by Michael Shea
Again Stilth fluted. The stubby-pipe—pleasingly coarse, flatulent in a friendly, low-comic way—rendered a jolly little jump-up very much in the southern mode. For an instant, Hex closed his eyes, and thought he might be in a Glorak tavern, down by the Academy quarter. He might just be waking up from a light beer-doze, coming out of a dream and back home to his vinous, lazy, loudly merry schoolmates, surrounding him in full carouse. The truth he reopened his eyes on, the wide, sighing vista of wave-lathered stone and darkening lavaseams, took on an edge of sadness. What a satanically intricate universe it was, a world away from youth’s ardent, disordered rallyings under the sheltering banners of ideals.
The all-but-sunk sun tossed over the mountains’ fanged crests a terminal flood of gold that fell far out to sea. Gently it sizzled there on the whitecaps the rising onshore winds had kindled. All in mountain shadow now, the slopes of Kurl were quietly winking alive. Far upshore, halfway to vision’s limit, the lanterns of the harbour works sparked serially on, pricking out the lines of piers and docking floats. To these, dark ships nosed thick as gnats. The clustered craft seemed the more poignantly doomed in that, Kurl’s natural harbour having been buried, this one was a thing of wood and buoys, and clung by cables, an appendage to the fire-sealed shore.
“Stilth,” he asked. “What places lie along the Old Highway? Just what is inland of Kurl? Do you know?”
“Well, let’s see. First, as I recall, are the Woods of Amberdowndown. Wodeling is the major city there. A civil place, but glum. Nice enough I suppose if you don’t like sunshine. After that, the Sparg Flats. Detestable vegetable! And the highway, remember, is long unrepaired. Even when I last passed there—is it thirty years already?—there was plenty of sparg to be hacked through right in the roadway. You’ve heard of sparg? ‘Mouthed bramble’? I hated the sucking of it worse than the stabbing of it, I’ll tell you! After that it gets hilly. The ground starts rising towards the Demonlace Mountains. How far inland are you going, anyway?”
Nonchalantly Hex picked up the wineskin—still full, though they had drained it all day. “To a place called Yana.” He drank, awaiting reaction. Hearing nothing, he looked up to see Stilth staring at him. His look was calm—a shade amazed at one focus, sardonic at the other, but unperturbed. Still his silence, Hex decided, showed he was impressed. Gradually, the old man smiled.
“Perhaps, oh excellent Bramt Hex, your information is confused. You seem to think that Yana lies along the Old Highway.”
“It doesn’t? You’ve heard of it? It exists?”
Sarf almost laughed with Stilth, but he craved the same answers. Stilth bowed slightly: “I’ve heard of it. I presume it exists. It does not lie on the Great Highway.”
“We heard it lay beyond Kurl, inland…”
“It does lie beyond Kurl, oh yes. But its portal is in Kurl. Deep in Kurl.”
There was a long silence. Sarf touched the old man’s shoulder. A strange gesture, Hex thought, in that tight-tempered, inward man.
“What do you know, Stilth? Is it real? Is endless life obtained there? Not some wizardly bondage, but endless life with freedom?”
A kind of crazed tenderness almost aligned the centrifugal planets of Stilth’s eyes. “I’ve never gone through the portal, Sarf Immlé. I can say nothing for or against your wish to do so. That gamble must be yours. Some few things about getting there I do know.”
“Will you help us get there?” Hex hadn’t weighed the question, though he was suspicious of the man. Slowly the old man nodded his head, turning his flute round and round in his fingers.
“I don’t know. Primarily, I don’t know that we’ll get that far alive. This wouldn’t be worth anything as a pilgrimage for me if there weren’t always a real risk, you sec. And the portal lies quite deep in the peak-wards reaches of the slopes. The added risk of such a long descent is something I’ll have to think about. I suppose”—here he sighed—“that I will direct you the way, whether or not I guide you myself.”
Full dark was very speedily on them—or perhaps it was just that the two friends were stunned. Kurl had been a nest of dangers they were to skirt—en route to other dangers, surely, but vague ones. Now, all they had heard of Kurl—had gladly glimpsed at one remove, as not their problem—loomed dead ahead, their own next step. The now-black slopes were thickly constellated by the smutty orange firebaskets of Tax stations, and slim chains of torches that marked established pathways over the glittery steeps. Stilth rose, nudged to its feet the azle, which lay snoring in the grass. Cinching the saddle, he said over his shoulder: “Look for small lights moving—just glimmers, some of them—hooded lanterns, globes of foxfire, the like.”
“Yes,” Sarf said. “Everywhere. Full-size torches too, groups of half a dozen here and there.”
“Those are the Squads, and a few licensed fools. Though the Squads sneak offtrail too without lights. Once the moon’s up only the most reckless, or powerful, will use any lights at all. There are far too many things, right out on the surface, which delight to be informed of human presence. So. Are you ready, gentlemen? A single caution. Do only what I tell you. There may be occasions when flight will strongly recommend itself to you, and yet not in fact be called for. Indulge an old man then”—a smiling bow here—“and heed him strictly.”
They skidded softly down the loamy bluffs that terminated the hills. Shortly, they were marching across the skirt of that starry volcanic mantle. Their steps grew audible, made a faint, frosty crunch on the ancient slag, the lava, a bizarre, contorted enemy. Its largest quietest paths were milky threads of flatness that the eye could follow a mile off in starlight alone. The web-fine skulkers’ paths, ducking through glens and shadowed seams, threatened differently: their less-trod stone snagged and gnawed at bootsoles, making Hex and Sarf stumble repeatedly. However, the azle—for Stilth sat so nonchalantly it seemed the beast steered—went amblingly, easily slantwise upslope, and used both kinds of track with apparent indifference. It snaked them through echoing dells (from one of which a shattered belltower jutted, a rusty chain ladder like a dead tongue hanging from its rain-smooth sill)—only to lead them next most blatantly across a star-washed knoll, with torches flanking their almost polished path. The pair found too that easily though the azle ambled, it set a pace that taxed even their trail-hard legs. On one of these broader tracks, four fleet shadows crossed their path, the last of these nine feet tall, and dragging the lax body of a man briskly by his ankles. The slack head jarred across the pavement, the group plunged down into the off-road dark. The pair, irrepressibly, had stopped and drawn, while the azle sauntered unfalteringly ahead.
“Come, gentlemen,” Stilth turned to admonish, not reining up. “If need be, hold Hamandra’s tail, but in any case keep pace. We will need to work shifts, deceptions… Surely you appreciate that these call for unity, for orchestrated behaviour?”
Stung, the pair kept up.
Now, entryways to the depths more thickly featured the slopes: circular towers umbrellaed with ancient lead shingles; the broken crown of a gargoyled campanile, its dial runed with a forgotten measure of time; the jutting corner of a buried mansion’s roof, a rain-scoured jawbone toothed with the broken stumps of balustrades. And, along with this thickening city-jut, there were more frequent shaft-mouths too: square-cut into the epoch-ending stone, timbered or lintelled with masonry. Some of these port ailed gentle inclines down into the city, and some framed pits, with hitching posts for ladders and lines anchored near their lips.
“Listen,” Stilth murmured. “Both of you: keep one hand on Hamandra’s flank. Don’t pause. Grin as broadly as possible. Do not cease to grin at their eyes, and say nothing.”
A torchlight approached their path, coming out of a confluent defile ahead. The pair touched the azle at either haunch, and grinned. The torchbearer turned and bore down on them, followed by four other men. All had torches, steel gauntlets, knouts, and swords. But oddly, these bravos—hungrily alert to them at the first sighting—began to slow, with a clu
msy piling-up effect, while their leader addressed the trio in a vindictive boom that dwindled almost to a whine as the azle bore the trespassers steadily forth:
“Travelling without a squad, are you… eh?”
“Yesss! Yesss!” Hex, not turning, knew it was Stilth who spoke, but the voice now spidered along his spine. It was a facsimile, a lizard-dry voice as creaky and clean as a decade-buried bone. “Greeetingz, Sssweeet fellow humanzss. Come, give us your handszz, Sirzzz!” During this statement Hex thought he saw Stilth glowing with a faint yellow light and more—thought he saw the same glow on his own insanely rictused cheeks. The lead squadman, hearing this greeting through, screamed, flung his torch away, turned and fled. He would have overrun those behind him had they not fled even swifter than he.
The trio proceeded, the old man lax as before, and definitely not aglow. “What did you do?” Sarf asked.
“There is a denizen of these parts,” Stilth said, geeing Hamandra to a slightly brisker saunter, “called the Quash. It tends to travel in threes. Its human disguise is remarkably good, though marked by certain well known deficiencies.”
“The Quash? What is the Quash?”
“Give the name a rest,” snapped the old man, glancing nervously round, “lest it bring the thing itself.”
They crossed another knoll. Now they saw a good two miles of jewelled lava plunged to the sea behind them. Far upland ahead of them the dark peaks—shadows sharply bitten from the clustered stars—appeared no nearer. Softly Hex said aloud—not to tell but to hear the truth himself—“We cross the field of a million-million men’s dreams of greatness. Does anyone ever retrieve anything, and escape with it alive?”
“Oh yes! A tidy few!” Stilth grinned. “And I might say that not very many of them come here looking for Yana. I suppose it is not widely known.”
“Is it real?”
“I’ve already told you what I’m going to. I can give you one other bit of news. The portal you must seek, though deep, is at least not much ambuscaded—for so few willingly go there. Of course, that’s a mixed consolation.”
“I suppose it’s right that the portal should be here,” Hex offered. “Where better than here might eternal scholarship commence? Where else does so much lie—”
Into the gully they now followed a bigger gully debouched just ahead, and from this came—suddenly audible as it rounded some turning—a horrible sound, a noise both complex and at the same time hideously, dearly readable: a multi-voiced chorus of human agony, groans and gasps of effort. Behind this there approached a massive, grinding noise, the single tread of some following colossus. It was something big, driving a sweating chorus of human captives.
And there they came—first, the struggling crew in bonds. Towering after them, a huge beaked head, fifteen feet in the air, its eyes red globes of flame. Hex’s feet were triggered, as if they alone were conscious, and capable of saving the rest of his stupefied body. He sprinted for a shaftmouth just below the path and to his right—its deep-set frame could shadow him from the monster’s gaze. Just as he leapt for it, he glimpsed behind him the clustered victims squirming under the beast’s outstretched claw, heard Stilth’s startled, preventive shout, and tripped—all three at once. His leap was now a dive. Airborne, helpless, he flew towards the pit within the portal. Only a stone anchoring post stood at the pit’s lip, and desperately he hugged that in midair. His shoulder, with his full mass’s thrust behind it, felt the stone solidity even as—struck quirkishly awry—the post snapped clean off its base. Insanely, he still hugged the post as they pitched down into the perfect dark. Teeth clenched, clutching his anchor, he writhed and fought to pull his body up and back off of gravity’s sticky pull, to hang back from the blotting smash below.
But the impact—though it smacked his lungs flat-empty like a bellows—was soft. He had one pain—in his ribs, from the blunt end of the post, which was now sunk full length into the pillowy mass he sprawled on. But even as he realized he was safe, the springy substrate heaved, the slippery shoots that furred it squirmed violently under his cheek and palms, and a stinking syrup welled out from around the newly rooted stone. With an explosive twist of loathing, he scrambled and rolled till the grateful shock of clean stone bruised his tumbling body. On all fours he scuttled from a thrashing bigness till a rough wall stopped him. There he crouched, straining his eyes.
At first the thing’s struggle was noise only—a flabby smacking, a chitinous rattle. But above it, a conic section of starlight screwed down through the entry-shaft’s throat, and after a moment this shed some faint form on the tormented being. A huge bulb, hirsute, tapered, at whose tip a clutch of polished, jointed legs rattled in a spastic bouquet. Sword out, Hex backed along the wall. The thing heaved towards him. Hex scuttled faster. The hand that felt his way thrust into emptiness—a tall vent of a natural fissure in the lava. A few strides down its ribbed length a yellow light glowed that limned its twists. The thing, though nearer, lay now in another spastic pause. Hex hesitated. It heaved nearer, and he slipped into the fissure.
The light came from a hallway. He stepped wonderingly down on to its floor. This, though pocked and scorched, was all arabesques of mosaically laid bricks. He moved towards the light source, noting that, the walls being hewn lava, and the paving’s pattern irregular, this was probably a tunnel across what had been an open space, some plaza, or great hall’s floor.
Rounding the next curve, he saw this confirmed. The light source was a wide, open space ringed with torches. It sprawled one short flight of marble steps below Hex, who cowered to see two ranks of giants flanking these steps, facing the plaza beyond. No. They were statues, theriomorphic sentinels of stone. He crept up behind the nearest, from its shadow peeked down and out across the rotunda, whose rough-hewn walls were apertured by rude tunnels all around their circuit. Probably, he was on the higher of what had been a series of broad squares, only the lower of which was widely excavated. He scuttled down to the next statue’s shade, then the next’s. Now he could see that the ragged-rimmed pavement’s containing wall presented, among the tunnel mouths, one proper door, or gate, rather: two majestic valves of bronze, their hinges huge, as big as wine-tuns. To three times a man’s stature they rose, blushing bright gold when the torches stirred in the black, subterranean breeze. The brazen torchsockets that ringed the plaza were of this portal’s make, for two larger versions supported huge flambeaux that flanked the door. Clearly, it was the door’s keeper who maintained this nexus of light, where so many ways converged.
A multiple tread sounded from one of the tunnel mouths. Hex, sneaking between statues, plunged and locked the next one with his hasty crouch behind it. The big archaeolith heartstoppingly teetered on its base, then stilled. A man in billowy robes emerged from a shaft across the rotunda from the door. Out he marched, followed by three pairs of men, each of which carried a covered litter between them. The man in the lead, in his awkward stride to the great doors, stumbled twice. He seemed to have trouble with his robe as he led the others across the burnt flagstones. At the door, his worried briskness contrasted with a lagging manner in the litter bearers behind him. When they were stationed by the door he turned to them with shooing gestures: “Let’s be at it then! Come on!” The voice was frail and cross, fragmenting against the torchdecked, blackmouthed walls. With ostentatious delay, yawnings and stretchings, the bearers set down the three litters, and undid the bolts which fastened the cabs of these conveyances to their bases. They lifted the cabs off, reducing the vehicles to three stretchers, each enthroning a single occupant, slouched in a chair. Two of these were nubile girls, the third, a pubescent boy. All were frozen, nude, a green neckscarf the only garment of each.
While the bearers were uncovering their charges, shambling about, the robed man stood aside, his nose pressed close to a parchment page, his lips visibly rehearsing the shapes of words.
“Shall we call for your understudy, Understudy?” The question, from one of the bearers, raised a snicker from the rest.
The understudy glared back and shook his fist at them, crumpling his page with the gesture. He turned and marched to the bronze door, anxiously smoothing the parchment against his hip. He plied the knocker three times and at the first crash Hex gave a jump, distant though he was.
The understudy stepped back and one of the great valves swung mutely forward a short way. From behind it a lithe, white ankle followed a tasselled blue slipper into view. Next to emerge, at somewhat less than a man’s height, was a white head, a hairless bulb. It was inset with eyes like great sentimental opals, and underslung by a shrunken little chin and jaw the size and texture of :t large prune. Then the little figure stepped fully out. Slender, whitely nude, he wore besides the slippers only a scarlet breechclout. His crooked jaw drooped with astonishment, and his seamy lips framed a musical exclamation: “Oh! Oh! Oh! Who, then, are these? What visitors these, at the Ghuls’ gates? Whoever might they be, these callers at the gates of the Ghuls, which are also the doors of the Archives of Tam where, humbly entrenched, the mild and goodly Ghuls have continued these three hundred and seventy-one years?” The egg-skulled Ghul’s voice was tender, liturgical. He spoke as if to a middle distance, and not to his callers at all. The understudy, drawing a deep breath, held his page close to his nose and began to read loudly: “Oh oh it is we we who implore and abjure. Your sufferance for our plea oh please hear our simple. Request. Namely that you receive these whom we have brought these fair ones here. As it happens by a stroke of luck precisely—Oh, I’m sorry! That’s the next one…”
But the slippered Ghul seemed still not to see the man, and exclaimed smoothly: “Are fair ones mentioned? Fair ones? Could it be that you have brought, that you have with you, dear visitors, such ones as we delight in, such ones as we adore?”
“As it happens by a stroke of luck precisely such as you say—sit here yes fair ones sit here on whom sits all loveliness behold!” The understudy swept his arm at the last word. One of the men by each litter, with a tug, slipped the knot of its occupant’s green neckscarf. Only one of the three, a girl, was faced in a way that presented the throat to Hex’s view. A red but oddly clean gash crossed its width: a second mouth, slackly open, as if shocked, while the face above it, fine-featured, merely slept.