by Michael Shea
“Let me in, oh Enormity! There’s more than room enough in your warm blood. How agilely I plied your pump—remember those drunken nights? We’ll twist that spigot and I’ll pour into you the way you poured out into me. So easy! A little itch, a faint burn, that’s all I’ll be! So spacious is your fat-arsed vitality! You pig! You facile swine! You signed my life to hell as easy as a coin passed for a dram! I had to leap into a fire to die! I—”
Black fur sprouted from the water, a reeking lawn of squirming hair. Something huge and otter-lithe had looped round both Hex’s legs and Zelt’s claw, on which it gnawed with great fanged jaws. It had no eyes, but both its mouth and snout, even through the gorgon coilings of its beard, were unmistakable enlargements of the Lady Poon’s. Though her bite cracked the harlot’s pincer, it did not let go. Poon’s length sufficed both to grapple the free claw and to clamp with python force the scholar’s lower half. The big necroplasms tore and tumbled madly through the water and—now sunk, now hoisted high—Hex was mill-wheeled endlessly across it. And throughout, the contestants’ voices fought within his mind:
“Loose him, slut! He’s mine! Evicted me from mansion, from fortune, from my life! He’ll house me now. Yes, you’ll be my mansion now, officious fool! I had to slit my throat because of you! We’ll couple now, and you’ll warm me through all the years you have left.”
“Ha! You’ll split him like a growing wasp its spider prey. Your gluttony for possession will worm his brain hollow—he’ll have nor dreams nor nightmares but your own.”
During this battle, another raged in Hex. His every inmost sexual channel recalled, each pulse of lust he’d ever known. Even as he tumbled, mad with these volcanic she-powers, he saw for what it was the delusion of possession that sexual crisis had always brought him. The puny egoism of desire now mocked him as these two libidinal juggernauts ploughed the seas with his little share of skin and mind. And even so his lust prevailed, was what had locked his jaw thus far. When he saw this, he found his voice at last.
“No! I deny you both! I tell you no!” He kicked feebly, yet their grip attenuated. “And no again!” His kick felt strong now—Poon’s viscid clasp grew more liquid, and his hands could start to pry Zelt’s claw apart. He roared again, thrust wide his arms, and was floating free, alone.
Gasping to breathe, utterly shaken, he felt for the first lime a yielding to this swamp, an acquiescence. Sarf was he knew not where, but they would find each other, and Yana’s door, or they would not. In this new vista, the only demon fragment was a clawed, stump-wristed hand; piebald with a fur of parasites, it clutched in spasms while—too quick for it—the scythe-beaked flocks on their leathern wings boiled up, slipped between its fingers, resettled. Mists were thicker here. In crooked pillars they wandered over the waters whence, here and there, shapes boiled up into them, filling the foggy frames with incandescent viscera. Scarcely trying to steer past these, Hex swam. An architectural corner of the Incubarium was at last evident: half an arch of stone, crown lost in clouds, its raggedness all starred and tented with spiderwebs. Under this the waters seemed to echo with some faint tidal noise and a current, just detectable, moved towards it. Uncaring, Hex moved with it. Another of his dead laid hold of him.
This was homunculus, a third his size, hanging just under the surface. From its shattered skull a sticky weave of brains and ropy tissue had snared Hex’s feet. His counterkick and shout of refusal sufficed to free him. The dwarfish phantom would have been the man in the rowboat. Immediately he felt a gnawing on one ankle, and found a tiny frog-shape had him there. He sent this fleeing with a second kick, telling him that this ectoplasmic minnow must be the guard of Forb’s that he had slain in the Dapple’s killing-yard. Almost, the meagreness of these dead of his made him groan aloud. So many, great and small, torn raging, uncontented from their lives! A universe of them. And in this cosmic slaughter-fest, what signified his own brief, greedy damages? His own scant bill of dead? Could any man move, act at all, without killing? An immense loneliness bore down on him, a sad powerlessness that he felt no length of life could cure.
A raging voice reached him, gasped denials, a bubbly noise of struggle. He paused in the gentle drift. Clearly, it would take him under the arch which towered near now, dark spiky shapes discernible in the webbing that partly curtained it. He heard more torn water, and a shouted “No!” He drifted a little longer. Sarf, as lax and worn as he felt, drew near. He seemed himself a ghost—and what was a man, Hex thought, but the sum of phantoms that haunted him, as much those he denied as those he admitted?
“Hail, fellow ghost!” Hex said, to see if he still had a voice, and what a joke would sound like. It sounded like a croaking in a tomb. Sarf’s mouth was slack with exhaustion, but a stubborn fever in his eyes filled Hex with admiration. His friend had felt no slightest acquiescence to these horrors, no kinship. Only an uncrushable will to reach their goal.
“The worst is coming, Hex. No others are left—at least for me.”
Hex blinked, then remembered. The black tide now moved them at a walker’s pace. The great arch loomed above and dropped behind them. To their right, far mists and clouds were vision’s limit. On their left, a towering cavern wall, along whose bayed base the current snaked them sluggishly. And, in the big embayment it now bore them to, it briefly seemed that something moved beneath the water.
“The man-witch.” Hex’s voice came almost stillborn. He’d thought himself emptied, all power to fear wrung out of him yet now his legs began to move in wild retrogression.
But it was as if he kicked against thin air, and that black lagoon were a place he fell towards. They saw what seemed a bouquet of pallid kelp filling the great pool, seemed thus until it stirred and thrust with silken muscularity against the flow, probing greedily towards their coming. The tarn’s floor deepened under them, sank to a depth they could not have guessed through the murk, save that the pallor of an immense torpedo body—a body where those shuddery tentacles were rooted—moved within the chasm, and showed its scope. A tentacle took Hex’s middle, another Sarf’s. They were lifted from the water and brought to hang above the surface where, like a weedy shipwreck resurrected, the ghost’s tapered body rose. One of its eyes turned to them. Though big as a warshield, it was the warlock’s eye.
“No!” Hex cried. “I never struck you! You’re not—”
“I am yours too.” The voice filled not just the captives’ skulls, but resonated through their bodies, shook them as a gentle surf might do. “You buoyed each other’s purpose. You launched the giant’s hate for him, you set it on the wing, however confusedly. And now my mate must live out her life alone, and ward the monster by herself. Yet, if you take me in, you could go back to her, and clasp her hand, and thus I could pass into her, and at least that much restore our union.”
Sarf’s strangled negative came as through a dream to Hex. The enormity of taking in so vast a being made his throat cleave shut, and it stunned him so precisely because—yet greater enormity!—he found he wished to do so. It devastated him, this aberration, this alien impulse in the mind he had thought to be his own.
It was the eye that caused it—that barbarous orb whose pupil’s tiniest contractions seemed to gnaw his image from the air, and devour with that image the form and feature of his soul. Yet at the same time a monstrous beauty in that eye made Hex feel he looked—not into it, but out from it. Here was no longing hate, but a sardonic love, a superhuman appetite for the All, for Earth Sea and Sky, and Hex seemed to look out on these things, on every vista he had ever seen, and feel that love himself—a giant’s love, far greater than his littleness was framed for. He hung in stupefaction, already aware that the critical moment of passivity was past, and he was the warlock’s. The eye, he thought, now held a smile.
The tentacles tremored. The body grew smoky, vague. A sharp pain now girt Hex’s ribs, matching the ghost’s grip. Sarf fell to the pool, released. The molluscoid melted and contracted, and the tentacle it held Hex by throbbed like a pipe up w
hich pulsed the phantom’s dwindling mass. The eye was last to melt; then, pain gone, unsupported, Hex too splashed down to empty water. Sarf swam to him, touched his shoulder. Again the current took them, Sarf half pulling his friend along. The cavern wall receded. Just detectably, their flow-rate quickened.
“Sarf,” Hex breathed. “It is… astonishing. Yana’s very near. It is… a green place that we fall to without harm. The warlock makes me see it. But…”
“But what?”
Slack-jawed, Hex shook his head. Yana’s gate was the simplest vision given him. And it was, he now understood, a gate at which, with the gain of endless life, he was about to lose all the life he had had. For the rest of his revelation was no less than that: an upwelling of a million things and faces he had seen, thoughts he had read, fleet, inexpressible tastes and touches of the world and all the imaginings it had kindled, and the countless musics of wind and word and sheer sweet noise it had made to him. It was as if the aggregate of his finite time formed a great chandelier of flashing crystals, sharp-edged instants each of which, approaching extinction, flared alive in him with a new radiance born precisely of its singularity and its fragility. Had the understanding of this radiance been the warlock’s strength that made him so firm against Hounderpound’s tireless hate? He saw the witches’ cove as—in some part of him beyond his fear—he had seen it on that morning of the killing: the sun-gilt glides in their flawless aerial river, the sand like beaten gold. That splendour, that sufficiency! Thus had the warlock possessed the treasure of his time. They were drifting much faster now, and a soft roaring could be heard ahead. A great terror was awakening in Hex.
It was not terror of what he could envision even before they saw it—though they saw it almost at once: the black flux, nacreous with sudden turmoil, plunged down a slope, and ahead appeared a wide wheeling of waters round a monstrous pit in the ghostworld’s floor. But his terror was not of the fall ahead. It was of the deathlessness he now knew, past doubting at last, that they would fall to.
“No,” he mouthed without voice. It was as if the warlock, by showing in its true light the world Hex’s life for thirty years had failed to embrace, had back-lit for him the true size of his soul: a jot of gluttonous plasm. And this soul now speeding into the swirling rim of waters, was spinning around the very brink of an unholy enlargement, a prolongation that would make its maggot’s smallness huge—an empty gorging on a world it could not taste.
The waters flung them down into the pit, whose floor was a sunlit sky of royal blue, where the black flood’s spin whirled to mist that fed clouds white as hoarfrost. Through these stately, scudding clouds they fell, towards a green land miles below, a gentle-hilled paradise of silk-fine meadows brocaded with flower-studded trees and minutely stitched with silver streams. The body-panic of so great a fall was almost at once mollified by the sheer upwelling glory of that place. Yana’s beauty lifted to their eyes a balm that promised impact not just harmless, but bosomy and tender. Hex dropped towards immortality’s awesome magnification. All power to possess his life would die there with his power to die; there, a monster with an unassuageable hunger would be born. Huger than the ghost had felt entering him now swelled his fear as he fell. It filled his lungs and cracked his jaws wide open and burst out in one outcry that seemed to ring as wide as all that world.
“NO!”
He was in utter darkness, tumbling in an icy hurricane. He was a dead leaf swooping, smashing and crumbling frail as eggshell in the wind’s pummelling. He was no longer body, but a thought of motion. He was lying on cold stone, shivering in his sodden clothes. He opened his eyes.
He lay on the floor of the Incubarium’s antechamber. Crews were breaking down the last of the scaffolding round the empty rollers. Stilth sat not far off, smiling strabismically at him.
“Change your mind?”
Slowly, slowly, Hex sat up. He drank long and repeatedly from a winejack Stilth handed him. At length he sighed and shivered.
“No,” he said. Then more decisively: “No. I’ve just decided to come back later. I have some things to do first.”
He realized he had never heard Stilth really laugh before as he sat listening to the old man’s mad cachinnations. Hex waited calmly, then asked: “Can one return?”
Grinning, Stilth shrugged. “Survive the trip here? That’s as may be, of course. Re-enter the portal itself? I’ve never heard it was impossible. Just what is it you have to do first?”
“Hard to explain. Learn how to taste the life I have before I take a second helping.” He could not read in Stilth’s continued smile if the old man mocked or liked this notion, or even if it came as news to him.
“And Sarf?”
“Well, I am going back to Glorak, retracing my route somewhat. There’s one cove in particular where I have to stop, south of Sirril. But of course, Sarf will be there so much sooner, and he’ll have rare projects to pursue… Why did you laugh so hard?”
“He’ll be there already, no doubt about it.” Stilth got up, suddenly bright and brisk. “Well, it’s time I headed south myself, so I can give you some company. Let’s get you some new gear. Hogwand!”
The tusked, bullnecked hybrid marched up and delivered a smart salute.
“Did you see to my azle’s foddering, Hogwand?”
“Yes, Trickster.”
“Good. Now my friend here will need new trail gear—stout leather and sailcloth, for rough wear. Give him your boots, Hex, so he can match the size. When you’ve brought that, we mean to sup topside, so bespeak the meal while you’re up there, and arrange to have a basket ready for us.”
“Very good, Trickster.”
“And have the captain over there bring us that brazier. My friend needs drying out.”
“Yes, Trickster.”
When he was gone, Hex smiled. “You cut a wide swath here it seems, Stilth.”
“Ah well. Raddle carelessly left a leak in the wall, you see—caused a bit of a bother here. I closed the door for them. Here’s some fire. I’ll leave you to make yourself more comfortable.”
He strolled off towards the crews, and watched their work like any idle old man. Sighing comfortably as his mind ranged over all the dangers that lay before him, filled with a serenity he could in no way justify, Hex stripped off his doublet. He found his notes only slightly damp, and ranged them round the coals to dry them. He smiled as he did so because, as he had unbelted his pouch, he had made a discovery: he was a thin man now.