by Hugh Cook
34
Name: Jon Arabin, alias the Warwolf.
Occupation: pirate captain and ambassador from Lord Menator of the Greater Teeth to Ohio of Ork.
Status: full-time survivor and leader of men, now responsible for the welfare of his old enemy Slagger Mulps (the Walrus) plus young Drake (known to the all-conquering faith of Goudanism as 'Demon-son Dreldragon'); Sully Yot; Whale Mike; Bucks Cat; Ika Thole; Rolf Thelemite; Simp Fiche; Salaman Meerkat; Ish Ulpin; Jon Disaster; and Peg Suzilman.
Description: lean, bald, black, beardless man with eyes of pale sky; currently looking much, much older than his years (and those are many enough).
Running from the flames, the thirteen survivors fled north. They had gone but two hundred paces when Jon Arabin called them to a halt:
'Stop!' he yelled. 'The flames aren't chasing us!'
Panting, sweating, gasping, his men halted, and looked back. The flames had raged to the nearer wall of blue crystal then halted. But they showed no sign of dying down.
'We can't go south,' said Drake. 'Not yet, my son,' said Arabin. 'But no fire can burn forever.'
'This one can,' said Sully Yot. 'For it was started by the Flame of all Flames. Gouda Muck is angry with us.'
'Is he?' said Peg Suzilman. 'And who the hell would he be?'
'He is of no hell, but of a transcendental heaven which suffers no wind or rain, but music only. If you wish to know more of his—'
'What is this bullshit?' said Ish Ulpin. 'More religion crap?'
'We not talk gods,' said Whale Mike, leaning on his titanium battle-rod. 'We be happy friends.'
But Yot, taking no heed, declared:
'It's not bullshit! It's truth! Revealed truth! Drake will tell you!'
Drake, at that moment, would gladly have paid good money for the privilege of strangling Yot. 'What say you, Drake?' asked Ish Ulpin. 'I say—' said Drake.
But did not say, for Meerkat, who had kept an eye on the forest to the north, yelled out: 'Ware! Slugs!'
They turned as one to see several gigantic yellow slugs cruising slowly toward them. The slugs held the north. East was the river, haunted by bone-chewing terror. South lay fire. Simp Fiche led the retreat, scuttling away to the west.
'Hold!' shouted Arabin. 'No running, or we're dead men by dusk!'
But most of his men sprinted regardless.
'Bugger you then,' muttered Arabin, and, abandoning his efforts to bring the fools to heel, plodded on stolidly. With him went Whale Mike - who was not built for sprinting - and the swordsmen Drake Douay, Rolf Thelemite, Ish Ulpin, Ika Thole and Jon Disaster, their wits steadied by the possession of sharpened bronze.
After a half-league march, they caught up with the others, who had gathered in a boggy clearing between two sky-threatening buildings which hoisted great shiploads of forest-creepers toward the clouds. The runaways were sitting on a marble plinth which supported a steel archway.
Arabin strode into the slade, boots going quelch-squelch-quelch as they crushed stranded leaves into the mud, and shattered the surface of cloud-reflecting puddles.
'How do you feel, boys?' asked Arabin.
Sully Yot looked up and answered for all of them:
'Knackered.'
'Aye, and that's not running far,' said Arabin. 'Is it? Slow and steady, that's the thing. We can outwalk these monsters easy enough, once we start thinking. Pull off your boots. Check your feet as our good friend Rolf has taught us to.'
With that, Arabin sought and was granted buttock-space on the plinth. All thirteen of them managed to squeeze onto the plinth, which was a good size larger than the stainless steel monument it supported (an arch just as wide as a man's outstretched arms).
Drake watched Slagger Mulps remove his boots then massage his feet. A sorry sight they were, too: a mess of corns and bunions, blisters, water-rot, and painfully raw patches of skin where tinea had got a grip. Mulps squidged a large blister with his index finger, disturbing yellowish fluid within.
Drake found his own feet almost as bad. Cold. Sore. Soft and pallid. And blistered. Whatever protected him these days against illness, it could not protect his feet.
'Yot!' said Arabin. 'Get your boots off!'
'Yes,' said Rolf Thelemite. 'Remember: no feet, no soldier.'
'I'll do it later,' said Yot tetchily. 'I'm thirsty.'
So saying, he went down on his hands and knees to drink from a puddle. Bucks Cat stamped down hard and sudden, sending mud and water flying into Yot's face.
'Hey!'cried Yot.
'Belay that!' roared Arabin.
'Aye,' said Mulps, backing him up. 'Or there'll be more than one of us after your liver.' Cat, sulking, walked away. Nobody made any effort to stop him. At the edge of the clearing, he turned, then spat. Then was lost to sight, heading to the west, the sole remaining direction of safety.
Drake did what he could for his socks, which was little. He kneaded his feet. Every day, they were less like flesh and more like dough. He kissed his boots for luck, then put them back on. Then sat, thinking nostalgically about good times long since past - like the roast-meat banquet he'd enjoyed two nights before.
Between his legs, in the face of the marble plinth, was a round gilded hole big enough to have swallowed both his fists. Idly, he tried to pry off the gold, first with a fingernail then with the point of his bronze sword. He loosened no lucre, and concluded that the gold was colour rather than metal.
Disappointed, he stabbed at the ground with his bronze sword. At first, he had delighted in his choice of weapon rather than wealth when everyone scrambled for loot - after all, he had gambling gold waiting for him back at the Teeth. But now he thought it was not really fair that the others should have all the goldwork, some of which was highly wrought and obviously very, very valuable.
Perhaps this was the time to say something about it, before they got going again.
So thinking, Drake stabbed the ground again, harder this time, a bit of anger in the blow. And the point of his sword hit something. He poked it, then, idling at it as he might have idled at a scab on his arm, urged it from the earth. A globe of glass, if he was any judge. A paperweight, perhaps. He'd seen such sitting on the Examiners' desk when he went before the Board during his apprentice years, to suffer a viva voce examination on the Inner Principles of the Old Science.
He picked up the paperweight. Rubbed away the dirt. Glass? Crystal, maybe. Very pretty. A fist-sized transparent ball as big as his fist. Green, like the monstrous phalli they had seen standing on the banks of the river. Tiny lights of all colours gleamed within, hanging motionless like the souls of fireflies. Or like stars.
'A globe of stars,' murmured Drake. 'A star-globe.'
He remembered the astrolabe the alchemist Villet Vate had once shown him. Maybe this star-globe was a fancy kind of astrolabe. Old, rare and precious.
'What have you got there?' said Meerkat, making a grab fork.
'Something that's mine,' said Drake, snatching it away.
For safe keeping for the moment, Drake shoved his green star-globe into the gold-coloured hole between his legs.
The air filled with an ominous hum, waking memories of the sky-splitting disaster which had followed the destruction of the flying island-ship in the North Strait. Men scattered in all directions.
'Sha!' shouted Meerkat. And:
'Help!'cried Yot. And:
'Ahyak Rovac!' screamed Rolf Thelemite, bringing his sword around in a sweep that almost took off Drake's head by accident.
Drake turned and saw the steel archway mounted on the marble plinth had filled with a sheet of loudly humming silver. Guessing which Cause had led to this Effect, he scrambled the star-globe out of the golden cup.
The silver sheet filling the archway vanished. The hum died away to nothing. Those with swords slowly lowered them from the ready.
'What have you got there?' asked Jon Arabin.
Silently, Drake offered up the star-globe. Arabin turned it over in his hands, then, face se
t in decision, put it into the golden cup again. One moment they could see through the arch to the mud, puddles and trees beyond. The next moment, the silver gleamed to life, perfect, humming and opaque.
'This is a Door,' said Rolf Thelemite, decisively. 'Not that I've ever seen one, but I'm sure enough from the descriptions.'
'A Door?' said Whale Mike slowly. 'Him look no door to me.'
'Not an ordinary door,' said Thelemite. 'This Door goes a long, long way. To some place off the horizon, like as not.'
'Aye,' said Ika Thole, 'and what place might that be? The horse devil's stable or the love god's twat?'
'Death if it's anything,' said Peg Suzilman. 'Like all the other weirdness here.'
'No,' insisted Thelemite. 'It's a Door, a one-step roadway to Elsewhere.'
'Aye,' said Jon Arabin, slowly. 'I've heard of such.'
'So have I,' said Ish Ulpin. 'In Chi'ash-lan there were rumours. The Door takes you round in a circle, one place to another. A globe set in any arch of the circle opens the circle complete.'
'Let's go through then,' said Slagger Mulps. 'It can't be worse than here.'
'Sure it. can't,' said Arabin. 'Go right ahead, Mulps me darling. Chance the circle then tell us your wounds.'
Suddenly, a rock hurtled through the Door, hit Yot in the face and sent him sprawling. It was followed by a human foot. Drake hastily scooped the star-globe out of its golden cup.
'Aye,' said Arabin, taking it from him. 'Thatwasamove smart enough. Stones first, then maybe spears afterwards.'
Meerkat picked up the foot. It was pale, bloodless and slightly wrinkled, as if it had been out in the rain for a while. He sniffed it. The meat smelt all right. The wide spacing of the toes suggested the owner had gone barefoot for a lifetime.
'I see,' said Ika Thole, as Meerkat pondered the foot and Yot fingered his rock-grazes tenderly. 'If we go through this Door, we get to a place where they've plenty of rocks and fresh-chopped feet to spare.'
'Eventually,' said Arabin. 'But we go other places first.'
'How so?'said Thole.
'It's a circle, man,' said Thelemite.
'I don't understand either,' said Drake.
'Say we open that Door,' said Thelemite. 'Say you stick your head and shoulders through. Your feet will be here and your head Elsewhere. Fine. You can grab hold of anything you fancy Elsewhere, then pull your head back in. But if you go right through the Door, leaving no part of yourself on this side - why, then you're in Elsewhere entirely. Then if you go through the Door again, you find yourself in yet another Elsewhere. And so on, right round in a circle, until you come back to where you started.'
'How many Elsewheres in a circle?' asked Drake.
'It varies,' said Thelemite. 'But the place with rocks and feet is the last place on this circle. If some rock-throwing foot-chopper poked his head through the Door from his place to here, then we couldn't use the Door to go anywhere until we'd pushed him back where he came from or pulled him through entirely.'
'If,' said Drake, 'if some foot-chopper grabbed one of us then pulled him back to where—'
'Let's not start making ourselves nightmares,' said Arabin. 'Let's think where this Door might go. Rolf? Any ideas?'
'The first place this Door goes to,' said Rolf Thelemite. 'It could be . . . why, Chi'ash-lan, or Stokos or—'
'Not Stokos,' said Drake. 'We've got nothing like this on the island.'
'Maybe not,' said Thelemite. 'But other places surely do.'
Whale Mike took the foot from Meerkat.
'Him who threw this,' said Whale Mike, gesturing with it. 'We open Door, they jump through easily as throw through, that so?'
'Mike's got his head on, aye, that's for sure,' said Arabin. 'By opening this Door, we open every Door in the circle. Then everyone can move, friendly or otherwise.'
'But we're up against monsters as it is,' said Simp Fiche, in something like panic. 'Giant slugs! Man eaters! Why, they could be on us any moment!'
'Aye,' said Arabin, not concealing his contempt. 'Then we get up and walk away. Man, what kind of monster is a slug, however big? I'd rather face fifty thousand of them single-handed than try tackle one of the Neversh with fifty men at me back.'
'Whatever we decide,' said Salaman Meerkat, 'let's decide soon. I see something to east of us. One of our slow-slime monsters, by the looks.'
Arabin got to his feet.
'Men,' said Arabin, 'we'll west a bit. Likely we can escape to safety. I never heard any whisper of slugs when I was in Lorp, and that was for a long time, and recently. So they don't range over all of Penvash - probably no distance from here at all. And if we can't escape, why, we circle back, slip between them - man, they don't run faster than vomit crawls - then try our Door.'
At that moment, there was a smashing-crashing of vegetation in the forest to west of them, west being the direction of safety. Into the clearing ran Bucks Cat, gasping in panic and horror.
'Monsters!' shouted Cat.
He had tampered with a cause-and-effect panel in a ruinous building, inadvertently releasing a horde of monsters from imprisonment within a stasis-field.
The monsters charged into the clearing after Bucks Cat. They were trampling creatures built higher than a horse, with great big spikes projecting from flaring armour round their necks, and huge claws on their elephant-grey feet. Feet which kicked up showers of mud.
'The Door!' shouted Arabin.
He slammed the star-globe into the golden cup. He scooped up Sully Yot and threw him bodily through the Door as it gleamed to life. Drake leaped onto the plinth, hesitated - then Arabin booted him in the arse, and he tumbled through. Simp Fiche went rabbiting after him, through the silver screen to Elsewhere.
Then a muscular warrior leaped out of the screen. He was armed with a spiked club. He was as pale as Ish Ulpin, as blond as Drake. Wore leather breeches ending just below the knee, and a thick sheepskin jacket. He was outnumbered, but struck out bravely with his club, but— Whale Mike grabbed both club and warrior, then threw both hard and far, so they crashed to earth in front of the monsters which were gaining on Bucks Cat. The warrior fell heavily, got to his knees - and was gored by a monster.
Other monsters crashed into the lucky one, fighting for a portion of the meat. Meanwhile, the men escaped. For Whale Mike, it was a squeeze - his shoulders, after all, were as wide as the Door - but he got himself through.
Bucks Cat scrambled onto the plinth, panting.
'In!' said Arabin.
And pushed him through the Door without bothering to make explanations. By the time the monsters had settled their disagreement over a dead foreign warrior, only Jon Arabin was left in the clearing.
Another warrior jumped through from the Place at the End of the Circle, wherever that might be. He looked around in astonishment. This warrior carried a sword.
'Enjoy paradise,' said Jon Arabin, booting the man in the crutch.
The man went down. Jon Arabin chopped him on the neck, seized his sword, then jumped through the Door himself.
35
Door, portal forming part of one of the Prompt Physical Communication Webs built during the Technic Renaissance and thereafter largely disused (though the Partnership Banks command a web secretly linking organizations as widely scattered as the Morgrim Bank of Chi'ash-lan, the Orsay Bank of Stokos, the Safrak Bank of the Safrak Islands, and the Singing Dove Pensions Trust of Tang).
Jon Arabin sprang through the Door. He saw fire, and smelt smoke. Breathed smoke, too. Coughed. The fighting thirteen were standing in tinder-dry eucalyptus forest through which wildfire was spreading like - well, frankly, like wildfire.
'Knobs of gods and bollocks of bulls!' quoth Slagger Mulps. 'Out of the dragon's pantry and into his oven!' 'I think—' began Sully Yot.
Then he too coughed because of the smoke, and, if he continued to think, did not pronounce on the fact.
'Move your arses,' said Jon Arabin, jabbing his newfound sword in the direction of the Door. 'Into it!'
>
'But we don't want to go back there!' protested Simp Fiche.
'Haven't you got it into your head yet?' said Arabin. 'The Door goes round in a circle!'
'Then let's get on with it,' growled Ish Ulpin, jumping back onto the marble plinth. He collided with a foreign warrior who was exiting from the Door. 'Bloody bad
manners,' said Ish Ulpin, swatting the foreigner and breaking his jaw.
Then he went through the Door.
Drake jumped onto the plinth. A grey monster with an armoured frill round its neck almost gored him as it thrust its horned head through. He plunged his sword deep into its eye, withdrew the weapon as the monster backtracked—
Hesitated—
Then fell through the Door as Arabin booted him again.
Drake hit the ground rolling, came to his feet with a fighting scream, and danced round with blade in hand, menacing each direction in turn.
'Nobody here, man, but us ship rats,' said Ish Ulpin, as Meerkat came through the Door.
As the others joined them, Drake took stock of his situation. They were on a small, flat, sandy cay in the middle of a flat, glittering ocean. At the far end of the cay, some fifty paces distant, was a rowing boat turned on its side. A man rose from its shadows and strode toward them.
'Who be he?' asked Whale Mike.
'How the hell would I know?' said Jon Arabin, irritated.
The man closed with them, halting at twice sword-blade distance. He was a big, burly brute, a man of middle years with high cheekbones, dark eyes, big jug-handle ears, and a large nose with wide-flared nostrils.
'Who you be?' asked Whale Mike.
'Who asks?' said the stranger, putting his hand to the hilt of his sword.
At that moment, a Penvash monster burst through the Door. Roaring it came, scraping its great armour-plated body through the steel arch. It started scrambling off the plinth, tripped, rolled, fell on its back, lay for a moment with belly exposed and the brutal stumps of its four claw-equipped legs kicking in the air—
Then kicked no more, for seven men had sunk swords into the softness of its belly.
'Kalman-chay,' said the stranger softly, using an expression unknown to the Galish Trading Tongue as he withdrew his bloody blade. 'Blood and water! What is it?'
