by Michael Shea
“Well, we’ll miss your company, Stilth, beyond that door. Because I think this pair could be more than a little crazed.”
Stilth grinned unpleasantly. “Miss my company, hmm? A little crazed?” He turned to look them over with an unsettling thoroughness, as if finally noting them for his mental record. Then he seemed to have, in quick succession, a nasty idea, and a humane second thought. “Listen, my estimable, dense friends. I flatter these ninnies to procure your passport, because they will make your entry easier. But once you’re in, I have just two words of advice: abandon ship. Hit the dip and start swimming. Because if the swarm that hits them gets thick enough fast enough, you’ll be sunk and torn to bits by its sheer weight before your own dead’s prior claim has time to work. Raddle is centuries past his prime, and doomed by an infatuation with his youth. No!” Here Hex had tried to add a question. “I won’t say more than this! Those waters are such as you will loathe to enter, but you must dive, or die there. So. Where will you meet? For I believe, if you attain Yana, you are returned, immortal, to your place of choice.”
“Glorak?” Hex asked his friend.
Sarf nodded. “There’s lots to work with, there.”
Hex briefly wondered what his friend meant by this. And then they watched the swarm of engineers, for plainly, Stilth meant to say nothing else. Already the crews were mainly busy with the scaffolding’s disassembly. Workmen, with their pulleyed baskets of pegs and spikes, melted down from the ship’s tall rigging. A huge, wheeled Thruster had just shed its own assemblers, and even now the titanoplods to push it were craned down—one after the other—being uncabled, and led to their engine. Once harnessed to its stern they shoved it so that it rumbled till its padded tip just touched the stern of the Necronaut. Now the staging fell away from the craft’s hull in tall, stilty sections, and they could see a seaman beckoning them to a ladder that dangled from the gunwale. As they rose, the pair spoke awkward good-byes that were not answered, only smiled at. They climbed aboard on to drum-tight decks, that rang with a perfect rigidity of construction. The crew—some in the rigging, most in the mizzen-deck ranged along the rail awaiting duty—rocked only slightly, so good were their sealegs, when the plods pushed the Thruster cautiously, snugly against the stern. Raddle marched pompously down a special gang-ladder from the bow, and up to the mighty, one-valved door of bronze. Though he gave his gait a priestly emphasis, eager haste showed through. He flourished a small hammer at the mighty valve, and shouted—impressively for lungs so old and drink-pickled:
“The dust of a grave required here to open thee, I now supply.
As all Kurl’s now a grave this, her glassy mantle, is its dust!”
Then he smote the lava underfoot with the hammer and, dislodging thus some igneous flakes, pinched up and flung these against the bright door’s lowest hinge. He retreated, and remounted the ladder. The immense gate swung outward with a tearing, sucking sound, like the unpeeling of an old, infection-crusted bandage. A wall of murky water, stable, though it shuddered and wrinkled softly, filled the brazen, rune-graved frame.
“It’s a window, you see, set into the floor of the incubarial lake,” Raddle enthused, rubbing his hands. “Well, come on there!” he roared at the Thruster’s drivers. “Do you want us to sit out here all day?” The old man bustled in joyful circles on the foredeck, somehow unstaggered by the ship’s forward surge on its rollers. From his girdle he plucked a little bone flask chased with silver, drank, and gazed longingly at that uncanny water-wall. Hex guessed the old wizard was alone in not sharing the drivers’ hesitation. The prospect seemed to touch everyone else on the ship, with awe and gloom. A faintly rotten-smelling cold breathed from it. It had a vague translucence, as if some vast, dim light shone beyond it, at an unguessable distance.
Their prow had almost touched it when Raddle shouted, “Hold! Just there!” He took another long pull from his flask, draining it, and then, with a whoop—as startling as a thunderclap in this moment of general awe—flung it at the water-wall. It struck, and was sucked straight into it. Raddle shouted a harsh, uncouth polysyllable, and made an out-flinging gesture with both arms. A spinning disc of glassy plasm formed in the air before him and smacked flatwise against the centre of the water-wall. It still spun, bulging against that upright flood, pushing a glassy, growing dome into it. “Forward slow, now!” Raddle cried, repeating that shooing gesture which, each time he made it, swelled the dome. The plods eased them forth. Their bowsprit entered the dome, then their foredeck, their mainmast.
Still wildly conjuring with his arms Raddle—crackling with delight and now facing sternward—wove the bubble round them.
“Now then—one mighty shove!” he shrieked. The ship lunged entirely through the doorframe, and with a great sweep of his arms the wizard sealed the bubble shut astern. In that instant the eerily suspended ship pitched violently through a quarter-turn to present its keel to the antechamber still barely visible behind them—or rather, beneath them. For what had been forward was now overhead and, as Hex and Sarf picked themselves up, the bubble snatched them all with smooth power in that direction.
Through the shuddery flash of the bubblewall, increasing light filtered as they rose. “Look! Ah, look!” the wizard cried triumphantly to Snolp who, rather slumping at his side, seemed not to share his joy. “That lovely mellow violet of the sky that Daz made! It shows through already!”
But the magnate plainly saw what all the others did—a carious brown-yellow light, a sickish glow.
“Is he now mad outright?” Sarf asked.
“I think so—see the waters?” As through a twisted pane they could now see the ghastly, sodden trash which the airbulge shouldered aside. Skulls and fragmentary bones danced, in a kind of reversed hail, against their wobbly envelope. The light increased.
“Hold tight!” Raddle bleated. They erupted into air, crashed down, rocked crazily. The breaking bubble fell to pieces all around and hatched a view of all-embracing murk. A sky of torn and dangling clouds bled muddy-yellow light upon an endless, muddy-yellow swamp. In one direction there were silt-bars overgrown with shapes the eye at first shrank from analysing. Open water stretched away to port. Dead ahead, halfway to vision’s limit, a colossal cadaver, or part of one, thrust stark ribs against the drizzly sky. Raddle’s delusion had shattered with the bubble. He stood gaping, irrevocably enlightened. Horror had weakened everyone’s knees except Snolp’s, whose plump face darkened with congestive wrath.
“Dazu-Zul alive! Alive you said!” he bellowed, sweeping an arm round at the scene. “You call this alive?!”
22
In Yana, the Touch of Undying
Oddly though, it was alive—most horribly. Their keel, scarcely moved by the slack, tarry sails, cut through a soup of soft concussions and twisting shoves. From the rail all eyed the main, wherein a host of presences stirred. No one of these had shape in more than blinks, and they teased the mind with a fleet, melting multitude of fanged and snouted things. The siltbars too were alive with mournful, anchored movement, char-limbed things that had been men writhed there, rooted at waist or knees, and strange shapes squirrelled amid their blackened arms. The stark-ribbed giant too—legless, and with just one wolfish lower jaw thrust up, a fanged tower where its head had been—was doubly alive. Numberless ghosts maggoted its hide, or wheeled restlessly in winged flocks from perch to perch on it. Moreover, with rising gorge Hex saw that—though dismembered, though half-mummied, hardly fleshed at all—the anchored demon actually breathed, the laboured bulge of its thorax—gaunt coffer of its ensorcelled life—disturbing the bloodfly swarm not at all.
Snolp, whipped to a fury Hex had never guessed was in him, lunged to seize Raddle’s throat. Scarcely thinking of it, Raddle made a warding gesture that flung the magnate through the air and tangled him high up in the rigging, while still the wizard’s rheumy eyes looked round in dismay.
The pilgrims watched this dumbshow only half attending, for the sheer spiritual mechanics of their situation crus
hed them with dread. A score and a half of mercenary soldiers, the red-handed Snolp—all entering here alive together. Stilth had made plain the rush that must ensue—not only the convergence of their own dead, whose aggregate must be legion, but any others drawn by the smell of life, for they were out of water, and free game. And yet, though the friends searched each other’s eyes, they could not find the desperate courage to jump.
The crew were mobbed together in such fierce, recriminating babble as men fall to when disaster strikes them. Some few looked up at Snolp’s howls to be helped down—and then these cried out, and made their fellows look, and all were staggered. Snolp’s entanglement was not what he himself still took it for; the rigging moved to weave him in. Ropes broke, raised frayed heads, and snaked to web his writhing plumpness, while the tarry sails bulged into animate tatters that spidered down to seize him. This raised his roaring to a different pitch.
But now the crew howled equally, for some of the rigging broke free and fell on them in phosphorescent skeins, and like swift fungus rooted in their flesh and sprouted shaggy myceloid shrouds. The netting melted from the scoops and swatters and rolled—now glowing too—in amoebic blobs that sought the wizard where he stood still brokenly regarding the vast ruins of his hope. The anchor chain poured into the air, a slick tube of gut now, throbbing with hellish ichors, and slung its hook through a man’s chest. The remnants of the sails—those parts not devouring the squalling Snolp—also pulsed translucent, thick with veins, and peeled down to enfold the struggling seamen. The iron rending-vats made mouths and bellowed and, bounding free, swallowed fugitives and snatched them overboard. Meanwhile a hideous polymorphous riot now converged on the ship from the air.
“We have to jump!” Sarf’s urgency was suddenly facilitated, for glittering, clawed flippers now clutched the gunwales, and the ship began to list as the aquatic dead mobbed up its side.
“They’ll break like glass on impact!” Hex screamed this to make himself believe it, meaning the shape-jammed waters they now vaulted into.
They thrashed in the teeming stew, their violence as much a tearing aside of it as a means of making headway.
They milled their arms and legs to pull them free of the gelatinous, fleet nudge and rub that swathed them. The liquid was less dense than water—volatile, spirituous, its exhalations faintly stung their nostrils, and its buoyancy was such that even their sodden gear did not exert much drag on them. Rather, its saturation made them feel bubble-light, and moreover seemed to inscribe upon their skin—even upon its most intimate inches—swift sensations, horribly particular and distinct.
At first, though the eloquence of these ticklings was felt, it was not readable, for their first agony of loathing kept them ripping and bucking at the waters, fighting for distance from the doomed Necronaut. But shortly, they could feel the flux they swam grow less turbid, the queasy impacts far fewer. Facing back, they gaped to find themselves almost a quarter mile away. The craft’s net and swatter arms waggled in the air, masts—uprooted—danced with an obscenely expressive jubilation, all of them furred and studded with thick-clustered ghosts. Even as the swimmers watched, the Necronaut’s ballistae fired off harpoons that looped up towards the clouds and wrote liquid, cryptic scripts of writhing cable against the grey, sweating air. Winged, crested, fiercely snouted, squat and busily multibrachiate—all seething like ants on a honeydrop at noon, the lust-crazed dead so densely thronged the listing craft it looked like a ripe, wind-blurred thistledown globe whose fragments ambiently smoked and swarmed—save here was convergence, not dispersion. Hither hastened numberless airborne shoals to heap the decks in drifts that deepened by the second.
The pair swam easier now. Tall kelps and oil-black, multifoliate seaweeds were the main inhabitants of the waters, as though the ship had drawn off the moving traffic of half-visible things. And now the water’s ticklings, its creeping evocation of memories in the skin, grew frighteningly distinct.
“Do you feel them, Sarf? My hands, palms are… remembering the feel of the cask I threw when I crushed the head of that man in the rowboat.”
“Yes. Mine feel—feel exactly the chains I clamped on to those musicians.”
“And my right arm. At the same time. The blows I gave them down in the gully to stun them for the killing-slopes.”
“And also, Hex,”—Sarf’s voice shook slightly here— “also the feel of the rock I took from Hounderpound.”
“And so do I,” Hex realized, awed. He hung treading water. “Could it mean that he’s one of my dead too? It was you that hit him!” They gazed back at the Necronaut. All but shapeless now, it seemed a floating hive that fumed and dripped with toiling wasps. Dozens of new nightmare anchor lines now bound it to the main, squirming fetters of braided ghosts. Bramt Hex screeched aloud.
This did not startle Sarf, who did the same, for the same reason. Their legs were seized, greasily tourniqueted by snake-tough bights of seaweed. Loops of it captured Hex’s shoulders, cobraed from the water before his face, whence his hands wildly slapped them aside. Socketed in each oily, pennate frond of the ghost, a jewel-bright eye flashed bale—the eye, a hundred-fold, of Oberg, the Polypolitan conductor. Each muscled leaf of him that clutched Hex thrust an icy nerve-root into him. These ghost-pangs sketched in his mind a tenuous map of agonies he had never guessed at—the being’s death-pains, Hex understood. He wrestled furiously, counter-strangled with fevered hands. Fight back, and as long as you do, it can’t take you. At your first passivity, it has you for its lodging till you die. Stilth’s voice, unreal footnote, hung round the margin of his horror, his bodily explosion of resistance. Central in his mind, uncannily interior to it, was Oberg’s murmured voice, whose text the coruscation of his multiple stare counterpointed with flashing hate:
“Take me on. The shrunkenest, meanest little corner of your life! I’ll curl up, be content to thaw in your blood’s heat. Take me on, you scum! You chained us there! I had to strangle Umber to spare him pain. I sank alive in the acid maw of the Shlubbup! Smothering foulness! Snot-thick caustics rubbed all my flesh from the bones! Take me on!”
Pity as devastating as his horror half paralysed Hex. Clearly he saw the small bright-clothed shapes chained to the killing-slope in the early morning. To shout “No!”—as, groaningly, he did, was a thing as hard to do as nocking, drawing, aiming, and loosing an arrow deep underwater. Cumbered by his own woozy terror and compassion, he let fly the negative. Fractionally the liquescent necroplasm melted to a slighter grip on him, and he bellowed again.
“No! And No! I do refuse you! Release me and retire!” He saw now that the whole weedy floor of this tarn shivered and danced like flames, and flashed with constellations of hating, craving eyes, but then he was released, and Oberg shrank down to the impotent level of what, surely, were his townsfellows. A bar of bare, bone-studded silt defined the limit of this shallows, and Hex swam for it. On the gravel of vertebrae and cranial shards he sprawled, gasping, and only Sarf’s arrival at his side reminded him of his friend’s existence. They lay catching breath a while. At length Hex told his friend: “I danced with the conductor.”
“I fought his catamite.” A shudder. “So slippery and cold a thing!”
“They are bigger, the stronger their souls. Have you thought of that? And I keep feeling the giant’s rock on my palm.”
Sarf nodded, not answering. Plainly, the warlock had been a man of Power. After a moment he said: “If we don’t continue, we’ll grow afraid to, and die here.”
Grunting, they rose and heaved themselves into the deeps beyond the bar. The Necronaut, crumbled, a puddle of swarming fragments, now left their sight. The far sky was feverish with sluggish lightnings which backlit, near the horizon, more demon fodder: a colossal, rat-gnawed spine—whence some few hook-footed limbs branched, remnants of a centipede’s array—that was skulled at either end by sharp-beaked raptors’ mummied heads. Feebly, their legstumps stirred, and rippled the inky flood they rode; feebly their beaks gnawed the air, and now
and then crushed tardy members of the aerial hosts that rookeried them even to the point of filling their eyesockets, and painting their cruel cheeks with streaks of phosphorescent guano. Still the swimmers felt blubbery bignesses flirting with their kicking feet; still, through the turbid flux, quick, melting faces feinted near their own—tusked muzzles, barbed probosces, slitted yellow eyes flirted against their cheeks. But now, having felt the nearness of those with claim on them, they swam less fearful of the general shoals. The mudreefs and sandbars they here and there passed still made their eyes cringe—from the charred, truncated eloquence of fingerless gesturing arms; from cairns and the broken walls of cloacal shrines, all graffitied in scripts of varied muck and drying blood, calligraphies as stark and menacingly sharp as silhouetted lines of demon-troops. But their bodies, meanwhile, recoiled less and less as they swam. They understood that however they wandered, they would be found, and re-embraced.
The water was alive with vaster tactile memories than their own. A kind of neural mutter moved through it; murder in a thousand vivid forms crackled around them, to be erased by a random counterwave, the pangs of a thousand species of disease.
“Hex. The water’s colder—feel it?”
Hex groaned for answer. Fear was big in him again. The water was not only colder, but had a new emptiness that felt premonitory—even bony trash thinned out. There was something big coming, he felt, and it was for him. He howled half with relief when he was seized, so sure he’d grown he would be taken.
A glowing pincer had his middle, a serrate claw that lifted him out of the swell. Two stalked eyes—slanted ovoids tapering to points—thrust up to view him from the huge crab’s carapace they crowned. Hex knew Zelt’s eyes, and dreaded them. Her mouth, underslung to the carapace, was a wide seam, puffed into a crimson bivalve whence a thin stream issued through the water, smelling of sulphur and burnt bones. Again, the tongue she spoke with was no organ of her own, but a suddenly animated valve within his mind.