We passed through a graveyard of sorts where the serpentine bones of some monstrous creature lay half buried in the sterile dirt. I glimpsed its skull, devoid of sockets, and instead of mandibles, a gaping circle full of teeth. Around it lay the remains of whatever scavengers had devoured its flesh before they succumbed to the same entropic force that had ended the existence of the larger creature. Bare bones and chitinous shells and tufts of coarse, barbed hairs from ancient, withered carcasses clicked and rattled in the thin wind that skated down the slopes of the mountains behind us.
We passed through that belt of death, and I came to stand beside Alistair at the lip of the chasm he called the Valley of Shadows—nothing as vast as the Grand Canyon, not nearly, but wide enough to contain a city stretched on end. The light of the flat stars withered as it fell into the rift until it disappeared into a river of shadow that obscured the valley floor.
Alistair held his book before him, and I saw his elaborate handwriting all around a drawing I recognized as a rough map of the valley. Eagerly, Alistair pointed down and to our left where a ziggurat rose like a squat pyramid in three great steps with a ramp leading up to the shrine at its pinnacle. My hackles stiffened, and my mind revolted at some unidentifiable wrongness in its proportions or the dull stone of its facings. Not a wrongness of the three dimensions I could recognize but some other angle that grew out of or wrapped around the temple, distorting it into unrecognizable shapes. I turned my eyes away and dug the heel of my hand into the right socket.
Alistair trembled with eagerness. "There, you see? It's the temple of Thoth, and there," he pointed past it and well down the valley to the face of what, in the shadows, could have been a rock formation or, with the application of some imagination, the outline of a temple eight stories high built into the cliff wall on the opposite side of the canyon. Alistair said, "If all my studies are correct, that is the palace of Slethyrl, she before whom I will bow down and surrender all my devotion."
I shuddered. “Alistair, there’s still time to stop. Leave your goddess behind, and let’s go home.”
He regarded me almost tenderly. “You are a good friend to me, Henry. Almost a brother. Stay here and wait if you want; when I come out, if you don’t fall in adoration before my beloved, I’ll send you back.”
Something in the way he said it made my hackles prick and ice-water flood down my spine. “Then send me home now.”
“But I can’t,” he said, smug as if he had accomplished something wonderful by stranding us in this empty universe. “The door is shut for another ten thousand years. No, Henry, you will have to wait until I have waked my goddess and thrown myself at her feet. Only when I have her power at my command can I open a way for you to return to your mundane little world.”
“What have you done?” I stepped toward him, and he stepped back with the valley gaping behind him. Another step or two, and he would go over the edge.
“Careful, Henry, if I fall, you have no way home.”
“What are you talking about—the door being shut? How did you mean to get back? How have you been getting back all this time?”
“Me?” He looked gently surprised. “Why should go back? But until this night, the way was open; one cannot go back by the same way one comes, but the portals stood in place to permit one who knows the path to return from here to our former world. The doors have since moved on, and there is no way home. Once my beloved is awake, however, I shall find the means by which to turn the worlds into alignment and open a way for you if you really want to go.”
A moment ago, he had implied he knew how to do it. “And you’ll bring Her back with us?”
He shook his head. “It won’t be so easy for me. She is bound here, and I have much to do before I can free her and return to our world at the head of her army. But I can send you back. There might be complications, but certainly I will be able to do it eventually with some study.”
Did he mean what he said about returning with an army, or was that another of his fantasies? I could hardly dismiss the former possibility while I stood on the lip of the chasm looking down on the temples of his gods.
Maybe I should simply push him backward and let him fall to the valley floor, but that would leave me trapped in this world until whatever had sucked it dry of life put an end to me as well.
I balked at committing either suicide or murder. “What is the point of my going back if you’re just going to lay waste to the earth?” I demanded.
His eyes widened. “But Henry, you have nothing to fear from my return. Those who have been my loyal friends will be put in places of honor and power under me.”
His “loyal friends” could become his enemies in the space of an ill-chosen word or a wayward glance.
“What about your book?” I asked. “Is there nothing in it about getting home after the pin is pulled?”
He shrugged. “As I say, there is no way back to our world through the portals.”
He turned his back to me and began to prowl the lip of the canyon. I followed him, resigned to staying nearby and watching for another chance to change his mind. It took him half an hour to find a cut in the lip of the canyon that seemed to give access to the valley below. Indeed, after the first long scrabble, the rift gave out on a path running down the canyon wall in a series of stairs and ledges. The air grew close and heavy, and the light of the unblinking stars overhead dimmed, cut off by walls and shadow, while monuments carved out of the chasm walls seemed to grow ever taller as we descended.
That sense of alien angles grew as well. Whatever had built this prison for Alistair’s gods had not been content with three dimensions. I tried to climb with one eye shut, but the narrow path required some careful navigation, and I sometimes blinked and saw the temples twist around themselves in four or five dimensions while the valley floor roiled and folded, locking the alien palaces in more than stone and space and time.
We came at last to the valley floor where I had expected to find perfect darkness, but what had appeared from the height of the canyon wall to be an impenetrable river of shadow was not as profound as it had seemed. A wide road passed between the monuments. It had once been flat and smooth, but entropy had done its work here as up on the plain. Boulders as high as my head had tumbled from the cliff face and rolled into the path, drawing phalanxes of smaller detritus, even breaking chunks of bas relief from the temples. Segments of cracked and shattered pillars and carved facings lay in the dust. I glanced repeatedly over my shoulder, teased by the sensation of something vastly and hideously alive in this place which on the surface seemed entirely dead.
“Alistair,” I said, “Shouldn’t we rest here before broaching the tomb of your goddess?” My feet had begun to feel heavy and hard to lift, and my neck seemed too thin to hold up my head.
He hissed. “They sleep, but they are not dead which can eternal lie. They drink into themselves the very light of the stars and the energies of life as you saw above on the plain. Lie down to rest, and you would never rise.”
I increased my pace at that and forced my head up on my neck. I had pushed my way through marches harder than this. The tombs and temples varied widely from a simple cave mouth blocked with a single rough stone and carved around the mouth with sigils to a palace as elaborate as a Disney fantasy complete with minarets and stone arches. It should have been beautiful, but it struck me with a desire to weep in abject despair until I averted my eyes and hurried by.
We passed the temple of Thoth on my left, its base three stories high and its upper segments marching back until it merged with the canyon wall at its peak. Alistair showed no interest in the ziggurat, but I, compelled by unwilling curiosity, turned aside to study it. Friezes marched along the wall of its lowest terrace. An ancient and alien artisan had carved scenes that featured monsters assembled from bits and pieces of every creature imaginable on Earth and some that couldn't be imagined at all. Those hideous and distorted creatures abased themselves before a winged central figure that might have been a dra
gon if dragons walked on roiling tentacles and had no heads. If that hunched and crawling thing was Thoth, then who, or what, was mad enough to call it a god when demon or abomination would suit it better?
I caught up to Alistair and followed on his scurrying heels between tombs and temples, towers and crypts, doors carved in unreadable glyphs. Some of those glyphs turned my stomach. Though I couldn’t read them, I could almost see how they knotted and twisted the universe around the prisons of what slept within lest they escape and swallow world upon world to feed their bottomless appetite.
“She is here.” Alistair darted forward to the feet of a temple looming out from the cliff wall. He almost leaped with glee. “At last, I am coming, my beloved, my queen, my lovely.”
I studied the temple with considerably less delight than my friend. Four misproportioned pillars supported, a hundred yards above the valley floor, an entablature carved with letters or signs I couldn’t make out in the miserly light. A giant’s stair rose three steps to the base of a pair of stone doors twenty yards high between the two inner pillars.
Alistair clambered up the grand stairs, too high and deep for human legs, and rushed to the towering doors to run his hands over their faces, murmuring to himself as he probed for an entry. I forced myself to study the images carved on the foot of the temple, looking for any potential weakness in the occupant in case I came face to face with it. A vermiform length looped across the stone face. A million tiny, claw-tipped legs splayed from the boneless coil. If it had a head, I couldn’t find it. And were those teats from which malformed men seemed to suckle?
I averted my eyes. “How do you mean to get inside?” I asked. Maybe the builders, or jailers, had sealed the tombs too well to permit entry.
His fiddling must have had born some fruit because Alistair, his voice rough with emotion, called, “Come help me.”
There was no possibility of one man, or even two, budging that mass of stone, but I obliged Alistair by throwing my own weight into the effort.
To my surprise and dismay, with one good push of our shoulders, a crack appeared, running perpendicular to the threshold, and the right-hand door swung inward—smooth and silent despite its incalculable mass. Stale air puffed out of the opening. It smelled of age and death and something faint and rank and organic.
Alistair breathed the air as if it were perfume. “Come,” he said. “Or wait for me if you prefer." He plunged into the black mouth of the tomb and disappeared from view.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I had no desire to see what lay inside. My hip ached maddeningly, and I had no real hope of stopping him from whatever he chose to do, but Alistair had gone, so I followed him.
I went sideways between the doors and guessed their thickness at a little less than a yard. How had they been moved by only two men? I stopped in the anteroom. The near-dark outside cast no light into the crypt, but the echo of my footsteps gave me a sense of its size—a few yards in each direction and much higher than that overhead.
A yellow glow flickered from a narrow opening ahead of me. Alistair must have brought a flashlight. I hurried after him, using my cane to feel for obstructions on the floor. When I caught up to Alistair, almost close enough to walk on his heels, the light cast enough illumination to the sides that I could make out the suggestion of figures on the stone walls. I caught Alistair’s shoulder. “Wait.”
He turned with eyebrows raised.
“Give me the light a minute.”
I took the flashlight from his hand and used it to scan the band of painted images on the wall at shoulder height. My skin crawled. The scenes painted there—whether by her worshipers or her jailers—portrayed loathsome perversions of nature. Men wore unfamiliar clothing—complex, elaborate and stiff with upstanding shoulders, and long skirts or coats that dragged behind them. Many of those knelt before the monster I recognized from the outer doors or coupled with it in priapic ecstasy. Further down, women lay chained and splayed on altars as alien abominations burst out of them. Hordes of malformed things like perversions of humanity overran clusters of running humans. Some of those monsters crouched to gnaw disembodied limbs, and all along the frieze ran the organoid coil of the thing Alistair proposed to worship.
“Alistair, is this your goddess?”
He stroked a loving hand over the mural clearing a layer of dust and revealing the unfaded paint beneath. “Her day will come in glory,” he whispered.
The time had come to stop him. He wouldn’t stop himself, and I couldn’t allow him to complete his quest. “That’s not glory. That is what will happen to our world if you bring her there.”
He furrowed his wide white brow as if he couldn’t understand my objection. “True, my enemies will be crushed and devoured by my beloved, but I have told you that you will be uplifted to the high places of my queen’s court.”
“Alistair, I don’t want anything to do with this. If you have to let her out, at least keep her here. You can worship her or adore her or whatever it is you want to do without taking her to our world.”
Had I been with any other man than Alistair, I would have been alerted when he slipped his hand into the pocket of his father’s jacket. I heard a clap and felt a blow to my side at the waist. Puzzled, I stepped back and looked down. A second blow struck my shoulder, and I grunted, overbalanced. The light fell out of my numb hand and, remarkably enough, did not break. I saw by its rolling illumination the blackened hole in Alistair’s jacket pocket.
A third clap came with the punch of something against my left shin that made me cry out and drop to the ground in sudden, excruciating pain as my leg gave way.
I scrambled for the nearest weapon, the fallen flashlight, hoping I could blind him by shining it into his eyes, but Alistair skipped back a few steps and reached it before me, splashing the light into my face. I threw my hand up to shield my eyes, but they watered and burned from the sudden shock. I didn’t dare move while he held both gun and light.
The light shifted to one side, and Alistair pulled the gun from his pocket. He had fired right through the cloth. Blinking light ghosts from my view, I recognized a derringer from Walter Blackwood’s collection, a silver-plated toy no bigger than Alistair’s hand. It fired twenty-two caliber subsonic bullets by the sound and by the fact that the bullet had nicked the bone without going all the way through the meat of my calf. Just the sort of weapon that would strike Alistair’s fancy and small enough to ride lightly in his pocket without distorting the hang of his oversized jacket. I calculated the chances of his getting off a fatal shot. A few vital points would have me bleeding out in minutes, but they would be hard to hit with those small rounds.
“I am sorry to injure you, Henry,” Alistair said. “Believe me, I do know you mean well, but I can’t allow you to interfere.”
I breathed through the pain. “Shooting me is hardly a just reward for trying to save you from folly.”
“It’s true you have served me well thus far.” He shrugged. “When my lady wakes, she can renew your flesh as if you were never injured, erasing even those disfiguring marks upon your person which have caused you so much grief.”
“Never mind my scars,” I croaked. I rolled to one side and clenched my fingers around the sticky mess of my jeans. “You have to help me stop the bleeding.”
Alistair backed away. “I have no doubt you will contrive something, and if not…” He gave an insouciant little wave of the gun. “No doubt my lady has the power even to restore the dead.”
Alistair retreated backward down the corridor with the light and, probably, the miserable little gun still aimed directly at me. I held myself motionless until the light turned from my face, and the echo of his footsteps faded.
I hitched myself to a seated position against the wall. My eyes had grown used to the light. Now my pupils dilated again with a sensation of pressure as if the dark had weight. I probed my wounds. Blood soaked my cotton shirt from shoulder to hip and seeped into the waistband of my jeans. They wounds were bad enough
but hadn’t hit anything vital. The wound in my leg was worse but only because the bullet had struck bone, a much more painful injury than soft tissue. It would be a struggle to walk even if the bone wasn’t broken.
The entry wounds were smaller than the tip of my little finger, definitely a low velocity twenty-two. I shrugged out of my coat, retrieved my stone knife and groped at the cuff of my nightshirt. It took some time to form pressure bandages, and I sacrificed both sleeves of my nightshirt and both legs of my jeans below the knee, using strips of denim to secure two of the bandages and my belt to hold the one covering the hole in my side.
Once I had groped around on the floor and found my cane, I levered myself up on my feet and hissed through bared teeth as my weight fell on my wounded leg. The bone hadn’t shattered, and the muscles should be able to support my knee. I considered options. I could abandon Alistair to his fate. The traitorous sneak had earned whatever his goddess decided to do to him.
On the other hand, there was Slethyrl. If Alistair woke her and succeeded in finding a way to bring her back to our world, he would destroy everything I loved—beginning with Woodhill.
I heaved myself up against the wall, then forced myself straight and went after Alistair. I groped along in total blackness like a blind man, sweeping my way with my cane and pausing from time to time to rap the stone wall of the tunnel with the butt of my stone sliver and listen to the shape of the echoes. That saved me. I heard the shift from confined corridor to deep cavern before I came to the lip of the chasm.
Dropping to hands and knees, I probed the edge, lying on my stomach and reaching down as far as my arm would reach. Then I risked the loss of my cane by using it to tap along the stone further down. The end of my stick encountered no obstacle, and the echoes told me I would have a very long drop if I fell over.
The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption Page 13
