by Jack Conner
Avery felt a sinking sensation. He, Hildra and Janx exchanged another round of dark glances.
Avery cleared his throat. “What you need is for someone to infiltrate the Temple that doesn’t bear the mark. That’s easy enough. We will go.”
“You,” said Yaslen, his tone doubtful.
Layanna laid a hand on Avery’s arm. “Francis, no.”
Avery disengaged himself gently. “We need that information.” To Layanna, he said, “While you work on the Device, we’ll get your intelligence.”
Yaslen stared at Avery, then Janx and Hildra. “You’re too noticeable,” he said. “You stand out. A woman with scars, a hook and a monkey. A huge gorilla of a man with no nose. No. You won’t do at all. Fliers will have circulated with your likeness, and your likenesses are too ... much.”
Hildra grinned. “Never thought I’d be grateful for my hook and scars.”
“I’m not noticeable,” Avery said.
While Yaslen mulled this over, Layanna squeezed Avery’s arm again and said, “Please, Francis, drop this.”
“Well?” Avery demanded of Yaslen.
“It’s no good,” Yaslen said at last. “Only those who’ve accepted the Sacrament may enter the Great Temple.”
Avery sagged.
Yaslen shook his head. “It’s impossible.”
“The hell it is,” Janx told him. “We haven’t done all this for nothin’. Listen, you, I’ve lost my home, seen my friends die, one by one, all for this godsdamned machine. I’ve come halfway across the continent, through a fucking world war, and I mean to see this thing through whether you think it’s possible or not.”
“Then tell me how.”
Janx glowered at him but didn’t answer. A mood of defeat slowly settled over the room, or perhaps it had already been there and had now just begun to infect the newcomers.
No, Avery thought. There is a way. He cringed at the idea. Surely there was another solution. He racked his brain for one.
At last he sighed. If it must be ...
He didn’t give himself any more time to think. He marched over to one of the Black Secters reclining along the ground consuming foul-looking flesh off a plate—unprocessed seafood, certainly—and grabbed a handful. The Black Secter blinked but did not stop him, nor did it look capable of trying very hard to do so.
Avery raised the diseased food to his mouth. Its stink wrinkled his nose and brought water to his eyes.
“Doc!” Janx bellowed. “Put that shit down!”
The big man started to lumber over. Hildra was faster. She all but raced toward Avery, positioning Hildebrand to hurl at Avery’s head.
Avery placed the extradimensional flesh between his jaws, tore off a foul, rancid bite, which was surprisingly juicy and redolent of vinegar, and swallowed it whole. Then he shoved in the rest.
Chapter 5
Avery plunged through blackness, deep and without bottom. Strange lights glinted around him, flashed and were gone, like the wriggling of fish in the deep. Down and down he plunged, dragged by some unseen weight or momentum. He could feel something bellow him, something great and awful. Something huge. Down and down. Panic welled up in him. He threw back his head and screamed. Water shot down his lungs. Fire filled them. He wheezed and hacked, but the water flooded his pores and suffused his body. He felt it like flame rushing through his veins and arteries, burning him up from the inside. Changing him. And still he went—down. Screaming as he plummeted.
The great presence grew more significant below. He could feel it like a pressure in his brain. The lights that had been swirling around him now broke off. They retreated in terror.
Blackness. Deep and cold and bottomless. Avery was alone.
Fire ate him from the inside.
Finally he saw more lights below. Two of them. Huge and glimmering.
A great darkness, blacker than the surrounding void, yawned open in a pit of teeth and twisted flesh only visible because of, truly just suggested by, the half-glow of the two eyes.
The great, awful eyes ...
The mouth rushed up, horrible and vast, the devourer of worlds and cosmoses. Avery screamed as he passed between those monstrous jaws and plunged toward the gullet.
* * *
He woke gasping.
He lay on a cot in a small room. Clammy heat pressed against him. To his surprise, Layanna leaned over him. She dabbed a wet cloth on his forehead. Bile stung the back of his mouth.
“... ayanna ...”
She drew back. “Francis?”
“ ... aya... .anna ...” His mind reeled. His mouth was dry.
“Rest, Francis. Rest.”
“I’m ... fine ...”
“You’ve come to several times. You’ve never remember afterward.”
He blinked. Smacked his lips. “I’m ... clear now.”
“What you did—it was very noble. Very stupid, but very noble.”
He chuckled weakly.
“You could die,” she said. “You know that, don’t you? If you’d gone to one of the temples, they have new techniques to make accepting the Sacrament somewhat safer, but ...” She squeezed his hand. “We’ll do all we can for you, but we don’t know those techniques. I’m afraid it will be very painful. Our supplies of medicines are low. Janx—he’s better now—and Hildra have volunteered to lead a raid to acquire more, but even so ...”
Then, surprisingly, she leaned over and kissed him on the lips. He smiled and slumped back into the pillow. Blackness took him.
For days he lolled on the bed, dancing on the knife-edge of oblivion, fleeing through dreams of nightmare seas and awful beings lurking around him. He knew he was still passing through the intestine of the Leviathan. If its acids ate him, he would die. But if he allowed the fire inside him to change him ...
He was vaguely aware of Layanna coming and going, and Janx and Hildra, too. Sometimes Hildebrand would scamper across his chest and chitter in his ear. At some points he was capable of understanding, but for long periods he burned with pain, insensible to anything else.
It began as an itch, then a chafe, then a crawling, slithering agony that encompassed each and every cell on his body, but especially his upper chest, throat, and face. He tore at himself with fingernails, and strips of flesh peeled away, his nails red with blood. The others had to hold him down. What am I becoming? As the days wore on, he grew more and more conscious, and he began to emerge from the delirium, inch by inch. He learned that Janx and Hildra had indeed participated in a raid that secured vital medicines, and it was partly because of this that he had come out of the grip of his fever. Layanna, meanwhile, had galvanized the others in the Black Sect and was directing the completion of the Device with unceasing intensity.
Finally, on the eighth day, Avery felt well enough to get out of bed and move about the halls with an acolyte as escort. He surprised Layanna while she was working on the Device, and he saw her with her amoeba-self pulled around her, tentacles plunged into the engine-like machine. She laughed when she saw him and waved one of her limbs at him. He responded feebly.
He noticed a priestess nearby daubing glowing paint on the faces of three worshippers, who knelt on the ground, eyes closed, and prayed as she led them. When Avery asked what they were doing, Layanna told him they were offering themselves up as sacrifices to enable the gods to continue the Great Labor.
“Don’t worry, I won’t accept,” Layanna hastened to add, when she saw Avery’s expression.
The worshippers looked like a father, mother and son. The boy was no older than nine. A whole family ...
Avery’s gaze went from them to the other R’loth, who eyed the sacrifices in what Avery could only thing of as hungry manner.
“And them?” he said, feeling nauseous.
Layanna did not reply, which was all the answer he needed. He did not stick around to see the R’loth accept the offering.
That day he had lunch with Janx and Hildra in one of the mess halls where the priests took their noonday meal. They w
ere both sweaty and begrimed from their work on the trains in the level below; they had volunteered to assist in the repair of the vehicles that were to be the Black Sect’s method of escape if needed. There seemed to be some other purpose to the trains, as well, but they were cagey about what it was and Avery was in no mood to pursue the matter.
“I don’t like this place, Doc,” Janx said, fork halfway to his lips. He was glancing around at the priests with an air of apprehension. “It ain’t right.”
Avery smiled grimly. “Well, we are in an underground city among the priests and the gods of an alien set of dimensions.” Hungry gods, he added to himself. He swallowed. “What news of the war?”
Hildra winced. “Sure you wanna hear it?”
“I’m sure.”
“Alright, then. The Korwen Pass has been unblocked.”
Avery felt as if he had been punched. After the fall of Ungraessot some months ago, the blocked Pass had been the only thing preventing Octung from attacking Ghenisa from the west. If the Octunggen had cleared it ...
“They’ve already launched their first attacks,” Janx said. “Ghenisa is officially under invasion.”
“Gods,” Avery muttered.
“And it doesn’t get any better,” Hildra said. “Cumnal has finally fallen—at least, the west half. Octung is sorting through the ashes right now.” Cumnal was Ghenisa’s neighbor to the south. “Soon as they establish occupation, they’ll knock down East Cumnal, then drive up into us from the south. They’ll be hitting us from two sides.” Us, of course, meant Ghenisa.
“Gods,” Avery said again. He felt so helpless against it all. And yet there was something he could do about it. Something he was already doing. It’s why he was here, why he had done what he had done to himself. Hopefully it would be worth it.
Hildra was staring at his face. When Avery caught her, she looked away.
“You still won’t let me see a mirror?” he said.
She and Janx exchanged glances. The big man shrugged. “He has to see sometime, darlin’.”
She studied Avery. “You sure you wanna know, Doc? You sure you can take it, with your health and all?”
“I can take it,” Avery assured her. “As a doctor, I’m more curious than anything else.”
She didn’t look convinced, but she pulled out a compact mirror from somewhere on her person. Avery was surprised she would carry such a thing, but then he realized she must have found it somewhere—and hidden it from him. As she handed it over, he knew he had lied to her. His fingers shook as he accepted the mirror, and suddenly he began to sweat. What if he couldn’t accept what he had become?
It would be all right, he told himself. He hadn’t eaten very much of the diseased food. The truly elaborate mutations required frequent and copious gorgings.
He would be fine.
He would be fine.
Getting his breath under control, he brought the mirror up to examine his face. Instantly, he dropped the fork that he held in his other hand. And stared.
Hildra reached out to snatch the mirror back from him, but he pulled it away, and Janx clamped a firm hand around her wrist.
“Told ya, Doc,” she said.
“Give him a moment,” Janx said.
Avery swallowed. He blinked, then reexamined himself. The truth was that the transformation wasn’t too bad. It was simply shocking to see one’s own face ... changed.
Wine-colored striations now striped over half his face and ran down his neck, chest, and left arm. He had seen the stripes on his upper arm before, but it had been dark and he’d thought they were probably rashes or the like. Had hoped. Now, with the perspective of a mirror, he saw them for what they were. They were the sort of striations a fish might have, camouflage to mimic the rippling sunlight lancing the ocean’s depths. There were no accompanying mutations, he was happy to see—no fish lips or buggy eyes. He was still Dr. Francis Avery, still the man he had grown accustomed to seeing in the mirror every day, only ... different.
Striped.
He took a last look, snapped the mirror shut and handed it back. Janx and Hildra eyed him tensely.
Their expressions made him laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Hildra asked.
“Nothing,” he said, smiling. “Nothing at all.”
Honestly he wasn’t sure what amused him so much, at least at first, but later, hours after he had finished his meal, he realized it—they were concerned. For the first time in years, he had people in his life that cared about him. When he realized this, his amusement at their discomfiture changed, and he felt his throat constrict. It was a strange world he lived in, there was no denying it.
Later that night, he took a walk through the ruined squatter-city with Layanna. He had to walk slowly, but with every step he moved with more strength and poise.
A vague subterranean wind blew through what was left of his hair, bringing with it the smell of stone and dust and bat offal. After days in the tight confines of his cell, breathing in the stench of his own stink and disease, it was a blessing.
“This is nice,” he said, as they traveled over a rickety bridge from one chasm-set building to another. Below them dropped the bottomless expanse of the abyss and around stretched the hunched, dismal warehouses and leaning, sagging towers of Golna. It was all quite amazing in its way, though it made Avery’s belly flutter to look down. He had to watch his step or go tumbling off into darkness.
Layanna lit the way before them with an alchemical lantern. “Did you know we’ve found an arena where we believe the old smugglers watched captured Carathids fight each other?”
“Carathids? But they’re dead!” Carathids were the giant insectile creatures that had roamed the world hundreds of millions of years ago, when the atmosphere and so many other things had been different.
“So it was thought. But the remains are relatively fresh. Some with mummified meat still on them. We believe the smugglers captured the creatures in the tunnels, then pitted them against each other and bet on the fights. Human remains in the arena indicate the Carathids may have been fed on a diet of the condemned, people who’d stolen or cheated the underworld bosses, perhaps. Or maybe they were slaves. We don’t know. But we do know they liked to watch the Carathids fight.”
“Giant bugs fighting each other,” Avery mused, half smiling. “That sounds like something I would’ve paid good money to see when I was a kid.” After a second’s thought, he added, “I might pay something now.” He laughed. “You’ve investigated the town?”
“Well, our followers have. Those that aren’t involved in attacking the Collossum. There isn’t that much to do down here, after all. Some say they’ve even found the remains of Viz’ig’ni.”
“What’s that?”
“An intelligent race of Carathid. One of the pre-human races. All gone now, of course. They often lived underground to avoid their larger brethren. Some scholars claim they were as intelligent as humans, maybe moreso.”
He was hardly paying attention. He chewed his lip for a moment, then said, “Layanna, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you ...”
She raised the lantern so she could see his face, and he squinted into the light. “Would you put that down.”
She did. “What did you want to ask?”
“It’s about Sartrand.”
“Ah. I was wondering when you would mention him.”
“Well, I didn’t want to talk about it in front of the others, but I saw the expression on your face when you smashed that device of his. And I thought it odd that you would destroy it. He said it would bring him and his allies to our aid if we needed it. You wouldn’t destroy an opportunity like that.”
Even in the darkness, he could see her smile sadly. “You know me that well?”
“I like to think so.”
She nodded slowly, still walking abreast him as they wound their way up the side of a tower, away from the lip of the abyss. “You’re right, I didn’t destroy it. It was merely a container for an
extra-dimensional device or conduit—and I absorbed that into myself as I broke the shell.”
He stopped and stared at her. “Why?”
“Like you said, it was an opportunity. Sartrand offered help, and it seemed like a good idea at the time to have that option. Janx and Hildra, however, seemed opposed to the idea. It made them uncomfortable. So I pretended. I’m sorry if that offends you.”
He watched her for a moment. “No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
“Good.” She seemed relieved.
They continued on.
“But who was he?” Avery said. “What other faction within the Collossum would come to our aid?”
Layanna sucked in a breath. “I don’t know for sure ...”
“But you suspect.”
“Yes. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it. And it makes me wish I had truly destroyed Sartrand’s beacon.”
“Why?”
There was a long silence. “Do you remember, I told you about the Muug?”
“The awful beings your people called from some set of nether-dimensions? The ones that destroyed your civilization and put you and the few survivors to flight? Oh yes, I remember them. They’ve given me more than one nightmare.”
“Then we have something in common. Well, it was my people that summoned the Muug, as you said, or invited them over, because they were gods to us and we hoped they could help us serve and profit from even greater gods. Well, even after the Muug turned on us there were still many that worshipped them. The Muugists. There were vast populations of R’loth converted to the Muugist faith, and they served the Muug and made war on the rest of us.”
“I don’t like the direction this is going.”
“You shouldn’t. It’s always been feared among the R’loth that have come to this world that some Muugists are among us—that a few of the Muugists went underground and infiltrated our ranks even as we fled our, for lack of a better word, universe. (It’s really much more than that, of course, as we’re multi-dimensional beings and our Ulus-tithi, or anchor-plane, was connected with many other planes, as well. But I digress.) These rumors have never been confirmed, but they have always persisted, and there has also been a latent fear of Muugist cults and sects within our ranks here in Octung.”
