by Michael Shea
Dazu-Zul, alas, was just outside the incubarium when the mountains ruptured—mounting its front steps, in fact, scant yards from the safety of the ghost-dimension.
The lava—monstrous and sudden—caught him in this time and space, and even senior thaumaturges, when their bodies are converted to ash, cease to live. And now, within his perduring gate, the vengeful dead raged and swarmed in a vast, anarchic zoo. Jammed with the bones of men dragged down alive, that bright-skied sea was now an endless swamp, an ectoplasmic hell and feeding-ground. And the only guarantee for those who swam here was the prior claim of their particular dead. Hex’s own, in a vague-shaped, faceless line, wound tauntingly towards his inner eye—even as the newly landed army wound towards them still.
“This is remarkable,” Stilth said. “Titanoplods.”
Clearly now, all varnished silver by the sun’s approach, the army’s polished weaponry detailed their quick-time march. The bigger shapes within their line were titanoplods, and big saddle-packs could be seen to bulge from the beasts’ sides. Some smoke went with the line, and at length the three could see that censer-bearers flanked it and dispensed a saffron fog that uncannily hugged the slopes despite the morning breeze. Skirmishers, both mounted and foot, could also be seen scouting in advance. The watchers viewed a miniaturized drama: six like-dad human jots—a tax squad—flushed, cornered, and exterminated with arrows and—finally—axes, in a shallow gully. It was, in its conciseness, the absence of discernible waste-motion, a chillingly workmanlike performance. The line, free of the time-consuming ploys of self-effacement, set a blistering but effortless-looking pace. Soon—since it still came in their direction—they began to hear it. A frail, bright clatter of steel and lacquered shields reached them. A tiny worm of flute music also began to twist towards them, and a minute clash of cymbals. A decorous and pompous march began to piece itself together through the brightening air—just such state music as precedes a royal progress. Another tax squad was flushed and dispatched. Stilth’s expression had grown a touch dreamy.
“My friends, if you find no particular need for hurry, let’s wait a bit.”
Hex laughed despite himself. “I must confess, I itch to be down and doing! It seems I can hardly wait to start my swim through the lovely, writhing muck you’ve described to us! But wait for what, then?”
“Am I going blind? Don’t they appear to be headed this way?”
“They’re hours off! Who could say?”
“I think we’ll wait. We may get lucky, for this shaft is not unfamed. And where the great precede, they widen the gate.”
Both Hex and Sarf lounged back more comfortably, glad to accept the odd calm that the old man’s voice worked on them. Not that he seemed in error, for that force (they now could distinguish the slingers, the peltasts, the ranks of heavy-armed with their leaf-shaped spearheads and round shields) was with a dreamlike tenacity persisting—through the roll and pitch of the terrain—in their direction. What was strange was that he calmed them with the belief that these at least five thousand skilful killers were headed for the very spot they sat on. Hex smiled at this thought.
“You don’t fear they’ll turn out to be folk we should rather escape than wait for?”
“What need harm us—so grand and well-mounted an expedition as that? That smoke’s a spell-ward that costs thousands of lictors an ounce. Look at the gear they’re bringing. Wherever they go down, they’re going to open things up and set their neighbourhood astir. We can risk waiting to find out how.”
The sun appeared, and for a while made a gold-scaled dragon of the supple, armoured line. The line had a distinct head: a quincunx of titanotheres. By the time the sun was an hour high the beasts were near enough for the centremost’s superior age and size to be seen, as well as the richness of the brocades in the canopied pagoda it bore. Two men were throned beneath the canopy. All five beasts were helmeted and greaved and belly-armoured for battle, and the four that surrounded the chief one bore cranes and ballistae on their swaying backs. Hypnotically, they did not cease—through all the ground’s deflections to approach the watchers. And when the moment came that the latter found themselves rising to salute this giant vanguard as it mounted to the vale, Hex and Sari exchanged a marvelling look. But it was Hex who was to be the more amazed—for he now discerned that the smaller, plumper of the two men beneath the regal canopy was Arple Snolp.
Incredibly the magnate met his gaze, his eyes kindled and he shouted convivially down: “It’s the scholar! Good morning, young man! This is most surprising! You must never have found your way to Madam Poon’s—otherwise I don’t see how you could still be alive! You, ah, are still alive?” Snolp’s eyes had flickered thoughtfully towards the mouth of the pit beyond them.
“Oh yes, respected Snolp!” He felt absurdly flattered and grateful at this cordiality and recognition of a mall who sat so obviously at ease in the world’s dire scramble. “I reached her house, you see, even did business with her, but by blind luck escaped alive. And lest you fear that the incubarium back there leaks ghosts, we are assured by our knowledgeable guide, Stilth here, that Dazu-Zul’s outer gates are still intact.”
This suavely offered comfort seemed to infuriate Snolp’s seatmate—a far older man with a bony red nose. “Of course they are! Is he an incompetent, to let them decay? Do you take him for a fool?”
“No more,” declared Stilth, with a graceful bow, “than we could take the great Raddle of Ploys for a fool. We are honoured in this meeting, Mage. My friends, though well meaning, are imperfectly educated, and do not know great wizards when they meet them.”
Thoroughly mollified, the wizard waved off praise with a gruff chuckle, and Snolp seemed no less pleased. “That’s well said, sirrah Stilth. I have spared no expense in this expedition, least of all in the matter of wizardly expertise, you may be sure. Quartermaster! Our breakfast pavilion! Over there! Hogwand! Deploy our perimeter, and then have the chief pioneers and engineers attend me at table.”
Attendants swarmed. A capacious, pennanted canopy sprang from the stone and overspread a table groaning with gold service and surrounded by plush couches. Wonderingly, the pilgrims forked meat from smoking heaps of it, and guzzled wine as golden as the cups, and saw the dangerous waste that had so recently surrounded them transformed into a bustling, ordered camp, a place of safety.
Indeed, the transformation went further than this, for the whole prospect of a descent to Dazu-Zul’s incubarium was changed into an easier, sunnier thing than that which Stilth had so sombrely depicted to them. For one thing, Snolp’s terse directives, delivered between greedy mouthfuls, kept his engineers hopping to and from the pit-mouth, which soon seemed a much tamer portal, for three great cranes sprouted round its rim, and dangled basketfuls of workers into it who walled its shaft with ladderways and scaffolds, and conducted downwards great bundles of material for assembly half a mile below, before the gates of the ghost-keep. Meanwhile, Raddle was remodelling the travellers’ conception of the incubarium itself. To be sure, Stilth had not urged his differing view. With a smile of charming diffidence, seeming to foresee the storm he raised, he had only said: “You know, great Raddle, on our way here we heard the oddest rumour—that peerless Dazu-Zul actually perished in Kurl’s holocaust, and that his—”
“What?! A learned man like you, believing such tavern talk as that!?” The wizard’s kingly arch of nose and ancient cheeks were all patched and veined with the purple of burst veins. His eyes displayed a sublime disdain, so bright it half-seemed lunacy, at least to Hex. Fiercely he drained his cup, as if thus disposing of Stilth’s outrageous notion. “Have I not hunted here with him myself, on the high ghostly seas we both so loved? Ah, the song of the harpoon’s cable paying out, the grunts and gasps of the crew, the surge and splash of the barb-snagged prey! Did he live for anything else? Hal And would indeed have I lived otherwise, had I had choice? You no doubt know I have been… out of time. A black-luck sojourn in a lower world. But of course, down there—” the w
izard indicated the pit, where lamps now blazed on catwalks coiling down past sight, “—Daz himself has stood apart from time, and lives there still. Ah, how sweet return will be! Youngsters like you can’t know the clarity one’s finest years retain down through the longest lives! I can tell you, in perfect truth, that with all the centuries of rare balms I have snuffed, the hot stench of the rendering vats remains for me a cosmic landmark, a plane of consciousness apart from humdrum reality!”
Already calm—yea, mellow and exuberant—the wizard settled with that Bore’s address, that quick pleasure in his theme which, three phrases into it, forgets all other souls, and is past hearing answers to its flow. With easy, laughing strokes, he drew a world of wild intoxication. Stilth had made the pilgrims aware that the bigger necroplasms were widely hunted by wizards for the raw necromantic power they contained. Ghost-mass depended on moral and mental force; great murderers figured large among the murdered. Since geniuses of conquest, wizards of the sword, were mankind’s most abundant crop of talent, Dazu-Zul’s lake of the slain had always teemed with slow, remorseless leviathans of slaughter—so fat with other lives they could fuel a million spells for the magi who speared them and cooked them down to ichor. These ichors were the very stuff of man-compelling spells, for if ghosts were anything, they were the interface of sentience with world. The plucked nerve, jangled ear, and oft-sleighted eye of a soul—this was the true ghost substance. The echoing record of a still-vivid, unconsummated life. With such matter, armies of the living could be driven to the wielder’s slightest wish.
And, undeniably, Raddle could saga such sea-hunts as Dazu-Zul’s vaults had abounded in before the mountains spewed up an empire’s end. He could make the travellers see the brain-pierced giants that were—one instant—writhing gargoyles hideously distinct and—other instants—huge, convulsive dents in the sea, with no shape or colour, only voice.
But his talk’s fervour soon unsettled Hex. Too clearly, a subtle madness underlay it. The least gainsaying of the wizard’s vision brought this out in the angry fervour of his reiterations. Couldn’t Arple Snolp see this? Hex and Surf looked to Stilth, but the old man, eating steadily, gazed rapturously at his plate, leaving in doubt if it was Raddle’s story or the meal that enthralled him. As for Snolp, if the wizard’s monologue caused him anything, it seemed to be boredom at needlessly repeated facts, no doubt.
“Ho now!” the magnate cried. “Raddle’s ready for the dessert wine. Can’t you see that, boy?” The diversion worked. The wizard, who throughout had made bold with the wine, looked around with sudden interest for the treat.
“You know,” Snolp cried, thwacking Hex’s shoulder, “I am so glad that you’ve survived, and that I’ve run into you again! From the first, you’ve struck me as such a plucky jot of scum! And here you’ve survived Poon, proving it! She’s vanished, you know.”
“I am no jot of scum!” His voice, in his own ears, had an ineffably ludicrous sound—comically baffled. It sounded like the denial of a jot of something which was only undecided whether it was composed of scum, precisely, or of some other, equally inconsequential waste-material. Suddenly vivid came the memory of the big wave thrusting him straight up the face of the cliff, and the slight atom of awe he had been in that blind unanimity of brute material power. A moment passed, and then he saw the entire question was tertiary at the most. He laughed.
“Where did she vanish, exalted Snolp?”
“The most amusing mystery! You were Bramt Hex, yes? Amazing, what I can remember! Mystery, yes dear Hex! She went to a certain shameful property in Shoreditch—rightly rumoured to be her own—and vanished, with the building itself, quite suddenly one rainy afternoon last autumn! But of course you don’t want to discuss your insignificant affairs—you want to know what we’re doing here, and how you might benefit by it!”
“Exactly, oh most unspeakably inexpressible Hugeness! For you see, we’re going down into the incubarium, and I’m sure you’d make it easier if you took us along with you!”
Amazingly, to judge by his benign nod, Snolp heard no sneer in this. Suddenly Hex grasped why the magnate heard no madness in Raddle; he was deaf to the betraying dissonances of the mad because they chimed with his own serene self-exaltations. Thus easily, then, Hex had his wish—escorted entry to the incubarium. He had to ask himself just how happy this made him. The evident power of their hosts soothed the doubts these hints of lunacy raised. Could Snolp, so consummate in atrocity, mount any kind of fool’s errand?
The magnate, leaning back, was now expounding his mission: “The question, you see, which even the greatest—especially the greatest—must ask themselves is: ‘Where have I failed? Where have I fallen short?’ ” He paused so meaningly here that all three of his guests hastened to make protesting sounds which he contentedly gainsaid: “No, even I, I assure you, even I was forced to propound this question to myself. We all omit some form of accomplishment, and in my case—shall we proceed as we talk, friends? Hogwand! The basket!—and in my case, the answer was suddenly evident. I had omitted nothing in the way of exploiting the living, but I had done next to nothing by way of exploiting the dead.”
One of the cranes swung a basket to one side of the pit, and the five climbed in. They swung back over the bottomless, torch-freckled bore of the shaft, and smoothly sank into it. Raddle, as a man nearing home, sighed happily and, having brought the bottle of dessert wine, took a lusty draught.
“So consider my joy,” Snolp was saying, “when I learned that by doing the latter, I could wring even further profit from the living! And I mean cities-ful of the living. For you can swindle a city, or sack it with mercenaries, or delude it into forming an army for your uses—but to compel and enslave it, each man, woman, and child of it, into utter, unanimous obedience to your purpose? This is a whole new magnitude of power, potentiating rapine on a scale undreamed of!”
Ramp-and-ladder networks starred with fire slid all around them upward to a shrinking patch of sky. Snolp looked ruddier in this light, quite jovial and avuncular. Hex, who sat next to Raddle, could hear that the wizard was humming some sailor’s shanty under his breath, and could see—with some unease—the reflected torches, tiny squirmings in those deep-shadowed, drink-oiled eyes.
“It’s the particular energy, you see,” Snolp said, “which all these vengeful dead have—that baffled rage at interrupted life, that aching, ragged edge of mind, tom off by death, where every brutally discontinued lust, ambition, spite and tender urge throbs inextinguishably!”
“Are all the dead thus?” Stilth asked. There was a fatuous fascination in his manner which Hex felt sure was false.
“Oh no.” Snolp waved dismissively. “Many die fulfilled and they vanish somewhere that is not ascertainable, or so I’m told. But you seem to miss my point—it’s these bitter ones, you see, whose ichor works such thralldom on the living. For they are human longing in its essence, and nimble nightmare at its most metamorphic. They can instil a host with any obsession you choose for them, and make them inexorable as zombies in the execution of it.”
“They’re a heady treat, by the One Black Crack!” Raddle shouted this, then drained his bottle and tossed it from the gondola. “Daz and I used to drink it boiling hot from the rendering kettles—a boyish prank, bravado you know… foolish of course but, damn me, those were the halcyon times!” From far below, there came a tiny smashing noise, and a minute curse. They passed a tunnel mouth in the shaft’s wall, and saw men with sarissas stabbing at some frenzied, spiderlike thing inside it. “Ah, those hallucinations, those alien urges! What sport!” Raddle’s voice dwindled to a less expansive note—perhaps he had bethought himself of his age. “I hope, Snolp, that your engineers have fully met my specifications. I’m going to go over her thoroughly. I don’t want Daz, after all this time, to see me steering anything second-rate, or makeshift!”
“How could you think it!” Snolp’s plushy tone of courteous blandness was a little threadbare—his dislike of being interrupted peeped thro
ugh. For an instant the two partners shared a look of politely mutual detestation.
“At any rate,” Snolp told his guests, “I’m sure you’ll see the power of these essences if you just consider your own diverse attachments to the world, the poignancy and hopeless disorder of them, and then imagine death’s blade lopping them off all unresolved. The resultant psychic amputation will cling to any living mind it touches. I don’t know why you have come here—it is a matter without the slightest significance, of course—but I have come to take at least a million gallons of Power’s purest nectar from Dazu-Zul’s deep hive. Ah! Now you can see her, gentlemen—the Necronaut!”
They sank into a great vault hewn raggedly from the lava. It was big enough to have contained the Glorak Academy’s main hall thrice over. What it did contain was a tall-masted, portly ship, now all but assembled by swarms of engineers on the scaffolding encaging it. Its keel sat on rollers, and its proud, curved prow was aimed at a vast door of polished bronze. As they approached the floor the pilgrims saw that some of what they had taken for masts were wooden arms supporting scoop-nets or, alternately, swatters of woven wire. Big ballistae of a curious make were mounted on the foredeck, and the sails were black and saggy like sheets of soft tar.
“Esteemed Snolp—” Stilth bowed. “I’ll bid my friends good-bye—I’m not contracted to go with them.” Distractedly Snolp waved them off as he climbed out after Raddle, who already was striding towards the scaffolding. Stilth led his friends aside, where they found seats on the ground out of the way, and watched the work. Stilth said nothing, but sat serenely full of unspoken truths. At first the pilgrims resisted questioning him, as he so plainly knew they longed to do. Then Sarf tried chummy nonchalance.