Death's Heretic

by James L. Sutter

  The glance the satyr cast her was pure contempt. “What did I just tell you? The rules are different here. We’ll be there soon enough.”

  Salim refused to be distracted by the bickering. “And this Shyka? What is he?”

  “The boss. The one who set us to guarding the breach against anyone who might try to exploit its energy. One of the Eldest.”

  Salim nodded, but inside he felt a stone deposit itself in his stomach.

  “And what’s that?” Neila asked, clearly frustrated at being talked past.

  “One of the little gods of the First World,” Salim said. “Not true gods, but close enough. Fey lords of immense power.”

  “And we’re going to ask one for help?”

  “Yes.”

  Neila’s face took on the same somber cast as Salim’s own. One did not petition gods lightly. Even little ones.

  “And now, if we’re through with today’s lesson,” Delini said, “perhaps we can begin? There’s no telling how far we’ve yet to go.”

  Wordlessly, Salim and Neila fell in behind him, and together the three set off toward the mountains, the portal that was their sole link to home quickly dwindling and disappearing into the featureless expanse of grass.

  For all his mocking of Neila’s ignorance, it quickly became apparent that Delini enjoyed the sound of his own voice more than lording his superior knowledge over the humans. Before long, he was conducting lessons of his own, explaining the nature of the First World as they walked, punctuating his diatribe with sweeping, grandiose arm gestures.

  Though Delini himself was a product of the Thuvian wilderness, and had never so much as glimpsed the First World until the appearance of the breach several years ago, he was full of ideas and opinions about the place. In his view, the First World was superior to the planes of the multiverse, Heaven and Hell and Axis and all the others, because it was bereft of any underlying moral or organizational strictures. Instead, the First World was ruled by possibility and potential, a place where nature and evolution were granted an unlimited canvas and the freedom that came with a flexible interpretation of natural laws. Anything could happen here, and because it could, it did.

  Salim had heard bits of the story before, but there was a difference between a scholar’s speculations and experiencing something in the flesh. As he and Neila quickly discovered, the satyr was right about the unusual flexibility of natural laws here. Time seemed different, and distance was distorted in ways that were difficult to discern, save that as they walked, the mountains grew in size far faster than they had any right to, in fits and starts, looming high on the horizon before any of them were even winded. It was as if the landscape were a sheet that had been folded to bring two points together, with the intervening sections conveniently removed.

  Around them, the landscape changed as well. When they’d arrived, there’d been nothing but fields, flat as a calm ocean of yellow-green grass. Now the field was still there, but its shape changed, bowing up into hills or down into valleys, and new features seemed to pop up out of nowhere—forests that appeared full-formed off to their left, or high mesas around which dark shapes fluttered and dove.

  There were stranger things, too. Once the land twisted to reveal a massive black sphere in the distance, seemingly floating above the sea of grass without moving. Straining his eyes, Salim was just barely able to make out a jumble of pockmarks on its surface that turned out to be a mismatched assortment of holes and doors, gates leading into the obsidian orb from every angle. Another time Neila glanced back over her shoulder and gave a little shriek, drawing all their attention to the full-sized mountain that had appeared on their backtrail, so close that there was no way they could have overlooked it. As they stood there, transfixed, the mountain began to move before their eyes, sliding across their tracks and into the fields beyond as smoothly as a sailing ship.

  Of the land’s residents, however, they saw little. Judging by the way Delini occasionally squinted into the distance and then adjusted their course, Salim suspected that wasn’t entirely coincidental. At one point they paused to rest at the top of a low hill, and Neila pointed out a strange phenomenon off to their left, much closer than the others. It looked like a river, but only a small section of it, perhaps thirty feet long. The segment of stream, sharp-edged at either end, seemed to stretch several feet above the top of the grass, pouring onto new ground and then curling up behind itself as it slithered across the landscape.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  Delini looked, then ducked reflexively, motioning for them to lower their profiles.

  “Grodair,” he said. “Giant fish-person. Takes its own stream with it wherever it goes.”

  Neila smiled at the idea, so like something out of a child’s fairy tale. “Are they dangerous?”

  “That depends,” the satyr replied. “Can you breathe underwater? If so, then I’m sure they’re perfectly nice. If not—well, once it realized what it had done wrong, it would likely apologize profusely, but it would be too late to make a difference to you. Still want to go make friends?”

  Neila said nothing in response, just joined Salim in hunkering down at grass level until the portion of stream disappeared beyond the too-near horizon.

  Only once did they truly have to hide. By that time the field had at last given way to the foothills of the mountains, and gnarled, lichen-covered trees held court between boulders the size of houses, cut through with tiny, perfect streams small enough to hop over or cross on makeshift bridges of upthrust stepping stones. They were near one such rivulet when Salim suddenly noticed a new sound above the water’s babble: a high, fluting chorus, less like a bird call than a set of mismatched panpipes played by the wind. He turned to mention it to Delini, but the satyr’s eyes were already big.

  “Skrik nettles,” he said, grabbing their hands and yanking them over to where two enormous stones leaned against each other to create a low, narrow opening. There he promptly dropped to his belly and wriggled into the dark hollow, tugging and motioning frantically for them to follow him in. Soon all three were lying in the hole, pressed well back into the shadows and likely invisible to anyone passing by.

  “What’s a skrik nettle?” Neila whispered.

  In response, the satyr slapped a hand over her mouth and left it there. He looked to Salim, as if considering doing the same to him, then clearly thought better of it.

  The fluting was louder now, its smooth vowels creating strange, discordant compositions that were somehow too pure and clear to be unpleasant. Then the source rounded one of the big rocks and came into full view.

  The skrik nettles were enormous jellyfish creatures, translucent and eight feet across at the dome of protoplasm that formed each body. Perhaps a dozen of them floated in the air at easily twice Salim’s height, moving serenely without any apparent mechanism of flight. Below the iridescent bubbles of their bodies, long tentacles stretched to the ground, ringed by an incongruous fringe of feathers where they met the main dome. At its end, each tentacle was tipped with a birdlike beak. It was from these beaks that the fluting came, twittering and hooting to each other—sometimes even at other beaks attached to the same creature—as they trailed along the ground, writhing and investigating the grass and dirt.

  They looked absurd, but Salim had grown up near the ocean and seen men scarred and crippled by the poison of jellyfish no more than a few feet long. He looked questioningly to Delini, and the satyr gave a grim little nod. All of them shrank farther back into the shade of the stones, which suddenly seemed far too exposed.

  And it might have been, had things gone differently. The skrik nettles were in no hurry, sliding through the air with their tentacles just barely touching the ground, piping beaks hunting into nooks and crannies for anything attempting Delini’s tactic. One of them drifted close enough that a single tentacle peeked under their stones, twitching in the dirt with horrible, blind intensity. Salim wondered if the thing could smell them.

  Up ahead, something brok
e cover. A creature like a cross between an alligator and a piglet, no larger than a small dog, crashed out of the brush and raced forward in a low-slung, back-twisting run, desperate to escape the floating menace.

  The tentacle that had been questing toward the three travelers was instantly withdrawn as the pack converged. From their vantage, Salim and the others could see clearly how the skrik nettles broke ranks and swarmed, surrounding the squealing animal. Tentacles flicked out and stroked pebbled hide, and Salim knew that the creature was finished.

  Yet the reptilian piglet didn’t drop. Instead, it did the opposite. With its tiny clawed feet kicking wildly in terror, the creature began to drift up, out of contact with the ground. Cut free of its moorings, the little beast pitched and yawed, tumbling somersaults in the air as its bladder and bowels let go in panic.

  The tentacles continued to lash out, stroking and caressing. The animal rose faster, first ten feet, then twenty. As it rose, so too did the skrik nettles, an aerial entourage that matched the creature’s steady ascension into the cloudless sky. They passed from the cave-dwellers’ view, and soon even the sounds of the tiny creature’s cries and the skrik nettles’ fluting—now bearing an unmistakably triumphant tone—became faint and indistinct. Delini waited for several breaths after they lost track of the sound, then scrambled out from beneath the stones and took off in the direction they’d been traveling before, moving at a slow run and keeping to the shadow of overhangs and tree branches whenever he could. Salim and Neila were quick to follow, and the satyr kept his pace slack until they caught up, then began to run in earnest.

  “What just happened?” Neila asked, breathless. “Where did they go?”

  “It’s how they hunt,” Delini replied, ducking low beneath a branch. “We’ve got a few minutes while they climb for altitude—they’ll be too focused on their prey to notice us, and once they start to feed they’ll hopefully be distracted for a bit longer. But I want to be far away when that happens.”

  “Feed?” Neila echoed, horrified. “How do they—”

  Without turning, Delini made a fist in the air and brought it down, adding a descending whistle. He ended it with a sudden spread of his fingers and a little popping noise. Neila gagged, and then all attention was turned to escape.

  They ran for perhaps ten minutes before returning to their strangely effective walk. Around them, the landscape had changed once more, trending uphill and turning into the mountains proper. The valley they had been running in became a steep-walled cleft, and the grasses and trees gave way to fields of scree and boulders. In some places the rubble was new, knife-edged, while in others the sides were rounded and softened by thick mats of lichen, spanning every color from deep purple to a shocking, vibrant green. These the travelers clambered through as best they could, feeling exposed but seeing few creatures, and none of any size. Above them, rookeries of unknown birds occasionally cawed and trilled at each other. Something like a rabbit, its body stretched snakelike beyond any reasonable length, slithered between two burrow entrances in the rocks.

  Salim was on the verge of asking exactly how much farther the satyr expected them to travel when they found the staircase. It began innocently enough, cut into the rock at the top of a small slope of shale. The steps were only wide enough for them to travel single file, and Delini took the lead, stepping from the scree field to the first of the stairs with a small sigh of relief.

  “This is it,” the satyr said, putting a touch of pomp in his voice. “The stairway to the House of Eternity. Not far now.”

  But of course it was. They climbed for hours, twisting and winding as the last of the low valleys gave way to bleak rock. The path they followed was immaculate, the right angles of the steps bereft of any sign of erosion, as if they had been chiseled just yesterday by some giant’s hammer. The stairs wound their way up through narrow passes and along exposed cliff faces, up chimneys so tight and steep that the stairs almost became a ladder, with all three of them using the side walls as handholds, lest they overbalance and fall backward into open space. At times the path was joined by other staircases writhing their way in from other trail heads far below, yet so well crafted was the path that there was never a question as to which way the staircase led. Others joined, but always the course continued upward.

  At last they came to what could only be their destination. Here the river of stairs that had been collecting for miles finally came to a head and gave out onto a narrow courtyard of natural stone. At its far end, a palace rose.

  It was primarily a construction of spires, either carved from the native rock or growing from it like some strange, organic being. The towers, more than a dozen of them, were of varying heights, but all were tall and slender, tapering near their points into tips so long and needle-thin that Salim guessed any natural stone would have cracked and fallen in the breeze. The sides of the spires were as smooth as ceramic from a potter’s kiln, broken only by tall, open windows set at seemingly random intervals, all lit from within by golden light.

  At the spires’ collective base, a castle emerged from the mountainside, its shape following that of the gray slope. Its grand arched windows were similarly lit, yet here the phenomenon took on a more sinister cast. For though it seemed to Salim that he should be able to see into the nearest of them, everything beyond the thick stone sills was lost to the gentle radiance.

  Delini crossed the courtyard to the enormous metal double doors that stood at its end, their swirling faces embroidered at the edges with a continuous line of tiny figures marching single file. As he walked, there came a metallic booming, then silence as the portal split down the middle and swung inward.

  Despite the obvious invitation, the satyr stopped a good twenty feet away and bowed his head, hands folded. The simple sincerity of the gesture was so different from his usual capering and grandstanding that the back of Salim’s neck prickled into gooseflesh.

  “It’s Delini, Lord, with two humans come to beg your aid.”

  For a moment, there was no sound at all save for the sighing of the wind through the smooth obelisks of stone. Then:

  “Enter.”

  The voice was mild, genderless, and seemingly everywhere at once. Salim looked to Neila and saw her glancing around as well, clearly unnerved. Ahead, Delini was already striding forward, and the two humans moved swiftly to keep up.

  They found themselves in a palatial receiving chamber, its high ceiling arching like the great hall of a king or emperor, yet bereft of a throne or the hangings and tabards mortal lords were so fond of. Instead, the walls themselves were art, carved in the same motif as the doors behind them. Around the room’s edges and up and down the walls, a twisting serpent of foot-tall engraved humanoids marched in an orderly procession, sometimes seeming to be walking, others sprinting with swords or trumpets held high. Despite its convoluted weavings, Salim got the impression that the train of figures made a single continuous loop, never repeating a figure. Above the parade, the arched ceiling was embossed with four titanic figures in flowing robes, their shapes twisting and swirling clockwise as they stretched and reached for the dome’s apex, a circular window of crystal that blazed like the sun, illuminating the entire room. Inside the robes, the bodies of the figures were thin and lithe—two male, two female—yet the cowled heads were faceless, the stone blank and smooth beneath strange runic halos.

  “Welcome, travelers. You have come far.”

  Salim looked back down. When they’d entered, the room had been empty. Now a woman stood before them, golden hair cut short and body draped in a gray gown not dissimilar from those of the carved figures above. Delini straightened into an almost military posture, and Salim found himself doing the same. The satyr opened his mouth to speak, but Salim beat him to it.

  “My name is Salim. This is Lady Neila Anvanory, formerly of the Taldan aristocracy, currently of Thuvia.”

  “I know who you are,” the woman said, pleasantly enough. “And also why you have come. Why else do you think you’d have b
een allowed to climb my stairs? I am Shyka the Many.”

  “Greetings, Lady Shyka,” Neila said, dropping into a curtsy deep enough for royalty. “We—”

  But the lady was no longer there. Salim didn’t remember blinking, yet he must have, for he never saw the transition. One moment the woman was there, listening to Neila speak, and the next she was gone. In her place, a dark-skinned man maybe ten years older than Neila stood in an identical posture of polite interest, his gray robes undisturbed. Neila’s jaw dropped and hung.

  “—were wondering why I’m called ‘the Many,’” he finished for her, grinning broadly. “No reason to hide your curiosity, child—I could read it in your face. And I believe the answer should be self-evident.”

  “Illusion,” Salim said.

  Shyka and Delini both shot him scandalized looks.

  “Hardly,” the young man said, only now he was no longer the black man, either, but rather an emaciated patriarch several inches taller than Salim himself, with a long silver beard and an elaborate topknot. “You really should know better, Salim. This is the First World. What use is illusion when reality itself is malleable? Anyone with a little imagination can bend it to his or her will—you saw it yourself on your way here. Or did you think the landscape folded of its own volition?”

  Salim hadn’t truly considered the matter until just now. As he did, Delini jumped in.

  “Shyka is one of the Eldest,” he said, puffing out his lightly furred chest. “Worlds are born and die at his whim, and all elements bow before him.”

  “Including my favorite,” Shyka added.

  The old man waited expectantly, hands folded. After a moment, Neila obliged him.

  “Which is what?” she asked.

  “Time.” The whisper came from every direction, and as it did a hand fell on Salim’s shoulder. Shyka was now behind all three of them, back in the original guise of the blonde woman.

  “Shyka the Many is a name,” the Eldest explained. “But it is also a title. The Eldest live long—too long for even you to rightly conceive of, Salim—but we are not immortal unless we choose it. Over the ages that have been and have yet to come, there have been many Shykas, all of them masters of perceived causality, the shimmering ribbon that you understand as time.”