Topical application had apparently been the correct treatment, as neither of us advanced to the peeling and rotting stage. After that, I slapped compulsively at every tickle of my skin, until Alistair pulled me around a corner, and we stumbled out into a mummified city under a winter sky in late afternoon with evening looming.
We stood in the center of a wide street paved with cracked and buckled asphalt. The skyscrapers of stone and glass and steel could have been the towers of downtown Seattle, but I could make out their details only in bits and glimpses through the dirty grey bandage of cobwebs that muffled them in sticky layers. In many cases, the wrappings extended all the way to the sidewalks and into the streets where they cocooned the vehicles at the curb.
Alistair squinted at the towers and back at his book. At last, he found some landmark and selected a route. Cobwebs stretched between the buildings overhead. They rarely dipped as low as ten or twelve feet except in an occasional ragged sheet torn from some higher mooring and left to blow and billow in whatever light wind moved the air. In the intersection, a traffic light hung loose from its cable, suspended in a dingy cocoon of web a few feet above my head.
On the opposite corner of the intersection, Alistair set off up the street at a rapid clip. I followed him, passing a tilted parking meter moored by tangled skeins of cobweb to the tower beside it. This close to the mummified building, I thought I saw movement within the cocoon. I stepped a little closer and squinted, trying to make out what had attracted my attention. A shape inside the web moved again, and I jumped back, catching my balance on my cane. Something stretched and squeezed itself higher in the cottony nest, climbing toward the sky. Now that I had a wider view of the building, I recognized more long, narrow creatures, moving through the web in all directions. As I watched, a half-curled shape pushed against the outermost layer of web. The veil of silk bulged, and a head broke through, an insectile face, heart-shaped with too many eyes, black and faceted. Mandibles clicked. More of the body emerged, striped black and vivid yellow.
I took a wary step back, but the creature ignored me and, pulling itself out one segment at a time, set out on a course parallel to the ground that would bring it in a circle around the building.
I caught up to Alistair. As evening folded over us, the caterpillars emerged from their cocoons in greater numbers and began to crawl among the webs overhead, rippling along gauzy bridges between one tower and another. I wondered what they ate; there seemed to be no other living thing in the city. I gripped my pointed shard of stone in my crabbed right hand. The caterpillars continued to ignore us, but I didn’t care to be caught off guard if they suddenly decided we were edible.
The webs grew thicker as we went deeper into the city. They spanned the air between the tops of the towers like ghost sails and bridges, glowing ever more distinctly as dark fell, but never casting any light on the street to help us navigate cracks and potholes in the asphalt. Alistair stumbled frequently but didn’t slow down. I was more sure-footed, using my cane to test the ground in front of me every few steps and sometimes catching his elbow when he tripped on an unseen obstruction.
At first, the thin, high strand of music barely registered in my ears as if I had developed a hint of tinnitus. Then the music grew louder, and more notes joined the first, some higher or lower in a slowly growing chord. I looked up, wondering if something had plucked the webs like harp strings, but the caterpillars seemed undisturbed by the music.
As I scanned the billowed sails of faintly-glowing cobwebs, I glimpsed a shadow gliding behind one of those silk-thin sheets, something vastly larger than the caterpillars and of a much different shape.
“What is it?” I asked Alistair.
He shrugged.
The shadow came closer, still concealed by drifts of cobweb, and more of those bulky shapes joined it. The first of the singers finally slipped from between two cobweb swales and floated over our heads, a bloated spider with ten branching legs half-extended. It didn’t run along the webs like an Earthly spider but drifted twenty feet above the ground like thistle-down or a helium balloon. As it passed overhead, a woman’s face, perfectly black like a charcoal drawing, looked down from the center of the creature’s thorax through ten compound eyes. Her sweet, soft mouth dropped transcendent notes almost above the range of hearing, and she tilted her face in its rigid casement of chitin to watch me as she drifted by.
I didn’t realize I had stopped walking until I saw Alistair clap his hands to his ears. “Pay no attention,” he bawled.
Reluctantly, I covered my own ears. The music still vibrated through my hands and into the bones of my skull, but the barrier blunted the edge of their combined voices and broke the magnetism that enticed me to stand and gawp. The lovely black face conveyed an expression of sorrow as she drifted away, despite the cold, arachnid eyes.
Alistair trudged ahead with his hands pressed to his ears and his shoulders hunched, his head half disappearing into the collar of his oversized suit. More spider-sirens emerged from the webbed city and floated over our heads. More sad female faces studied us and sang haunting notes.I limped along with my eyes on the spiders and their oddly beautiful, forlorn faces, until they disappeared back into the webs, and their song faded.
A dozen worlds later, in another universe, dim as twilight, luminous blossoms the size of dinner plates filled the air with sweet smells. Vivid birds of many sizes and colors flitted and flirted among the branches of shapely trees calling to one another in falling, liquid notes. Unfamiliar fruit hung big and rosy-cheeked and shining on overweighted branches. Delight and hunger overcame the memory of a previous world and its meaty blossoms. I reached for a gold and rose globe that bobbed just overhead above the path and promised unimaginable delight.
Alistair slapped my hand away from it. “Touch nothing,” he hissed, casting his eyes around as if he suspected spies in every shadow. “It's his garden.”
“Whose?” I asked. It could have been the garden of Eden, it was so beautiful and the fruit so tempting.
“His,” Alistair repeated. “This is one of his places. He is king here, and nothing must be touched.”
We had eaten nothing since our departure from our own world, and I had been watching for potential edibles since the world of the goat men, where I had been tempted to try the lichen they had been so fond of. Despite Alistair’s near-panic, I would have liked to risk the fruit. I felt confident it would be as good to eat as it was good to smell, but Alistair bolted ahead down the path, almost running and looking from side to side, trying to consult his ancient journal without stopping. “Where is it? Where is it?” he muttered.
I followed him, first along the sandy path then through blooming bushes of delicately-shaded flowers whose hidden thorns drew blood from a hundred little scratches.
He found another path, narrower and broken by roots and fallen tree limbs, and now he ran faster, his father's suit flapping around him. Here, the fruit trees dispersed among twisted growths whose bent, vining trunks leaned over the leaf-strewn track.
Then, as I limped in the wake of my friend, a rustle and a wild crying of birds stopped us both. Alistair stared around, his eyes wide. A new sound replaced the birds, something faint and far off and in its own way as lovely and compelling as the birdsong had been. It grew and filled the air like the pealing of distant bells, the calling of mellow horns, the barking of hounds if hounds had bells for voices. I listened, icy fingers of delight tracing my spine and raising the roots of my hair.
Alistair’s face whitened. “It's too late. The hounds.”
“What are they?” I murmured.
He seized my sleeve to drag me after him. “They're his hounds, the Fa hounds. Don't you understand? They're hunting us.”
“Fa hounds?” I couldn't make out what he was saying.
“Run, Henry. He's coming. He's right behind them. If they catch you, they'll tear your soul to pieces and eat it with your flesh. Run.” He turned words to action and bolted away.
I looke
d back toward the swelling, belling call of the hounds. Behind the trees of the garden burned sparks of bitter orange the color of the sun the moment after rising. They came nearer, flicking among the trees, belling their sweet cries, and I still felt no need to fly before them. Even when their forms resolved into the shapes of fiery dogs like wolf hounds, I stood and watched and listened, rapt with the beauty of the hunt.
Had I faced only hounds, I might have remained there, willing quarry. But behind the hounds that leaped among the trees like flames, a shadow poured, a rolling wave of smoke, and in the smoke, a shade, the outline of a rider on a curvetting mount. My breath caught. However sweet the hounds, the huntsman rode on a storm of terror.
Fear charged the twisted muscles in my hip and blunted the pain, enabling me to run, following Alistair's scuffed tracks, but bitter orange flicked among the trees to my right as hounds drew up to flank me. Alistair's trail bore right, straight toward the hounds. To flee the creatures, I would have to plunge into the thickest forest, leaving Alistair and his gate behind.
The hounds panted almost on my heels, too bright to look at. One swerved in to snap at my leg. The fiery dog was lean as a whip, its shoulders almost as high as my hip. I slashed at it with my cane, but the hound flicked out of reach like the flame of which it seemed to be formed. Another tried its luck, but I refused to be driven from the path, and the hounds wouldn’t set foot on it.
All the while, a rumble grew behind the belling voices of the hounds, the thud and thunder of falling hooves that grew until I almost thought I felt the hot breath of the mount scorch the back of my neck, but I kept running, unwilling to turn and try my stone knife until I was sure I had lost every chance of easy escape through a gate.
I lashed with my cane at another closing hound, and finally, I caught a glimpse of Alistair's throbbing portal astride the track. A monstrous hound, as tall as my ribs, threw itself at me. As it turned its blank, white-hot eyes on me, I hit it with all my weight behind my knife. For all its brightness, it gave no heat. The blade grated through what felt like muscle and bone—a lot of bone—and the hound crashed to earth. It landed square in the path before me, and as its back struck the ground, it flicked out, snuffed as thoroughly as a candle.
The portal opened before me, an endlessly unroiling angle, but there was no sign of Alistair. He had gone through without me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I had no time to curse his betrayal. With escape out of my reach, I turned almost in the mouth of the interstice, ready to defend myself with my knife, already plotting the positions of the hounds and calculating which would leap first.
But the hounds had stopped with me, their flickering bodies all around me, some pacing on long legs, long narrow heads sunk between heavy, sloped shoulders, their white-hot eyes turned toward me. Others lay on the ground, panting audibly. Though they burned bright enough to leave negative imprints on the back of my eyes, they set nothing alight and cast very little light around them. They showed no sign of molesting me as long as I stood on the trail.
The hunter, too, had slacked his pace when I turned at bay. Now his mount came forward, the roiling smoke spilling down its flanks and back into the trees as the animal advanced into the open at a steady pace. It tossed its head, as much feline as it was like a horse, and flared its nostrils. It stopped. Its feet—three hoofed toes apiece—rested just at the line between path and forest. It stretched its neck over the path and yowled, shook a yellow mane and rolled slit-pupilled green eyes.
The rider sat a high-cantled saddle. A tunic of tarnished chain mail hung on wasted shoulders. A ragged yellow surplice covered it, bound with a frayed cord. An ancient yellow veil hung over the rider’s face from a high helmet or crown like a fringe of bone.
The rider bent toward me, raising his hand. Yellow-gloved fingers caught the edge of the veil. As the tattered cloth began to rise, I realized there might be more terrible fates than death.
I recoiled. The huntsman rose in his stirrups and called to its hounds—a cawing, sawing sound that stirred the fire-dogs to their feet in an instant, their flames leaping. The dogs sprang at my face. Already in motion, my arm raised, ready to take on the first hound and the next after it, I took a backward step to improve my balance and stepped into the gate.
I folded around myself, spindled, and opened in another world my knife still pointed toward a predator that was no longer there. Something caught my feet, and I went down backwards, splashing into something cool and wet that soaked my jacket. I scrambled up and peered around at the verge of a lake surrounded by a fringe of hills like the long-worn circlet of an ancient caldera. No sign of hounds or hunter or mount. No sign of the opening through which I had come. The hounds evidently lacked the power to pass between universes. Something made me doubt their master suffered the same restriction, but for whatever reason, he had declined to follow me out of his realm.
Alistair hadn’t abandoned me. He’d found a way to leave the gate open behind him. If I hadn’t taken that backward step, I might have been torn apart with escape less than a step away. Alistair’s footprints trekked along the silty edge of the lake toward a copse of trees on a headland. I followed his trail, watched the tracks turn from a stumbling, thrashing run to an unsteady walk, the heels digging deeper but the steps still uneven. I had begun to shake with the backlash of unspent adrenaline by the time I caught up to him on the headland. I called his name, and he whirled, his eyes wild. He barely glanced at me, his real attention focused behind me. I turned to see what had followed us, but I saw only our two sets of footprints on the silty verge of the lake between the water and the whispery sedges.
“How did you pass the portal,” he demanded. “Did He let you through?”
“I don’t know about He,” I said. “I was about to fight the hounds when I fell through at the last minute.”
His head jerked back. “On your own? Without aid?”
I studied his face. “I thought you had left it open.”
A moment of confusion, then he relaxed from his half-resentful scowl. “Yes, of course.”
“But you didn’t wait for me on this side?”
“Time and gravity, my dear Henry. I dared not wait, but I had confidence you would rejoin me.” Alistair nodded, looking happier now. “I rejoice in your escape. I would have grieved the loss of your sturdy companionship.”
I needed him to get me home, and in his defense, I had lingered behind him, tempted by curiosity, and Alistair had never included courage as one of his virtues.
I fell in beside him and held my peace until I could speak without a shake in my voice. “What would have happened if he had lifted the veil?"
He turned on me, his hard with suspicion. “He lifted his veil, and he still let you go?"
“He started to.”
He glowered a moment from under his furrowed brow before he turned away. “You can’t trust him,” he muttered. “If he let you go, then maybe he thought you were too insignificant to trouble with, but if he had removed his mask, then he might have drawn you into darkness where, through aeons uncountable, your body would slowly grow to join the creeping white worms that grub the pits of boundless hell dimensions while his will consigned your soul to endless torment.”
I wondered how much of what he said was knowledge and what portion was Alistair’s hyperbole.
“Still…” He scowled. “He’s been known to give…favors.”
“He doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you’d want to take a favor from.”
Alistair flicked that away as of no importance. “Doubtless the repayment would be unpleasant enough, but what does that matter in light of the powers he might confer?”
Powers from the yellow rider didn’t sound appealing to me. “Who…what is he? You said it was one of his places.” We had crossed the headland. Now we slogged around a reed-thick marsh that reeked of swamp gas and skunk cabbage.
“I told you, he’s the king. That’s all. He’s in a thousand, thousand worlds, or el
se there are a thousand, thousand of him. Who can know? But he knows you now.” He scowled. “Be sure you never encounter him again.”
How can you measure distance when you travel in universes rather than miles? I had to admit a certain fascination with the worlds through which we passed. I had joined the Army in part from a hunger to see new places. Now I traveled through worlds I could never have imagined.
Alistair allowed us to stop in a wet world where mushrooms grew to the height of trees and a light rain fell like thick fog. There, he showed me how to pluck the round knobs of mushrooms the size of my thumb from their clusters around the base of the mushroom trees. They had the texture of Earthly mushrooms and tasted faintly like pork with a musty overtone. I had eaten worse.
After the mushroom world, we passed through what seemed to be a universe of crystals the size of skyscrapers, interlocking at angles. Gravity seemed to pull in every direction at once, forcing us to walk along the smooth faces of the giant crystals as if we negotiated an Escher drawing.
In another world, we passed through a glacial crevasse between walls so blue and pure we could see the magnified shapes of frozen leviathans suggestive of plesiosaurs with the heads of dragons and fine, articulated fingers in their forward flukes
Finally, we turned a corner that wasn't a corner and stood together on a plain under a star-iced sky that shed a flat grey light. I looked behind me. The high fangs of mountains rose up against the dead-white stars, their peaks ghostly with glaciers that didn't shine. Far off to our right, a river wound across the plain and disappeared into vague distance.
Alistair's speed had lagged, and his cheeks paled with fatigue as we passed through the last several worlds. Now he darted forward, chuckling to himself and all but clapping his hands like a goblin at a birthday party.
The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption Page 12
