Department Zero

by Paul Crilley

  “How do they make you feel?”

  “Utterly . . . insignificant. A mote of dust in the eye of the universe.”

  “But that’s exactly what we are.”

  “Well . . . sure. But we spend our entire lives trying to ignore that fact. When I have those dreams, I can’t escape it. I want to just . . . crawl into a hole and die.”

  “Well . . . There’s nothing we can do about it now. And who knows? Maybe this Oracle they’re taking us to see is the real deal. Maybe she can tell us what it means. Because I certainly don’t know. And that’s the first and last time you’ll hear me say that.”

  “It all just feels a lot bigger since we’ve come to this world. More serious. Like back when we were getting the spear it was important, but still workable. Now it just feels hopeless. And the worst thing is there’s nothing I can do. We’re powerless here.”

  “Like I say, let’s wait and see what the Oracle says. Plenty of time for wallowing in self-pity later.”

  The barge is guided deep into the center of the floating city. We finally stop next to one of the broken islands formed by a collapsed spire. This one is larger than the others, easily a mile across. Streets have been leveled out of the rock, permanent structures built using stone and mortar instead of the wood I see everywhere else.

  The Matriarch appears behind us. She steps off the barge and is soon deep in conversation with someone waiting on the island. He runs off, and we wait another ten minutes or so before he returns with a message for the Matriarch.

  She gestures for us to follow, leading us away from the wet rock at the water’s edge. A single main street leads to the center of the island. At some point a second pillar of rock dropped from the distant underside of Roflake and landed on the island. Where the pillar met the ground it shattered into vast pieces, forming a huge cave-like structure.

  The Matriarch leads us inside this structure, along a tunnel lit with a soft gray light. We follow the passage through a series of twists and turns until the light starts to brighten, like the arrival of dawn.

  We enter a large, circular chamber. There’s an ancient woman sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, bathed in a directionless white light. I stare at her. I thought Mad Arin was old, but this woman looks like she has a couple of hundred years on Yoda. Her face is a map of deep wrinkles. Two dark, glittering eyes peer out at us.

  “Which of you claims to enter the Dreamlands?” she demands.

  Graves gives me a shove. I stagger forward, hands clasped before me like a naughty schoolkid.

  “I don’t claim anything,” I say. “Mad Arin said I was able to do it.”

  The Matriarch steps forward. “It is true, Oracle. We were all drawn into his dream.”

  The Oracle waves her hand impatiently. “It is impossible. No one can do such a thing. Not even I. This is something only the Old Ones could do.”

  “This is why I thought you should meet him, Oracle,” says the Matriarch respectfully.

  The Oracle turns her attention to me.

  “Come forward. Sit by me.” She gestures, and a young girl who I hadn’t even noticed moves forward to lay mats on the floor. Graves and I sit down.

  “Now,” she says to me. “Do you know what the Dreamlands are?”

  “Just what your Speaker of Words told us,” I say. “That it is the soul of the universe?”

  The Oracle nods. “Just as you have a soul encased in your body, and your soul is who you really are, so the multiverse has the Dreamlands. The Dreamlands came first. They were the home of the Elder Gods, the home of the Old Ones. Our plane is the shadow cast by this realm. We are the physical body; the Dreamlands are the soul, the spirit.”

  The small girl comes back with a tray and presents a cup of steaming liquid to Graves. He takes it and sniffs as she passes a cup to me.

  “Is there alcohol in it?” he asks.

  “Lots,” says the Oracle dryly.

  Graves tips it back and drains the cup. I sip mine more slowly. Some kind of tea. Sweet, but with a bitter aftertaste.

  The Oracle waits until I’ve finished. She smiles.

  “Now we wait.”

  “For what?” I ask.

  “For the berlini bark to do its work.”

  Graves frowns at her suspiciously. “What are you talking about?”

  I stare into my cup. I blink, my eyelids suddenly feeling incredibly heavy. I’m dimly aware of someone appearing at my side, taking the cup and gently laying me down on the mat.

  Then I close my eyes.

  The sky is black and filled with pinpricks of brilliant light. A gibbous moon hangs low, a sickly yellow in color.

  I blink and look around. I’m standing on the muddy shore again, yellow light glinting on the cold mud.

  Graves stands to one side with his arms folded. “You tricked us!” he shouts at the Oracle.

  The Oracle shrugs. “I did what I needed to do.”

  “Are we asleep?” I ask.

  The Oracle cocks her head. “Our bodies are, yes. But in a way, you are more awake now than you have ever been.” She winks at me. “But now’s not the time for such conversations, eh?” She studies our surroundings. “So it is true. You have the ability to bring people into the Dreamlands. Very interesting.”

  “I don’t know how I’m doing it,” I say quickly.

  “So you say,” she says mildly.

  I look in alarm at Graves, but he gives an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

  “And this is the city you visited,” says the Oracle.

  I turn and see the angular cityscape jutting against the night sky. The buildings hurt my eyes, like looking at an Escher painting when drunk.

  “I . . . do not like this place,” says the Oracle.

  “No,” says Graves. “I feel like my brain is being twisted around and inserted back through my eyeballs.” He turns to glare at me. “Where have you brought us, idiot?”

  “I have no idea!”

  “That tower,” says the Oracle.

  I turn and look at where she’s pointing. And as if the mere act of looking is a signal, the three of us are suddenly standing on the tower, staring down over the cityscape.

  “Stop doing that!” shouts Graves.

  I don’t answer. We’re standing on a walkway that circles the structure. Black arches lead inside, but I really don’t want to go in there. There’s something . . . other, if that makes sense. I can feel it, lurking in the darkness.

  The Oracle, however, has no problem at all, and she strides through the closest arch as if it’s happy hour at the local pub.

  Graves glares at me as he strides past. “I regret the day I met you. I just want you to know that.”

  A crystal growth takes up the center of the huge room inside. There is no pattern to the structure, facets and protrusions sticking out randomly, crystal clear and segmented, refracting the little light that enters the tower.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  The Oracle is peering inside. I follow her gaze and see something beyond the crystal. Some kind of dark skin. Scales, shifting around.

  “What’s . . . what’s in there?”

  And then a sudden movement. The chamber is lit up in purple-and-black light as the creature opens an eye as large as the Statue of Liberty.

  My eyes snap open.

  I’m back in the chamber, lying on the mat that had been laid on the floor.

  I push myself shakily to my feet. The girl who had poured our tea is checking on the Oracle, handing her a glass of water.

  She pushes it away, turning her attention to us. “This is worse than I feared,” she says.

  “Why?” asks Graves. “What was that?”

  “That was Cthulhu himself, in his prison of R’lyeh, the city beneath the sea.”

  “That wasn’t beneath the sea,” I say. “There were stars.”

  “That was the dream reflection of R’lyeh. The true version, if you will. What is your plan?”

  “We’re suppo
sed to be getting this jewel from the priests. It’s part of this. I think part of a key or something. There are people after it.”

  “The ones who wish to free the Old Ones?”

  I nod.

  “Then we must help you. You must get this key before our enemies.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  An hour later and we’re ready to go. The Oracle has chosen ten clan members to see us back to the surface, and I have to say, I’m feeling pretty safe. They’re a hard-looking bunch. Six men and four women, all of them carrying long spears. On top of this, they’ve got bows and quivers of arrows strapped to their backs and thin blades scabbarded at their waists.

  Even Graves eyes them warily as we approach them. The Oracle is talking to the eldest of the ten clan members, a thin, hard-faced woman who looks to be in her forties.

  “This is Teshani,” says the Oracle. “She will be in charge of your safety.”

  “I still protest,” says Graves. “I do not need looking after.”

  Teshani looks him up and down. “How old are you?”

  Graves draws himself up taller. “That, madam, is none of your business.”

  “Because with the white hair and everything, you look ancient. Seventy at least.”

  “Seventy! Are you insane? I do not look seventy.” Graves turns to me. “I don’t, do I?”

  “Nah. A well-preserved sixty?”

  Graves’s eyes widen, and he sputters his outrage before turning his back on us and striding toward the ramp.

  “Good luck,” says the Oracle softly. “Your destination is the temple of Azathoth. A labyrinthine complex of halls, passages, rooms, scriptoriums, and cells.”

  “Sounds cool.”

  “It is not,” says the Oracle.

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “The jewel you’re after is one of their holy relics. It’s said the head of the priesthood—they call him the Eli—keeps the jewel in his bedchambers.”

  “He keeps their holiest treasure in his bedroom?” I ask incredulously.

  The Oracle shrugs. “That is what I hear.”

  “So . . . how do we find his rooms?”

  “Just keep climbing. He has the highest room in the temple.” She hands over two satchels. “Water. Disguises for when you reach the temple. Weapons. Good luck. You will need it.”

  “Thank you,” I say. The Oracle nods and leaves us.

  I pull the satchel onto my back and study the ramp that is going to be the first leg of our journey back to the surface. It’s been cut out of one of the support spires, spiraling up around the pillar before stopping at a wooden rope bridge that connects to another distant spire.

  It looks like we have a lot of walking ahead of us. Which sucks, because I hate exercise. I think I’m allergic to it.

  Teshani and her troop set off, heading up the ramp at a rapid pace. Graves is leaning against the wall, sulking. I toss him his satchel, and we set off after them.

  After about twenty minutes we arrive at the top and cross the rope bridge to a narrow shelf of rock that curves around the next pillar. A long ladder has been carved into the rock, handholds chopped away and then smoothed out so the stone won’t cut into the skin.

  This leads up to a tunnel that cuts straight through the middle of two thick spires, the insides of the tunnel illuminated by flickering torches. I run my hands over the walls, wondering how they were carved.

  “Bore worms,” says Teshani, seeming to read my mind.

  The tunnel is easily three times my height. “Must have been really big worms.”

  “These were babies.”

  The second tunnel exits onto a stone arch so narrow that we have to walk across it single file. I make the rookie mistake of looking down as we go, my stomach flipping as I fight down a wave of dizziness. The clan Gathering is well underway by now. I can just hear the sounds of laughing and singing from far below.

  Our path leads us through another bore worm tunnel that slants steeply up through another spire. We need safety lines attached to our waists for this one, since the incline is too sharp to simply climb up on our own. A sullen-faced woman fastens our lines and then sets a taut wire, which disappears up the tunnel, to vibrating. A moment later I feel a tug on my midsection as someone above responds to the signal.

  We’re all winched upward at a walking pace. When we reach the other side, we remove our harnesses. A broad shelf of rock with a more gentle slope climbs into the darkness before us.

  I lean over to get one last glimpse of the barge clans before they disappear from view. Let’s face it. When the hell am I going to see anything like this ever again? Especially because once we get back home and resolve all of this, I’m quitting.

  It’s something I decided on the barge. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but now I am. This is crazy. I’m all for seeing amazing things, but when they take me away from Susan, just . . . no. I can’t do it. What the hell is she thinking? That I’m just ignoring her? Is Megan worried about me, or does she think I’ve gone on a bender or something?

  I frown, realizing I’ve been staring down but not actually seeing anything. I can still see tiny glimpses of color where the torches illuminate the multicolored cloth strung up between the barges.

  I’m about to turn away again when something catches my eye, an odd movement that doesn’t quite fit in with everything else. I squint, trying to see what it is.

  There. Some sort of disturbance, barely visible from this height. Nothing specific, but a ripple of shadowy, violent movement. I let my eyes unfocus, and I catch another burst of activity in my peripheral vision. A shadow moves across the barges far below, snuffing out fires and torches as it passes. And now that I know what I’m looking for, I can see other patches of darkness, all of them sweeping across the floating barge city, leaving behind chaos and darkness in their wakes.

  Then the screams start to filter up toward me.

  “Teshani!” I shout.

  She hurries over, scanning the scene far below us. Graves appears at my shoulder.

  “The Hounds of Tindalos?” he asks.

  I nod.

  One of the hounds leaps up the ramps and slopes we just used. I watch in amazement as the creature soars twenty feet through the air, grabs hold of an underhang, then pushes itself off to soar another thirty feet before latching onto a stone spire with its vicious black claws.

  It turns its head around almost 180 degrees and looks directly at us, the tentacles on its face reaching through the air.

  Even from this distance, it knows it has spotted its prey. The hound tilts its head back and lets out a high-pitched howl that raises the hair on the back of my neck. I look down and see that the other patches of shadow have stopped moving.

  Then they start bounding toward us, scrabbling up the rock spires like spiders darting along a wall.

  Teshani yanks me away from the edge and shoves me up the ramp. “Go,” she says. “Run.”

  She turns back and grabs Graves by the collar.

  “Hey, I want to see the . . . oh—”

  He’s cut off as the first hound leaps past the ledge and lands directly in front of him. It rears up to its full height, its head twitching this way and that, blurring and shuddering as it shifts through the angles of reality. I stare at it in horrified fascination: gray-and-black skin riddled with red, swollen veins. Yellow eyes with orange slits for pupils, and a mouth so wide it looks as though it has been ripped into the face. Tentacles wave in the air, dripping black fluid onto the ground.

  “Run!” shouts Teshani.

  She lunges forward with her spear, stabbing the hound. The creature whirls to face her, swinging its hand down and snapping the spear’s shaft in half. Teshani stumbles back as the others move in, keeping the creature at a distance with their spears while trying to land a killing blow.

  The hound jerks and hisses, obviously in pain. But an attack that would have left a normal person dead doesn’t even slow the thing down.

  It reaches out and touches the clo
sest fighter. The man stiffens, then jerks his head back and screams. His face melts, his skin sloughing off his bones, turning to a puddle of blood and purple, rotten flesh.

  The other fighters stare at their comrade in horror as his body drops to the ground. Then Teshani runs forward, leaps into the air, and swings her sword, slicing through the hound’s neck. The creature’s head flies through the air and disappears over the ledge.

  Teshani boots the creature in the chest, and the body tumbles away into the darkness.

  Teshani turns to the others. “Move!”

  No one needs a second warning, even Graves. We all turn and sprint up the ramp. I search ahead of us as we run, but can’t see any end to our path. It looks as if it was supposed to be the final part of our route, that it leads all the way to the surface.

  Which means there’s nowhere for us to hide.

  Another hound clears the edge of the ramp. It sniffs the ground where the blood of its brother was spilled, then comes after us, bounding up the ramp on all fours. Teshani shouts an order, and five of the fighters stop running and spread out in a line, spears and swords at the ready.

  The hound attacks. The clan members have learned now to stay out of reach. Four of them jab and slash with spears, keeping the hound at bay while the last one circles around with a sword, looking for an opening to take its head.

  I stumble over a rock, and Teshani grabs me before I fall to the ground.

  “Eyes front,” she commands.

  I manage to keep my eyes forward for about ten seconds, and then I have to look back.

  I wish I hadn’t. The hound is dead, but so are two more clan members, and another hound is heading straight for the remaining three. Teshani also sees this because she curses loudly and moves us toward the craggy wall at the left side of the ramp.

  “Wait here,” she says. She grabs a lantern from one of the clan members, then sprints ahead, peering at the wall and running her hands over the rock. Searching for something.

  She obviously doesn’t find it, though. She hurries back to us.

  “There is a cleft in the wall somewhere along here. It leads into an old network of bore worm tunnels. Find it.” Teshani nods at two clan members, a grizzled man and a girl who looks to be in her twenties. Teshani hands the lantern to the girl. “You two, stay with them. Get them to the top. You,” she says, pointing to the last remaining fighter, “with me.”