by Chris Walley
As the echoes of the blast died away, he rose to his feet. His ears were ringing; he was shivering with cold and ached all over.
“You should have come back well away from the winged creature,” said the envoy. Merral tried one more time to see him, but as ever, he was no more than a shadow on the periphery of his vision. Like an optical illusion: present, but not present.
“Yes,” Merral admitted. “I assumed it was dead.”
“It was, but beings such as your enemy can manipulate the dead.”
“I see.”
“Now, you have one last task.”
For a moment, Merral wondered whether to refuse. As he hesitated, he noticed that on his gun the status light now glowed green. He glanced at his belt and saw that his diary was working.
“Okay,” he said, aware of the weariness in his voice. “What do I have to do now?”
“You must return and slay the being. Even that blast only stunned it and stripped its body of its protection. Unless you destroy it, it will soon pass into an invisible spirit form. You must use your knife. But be careful.”
Merral closed his eyes. I have come so far. I suppose I must go on. “Very well,” he said.
Once more, he found the door handle and pulled down.
43
With a series of creaks, the door slid open slowly, letting in a wreath of hot, foul smoke. Waving his arms to try and dispel the fumes, Merral stepped carefully over the wreckage by the door. He was surprised to find that the chamber was now much better illuminated; the strange lights had gone, and along either side of the roof, strip lights had now come on. The mist had fled and the temperature seemed warmer.
The chamber had been devastated. Almost all the structures in the room had been badly damaged. Paneling hung from the walls, doors of lockers swung open, blackened cabinets were tilted and twisted, and the floor was covered by every kind of debris.
Merral walked forward, stepping carefully around the fragments. The corpse of the dragon could not be seen and he did not seek it. He walked toward the shattered column, aware of the envoy following noiselessly behind him. Even with the gloom lifted, Merral had no desire to linger here; he wanted to be out of the ship and back with his men.
Something white on the floor caught Merral’s attention. He shuddered to see that it was the limb bone of some creature. Looking around, he saw there were other bones lying about. Were these the remains of things the dragon had eaten, or had they been used in some dreadful rite? He didn’t wish to know and kept moving on.
He found the steersman by the broken metal shards of the column. It was lying sprawled over the remains of the seat, its limbs extended in impossible directions. As Merral approached, he saw it move. As he stared, he was astonished to find that the motion came not from the body, but within it. The pale brown surface seemed to ripple as if an invisible hand was moving matter from one place to another. As Merral watched, he saw the spindly legs shorten and solidify.
“Quickly!” urged the envoy. “Slay it.”
But Merral felt reluctant to act. The spectacle unfolding before him was so astonishing that he felt he had to watch.
The movement within the steersman had now shifted to the body: the cavernous abdomen seemed to enlarge and become smoother, as if being inflated, and the skin became softer and lost its dried-parchment look. The creature gave a little lurch and slipped against the ruined chair so that it now sat facing Merral in a broken-necked way.
“Man,” came the urgent order, “strike!”
“I will,” Merral said as he stared in wonder at what was happening, and he moved his fingers to the handle of the bush knife. But he did no more than that.
Before him, the chest of the steersman was changing in the same way that the legs and abdomen had, becoming smoother and more rounded. The movement shifted to the arms and fingers, and wrists were fleshed out.
Now the neck moved and the head twisted forward. Eyelids extended over the cavernous sockets, cheeks filled out, eyebrows grew. A nose suddenly bulged outwards as if molded by an invisible sculptor, and the dry brown lips became a soft and healthy pink.
“Strike!” the envoy ordered.
Impressed by the urgency in his voice, Merral pressed the button on the handle and the blade raced out. He raised the knife and squinted, aiming for the neck.
The lips moved.
“You have won,” the creature said.
Staring at the being that was forming in front of his eyes, Merral relaxed his grip.
“No! Wait!” The voice was human; the words were ragged as if it was still learning to speak.
Merral lowered the blade.
“It was a mistake to come here,” the thing said in contrite, apologetic tones. Its words were smoother now, as if the mouth and lips had learned to move in coordination. “You may exact your price from me. As in the old fables.”
Memories arose in Merral’s mind of the primeval fairy tales of his childhood with their fantastic goblins and sorcerers. The creature shivered, and with a ripple the flesh on the face seemed abruptly to slide into place as if it were a garment that was being adjusted.
“Name anything,” the creature continued, almost pathetically. “What do you want?”
Merral, conscious of the dull, gray, metal blade held in his hand, found himself torn. He wanted to end this horrid thing’s existence, and he yearned to hear more. He hesitated, and its form changed further; tissue flowed miraculously from one place to another, and the pale brown skin became softer, paler, and more alive.
Merral glimpsed the dried blood on his sleeve: Lorrin’s blood.
A deep anger bubbled up in him. “Thing!” he shouted, his voice unsteady with rage. “The Gate is gone! We are cut off from the Assembly. Everything is—” Emotion choked his words. In his mind, he could see Anya and others: Isabella, Barrand, and Elana. And poor dead Lorrin. “Everything is . . . is rotten!”
“I apologize,” came the cool answer. “But you know, these things can be undone.”
Merral watched as the creature flexed smooth fingers.
“Undone?”
A golden fuzz of hair was extruding from the skull.
“Strike!” ordered the envoy again, but although Merral tightened the grip of his fingers around the handle, the blade did not move.
“Wait! Please.” It was both an order and a plea. New changes flitted across the face. “This voice,” the creature asked him, “the one you are listening to. Tell me, please, what do you know of it?”
“I trust him and I have seen what you look like.”
“You have been misled by appearances,” reasoned the smooth voice. “And after all, you have not seen him. How do you know what he looks like? No, he wants you locked here on Farholme forever. If you strike me, you will lose all hope of traveling back to the Assembly. And without help, your tiny world will never survive in isolation.” There was a pause. First one, then both ears sprouted. “Spare me and we will leave your system, and I will give you the secret you want. Of finding help and getting back. I will give you this ship. I am a steersman.”
“Strike, Man! Before it is too late!”
“Oh, Merral,” the creature said, its voice now gentle, even humorous. “He just wants to stop you from learning knowledge.”
Merral stared at the creature. It was a young man—no, he realized with a mixture of emotions—it was a young woman. The face was shy and graceful and had wide, dark brown eyes. The hair, still growing, was framing the face.
Smooth, pale red lips parted gently in speech. “Merral, this envoy thing is a spoiler. He is himself fleshless, and thus he hates everything associated with life. But then, you know that, don’t you?”
The tone was amused, intelligent, and sensible. To his utter amazement, Merral realized how much sense the thing was making. No, it is not a thing, it is a person—a she.
The long legs now locked themselves under her body so she seemed to sit cross-legged. The face looked up demurely at Merral as if expect
ing him to automatically acknowledge the truth of what she said. There were faint flickers of motion along her back as if some invisible sculptor was putting the final touches to his creation. Her hands, finely nailed, came up in a gesture of helplessness and embarrassment over her nakedness. Merral was almost overwhelmed by the vulnerability of this girl.
“You know, he wants to stop your enjoyment,” she said, her tone at once wise and sympathetic. She shook her golden hair and it caught the light. “To stop you from doing what is your right. After all, this is your planet. Not his.” She smiled at him and he felt his heart tremble. “Look, let me help you rebuild your world. I will gladly serve you. Help you in every way.” She smiled with a happy innocence. “We can do things. Together.”
The single word together evoked an extraordinary excitement.
“Do you really promise?” Merral asked, telling himself that listening could do no harm. Indeed, he reminded himself, did he not have a duty to extract the best possible concessions for his world from this being?
“Oh yes,” said the earnest voice.
I must give her a new name. Something beautiful, something fitting. As he was thinking about it, he caught another glimpse of the caked blood on his sleeve.
“But Lorrin Venn is dead,” he heard himself say.
“I know,” she answered thoughtfully, “but only a short time ago. There will have been little biochemical change yet. If you promise to spare me, I can bring him back.”
“You can do that?” he gasped.
Then she gazed up at Merral, and he thought how he longed to be immersed in her timeless and beautiful eyes.
“Spare me. I can restore life.”
Then she bowed her face toward him submissively, as if to indicate that she was his.
As she bent her head, Merral glimpsed beyond her fine hair something white that had rolled under the chair in the blast. It was a polished, smooth waxen object, like a bowl.
In a moment of appalling knowledge, he knew what it was: the skull of a child.
And in that moment, he knew that she was Death, not Life.
He screamed.
The blade arced straight down. With a terrible sucking noise, it sliced through the smooth flesh of the neck.
Merral closed his eyes briefly as the head hit the floor. Slowly, sobbing with emotion, he opened them. The slack-jawed face was upside down, looking up at him from the ground.
“Man, have it be gone.” The envoy’s words were formal and unsympathetic.
Then, aware that his hands and legs were shaking, Merral spoke words as they came to him. “Thing! Demon! Whatever name you are known by, I command you by the authority of Jesus, the living King of the heavens and the worlds, be gone, and return to your realm to await your judgment!”
The figure crumbled away as if it were made of sand. A faint column of dust spiraled up into air and then, in an eddy of air, it was gone.
Merral stood there shaking, full of shame, realizing how close he had come to disaster. He wanted to be sick. What was it that the envoy had warned him barely an hour ago? “The enemy seeks your ruin. For him there are more satisfying and useful ways for your destruction than fire, sword, or tooth.”
“I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I didn’t mean to listen.”
The shape of the envoy, although still at the margins of his vision, was somehow more substantial than it had ever been.
“You would have been far wiser not to. Again, you nearly fell.”
“I’m truly sorry.”
There was only silence in response.
“Is it destroyed?” Merral asked, still shaking.
“It has lost the body fashioned for it and gone back to the abyss.”
The horror of the thing, and of what he had had to do to slay it, came back to him and made him shudder afresh.
“Envoy, what was it?” he inquired.
“I do not name it. Its name is best forgotten until the Judgment breaks. It and its kind had been set free. By explorations where mankind was not meant to go, and by men who thought that they could be harnessed.”
“And would she have kept her promises?” Merral asked.
“Man, you know so very little,” the envoy said, and there was a great sadness in his voice. “Not one of your race ever struck a deal with their sort and did not regret it. I think Lorrin’s family would not have long thanked you for what walked in their midst and pretended to be their son. And the Assembly’s rejoicing at your arrival through Below-Space would have been very short-lived.”
The figure beside him seemed to sigh in an almost human way. “And troubled as your world is now, all this would have been a pleasant dream compared to what you and she would have unleashed together as Lord and Lady of Farholme. Let alone your offspring.”
“I see.” Suddenly Merral felt very small and very weak.
He turned to the envoy, now certain that he was much less indistinct than he had been.
“The other things. The things the steersman said, in my mind. The breach in the barrier, the end of the Assembly. Those things. Are they true?”
“There were lies there, as you know. Yet not all was lies.”
“Which bits were true?”
“Ah, Man, that is for you to find out.”
“I had a feeling you’d say that.”
“But more importantly, next time, obey immediately.”
“Next time? I thought it was finished?”
“Finished?” Merral suddenly heard a sound that might have been a laugh. “No, you will know when it is finished. There will be no doubt of that moment.”
“What about the evil loose on my world?”
The dark shape at the margins of his vision seemed to suddenly become even more solid, and Merral thought he could make out a strange, archaic coat and a round, wide-brimmed hat that seemed to hide the face.
“No,” the figure said slowly, “the war will go on. But with this gone, your world may have some measure of healing.”
“Only some measure?” Merral asked sharply, feeling that the sacrifice of Lorrin and the diplomatic team and—for all he knew—another dozen more, merited a greater prize.
“The time for the mending—and ending—of things is not yet. Be content with what the day brings. But you must go.”
Suddenly Merral realized that outside the battle still raged. He glanced at his watch; to his amazement he saw that he had been on the ship for only twenty minutes. “Yes, I must.”
“You will face opposition outside the door, but they already fear you as Lucas Ringell. When they see you return alive and victorious out of here that fear will be greater. They may use terror, but they are not immune to it themselves. And your gun works now.”
“Thank you,” answered Merral, collapsing his blade and clipping it back to his belt.
“Man, save your thanks for him who sent me.” He paused. “I too serve.”
Then Merral turned, ran across the ghastly floor and through the doorway. Any sense of achievement in having killed the thing that had been the source of evil was dampened by the awareness that he had come so close to destruction.
He picked up the gun, and as he did, he turned and looked back. There on the floor of the chamber he saw a tall, straight-backed man, clothed in a black ankle-length coat over black trousers, whose face was hidden by the brim of his hat. He was poking tentatively and thoughtfully at the remains of the column with a black-shoed foot.
As if aware of his gaze, the figure began to turn toward him. Merral, curiously anxious not to see the face under the brim of the hat, turned away.
He slid the gun to “ready,” saw the status light go to red, and tugged at the handle of the outer door. As soon as the door began to open, he heard the shrill noise of multiple sirens.
As the door opened farther, he curved his finger around the trigger.
He gasped.
Lined up in front of the defaced bust in two symmetrical and silent rows were at least twenty intruders. The back row was made up
of towering ape-creatures, the front by a line of twitching cockroach-beasts.
With a sickening feeling, Merral realized that every single one of them was staring at him.
44
The door clicked fully open, and as it did, it seemed that for a brief moment time itself froze. As the forty or so weird and hostile eyes gazed at him, two thoughts came to Merral: The first was the bizarre one of how much the sight in front of him resembled some monstrous parody of a formal sports team image. The second was simply this: the time had come to die well. Then, on the heels of that, came a third thought: He had, first of all, to announce the defeat of the monstrous steersman.
“The steersman is dead! Glory to God and the Lamb who reigns!” Merral cried, in as loud a voice as he could muster. And as he shouted it, he felt astonished at the calmness with which he faced his end.
Then he fired in the air, and amid the crash of falling ceiling panels, the twin lines of the opposition suddenly broke. With a terrible cacophony of wails and yells, the creatures fled left and right in utter panic. Merral fired again into the midst of the fleeing figures on both sides.
The result was an astonishing—and gratifying—mayhem. The smaller cockroach-beasts with their faster initial response were overtaken near the stairways by the longer-limbed ape-creatures. The result was that both sets of terror-struck creatures tried to get down the narrow stairs at once. To his right, Merral saw an ape-creature trip over a cockroach-beast and go flying, taking another of his own kind with him. To his left, two ape-creatures reached the stairwell at exactly the same time, their limbs becoming hopelessly enmeshed, while a cockroach-beast cannoned into the back of their legs. Fighting erupted between them, and he glimpsed a brown-shelled creature tumbling—or being thrown—over the rail.
Merral fired quickly once more at each side, to renewed howls. Noticing that the elevator door was open, he ran in and pressed the lowest of the six buttons.
