by Scott Jäeger
The high priest brought his palms up from his sides as if holding an invisible tray, and the ground between us began to split. Ajer and I assumed a fighting stance, I fearing we would be swallowed up. The cracks did not reveal a pit however, but squirming, organic movement. Pushing up from below, living things were breaking free of the earth the way a chick breaks free of an egg.
What arose made the uncanny nexus above and the clash of battle at my back fade away. Naked human figures struggled free and, shaking the clay from their bodies and hair, formed a rank between us and the high priest’s platform. Here were a dozen flat, expressionless faces I had never thought –nor hoped– to see again. I saw among them Orvuhlt and Marthin, as well as others of the Peregrine’s crew and the Asphodel’s, and pirates I had killed. At the end of the line stood little Lark.
Ajer’s staff trembled in his hands, and his eyes bulged in panic. I was thinking that Gorice was mercifully not among them, and at the same time realized the ground nearby had begun to bubble with more.
“Did you not hear their troubled cries from beneath the clay?” the high priest asked. “They were calling your name, Isaac Sloan!” He roared with laughter, and a copy of the young pirate I had killed on the Asphodel came towards me.
The doppelgänger’s face remained perfectly blank, even as I severed his raised right hand with a sweep of my sword. His colleagues looked on while he confusedly contemplated a grey, bloodless stump. His master lifted a cupped hand, and the rest of his cursed minions advanced as one.
I gave a rather unheroic yelp as Ajer and I were jostled from behind.
“Hush,” Huspeth said, finger to lips. “Mind your arms for you will need them.”
Standing between us, the soothsayer planted her staff, the same stick I had brought down from Captain Bromm’s mountain, and faced our nemesis. She began to whisper in an unfamiliar, guttural tongue. I could not repeat what I heard, but the alien syllables seemed to rise in volume upon leaving her mouth before culminating with a sound like a clap of hands. The high priest had leaned forward at this development, chin jutting, but stayed within the bounds of the golden symbol.
Huspeth raised her stick and, making a cryptic gesture with her left hand, brought it down. White light flared up before us, seemingly from nothing, a flame borrowed from that towering pillar which blessed the Temple of Nasht and Kaman-Thah. A brilliant corona formed the omega around it, completing the symbol first shown me by Bo'sun Longbottom.
I do not know whose voice said in awe, "The elder sign," as at the same time the naked men stalled and the high priest himself reeled as if struck a blow, briefly falling to all fours. After hanging in the air like a high clarion note, it vanished.
Orvuhlt and the young pirate collapsed back into the clay from which they had been raised, and the hummocks of ground where more of their kind had been breaking free stilled, stray arms and faces crumbling into inanition. The others were marked everywhere with hairline cracks like spider webs, but came on nonetheless.
The golems carried no weapons, but though I lopped off a hand, an arm, and even a head, whatever remained bit and battering relentlessly. Thanks to Ajer sweeping the legs from under a few of them, we were not immediately overrun.
The high priest was tracking the action closely, his head moving in quick jerks like a bird's. I spied what must be the relic from the Toad Temple, a tusked skull, resting on a low pedestal at the heart of the circle, and recalled the long effort the Men of Leng had made to capture it.
“Ajer,” I cried with breath I could not afford to spare, “the clay men are a distraction! The skull is the thing, get to the skull!”
The black fighter grimaced in understanding. With an artful thrust of his bō, he created an opening in the tangle of bodies, and rushed at their master on his granite platform.
Unfazed, the high priest produced, seemingly from air, a scimitar almost the height of a man. He met Ajer with that weapon as if it were no more substantial than a switch, and opened with a flurry of blows. Ajer deflected the assault and returned a shocking jab to one thigh. As soon as the wizard became distracted, I saw that his minions slowed and I shifted my efforts to providing a rear guard for Ajer.
Having pushed his opponent back a step, Ajer Akiti knocked the weird skull from the plinth. The air above the magic circle rippled like the surface of a pool as the skull danced helter-skelter across the plaza. When it came to rest twenty paces away, near the far edge of the design, the sigils’ upwards flowing light subsided like a fire banked to embers. I risked a glance at the sky but whatever the nature of the singularity, it had not been interrupted. Ajer at once began backing in the direction of the relic.
The cultist’s blade beat rhythmically against Ajer’s bō, which blurred in compact, efficient arcs as it countered each attack with a steely ring. The high priest was relentless, but each blow drove Ajer towards the skull. The assault grew frenzied, then reckless, and when Ajer chose at a critical moment to sidestep rather than retreat, his opponent chopped wildly at empty space and was left defenseless.
Ajer launched a terrific strike at the priest’s chest, but his cloak billowed out behind as if the weapon had passed through empty air. Swinging the staff club-like against the cowled head had no more effect than beating a sack of gravel. At last Ajer spun the bō in a circle, catching and turning the blade of the sword, just now returning to the fight, in a downward arc. When its tip met the ground, the scimitar lodged in a crevice of the arcane design, and was held fast.
The cloaked fiend was wrestling to free his sword when I received a glancing knock on the head from behind. Scrambling around on hands and knees, I saw the Wilted who had clubbed me already down with a thrown dagger, Erik’s, in his back. The golems should have overwhelmed me, but had instead halted in place to stare straight up. The Wilted had likewise stopped their attack, for the first time acting in unison, and dropped their weapons to turn their faces to the clouds. What was reflected in those dozens of dead eyes shone like the scattered chips of a broken mirror, and I resisted the unbidden instinct, like a finger under my chin, to look skyward.
The Peregrine's crew wasted no time pondering their good luck, but reaped their stunned enemies in a bloody harvest. Of the three sailors who did look upon the cultists’ god, two fell dead on the spot. The third, an Oriab Islander named Stouma, lowered a face transformed to a rictus. Mouth agape and chin wet with saliva, he began to run hither and yon, gibbering like a madman and lashing out with his truncheon at friend and enemy alike until Erik and Gavrel were forced to bring him down.
I pushed myself to my feet and turned back to Ajer. My friend stood calm and triumphant at the edge of the circle of gold, one foot atop the stolen relic. The high priest had abandoned his scimitar, and was walking towards him. His hands were raised in a pleading gesture, but his voice no longer contested the lashing wind, and whatever he said was lost as Ajer raised his staff overhead. Grinning white-toothed, he brought the iron-shod butt of the bō down and crushed the skull to dust.
When the staff struck, I caught a glimpse of nothingness where the skull had been, rays like a black sun rising, before every image was negated. I no longer heard the storm wind or the dying Wilted, nor even my own laboured breath. What followed the relic's destruction absorbed every vibration, so that even in the perfect absence of sound, where one expects to hear the beat of one's own heart, there was nothing.
When the day’s light returned it did so in stages, reluctantly, as if fearing to be driven out again, and left everything limned in a fungal green afterglow. Small sounds too began to wash back over me like a surf. The funnel of dark clouds overhead was dissipating, strips of rag torn away by the winds off the north coast. Sailor and Wilted alike stood dumbfounded, the latter now looking very fragile, as if their flesh were a shell about to collapse. The slaves of the Men of Leng began warily to retreat to the woods. No one pursued them.
The golems had in their master’s defeat disintegrated, leaving here and there shapes horrifi
cally reminiscent of men.
The soothsayer’s form was laying only a few strides from where I had stood against the high priest’s horrors. Having tumbled to the ground after her final working, the ill-used Huspeth would not rise again.
I stumbled dazedly over the clay towards the golden circle, though already I could see what I would find: the high priest and Ajer Akiti were gone.
* * *
The Peregrine’s arrival in Zij was anticlimactic. Shortly after we had embarked on the search for Isobel, the yellow-eyed merchants had withdrawn, and with them the steady supply of wilt. Voxhaus had been killed in the ensuing riots and several ships had been burned to the water. Other sporadic violence followed while the hundreds of Wilted came to terms with the shortage. Some of them left town in search of more wilt, many died through violence or lack of their drug, and the hardiest of them simply recovered.
There was no hero’s welcome for us, but each crewman’s share of raw gold must surely have assuaged that disappointment.
Fortunately for them, the two squatters who had taken up residence in the Iron Street apartment had left immediately at Jome’s request, and in Isobel’s care it had again taken on the semblance of a home.
The night of my return, Isobel and I put down our grief for Solomon, and friends dead or lost, and embraced in the one perfect solace of humankind. From that reality, sweeter than any dream, I fell into a slumber as pure and bottomless as I had ever known.
* * *
A violent sneeze brought me back to a world cold and silent. Brushing at the layer of dust settled in my eyes and hair, I looked about in confusion. After several seconds, I realized that grey place as the bedroom of Ms. Granville’s safe house. Arkham again. The understanding that I had been separated from my home, from Isobel, was as painful and undeniable as a severed limb.
Pushing away a host of unpleasant sensations –throbbing headache, ferocious hunger, and a tongue like a bus station seat cushion– I clung to the image of Isobel. I lay back, pulling up the covers, and cursed the single line of daylight at the edge of the blinds. Isobel. I tossed back and forth as her beauty faded, as must all our experiences, growing ever dimmer and duller in imperfect memory. It was useless.
Against the protest of my own skull, and stiff and aching muscles, I sat up in my borrowed pajamas.
“Bollocks.”
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank these brave volunteers who agreed to read and provide feedback on the first rough draft of Dreamlands: Emily Norton, Ted Petch, Vince D. Weller, and especially Ali Walsh, who acted as my proofreader and editor. Without their efforts, Dreamlands would have been a much lesser work.
About the Author
Scott Jäeger works as a software consultant, and occasionally contributes 3D models, character animation, and writing to computer game projects. He lives in the United States.
