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The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

Page 7

by Kij Johnson


  Nothing she had with her was appropriate, so she found a dressmaker to make a gown for her audience. She took great pains over the fabric and cut, and laughed at herself as she did so, for she knew that it was not for the king of Ilek-Vad she did this, nor even to please an old lover, but for her own vanity. She had not seen him in thirty years and it had been she who left him: it would not do to look shabby, or as though she regretted anything of her life since—which had, after all, led her to her current state, Professor and Fellow at a great and ancient University.

  She articulated some part of this to the dressmaker, who was (in the way of such women) incomparably wise and guessed all was not spoken. The dress would be heavy silk of a rich corvine black (“Like a professor’s robes, but O! So much richer,” said the dressmaker), square-necked and narrow-sleeved, with the cascading, trailing skirt preferred by Ilek-Vad’s aristocracy. “Elegant, intelligent, and strong—but not too young,” the dressmaker said. “I will have it tomorrow at noon, if you come back tonight for a fitting. And for the audience, your cat may have a ribbon to match. Or . . . No, that would be perhaps too much. I must consider.”

  “It’s not my cat,” Vellitt said, but otherwise acceded to whatever was said. She paid the slightly shocking sum demanded of her without complaint, grateful again for the Bursar’s generosity. After that, her hair—and then there were shoes to purchase, and a scarf she might use as a shawl.

  It was dinnertime before they returned to the inn, and she found a reply to her application: Randolph Carter, ordained king and right ruler of Ilek-Vad, Narath, Thorabon, Octavia, Matië (there was quite a long list here), salutes Vellitt Boe, Celephaïan Doctor of Theoretics and esteemed Professor Maior at Ulthar’s ancient and honorable University, and summons her to attend on the morrow, at five o’clock.

  She went early to bed. In the night the cat tapped her face with a silent paw until she pushed it away. It repeated the gesture, and a little annoyed, she sat up, awake, to hear a soft, careful snicking at her door: a lock-pick.

  She slipped from her bed, reaching for the long knife beneath her pillow, but as she rose the cat cascaded to the ground with a heavy thump, and the snicking noise stopped. She crossed the room in a few strides and jerked the door open, but it was too late. There was no one visible in the short corridor.

  She lit the gas-jet in her room with fingers that trembled only a little. Who was it, and why? She knew, somehow, that it was not a burglar, nor a man with rape on his mind. Was it a kidnapping? Was this to do with the gods? With her quest to retrieve Clarie Jurat? She remembered Tir Lesh Witren, the way he had watched, and mined her for information. Perhaps he had been a spy of some sort, but for whom? He had disembarked in Ograthan; it didn’t seem possible that whatever information he had managed to collect might get to Ilek-Vad faster than the Medje Loïc had. And what did it imply for Ulthar, if there were spies set? Or was it just some court intrigue that had everything to do with a king and his politics, and nothing to do with her?

  There was no sleeping with such thoughts, but Vellitt was old and wise and experienced in far-travelling. She was able eventually to eliminate the pointless circling fears, and slept at last. But the cat remained awake until morning, lying at the foot of her bed, still as the pictures on the wall save for the occasional twitch of an ear or a whisker, or the blinking of its green eyes.

  * * *

  The dress: finished, wrapped in silver paper, and laid tenderly into a box of pale-blue cardboard; her rucksack and the valise purchased to contain the clothing she had acquired in her travels, repacked; the whole sent up the cliff road on a zebra-drawn cart driven by the innkip’s daughter: and finally in early afternoon, Vellitt Boe herself ascended the crystal cliffs of Ilek-Vad beneath the strange twilit sky. The cat walked beside her.

  The cliffs were wind-etched to the delicate white of hoarfrost, but wherever a crag had recently sheared off, they were clear as glass, and she could see into their crystal depths: shadows cast by the higher slopes and the road itself, striations and flaws, visible caves. She looked back at the sea whenever she paused for breath. From so far above, the ruins of a great underwater maze were visible beyond the harbor, with a single fleck of red angling across it: the Medje Loïc, her sails filled with the offshore wind, heading for the sunlit lands.

  It was midafternoon when, winded and a little weary, she took a room at an inn in the many-turreted town near the palace. She arranged for the attendants that would walk with her, for no one navigated the steep streets of Upper Ilek-Vad without an escort carefully calibrated as to size and formality. She bathed and dressed—and there was still nearly an hour before she might present herself.

  The dressmaker was as much a master of her art as any king’s architect. The gown was exactly correct: severe, wise, and beautiful. Vellitt had no jewelry, but her hair shone like steel and iron, a bob of tight-twisted cords that brushed her jawline when she turned her head. She was older and her face was set into lines, though her eyes were the same as they had ever been, she thought. A matching neck-ribbon for the cat had been judged de trop, and the dressmaker had created instead a slim collar from a scrap of blue ribbon embroidered with silver. To Vellitt’s surprise, the cat permitted it to be placed about its neck, then sat, examining itself in the room’s glass.

  She was going to be seen by an old lover, now a king. It was impossible to assume she would not be considered against the Veline Boe that had been. She hadn’t loved Randolph Carter. He had been a man like many, so wrapped and rapt in his own story that there was no room for the world around him except as it served his own tale: the black men of Parg and Kled and Sona Nyl, the gold men of Thorabon and Ophir and Rinar; and all the women invisible everywhere, except when they brought him drinks or sold him food—all walk-on parts in the play that was Randolph Carter, or even wallpaper.

  But he had loved her, or thought he did, and that had brought her, sputtering and gasping, above the surface of his self-regard. The dreamer’s sheen and the power of his passion had for a time attracted her, but in the end she had not wanted a life spent treading water in his story. She still did not—and yet she regarded herself in the glass a little ruefully. To have that choice removed by time and age was painful.

  “Eh,” she said to the cat, who at the sound looked up at her with narrowed eyes. “Let us make our curtsey to a king.”

  * * *

  The throne room of Ilek-Vad was a space a hundred meters square, fashioned of dark opal, a moonless midnight that glittered with the brilliant colors of butterflies and jungle birds. The ceiling was lost in elaborate vaults hung with lamps that cast a sharp electric-white light. The throne was as grand as the room, fashioned of a single giant golden opal and illuminated by torchières bearing blue flames that never died.

  But the king did not sit there. There was a lower throne to one side, on a Drinanese carpet of great size and beauty, alongside other seats and a round table of aloeswood. Lanterns hung above this wall-less room on chains of such length that they swung slowly, like pendula. It was to this that Vellitt was led. A man in scarlet stood as she approached. She recognized him immediately, though she had forgotten that he was no taller than she.

  But he—“Veline?” Randolph Carter said sounding a little shocked, and then more firmly, “Veline.” She saw it suddenly: she was older and he had not predicted the ways it would change her. In the same moment it came to her that he had not aged externally, not by more than a year or two. He took her hands in his, and after an almost indiscernible instant’s hesitation, saluted her upon her cheek. His guards and her escorts left them there; and Vellitt Boe and Randolph Carter stood alone in that soaring feather-hued space.

  There was no question of formal supplications. He led her to sit beside him on the divan and poured from a bottle of pale-yellow wine from Sarrub. It tasted like sunlight and home to Vellitt, for the College’s cellars were filled with Sarruvi wines. She told him of her quest, the journey thus far, and what was to come.

 
He looked at her in silence for a time, then said, “Four days ago, a vision came to the priests of the great shrine in Narath, with a message to be brought to me in secret. There is a god: foolish, mad, and sleeping. The daughter of his daughter has vanished from these lands, and the oracle was of the results should he awaken and find her gone—the Skai valley in fire, from Mount Lerion to Sarrub and the Karthians, and even into the zoogs’ forest.”

  Vellitt put her head into her hands, suddenly faint.

  “It was an oracle, not a prophecy,” Randolph said. “It hasn’t happened, not yet, but the vision warned that mischief-making gods are even now whispering into his ear and tickling his feet so that he shifts restlessly upon his couch. And more: the vision cautioned that there are yet other gods who do not care either way about him, but will prevent any attempt to retrieve the girl.” He sighed. “So many gods, so many factions and politics and petty resentments. If you are the one seeking her, then you are the one they hunt.”

  She recounted the attempt to break into her room, and of Tir Lesh Witren on the ship, and added, “It did not seem to me that any of the usual reasons applied. For this, then, I suppose?”

  He said with decision, “You had better stay here tonight.” Summoning an attendant, he gave orders, and when the man was gone, continued with some satisfaction, “I do not think even a god’s followers will seek to harm you beneath this roof.”

  “Thank you.” Vellitt leaned forward. “You’ve heard my situation. Randolph, will you give me the silver key that opens the Gate? You can see how critical it is. I’ll return it myself or have it brought back to you.”

  But Carter was already shaking his head, and his face expressed an inward grief that seemed inapt for the situation. “I don’t have it. It’s gone and I don’t know where, whether it was stolen, or I hid it somewhere to keep it safe from theft, or—or something else. Thus far I’ve been able to remain, but I feel it: the real world dragging at me like gravity. There is coming a time when I’ll lose this fight and fall back into the waking world. And without the key, I’ll be trapped there.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, a homely gesture that brought his essential nature back to her as his unchanged face and voice had not. Thirty years ago, she would have crossed the space between them, touched the frowning line between his brows with a fingertip, and kissed him. Even now she felt the impulse ground into her muscles, but she had larger concerns.

  “Then Ulthar cannot be saved?” She thought of it: Ulthar; but also Nir and Hatheg and all the little inns and farmhouses; the shepherds and the ox-drivers; Gnesa Petso and the Bursar and Derysk Oure; the toll-taker at the bridge with her practiced tale of human sacrifice; the man renting punts on the Aëdl, the Eb-Taqar Fellows with their elaborate Flittide parties; the girl in the Woolmarket who had taught her monkey to curtsey for coins—so many men and women and children. And everyone gone. She took a breath. “There must be alternatives.”

  They talked on. More wine was brought, and cakes and dates and little curls of an indescribably tender meat, which they ate absently with their fingers as they spoke. There were alternatives, six that Carter knew of, all so dangerous that there was evidently no need of locks and keys.

  One was a cave deep in the Tanarian Hills behind Celephaïs, where the grassy hills grow dry and turn to badlands, and eventually the great Eastern desert. But that route was forbidden by ancient edicts and, while Kuranes (the king there) was Carter’s once-friend and ally, he was old and would not challenge the ancient ways. If she went, she would have to enter the hills in secret.

  Or, if she had money enough and did not fear treachery, she might take passage on one of the black tall-masted triremes that could sail to the moon itself. It was alleged that one might cross into the waking world by traversing its shattered regolith, but Carter did not know the details of how that might be done, nor how to descend from there to waking Earth.

  The plateau of Leng under the shadow of Kadath was rumored to cross the boundaries of all worlds; but having stated that, they discarded the prospect, knowing that it was, of all options, the worst.

  There was a ghenty den in distant Rinar, a few steps from the city’s great market. One entered an unnamed alley and spoke certain words into a star-shaped aperture cut into a door, and if the words were the correct ones, the door would be opened. The den was so thick with the mingled smoke of tobacco, thagweed, hemp, and ghenty that it was impossible even to cross the room unaltered. If one entered any of the curtained alcoves, it was easy to judge the eerie visions contained within as hallucinations. “But they’re not,” said Carter to Vellitt. “The fourth opening to the left leads to the real world.”

  “That doesn’t sound so hazardous.”

  “Then I have misspoken. There are things behind those curtains that would destroy you merely by being seen.”

  “I am not so weak,” she said, angry.

  “You could be made of steel and diamond, Veline, and it wouldn’t matter. Some of the alcoves open onto the space between the stars. The Other Ones would find you there.”

  She sighed. “What else, then?”

  Or, the cats might aid her. The small black cat in its blue collar had accompanied Vellitt to her audience and been well rewarded: Carter had saluted it with honor as a noble of its species, and it had been served with its own fine foods: mountain-clear water, minced mice, and a tiny fish still flipping its tail in a lapis dish. Now he stroked it where it lay upon his knee. Of course, he had always been wise in the ways of cats, valuing them above entire races, many men, and most women. “The cats have their own secret routes. They’ve saved me before this,” he said.

  “Would the cat aid me? Would you, little one?”

  Carter consulted (so it was true that he could speak the language of cats), but after the colloquy, he shook his head. “She would willingly, but she tells me that it’s not possible for men of the dream lands to travel thus. Or women,” he added, perhaps remembering Veline Boe’s ill-advised attempt in her youth to climb Mount Ngranek, of which it was said that no man could ascend and stay sane.

  And so it came down to the secret paths of the ghouls. They both knew something of the creatures, who dwelt in decayed packs in the unlit under-realms. Scattered through those ichor-wet caverns and tunnels were their secret routes into the graveyards, dead-fields, and necropolises of a hundred worlds. Carter had once had friendships among them, though their support many years earlier for a quest of his had brought the deaths of many. “So do not tell them I sent you,” he ended with a wry expression; “not until you know whether they associate the name of Randolph Carter with friendship or whole-scale slaughter.”

  * * *

  Carter gave orders for an escort and supplies to leave at dawn. Vellitt sighed inwardly: always, dawn. She showed him the glossy black object from the library of the temple of Flame, but he could make nothing of it, saying only that it might be from his future, as time between the two worlds was not constant—obvious enough, seeing Carter’s unlined hands beside her own, hard-knuckled and old, when she took back the object—and could even, perhaps, move backward. He offered her two additional gifts of great value: a password that should secure safe passage and the aid of any ghouls she encountered, and a carved red opal suspended from a fine black iron chain, which would allow her to see in the lightless under-realms.

  It was not yet late, so they remained talking, moving to his private apartments high in one of Ilek-Vad’s opal towers: cold rooms despite the fire that rose, smokeless and eternal, from an iron brazier broader than a man was tall. There was dinner and more wine, a red so soft that it flowed across her tongue like a recollection of autumns past. Beaujolais, he told her, brought in memory from a place in his world called France. The small black cat of Ulthar curled up beside him, purring in its sleep.

  They had met in the marble streets of shining Celephaïs, kissed before they had spoken: Veline Boe young, clean-limbed, and radiant, and Randolph Carter with the sheen all master dreamers
have. They had kissed and then spoke and then far-travelled together for nearly two years: a xebec that stopped in Sarrub, in Dylath-Leen, at the wave-swept jetties of the isles of Mtal and Dothur and Ataïl; weeks afoot exploring Thalarion and the jungles behind that demon-city; a freight barge to Sona Nyl and then Oonai and the long overland trek to Teloth and Lhosk; the pataran they had purchased and sailed alone to Thraa; the flat-beamed abari that took them up the river Ai; and finally, the disastrous crossing of the swamps of Mnar, which had ended when they fell through into the under-realms.

  “Such a dark place, your world,” Carter said, after a lingering silence. He lifted his glass and looked at the flames through the wine. The room in the tower of Ilek-Vad had grown quiet: the servants gone and the fire low.

  “Is the waking world so different?”

  “You might have found out,” he said softly. There had been a night when he had invited her to return with him: no talk then of it being forbidden. She had refused, not understanding why. Now she understood that it was not the waking world she had said no to, but Carter.

  “No,” she said suddenly weary of it all: his self-absorption and the soul-sickness that sat so uneasily on his young face. He loved who he was: Randolph Carter, master dreamer, adventurer. To him, she had been landscape, an articulate crag he could ascend, a face to put to this place. When were women ever anything but footnotes to men’s tales?

  “You were so beautiful, Veline,” he said. “Beautiful, clever, bold-hearted.”

 

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