The Dark Crystal: Plague of Light

by James Comins

  "Warm bed," the Chamberlain hissed. "Provide you a warm bed. My room." A particularly nasty glare appeared, with a hiccup of a snarl beneath it. The snarl faded into a cruel smile. "Oh, it won't need unloading, I think. I'll take the cart, too. Mmmmm."

  "Now wait just a minute," Lemny exclaimed. "We've had this ol' thing since time imminterial. Thick and thin. Up this fine land of ours and down it. If you think we're prepared to sell it, after you've--you've--"

  "Careful," Gobber hissed.

  "After you've--" said Lemny.

  "Careful," Gobber said again.

  "AFTER YOU'VE STOLEN OUR SHOVEL AND SMASHED OUR GLASS THING AND EATEN OUR FOOD AND STIFFED US ON THE LOT, IF YOU THINK YOU'RE GETTING OUR--"

  "Stolen?" interrupted the Chamberlain carefully. "I, a thief? I think not. Hmmmm! I distinctly recall hearing the word 'gift' from you two. Did I not? But," he continued, "if you're going to throw around accusations--"

  "Nope, cart's yours, cart's yours, we were just going," Gobber said. "Er, about that one yenti? No, you're right, it'd be an indignity, it would. All a gift, and we'll be right on our way--"

  Long fingers gripped Gobber by the collars of his coats, lifted him up, up, up into the air, and brought him face to face with the sharp beak of the Skeksi, who smiled.

  The Podling was flung into the doorway. He landed hard and groaned as he pushed himself to his feet. On impulse, he kneeled, shaking.

  "I'll take the bug, too," the terrible voice snapped. A yenti coin landed in Gobber's lap. Gripping it in four sticky fingers, the Podling turned and ran.

  * * *

  "Fancy yourself a builder, do you, Loora?" Aughra said as Cory swept up the leaves that the Woodland Gelfling Council had tracked in. "Like to work with your hands? Hmp! Come with me."

  Finally they were gone, and Cory was alone with his thoughts. There wasn't anything to ponder into, since Aughra had destroyed his meditation globe, so he swept and sang very softly to himself. Cory was no great singer, so he only sang loud enough to hear himself. Everyone told him he was awful, told him not to sing, and he knew they were right. But nobody else seemed to know the songs he knew, and nobody would ever sing to him, least of all his parents.

  "Time sweeps on," he sang as he swept,

  "Through every leaf and twig and branch and limb,

  Time runs through us all

  From morning's shine to twilight's dim,

  There's nothing on Thra that doesn't change with time--

  Me or you," he sang, "her and him,

  Time sweeps all of us on."

  He bent down and took handfuls of leaves from his pile and threw them out the door. A zephyr swept them over his head and back into the room. Sighing, he turned and started again.

  "The only truth that we all know

  Is that nothing ever stays the same.

  Boats on flowing water, moving slow

  Past the lonely shores of life

  Time takes us farther than we want to go,

  All we can do, from day to day,

  Is let time sweep us on."

  Brushing his pile of leaves and dust and forest mud out the door successfully, he observed the nice view out the front door, the clean and leaf-free front hall, nodded, sighed, and sat crosslegged in front of the closed door to meditate.

  Harder to focus without the glass. His head was so full of pictures. Couldn't clear them away without distraction. Something to ponder about . . . the Grand-Gelfs, laying side by side, blue light shining from them . . . his father, laying at home in bed . . . Light Sickness . . . the blue light . . . an illness that touched both the greatest of the elders and a lowly village gardener . . . people who've never met each other . . . how did it spread? . . . people were connected somehow . . . what connected them? . . . yes, the focus was coming . . . the future surrounded him . . . he let it fill his mind, pushing aside his swarming thoughts . . .

  Gelflings, tens of thousands of Gelflings, filling the rolling prairie between the edge of Dark Wood and the arid outer reaches of the sparkling Crystal Sea Desert . . . Tents set up, pavilions, strange wheeled landships and long-legged landstriders and sunstained faces and tall hooded Gelflings and slender shining Gelflings and crabwalking bent Gelfs and pets and steeds and horns and flags . . . The reddish-maroon dying sun setting and the great and rose suns already down as evening precessed in the late season . . . An obscene roar of voices, unending . . . the seven tribes . . . a great machine in the center, ready to end life, ready for war . . . shouts of fear, an absolute fear, a fear consuming and throbbing and deathly . . . fear growing like the welling thoraxes of biting insects . . . fear . . .

  Cory flew backward, tumbling over himself leaflike through the open door of Aughra's house. But he had closed it, he thought briefly as he fell and clunked onto the steps and slid down them.

  What had happened? Why were these reactions so strong now? None of his visions had ever lashed out at him before, he thought, brushing himself off and finding his feet on the slanted steps. Must have been that black water. It had done something to him; that must be it. If only his mother had left him alone, if only he hadn't come here, if only Aughra hadn't poisoned his beautiful future . . .

  As he climbed the last steps back to Aughra's house, he looked up and found the door had closed again. Trying it, he found it barred. Someone had gone in.

  Should have barred it himself, he thought. Now a robber had slipped inside when he was distracted and had locked him out. A few determined shouts of "Aughra" and "Loora" earned no response. The windows were solid green glass. Cory glared at the leaf pile he'd just swept outside the door and kicked it, irritated. He hoped whoever had snuck in didn't mean to hurt anyone. Really wasn't his business.

  There wasn't any comfortable place to sit and wait, so he began circumnavigating the thin dirt and stone rim around the outside of the observatory, pushing through leafy and spiny limbs of trees at the very edge of Dark Wood, feeling much more alone out here than he had indoors. Being alone didn't feel so comforting out here. It wasn't safe, being locked out of some stranger's house after he'd been practically bought by her . . .

  Cory slipped.

  Vertigo spun as his feet went out and he went down. Slipping, falling, headfirst. A series of slopes, plateaus. Leaves gathered behind his black hair as he fell through, and a layer of dry gray soil skittered past as he plunged into Dark Wood. His hands scraped as he tried to slow his progress, and he called out, to nobody and to nothing. The slope transformed from dry and leafy to moist and rainforested the deeper he slid, and he skipped through streams of spraying waterfalls and into ferny plants he'd never seen before, flew past burls of golden-trunked trees whose bark let off a filmy light, into a low stratum of fog that made Thra wet and white, emerging upon a deep valley and shooting over a short cliff where he managed to get himself facing right-side-up before skidding into open space, free falling at high speed over the open vale, a thousand green leaves covering the sky, landing on a leaf so wide that houses could be built out of it, ships folded from its lance-tipped green shape. He tried standing, but the leaf was bending on its stem from his weight and--oh no it was going down--he slid down the central vein and fell onto another leaf, which tipped as well, again and again, a cascade of leaves, each larger than the last, until they were wide enough to fit Aughra's entire observatory but so sensitive that they folded at his miniscule weight and he fell, and fell, and there was the ground coming closer, and he was going to--no, this leaf didn't fold, it held his weight, bowing and springy, and he sat uncertainly and was, at last, at rest.

  The Woodland Gelfling Clan never came this deep into Dark Wood. Nobody came this deep. The inner wood was unoccupied. The canopy meant that light only filtered through in jagged grids, leaving the depths gloomy and still and as hot as boiled oilbread. Echoes of flapbirds and cragraptors high above. Drips of captive water. The leaf bounced as he tried to rise, and he flinched as he lost his footing, expecting to fall again. But it held his weight, bouncing unsteadily
. Green as--well, leaves, he supposed. Yellow at the curled tip.

  Alone.

  * * *

  SkekTek stood facing the blinding purple flame which played across the eastern tower of the Castle. Over his eyes were wraparound darkglasses made of layers of clear crystal with a variety of light-diffusing chemicals sandwiched between them. One can never be too careful with the unknown.

  What he saw amazed him. Skektek frequently wished he had someone equally intelligent to share his discoveries with, but none of the other Skeksis cared for his experiments and there was no one else here, so he talked to himself instead. His was the only opinion worth his time. So what if a few slaves overheard?

  "It came from the Dark Crystal itself," he murmured. "Yes, it quite certainly did. The same frequency, wavelength, and resonance. Came from the Dark Crystal. But how? Perhaps the Crystal has been emitting a low-level charge that built up somewhere until it reached a threshold. Static? What's the cause? And can it be duplicated?"

  The house slaves did not answer.

  "Can this discharge be stored?" he said to himself, pacing. He took a small piece of shattercite and carefully approached the purple flames with the ordinary Thra crystal extended.

  A terrifically painful, exotic electric ringing filled his ears. Grimacing, he kept the shattercite cluster tight between two fingers. He couldn't open his eyes, but something was quite definitely happening. Quite definitely. The noise was at the high reaches of his hearing, grinding like cut glass. It persisted, then ended with a shocking pop.

  The shattercite had become a violent purple and seemed to vibrate in his hand. Lucky it didn't have inclusions or caries, it might have burst. Instead it was a perfect receptacle. Of course it was. The flames were gone completely.

  Such a genius, you are, skekTek, he told himself, bringing the charged shattercite down the stairs toward his lab to see what it could do.

  The castle was a maze, a tangle. The sandstone interior blacked out the light of the crystal exterior, and flaming sconces in twisted braziers were tended by slaves with bellows. A less noisy light source must be found--a single beam reflected into crystals, perhaps--

  In one of the middle corridors, he heard, "Hmmmmm." And, "Put that light out, you lunatic! I'll go blind."

  SkekTek smiled to himself and continued toward his lab, failing to put away the glowing crystal.

  "Did you hear me?" the Chamberlain shouted, coming up the hall.

  An odd croaking creaking squeaking sound, and "Wouldn't you reconsider, kind sir? It's only that, you know, fair's fair, and I know from fair, and couldn't you at least let me out to stretch me legs, I'd only be a moment, be hardly a flick of your fingers, kind sir, only I meant no offendin', and I can see I've said something wrong and I'll take it back and recant the whole thing only I've got to be on the road, d'y'see, Gobber'd be expecting me--"

  Through the slightly watery brown-red glaze of the darkglasses, skekTek saw the Chamberlain dragging a filthy cart through the corridor, leaving muddy tracks behind him.

  "What have you got?" skekTek asked, smiling as the Chamberlain flinched from the powerful light of the shattercite.

  "None of your affair. Hmmmm! What have you got?" the Chamberlain asked him.

  The two stood facing each other in the narrow hall. There was no way to get past the Chamberlain's cart, and skekTek was certainly not going to backtrack just to let the cart pass.

  "WILL YOU PUT THAT THING OUT?" the Chamberlain snapped. SkekTek closed his hand around the shattercite. Both the busybody and a small beetly creature in a cage uncovered their eyes.

  "Why not just tell a slave to unload that for you?" skekTek sneered.

  "Thieving lot, Pod People. Hmmmm! Everyone knows that."

  "They've not been adequately conditioned, I've told you."

  "Tell it to skekNa. Now. Out of my way," the Chamberlain said.

  "Er, kind sir, would it be so much to let me out of this cage? I was not actually for sale, ack'shly, being the one doing the sellin'."

  That was said from somewhere within the depths of the filthy cart.

  "What," skekTek asked, "is that?" He peered in at the creature, with its small claw-like hands and bug face. "Looks like dinner."

  "Belongs to me," the Chamberlain said. He swept his wide sleeve over the cart.

  SkekTek stepped into the Chamberlain's personal space, intending to brush past and continue on his way. Instead he heard, "You'd best ask him about the golden shovel he bought off me, my grand feathery compatriot. Seems the sort of thing a smart one like you 'ud want to know about." The Chamberlain squawked for him to be quiet, but the words had rather caught in skekTek's ear.

  "Golden?" skekTek murmured. "Something golden?"

  "Oh yes, gold azza rising great sun, and believe you me, I know from gold. Took it like a common thief."

  "Quiet!" the Chamberlain howled.

  "But seeing as you're clearly a Skek of some learnin', I'd say that if you'd gotten your fair pick of our goods, you'd of taken one look and thought, 'That's a shovel for me,' you'd have thought."

  "Would I really?" said skekTek. He was not susceptible to flattery, or course, being of an objective scientific bent, but he was not adverse to some . . . recognition of his intellect. That was a different thing entirely.

  "It's up his sleeve, if you want to know," the bug said.

  "Ha!" SkekTek unclasped his hand and shone the charged shattercite at the Chamberlain. As the busybody shielded his eyes, skekTek lunged and rummaged in the ornamented sleeves and pulled out something metal wagging in a hidden pocket.

  "No fair. I'll let you rent it from me for three yenti. For one day," the Chamberlain said, cringing in the potent purple glare.

  SkekTek cared very little for money. Bothersome practice, not at all like the bartering and stealing of yestertrine. He found a single old coin in his own sleeve. "I'll take it for a week," he said. Reaching into the cart, he pulled out a handful of amber beads, the shard of glass lens, and took the Crabbit cage from its hook. "And these are necessary for my experiments." He flipped the coin to the Chamberlain, who scowled, and skekTek pushed past him, knocking the cart sideways and spilling everything.

  * * *

  In the beginning, the Storyteller told her audience, there was friendship. The Skeksi and the ur-Mystic. The Gelfling and the Podling. The cragraptor and the fizzgig. All lived in harmony, as if they were one being. Then the Dream infected the Skeksis, and disruption spread. The Skeksis began to look more carefully at their friends. Friendship with the Podlings and Gelflings provided stability, but how much more stable if they were controlled utterly? Friendship with the Mystics meant balance, but how much nicer to be unbalanced . . . in your own direction? Friendship with the animals meant safety, but how much safer if animals were blindly obedient to the Skeksis? Better to enslave them, to take without giving. How much happier the Skeksis would be if everyone did what the Skeksis wanted!

  And they had an advantage. Control over that which controls all else: the Great Crystal. They had long since driven out the Mystics and had the Castle of the Crystal to themselves. So much power within the palm of their scaly hands, the heart of Thra itself in their grasp. And for so long they had left that power unexploited.

  No longer, the dream whispered. It was time to use that which was Skek. And all the world was Skek, if only they wanted it.

  Oh, how they wanted it. They just didn't know it yet.

  * * *

  "Yes, that's the way. Heat it again before you attach the handle. Don't let it rest, keep turning it, elsewise it'll go flat as it cools. Yes, almost done. Now keep it perfectly round until it loses the fire's glow."

  Loora's hands were too small for the gloves really, but she kept a tight grip on the tongs as she turned the meditation globe. Not a plain blue globe like Cory's smashed one. This was a glittering wonder. She had a knack for glassworking, she could feel it. It would be perfect. There: finally the liquid orange had faded to sparkles. It could be posted uprig
ht in the stand without fear of it becoming lopsided.

  "One last finishing touch. This'll really give it pizzazz."

  The strange old woman departed from the glass furnace, took a ladle from a hook, and marched down to the front hall.

  Loora heard a faint, unfamiliar voice in the distant front hall. The splash of spilled water. After some time, a scowling Aughra returned with a rag and squeezed black water out onto the cooling meditation globe. She chucked the ladle into a corner irritably.

  "What kept you?" Loora asked. "It's already cooled."

  The strange water dripped over the globe. Very little of it actually melded into the cool glass. The result was far less than satisfactory, Loora thought, dark and splotchy, but perhaps Cory would like it anyway. She wished Aughra hadn't altered it. It'd be nicer to give the gift just as it had been.

  "What's your beak made of?" Loora asked, reaching to touch it. Aughra swatted her hand away.

  "Why's it your business, I'd like to know?" the woman snipped. "I'll look the way I want to look."

  "Mother."

  The word came from a few feet away. It was not Cory; not at all.

  The two turned and saw who it was.

  Who it was was shorter than Loora. Bluish-black skin was covered in a tunic of patchy furs. Long brown ears were tilted up, shaped as if carved from some very exotic wood and tufted with bluish-black hair. The face was assymmetrical; one eye bulged orange while the other seemed miniscule in light purple. A watery grin, and behind it, a thousand teeth like a snapping karock ready to feed.

  Loora had to fight the urge to run and hide. It was, she thought, a killing animal who had been taught to stand upright and wear clothes. No wise or loving thing wore such a face.

  "I'm here, Mother." The creature with the mismatched eyes breathed heavily. Aughra was screwing up her mouth in disgust.

  "Why?" Aughra said. "Why have you come home? Raunip, you've made your choices."

  "Do you know how far this disease spreads, Mother?" the imp asked.

  "Cured it this morning," Aughra said.