Deepest, Darkest Eden: New Tales of Hyperborea

by John Shirley

Hundreds of miles passed below them in seconds...They had glimpses of city lights, passing beneath them; of a sea unfurling below...of a frozen landscape. They rocketed toward a tower which jutting up through ice--a tower missing its roof. They were plunged down into the gaping mouth of the tower, down, into a brooding gloom...

  ~*~

  Sheathed now in comfortable ectoplasm, Pnom—who’d once called himself Rodney Lasalle—floated over the great sparkling heap of gemstones in the vault as gold-robed Eriphodes turned to gaze fondly up at him. Eriphodes smiled, showing sharp-filed teeth as he stroked a beard like Spanish moss. “There you are, Pnom! Back at last! You don’t have your old body, it’s true, but I think you’ll find this apparitional modality a satisfying replacement. It’s far more mobile. And certainly better than the one you’ve been trapped in more than twenty years. You have had enough dallying about with the unclean ones, yes? Ha ha! Now then--I have found a new clutch of treasure stones and would have you count them...after you and I take care of one other matter...”

  “Certainly, Golden Master.”

  Eriphodes went to the door, humming to himself, and strode through it, along a stone corridor lit with fluorescent gems ensconced in the high, platinum ceiling. Floating along, Pnom followed close behind his master, content to be free of the damaged body and equally damaged feelings of Rodney Lasalle.

  They came to the Chamber of Sating—where two groaning, bruised and bloodied figures twitched on the stained granite floor, feebly trying to rise: Hezza and Skroggy. But they could not stand, they could even crawl; most of their bones were broken, for after falling through the tunnel in space itself, and down through the shaft into the temple, their impact on this cold stone floor had been considerable.

  “Help...help me...” Hezza said hoarsely.

  “Dolt!” Pnom jeered. “There is no help for you! Your physical suffering is about to come to an end. Your psychic suffering—that is just beginning. Your life force will be traded for weather magic--and a new sheath of ice over Commoriom. At last you are of use!”

  Then Pnom and Eriphodes spoke the words, together, that opened the doorway between planes, and the hungry ones came swiftly to be paid for their service...

  The hungry ones took their time in feasting. They did so enjoy a good meal.

  The Winter of

  Atiradarinsept

  By Zak Jarvis

  His sword smoldered on the table between us. It terrified me that he did not care about the value of wood, now that winter had come.

  “This,” he said, gesturing to my inn as though it were his. “Is my victory. This land destroyed, the waste of my every dream. Gather your people and anything you have to record my story.”

  He put his armored hand palm down on the glowing metal of his sword. The room filled with the smell of his flesh cooking on the blade.

  I pulled my skincoat close and stepped into the cold.

  Our only ingenite lay in steaming pieces, its milksac ruptured. We would not survive long without it. My anxious, thrumming heart blotted out the sounds of the world so that even the crunching of snow underfoot went unheard. Our home, joined to but separate from the main inn, glowed golden in the nighttime ringlight.

  The moment the door opened Gematra clasped me and held my eyes with his weird stare.

  “Do we need to flee?”

  I looked past him to the children, their eyes nearly luminous in the dark, all turned to me.

  “No,” the stranger’s voice said behind me. “Gather up your things and come in the other building. I have right of laniation. Obey.”

  I heard his footsteps recede behind me.

  “That was the crest of the Interdiction, but what in the name of Mnostia and all the eternal heirs is a right of laniation?” Concinnity whispered.

  “Who knows, love,” I said. “But we’re ruined even if we obey. The ingenite is dead, and that man killed it.”

  They gasped.

  Gematra pulled away and turned to the children.

  “Hurry! Do as he said! We might still find hope so long as we’re alive.”

  “We’re to record a story,” I said, feeling the cold bite my skin.

  With my family herded into the main inn, I began to write what the stranger told me.

  The following is as it was told to me, Sough of Ge’sqnul, owner and records keeper of the Way Home at the border crossing.

  ~*~

  I am Atiradarinsept, fourth Cicurator of the Magisterial Interdiction. My masters chose me to lead an army and crash down the wall between our world and the strange place that our fathers, Eibon and Morghi, abandoned.

  Can you imagine the honor? The terror?

  There are few of us, we humans, who are allowed to speak with Intercessors, and only in the bondage of what you might call matrimony.

  Your triune marriages are an echo of this, but the Intercessor’s mercy bears little relation to what a husband and wife do with their trennel. Even the most pious do little more than carry semen in hand or mouth from husband to wife.

  A very long time ago I was pledged to a zeugma called Heptanquirra. It took me months to learn how to manipulate her glands, to stroke the ciliated ridges just so, in order for her to open herself to me. That I did not lose my manhood to those early experiences should be proof enough of my loyalty, but the Interdiction needed far more. I had to train myself to penetrate Heptanquirra in front of a royal audience, to do so while my head was immersed in the viscous fluid the Interdiction uses to breathe, to fulfill congress in full armor, while being flogged.

  Only when I could perform all of that to the satisfaction of my masters was I allowed to even to see an Intercessor.

  In all Cykranosh I had seen no being so powerful.

  She towered above me like a garrison. Plates of armor moved with her body like river ice in spring. Her lashing hands clattered against my armor. Her musk burned my nose and left such an ague in my lungs that I thought they’d cracked a mnechtun seed. Heptanquirra, gulping furiously around my manhood, folded back her sheath and unfurled the organ that would join the three of us together. Never in our solitary couplings had she shown me this part of her. Innumerable tongues of the Intercessor mopped over the grayish organ, each slathering Heptanquirra with a sizzling, catheretic mucus.

  In a great press she pulled the three of us together, bucking hard enough to bruise my iliac crest.

  Her ten arms pecked through my armor in a hundred places, moving like the probing limbs of a kultern spider until my flanks burned with tiny punctures.

  Just as her exculpatory mandibles opened to bathe me in imperative fluid she dislodged Heptanquirra, the aperture gaping open and pouring glair in lumpen strings. The Intercessor slowly withdrew into the darkened chamber from which she’d come.

  The zeugma’s conjunctive organ pulsed in the open air, turning violet as their combined fluids oxidized.

  I had passed the final test.

  My Intercessor was Analepsis. To bind me to her, they took one of her eyes and let it burrow into the base of my skull. Then, after a joining much like the previous Intercessor, she soaked me in her imperative fluid. The orders seeped into me. Like dreams or madness they invaded, pushing my thoughts aside.

  From that day onwards I conquered for Intercessor Analepsis and the Magisterial Interdiction that guided her.

  The obstreperous sciapodes of Pnul watched in awe as I dismembered their patriarch.

  The once glimmering mineral forests of Opsiun fell before me.

  Hundreds of lesser gods took my offered yoke of slavery.

  My army grew from a small squad to a land-shaping mass more beholden to the foodgoods I could procure than even the will of the Interdiction.

  Any peace you’ve known, or prosperity, has flowed into your life through the wounds I’ve left on the world.

  For most of a year I labored. As I warred, the infants of my sisters and brothers grew, from swaddled dependance to successful adults. My days were marked by scars. The cicatrices of my serv
ice are a map of our age.

  My defining mission came at the height of my power.

  At the end I lay coated in the glut of her influencing rheum. I felt her intent becoming my own. The shape of the mission, the eidolon of it rooted itself to everything. It was in the convulsing throat of the zeugma as she milked me, in my own cataleptic explusion, even Heptanquirra’s thirsty grunts as she gulped down the product of our union.

  The Intercessors chose me to return to the world of humans.

  ~*~

  Concinnity caught his attention.

  “Where did you serve before the Intercessors?”

  “I was among the war chattel in the Battle of Three Moons. My life before that is erased.”

  Gematra ignored the children for a moment only to be accosted in their strange language. It made me ache for the day when they learn to speak like proper adults.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “How did you know you were chosen? You said the idea came from inside you. How can you be sure that you aren’t mad?”

  He smiled at me, broad and wavering. It was not the smile of a sane man.

  “That’s always the question, is it not?”

  He leaned over the table and grabbed the skins that kept me warm.

  “How can you ever be certain what is inside your head and what is real?”

  As quick as you please he brought the sword around behind my head. It burned my neck.

  “A finger’s width of this into your spine and the inside of your head begins the transition from personhood to slop. I assure you though, the world outside your head goes ever onward.”

  I felt sure that I defiantly held his gaze, but as I enrich this transcription of his story I cannot be certain. Could I really have looked that man in the eye?

  He relaxed back into his chair, the sword returning to the char it had left on the table.

  “It is very perceptive of you to ask,” he said.

  Gematra caught my attention briefly with a tiny raise of his eyebrows. He had a plan, but I could not know what.

  ~*~

  Over four hundred years have passed since our fathers Eibon and Morghi lived. Thirteen thousand generations of men and women, stillicidious births, a defluxion of lives, and serein deaths uncountable. As best I knew, none since had set eyes upon their Mhu Thulan sea. We humans of Cykranosh have only the stories of our fabled home. Until the moment I knew I was to return, I discounted the stories as myths of a race denied knowledge of its origin.

  Intercessor Analepsis gave me a hoary incunabula from the defiled Blemphroims. It detailed a portal, crafted from common metals and imbued by the will of wayward gods. While most of the Blemphroims died to purge their heresy, a few, I learned, escaped to Hyperborea some hundred years ago.

  I made a new portal, large enough for armies.

  The first scouts reported trackless ice. Truly, none of us expected a world unchanged by the vast years between Eibon’s crossing and our time, but no one expected desolation. Again and again our sorties found only ice, featureless and expansive. So I ordered them to look down. I procured a mithridate key from the Interdiction’s stores, gathered my best soldiers and stepped through the portal.

  The hyemal wind wrapped me in a thousand stitching pains. Its arescent howl flayed away all my purpose and left me with the fearful certainty that all my effort would end in smoke.

  I steadied my nerves as I’d been taught, as though I were preparing to meet an Intercessor. The fear pulled back and I grasped the hilt of my sword.

  The sky above us was black. No ring lit the land, only a wan and gibbous moon. The land, such as it was, stretched into hazed obscurity. Gelid dust drifted in curls and strings, prickling my nose and skin.

  That pale, miserable satellite glistened across the icy powder as a long line, like a bridge or a beam reaching for the sky.

  I ordered my soldiers to dig pits. They filled them with naphtha and we burned snow. Beneath hard-pack waited monumental serac like sharp and numerous teeth. As that ice melted its surface became pellucid. Irreconcilable blackness stretched beneath us as blank and terrifying as the Kulgness at high tide when the megapredators have sunk deep to feast.

  For hours we flensed the rime from that distant world, spiraling outwards to always leave a path to the surface.

  When the unnaturally huge sun rose it turned the landscape into a blinding emptiness, endlessly luminal. The blinding disk mocked us with its failure to bring warmth. Though we did not benefit, its rays heated the atmosphere above us enough that a thick fog rose from the ground. That terrible sun crept across the sky with agonizing slowness. We made a base camp with our return portal.

  The Hyperborean sun circled us again and again as we worked. We burned deeper, finding at last some stones bearing extra-telluric metal, but no sign of hands, human or otherwise.

  At the surface of the submerged mountain I ground a tiny portion of stone and let the mithridate key make its decoction. A sour drink, from the glacial ice and these otherworldly stones, but in a moment the visions came.

  I saw the ice ebbing and flowing against the mountain, carving it into a vertiginous tooth. A city sprang up and crumbled, then another and another, like crops in harvest. Roads stretched and stunted, pulsing and radiating away from the habitations. The ice, for its part, had imperceptibly retreated from my view. The cities grew and merged, involuted by roads and metallic beams, rivers of tiny metal and glass cells flowed between them and all around them.

  Then came the ice. Resolute and imperdible it crouched, pulsing against the movement of the city. Men and women uncountable surely looked up at that wall and despaired.

  The end came quickly. A single flexion and all the city’s movement stopped. That brumal mass rolled between the towers, it thickened and grew, filling every space with neve and serac.

  With the vision fading, I pointed toward the entombed city and we set the fires anew, pumping naphtha down from the surface in long pipes.

  The tunnel work went much faster than the dig.

  Our reflections writhed inside the ice, the movement giving illusory life to the vile stillness of that world. My soldiers busied themselves behind the boring crew. They ferried supports to shore up ice we did not trust. The world outside the tunnel appeared liquescent and ghoulishly blue, rent by fractures and inclusions. From time to time that disconnected fear would return to me, squeezing on my chest like failure, but we pressed forward.

  I had to know.

  What happened to these people? If we could achieve footing on the city, the mithridate key could tell me. I called back through our supply line for equipment to remove the melted ice, to dig into it faster, to clean the air of choking naphtha fumes.

  At first I could not tell what the shape was, glinting green and distorted through serac bulb and facet. It hulked low to the ground outside our tunnel. I ordered it excavated.

  As we got closer I recognized one of the glass and metal cells I had seen pulsing between cities. It bore a thin metal shell and rhomboidal apertures sealed with mineral glass. The form of the thing was almost like a predatory desert tresk, its sharp edges flowing over a smooth, elongate mass. With the ice carefully melted away I knew it as a conveyance. Its interior, though filled with ice, housed a soft bench and two shaped cathedra. The textiles that wrapped the seats sagged and ruptured as the water poured out, revealing thick sponge beneath, the ugly orange color of fungus or rot. It would have seated five in its day.

  I ordered my soldiers away but for a guard and I settled in to devour the history of the Hyperborean device.

  It had conveyed one of many duumvirate families from a residence on the distant shores of the city, to a larger transportation center at the interior, and sometimes to disparate places across the continent. The device itself was supremely clever, being a distillation of extra-telluric metals and attenuated mineral elixirs. The motive force came from a fiendish arrangement of ritual magics that ultimately combusted and relied upon a strange draught. An entire
subclass of men scoured the Earth, as it had come to be called since Eibon. They extracted the residue of a vast sacrifice, many millions of years distant. A sacrifice of unimaginable proportion. All this arranged against a foe that I could not see. The sacrifice permeated everything about the device, an event so singular, so vast that none of the people in its wake could see it. I had glimpses of an ancient cult guiding events, but the mithridate key could find nothing more than a few meaningless names: Good Walkers, Phoebus, The Oculists. All opaque to me.

  We tunneled on toward the city. There I hoped to learn more. As the days cycled, the sunlight filtered through the ice came to be more and more ominous. It made shapes move when there was stillness, made me see soldiers that were not there. The tunnel once contracted in my view like the throat of an enormous beast swallowing its prey.

  In their fear, my soldiers attempted to rebel, but ultimately I was the more fearsome.

  We continued on.

  The city massed above us as a vast darkness concealed within the evil blue of the ice. There our tunnel found caries within the ice, and within them the mummified remains of people. The air in those pockets came in stercoraceous gusts. My less-trained soldiers retched at the smell and retched again when I used the mithridate key on the dead.

  Then did the magnitude come clear.

  ~*~

  “Bring me spirits,” he said, interrupting himself. “The memory does not bear sober recollection.”

  Gematra stood so suddenly I thought he’d been waiting for the opportunity. “Does ignis wine meet your needs, sir?”

  Atiradarinsept looked us over, a smile grudging its way to his mouth. He nodded slowly.

  “I’ve only understood half your words, but it is all faithfully recorded,” I said.

  That brought him to full smile. The expression suited him and I felt a flicker of admiration.

  “You’ve never been among people more important than your village elders, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “And you think I’m going to kill you.”

  I nodded.

  This time he laughed. “You’re coming with me after the story is committed,” he said. “Do as I say and I’ll keep you and yours far from the sear and yellow leaf. If I’d left your beast alive, you’d have wanted to keep it. It would slow us considerably.”