by Michael Shea
It did truly ravish the senses, and so it was only belatedly you felt the horror of the enclosure of so huge a sea. For though the light that broke through the clouds might suggest earthly sunset colors, it was quickly recognizable as a demonic imitation—more garish less subtly shaded than the dying sun's true radiance. Such subearthly luminosity, in varying hues, had been our sky for weeks now—never a real sky, of course, never a transparent revelation of endless space, but always a kind of bright paint masking the universal ceiling of stone imprisoning this world. Now a true ocean is the sky's open floor—that's the feeling men love in it, the reason they venture upon it, apart from gain or exploration. But this bottled sea, for all its terrible vastness, gave you not the awe of liberation, but its black opposite, the awe of drear imprisonment's infinitude.
We sat staring at this vista for a long time. We meant to discuss our situation, but simply failed to muster the effort of speech. At last Barnar drew a long breath. In a voice utterly blank of feeling he said: "To hell with everything. Let's just go right for luck."
And so we did, both secretly grateful that we had managed even this minimal act of decision, for neither of us had believed it impossible that we might just sit forever on that impossible lookout. As it was, we set out sharing the glum, unvoiced conviction that we knew where the manse of Gildmirth was to be found: nowhere. And we would take forever getting there, except, of course, that we would not survive nearly that long.
Though we marched atop the salt bluffs, we found our eyes and minds constantly entangled with the vivid jetsam cluttering the beach below. And what we saw there had soon roused us from our despairing stupor, for though our spirits were jaded with terrors and atrocities, those sights revealed to us new dimensions of demonic activity. Some of that bright tangle on the black strand was merely the detritus of lower life forms indigenous to the sea: broken coral branches thick with budding rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, or uprooted crinoids whose torn husks were purest gold. Such common objects bespoke nothing beyond the ocean's grotesque fecundity. But equally numerous were products of art, of active—and surely malign—intelligence: wrought chalices of gold with elaborate silver inlay, tiaras of gem-studded everbright shaped and sized to crown no human skull, shattered triptychs whose fragmented images were vivid as hallucination. There was a broken chair, elaborately hinged and barbed, designed to hold unimaginable shapes in unconjecturable postures, and we saw several battle helmets with triads of opalescent eyes inset in the visors tumbling empty in the foam. All such evidences of active artifice serving unguessable aims proclaimed the sea's hidden cunning, its vast, unbreathing population aboil with a million malefic purposes.
Yet this was only the inanimate portion of what lay scrambled on the dark gravel. Shorelife abounded. The human form was so much a part of its makeup that we could not always tell whether we were looking at demon hybrids native to the place, or at the deformed thralls of demonkind. If even half of them were captives, then truly, our race has fed multitudes to the subworld's endless appetite for our woe. The lifeless wealth on the beaches—clearly a slight fraction of what the depths contained—showed plainly enough the bait that has drawn so many luckless souls within the subworld's grip, most commonly thru ambitious and uninformed spell-dabbling. And surely it is dangerously easy nowadays—most especially in Kairnheim—to buy the power to call up entities which can only be dominated and put down again by a degree of power not even generally understood, let alone purchasable, by any overweening dilettante.
Some of those we saw, of course, were unmistakably of the latter group: the sea's human "catch," spoils of its malignant enterprise, its fishing among men. Some grottoes, for example, were densely carpeted with victims whose faces alone retained their human form. The rest of their bodies—everted and structurally transformed—now radiated from each face's perimeter in wormy coronas. They resembled giant sea-anemones. The souls within those faces still—all too eloquently—lived, while every vermiculous grotto of them had its demonic gardener: an obese, vermillion starfish shape, all scabbed and barnacled with eyes, and which inched the slathering mucosae of its undersides across the quasi-human meadow. Each threatened face expected its embrace with a piteous look of loathing and foreknowledge.
And there were others of our species who lay in nude clusters resembling the snarls of kelp which a northern sea will disgorge on the sand in storm season. Their legs and hips merged in central, fleshy stalks, while their arms and upper-bodies endlessly and intricately writhed and interlaced. These were the very image of promiscuous lust, but the multiple voice they raised made a hospital groan, a sick-house dirge of bitter weariness. Crablike giants, hugely genitaled like human hermaphrodites, scuttled over them with proprietary briskness—pausing, probing, nibbling everywhere.
But how were we to interpret the huge terrapin forms we saw plodding ashore to lay clutches of eggs in the black gravel? Their hatchlings, which erupted instantly, were scaly homunculi with frighteningly individualized human faces. We saw more than once their cannibal assault on the parent beast, as well as their launching of the dead mother's hollowed, meat-tattered shell—a swarming nursery-barque—through the surf, and out into the open sea.
It should be understood that I don't imply that the open waters themselves were barren of vital signs. Everywhere the waves suffered swift, grotesque distortions, and the shifting architectures of mist and fog that cluttered them everywhere pulsed unpredictably with movement, as of shadowy things in their depths. Once we saw what was surely a combat of invisible entities, which occurred about half a mile offshore. The waves there dented and sagged under massive, dancing pressures. It appeared that a pair of feet or paws were involved on one side—each as big as a large ship—and that a dimpling multitude of claws or tentacles were involved on the other. At length, something huge hammered a hollow in the water. The waves calmed, and an immense volume of saffron fluid gurgled onto the sea from what looked like a seam in the air, and sank coiling roots into the deeps.
Such spectacles as these, always accompanied by the incessant, soft, mind-seducing antiphonies of the ocean's vast noise, beguiled our sense of time just as completely as an interval of ease and merriment might have done. For the most insidious aspect of that place was the subtle, instantaneous comprehensibility of what we saw and heard. It was already halfway to madness just to realize that at the very first note, you understood those choruses of mangled rapture, those arrogant boomings of idiot Murder triumphing over defenseless Life. In short, slowly though we progressed, we were swept along by all we witnessed. Days had surely passed, though how many we could not know, when Barnar first opened my eyes to something he had been aware of for some time.
For out of a seemingly endless silence that had settled on us, he cried: "I can't help it! I've got to ask you." He laid one of his great paws—all cracked and scorched with our trials—on my shoulder. The other he aimed up the coast where we were headed. The shoreline there was an endless white serpent of cliff and surf, diminishing to a wisp of smoky pallor near the horizon. Barnar's eyes, which the squareness of his face has led some to call bovine, but which are in truth alive with acuity, he aimed at mine. He had a haunted look. "Am I seeing a little blackish spur, which might be a headland, about three-fourths of the way to the horizon?"
It was a long time before I answered, my voice a hollow strangeness in my own ears: "Yes. I think you are."
The sinuosities of the shore protracted our approach to the apparition almost unendurably. We were still far from it once it had resolved itself sufficiently in our vision to become a source of hope to us, and thence of new energy. For what had appeared as a large landspit proved to be a small one, densely crowned with structures, opposed by a crescent of breakwater and pilings, which also supported numerous buildings, and whose arc mirrored the headland's, so that the two formed a pair of pincers which enclosed a broad, shallow lagoon shaped like a teardrop. If this landmark proved to be of human construction, it was certainly on a scale
attributable only to an entrepreneur of Gildmirth's legendary stature, and in that class, his was the only name we or Charnall had been able to discover. We began to toy with the belief—pretty stupefying to ourselves—that we were going to find our man. Still the twisted coast interminably multiplied the hours of our drawing near, and through them all, the vivid, ersatz light never changed, and it was always sunset that poured from the broken iron-gray of stormwrack and fog.
But, long though we had studied the place on our approach, when we finally crouched above it—as low in a fissure of the salt cliffs as we could get without abandoning the land's protection from the sea's powers—it was long again that we stared at it from near at hand. There was an indescribable poignance in it—in the combination of its splendor and its damage.
For the whole architectural sweep of the place was marred at the base; the headland had been riven, and half its length was subsided several fathoms into the sea. An imposing pyramidal structure that crowned the spit—by its grandeur the Manse itself, if Gildmirth's place this was—was sunk with it, and its lowest terrace was half-inundated by the swell. The sea's weirdly spasmodic surf climbed triumphantly up the sculpted pediments flanking its doorways, and went rummaging inside through its gaping windowframes.
Yet the rest—the bulk of the establishment—looked remarkably intact. The jetty and rank of pilings that opposed the headland's curve supported an elegant and various procession of architecture that didn't look in the least derelict or decayed. It was a splendid defiance, this parabola of human workmanship that pierced—stood kneedeep in—the Demon-Sea itself. Such a flamboyant trespass upon so deep a universe of malignant power! That fragile ring of earthly art was a lunatic declaration of empire, a flagrant challenge to all that swam there. And yet, withal, there was this half-drowning of the manse. Seeing this, we no longer truly doubted that we had found—if not Gildmirth—at least his fortress, for the spectacle tallied with the report. If, in his bondage, the Privateer indeed lived freely here, his outpost's general soundness reflected it; while, if it were equally true that he suffered bondage, his broken manse proclaimed that just as clearly.
That a man should choose to come to such a place, and to abide in it, astonished us. That he should have done so for so long on his own terms moved us to awe. That he should endure here now on demonic terms made us grieve for him—for whatever kind of man he was, he had dared much, and alone.
"What impudence!" Barnar rumbled, smiling softly.
"And a hundred years of freedom and power before he was taken."
"So you accept that part, then?"
I nodded. "I feel it. If men do age here, it's far more slowly than they do under the sun."
"For everyone, captive or not," Barnar muttered, nodding in his turn. "I confess I feel it too. Somehow it's part of the . . . weariness of being here. So I suppose, if we assume thralls are protected by their possessors, we can also assume he still survives."
"I think so. After all, who else could be maintaining that . . . that zoo down there."
"If it is a zoo. If those aren't invaders of the place, new tenants."
The notion startled me. For some time we had been studying the water enclosed by the headland and pier. This was shallow and quite clear, and its floor was a sunken labyrinth of scarps, reefs and grottoes. And in each pit and den of that maze shapes crouched, or restively stirred. And despite the irregularity of the maze's structure, it gave an impression of design which made me still incline to see it as a menagerie, and not an enclave of demon usurpers.
"They're too various," I pointed out. "Demons don't usually form coalitions. One species might have invaded him, but not a mob, surely. It looks much more like a sampling, a specimen collection."
Truly, a collection of more infernal rarities than those would be hard to imagine. It was like looking in a fair booth through a Glass of Piercing Sight at a drop of pond-scum. Many of those beings are now a merciful blur in my mind's eye, but others I am doomed to remember. There was a globular explosion of spikes and spines, like an immense sea-urchin, and from the tip of each of its spines oozed a yellow human tongue like a drop of poison. Another of them was a crystalline blob of veined but otherwise transparent material in which hung a constellation of anguished human faces. And there was one demon that resembled nothing so much as a huge lurk. Just as I was studying this one, I made an unnerving discovery.
"Look up there," I said to Barnar, "on the pier about halfway out."
"By the Crack. Is it a lurk?"
"It's a twin of that demon down there in the water, in the grotto just below where it's crouching."
X
The shape on the pier clarified for us the murkier features of its submerged counterpart. These demons differed most strikingly from lurks in that their flat forebodies were studded, not with the onyx eye-buttons of lurk-kind, but with a freckling of human eyes. Their feeding-legs too—that shortest and foremost pair that cleanse or hold prey to their bristly fangs—were tipped, not with hook-and-barb feet, but with clawed hands on the human model. Their color was a phosphorescent green marbled with scarlet. Their movement—for both were restive with mutual awareness—was lurkish, both in its steel-spring quickness and its overall liquidity.
Then the monster on the pier—it appeared to be somewhat smaller than that in the water—heaved itself up onto the balustrade, its hairy bulb of a body teetering as its legs bunched to spring. It launched itself into the air. Its dive seemed sensuous, floating, and its multitude of eyes closed dreamily as it plunged. Its counterpart reared and tore the water with its forelegs, and met the leaper's impact with a frenzied counterassault.
Bubbles thick as smoke masked their struggle, but when at length the water stilled and cleared, we saw the attacker had mastered the larger demon. Locking the latter's forelegs in a cross-grip with its own, it pushed upward. This hoisted the other's forward half off the sea floor, keeping its fangs out of striking range while its hind legs scrabbled impotently for counter-leverage. From the attacker's underside a brilliant red coil extruded. Its twisting length touched a slot in its pinioned opponent's underside and slid into it. For several seconds the linkage was maintained, the coil pulsing with the transmission of unimaginable essences. Then the coil was retracted. The attacker released the other, which had grown oddly quiet, and began to swim toward the manse just below us. During its progress all the monstrosities it overswam, including many far larger than itself, shrank down and cowered in their craggy cells. It accelerated, gathered itself tight, and rode a swell through one of the manse's gaping doors.
Barnar and I exchanged a long look, each waiting for the other to say something that would clarify his own excited thoughts.
"He was renowned as a shifter of shapes even before his expedition here," my friend said at last. That enabled me to take the next step.
"Yes. And maybe, in all this time, he has gone over."
It was some relief to have spoken what we both feared, but not much. Without much hope Barnar countered after a moment: "Yet Charnall did say that half his passion to come here was for exploration, for knowledge of the ocean's demon forms."
"Knowledge," I snorted. We looked at the lagoon and Barnar shuddered.
"Let's hail him," he said, "from here. We're still technically outside the sea's zone of influence."
I agreed. Barnar cupped his hand to his mouth and cried down upon the manse: "Gildmirth! Privateer! Gildmirth of Sordon-Head! Two men of upper earth ask your hospitality!" The words rolled down and broke in echoes that reverberated in the empty, tilted terraces of the great ruin. It felt exceedingly strange to shout a summons here. The human voice, human speech—they were tools that were utterly unavailing in this world, and for long weeks we had struggled through it without using them, mute invaders who simply fought or fled whatever they encountered. So it almost made my flesh crawl to hear an unmistakable response to Barnar's words: a small, watery commotion within the manse's sea-level tier. From the door through which the lur
kish demon had swum, a naked man swam out.
He had a squat frame, and moved with quick intensity—ferocity almost. He whipped round in the water, seized the luxuriant bas-reliefs framing the doorway, and—monkey-deft—hauled himself up to the next higher tier. Here he stood scanning the sky, as if he thought Barnar's voice had literally penetrated to him through the eternal cloud-ceiling, direct from the world of the sun. I looked at Barnar, hefting my spear. He gave me his target shield and I gave him my sword, thus wordlessly agreeing to what had been our armed strategy of recent days—I would be advance harrier, and my friend, with his one-and-a-half blades, my back-up. We stood up and hailed the small, solitary shape on the terrace.
He turned in our direction then, and dispelled our last doubt that he was Gildmirth, for the eyes with which he met ours were—both pupil and ball—a lush red. The purplish red of summer plums splitting with ripeness. "Bloody-eyed" was an epithet two textual references had applied to the Privateer in describing his post-capture condition. For the rest, he had a full-lipped, goatish face, was fleece-haired and fleece-bearded. Though his stature was small he had the feet, sex, and hands of a larger man, and his knotted limbs, chest, and stomach bespoke an unusual vigor. He grinned when his eyes had targeted ours, and we caught the flash of a second demon detail that set our own teeth on edge, for his teeth were large and splendid, and made of the brightest steel.
He laughed. "Are you real? Come down! Make me believe it!"
We climbed down the bluffs to a point from which we could leap to the tier of the manse next above the one where Gildmirth stood. Still grinning, he motioned us down. We jumped. By the time we reached the railing, the Privateer was clambering over it.
We both made him a reverence when we greeted him. It was instinctive; the heart will honor excellence where it meets it. Sardonically, he bowed in return.
