by E A Bagby
8
Dust
“Erikal!” Alana shouted between coughs. “Go!”
“Not yet,” Erikal said, his voice hoarse but calm. A couple of small coughs escaped him. “Look, it’s thinning.”
The entity crept below the windows and drifted, calmly and slowly, until it reached the platform’s edge. Like a fog, it slid into the lower basin of the cave.
Erikal’s eyes followed it. Mine shifted between him and the creature.
“Look at that,” he said and pointed. From the yellow room, light now shot out into the cave, like a Sunray in grey mist. My heart paused from the sight. I wondered if the door led to the world above, and if the Sun shined. But no, it had a fraction of the Sun’s brightness and shot out sideways, projecting a rectangle of ghostly light on the opposite wall.
I didn’t trust the light and wanted to leave immediately, but Erikal’s calmness fascinated me. What thoughts arose in his mind? Everyone else screamed for him to get us airborne. But one by one, they turned from him to watch the amorphous creature or look at the bright ray.
In moments, the shadowy beast dissipated as if into the ether.
Our coughing slowly subsided.
“Are we surprised to see evil spirits?” Meritus said. “I’m guessing that was the horrid protector. What’s it called, Giels?”
“The Guardian?” I said. But I was skeptical, since our stories describe the beast as more like a gross combination of creatures. Sometimes it was part boromount and human, other times, part snake and tazer. The Guardian would do much more than choke us for a moment.
The floor around the cab, especially near the yellow room, discolored as if the ghost had left an embodiment of dark memories and thoughts.
“I believe we’re fine now,” Erikal said. He grabbed the cab’s door handle.
“No!” I shouted, but he had already lifted the door.
Erikal jumped out and swiped his hand across the discoloration. He turned around to show us his greyed palm.
“Powder,” he said. “We didn’t unleash a spirit, but a trap.” In our language, a trap is a device for the capture or killing of animals for a future meal. I imagined our stunned or dead bodies lying about while our confused souls waited silently, unaware of a stalking devil nearby.
“I assume we triggered it,” Erikal said, “and it’s now harmless.” With a smile, he gestured for us to join him.
Cleo looked at me. I shook my head. “How can he know?”
“I’m going,” she said.
Cleo and Meritus moved to the cab’s open door. “Fine,” I said.
Cleo’s prodding and my reluctant trust of Erikal’s intuition pushed me to join them, but survival took hold. I curled my arm around Cleo’s to keep her close and behind Meritus. If she and I remained at the rear, we might escape another attack. If the others did not, she could drive us home.
Alana leaned against the back wall, the fear of death on her face. Cleo gestured for her to join us, and to my surprise, she did. She came and held my other arm.
Once on the platform, our steps left footprints in the residue, like Erikal’s. The layer’s thickness increased as we approached the yellow room, to about ankle-deep at its threshold. The yellow glowed in the light. But from the angle, I could not see the second door or what lay past it.
I leaned over and pinched the powder between my fingers.
Dust?
“Erikal,” I said, “this is not actually a powder. It’s more like—”
“Dust,” Erikal and Cleo said in unison.
“Opening the door stirred it,” Erikal said.
Cleo had her fingers to her mouth to block the dusty air. “We can tear strips off the pillow coverings, and wrap them around our mouths. I used a very fine fabric.”
The light both beckoned and repelled me. I decided I was in no rush and walked back to the Silver Dare to tear up one of the pillows, being sure not to select the one I had previously spat on.
Movement caught my eye. A small cloud of dust wafted out from the yellow room. I hastened to my friends who, except for Alana, had gone in. Lines of deep footprints ran through the open door and out of view. Their silhouettes blocked portions of the beaming light.
Alana and I each tied a cloth around our mouths. I looked at her. “I’m guessing you never thought you’d be doing this when Meritus introduced you to us.” A glimmer broke through her terrified eyes. My knees shook. Together we ambled, kicking up dust that swirled around our legs.
“Here’s the cloth,” I said as we approached.
Cleo came into view. She turned to me, her eyes sparkling. “Slowly. Come . . . take a look.”
As I neared, I gained a view through the second door. A straight passageway stretched beyond, where pipes, conduits, supporting structures, and various other machinelike odds and ends loosely defined its walls and ceiling. Although from the angle, I still could not see the passageway’s end.
A much deeper mass of dust covered the passageway floor just beyond the second door. From immediately rising up to knee height at the passageway side of the threshold, it quickly tapered down to almost nothing, where it revealed a grated surface. Dust, therefore, had piled nearly two feet high on a floor that should have prevented that very thing. “Can you imagine—” I started, but Alana’s expression of utter awe stopped me. She had stepped forward a couple of paces. I moved past her to have a direct view down the passage.
The path went about a dozen feet to where the pipes and other mechanical work thinned out and the floor ended. Beyond that—far beyond—a vast space glowed with the same eerie ambient light as the cave, but magnitudes brighter.
Some great distance away, a delirious amalgam of unnatural, light-grey mechanistic objects were jumbled and intertwined with one another.
An object that looked like a massive rounded duct turned a corner—or perhaps it was an immense storage tank, tightly packed among a wall of latticework, pipes, and myriad other machinery. Judging vaguely at that moment, I estimated that single form to be as tall as a small mountain and the tubes as wide as rivers. Next to and more extensive than the giant tank, a crag-like fissure cut at a slight angle through the wall of mechanisms. I reasoned that the opening was not some natural break, but part of a disturbingly chaotic design.
The sight had the grandeur and scale of the Western Sea as we had seen it earlier. My body surged with excitement and fear. My face must have looked as enraptured as those of my friends.
Cleo, now on my left, shifted to me so that our arms pressed. As we stared, she swayed a little. The pressure and warmth of her electrified and magnified the view’s intensity. I had come on the journey so that it would be me who shared some grand, romantic moment with her. Right then, I believed I had very much surpassed that goal.
I hope the day will end well for us.
Cleo looked at me and smiled, seemingly thrilled that I was standing next to her; as though she decided she had been right to ask me to come on the journey; as though she had been right about me all along.
She gently touched and squeezed my hand with two of her fingers and her thumb. The gesture, unexpected, caused me to flinch and pull back a little—not from discomfort, but from the intensity of feeling in me. “Is the cloth working?” she asked in a low voice. She had only wanted my attention to ask me that.
“Yes. I can breathe fine.”
“May I have one?”
I scoffed at myself. “Sorry, I’d become distracted.” I gestured towards the view.
I noticed every minute detail of her hand touching mine—the hairs on the back of my thumb as her fingerprint moved across them—and when she let go, it was gentle. Without any of our fingers brushing together, her hand left mine. I turned from the view to stare into her eyes. She glanced up, smiled, and pulled the cloths from my grasp.
Cleo’s thin figure moved around me, stepping on the dust with a light touch, to hand the rags to the others. Dust rested on her shoulders and hair and blackened the fabric around
her ankles.
“When the air cleared, and we saw this view revealed . . .” Meritus said as he tied the cloth around his mouth. “I will never forget it. I only hope I live long, if for no other reason than this memory can be with me.”
“Giels,” Erikal said, “didn’t you say if Salihandron wanted us to enter through the door, we would?”
I swallowed hard. “I did say that.”
“I had been right all along,” Alana said, astonished. “None of it seems possible, and I’m not sure I want it to be.”
“Sounds like the way this works, it doesn’t matter what you want,” Meritus said.
Cleo again touched my arm. “Shall we take a closer look?”
“I see no reason not to,” Erikal said, responding before I could. “Allow me to be in front. I’ll feel the floor with one foot as we go to make sure it’s solid.” He turned to me. “Giels, are you recording this?”
“Yes.” Three of them had now asked about me recording the journey. Part of me preferred not to; I wondered if it was a good idea to have the device remember that I had gone to the world below. Another part wanted it to prove to somebody, someday, that I had.
Led by Erikal, we all stepped over the thick dust at the threshold into another world. Despite being careful, we still kicked up masses of the filth.
The cloth from the pillow worked reasonably well at keeping my lungs clear from the swirling grey mass that ensued. My eyes, though, burned and watered. The whites of the others’ eyes had turned red. Tears streamed from their faces, carving tendrils through the grey on their cheeks.
Most of the dust fell through the grated floor beyond the threshold, and it swirled down below like the evil amorphous beast we thought had attacked us earlier.
Down there, multitudes of boxlike machines, ducts, panels, pipes, and other mechanical work jumbled together, and on those things sat more piles of residue, which the newly falling dust kicked up in turn. Dust puffed out in distant places after swirling through unimaginably complex spaces within the unnatural sieve. The substance tended to fall, but that did not stop the air around us becoming dense from it.
The foul air slowly moved, tracking back towards the yellow room, clearing quickly. Perhaps it would join the wind of the cave and find its way to the world above. I turned to see it drifting into the tunnel. Alana glanced up at me, her face nearly expressionless. She had moved the hair from her large, round eyes, and they seemed to be expecting answers from me. I had none, and I turned back.
A short distance from where we entered, the semi-enclosed passage ended at a grated metal stair. It descended about a dwelling’s height in a single run to a straight, grated path, which ran right and left.
We moved to the top of the stair. Mechanical work no longer surrounded us, and the incomprehensible immensity of the space lay naked. All around, extending on into the distance, were pipes or conduits, struts, columns, and floors, and mechanical boxes and indescribable machinery, each piece simple in itself, but contributing to one great machine.
All of it white, topped by grey residue. For a moment, I lost my bearings. I gently touched Cleo’s shoulders to have a sense of where I stood.
Erikal turned to us. “This is all mechwork,” he said with an airy voice, using a term for the internal mechanisms that made machines function, and in which the mechanical spirits dwelled. Disbelief and wonder filled his eyes.
Despite being mechwork, the Underworld looked unexpectedly like a landscape, as if composed of a subtle order beyond mortal understanding.
Before us lay a strange valley. In place of rocks, dirt, and trees, the landscape consisted of endless mechwork, which rose and fell like hillocks to a low point midway between us and the distant wall.
Unlike a natural landscape, however, there appeared to be no solid ground. Tangled mechwork descended far below us, if not infinitely. And the other side was not defined by a river’s embankment, as with a typical valley. The large tank object and massive jagged crack passage, which I described as being the size of mountains, I now saw as relatively small elements within a much broader tapestry of a great wall of mechwork that extended up and out to unbelievable proportions. I feared that if I looked up and around, I might lose my balance and fall to the floor, although I looked anyway.
Above us, as far away as the sky, stretched a ceiling of the same character as the distant wall. The right and left directions extended much further and ended where amalgams of structures swallowed the open air in rough, toothy pieces. Overall, that world was like a room on the scale of the gods. My head spun, and I clutched Cleo’s shoulders tighter. She put a hand on mine.
Despite the unimaginable strangeness, the place felt bright and airy—more how I envisioned heaven, not the Underworld.
“Giels?” Alana whispered from behind, as if still expecting me to explain something.
I only shook my head. The cave had not come close to my impressions of the world below, but at least it was dim and ominous. The lore never hinted at what lay before us now. We had opened a door on a great secret—in fact, two great secrets. First, that the world below actually existed in physical form such that we did not need to be spirits to travel there, and second, it matched nothing that I, nor certainly anyone else, had imagined.
My mind urgently worked at reshuffling reality, as though trying to right itself after having been mauled. The place confirmed what I had resisted believing since we entered the cave: that the sacred stories might not be right.
Despite myself, my heart lifted. I think I wanted to be scared, maybe because everything I knew told me I was supposed to be—instead, a surge of ecstasy pummeled me from within. It’s exactly like living our own epic.
But to what end?
“Oh, the gods! Where are we, Erikal?” Alana asked.
Erikal put a hand to his chin. “Exactly, Alana. I believe we’re here.”
9
We Asked You What You’d Seen
“The Underworld,” Alana said from behind me. “We’re in the Underworld.”
I looked on and marvelled, trying to make sense of the endless machine. But I could not. Was I actually standing there? Or was it all a trick, a dream, or death?
“What a find!” Meritus said. He pushed past Erikal and trotted down a few of the steps. Grabbing a flat bar handrail as he went, he unleashed a mass of swirling dust, shielding him from our view. He appeared fearless.
“Meritus!” Alana shouted.
Moments later, a hollow sound filtered through the giant space. “Ghosts?” Alana said. “Did you hear that?”
Or demons. I scanned the vastness to see where it had come from.
“Echoes!” Meritus shouted from somewhere beyond our view. “I’m here. I saw something shiny and am taking a look. I’ve gone to the right. Come!”
Moments after each shout, the vast space responded with soft, indecipherable distortion; echoes with grandeur.
We walked down the stairs to the lower path. To the right and left, the mechwork engulfed the walkway like a trail that tunneled through thick hedges. And in both directions, the walk turned after some distance, disappearing within the mechanical tangles.
Long, shiny bundles of silvery strands adorned the side of the right-hand path. Presumably, Meritus had gone to investigate those, but he was now out of sight.
Erikal took off to find him. Alana and Cleo joined him, but Cleo then turned and made her way back to me. “Are you going to wait here?”
I pointed the opposite way. “I thought about going that direction a little, just to see.”
“All right,” Cleo said, her eyes beaming, “let’s go.”
My fingers scraped on my head so tightly that the hair pulled at my scalp. “Is this amazing or scary?” I really could not tell. I sensed no danger, though I thought I should.
“I don’t know, it feels much less scary, and more amazing, somehow. It’s so open and bright, and we can see for miles and miles . . . and more miles. Yet, we appear to be completely alone, as t
hough nothing has been here for many, many years. It’s extraordinary, it’s—”
“Not much of a hell, is it?” I said.
She chuckled and tugged at my hand before trotting ahead. Her colorful, dust-laden wrap flowed loosely from her knees to her ankles. She was the image of youthful euphoria.
Nothing cast a shadow. No corner or nook was brighter or darker than any other. Yet, somehow, all of the objects’ shapes were visible because of the natural gradation of shade on their surfaces. It all gave me a dreamlike sensation, like we were floating down a walkway in a mechanical world of a faerie’s imagination.
The air had a temperature one does not notice. The dust reeked of age, but otherwise, breathing felt dry and clean.
After walking for a minute, we saw side passages dotting the right hand of the path. We kept going, and the main walkway soon turned. There, we descended a stair. I followed Cleo and lost myself in the moment, unconcerned of danger.
The path twisted and regularly forked. We occasionally encountered more steps and full runs of stairs, always going downwards.
Cleo turned a corner in front of me.
“The Maze of Azer?” I said, referring to the mythical place at the transition between the mortal and immortal realms. Cleo did not respond. I turned the same corner and nothing, just a passage, and a stair. I stood alone.
“Cleo,” I called. After a moment, blurred echoes responded. I looked around, thinking of which way I should go, but the passageway forked several times behind me. I ran to the stair. Several paths broke off to the right and left below. “Cleo?” I repeated. No answer. I ran down the stair and looked down the closest side pathways, but still no Cleo.
The danger of the place started bubbling up.
A passage from White Cloud’s Fall came to mind.
On the way to the angry one, on the way to the fierce one, the Maze of Azer pulled White Cloud. He did not know the maze had been aware of him. It talked to him without words. It whispered to him without voice. The devils would lie with shouts, but the maze had no reservations about hidden deceptions.
