by Chuck Wendig
“Hey!” he protests, curling a glistening lip. “I’m here as a favor to your father, you little, ill-mannered gob—”
Sirinas wheels on him. “It was you. She’s right. I would gut you like a carp if you were not already dead. I may still—” And here she draws a zig-zag in the air with her blade. “If only so you are forced to carry your guts as you crawl back home.”
Hrothk just breathes loudly, equal parts snarl and snore.
Burnsy, he stares holes through Nora.
Sorry, Burns.
Sirinas retracts her blade. “Bah!” She spits on the ground.
“Now what?” Hrothk asks.
Nora says, “We go back up. We climb the trestle. We get to the tracks and follow them back and from there—”
“I know where we are,” Norky says.
They all turn to the walking, talking pile of Hubba Bubba bubblegum that is the Half-and-Half.
“Look look look,” he says, and he lifts up a sludgy flesh flap from his side. From underneath the piggy-pink skin shelf he pulls a tube, and from that tube he unrolls a ragged cloth map. He sets it on the ground and points down. The map shows a massive tangle of passages—all of it stitched into the cloth with names sewn in along many of the routes. The Breakbone Path. The Gobsblood Trail. The Seven Lampreys. He thrusts a wobbly hot-dog finger down against the map. Right next to what looks to be a little round body of water: The Lacrymose Lake. “This is us.”
“So?” Sirinas asks.
“From here, there’s a way out.” He licks his lips, then looks to Nora. “And for you and me, there’s a way deeper.”
“You and me?” she barks. “I don’t think so.”
“But I... I have the map!”
Sirinas reaches down, yanks the map out from under his finger, and tosses it to Nora. “Now she has the map, freak.”
Norky bleats. “But—but I know how to read it. I know where things are. I have other maps, too, I’ve been planning this journey for months...”
Nora hesitates. This is not how this was supposed to go. The 13 Train was supposed to take her right to where she needed to go. That’s how the train works, or so she heard. Pay the token. Get onboard. Wait till your stop.
Then Burnsy shows up.
Now her only lead is this odious Half-and-Half, a flabby mutant who looks like one of those people who got the gastro bypass surgery and lost a ton of weight overnight but remain trapped in the labyrinth of their own sagging skin-sack.
“You can just go to the surface,” Hrothk says. “Find another way.”
“It’ll be slow,” Norky says, offering a sheepish smile. “But if you have the time, that’s okay, I understand...”
Time. Time. She has the time. But not the patience. Nor the physical ability. If she even tries to go to the surface she’ll start to seize, bleed, die. She could take her chances on her own, feel the Great Below, try to navigate the paths herself.
Everything inside her is a rat pawing at a padlock, trying to make it open. She wants out of Hell. That cannot happen soon enough.
“Fine,” she growls. “You and me, Halfbreed.”
“I will go, too,” Hrothk says.
“The hell you will,” she says.
But then Burnsy jumps in with, “I’m in, too.”
“This isn’t the Wizard of Oz,” she seethes. “We’re not all going on a magical journey together—”
“And that’s why you can count me out,” Sirinas says, thrusting her chin out and offering a face so disgusted it looks like she just licked a dirty syringe.
“I’m going alone!”
“No. I will go with you to see the Prophet,” Hrothk says.
Burnsy shrugs. “I’m in because I came all this way, and if I don’t, I’m afraid the ghost of Mookie Pearl is going to find me and rip me from fuckstick to forehead.”
Nora closes her eyes. Draws a deep breath and tries to play this out. This was her trip to make. Alone. But old inclinations rise and that sinister, selfish thought cuts through the haze: You can use these people if need be. This trip could be dangerous. They’re capable. They have value. Same as the Get-Em-Girls did, once. They are your armor. They are your weapons. Don’t work against them. Let them work for you.
Nora rolls her eyes, then forces a sour, curdled-milk smile. “Guess it’s time to follow the yellow brick road, then.”
13
Wheels turning. Epochs lost. Civilizations before the ones we know: the Lamites, the Erisians, the Eruduins, the Hyperboreans, the Rann-Kutch, the Merops. And with them were monsters that predated the ones we know of the Below—before the gobs, Naga, and golemfolk we sometimes find remnants of Lygow (the Skulled Faces), or Sydonians (Those Formed of Dark Water), or the Fomora (the Deep Giants). Sometimes I come upon the sites of these ancient creatures: burial mounds or forgotten temples of the Time Before Time.
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
Nora hates walking. Her feet hurt. Blisters threaten to pop and turn to callus. (Calluses make her think of Mookie—his large, rough hands, each fingertip like unsanded wood.) And they’ve been walking for—how long now? Norky assures her it’s only been six hours. Maybe eight.
But time is strange down here. She’s known it since she became married to this realm. Sometimes time moves fast like white water; other times it goes slow, like the way frozen water drips to form icicles. And it doesn’t help that they keep moving in and out of shadow, into chambers lit by shelves of glowing polyps and carpets of fungi (their spore-pods like little glowing fly-eyes drifting swimmily on stalks), and then back into unlit tunnels where their only light is the line that shines forth from the eyes of Hrothk, the gun-armed golem.
They cross over a narrow stone bridge—one that spans a sharp fissure plunging forever into an empty abyss. Norky whimpers as he follows along. As they get to the other side, he beckons for Hrothk to point his brightly shining eyes at the map. They confer, mumbling as to directions.
Nora hangs back. So does Burnsy.
“You did me a number back there,” he says.
“You’re tough. You can handle it.”
“Nngh,” he mutters. “What was that, anyway? Why throw me under the bus?”
“Because you’ll survive the tires. You’re roadkill. Whatever they do to you, you’ll live through. Me? That Snakeface bitch would’ve had my eyeballs on her icepick before I could blink twice. Besides, it wasn’t a lie. You did mess this up for me. Things were going fine.”
“I liked you better when you were hugging me.”
She shrugs. A small voice tells her: No time now to be sentimental. You can’t afford that kind of weakness down here. “How’d you do it, anyway?”
“Do what?”
“Get onto the train.”
“Took my four-wheeler. Chased after you, then it, then... jumped onto it.”
“Where’s the quad?”
He sighs. “I leapt. It rolled. It’s back there in the dark somewhere. Hundreds of miles away at this point. Shit.”
“You should’ve stayed behind, Steve.”
“My name’s not—”
But she’s already walking away.
*
More time lost to the chambers and caverns. Time eaten by darkness. Time corroded by the damp air, the smell of sulfur, the hungry fungus.
The passage descends sharply—they have to grab hold of rocks in order not to slip on the wet stone. Burnsy tries to reach for her to help, but Nora bats his hand away like it’s a pestering housefly.
She manages. Even though her muscles are on fire. Everything hurts.
At the bottom is a jagged crack in the stone like the lightning bolt in a comic book. A hot wind keens through it. It smells of mulch and earthworms after a rainstorm.
Norky tucks the map up under his folds, then lifts his blobby skin and jiggle-shimmies his way through the fissure. It’s tight, even for him.
It occurs to her: “You won’t be able
to fit,” she tells Hrothk.
“You first,” he says. “Then we will see.”
Burnsy gives her a look and a shrug.
She squeezes herself into the space. Hands flat against the cool rock. Just touching this passage, skin to stone, and it’s like all of the shadows of this place flow into her. For a moment it feels like these walls might shift, crush her like an orange in a juice press, but then she lets her consciousness go out through the rock and again she can breathe. Out there, she senses things:
A vein of Cerulean a hundred yards away, deep in the stone. A series of dark creatures gathering in a cove above their heads—not bats, but something just as mindless but far bigger and with greater hunger. She feels ghosts wandering about, as she always does—specters you only notice when you’re looking for them, when you let your eyes adjust and see behind things. Way out, a small configuration of lights— little bright pinpricks like stars, like fireflies pinned to the wall of her awareness. A town. Or market. People. Monsters. Not far. A few days walk and then—
Something else is out there.
Something moves through the stone, eating it, crushing it, something big and consumptive and gods is it hungry—one of Them, one of the god-worms, worm-gods, Hungry Ones, churning through the dark and—
A hand pulls her out the other side and suddenly she’s back. Her mind again anchored to the meat of her body. Norky looks her up and down. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I just—”
She slaps a palm against the stone again. Searching for the ancient beast.
But it’s gone.
“Nothing,” she says. “It was nothing.”
Burnsy comes through next. He emerges whimpering, trying not to weep. Blisters have popped across his face and arms. His skin looks even redder than usual. “I hate this goddamn place,” he says, grunting and growling past the tears—an expression of anger meant to stave off the pain and the sadness. It’s the kind of sound she knows well: Mookie made it often.
“You all right?” she asks, but Burnsy pulls away. “Okay. Whatever.”
Then: nothing.
They peer through the crack. The way the wind sucks through the fissure it’s like being on the inside of a vacuum.
“Hello?” she calls through the space. Voice echoes.
“Hrothk?” she tries.
He’s gone.
She turns to the others. “He’s not there. I don’t know where—”
“Right here,” he grumbles, his voice only a few inches from her head, and she startles with a yelp. There, in the rock, is his face. Emerging from the stone as if it were mud and he was merely hiding in it. “Almost out.”
And then the face is gone.
She pulls away. Heart racing.
And sure enough, Hrothk’s one arm emerges slowly from the stone. Erosion in reverse. The formation of a stalactite in fast-forward. The hand grows, then plants hard against the rock to push the rest of his body out. It’s like a big rock baby being born from nothing.
He drops hard, shoulder hitting stone. It cracks. He doesn’t.
Hrothk stands, dusts himself off, puts his white sheet back on.
“Let us go,” he says, then stomps off. Like nothing happened.
Norky whistles, low and slow.
Burnsy, applying moisturizer across his raw red skin, just shrugs. “I did not know they could do that. Weird, wild stuff.”
*
She tells them there’s a town ahead. Few days walk. Norky nods and shows her on the map. “That’s Muskrat,” he says. “Near the...” His rubbery finger traces a stitched path. “Near the Screwthread Swamp. I think—hope!—that, uhh, ahhh, we can use that as a launching point to head up-, or rather down-,river to get to the domain of the Skinless King because it looks like the river goes through the swamp. Starts there, even.”
“Why do you want to go there?” she asks him.
His eyes shine with sadness. “I just want my friend back.”
I just want my father back. And my mother. And I want me back, too.
“Fair enough,” she says.
And they walk.
*
Their supplies dwindle. They come upon a grove of what look to be trees—spongy forms like rotten, collapsing barrels stacked atop one another, the branches drooping and sagging like cardboard tubes that got wet and unspooled. Hrothk tells them they can eat these trees, which are, in fact, not trees.
“Wetwood Blight,” he says. Fungus from above that eats trees, gains the memory of those trees, and washes down into the Great Below. It then grows into the form of the trees when it reaches a place where it goes no further.
Norky jumps in: “Oooh, ooh, I know these, sure, sure. See those shapes up there? Bats. The fungus gets on the bats. The bats fly back out to the surface, then land in trees, drop the fungus on the trees, and... voila.” He seems almost reverent when he says, “The circle of life often overlaps with the circle of death. Above and Below.”
“That’s great,” Burnsy mumbles. “But I’m hungry and I’m tired of eating granola and sunflower seeds and other bullshit. Let’s go harvest some shroom trees.”
Hrothk tells them to pull from the trunks, not the branches, “Unless you want the spores to colonize your throat.”
Which, they all agree, sounds really bad.
They each go to separate trees. Nora, though, follows Hrothk.
She stands back as he scoops great mittfuls of spongy fungus right out of the Wetwood Blight-trees. “So, what’s your deal?” she asks.
“Hnn?”
“Your deal. Your bag. Your 411, your sitch. You’re not like other golems.”
“We are particular, singular creatures.” He hands her a clump of fungus. She smells it. Not entirely unappetizing. The smell of portabello and fertilizer. She takes a bite. Like chewing Styrofoam that tastes like sour meat. Not unpleasant, exactly. But definitely not pleasant, either.
“But you’re not,” she says, dry-swallowing a fungal wad. “You’re part of a group. I thought the Trogbodies didn’t do ‘groups.’ You’re freelancers. Never met one that wasn’t.” Though, didn’t she think the same thing about the Snakefaces once upon a time?
“I am a Knight of Aristovilnus, and—”
“Who was that? Aristovilnus.”
“A man—”
“A man, not a golem?”
“Interrupt me again and my mouth closes.”
She holds up her hands as if to say, mea culpa.
“I am a Knight of Aristovilnus, a man and later the ghost of a man who felt that the worlds of Above and Below must be separate, that to bring them together was not an act of unity but rather an act of entropy: not two halves merging but rather the pillars separating the two breaking down and crumbling to dust. And when those two worlds met once more, all things would break down. Life. Death. Time. Reality. The boundaries between these things are necessary. Over and over again, history shows us instances when someone Above or someone Below seeks to crash the two worlds together again. That may be happening now. And I am standing here to prevent that.”
She waits. “You done? I wouldn’t want to interrupt.”
“My words are complete.”
“I’ve never heard a golem say more than ten words. Maybe no more than five. And you just said all that?”
“It is a practiced speech.”
“So you’re standing here to prevent that. Where are your brothers and sisters?”
He remains quiet for a moment, his jaw shifting left and right like he’s grinding rocks into slurry.
“I am the last,” he says finally.
“Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.”
“Sorry.”
“Your apologies are unnecessary. We have been winnowed. But we will grow again. Until then, I will have to suffice.”
She narrows her gaze as he scoops more fungal clumps from the Blight tree. “Suffice for what, though? Why are you here? Not ‘here’ in the cosmic sense. But ‘here’ as in following me, some se
lfish girl, through the bowels of the Great Below?”
“Because I sense a great deal of energy around you. You are a fulcrum point. Events hinge on who you are and how you act. And because you are leading me to the false prophet, the Skinless King. John Atticus Oakes. Then together we may kill him.”
She hesitates. “Kill him.”
“Yes. That is your plan, is it not? The Half-and-Half owes him no love. Nor do I. One does not go to the Skinless King in this way unless one wishes him harm.”
“Of course,” Nora says with a nod and a wicked smile. “Killing him is always the plan.” The lie comes easy. For her, lies always come easy. If that’s what it takes to keep Hrothk along for the ride, protecting them until they get to where they need to go?
So be it.
14
In the beginning, all was darkness. Roiling and alive. Not just chaos. Entropy. Hungry. Corrosive. Consumptive of all that was born and that might be born: the real and the potential to be real. But then: a flash of something. Consciousness. Singularity. Hope. And light shined on the cooling earth and from that beam came the engine of life itself and the mitochondria conspired—whispering the frequency known only to the cellular—to evolve from something as small as the prick of a pin to a gamboling ape gone hairless and down out of the trees. What was it that sparked that moment? What was it that allowed that light to penetrate shadow?
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
The town of Muskrat sits up on stilts, like a proper swamp village—stilts made from telephone poles and bound-together broomsticks and steel rebar. Houses made as the houses of Hell often are: from found items like broken-down crates or parts of cars and trucks and buses or the sides and roofs of old barns. Pieces of the human world that have wound their way through drains and down rivers. Refuse. Debris. Trash. Picked up by those who dwell deep and made into shantytowns, forts, markets and castles.