“I need do nothing. Doom cracks even as we speak.”
[Then go.]
He averted his eyes from the thing in the pit, walked a few steps away, bent over, and vomited.
Not much came up. Swallowing bile, he walked off, wishing for a drink of water. But such a ware fetched a high price in the very pit of Hell.
* * *
The world shook as he searched for his sister. Demon carcasses littered his path, victims of the holocaust weapon’s first effects.
He found her in a laboratorylike room on one of the upper levels. What he saw staggered him, and the bile again rose in his throat.
There was no describing the monstrous device of which she was the central concern. Rods, probes, drills, blades — wicked implements of every sort bit deep into her flesh. Every accessible nerve point was tapped, every orifice violated. Little remained of her skin, and much of her body had been subject to hideous mutilations.
Her heart still beat, yet he could do nothing for her. Quickly he cast the only enchantment that would help.
Her eyes were open, for the lids were gone, torn away. But now she saw.
“Incarnadine,” she croaked, her swollen lips trying to smile. “Inky dearest.”
“Ferne. Are you still in pain?”
“No, Inky. It’s marvelous. I feel nothing now. I want to go home.”
“In a moment. Just say yes or no to my questions. You somehow got away from the guards who conducted you to your exile. You spelled them and fooled them into thinking that they had thrust you through a wild aspect. True?”
“Yes.”
“You cast about for a plan. In a moment of wildest desperation, you decided to throw in your lot with the Hosts.”
“Very bad mistake, Inky. I was … a fool.”
“Don’t talk,” he said. “Save your strength. Now, listen. You didn’t do what you did last time, unravel the spell that blocked their portal. Instead, you simply unhooked it temporarily and passed through. I don’t know how you did it, but you did it.”
She nodded.
“Again, you amaze me, sister. But then you were at the mercy of the Hosts. You tried bargaining with them, but they had the upper hand. They had you. You outlined a plan to attack the castle, taught them how to transfer power between universes. But there had to be someone on the other side to use that power. A confederate within the castle. An adept magician who could use that power selectively and wisely within castle walls.”
“Yes. J —” She struggled to utter the name. “Jamin.”
“And someone else. Something else. A warrior demon who had stayed in hiding when we chased the Hosts from the castle?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Insurance against Jamin’s possible double cross. So, the Hosts had a plan, and now the machinery for a covert operation. The plan was first to rid the castle of powerful magicians, starting with the more talented of the Guests. This tactic was high on the list, I imagine, because the Guests had proved such a thorn during the last round of hostilities.”
“Yes.”
“But there was one catch. Feeding power through the interdimensional barrier drained the Hosts of their reserves. They needed another source of power, and you knew of one. This was their way of persuading you to divulge it.”
“Yes, and I told them. I told them everything, Inky, all my tricks. But they didn’t stop, they didn’t stop….” She trailed off into a moan.
“Easy, easy.” He made motions again, then waited for her respiration to stabilize. “Are you all right now?”
“Yes, Inky.”
“Fine. You’re going to go to sleep in a moment. When you wake up, you’ll be home.”
“I’m dying, Inky. I know it.”
He was silent.
“Inky?”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Did you love me?”
“Of course, dear sister.”
“You know what I mean. We once kissed like lovers, and we weren’t exactly children. We were in our early teens. Do you remember it?”
He looked away.
“You do. You’re ashamed. You did love me, I always knew it. But we never made love. We should have. To hell with convention, Inky.”
“Ferne, my darling sister Ferne.”
“Don’t cry, Inky. I knew what I was doing. We all do what we must. We all have our —”
Sudden, violent convulsions racked her. Then the light in her eyes faded, and her chest heaved once and was still.
Extricating her body from the diabolical machine was a consummately grisly task. Parts of her came away with the blades, the screws, the drill bits; gobbets of flesh crumbled off. But at last she was free. He could not recognize the body of his sister, who had been the most beautiful woman he had known.
He materialized a casket to contain her remains, and conjured two pale figures — indistinct, squat, and homuncular — to bear her away.
They reached the roof, where the Voyager still waited, undisturbed.
The sky was no longer black. Streamers of pale green fire banded it, forming a circular storm system whose calm central eye was contracting rapidly as the chaos closed in. He stopped to regard this phenomenon as the pallbearers loaded the casket into the Umoi machine.
He heard a roar like thunder, turned, and watched pieces of the dark tower fall and crash to earth. The roof under him wobbled, and he thought he had better be off. He dismissed the bearers, and they disappeared. Then he boarded the craft.
He watched from on high as the black spire disintegrated and the surrounding complex of hives turned to dust. The ground disappeared, shrouded in fingers of green mist that choked and throttled the life out of the land.
Some time later, there was nothing below but a vast gray wasteland, featureless and undifferentiated.
He threw a switch and even that was gone, replaced by the nothingness of no place, of nowhere.
Nowhere at all.
Thirty-nine
Chamberlain’s Quarters
Gene had once fought a demon of the Hosts successfully, but only with magical help. Now he was holding his own without aid, after having survived the fiend’s initial attack. Either Gene’s skills had increased or the demon was operating on low power. Gene was persuaded by the latter theory. The way he understood it, these warrior demons were really analogous to robots, needing energy from the home universe.
Gene swung mightily, sparks flying as his sword met the demon’s. He backed his opponent into a corner and probed for an opening that would allow a killing blow.
But the demon had some juice left in him. It attacked with renewed vigor, and Gene had to back off.
Then, very suddenly, something changed. The demon halted and lowered its sword. The hideous head twisted to and fro, glowing eyes searching about for things unseen.
“Something is happening,” it said.
Its sword clattered to the floor.
“Vasagaroth!”
Jamin came out from behind a stuffed chair and rushed to the side of his diabolical ally. “Vasagaroth, you can’t stop now. You must kill him. You must kill them all, or I am doomed!”
Vasagaroth turned withering eyes on him. “It is the end.”
“Don’t say that! What is amiss?”
The demon teetered backward to the wall and leaned against it, the sweaty red luminosity of its body on the wane.
Jamin whirled about, eyes desperate, pleading. “I give myself up! Linda, you must intercede for me with His Majesty. I was possessed by the minions of Hell! I knew not what I was about! They in —”
The words choked off, for Vasagaroth’s immense taloned hand, the right, had locked about Jamin’s neck. The other enveloped his head. Both squeezed. Jamin’s feet lifted a few inches off the floor. He kicked wildly, his body spasming.
Linda yelled, “Gene, do something!”
Gene could do nothing. Jamin’s strangled gasp ended abruptly, blood spurting from between the demon’s fingers.
Linda screamed
.
Then Jamin and his murderer keeled over together and lay still on the bloodied oaken boards.
Gene kicked at the demon’s body. It had lost its luminescence and was curiously insubstantial, as if having instantly turned to papier-mâché. He examined Jamin briefly.
“They’re both history,” Gene told an ashen-faced Linda.
“My God. What happened?”
“Have no idea. There’s nothing we can do here. Back to the lab.”
They left and shut the door.
The Voyager had returned.
Incarnadine stood on the platform, watching two Guardsmen carry away what looked like a coffin.
Gene mounted the stairs to the platform, made as if to say something, but held off. Incarnadine’s thoughts seemed light-years away. Gene stood by silently.
Finally the King grew aware of his presence.
“My sister,” he said. “She is dead.”
“You have our deepest sympathies, Your Majesty,” Gene said, bowing.
“Thank you.” Incarnadine collected himself and looked the lab over. “Hell of a mess. Are you people all right?”
“Fine, sir,” Linda said. “Jamin is dead. His demon friend did him in.”
Incarnadine nodded as if such an event were implicit in the scheme of things. “And so it ends.” He frowned. “But you have friends still missing.”
“Yes, sir,” Gene said. “Snowclaw, Sheila, and, we think, your brother.”
“Trent, yes. I have a feeling, which I will corroborate shortly, that my brother is fine, and that Sheila is with him. We’d best concern ourselves with your friend the Hyperborean.”
Gene said, “Beg your pardon? Is that what he is?”
“Hyperborea happens to be the name of the world he comes from.”
“Oh. He never told me.”
“It’s castle nomenclature only. I have no idea what the aboriginals call their world. Actually —” Incarnadine interrupted himself and gave a laugh. “Here I am babbling. Gene, how the hell did you contrive to get yourself inside this contraption at the exact moment when I plucked it out of the great gossamer nothingness of the Never-Never? You must have one hell of a story.”
Gene let out a long breath. “It’s a novel. You’ll all get a copy, hot off the press. But for now, I’d like to see about finding Snowy. Linda tells me he was with Trent and Sheila when they disappeared.”
“He might have gone his separate way. I did manage to establish partial contact with Trent, and I got the impression that Sheila was with him, whereas Snowclaw was not.”
“Hell, that means he could be anywhere.”
Linda said, “He could be on Earth.”
Gene smacked his forehead. “He’ll be on the evening news!”
“Sheila changed him, Gene. He had a human form.”
“Really? Well, that would help, of course. But Snowy? Running loose in Long Island? Ye gods.”
“Your Majesty!”
They turned to see Osmirik come running into the lab.
“I have the spell!” he yelled. “I have it! All I need is the young man with the calculating device —”
Jeremy looked up from rooting through the wreckage of the mainframe. “Over here, Ozzie.”
But Osmirik had stopped in his tracks at the sight of Gene.
“I see that Sir Gene has returned,” he said, “and I am uselessly tardy once again.”
Incarnadine said, “Not necessarily, old fellow. What spell are you talking about?”
The librarian held up a battered grimoire. “The Earth locator spell. I found one that might work, with a bit of updating and the use of that young man’s …” He became suddenly cognizant of the general destruction around him. “Oh, dear.”
Then he was struck by the sight of the tall, nude woman standing next to Gene. Her beauty took his breath away.
“My word,” he said. “I do have to get away from the library more often.”
Forty
Westmoreland County, PA.
Dawn was breaking and Snowclaw was tired. He had been hiking all night, and his feet were sore from treading on sharp twigs and hidden stones. Rough country around here, not like the clean, bare tundra he was used to. There was so much vegetation about. Positively tropical. Why, it even got above freezing in the winter!
He was homesick, and not only for the castle. He wanted six or seven layers of good packed snow under him, and a fathom of permafrost below that. Made your feet feel nice and cool.
He strode along the narrow trail he had been following for the last hour. Lots of game about. He had seen white-tailed critters bounding away, and tiny things had chittered at him, hiding among stalks of brown weeds. Nothing he could eat, even if he had taken the trouble to chase them down. Besides, he didn’t like land game. Seafood was his first love. Spikefish, fried in rendered blubber. Four-clawed crab, boiled and served with clarified blubber. Plain blubber in tasty, glistening chunks, served up fresh. Now you were talking food.
Great White Stuff, was he hungry! He had to stop thinking about it or he would go crazy.
He tried not thinking about it.
Nah. Didn’t work. He was hungry, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He was outdoors, that’s what the problem was. The air was sweet, fresh, if a little strange. But during his stay on Earth he had grown used to the native environment. The smell of the forest set his juices to flowing, and all he could think about was stuffing his maw with endless quantities of …
Food. He licked his chops. He was really losing it now. If he didn’t get food soon … well, there was no telling what he’d do.
He swiped at a tree and came away with his claws full of bark. He sampled that, spat it out. Too dry. He tried some weeds. Not bad, but like eating air.
There was nothing around to eat! But what did he expect? It was winter. He tore off a fresh branch and gnawed at it, spitting out the bark and biting into the fresh green wood underneath.
No taste. No taste at all. Nothing in this world had any taste.
He howled once, then came to a halt, astonished at himself.
“I’m going crazy,” he muttered.
He stalked on, increasing his pace. The trail bore downhill, then leveled off. A narrow brook crossed his path, which he took in one hop. The trail went up again, crested, then twined down the side of a steep hill.
There was a structure sitting on the gentle slope of the field below. A human dwelling.
He approached, hiding behind an outbuilding. Peering around a corner, he checked the place out. It was quiet. The house was dark. Fine. He went to the back door and tried it. It was a sturdy door, locked good and tight, but the carpenters had never figured on a seven-foot-tall quasi-ursine alien with the strength of ten gorillas.
Snowy pushed hard, and the dead bolt tore out of its slot, ripping the doorjamb.
“Oops,” Snowy said. He felt guilty about this. He respected private property. After all, he wouldn’t take to someone breaking into his own shack out on the ice, humble as it was. But Snowy really didn’t have a choice.
He found himself in a dark basement. He knew there was a light somewhere, but couldn’t find it. His eyes adjusted to the dark quickly, though, and the first thing he saw was a possible food substance.
Whatever it was, it was packed into glass jars lined up on wooden shelves. He looked at the stuff. It was red. He unscrewed the top off one jar and stuck his finger in, licked it. Tangy, not bad. He upended the jar into his mouth.
Not bad at all. It was what they called tomatoes. He had eaten them in salads and other things. Salads! Now, talk about eating air. How could humans live off a bunch of leaves? Nothing to it.
He unscrewed another jar, then tossed it disdainfully over his shoulder. Nothing to this stuff, either.
There were other foodstuffs available. Metal cans of junk. Forget that. Other things, hanging from the overhead beams. Meat! Spiced meat, too. Sausage, it looked like. And a big hank of raw rump, cured with salt and having a
smoky flavor. Hey, this was more like it. Idly munching a haunch of ham, he went up the creaking wooden stairs.
His appetite was getting stronger, despite an overpowering human smell to the place that ordinarily would have put him off his food. Enticing smells turned him to the right, toward the kitchen.
He rifled the cabinets, finding dry and dusty cereals, more cans, spices, packages of unidentifiable whatever, still more cans, more boxes of dry and dusty stuff….
The refrigerator held leftovers that hadn’t been good ideas in the first place, along with ice cubes, three trays of which he crunched up with relish. There were various liquids to drink. He glugged those. There was fruit and some greens. Ptui.
He searched the rest of the house, but came up empty. Going back to the kitchen, he looked under the kitchen sink. Here was some hooch — drain cleaner, liquid soap, furniture polish, and suchlike. He popped the lid off a bottle of Lysol and guzzled it down.
Mmm, pine-flavored. But he needed FOOD.
All right, he was desperate. If quality wasn’t available, quantity would have to do. He stumped back down to the cellar, rummaged, and fetched up a huge plastic tub. This he filled with everything at hand. In went Jell-O Pudding, corn oil, Nestle’s Quik, Spic ‘n’ Span, Hungry Jack pancake and waffle mix, California seedless raisins, cornstarch, sugar, flour, Rice Krispies, Quaker Puffed Wheat, Corn Chex, ammonia, vinegar, salad dressing, Crisco, bread crumbs, Log Cabin syrup, Karo syrup, molasses, baking powder, milk, Pepsi-Cola, Kool-Aid, mustard, ketchup, floor wax, a half gallon of milk, lemonade, orange juice….
And on and on and on, everything going into one ghastly, heterogeneous concoction. For savor he threw in everything in the spice cabinet, from turmeric to fennel, from paprika to cream of tartar, along with two canisters of salt and a big box of ground pepper.
He thought of cooking down this horror, but who was he kidding? He couldn’t wait. He dipped the gnawed ham bone into the stuff and sampled it.
Not bad. He searched for an eating implement, found a big soup ladle.
He ate it all.
Snowclaw was exceedingly ill. He had wanted to get up on the roof and scout the countryside, get his bearings, but he had not made it farther than this small bed, on which he had fallen asleep. Now he was awake, and it was night again, and he was sick. Very sick.
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