the man’s jerkin and breeches. “Be so good as to describe where you left it last.” Hex felt his conclusion ring a little lame. The man smiled affably.

  “I’m sorry. I was professionally engaged, and my oaths forbid discussion of my work. You see, you must simply believe me. The cap is no mere adornment. It is my witguard. I must pass through Kurl soon. It is essential that I be at my very sharpest if I am to survive. Kindly return me my property.”

  Looking to his friend, Hex could see that Sarf—to whom he’d detailed the cap’s odd provenance—had registered a sequence of doubts much like his own. The man had practically described himself as a possible guide through Kurl, and he must, by the ploy of the cap, have been following them for at least three days. This close fit of his to their aims smelled of a trap. Hex struggled to remember if they had told Kagag Hounderpound that they were going to or through Kurl. He and Sarf had long discussed the only real danger from Hounderpound: human agents, enlisted for shorework as they had been. Hex bowed once more.

  “Your honesty is plainly printed in your face, sir, and I’ll ask no further text to prove you true. Are you perhaps a farmer, sir?” Never thinking that he was, Hex waited. Receiving the hat, the stranger shook his head.

  “No, friend. My name is Stilth. I’m a traveller. Do you know a curious thing? I have an idea about the two of you. Not far back, I met a giant whose nodding acquaintance I am, one Kagag Hounderpound. Spoke to him a bit—he offshore, I on, of course. A bad fellow, but I’ll trade amenities with anyone on civil terms.” He donned the cap. It completed him, sat like a crowning insolence atop his now sarcastic hatchet face. “Kagag was gnashing his teeth, in a fury. A gale was blowing and it seemed to suit his mood. The breaking waves leapt round him, like a hunting-pack entreating the master to loose them.” His voice trailed off. His face, senile again, wore a look of pleasant, fuddled reminiscence.

  The pilgrims traded a second look, granting there was some reassurance in Stilth himself bringing up the titan.

  “You didn’t finish, good Stilth,” Sarf prompted. “I, by the way, am Sarf Immlé. This is Bramt Hex. What did the giant say?”

  “Why just so, then! You’re the two he spoke of! He said you’d broken a contract, and owed him your lives. Now there’s a nasty matter. Neither of you should go sailing for a while. In fact, I would think twice about taking a swim.”

  “Well, neither of us craves a swim, nor will we, I think, for quite some time.”

  They had all eased into a northward stroll now. The pilgrims wanted Stilth to say more, but said nothing of it. The old man gee-d in the azle to their pace, and rode wordless and calm, occasionally snuffing the early air with appreciation, seemingly unperturbed by the whiffs of swamp.

  At last Sarf prompted: “You said you are passing through Kurl. Where are you headed beyond it?”

  “Nowhere at all. I am going to the head of the Old Highway, and from there, I am returning south. I’m not going to Kurl for its sake, you see. I go to the Old Highway and home again—it’s a penance I perform every third lustrum. I offended a certain lady of considerable powers, you see. I go through Kurl only because the Old Highway begins in the mountains above it.”

  “What an interesting life you must lead,” Hex cried convivially. “What is it you do on your travels?”

  “Come, gentlemen,” Stilth said promptly. “You shouldn’t pry. Am I asking you endless questions about yourselves?”

  After this, they asked him only about Kurl, wherein too they could somewhat test him, having Banniple’s stories to compare his to. On this topic he was genially prolix. His tale rang more than true—it dauntingly fleshed out the gentle Erkishite’s sketch of the dangers there. Meanwhile something in the way Stilth spoke, his occasional laugh as he laid out his facts, fed the pair’s trust of the man. At length he paused to give them his azle’s bridle while he went into the high grass to relieve himself. The friends found that a conference needed little time.

  “An agent of Hounderpound wouldn’t say that anything was none of our business,” Sarf pointed out. “More likely he’d have something plausible cooked up.”

  When Stilth resumed his mount, he resumed his story. The Dynasties of Kurl, throughout the millennium of their naval empire, had exercised a broadly tolerant rule over their client states and cities, while showing a remarkably consistent preoccupation with the rarest fruits of culture. The inevitable harvest of artworks and libraries that accompanies the military establishment of empire was but a nucleus which all the dynasts, through the centuries when their keels and coinage were the lifeblood of a fourth the known world, augumented in their turn. And, inevitably, a tolerant capital which is the repository of such materials becomes the cynosure of the greatest talents throughout its territories. And most who came there to study stayed to enrich the mountain-flanked mecca’s stores.

  Kurl had no decline; she died a sudden death. One summer a scholarly coalition from one of her academies sank a new pit high in the hills of what was sometimes called the City of Galleries. This was the foundation for the ill-starred Last Incubarium. It was not meant to be the last, certainly—merely the latest of a number of ectoplasmic libraries where thaumaturges might—at their own risk, of course—study incarcerated specimens of almost any species in the vast ghost-taxonomy still known in those days. Kurl’
s architects had for centuries extended new building underground as well as overground. The mountains at Kurl’s back, which cradled her against the sea, wore as many of the capital’s splendid structures within their bowels as upon their flanks. The pit for the Last Incubarium sank only one level farther towards the mountain’s roots, but struck a living nerve, a vein of lava.

  The Kurl Range fractured through a mile of its length. The empire-ending avalanche of magma took only a day to reach the sea, searing away all life and structure on the highest levels of the megalopolis, but cooling so quickly it sealed in deep, undamaged layers of the city. When that vast gout of chthonic vomitus reached the sea—when the surf, along a seventeen-mile front, froze the skirts of the boiling rock—the Museums of Kurl, the City of Galleries, began their new era as the Mines of Kurl.

  The survivors organized to repossess their capital, but the factionalisms between governmental agencies flared into life amidst these desperate remnants. Emigration, civic violence, and foreign raids decimated these survivors. The vestigial population quickly developed a rudimentary, parasitic society which lived by selling the licence to plunder the mother-city’s immense corpse—which men of all nations flocked to do—as well as by preying on those who refused to pay their extortionate fees, and sought to plunder Kurl by stealth.

  These bandit heirs of Kurl’s greatness, organized into the Tax Squads, were one of the major dangers of the place. They made the right to spelunk, or “mine”, so expensive as practically to compel even the affluent to become “sneaks”. Yet those who did pay, should they bring up anything of unusual value, were as sure to be killed and robbed by the Tax Squads as was any sneak who got caught.

  That the Squads should do little direct spelunking themselves, and prefer to fish in this way for the buried goods with the lives of foreigners, ought to give pause to the delvers’ greed, but the place so thronged with venturers, licensed and sneak, that no one, Stilth observed, seemed to give it much thought. Indeed, the Squads knew some fragments of the buried maze, which was to say more than most save thaumaturges, and they knew just enough to grasp that the thronging predators in those catacombs—their restless movement and explosive, bloody interactions—rendered impossible any trustworthy map of dangers down below.

  Deep in the galleries, vaults, shafts, and chambers of that stupendous inhumation a host of entities had taken up residence. These included men, as many of the temples and libraries still offered ideological centres around which troglodyte cultists and enthusiasts clustered, guarding their deep shrines from neighbours, human and otherwise. Mindless hungry things abounded: Torks, Albino crushers, shaggy Spidurbbs. And also hungry things with excellent minds, among them Ghuls and Broad-jawed vampires (far more intelligent than their chinless hill-cousins). As if this did not suffice, there were yet other denizens, the ones, perhaps, most in harmony with the mosaic tiles and sculpted symmetries of the sunken hive. These were loosely called “animate artifacts”, entities that were immortally, or at least indefinitely, about the business for which their long-dead creators had fashioned them.

  “I can hope,” Stilth said by way of conclusion, “that you, my friends, aren’t would-be miners. You have no gear for spelunking, nor conveyance for anything you might bring up. Put my mind at ease, and tell me you are not.”

  “We’re not,” Sarf said. “We’re passing through to the Old Highway, for I take it that’s the inland road from the pass above Kurl?”

  Stilth, incongruously with his stated concern, had plucked a little clay flute from his belt and was extorting a nimble, pleasing little squawk from it. He nodded, finishing the air before he answered: “I rejoice. Merely crossing the slopes is extremely dangerous, but nothing to what you face below. And of course, on the surface you’ll have my guidance, and therefore an excellent chance of survival.”

  “You are very generous,” Hex said. Stilth shrugged, fluting again. Then he stopped, as with inspiration.

  “Let’s have some wine and crumble. Find us a cushiony spot on that bluff. I’ll unpack the goods.”

  The pair lounged in the springy, milky grass, sweet-smelling past the swampstink’s erasure. The hilly coast lay by the sea like bathers’ limbs sprawled in careless sensuality. Thighs, torsos, jutting knees of this milky golden green, and the whole calm orgy of them tufted with the glossier greens of thickets, groves, and dales. Beyond this, looking much bigger now, was the bright tilted plain of the lavafield, above which fragmented images from Stilth’s account seemed almost still to hang like slow-dispersing mists.

  “He’s flatly challenging us to trust him, Sarf.”

  “He’s certainly let us know he won’t explain himself.”

  “So…”

  “So let’s ask bluntly why he’s helping us, see how his answer sounds, or evasion.”

  “And if it’s another evasion? What I don’t like is that it would be easy for a malefactor to know that no explanation’s more convincing than many.”

  Stilth, having hobbled his azle, set the wine and loaf on the grass, and sat with them. Speechless guzzling followed.

  The wine jumped in a glittery arc from the squeezed bag into their throats. Sighing mightily, Hex said: “Bless you, Stilth, for this refreshment! Why are you helping us? Why are you going to guide us? The questions aren’t courtesies—we have to know, you see. For you could—” Hex tried a suave, discounting smile “—be an agent of Hounderpound, and mean to lead us to harm, heh-heh.”

  Stilth, throughout the last of this, was wringing dry the wineskin into his bobbing throat. Smacking his lips, he dropped the deflated bottle on the grass.

  “How amiably insulting you are, Bramt Hex! It’s quite disarming, really, your flagrancy. You gentlemen did have a business agreement with that loathsome enormity. You, I believe, even killed for him! Yet you ask me—I, who’ve never lost a chance to do that monster secret harm—if I’m Hounderpound’s agent. Drink! I must toast your effrontery.” Hex caught the wineskin—now, somehow, fat and wobbly full—and dazedly drank.

  “Listen,” Stilth said as Sarf took his draught, “are you two disbelievers in coincidence? Far-travelled as you look to be, can you not have met with it? I will tell you one thing more on this matter, and then you may do as you like. Had you not half-undone your commission for Kagag, you would have been involved in a far more melancholy coincidence, for, assuming I had learned of your act, I would have seen you dead three days ago.”

  The old man’s asynchronous eyes gave two different inflections of mirth to this avowal—one foolish, the other carnivorously bright. Hex bowed ironic acknowledgement. Nothing had been proven, but in some way this threat of death stilled his distrust, and made its questionings academic.

  “I can only say, Stilth, that I’m glad of your aid—Sarf?—and that we are lucky to have a guide if all you say of Kurl is true.”

  19

  The Ghellim Visits the Ghul

  At sunset they sat on a deep-grassed hill at the lavaflow’s border, and gazed across Kurl. For almost twenty miles, broad slopes joined the sea with the mile-high mountain crests that rose perhaps four leagues inshore. Here was no Slimshur. Here was ragged-toothed rock whose shape recalled its once-liquid state. From between the fingers of the fractured peaks, it poured in gnarled currents, great ropy tendons of magma that fanned towards flatness near the shore, but whose upper reaches were seamed by deep rifts and glens and sulci. Now before the westering sun, the shadows of the peaks marched oceanward, miming the ancient disaster. Thus dimmed, the higher slopes began to show beacons and torchlight here and there, sketching a rather sparser bristle of structural detail than that the trio saw more nearly, down on the sun-flooded shore. Here, some of what they saw—parapets, minareted towers, broken polygonal steeples, all half-melted by millennia of rain—were clearly protrusions of Kurt’s buried architecture. Other forms—blocky huts and houses of weathered wood—were as plainly the stations of the Tax Squads. Stilth fluted a mournful little meander as they watched.

 
“Look,” said Sarf. “I can see someone going down.” Something crawled into a broken cupola, looking like an ant toiling its way into a fractured eggshell. Three more ants followed, linked at the waists by a just-visible, vanishingly-fine filament.

  “Poor fools,” Stilth paused to say.

  “For any particular reason, beyond spelunking at all?” Hex asked.

  “Well, first of course, they’ve paid the Squads, since they’re working in broad daylight. As I’ve indicated, to do this is simply to alert, formally, an added set of predators to your presence here. But secondly, more cogently, they’re fools for going down through any portal near the shore.”

  “Yet the protrusions, the structural adits, look much thicker there.”

  “Of course! The lava’s shallower there. The Kurlites built large, monumentally. A lot of those things stood intact against the lighter flux here. Whole neighbourhoods—street level and deeper—have been tunnelled clear here. These shallow mazes are—ah!—so thickly nuggeted with repositories, archivia still unexhumed, though hidden by mere inches of stone, and easy to crack for someone with tools and time enough. But just there—it’s the time, you see. Indwelling predators ambush these zones so thickly that you may rest assured: those miners you saw will be on street level in ten minutes, and in something’s jaws—or worse—in twenty. Upslope in the deeper tunnellings, many accesses go unwatched, if you know to find them. In short, spelunkers who mean to find something, and are determined to stay alive more than an hour, must use wise indirection, and prepare to spend days getting down and in.”