The people of K’n-Yan could die and return in new bodies at their whim, so he could do the same. And even if he was trapped in limbo, he could still find some way to make them wish to be rid of him.
And his people were still somewhere below, if Malakai hadn’t already fed them to the abyss.
Welcome home, Inigo Hull, Malakai whispered in his mind.
Hull threw up an imaginary shield against the intruder, but he could ‘see’ only a weird trailing wake, like the shape of a tall man, in the blue blizzard. His ancient enemy was all around him, but he couldn’t touch him.
Searching again, he saw a faded quadrant of the azure void grow dim and fade to a dead, dull black. Tiny cracks fanned out like capillaries from the dead space, throbbed and swelled into arteries shooting through the empty blue ocean of the dreaming engines.
A dreadful sound that was not a sound boomed throughout the infinite blue dream, and a thunderous voice roared from everywhere at once. “GOD DAMN YOU, INIGO HULL, I CURSE YOUR NAME, YOU BACKSTABBING HALF-BREED COCKSUCKER!”
By the sound of it, Tobin Roherty had found the Yothic dreaming engines, and mistaken the huge crystal dream-lenses for diamonds. But when Hull sent Roherty to wreck the dreaming engines, he never imagined that he would be trapped inside them.
Hull cast about for an exit, and the thought itself seemed to make it manifest itself. Ahead lay a yawning white whirlpool, but Malakai’s ghost floated before and behind him and whispered so loudly that his voice rang the void like a tuning fork. It’s time you knew the truth about your people.
* * *
September 28, 1849
Red Crow Mound, Kansas
A decorated officer, the son of a war hero and the great grandson of a Brigadier General, yet Lieutenant Cadmus Hull would have thrown away his command and run away that night, for her.
His detachment of eight cavalry troopers and a Pawnee scout had been three days on the trail of a party of Comanche renegades who raided a homestead on the Texas border, when they became lost on the prairie. The stars failed to come out at night, and the moon never rose. The men grumbled that he was leading them in circles.
This was no place for a West Point-educated horse officer. This vast green sea of grass should have fallen to the Navy to defend, but he had fallen head over heels in love with it. After the stifling warrens of Baltimore and the humiliating crush of Army life, the Great Plains had unchained his heart and filled him with strange ambitions.
The emptiness was like a cynosure from God. When everything around it was so abundantly blessed and lovingly shaped by the Creator’s hand, the prairie beckoned to Hull’s mind because it seemed as if God had left it so conspicuously blank for man to try his own hand at creation. When Cadmus Hull looked at the plains, he saw a vast city, and dreamed of his hand in its rearing, his name on its streets.
America was almost exactly half-tamed. All but a few stubborn holdouts among the native population had moved out of the east and south, but the endless plains and the Great Desert were something else, again. The Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche and Apache showed what one had to become, to thrive in such a wasteland. But it was an animal’s lot to conform to the dictates of the land. A white man brought the country to heel, and made it yield its bounty.
They’d ridden since dusk, six hours without seeing the rally point, or any landmark, elevation, or sign of life since the stampeding herd of buffalo that had driven them off the trail. The men argued among themselves about which direction they were headed, but agreed in loud mutterings that Hull was leading them to slaughter.
They’d passed abandoned homesteads with crops overripe in the fields, and wagon trains with grass woven through the spokes of broken wheels. There were no bodies or possessions and no signs of violence, as if the settlers had just set out for somewhere better on foot.
When Hull saw the pinpoint of orange light on the horizon, twinkling just above a lonely hill in the midst of the grassy nothingness, he thought it was a star. But it grew larger and brighter, beckoning him closer, until he galloped up the steep slope and found himself in the midst of the fugitive Comanche camp.
Hull drew his pistol and shouted an alarm, but the warriors lay prone upon black-red beds of bloody earth. The beacon that led him here was a torch in a woman’s hand.
No, he corrected himself with his second glance—a lady. Even from a distance, something in her bearing and her simple garments commanded his respect, even as the wild, pleading panic in her eyes inspired him to protect her.
He thought at first she was white, for she was so fair, but her black hair and almond-shaped, indigo eyes hinted at an exotic origin, perhaps Celestial. If she was an Indian, she was like none he’d ever seen. Whatever she was and wherever she came from, Hull knew she must be royalty.
She wailed in a strange tongue and dropped her torch as he approached, but she didn’t run away. Lieutenant Hull sent the others to encircle the mound, while he jumped down and quite instinctively took her in his arms.
The seven Comanche braves had not built a fire, but someone had come upon them in the night, and quietly killed them. Only one of the men had been eaten, but all had been opened up and disemboweled where they slept on the ground. They lay in a circle around a lump of green-black stone crudely carved into the shape of a squat toad with a wizened face and mocking, sleepy smile. Lieutenant Hull was not a religious or superstitious man, but a powerful revulsion stole into his bones at the touch of that blood-flecked idol, and he still felt its sickly weight and warmth in his hand long after he threw it into the dark.
She spoke no English, but the lady made herself understood with signs and meaningful glances that somehow told him more than words. Her own people had cast her out, and she had been taken by the Comanche war party only a few days before. They had tied her up and argued among themselves over which of them would have her, when something had come out of the night and slaughtered them all. She did not know why she was spared, but when it had left, she had lit a fire to try to signal for help.
Lieutenant Hull lifted her up on his horse. She rode with easy, weightless grace, clinging lightly to his back when he galloped after his men. The scout with their party told them that if they camped anywhere near the massacred Comanche on the ‘hollow hill’, they would wake up in Hell.
They camped an hour to the south, beside a winding creek on none of their maps. Hull led the lady he’d saved down by the water and gave her a ring he’d inherited from his mother when she died penniless in Baltimore. She told him her name.
The troopers broke camp before dawn. Hull and his woman were the last to rise. Only then did they set out.
Somewhere over the hills just breaching on the southern horizon, Major General Maddox was completing his spring-cleaning of the Texas panhandle. He was expecting them back with news of swift American retribution on the Comanche.
Hull stopped his procession of cavalry troopers again beside a lazy river, despite the protests of his men. They were a day’s ride from the company. But they’d complained about riding all night into southern Kansas, and he didn’t let them forget it. One wiseacre among the men had learned that his great-uncle, General William Hull, had surrendered to Tecumseh in the War of 1812, and now his chronic cough had always sounded peculiarly like the old chief’s name. Now, the wiseacre croaked worse accusations into his fist.
But Lieutenant Hull blithely put all this out of his mind, when he took the lady by the hand into the long grass at sunset. They lay together by the gurgling current, and he told her about the great cities in the east, and the strange nations beyond the sea. She was almost as eager for these stories as for his other attentions, but he lusted even more to lose himself in those boundless, unblinking eyes that seemed to peel away all his secrets, and accept him.
They lay entwined on the grass when the men came and tried to take her. The jealous Pawnee scout filled their heads with stories. She was not an Indian of the Plains, but a shadow woman of the Unseen Empire. She had killed the C
omanche herself, and she would do the same to them. She had bewitched their commander, but they would do their duty.
They tried to string her up. Hull shot two of his own men dead, and held the rest at bay, then rode off with her, headed west.
They lived together in a draw off Apache Creek, far from the trails. Fed by a spring and with arable land for raising crops, they were happy for some months, until the Comanche came.
Cadmus Hull was shot through with nine arrows when he reached their cabin. His wife was heavy with their child, and they caught her. By the time they brought her back to their camp, three braves were already competing for her attentions. When she delivered her child, she would have her pick of the finest of the Kotsotekas braves.
But on the day she delivered her baby, she died, and some said she went up to the sky in a cloud of blue smoke, leaving the oddly quiet, green-eyed half-breed child in their midst. They raised him as Comanche, but they knew he was different, for when he slept, Inigo Hull lay face-down, with his arms out to embrace the earth.
* * *
March 16, 1900
Gulf of N’kai
As Oliver Stickney ran through the infested avenues and fungi-fields of Yoth, he wished to be anywhere else, even back in the haunted purgatory of Tsath, rather than alone in this unhinged Inferno.
The bas-reliefs and leering idols everywhere, overhead and underfoot, were more intensely vivid and obscene than those of the blue-lit ruins above, but also far more alien. These decorations were as if the decadent artisans of K’n-Yan labored to express their adoration for serpentine and octopoid motifs, or that the insane builders of Yoth had been serpents themselves. And the objects of their devotion were too terrible to bear closer study.
The monstrous mushroom trees had succumbed to legions of withering parasitic fungi in this district, and the central plaza was open to the artificial sky. Clusters of dusky, deeply flawed ruby globes hung from the lofty, vaulted ceiling to light the city-sized cavern and bathe it in fertile heat and humidity.
A circular hole, sixty or so feet across, yawned in the center of the ruined city. The walls of the flanking pyramids were scabbed with fleshy white fungi like cancerous cauliflower. Deep, opaque shadows crept and stretched across the plaza around him, as if the artificial sun raced through the sky overhead…
Squirming wads of black protoplasm dragged themselves over the broken ground and streaked down the sloping pyramid walls to surround him. For all their hideous kinship to the oldest single-celled life on earth—the amoeba—yet they betrayed a shrewd predatory cunning that more than matched his own.
Primal fear and panic warred with a raging disgust in his trembling chest. His best efforts wouldn’t keep them at bay, yet they never closed in for the kill. He was not being stalked. He was being herded.
At the edge of the pit, Stickney sorely wished for a gun, though he knew how little good it would do. Peering nervously over the sheer wall, he saw a narrow staircase winding down the inside of the pit.
Though the formless horde reared up at his heels, Stickney balked on the top step at the faint echoes of a man’s voice from somewhere far below. He recognized the voice, but even here in this place, it gave him no comfort to hear the cries of Major Cawthorne, roaring in wordless grief and rage.
The stairs were slick and badly eroded by water seepage and eons of inhuman feet. The carvings lining the walls of the pit became mercifully unclear in the deepening gloom, but under his groping hands, the lurid animal motifs devolved in an orgy of miscegenation: blasphemous couplings of bat, serpent, toad and octopi begat and bred with their own mutant offspring. And as he descended, the misbegotten forms devolved into a uniform, plastic formlessness that he could not bear to touch any longer.
The echoing bedlam from down below gradually resolved into clearer impressions. He still heard the unhinged bellowing of the expedition commander, but wafting on the fetid, frigid breeze, he also heard the low rumbling of hundreds of voices chanting that strange, terrible name: Sadogwa.
And behind him, he heard a stealthy sound that was neither dripping fluid, nor the padding of creeping feet, but something in between…
He descended more urgently now, passing his hand quickly over the hideously carven walls, but he stopped and quashed a scream in the back of his throat when his hand slipped from cold, chiseled stone and brushed hot, sweating flesh.
“Please, don’t kill me…” the face in the dark begged him. “I can’t go on… He’s gone mad. He led us…but they…those things…they herded us down here! I was just following his orders, but he shot the others… I just…I want to go home.”
Fighting his own craven panic, Stickney grabbed the man’s woolen shoulders and shook him. He felt a lieutenant’s braided boards under his fingers. “Get a hold of yourself, for God’s sake! You’re supposed to be a soldier…” The officer was not wounded, just hysterical from all he had seen and survived.
Stickney touched the lieutenant’s holster and took the man’s pistol. He didn’t resist, and he didn’t listen to Stickney’s warning that it wasn’t safe up the stairs. The deserter bolted up the spiraling flight in a gibbering frenzy. Somewhere above, he screamed once, then fell instantly silent.
Stickney plunged down the remaining coils of the stairway in a dead panic. When he finally stumbled out onto the level floor of a natural tunnel, he wanted to fall down and kiss it, but the flickering light that lured him out of the tunnel lifted him to his feet and brought him running.
He emerged in a wide, low-roofed cave. A low, ancient step pyramid reached halfway to the low ceiling, and at its base, a great bonfire burned.
After uncounted hours in total darkness or under the unnatural illumination of the caverns of Yoth and Tsath, the honest light of a bonfire should have been a comfort, a beacon of sanity. But the firelight was broken up by the leaping silhouettes of dozens of dancing men, women and children, and scores more sat or lay prone on the steps, spent and desolate as lightning-struck trees. His heart broke as he finally found the people he had come down into hell to save.
They danced and chanted like sleepwalkers in a loose, shambling procession around and over the pyramid as he passed among them. Stickney had observed with real interest the dances of the various tribes who were unwilling neighbors in the Oklahoma Indian Territory, and he’d been touched by their grace and intricate symbolism. But this debased ritual was a travesty of the Indian and all he believed, and of the human form itself.
Locked in a deep, tormented trance that urged them beyond the limits of their bodies, they looked right through him as they cavorted and abused themselves and each other with spastic blows from fist, nails and feet. Painted from head to toe in stinking black filth, they jumped like broken-winged bats and crawled on the stones like toads, and in the guttering light of a noisome bonfire fed with piles of dried fungi, the bad medicine of this unholy place seemed close to granting their wish.
Severed once and for all from their sacred bond to the land, the Comanche seemed to pray to the void to let them shed their human skins and slip into the shrinking wilderness and fall into shadow. And everything that walked on two legs would be swept away by what they hoped to awaken.
Huge, hairless, deformed bats soared in out of the dark to add their flailing wings to the flames, or to latch onto oblivious Indians and glut themselves on their blood.
One renegade dancer moved to his own tune, running amok with a cavalry saber and an empty pistol, and howling, “Stop this abomination, you godless red bastards!” He lopped the head and arms off an ancient naked man, but the dolorous strokes threw him to his knees.
Major Cawthorne was drenched in blood and foaming at the mouth. Dismembered corpses and orphaned limbs lay scattered in his trail. He had spent himself in wanton killing without even getting the dancers’ attention. Indeed, he seemed to be a critical ingredient in the dehumanizing ritual.
Stickney climbed halfway up the pyramid, searching the chaos for the blue-eyed Indian Hull had called Mala
kai. He saw him on a towering altar that loomed at the summit of the pyramid.
Naked and gleaming blue in the cold cobalt light of an atomic lantern, Malakai performed a strange dance as subdued and subtle as the Comanche dance was bestial and depraved. His face wracked with silent invocation, his hands stretched out to the abyss and beckoning to something that waited below.
At his back, a squat green-black idol loomed over the empty altar. Stickney recognized it for a twin of the weathered stone atop White Widow Mound. He understood just as quickly, why someone had defaced its features, to hide its true face.
The bloated body of a toad sprawled over the edges of the dais. Its shaggy head was that of a bat, with gnarled, veiny ears cocked as if to hear the merest whisper of its nauseous name. Great goggling eyes with heavy, drooping lids stared down at the degrading orgy with sardonic amusement, as if all the madness and atrocities were but a sweet, fleeting dream.
This was the unthinkable thing the reptilian race that reared Yoth had worshipped, until their blessed extinction; the sleeping deity whose dreams had led the people of K’n-Yan to madness; the abominable demon the blue-eyed Indian had brought to the reservation.
This had to be stopped. Inigo Hull had given his life trying to stop it, only to be shot in the back with his own gun by that scum Tobin Roherty…
There was no one else. He looked around for Major Cawthorne, but saw no one—
“Traitor!” the drawn-out, wounded cry came from just behind him. Stickney whirled around, the unfamiliar bulk of the .45 Colt slippery in his shaky hand, but the curved saber at his throat and the gun barrel in his back ran any fanciful dreams of action right out of his mind.
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