by James Comins
* * *
"Bring me Aughra's nose."
It took only a toll for the Podling slave to return with the athertine object. How the gem-eyed slave slipped in through the notelocked kennels door was a mystery, one that skekTek hadn't any time to dwell on. How the Podling retrieved the object from the wise woman herself--well, he did so. No reason to complain.
And where was the Gelfling guard, for whose loyalty he was going to all this trouble? No matter. Levers were being usefully pulled.
A last few adjustments before the assault. A few straps of tough mounder leather and the enormous bladewheel and its reinstalled engine system hung like a prosthetic belly.
Everything was ready.
The kennels were most easily reached through the great hall, but just as there were secret places to see a purple fire in the outer towers, so were there ways to reach the kennels without being seen. SkekTek brought the black- and green-eyed slave to open the door for him.
Hidden corridors twisted through the underways of the Castle, veins in a hardened crystal heart. SkekTek's steps clanked, and the razorwheel turned freely in the still air. The slave hopped mindlessly after him. On skekTek's back was a bag with punishments inside.
A white sconce clicked and a patch of wall swung open. The bladewheel slid through the gap. Green light soaked through from the kennels braziers.
"Open the door," skekTek told the slave. A new pattern of pongs and dings later, the door opened. Wise not to open it himself.
The shadows were deep and barely cut by the emerald braziers. Hmm. It seemed that the light of the kennels was lower than it had been before. But the same cages held the same Pod families, differing only in the large and newly occupied steel cage in the distance, where the wise woman waited.
Where was the Slavemaster?
SkekTek took each step carefully, keeping a thumb on the latch that would release the Dark Crystal's energies. First, though. From the bag on his back, skekTek took his Incapacitator and held it in front of him, smiling grimly. Superior intellect . . . humiliations, theft . . . yes . . . these dark and sickening halls held all the keys to his vengeance . . . all the upcoming projects could wait, would benefit the others as much as himself . . . but this . . . and a new assistant, no reason to discount all the things to be gained . . . a flare of impatience began to grow in his breast, a hazardous feeling . . . the voice of that wise woman . . . stars, fire, void, the three suns . . . the voice of tens of thousands of Gelflings filling a vast plain . . . the screaming horns of fierce war . . . the voice of that wise woman, louder, louder . . . gone . . .
From above, an odious voice, filtering through the haze . . .
* * *
"SkekTek!" she hollered. "He's right above you!"
Four blades flashed faintly green and bright silver as a black shape fell.
UrNol pressed his brown face to the bars, observing as much as possible through the shuttered darkness.
A whine like the whiproots of sixbuds thrashing though the air. Several things happened as the dark shape landed on the Skeksi and his huge metal device. First, the razorwheel began spinning. Jangling, whistling, and steadily increasing in speed, the giant wheel carved through the air. Second, a flare of yellow light went off, deafening urNol briefly with a song that seemed to suck his brains out. Aughra collapsed, and he lifted her back to her feet, and together they watched the black shape curl into a ball on the floor.
The Skeksi set the whirring wheel down and knelt. With a wild, unnatural wail, he pulled metal thing after metal thing out of his sack and then bent over the black shape. Cries of distraction and meddler and betrayer and the black shape groaned and did not rise again.
"Poor urUtt," urNol muttered. Aughra shushed him.
The Skeksi lifted the howling wheel back to his chest and began stalking through the kennels, paying most of the occupants no attention at all. Ducking into a side room, the Skeksi began causing some sort of auditory nightmare as the wheel touched something unyielding and spat out grinding death. The terrible sound endured, and prisoners from every corner of the kennels began screaming. He must be grinding them all up. Oh, still such thoughts, urNol, it isn't within your power to save them. Turning, the ur-Mystic hid his ears in his hands and sat with his back to the screaming.
Minutes of grinding and screaming passed. Aughra nudged him. "See," she said.
First out of the side room was the wheel, a neon white-hot sparking circle that shot long sheets of blue flame out each side of the axle, a foul pulsar.
The Skeksi marched behind it, a look of gleeful insanity on his face.
And behind him came no less than fourteen bone-thin Gelflings in tattered waistcloths and sunken, sucking ribs.
The white wheel bit into cage after cage, and Podlings scrambled through lunkwood doors and streamed out of the kennels. Backlit in the locking doorway waited a motionless Podling with one black eye and one green eye and a twitching nose. The Pod families pushed past to freedom.
Eyes of madness shone above the wheel. The Skeksi approached the steel cage in the back.
"I care nothing whether you are free or captive," the Skeksi said in a husky voice. "But this creature wishes to hurt another creature, and this delights me."
"Hello, !'rm%htht'4@th*'blr@m," said Aughra, "I know your sister."
UrNol flicked his eyes between the two. Who--what was? Oh, it didn't matter what was going on, as long as they weren't cooked flapbird meat . . .
"Does she live?" the Skeksi asked, his voice changing still further, becoming higher-pitched, like a talking insect.
"Yes, we've preserved her. She dwells within the Gnarled Stonetree. Good place for her. But there's death for dreams afoot. Hmp! Coming too close. Would you help us to save your life?"
The wheel tore through the steel bars, and the bars fell hard, bleeding sparks.
"What do you need?" the Skeksi said in the unnatural insect-voice.
"Tell anyone you meet that the Dark Crystal is being drained of its essence," said Aughra, stepping out past the red-tipped stubs of steel bar. "And it's draining dreams of their essence in turn, to stay alive."
"My sister and I both have felt it," the thing inhabiting skekTek said, "and we each have found ways to stay alive."
"Hmp! Won't be forever."
"Is there a greater source of essence than the Dark Crystal itself?" skekTek's mouth said. "I can deliver such a message to the Skeksis. They don't listen, but they will obey the Emperor."
"Find me tomorrow, !'rm%htht'4@th*'blr@m. The Mystics will have found the answer by then."
UrNol flinched as the white wheel finally snapped through its axle and carved a flaming ditch through the floor of the kennels before exhausting itself halfway through a wall.
* * *
"Ready?"
"A new life is waiting for me," Yrn said, inhaling one last breath.
"Bargain me buttons, you're sinking into the--I'm sinking into--help!" Gobber moaned, staring at his disappearing feet.
Together they plunged into the stone, which spat pebbles into the air, and Loora braced a hand over the Dreamthing and the two refracting lenses she had made in their three individual bags as she, Yrn, and Gobber again rotated underground to the angle that they needed to point, but--
"It's too steep. We'll shoot over the--" Loora shouted.
"Wotyoumean 'shoot over the--?' "
"Over the canyon!" and in a familiar rush of tension they shot up through the rim of the valley and over the canyon. Clouds of batwinged insects flapped from the orange walls of the canyon, and rennfeets bellowed up from the canyon floor at the trio plummeting across the air and into the stone wall like hugging drills.
They slowed, and Yrn brought them to a stop inside the solid rock. Loora's breath began to fade out, helped not at all by the sensation of weightless flight. Twisting, Yrn turned them toward Crystal Castle, and an elastic feeling pulled at Loora's feet until she was nearly dragged away from Yrn and into the shattered rock, and--
Like lightning through air, they shot through stone.
Steaming breaths came in gasps. The Dreamthing remained tight in her hand.
"I'd rather be a Skeksi's lunch," Gobber shouted. "Matter of fact, I'm apt to lose mine--" but only a watery belch came out of him. "My tongue's gone numb, and it smells like those spots you get on your feet."
The roaring continued.
"Were we in such a rush that feet weren't good enough to travel wif?"
"We could drop you off here," Yrn said.
"Sourmouths, Gelflings, I've always said it."
And nothing more was said. The stone became clay, the clay became dirt, and the dirt became dry dirt and the three of them launched into the damp air at a thousand trors a second past the Crystal Castle and directly at the forehead of a cave-eater whose mouth was propped open with a metal spring.
"Grraauuughhnnar!" the cave-eater roared.
"Don't eat me!" Gobber roared right back. "I'm filfy, and I'm too young besides. Taste like dustmoats an' old string, I would--"
"Cllldn't eat ou if I 'anted oo," the cave-eater mumbled through the latch around its teeth. "S'artled me is allll."
"Fank anyone fankable for that," said Gobber. "Didn't see you the last time I was here."
Loora was starting to like the funny little bean.
"Na'ural camou'hlage," the cave-eater mumbled. "H'say, ould oo hmind remoo'ing zis? Can hard'hy thsay ood orning."
Wiping rock chunks off herself and checking that the Dreamthing was on its rope around her neck and the lenses unbroken in their pouches, Loora slid down the broad nose of the cave-eater, found the end of the spring, and began uncoiling it. Since the cave-eater didn't have hands, he couldn't do it himself, poor thing. Must have gotten himself tangled up in this old metal . . . whatever it was . . .
"Grrraaaaauuuuthank you," the huge mouth roared as the unbalanced spring catapulted the metal frame down the mountainside. Shaking the three of them off, the cave-eater rolled its huge head to the ground and began chewing. In seconds, only a cave was left.
"Nice enough sort," said Gobber. He took the two lenses and clutched them. "Let's take care of business, then."
* * *
"I appreciate the ride. Share my thanks with the family."
And the mounder lumbered away on its four heavy limbs.
* * *
"Do you think the Weaver's plan is really going to work?" said Yrn as they trotted down the stony ramp of the foothills toward the desert.
"Pessimistic," said Loora. "They're wiser than anyone else in the world. Of course it'll work. We transfer your dream to the Dreamthing, and then we transfer the Dark Crystal's sickness to you, and we travel back to ur-Kalivath. Crazy but easy."
"Sounds like mumkins and tamtail droppings to me," said Gobber. "Mystic mumbo-jumbo. Now for me it's yentis and a warm dinner. That's all I've ever asked for."
"Yrn, I want you to stay optimistic. Who knows? Maybe without death hanging around your shoulders you'll be happy, the way you deserve to be. Don't look at me like that. I think you deserve to be happy. Your skin will turn normal, and you'll meet someone you love, and everything will fall into place."
"What's wrong with my skin?" Yrn said, and Loora covered her mouth, mortified, but Yrn grinned at her and she scowled and punched him. He seemed, she thought, to be harboring a glimpse of optimism.
They walked the desert in silence. Strange bats shuffled across the storm-black sky, and scrawny insects chittered from cactulus stands.
The doors to the Castle of the Crystal rose above them like the world's tallest pair of teeth. "I'll do the honors," said Gobber. "I've got business here." He rapped on the door, whose crystal surface yielded an echo.
A forebidding silence replied.
"Always like this, those door-attendants. Don't care a cob or a trice for people waitin' out in the cold. OPEN UP, YOU OVERGROWN FLAPBIRDS, I'VE GOT MATTERS TO RESOLVE." He pounded his small fists on the resonant surface.
Nothing.
"Give 'em a second, is all," Gobber added.
Nope.
"Try the handle," said Yrn.
"Wouldn't do anything, they always keep it locked," said Gobber.
But Loora tugged, and the door swung like breadcorn in a strong breeze.
Inside, the braziers of the front hall had blown out, along with most of the candles of the chandeliers. No one was there. The three of them were alone.
"Somefing's happened," murmured Gobber, treading softly into the anteroom. "There's always guards. Attendants. Servants. Got uniforms on. Where is--?"
There was no one in the front hall. The three pushed on beneath shadowy, dripping chandeliers and the faint purple glow of the walls to where a second great pair of interior doors waited.
All the surfaces were alien and unnatural.
"We're saving my mom," said Loora, looking up at the shut doors. "And Cory's dad."
The doors were locked. She knocked.
"THEY'VE BROKEN OUT INTO THE ANTEROOM!" screamed a guttural voice from inside. The door blasted open and a beaked monster rushed out and lifted Loora into the air.
* * *
"Well," said Aughra, "you got here. What did the Mystics say?"
It was so close now. The end to a lifetime of nonstop concentration, of deformity, of loneliness. Inches away and all he had to do was face the Dark Crystal while bearing Loora's Dreamthing in his hand, a single word . . . And yet the Skeksis had placed a cage between him and his future.
"They told me I need to see the Dark Crystal," he told her.
"Through that big door," she replied, pointing.
An impromptu cage had been built inside some kind of demented laboratory. A Podling with a glass eye stood in the center of the room, motionless, while Skeksis scurried in and out, bringing Podlings and Gelflings in and shoving them into the newly built and very cramped cages. No one paid any attention at all when Loora shouted at them about a mission to save the people of Thra.
"Why are all these people here?" Loora finally asked Aughra.
The woman sighed. "The Skeksis have been taking slaves from the villages. Now that urNol and I have seen what horrors take place inside the Castle? Very unlikely that we will be allowed to leave. In the meantime, the Dark Crystal drinks from the hearts of everyone on Thra. Hoped they'd put tomorrow's survival above today's little pleasures. Hmp! Shows what I know. Shouldn't have come."
"The Light Sickness--" Loora said as she tried to disassemble the cage.
"The sickness is in the Dark Crystal itself," said an ur-Mystic squeezed into a cage beside Aughra. He smelled of cactulus. "It's wasting away. Soon we'll be gone, and then all of Thra will follow."
"The Mystics have a plan," Yrn said. "All I have to do is get to the Dark Crystal, and we can heal it."
"Sounds simple," said the Mystic. "Aughra, do you think that weird dream can convince the Skeksis to--"
"I am here," a reedy voice said. "I have been waiting. Permit me."
A gasp, and a Skeksi wearing a steel frame released a struggling Podling from his grasp and marched to the capstan.
* * *
As the bars fell away, Loora stepped out and stood beside Yrn, who was facing the rancid light of a purple crystal twice as tall as she was.
"It's just the way Cory described it," she said. "Except for the part about someone hitting it."
"Let's finish this." Yrn tore his vest open and took the Dreamthing from Loora. He held it over his green-skinned heart with both hands and recited the one word, renew, and it began--
The Dreamthing lit. At the same time, a red glow surrounded Yrn's body. Loora realized it was streaming out of her own heart, but she didn't feel--
No. No, it didn't come from her heart, it was flowing into her heart. From Yrn's. Somehow, under all his obsessions and pessimisms, he felt love--
The Dreamthing seemed to wake fully, and its star-shaped interior filled with a receptive white light. The Weaver had calculated its shape to be activated by
the frequencies from the Dark Crystal. Yrn's lovelight poured out of him into Loora, who felt a new warmth inside her own chest, not her own love but his, pouring out, a connection--
What she felt instead, somehow, was Cory, etched into a sunlight that she saw as vividly as a dream, and she reached for him, as if he were really there, and then Cory's face twinkled like a sky of stardust, and as her reaching fingers touched Cory's, a dark shape flitted between them, and she felt her heart stop.
* * *
"Loora!" screamed Yrn as she fell.
Other voices called out from where the dream-enchanted Skeksi had opened the mass of cages, but Yrn didn't hear anything, not really. Only Loora's lifeless body was real. He wrapped himself around it, feeling his withered arm twitch and pulse with useless new blood. Breath soared back to him, but Loora was gone and the dream of death would return to him, it might even have the strength to begin infecting the entire world, burning out lives one by one. The Dreamthing--it was the only thing that might--but Loora convulsed and went limp and a dark shape flicked from her eyes and Yrn held up the black amulet that might contain it, but the flicker seemed to bounce away, and--
A violent bolt of purple light crackled out from the Dark Crystal and encircled the flicker of dark.
The dark hand of death slid through the purple light into the crack in the Dark Crystal, and entered the light, and the purple flared and then dulled and burned darker and darker until its purple was the color of sick soot.
Yrn lifted Loora's limp body and took her to Aughra. "Help me save her," he breathed.
"Put her down."
The fragile body splayed like an armload of kindling on the sandstone floor.
"Now," Aughra's bitter voice said, "lift that instead."
She pointed to the Dark Crystal. It had become the color of old wine and sparked angrily with flashes of black.
Yrn's withered arm wasn't strong enough to support anything, but he wrapped his now completely healthy and muscular arm around the narrow base of the Dark Crystal, breathed, flexed, and heaved, and the Crystal shifted onto his shoulder.
When he turned, balancing the Dark Crystal with each perfectly measured, perfectly balanced step, he saw blue light flaming off of the chests of everyone in the laboratory: tiny blue sparks from the Podlings, and gouts like rivers from the Gelflings.
