Beneath Strange Stars

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  Tawa stood. The madman now seemed shadow and smoke. “I’m going inside.”

  Sethothtris looked up, eyes aflame. “Do you seek the god?”

  “There are no gods,” Tawa said. “I seek only answers.”

  She turned from Sethothtris and approached he Oracle’s portal. She glanced back but the old man was one with the night. She walked between the fangs, into sweet smoke and reddish light.

  Snakes writhed in the blood-light; Tawa saw their flickering tongues, heard their hissing. Venomous serpents writhed on every column and stone. Every path took her within striking range of the snakes. She saw the bones of others who had come this way.

  The thin vapors were heavy with incense. Her eyes stung.

  The snakes surged forward, eyes glinting.

  Fighting a primal fear, Tawa unsheathed her sword and held it ready. She trembled. The portal was only three paces behind her, safety and ignorance and defeat. She stepped forward and swung her sword in a flat arc, aiming across serpents ready to strike.

  Her blade struck stone.

  The head of a snake shattered, fell to the ground.

  Tawa now saw carved stone. The ring of metal against stone echoed from columns and unseen walls. The sound died, like the last peal of a temple bell. The snakes did not slither, did not hiss; their glinting eyes became faceted crystals. She slipped two gems into the pouch of sling-stones at her waist.

  Holding her breath, Tawa passed through the rising vapors, moving between serpents carved of veined stone, some sinuous bodies larger than a galley upon the sea. Fangs glinted within yawning lithic mouths. Then the guardians were behind her, and vapors no longer streamered the air.

  She stood at the plunge of a winding flight of stairs, dim lit by a pale blue illumination from below; on either side, black rock walls closed in. Wide stairs were littered with bones and shattered skulls. She saw weapons given over to rust and decay.

  Starting down, she heard a sound like the rushing of wind through a narrow place. She dropped instinctively; death moaned above her. Her sword clattered away. She tumbled, striking the steps and the blue-tainted blackness of the walls. As she came to a rest, a memory caught up with her, a stinging in an upraised elbow. Her hand came away wet and dark with blood. She found her sword on the steps and continued downward, keeping low.

  At the terminus of the stairs, walls fell away She saw distant mountains against the horizon. Below her, stretching on either side to the mountains and before her beyond sight, was a great forest. A milky luminescent haze swirled and eddied high above, making Tawa’s hands those of a corpse.

  Tawa descended to the forest. Gnarled, misshapen trunks twisted upward. The forest was impenetrable at every spot except a point where the mossy branches of two trees twined to form an archway. Tawa entered the immensity of those subterranean woods, and the light from the roiling mist all but vanished.

  The earth was soft, like decaying flesh. It gave at every step and released her feet reluctantly. Skulls grinned eyeless at her from shadows, mocking her. The forest was labyrinthine, but she kept to the straight track, veering left when options were offered,

  Growling sounds came from the depths of the forest, each echoed by another until she seemed ringed by menacing beasts. She saw their glowing eyes roving among the trees. She did not pause or give in to panicked desire to flee. She continued relentlessly along her chosen path.

  A bristling shadow leaped onto the path, barring her way, fixing her with fiery eyes. Tawa stepped into the beast’s lunge and beneath it. Her sword seemed an extension of her arm as she sliced upward. Her blade cut through something more substantial than smoke, less tangible than flesh. A frigid stink cascaded over her, like the breath of a slaughterhouse or an opened tomb.

  Other shadows besieged her. Frosty claws ripped at her. Their death-keens sounded harsh in her ears, mixing with blood cries from every quarter.

  Tawa came suddenly upon a clearing, dim by mist’s light. The hunters of the dark woods did not follow her. They retreated until their harrowing cries vanished with distance.

  In the clearing rose a circular temple surmounted by a dome of lapis lazuli. Tawa approached and mounted its steps. Sheathing her sword, she passed between pale columns.

  At the temple’s center was an annular altar, within which burned a black flame. Beyond, she saw a being having the general form of a man, tall and draped with flowing shadows. Its dusty hands rested upon a crystal rail and its cowled head was bowed.

  “Are you a priest of the Oracle?” Tawa asked.

  The figure lifted its head. Its face was covered with the dust of centuries. Curving teeth protruded between black lips. Tawa thought its eyes were closed, then saw they were sewn shut.

  “Are you the Speaker of the Oracle of Typhon?” Tawa asked.

  The creature nodded.

  “Tell me how I may return home,” Tawa said.

  “Do you desire a true answer,” it rumbled, “or a lie?”

  “I did not travel all this way, face all the dangers to be mocked,” she spat. “Why would I seek a lie?”

  “To reaffirm your disbelief,” the Speaker replied. “You do not believe in gods, so you fear an answer that leads you home by way of the gods. Only a lie will leave your faith intact.”

  Tawa suddenly saw in her mind an image from her youth, before Grandfather initiated her into the ways of the Tunukas, the traders who followed the Straight Roads to the Great Houses and spoke with the Strange Ones in the Red Cities of the South. It was Talamuwya, the night of the Summer Moon, and masked gods had come from the Sacred Peaks to dance in plazas. Later, when other children were asleep, dreaming of Whipping Spirits and Mudhead Clowns, Tawa followed the spirits, to see them fly into the Void from which they had come in the Beginning. But they took off their masks and became men she had known all her life.

  “I seek only the way home,” Tawa said. “That is all.”

  “Gaze into the flame and believe.”

  Tawa tried to turn from the black flame but could not. She saw a terraced city on a waveless sea, colorful galleys moored at its onyx quays. On the city’s central hill was a temple with columns that should have been too slender for its flaring roof and the statues upon the roof. The statues made Tawa shudder, for the visages of the statues were the masks of the gods who had danced in the plaza on that long ago night. She heard the gods whisper her name. Twin suns burned in a salmon sky.

  Dark flames consumed the vision.

  Shuddering, Tawa brought her hands to her cheeks and hated herself for the wetness she found there.

  “Belief is our strength,” the Speaker said, moving toward Tawa. “We are made real by those who die gripped by belief.”

  “I do not believe!” She whipped her sword from its sheath; she raised her blade. “I refuse to believe!”

  The Speaker laughed. Tawa swung her sword in a deadly arc. The being slapped the flat of the blade with a quick grey hand and sent it clattering away. Its other hand struck Tawa. She cried with the frigid pain of its touch and staggered back. The stone of the temple slammed against her back, forcing her breath away.

  That which should have been blind rushed directly at Tawa.

  She reached into the pouch at her waist, her fingers closing around the crystals she had snatched from the head of the stone serpent. She hurled them with all her might.

  The faceted stones flashed through the air, streaks of color in a colorless realm. They struck the Speaker’s sewn lids, bursting them like rotted papyrus. It cried and staggered back.

  Tawa grabbed her sword and struck, penetrating the shadowy robe. She pressed her palm against it chest and pushed. The sword slipped away; as the being fell, its boney hand gripped Tawa’s wrist. She hacked desperately – the hand came away and the Speaker tumbled over the rim of the annular altar and into the flame of darkness. The Speaker flared like parchment, and the hand still gripping Tawa’s wrist fell away like dust.

  The earth rumbled and shook. Tawa fled the temple,
fled back the way she had come, through the black forest, to the stairs rising upward.

  She paused and looked back though every fiber of her being protested. At the edge of the world a creature strode through the mist, skin white as sea-foam, hair red as the fires within the earth, its features like no animal that had ever walked the face of the earth.

  “I refuse to believe!” Tawa yelled, forcing her legs to move. “There are no gods!”

  Up through the blue-lit blackness she ran, beneath the death that moaned, into the blood-lit lair of the guardians.

  Then a cold and misty pale hand grabbed her, pulling her back. She kicked and thrashed, but the grip did not loosen. She found no purchase along the rocky walls, then gripped a fanged head, holding fast, and pulled with all her strength.

  She tumbled into forward darkness and lay there. She blinked and realized she saw the frosty stars The rumble of the ocean sounded in her ears. A black face formed in her sight.

  “What was it?” Sethothtris demanded. “Did you see the Destroyer? Tell me!”

  Tawa sat up, then stood. She looked back at the portal through which she had stumbled, though she had no memory of it. She looked to the old man and forced a smile.

  “There are no gods,” she said.

  She walked away, toward the road that led back to Balphos and the known world of the Central Sea.

  “I will know Set,” Sethothtris called after her.

  She looked back and saw Sethothtris had returned to his fire, to his long vigil. His belief and fear would keep him there forever, lost between the world of men and the realm of the gods, gripped by a divine madness.

  “There are no gods,” Tawa lied, her voice less than a whisper in the artifice of eternity. The black flames within her mind refused to die, “I will not believe…not yet.”

  Arabian nights? Well, maybe, just a little bit, but Kira does get around, and sometimes she does go off the edge of the map, but even then, I try to keep an historical perspective. A professor in college told me it was less important to memorize the dates of wars and kings’ reigns than it was to know what was going on in all the areas of the world at any particular time. Even historians wear blinders, focusing on their own little provinces and forgetting about the rest of the world. When abandoned pockets of civilization around the Nile were reforming into Pre-Dynastic Egypt and tribal chieftains were becoming pharaohs, men of Malta were erecting massive temples and traders were crisscrossing the deserts of North America. So, here’s a story of Kira somewhere near the Land of Ishmael when the lands northward were turning away from bronze and the old ways of the Goddess.

  The Demon of the Rock

  A Tale of the Age of Bronze

  Kira came upon Ras-al-Djinn at dusk. A city of mud, she knew, but the sunset-lit walls and domes shone like bronze and electrum. It sat atop a promontory in the sand sea which stretched southward into the Empty Quarter.

  Standing upon a trail trod by legion caravans, Kira saw a thrust of rock that seemed to possess a demon’s features: thick rocky lips, flaring horns and fangs, eyes closed and blind. A trick of shadow and light, Kira thought, for when turned and looked back it was just an outcropping of dark rock, a town perched atop.

  The impulse to move on was strong, but the need to linger was stronger. Long en route to Eridu on the Gulf of Albla, vexed by robbers, seeking a night’s shelter among tumbled rocks or in the lee of ruined walls, stalked by predators, Kira was ready for a town’s amenities. An inn, she thought, and ale, conversation and music to chase away the loneliness, a bed not made of stone or earth, nor shared with scorpions and beetles.

  Kira ignored the sleeping demon and mounted the high road to the gates of Ras-al-Djinn.

  The guards wore leather harnesses and brassards, so Kira was careful they did not glimpse any flash of bronze beneath her traveler’s cloak. They carried scimitars of poor quality and cast envious eyes on Kira’s Kelt-crafted sword. Seeing her hand linger upon its hilt, they grumbled and passed her through the gates.

  Torch-lit ways were lined with merchants’ stalls and thronged by people, camels and wagons. In every street tan girls danced to flutes and tiny cymbals. Avenues rang with drunken laughter and clinking copper coins. All indicated caravans stopped for the night. Alchemists and astrologers vended philters and talismans, and dust wiccans read a man’s fate in the palm of his hand.

  Away from the huge marketplace, streets were narrow and dark, twisting through the night, haunted by furtive folk, by the lost and abandoned. By moon’s light, the mud structures took on an ethereal beauty, as if made of ice.

  Coming upon a courtyard opening under the horned moon, she lifted her gaze and whispered a prayer.

  She saw an inn with the sigil of a raven. Pausing in an alley, she listened to whining pipes and strings, watched the play of shadows upon the inn’s mica-paned windows.

  “Child of the phasing moon,” a voice whispered. “Leave the city before the night’s ebb.”

  Kira whirled, daggers in her hands. In the gloom she saw eyes glimmer argent. An old woman shambled forward, garbed in black. Her seamed face was dark, but her eyes were quicksilver.

  “Shanti, warrior,” she murmured. “I mean you no harm.”

  Kira lowered her daggers but did not return them to their hidden sheaths. She had seen too many shape-shifting magicians to believe everything her eyes told her.

  “Why link me to the moon or call me warrior?” Kira asked. “I’m just a traveler on a strange road.”

  The old woman smiled. “Sisters know sisters.”

  Kira frowned. It had been months since leaving lands where once the Goddess held sway, years since seeing an active temple.

  “Who are you, grandmother?” Kira asked politely. “Why warn me from a place where I would rest?”

  “Ras-al-Djinn is dangerous, a place of dark magick and darker desires,” the old woman said. “Evil powers wax full this night, even as the Crone gazes down.”

  “The world’s a dangerous place,” Kira replied, sheathing her daggers. “Especially for women.”

  Kira heard a sound like wind through a narrow place. When she looked back, she was alone. A warning from the Goddess, Kira wondered, or just an old woman? Outside Ras-al-Djinn, she would encounter those haunting the wastelands around cities. A fight for sure, and she had endured too many recently. She left the alley and passed through the portal of the Raven Inn.

  The inn had a large common room flanked by hearths. Narrow stairs twisted to upper rooms. Two old, bearded men in blue and silver robes glanced at her with smirks she did not care for.

  A man with unkempt hair and a gap-toothed smile, wearing an innkeep’s leather apron, came to her. “Drink, lady?” he asked. “Meal?” He looked her over. “A room for the night and water for the dust of too many roads?”

  “All three,” Kira said. “But if you’re thinking to gouge me for silver, I’ll take a pilgrim’s cup and a hearth niche.”

  “Coppers only, lady,” the innkeep replied. “I’m a simple man, Abdenna bin Abrim at your service, with but simple needs.”

  Price settled, Kira followed a serving boy to a third story room.

  “A good room,” he said, lighting an oil lamp. “Not the best, you understand. Uncle keeps those for rich merchants and the priests of Iblis.”

  “Priests?” Kira put her satchel on a table. “Where I’m from, priests aren’t rich. There are so many gods, men can only afford to offer coppers for prayers, not silver or gold.”

  “These priests are not rich, but feared.” The boy poured water into a basin. “If they enter a man’s house and he does not give what they demand, their god comes and rips him apart. So Uncle gives them the best rooms, the best wine and fool. I would make them pay like everyone else. Maybe more.”

  “You don’t fear them and their god?”

  “I’m not a foolish old man.” He grinned. “Uncle has never seen a man ripped apart, but he believes what others tell him.”

  “What’s your name?”<
br />
  “Ishmael.” She gave him a half-copper, his grin widened, and he left her.

  She closed the door, slid the latch and secured it with a leather thong. Not the best room she had seen in her travels, but hardly the worst. It was clean and the bed was not infested with anything that might consider her a tasty meal.

  She opened the lattice window. The inn was near the edge of the promontory—light spilling from the back revealed a space of not more than three cubits between structure and precipice. Kira had no doubt it provided easy disposal of garbage and trash, and, perhaps, an inconvenient body from time to time.

  She gazed over dark leagues. In the shrouded north was her lost homeland, the cities of wonder and terror around the Central Sea, where magicians, necromancers, alchemists and others sought to warp the universe to their wills. Kira sighed. Too many years she had sought a home long destroyed, and taken silver from dark masters. She gazed south, to Zinj, where shaggy Beastmen still roamed, lands where a warrior skilled with a sword could find a good life, or at least a good death.

  Moving from the window, she shed her travelers cloak and bronze, luxuriating in the freedom of soft leather clothing. She washed, then pulled a pale comb through her short hair. Holding the lamp near, she tried to see her reflection in the water. The high women of Khemet and Kaphtor used mirrors of silvered glass or polished obsidian to watch themselves while they plaited their hair and touched their faces with subtle colors. She set the lamp aside and turned from the water.

  After securing her armor, she tread the narrow stairs to the common room. The two old, bearded men again looked at her.

  Kira took a table near the stairs. A simple fare—cheese, bread, meat and ale. In Knossos or Canopus, it would be scorned, a beggar’s repast. But after months traveling through benighted towns best forgotten and dire wildernesses, this was a feast.