Cthulhu Fhtagn!

by Laird Barron

  ***

  Ylie’s leg muscles trembled as he made his tired way down to his father’s workshop in the lowest level of the city proper. Ylie had carried new orders to every miner on all forty of the city’s levels. Now the city and the mine below buzzed with activity. The floor vibrated beneath his boots, and the walls shook hard enough that little curls of dust rose up off them. Ylie couldn’t remember the last time the mine and the foundries had operated at full capacity. As long as he’d been alive—fourteen Standard years, with twenty-nine Long Darks—Patrie had been a quiet city, growing quieter every year. When he’d been in school, he’d once asked why the population kept shrinking, but the schoolmaster had no answer.

  He knew that when ships still came from the other planets, Patrie had been a good place to live. Supplies came in from Kalifa, Valdez, Weyland I, and dozens of worlds whose names he had seen emblazoned on the light murals, but were rarely spoken out loud except in the stories whispered between classes by children who knew no better. He’d been one of them once, but he’d outgrown such foolishness.

  Ylie paused at the next-to-last landing and studied the mural on the wall. The bulbs had burned out long ago and no one had seen the need to replace them. Perhaps being reminded of this lost world, Weyland IV, once full of people and now a silent absence in the night sky, was too depressing.

  The loss of this mural was sad, Ylie thought. He could still remember this mural, although only vaguely. It had shown such a colorful place, its continents green and pink and gold on a setting of blue sea. If anyone had made a mural out of Patrie, they would have painted the world in steel and dirt.

  He brushed his fingers over the dusty surface of the mural. Where had Weyland IV gone, he wondered. The priests said there were no creatures between the stars, that nothing existed that could swallow a world. But no ships came from the Weyland worlds or Valdez any longer, and to even an untrained eye, the sky grew darker every Long Dark. Where did the worlds go? How did the space between the stars get bigger every year?

  It wasn’t the place of a simple messenger to ask such a question. Ylie turned his back on the mural and pushed on to the door of his father’s workshop. He tested the doorknob. Locked, of course. Pa had taken to locking even the door of their living quarters since he’d gone to work for Sister Hauer. Ylie rapped his knuckles against the door and heard the steel echo hollowly.

  “Pa? It’s me.”

  The door opened a crack. “Can I help you?” Pa peered out into the hallway. The fluorescent light above the door made the lines of his face deeper, turning him into a little old man and not Ylie’s sturdy father. He blinked down at the boy.

  Ylie reached for the earmuffs his father wore when he was cutting steel. “Hi, Pa.”

  Pa rubbed his ears. “Forgot about those.”

  “You must have been working hard.” Ylie pushed inside. His father hadn’t always worked in this massive space. Before Sister Hauer and the sky priests recruited him, he had worked in the main machine workshop in the mine, even farther beneath the surface than this place. Pa could have gone to priest school and learned the books to build machines; he had the smarts for it. But priests couldn’t marry or have children, and so he’d chosen to just keep learning on his own, working in the machine workshop and handling the repairs the priests thought were beneath them.

  The boy walked over to the workbench where a sheet of unpolished steel lay, a long narrow shape grease-penciled along its length. The machine his father was building for Sister Hauer was complicated and huge, the kind of thing he would have never gotten a chance to build down in the mines.

  Perhaps that’s why he’d decided to help the sky priests. He’d always wanted to learn more and do more. Maybe being just another worker and Ylie’s pa wasn’t enough for him anymore. Ylie felt his stomach seize up with a feeling he didn’t want to name. He took a deep breath and reached out to touch the steel.

  The surface looked strange, as if it had been treated with some kind of chemical while the steel cooled. He knew most of the polishing and coloring compounds, but not this one. He sniffed his fingers, but couldn’t place it by smell, either.

  He studied the shape drawn on the strangely ruddy steel. “This is going to be another support arm, right? It’s as long as the one that holds up Kalifa,” he said.

  “The last support arm.” His father patted his shoulder. “The biggest.”

  Ylie wished he understood how the machine worked, but he was also glad his father hadn’t told him more about it. Ylie met too many priests in his rounds of Patrie, and the more he knew about the device, the harder it was to resist telling them about his father’s secret project. The priesthood was firm about its central rule: priests specialized. Some studied the stars, some learned to heal, some built and repaired the machines that made the city and the mine work. The priests maintained that if one branch encroached on the other’s specialty, it risked diluting the precious knowledge the priesthood had tended for all these centuries.

  Then, to Ylie’s dismay, his father added: “This is special steel. Fine, fine steel. Sister Hauer, she’s looking out for all of us, you know. That’s why she makes sure I get the best for this project.”

  Ylie felt the weight of his father’s secret grow heavier. He quickly drew out the folded onionskin. “Sister Hauer sent me, Pa. She saw a ship in her sky-eye. Coming from Kalifa.”

  Pa clapped his hands. “That’s good! That’s real good!” He scurried across the workshop fast enough that Ylie had to jog to catch up with him.

  The workshop was huge. Broken bits of stone jutted out from the walls at one point, marking the point where a wall had once separated the space into two big rooms. They must have been storage spaces for the mine, once. Ylie wondered if the mine would ask for the space back now that they were picking up production. He doubted it. Even with every worker pulling double shifts, the mine would be running with a skeleton crew. It couldn’t produce half as much as it did in the era when it filled these rooms.

  And even if the mine needed more warehouse space, Sister Hauer had ways of getting what she wanted. She wanted paper, so she had paper. She’d wanted Pa, and she’d brought him out of the mines to build her secret device. Ylie wasn’t sure how Hauer got the council to do her bidding, but she always did.

  Ylie squared his shoulders. He was angry: that was the feeling in his gut right now. He was angry that his father had chosen to break the rules of Patrie and he was angry that his father spent all his time down here with the damn thing. Pa loved the device more than he’d ever loved being at home with Ylie.

  The boy circled the big machine. The orrery. He hadn’t been good at school, but he knew what an orrery was. His teacher had used a simple one to demonstrate what made the skies over Patrie go dark for months at a time.

  Although maybe if Ylie hadn’t gotten a job as a messenger this year, spending his days running past all the old, burnt-out murals of lost worlds and constellations, he might not have realized that what his father had built was more than just a massive model of the sky around Patrie. It was a work of art. His father had found bits of colored glass to add detail to the planets’ surfaces: there was big green Kalifa and small blue Shogrin, orange Bijou nearly as big as the Sun itself, and dozens of smaller moons like Patrie. Ylie could even see how they all lined up at different points in their circuit, the planets’ shadows sending Patrie into the dark for weeks at a time.

  There was something odd about this orrery, something that made it different from the one in the school room, but Ylie couldn’t put his finger on it. He had a feeling the device wasn’t just a model to help study distances between the planets or better calculate the length of the next Long Dark. It was just too large and too beautiful. Sister Hauer wouldn’t have broken the rules of the order to build another orrery. No, she wanted something special from this machine, and Ylie couldn’t help but wonder what she would get from it.

  “You’ve got something there, Ylie?”

  Ylie blinked at his fa
ther. He had almost forgotten the onionskin. It was so light, so delicate, he barely felt it between his fingers.

  “You should hurry on home, my boy. Sister Hauer was planning to come down,” Pa added. “After star recording.”

  The plaintive note in his father’s voice made Ylie ball his hands into fists, paper be damned. It wasn’t bad enough Sister Hauer made his father leave his real job and sneak away to work on some secret machine: it was like she owned the man. When she snapped her fingers, he came running like a man with a double-shift request from the mine office. Something snapped inside the boy, snapped like steel bent past its breaking point

  “I guess you’ll be missing dinner again.” Ylie thrust the crumpled onionskin at his father. “This is for you.”

  He turned away and stomped toward the door.

  “Ylie.” Pa hurried to catch up to him. “It’s just one dinner. This project is important.”

  “Yeah? To who?”

  “To all of us!” Pa looked suddenly nervous, even though they were alone. He lowered his voice. “The orrery is going to save us from what got all those other planets. Sister Hauer, she’s smart. She knows things. She’s got books that go all the way back to the first planet, books that talk about the—the world eater.”

  “The world eater?” Ylie threw open the door. “That’s why you’re never home? Because of some stupid story kids tell?”

  “Hush, Ylie!” His father shook his head. “Be quiet, please!”

  “Go piss on yourself, Pa. And your stupid orrery, too.”

  Ylie slammed the door behind him, rage roiling in his belly, red-hot and fierce. He scrubbed at his face with his rough sleeve and told himself he wasn’t crying, that he wasn’t sad, not one bit.

  ***

  Ylie lay on his bunk, letting his eyes find patterns in the worn surface of the steel shelf above him. The room smelled of the meal he’d overcooked—algae from the hydroponics facility and bread, the tangy stuff the baker managed to make from Patrie’s own breed of wheat. Pa had always made good food, but Ylie hadn’t ever learned his father’s skill.

  The knock at the door echoed throughout the small living quarters. If his father had been there, Pa would have jumped down from his bunk and sprinted to the door, thinking it was Sister Hauer needing his help. The thought made Ylie want to pull the blanket up over his head and pretend he hadn’t heard anything. Instead, he rolled over and stared at the door a long moment, his limbs heavy. It was probably a summons to run more messages.

  The knocking sounded again, with more urgency.

  He forced himself off the bunk and opened the door. He stepped backward, surprised. “Sister North?”

  The sister stepped inside as if he had graciously invited her instead of half-stumbling out of her way. He only vaguely knew the priest. Before Ylie had finished school and gotten busy with his own work, he would often stop by the mining workshop to visit with his father, and Sister North’s pale shaved head with its orange fuzz had stood out like a beacon from the overseer’s platform.

  A novice followed at her heels, one of Ylie’s former classmates now gone to the priesthood. He caught Ylie’s eyes for a second and hastily looked away, ducking his head and frowning. He wore the gray coveralls of a novice of the priesthood, and a tool belt cinched the oversized garment. Ylie tried to remember the boy’s name and came up empty.

  Sister North pushed back the hood of her coarse brown robe. A smudge of grease ran across her cheekbone, as if she’d absentmindedly scratched at an itch in the middle of some complicated project. She looked from Ylie’s face to the still-dirty cooking surface, and then to the empty bunks on the far wall. “Your father isn’t here?” Her eyebrows lifted into high arcs of rusty wire.

  A sheen of sweat showed on her shaved pate. She had hurried up out of the mines to find Pa, Ylie realized. A mining workshop overseer, a machine priest, had actually run to find him.

  “No,” Ylie admitted. His voice was squeezed small by the weight of his father’s secret. If there was anyone his father wouldn’t want to learn about Sister Hauer’s orrery, it was this woman.

  “There’s been an accident,” she said. “We need him in the mine. Immediately.” She watched him intently. The smell of algae and burnt oil hung heavy over the room, the smell of months spent alone and unhappy with a burden too heavy for a boy fresh out of school. He remembered how angry he had been earlier.

  The weight inside him shifted, and he blurted out: “He’s working for Sister Hauer.” He took a deep breath. “He’s building something to save us all from the world eater.”

  “What?” Sister North’s hand clamped shut on his wrist.

  “He’s working for Sister Hauer,” he repeated. “He’s building—”

  “Take me to him,” she said. “Right now.”

  ***

  The walk felt longer than any message run he’d ever made. Sister North said nothing as they made their way down to his father’s workshop. Ylie’s palms grew damp as they got closer, and finally, he stopped in front of the darkened mural of Weyland IV. He had to know more before he faced his father.

  “Why do the worlds disappear, Sister North? Can Sister Hauer do anything about it?”

  Sister North’s lips compressed. “If Sister Hauer has an explanation, she has not shared it with me.”

  “But what do you think?” Ylie pressed. “Is there a world eater? Is that why the worlds disappear?”

  “The world eater is a story,” said Sister North. “Preparations for the delegation from Kalifa are real. I do not have time to talk about superstition and nonsense. Take me to your father. Now.”

  He led her to his father’s workshop, then. He didn’t feel any better, but he didn’t know what else to do.

  When they reached the door and he raised his fist to knock, the sister pushed him aside. “No warnings,” she said. She beckoned for the novice, who produced a slim tool that Sister North wiggled in the lock for a few seconds. The door swung open.

  A trickle of smoke curled out of the workshop, carrying with it a smell that made Ylie cover his nose: the metallic smell of Sister Hauer’s hands combined with some luxurious scent he had never smelled before. All around his father’s machine, oversized metal cups burned, sending up plumes of thick smoke. The flicker of hundreds of candles lit up the space, and at least a dozen black-robed priests moved about the workshop, tending the smoking cups and the candles and anointing the different parts of the orrery with a black and tarry goo.

  “Sister North.”

  “Sister Hauer.”

  The two priests faced each other. Sister North’s head gleamed in the light of the candles, and Sister Hauer was an implacable column of darkness.

  “Ylie!” Pa lurched forward. “Why have you brought her here?”

  “I made the boy do it,” Sister North said. She shook her head. “I am disappointed in you, Larken.”

  “I had good reason,” Pa said. “Sister Hauer is the only one doing anything about the world eater.” He clasped his hands as he spoke, as if begging her to believe in his cause. Ylie could hardly stand to watch him.

  “There is no world eater,” Sister North snapped.

  “Oh, but there is.” A smile spread across Sister Hauer’s face, revealing her small, sharp teeth. “Did you ever wonder when we started locking up all the books on Patrie? I always thought it was odd, that the priesthood could have so many and the ordinary folk, so few.” She turned to Ylie and said in an amiable voice: “Did you ever have a book, Ylie?”

  He opened his mouth and closed it again. He could feel the novice beside him trembling, his arm vibrating through his coveralls and robe.

  “I didn’t think so. Even in the schools, children only get slates.” Sister Hauer’s hood obscured all of her face save for that small smile. “But children’s stories often contain the seeds of the truth. When I joined the priesthood, I read everything I could, and I was surprised by how many books confirmed the stories.”

  “Stop it,” Sister Nort
h spat. “You’re twisting the truth. You know many of the books the priesthood keeps are myths and legends, not real science.”

  “If that’s what you want to believe.” Sister Hauer snapped her fingers, and her black-robed priests stepped in. Hands closed on Ylie’s shoulders, and he heard the novice gasp as someone grabbed him.

  Boyd. That was the boy’s name. Ylie remembered him suddenly, a quiet boy, good at all his classes. He said the stories gave him nightmares. Ylie could remember describing the claws and the fangs and the evil burning eyes of the eater of worlds, and leaning closer and closer to Boyd as he spoke. It had been fun to watch him squirm. It had been fun to know he wouldn’t sleep that night.

  Ylie’s head spun. Was he really remembering that? His head felt strange and heavy from all the smoke in the air.

  “I have a little confession,” Sister Hauer said. “There is no delegation from Kalifa.”

  “What?” Sister North’s face twisted. “Why would you lie about that?”

  “Because I needed a distraction.” Sister Hauer waved her hand to take in the orrery, the candles, the priests, all of it. “I knew my orrery would be ready tonight. I knew this was our last chance to save Patrie.”

  Sister North struggled, but the priests who held her were strong. “Save it from what?”

  Ylie didn’t mean to answer, but somehow, even with all his thoughts twisted by the flickering light and the perfumed smoke, the pieces had come together in his mind. “The world eater. It already got Kalifa, didn’t it?”

  Sister Hauer nodded. “Years ago. I saw it happen and I knew I had to do something.”

  “What do you mean?” The strength had gone out of Sister North’s voice. She believed, too, Ylie thought. She didn’t want to, and maybe she couldn’t even admit it, but no one who had heard the stories as a kid had ever really stopped believing.