Yes, they could die, could meet some horrible and hideous unspeakable end…but if this truce and plan failed, well, the rest of the world would shortly follow. So, in the long run, their fates would hardly matter.
The success, however, of both truce and plan, would save them all. And then he and Harald would have made great name and fame for themselves for their courage! They would be remembered not only as the sons of a Lawspeaker, or by trading on their father’s war-hero reputation, but by being the first men to set sane foot upon R’lyeh, and come back alive.
What a tale for the ages that would be!
With, of course, conditions. There were always conditions. Not even when staring oncoming annihilation dead in the eye were the R’lyehans about to reveal more of their secrets than they had to. No filming, no photography, no video or audio recording of any sort would be permitted…communications would be limited, and supervised…Harald and Leif would hardly have free run of the place, but neither would they be prisoners. Tourists, after a fashion.
Or, what was it Mother had said? Honored guests. Yes. Honored guests. Just as she would treat whoever—or whatever—this Spawnpriest sent in the exchange.
Their counterparts. Fellow hostages.
He was, truth be told, a little disappointed they weren’t doing the swap like in the movies, some gloomy span of no-man’s-land between tensely squared-off armed and armored war-bands…on one side, Heimlandr shield-tanks, and elite bear- and wolf-troops, maybe with Quetzalcoatan heart-snipers covering them from a distance…on the other, R’lyehan crawlers encrusted with sharp-edged barnacles and toxic spitting polyps, octophibian warriors, and thought-drinkers seeking psychic hints of treachery…as he and Harald were escorted out from a guarded gate, and as the chosen hostage-guests from R’lyeh likewise approached from the other…the moment of dramatic connection as they all paused, taking measure and marking in memory…then passing on, to be relinquished to their host-captors.
But, no. The reality of it was far less fraught and far more prosaic.
The reality of it was long hours as the engines thrummed, as the attendants brought ginger-mead and meals, magazines, blankets, whatever else might be requested or required for their comfort. The reality of it was droning motion, waiting, and unrestful sleep.
“Nearing Ephemera coordinates,” said the steersman’s voice over the intercom. “Beginning our descent. Crew prepare for anchor-dock.”
Peering out every available window revealed to Leif only different views of the same vast sea-scape. This was, while not the middle of nowhere, certainly well within nowhere’s borders. He saw no sign of land, no ships, no other aircraft. Even the media were, for once, obeying instructions and keeping to the agreed-upon distance.
Most of all, he certainly did not see a…what did they call it, again? A nightmare corpse-city of slimy green vaults and something-or-other masonry…Harald, being the more scholarly of them, would know. Harald had tried to prepare Leif, or help Leif prepare himself, for the assault sure to beset their senses. Wiser and more learned men than they had been reduced to gibbering by the merest hint, glimpse, breath, or touch of R’lyeh.
“So…where is it?” he asked, squinting against the bright beams of the setting sun and their brilliant light-dazzle off the endless waters. “Where’s the city?”
“We won’t see it yet,” Harald said.
“Obviously, for I don’t see it now.”
“Be glad. If we could, if it were visible, the steersman might tear out his own eyes and nose-dive us into the deep.”
“And we’re going there.”
“You wanted excitement.”
They gathered their belongings—what few items they were allowed to bring with them, clothing and food, personal effects, no weapons or war-gear of course—as the eight rotor-engines changed pitch and pace. Asgard-One banked and slowed in a gradual, descending curve, circling widely around a patch of ocean that, to Leif, looked just like every other patch of ocean.
“What about this outpost, or island, or whatever it is?” he asked.
“Ephemera? An island with an outpost.”
Leif peered out a window again. “Shouldn’t we be able to see that, then, at least?”
“It’s ephemeral, isn’t it?” Harald said, with a slight chiding tone. “It comes and goes. Sometimes there, sometimes not. Weren’t you paying attention at the briefings?”
“Some,” Leif said. He shrugged. “You’re the brains of the family, brother-mine; I’m the good looks, dash, and charm.”
“You’re in for a rude shock if you’re thinking to charm the R’lyehans, or win them over with your so-called good looks, and you’ll likely meet disappointment—at best—if you tried.”
“Oh, I know better than to hope for lissome mermaids out of ancient legends. Still, when Uncle Torvald was in Leng—”
“Uncle Torvald,” Harald said, “was a drunk and a brute and a fool, and he died in a sand-pit with his guts squeezed out from both ends. I suggest you don’t seek to take after him.”
The world revolved in its constant spin. The sun set in a boiling chaos-storm of fire. The moon rose near-full, a bleak white staring eye. Planets traced their patterns against the eternal dance of stars and spheres.
And a speck, all but invisible, a pinprick among pinpricks, portended a death-knell for billions upon billions.
Y’cthiss waited.
Sensing the approaching presence of the humans. The thunder-weight of their machine, shaking the skies, whipping the waters. Electric tingling, chained-electric and life-electric, artificial, organic, sputtering signals, senseless cacophony. The stinks of metals and plastics, fuel and fumes, the poisons they called progress.
That they should have risen to dominance…they! When their thin crust of dry land covered not even half of the globe! And much of that, frozen or barren, inhospitable, worthless!
Yet, so it was.
While, in the seas, from shallows to depths to chasm-black trenches, the rightful had been passed over. Cheated. Denied. Glorious cousin-creatures of supple grace, boneless beauty, sleek of skin, shimmering of scale, myriad colors and delicate shapes…this should have been theirs.
Not the dominion of these…these…
Y’cthiss mind-searched their lexicon for a fitting epithet.
These fucked-up monkeys!
And, worst of all, to now be in need of them, in need of their help!
Could the Old Ones, in all their eons of dreaming, have come up with a more vile, insulting, abhorrent turn of events? It made the perverse obscenities of the Y’ha-nthlei deep-dwellers seem almost quaint, a mere lust-quirk.
Breeding with them. Y’cthiss shuddered, the involuntary motion causing a rippling chromatophore cascade, an oily spectrum racing outward along tapering radial limbs.
That any sentient being would even consider…
With such a monstrosity!
Grotesque and gangling, their stiff skeletal frameworks, their angular joints! Bony! Warm-fleshed, warm-blooded, sprouting with bristly loathsome hair! Bipedal and bilaterally symmetrical, with their ridiculous front-face binocular vision and their stupid round-hard skulls!
The machine-thunder departed, taking its barrage of noise and stink with it. Leaving behind two life-pulse-mind-signals. The two who were to be brought back to the city. To be well-treated. To be kept whole, unharmed.
Sane…might be another matter.
Sanity was far from guaranteed.
Nor was sanity guaranteed for Fthaal and Yhidd, though unharmed wholeness had been. Y’cthiss did not envy them the experience. Could not, in fact, imagine anything much worse than being a ‘guest’ among the humans. Except perhaps being taken captive to Carcosa, there to be displayed, tortured, and tormented for the entertainment of the court and servants of the King.
But Fthaal and Yhidd, as had these two, had gone with forewarned foreknown awareness into the bargain. They had agreed. They thought themselves strong enough of mind and will to withstand whatever strangeness they woul
d encounter.
Perhaps they could. Perhaps Y’cthiss underestimated.
It was not of immediate concern.
Of immediate concern was the charge of bringing these two to the city, looking after them as the Spawnpriest wished.
As if through a sheeting veil of water-space, Y’cthiss observed them.
They stood together on a rugged stretch of coarse, dark rock, the long-cooled remnants of a long-dead volcano’s final spew. As gangling, stiff, and bony as expected…compensating for that ridiculous front-facedness by setting themselves back-to-back to permit their weak binocular fields of vision to cover more of their surroundings. Of which, at the moment, there was little to be seen from their perspective.
The humans called this place Ephemera, mistakenly thinking the island itself came and went, when in truth the island itself stayed stationery, while angles of reality came and went around it.
“I saw it with my own two eyes,” one said aloud, in their weird language of breath and lips and tongue. “There was nothing as we descended, nothing, only open sea…and then, suddenly, as if in plain sight all along…”
“I told you,” said the other. “And, any minute now, it’ll happen again. A turning, as of a dial, or revolving door.”
Reflected moonlight played pale upon glistening formations of sea-slick stone as the transition occurred. The watery veil between Y’cthiss and the humans dissolved, bringing their grotesqueness into sharper, vivid focus. Bringing the warm blood-meat scent of them, the fast heart-pulses, the churning of their brains. By a particular potent and musky tang, Y’cthiss identified their ‘maleness;’ both were male, one younger and far hairier than the other.
Quelling an instinctive reaction to flare out frill-fins and extrude droplets of venom, Y’cthiss drew up to an approximate matching height with them, balanced on splayed tendrils grasping surely to the coarse volcanic rock.
They whirled, the hairier one clenching arm-claw digits into knobby clubs. The other put out a limb as if to restrain him. Their inadequate eyes widened in an effort to be more useful. Their throats made awkward gulpings—so many vessels ran through such a narrow juncture, air-tubes and blood-tubes and food-tubes; it was incredible the inner workings didn’t tie themselves in knots.
Y’cthiss moved toward them, undulating smoothly. The inflating and deflating pulsations of small bladder-sacs through fluted orifices allowed for a warbling, reedy approximation of their speech.
“You are the offshoots of the lander-leader.”
“It talks!” said the hairier of the two.
The less-hairy one nudged him with the restraining limb, then took a hesitant step toward Y’cthiss.
How they did not fall right over…unsupported by embracing water… tottering on a single foot-leg at a time…
“We are the Heimlandr Lawspeaker’s sons,” he said. “I am Harald. This is my brother, Leif.”
“I am Y’cthiss. To bring you to R’lyeh.”
Harald thought he had been prepared for this. He thought he had been ready.
He’d studied the available tomes, spoken to the best scholars and occultists, attended all the meetings and briefings with his mother and her advisers. He’d watched what few surviving videos there were: jumpy panic-stricken found footage; remote military and satellite surveillance; grainy black-and-white films from old wars.
He’d been to libraries and museums and secret government vaults. He had held, in his very hand, a figurine wrought from some strange and porous green-black mineral, the hunched and malformed image of the god supposedly sleeping beneath the sea.
He’d attended lectures and demonstrations by architects, mathematicians, physicists. He’d seen sketches, paintings, attempts at model-making and computer-generated rendering.
He’d even gone to asylums, and prisons for the criminally insane. He’d spent hours listening to cackling-mad mariners relate tales of the South Pacific. He’d met with a tiny, frail old woman who had, in her younger years, worked as a nanny for a family named Marsh.
R’lyeh.
Its immensity. Its looming, monstrous skyline…pillars and towers… tilted slabs taller than mountains…stacked walls of rough-hewn stones…coated with scum and slime, draped in fingerlike stringers of kelp…slick and wet in the pallid moonlight, in the harsh white blaze of stars…the way its buildings leaned, or bent, or curved…domes that did not seem like domes…plinths and monoliths and obelisks…arches twining back upon themselves…great vast dripping doorways into cavernous gloomy blackness…
All this, yes, he had thought himself prepared for.
The stench…brine, mud, rotting sea-weeds and dead fish, the rancid tang of sharkflesh left to ferment. A stench such that permeated the nose, that was tasted on the tongue and felt upon the skin as much as smelled, and the knowledge it was this air…this dank, damp, decaying air…being drawn into his lungs…
The sounds…the eternal slosh and crash of waves against pilings, against cliff-faces, coughing hollowly into yawing caves…a low but grinding, groaning creak as if the city itself strained to move…the eerie sighing whistle of wind through gaps and crevices.
Even the physical feel of the place was a revulsion. The surface of the path gave in a sick and sinking, appallingly wrong way beneath his feet. When he touched some mildewed piece of masonry jutting from a crumbling wall, it was firm but also soft, spongy, reminiscent in some terrible way of pressing the bald, birth-slippery crown of a newborn infant’s skull.
A nightmare corpse-city, they called it. But not because it was a city of the dead, no sepulcher or catacomb populated by wraiths and wights and the restless bodies of drowned men…the city was dead, the corpse was of the city…the nightmare the very fact of its existence.
Dead.
Dead, but dreaming.
Dead, but not empty, not abandoned.
Not populated by wraiths and wights and the restless bodies of drowned men…but by beings altogether inhuman. Many of them even nowhere near humanoid.
Very few of the denizens they saw, as they walked the broad slabstone thoroughfare beneath twisted bridges and overhanging fleshy lanterns like the lures of trenchfish, were what Harald had expected.
Hardly any of the froglike fishfolk of the Atlantic were in evidence, with their bulging eyes and slapping flipper-feet. Some octophibian warriors were stationed as silent, stoic guards outside a towering citadel.
Most were…other. Very, very other. Other, like the strangest, foreign, unearthly and most alien creatures ever dredged from the deep. Wavering polyps and clustered eyestalks, elongated spider-spindle legs, pincers, carapaces, underslung jaws bristling with needle-teeth. They crept, they crawled, they oozed like sea-snails with whorled shells and trails of slime.
He had thought himself prepared, braced for every mind-wrenching and soul-shattering abomination R’lyeh could throw at them.
But then there was Y’cthiss…
Their captor, guard, or guide.
Harald had not been prepared for…someone…or something…so…
So…beautiful.
The very idea, the very thought, distressed Harald to the core.
How could anything here, in this worst of all possible places, be anything but hideous?
Yet, Y’cthiss, flowing ahead of them, leading them onward toward that self-same guarded citadel, was…yes…beautiful.
Beautiful, and…and feminine somehow in aspect…though how, precisely, he could not say.
Perhaps it was the fluid grace of movement upon a gliding undulation of many slender, rolling limbs. Perhaps it was the iridescent sheen of colors swirling through a clear-dark amorphousness, as if the night-sky glimmer of the aurora had been captured within a smooth and living glassy sculpture.
“Mother’s plan to save the world,” Leif said, in a subdued, uneasy mutter, “means saving this. Saving them.”
Without turning, without needing to turn, Y’cthiss brought several limpid orbs to bear on Leif—whose mutter, however subdued, ha
d evidently not gone unheard. Myriad mouths like tiny blossoming undersea-flowers opened, issuing forth a haunting hollow whistle that took on the form of words.
“Our god,” said Y’cthiss, “slept already in his house here before the furthest ancestors of you fucked-up monkeys dropped from the trees. For us, saving this world means also saving you.”
The one who’d spoken blinked hair-fringed skin-flaps over his stupid binocular eyes, gaping as if to suck plankton. The other, who’d been in an odd-thought silence, broke it now with a burst of ragged sound like the barking of a seal.
Y’cthiss presumed this meant the use of words from their lexicon had been effective, and continued on. With their stiff-limbed, angle-jointed, single-footed strides, they followed.
“My brother,” said the one called Harald, when he had stifled his seal-barks, “intended no offense. We are honored to be here.”
“You are not welcome,” Y’cthiss said. “This is of necessity, nothing more. Mistake it not. Your presence in R’lyeh is for no embassy of friendship or further alliance. Just as is the presence of two of ours among your people.”
He wobbled his bulbous yellow-haired head upon his feeble-seeming neck. “Hostages to ensure the cooperation of our governments. We understand. Our mother sent us, her sons, to show her personal commitment to this common cause.”
“For so like are Fthaal and Yhidd of the Spawnpriest’s own brood-pods. High rank and importance.”
“Are they…are you…related?”
At that, Y’cthiss could not suppress a trilling violet-flicker quiver of annoyance. “We do not share lineage.”
“And my brother,” Leif said, flashing non-threatening blunt white nubs in a harmless display, “meant no offense either. Did you, Harald?”
The hair-ridges above his eyes drew together as if perplexed. “No, none, of course not.”
Ahead loomed the central citadel, its curled spires clawing at the moon, its mass blotting out the stars. Eldritch light spilled through its corroded, verdigris-caked gates and latticed windows. Tide-basins brimmed to either side of the entrance, seawater trickling sluggishly down mismatched travertine terraces where hagskips flopped and wallowed. A narrowing, upward-winding path between them was flanked at intervals by hulking armored guards with deadly and ornate spears gripped in suckered coils.
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