by Michael Shea
At the magnate's bed, I laid the plaque tenderly beside him, sprinkled some more drivel on it, and wrung his suety hand. Shamblor peered up at me like a fish through ice. While all this went on, I did the thing I'd come for. I let a rat pellet fall from my codpiece, and as I rose from the bed, much affected, I crushed the pellet with my heel.
I asked for the conveniences. Gladda blushed and directed me, remaining in the room. But out in the hall, I went no farther than the next bedroom door. This room was the only suitable place for lodging the sick man, once the other became unbearable, and the other room would become unbearable some time near midnight. I pulled some light, strong climbing cord from my doublet, anchored it to a window mullion, and let it fall outside. We had dyed it the color of the stone of Shamblor's walls. I reclosed the window but left it unlatched. I returned to the sickroom and took my wordy leave.
Our plan was loose and chancy. In such a big house, they might choose another room. Or the rats might come too soon, and Shamblor be moved before we could get ourselves into it.
Well, every big house, however fine, has plenty of rats in it, especially in damp waterside towns like Lurkna. But the staff was well paid and hard-driven by Gladda, and the bait was as slow as we'd hoped in bringing the invasion. Haldar and I climbed in just after dark. We chose our hiding place and lay listening till we had a good sense of how many servants were about, and what was the frequency of their movements.
As soon as activities appeared to be tapering off for the night, we stole out. Without trouble we slipped downstairs, got Defalk out of the mock tombstone, and brought him back to the bedroom. Once we were all settled on top of the canopy, there was time left for a half hour's sleep apiece. Then we brought Defalk round with a restorative herb. He must not suddenly awake in the midst of things. He had been prepared for his situation, but given no explanation of any kind. He knew only that we meant to ransom him, and that he would emerge unharmed, providing he did nothing, no matter how bizarre the circumstances he found himself in. So when he woke, he only glared at both of us, and said nothing. Haldar and I lay listening.
Sometime near midnight we heard the first hasty footsteps and shouts of disgust in the corridor. Soon after, we heard the skittering little feet of drug-maddened rats charging past. The rat-sounds got even thicker and never wavered, not even when several pairs of feet hammered up and down the hall. Ripe concussions, the squalls and coughs of slaughtered rats, reached us. The reaction was as we'd hoped. The passionate fixation of the rats on that one door alone was observed. Two wheezing grooms burst into our room with the sick man on his mattress between them, and the burly nurse like a harpy from hell on their heels. Rats, after all, are a groom's business.
Down the hall the storm raged, and would till the pellet faded. The apothecaries and the relatives quickly left the battle and cleanup to the servants and resettled in our chamber. Strong beverages were brought which, by the sound of it, none of the watchers refused. Conversation was attempted several times, but it did not thrive.
And thus we'd lain in our readiness for two hours and more, when I decided we'd have to take a hand in things. Shamblor had settled into a snore that sounded like restorative sleep. He'd gurgle now and then and some posset would be dribbled into him, and he would sleep on. It began to seem he'd rally again. I was not about to meet the Taker of Souls with my nerves worn and raw from a grueling wait. I reached across Defalk to warn Haldar with a touch, but before I'd moved farther, Gladda broke the long silence. Quietly she asked: "Do you suppose they came . . . for father?"
"No," said the nurse crisply. You felt, hearing them, that they'd forgotten everyone else. "They haven't followed him, have they? There's your answer," she concluded. There was a pause.
"So many of them. . . ." Gladda said.
Thus was a ploy pointed out to me. I eased a copper out of my breeches, the room's carpet being dark brown. I flipped it through the air so it struck the farthest wall. At the sound, the old cousin screeched and someone jumped up from her chair so fast it fell over backwards. The Druggists were made to inspect the other side of the room, and everyone else gathered at their backs. I sat up and flicked a pellet of poison at the goblet on the stand. It was as adept a move as I've ever brought off in a tight spot. It landed with a plurk in the posset—the noise raised more gasps, but no one could fix its source. They didn't find my copper either. They returned nervously to their positions. We had only to wait for the magnate to gurgle again.
Poisoning the cup made it all realer. The man would now die, sure and soon. Which meant the door to that world would open, sure and soon. None in the room but ourselves would see it open, and only we would see what entered. And roast me if I didn't nearly throw a fit then and there, Barnar. I was taken so fiercely with a shout of laughter that the canopy quivered with my holding it in.
It was Defalk, you see. The grimness of what stood now so near him, coupled with the ridiculousness of all he had just been through! How grotesque his puzzled theories must be, and how far off! I remembered the last thing I'd heard him say before we took him: I don't want to lose any time. Alas, Defalk! Haldar, at that very instant, was wheeling you to Eternity! I know you'll not think that because I laughed I did not pity him. Pity was half the reason of that laugh. I barely managed to wrestle it down—a bad omen, considering the bout I'd have to fight shortly.
The sick man wheezed, and there followed the sound of a dram administered. Hearing the sound was like having a key turned in the pit of the stomach, letting in dread. Haldar touched my shoulder to sign his readiness. We clasped hands over Defalk's chest, and Haldar began to whisper the spell. The breathing noise of the magnate suddenly grew spastic and harsh. The nurse said: "Your father! Look!" Her voice was crisp and alert, a sensuous tremor in it, as if the moment of passage were a physical pleasure to her. And I felt her voice as if it had slithered across me. My skin was unnaturally alive. I was feeling everyone in the room, as if they were moving through my nerves. I felt the quiver in the nurse's loins, and in Gladda's cry of "Father!" I felt the doubt mixed equally with hope. Everyone was gathering toward the bed murmuring. . . .
And then the room was absolutely soundless except for the dying man's breath. Nothing moved. So strong was the sense of the chamber's emptiness that I sat bolt-upright on the canopy, and got a bad shock to find everyone still there, frozen mute in postures of approach to the bed. Gladda faced us directly, but her face had stiffened in a look of heavenly appeal, and her eyes registered nothing. And then there was a sound outside the door. A progression of sounds. Footsteps.
Oddly, the steps seemed to scuff on stone, not carpet, and to echo in a cavern, not a corridor. The door of the chamber drifted open—inward, against the way it was hinged. A naked manlizard, six feet high and a yard wide, stalked in, shoulders swinging. Since it grasped a leather sack in one hand, it would be the Soul-taker, my opponent. I shuddered at the leverage in that cold, leathery frame. Its tail was short and massive, better than a third leg with its flexibility. The Taker would have tremendous stability in a tussle.
But when the Guide of Ghosts followed his servant into the room, I breathed a prayer of gratitude that it was only the henchman I had to fight. The Guide was a wild-haired barbarian. He had to stoop through the door—more than seven feet I'd put him. He wore a ragged and muddy kilt, and battle-sandals, also muddy, whose thongs wrapped his calves. He wore nothing else but a traveler's cape, under which his trunk bristled as hairy as an ape's. His eyes were black slots, his cheeks like glacier slopes, flat and cold. His mouth was a restless chasm deep in the brambles of his beard. All he carried was a staff, but its crook was a living serpent as thick as my arm.
The two of them stood looking up at us, pausing without surprise in their approach to the deathbed, waiting. I cleared my throat.
"Hail, Guide of Ghosts," I said. "We beg you to take us with you, alive, on your journey back down with the life of Shamblord Castertaster."
Slowly, the Guide said, "Come down." H
e had the voice to give those two words their ultimate expression. His tones seemed to fall endlessly—his speech echoed and fell away within him, and it drew you after it, into him. I jumped down onto legs that almost buckled under me, what with our long lying. Haldar handed Defalk down—he'd started to struggle when he heard our aim, and Haldar had stunned him with a blow to the neck. Haldar jumped down in his turn. We were in the midst of the watchers. Gladda still looked heavenward, the nurse hung poised nearest the bed like a hunting dog, the apothecaries exchanged an endless grave expression, the old couple wrung their hands, making paralyzed haste to their benefactor's side.
Alone among them, Shamblord was awake to us. His eyes moved with dismay from one to another of us, and real sweat shone on his face. He knew his moment, and was alive in it.
The giant stared at us; I believed I saw him smile, noting Defalk's bonds. As he stared, the serpent that sprouted from his staff leaned near us, and its tongue flickered with inquiry near my face. Its impudent obsidian eyes scanned us as a toad scans flies. Shamblord Castertaster spoke, it was the first time I had heard his voice. It was scratchy, and thin as a mosquito's whine: "What? Now?"
The Guide turned his eyeslots on the manlizard. He gestured at Shamblord. The Taker of Souls marched to the deathbed with its wrestler's waddle. It climbed onto the bed and crawled over the magnate's legs. Shamblord thrashed weakly amid his sheets. The lizard demon lowered its head and butted the sick man's belly—at least I thought it only butted. But in fact its blunt scaly snout, and then its whole head, sank right through the blanket. Then the whole damned squamous beast crawled through the belly-bulge of the old man, leather sack and all. For a moment it was gone. Shamblord gaped, and a bizarre, liquid convulsion moved through him. Then his face split asunder like a rent fig, and the bulky reptile poured out of the wound.
The Taker jumped off the bed where Shamblord now lay whole and untorn, but stone dead. The manlizard now held his leather bag down near the base, trapping something in a tiny bulge, while most of the sack hung slack. The Guide of Ghosts nodded at the sack. "Observe, mortals," he said. "He hardly had a spirit at all—just that little clot of ectoplasm. He'll hardly make a ripple when he's dumped in the sewers of the world beneath."
What could one reply? I bowed. "Great Guide, what is your answer? Will you bring us down to the place of the Raging Dead and bring us, or two of us at least, back again?"
"You must fight for passage," said the Guide. His words fell with a dire resonance into his emptiness. "One of you must wrestle my Taker of Souls to a standstill."
"I am prepared to do that, great one," I answered. "I would forgo it willingly, should you decide it was not really necessary."
"It is necessary," said the Guide.
V
It was indeed necessary to wrestle the Soul-taker without delay, because it handed its sack to the Guide—who grasped it in the same place—threw itself at my middle, and drove me to the floor.
It was like fighting a wave. The only way to survive the assault was to roll with the surge, to twist and scramble to stay out of its holds. Forget attacking! The thing had not only a third leg in its tail, but a third hand in its jaws. They were toothless, but bone-edged, and could crush muscle. Look here at my forearm—these two marks. The Taker made them. Yes, see the breadth of his bite? To this day I don't know how I got my other arm free to throat-punch the beast, for all the rest of me was writhing across the floor, one heartbeat ahead of a chest-lock that could have staved in my ribs like a rotten cask. I flattened its gullet and just as I freed my arm we piled up against the legs of Gladda. It was like colliding with stone-planted bronze. It knocked me half silly, but I got both hands up to one of her arms and hauled myself free of the manlizard, whose head had taken more of the impact of collision.
The thing shook off its daze in a blink, but I had time to find my feet and as it came curving round the statue-woman I threw a side kick to its chest. Full force mind you, with all my leg and all my weight behind it. The thing reeled back to its three-point stance. I hit my feet again and skipped back and fired another kick to its sex.
Now my target was problematical. Lizards' privates lie under one of many identical slat-like scales on their bellies. I chose the broadest slat and hoped for the best.
With my greater experience, I can now advise against this tactic with large reptiles or quasi-reptiles. The Taker rocked with the blow and then exploded forward, as if I'd fired it with new power. For an instant I thought I'd outwitted it when I leaned aside from its dive, and threw a neck-lock on it from behind with my arm. Then I was just holding on as the Taker stormed through the room, hammering the floor and walls and time-frozen people with my body.
I had such desperate work keeping my body tight against the crushing and the blows, that I had no strength to strangle it with, the best I could manage being to keep its head and jaws out of action against me. We crashed into the old woman—her abundant skirts were like cement—and careened from her to a great oaken wardrobe. The Taker rammed me into it dead on to break my hold on its throat. We smashed right through and into the wardrobe—through an inch of solid oak! Wait. Look here on the back of my shoulder where I took the blow. That's where it cut me as it broke.
And then it was like fighting underwater, drowning and blinded in the heavy coats and cloaks. The Taker worked its head halfway around and its jaws gaped right under my face. I thought I would suffocate in its swampy breath. Meanwhile it had twisted up the length of its body and was pounding at my head with its tail. It had me pinned in the box, and could well hope to pound me senseless, given time. I was forced to keep one arm up to protect my head, and my shoulder was being beaten numb.
Then, the next time his tail came up, I grabbed it with my blocking-hand and shoved it down the Soul-taker's own gaping throat. That freed my hands for an instant, which I used to get a double strangle-grip of its throat, locking its tail in its gullet. Its body was bent in a hoop around me, now, and I kept it pinned with my weight.
If the Taker had a weak point, it was its hands. They were as big as a man's, but only three-fingered, and had the scaly delicacy of a reptile's. Plucking a soul off its rack of meat takes dexterity and finesse, I suppose. The Taker couldn't break my grip on its throat, and in its extremity for air, it at last lay still, conceding the match.
I staggered back to the Guide. My opponent got up swiftly and moved to a position by the door, showing no slightest sign of fatigue or pain. He could have fought again, at this instant, I realized, and annihilated me in a moment. The Guide said to me: "It is Dalissem, the temple child of Lurkna Downs, who has called you."
Haldar and I assented. Defalk stared at the Guide fixedly, but without shock. Surely he had guessed who had sent for him. One could not be as close to such a woman as he had been, and come away without a feeling of her power to work her will.
"Come then, mortals," the Guide said. "We will seek her soul." He handed the leather sack to the manlizard. The servant preceded the giant out the door. The three of us followed, after slashing Defalk's ankle-bonds. The wardrobe, I saw, stood whole and undamaged. The people, it seemed, began to soften, and to stir. We stepped out the door, and into a spacious gloom. The torch-lit corridor was gone. We'd entered a vast, rawly stinking sewer.
It was arch-vaulted, hundreds of yards across, and its only light was a kind of glow from the scummy river that filled it wall to wall. We were on a rickety wooden staircase that led down to a tiny pier. There was a raft of tarred logs moored at the pier.
The Taker and the Guide stepped onto the raft. We forced Defalk after, and got on ourselves. The Guide said:
"You may unbind your captive. You are within the realm of Death. If any of you leave my protection, you are forefeit unto Death, forever."
We freed Defalk's wrists. Up at the head of the stairs the ornately carved bedroom door of Shamblord Castertaster swung shut and, with the stairs, vanished from the muddy sewer wall. Our raft was afloat, riding the hideous flood. The
lizardman had taken up a pole and was pushing us out to center stream.
Those waters teemed, Barnar. They glowed, patchily, with a rotten orange light, and in those swirls of light you could see them by the score: little bug-faced ectoplasms that lifted wet, blind eyes against the gloom, and twiddled their feelers imploringly; and others like tattered snakes of leper's-flesh with single human eyes and lamprey mouths. And there were bigger things too, much bigger, which swam oily curves through the light-blotched soup. One of these lifted a complete human head from the waters on a neck like a polyp's stalk. It drooled and worked its mouth furiously, but could only babble at us. All these things feared the raft, but you could feel the boil and squirm of their thousands, right through your feet. The heavy logs of the raft seemed as taut and ticklish as a drumskin to the movement of the dead below.
The Guide said: "Defalk. This is a journey you should have taken in another form, and long ago."
"You know our companion then, Great One?" I asked. Defalk looked away from the Guide and said nothing.
"Whose name do I not know, northron Nifft? I learn every living being's name as it is given. When the mother first speaks her infant's name, she's whispering it in my ear too. She is saying, though she does not know it, `Here, O Guide, is my Defalk, another job for you someday.' " The giant chuckled gently. There was silence for a while. The stink of the place was so entire and all-enveloping I found I could ignore it—like a waterfall's roar when you're near it long enough. It seemed to me that the current of the turgid flood was moving a bit faster.
