by Chuck Wendig
The door is splintering. Rocking against the bookshelf.
Nora. Nora. She’s dead. She’s really–
Her back. Still lifting gently. Rise and fall. Breath. Life.
On a nearby table is his bag. And his cleaver. That’s where Werth got the Red Rage. Did he also take…
“Nora,” he roars. Nothing. No movement.
He needs to get to the satchel.
Wham. The Boss-thing is through the door. Books rattle. His claws are tearing the mahogany back off the bookshelf now.
Mookie storms across the room. Grabs his bag, opens it. His giant hands can barely handle this task – they tear the bag in twain. At first he doesn’t see it and he thinks: they have it, or Werth took it, or it’s gone, we’re dead, she’s dead; and again panic scrabbles against his mental walls like tarantulas on fire.
But then–
There. The box. The Ochre. Werth didn’t take it.
The Golden Gate.
Gate. That’s what they need.
Some way out. To anywhere.
The glutinous golden sap crawls in the glass.
A dread thought hits him: I have no idea what to do with this.
Drink it? Rub it on his temples like Cerulean? On his gums like blow?
Shit! He should have asked Burnsy.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. They’re all right. You are dumb as a, as a…
He can’t even think of a good metaphor. He’s that dumb.
Burnsy would laugh at him right now. Marvel at his pain.
Wait. Burnsy. What was it Burnsy said? Not to drop it. Don’t drop it, for Chrissakes. That’s what he said. Why? What happens if one were to drop it?
Mookie clutches the phial to his chest.
The shelves against the door rattle. Books tumble. Splinters fly.
The Boss is almost through.
Mookie bellows, then pitches the glass against the floor. The phial shatters with a pop. The golden fluid spreads quickly, almost as if alive – oozing, shimmering, pseudopods of fluid crawling outward. He hears a sizzle. Smoke rises from the hardwood.
A flash of bright bronze light–
Where the puddle of Ochre was, now there’s nothing: just a hole, a pit, a yawning abyss rimmed with the oozing remnants of the glittering sap.
Fear stares up through that hole. And yet, what choice do they have?
Mookie knows he has to move fast. Panic is unspooling in the chambers of his heart like a clot of cankerpedes. He pulls away from the bookshelf. Launches himself across the gap to Nora. Swoops her up in his good arm. The bookshelf shatters inward – books and splinters everywhere. The Boss-thing stands in the gap, broken leech mouth clicking and chittering–
The cleaver is at his feet. Mookie kicks it to the hole – it tumbles in.
The Boss springs toward him.
Mookie feints right, moves left–
He leaps into the hole as Zoladski sails past.
Darkness.
A shimmer above.
A pop.
26
The gobbos came out of nowhere. A hunting party. Jars of still-living milk-spiders (for they can only be eaten alive), a few rimstone cankerpedes on skewers – and something else, a wolf-like beast with hooves instead of paws and barbed quills instead of fur. They had it hanging on a spit, carried between a quartet of goblins – I saw its head hanging limp, pale tongue lolling. It had no eyes. A long, prodigious snout – but no eyes. I thought to hide as they passed, pressing myself into a crevice. They passed by, but then the final gobbo in the ranks – a young one by the looks of it – was playing with his milk-spider in the jar. Rattling the glass, tapping it. The bulbous white spider running around in circles. The gobbo fumbled the jar. It broke. The spider saw its opportunity and ran – right onto my foot. The young gobbo followed, wailing and gnashing its broken teeth. That’s when it found me. Shrieked in alarm. The others came. I pressed myself deeper and deeper into the fissure – I was by then quite thin and able to slide through the stone. Then one of the goblins thrust into the crevice a jagged spear. The lance struck me in my side. I screamed and pushed through the crevice, losing skin and hair in order to manage it. The spear-wound is already infected. I’m bleeding very badly. I fear this wound is a mortal one.
– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
“Is he dead?” Candlefly asks.
Sorago lifts and shakes the corpse with one of his tentacle-feet. The goat-man’s body is limp, his life having leapt the fence and left the paddock empty. “He’s dead. What should I do with him?”
“Take him into the Below. Let the roach-rats feast. Let the goblins have his flesh in whatever salacious way they choose.” Candlefly sparks a cigar. Puff, puff, puff. Victory, it turns out, tastes so much sweeter than failure.
They do not have the Ochre.
Because it was here all along! And then Mookie went and used it, opening the gate that they needed open. Yes, fine, Candlefly didn’t precisely intend to open the gate here: he thought it’d be a bit more dramatic to do at the Empire State Building observation deck, but the door was open. An unexpected triumph.
Mookie did not thwart their plans. He in fact guaranteed their success.
What a fool.
Puff, puff, puff.
Still. In his way, he was a capable soldier, wasn’t he? More capable than his own. It’s then Candlefly feels a tiny sting of remorse: did he back the wrong horse? The inhabitance rite would have been better spent on Pearl. Certainly Pearl could have been manipulated into killing his own daughter just as the Boss was nudged into murdering his own grandson? Blood from one’s line must be spilled – and Mookie and Nora were already at each other’s throats.
Well. Too late now. He can’t put this monster back in the cage.
Or, rather, can’t take the monster out of the cage.
And though the Boss technically failed to put Mookie down, it all worked out in the end, didn’t it?
“Anything else?” Sorago asks.
“Yes, my old friend. Tomorrow is the big day, and I’d like to take out as many birds as possible with the stone we throw. Now that Nora Pearl isn’t out there stirring the pot, let’s bring the gangs together. At a single location near the dig – it will be more convenient that way. Down by the docks. Makes the most sense.” He blows a plume of smoke. Before Sorago can confirm, Ernesto holds up a finger. “Never mind. Zoladski should call. They fear him. They’ll listen.”
“They will fear me, too.”
“Don’t be dramatic, old friend. Dispose of the body.”
Sorago hesitates, and nods. The tension is palpable. Relegated to a common corpse-dumper? Ah. The envy. Good.
He calls up the steps: “Konrad. Come down here, please.”
Nothing.
Hm.
“Konrad! Your presence is… requested.”
There. The Boss appears from within the study. He has returned to his human guise. Jawbone fused back together. Body shrunken into the little old man. He begins to descend the steps, scowling.
“You don’t command me,” Zoladski says. “You are not my master. I am the master here. Until my brothers and sisters come to this world and claim it for themselves, I am the only god of this place. You don’t command me. I command you.”
Candlefly shrugs one shoulder. “Not so much, no. When you wanted to leap into the gate and follow after Pearl and his daughter, what happened, exactly?”
“I chose not to leap.”
“Yes, see, I remember it a bit differently? I remember yelling for you to stop a hair’s breadth of a moment before you leapt into the hole. And what did you do?”
“I chose–”
“You chose nothing,” Candlefly barks. “You did as I commanded.”
The little man bristles. His jaw twists – the skin and bone separate for a moment, revealing a glimpse of the leech-mouth within. “You dare speak to me this way?”
“I do dare. Because you can’t hurt me. And I can hu
rt you. I saved you, Mr Zoladski. And I summoned you, Vithra. Both of you listen up, because it’s time to have a little talk, mm? You like to see yourself as the first of your kind to rise up out of the Maw-Womb and infiltrate this world. An advance guard, if you will. A lovely delusion, but a delusion just the same. I brought you here and bound you. Maybe it wasn’t me doing the ritual, but it is the ritual of my family – the ofrendas, those offerings, the blood of your kin spilled. And now you – a very powerful old god – are trapped inside an old man’s body. What do you think happens if I decide to terminate that body? Do you think you will wriggle free, a butterfly from its vulgar cocoon? Or do you think that perhaps you will die along with it? Let me answer for you: it is the latter. The body dies. The god dies.”
Zoladski quivers in rage.
His hands move fast–
Black spikes spring from fingertips–
He swipes at Candlefly with enough strength to take Ernesto’s head off.
It scares the hell out of Candlefly. But he doesn’t flinch. And he is rewarded for his apparent fearlessness. The claws stop an inch shy of his face.
Zoladski – Vithra – tries desperately to push further. To get one claw-tip to touch Candlefly’s dusky cheek.
“Can’t do it, can you?”
“I… can kill everything else. Everything around you. Everything you love.”
“You can. And then I can end you. With but a thought. That is my power. To simply wish you dead, and you die. You are not my master. You are my prisoner. All of your brothers and sisters writhing in the Maw-Womb will be. Did you really think my family was summoning old subterranean gods in order to bow and scrape and kneel? Please. Far better to make a god serve you, don’t you think?”
Ernesto laughs. He feels good, suddenly. The loss of Mookie Pearl stings but…
Things still look pretty good from where he’s standing.
The black nails retract into Vithra’s fingers.
“You’ll pay for this,” the god says.
“Yes, likely. One always pays a cost. But I think it will be worth it. For now, I have a task for you.” It is then that he tells Zoladski-Vithra what to do, and the very act of commanding a god feels oh-so-good. The god listens. Simmers with hate. And at the end of it: nods.
Triumph.
He smiles, stretches, then says: “I’m going to go lay my head down. Big day tomorrow, after all.”
Ernesto wants to be well rested when this city falls to him.
27
The voices are loud now. My side throbs. The skin around it is black and puffy – tendrils of infection, some red, some the color of wine, spread out beneath the flesh. My breathing has gone shallow but the voices promise me I’m close, so close to what I seek. Here the ground slopes at a hard forty-five degree angle. I can barely stay upright as I walk downward, my calves burning, my hands raw from bracing against the rock wall. The voices now are deafening in my ear. They’re showing me something: tubes in the wall made of a fine crust, and within those tubes, a slow crawl of golden sap creeping. Is this Ochre? I believe it must be. They tell me what to do. I break one of the tubes off gently. I hold it in my hand the way a prophet holds a scroll containing the Word of God. And I break it against the ground and marvel in the howling pit that is created.
– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
It’s like falling through a hole in a layer cake. Speckled schist, black stone, pale sand, white pebbles like loose teeth, blue slate – they all hurtle past, down to up, no ground beneath, for what seems like an eternity. Tree roots, glimpses of skulls embedded in rock, glowing fungus in crooked striations. The flash of a milk-spider scuttling. A face in the rock. A vein of electric blue Cerulean. All whipping past.
Mookie has not lost his daughter. He holds her close with his one good arm. He hears her pulse in her neck, in her chest. He feels it in her wrist. But he is wet with her blood. And he feels her eyelids fluttering against him. Hears her soft moans of pain.
But he knows they’re going to die. This fall cannot end well. He doesn’t know much about science, but he knows enough about terminal velocity to suggest that whatever they hit – rock, water, a big room full of pillows and stuffed animals – they will die.
He hears a keening windy wail followed by a vacuum pop–
Then there’s a blinding golden flash.
The world rushes up to meet him.
But it’s not like falling and hitting ground. It’s like he has been in the same place all along, cradling his daughter, and now he and the world are… syncing up. Brought together and made whole again.
He scrambles to stand–
His legs care little for that plan. They’re weak, wobbly like those of a newborn fawn, and he falls. The Red Rage has left him: the fires have gone out. He tries to say something, but his throat is dry and feels like he’s gargling cut glass. All the fight goes out of him. He doesn’t know where they are – he sees a dim orange glow not far away like the way a sunset comes up through a line of trees, but everywhere else is dark, dark but for a few pinpricks of purple like a wall of stars, and way up there is the gate from whence they came, a burnished bronze disc cut from the darkness, an upside-down pit–
–and it’s then Mookie gives up. He crawls to Nora and curls up next to her – she moans, mutters something, “Pattern of dots, blast, bone dry.” The words mean nothing; he’s not even sure she said them. Maybe he’s hallucinating. All he can do is hold his daughter close as he lapses into something that resembles death more than it does sleep.
Words slither into his ear, wind around his mind, words that make no sense–
Morquin
Hyor-Ka
Vithra
Uthuthma
Mathokor
Pelsinade
Lith-lyru
His eyes shut tighter. A wind whips over the contours of his scalp – it’s cold in one instant, hot in another. He pulls his daughter to him. Keeps her close. Keeps her warm.
Then he hears Nora’s voice: Pattern of dots. Blast. Bone dry.
Then voice: Hi, Daddy.
Candlefly: Roots that drink from the oldest bloodlines.
More words-like-worms, these sung as a swift song:
Candlefly Woodwine Glasstower Bellbook Gravehorse Hogstooth Lambskey Wormsong
Pattern of dots.
Blast.
Bone dry.
A scuff of sound nearby.
Mookie startles awake.
A gobbo stands only ten feet away. Paunchy belly hanging over a maggoty white penis. It watches Mookie with bulging eyes as it scurries up to what looks to be a flat stone carved with symbols. It lays upon them a spool of thread, a handful of coins, and a bundle of dead, dry marigolds. It hisses at Mookie before hurrying away.
It doesn’t attack.
Thread. Coins. Marigolds.
Like those left behind on the corpse of Casimir Zoladski.
What was it Burnsy said? Ofrendas. Offerings.
Mookie checks on Nora. Her brow is feverish. Her breathing, shallow.
He needs to know where they are. The way out has to be near.
Mookie stands. He sees that they’re on a blasted stone shelf. It goes on and on, as far as he can see – except for the side that drops off into a faint fiery glow. Above is just empty space. Mookie has become accustomed, down in the Great Below, to having a roof of rock over his head, often so close that he had to stoop or even crawl. But here he can see no ceiling at all. Just endless dark. And little pinpricks of purple up the walls like violet eyes watching him.
He walks toward the edge of the shelf. Space seems to distort here. The edge seems close, but before long he realizes he’s been walking for several minutes. He turns. He can barely see the dim shape of Nora there. All around him are altars like the one the gobbo used. Many are home to unusual items: a scattering of coffee beans, an old Hershey bar, bits of broken colored glass, a six-pack of beer, a disemboweled rabbit, a chopped-up cankerpede
.
And near the altars are small stone circles – campfires, Mookie realizes. Dead. Ash piled in the centers.
Nearby is his cleaver. Lying there, sheathed. Fallen through the hole.
He leaves it. What good will it do him now?
To the edge, then–
As he gets closer to the precipice, the shelf tilts downward and Mookie has to be careful not to lose his footing. He still feels weak and his broken arm dangles uselessly at his side. The pain isn’t a dagger stab so much as a tumultuous wave pounding against toothy rocks. If he falls, that arm won’t do much good to stop his descent.
And a descent here means sliding over the edge into… where?
It’s soon that he sees.
An abyss. Dark, but for the distant magma glow.
It’s enough light to see the shapes moving.
Massive shapes. Like giant worms turning, coiling together and then apart. Whispers rise up: Morquin, Hyor-Ka, Vithra–
He pulls away. The whispers grow quiet.
That way is not the way out. It’s an escape, perhaps – but a permanent one, too terrifying to conceive.
As he backs away from the cusp, a dread thought strikes him:
This is it.
This is the Ravenous Expanse.
His heart grows cold.
They’re at the bottom of the Great Below.
He cannot calculate how far down this is. Hundreds of miles. If “miles” mean anything here. They fell through a gate that may not have been a corporeal one.
They’re impossibly far from everything. From the city. From the light.
From medical attention.
Nora is going to die down here. In the dark. With a father she hates and ancient gods squirming in the light beneath them.
Mookie wants to weep. And fling himself into the abyss.
No. No.
He’s got to fight. He made it this far.
She’s not dead yet.
