“Beautiful, is it not?”
He turned. The man with the yellow toga and no eyes was standing behind him, in the doorway. He still had the creature from last night clamped to his face, its thumbs plunged into his eye-sockets and its fingers clamping around the sides of his head. It covered his forehead and his ears, but left his mouth free.
Two other men wearing yellow togas were visible behind him, half-hidden in the shadows. They too had no eyes, but they seemed to be staring at him. The three of them could have been triplets, their features were so similar.
“Sothtoth, the cosmic timekeeper,” he went on. “The regular beat at the centre of the universe, counting down infinity moment by moment until the Old Gods are free once more. Sibling to Azathoth, the amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity. The order which defines chaos, without which chaos could not exist.”
“Caesar is dead,” Casca said. It was trivial, but it was the only thing he could think of. In amongst all the madness that surrounded him he was keeping a precarious hold on his mission, and on what the conspirators had achieved.
“Of course,” the man in yellow said.
“You knew?”
“There are many possibilities, but then –” and he smiled, “there are many temples, many Old Gods. Whoever takes control of Rome will be one of us. Or will be one of us. The one you call Brutus worships at the shrine of Hastur the unspeakable and has done so since his time on the coast of Gaul. The one you call Cassius is a devotee of Azathoth, the amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity. Every one has made a bargain which they do not yet understand. But they will. The Old Gods will be ascendant, one way or another.”
“The conspirators who killed Caesar will fall themselves, eventually,” Casca whispered, and he knew that it was true. “Octavius and Lepidus control far greater armies.”
“And they have struck bargains with Ghatanothoa and Shub-Niggurath respectively,” the man in yellow continued smoothly. “There is no escape. You make a bargain, or you die – but not quickly, and not well.”
“There is a third choice,” Casca said. It took every ounce of his skills as an orator to keep the trembling fear he felt from his voice. Before the man in yellow could move, he threw the burning branch into the centre of the moving wheels and rods and belts of flesh.
He heard it hit a wall and fall to the floor, but he couldn’t see it. There was no effect on the thing in the catacomb, which apparently had just ignored the trivial attack. Or hadn’t even noticed it.
“Sothtoth is not here,” the man said, smiling. “Or, rather, Sothtoth is everywhere. You cannot stop the pulse of the cosmos.”
“Then I can stop yours,” Casca said, plunging his knife into the man’s chest.
“My pulse is bound to that of Sothtoth,” the man said pleasantly. On the conjoined hands that covered his face there was a sudden stirring. Skin drew back on both sides, above where the holes of the man’s eye-sockets were, and Casca saw with little surprise two white hemispheres, like marbles the size of plumbs, staring at him with icy, malign intelligence.
He heard a rustling sound above him. Glancing up he noticed in resignation that the arched ceiling was covered with the conjoined hand-creatures. All of them were clinging to the brickwork with one set of fingers while the second set hung down towards him. Like leaves, he though numbly. Like white, marble leaves.
“Now,” the man in yellow said, “let us discuss the terms of your agreement to serve, or the nature of your inevitable madness and death. Whichever you prefer.”
The problem was – as Casca knew for a certainty – that it wasn’t a choice. It wasn’t either service or madness and death. It was one, and then eventually the other. That was the nature of the agreement. The only question was: how long could you extend the former before the inevitability of the latter?
He took a deep breath, and tried to recall every rhetorical and oratorical trick he had ever learned.
“Then let us talk, like businessmen.” he said.
The Undiscovered Country
Ian Edginton
Try as I might, I cannot bring myself to murder my child.
These are not what are father’s hands were made for. The hands that held her as a newborn, fresh to life, should not be the ones to smother that brief spark. I know a quick death would be preferable to the lingering fate that awaits us but I do not have the strength nor will in me for such an act. It is mercy at too high a price but I fear that may change as the days pass.
Were they around the throat of my usurping brother Antonio, though, I would have no such qualms. Yet even he would not sully his own hands with homicide, instead he cast us into this ailing craft and left us prey to the elements. He did not wield the dagger or draw the garrote but he has killed us just as surely as if he had. The wind and rain, hunger and thirst are his dread weapons.
She sleeps now, my angel Miranda. Swaddled in my cloak and sackcloth, in the base of this barque that has become the bounds of our world. She stirs and murmurs occasionally, calling for her dog. It was this that troubled her most, leaving her beloved pet behind. A boisterous, shaggy haired hound. I lie and tell her that he is safe with her uncle, that we will find another just like it when we make landfall. She knows the truth, she can see to the very core of me, as her mother once could but says nothing. Before curling up to sleep, she kissed me and touched my cheek.
“It will be alright, father. You’ll see.”
I felt my heart crack in my chest for my love of her and my soul howl at my impotence to save her. It was then, as the skies darkened and the seas began to churn and chafe, that I swore a dire oath. Should we live through this, I would never let my child be placed in harm’s way ever again. I would brazen the heavens and shoulder the Earth from its axis if need be in order to keep her safe. But first we must endure.
* * *
The sea thrashed and boiled. Lightening arced in jagged spears of white fire, briefly illuminating towering, foam-edged promontories that tore at the fragile shell of our craft. I lay next to Miranda, folding my arms about her. I felt her cry and quake with terror.
“I’m frightened,” she said.
’So am I,” I replied, “but whatever happens, wherever we go, we shall be together.”
A surge slammed into the side of the boat, sending us spinning. Another hurled us back. We were nature’s catspaws. I braced my arms and legs tight as I dared against the insides, pinning us into place. My limbs quickly burned with the exertion but to relinquish my grip for even a second would have sent us hurtling into the maelstrom. The sea and sky roared, pawing with claws of salt to find purchase in our tiny refuge. In petulant fury it hurled us high and far. The world and my mind span, darkness upon darkness. My hold loosened. Miranda screamed and then there was nothing.
I woke to a void, vast and absolute. I called out to Miranda but my speech found no traction. My words fell short from my lips, despite calling at the top of my lungs. The very air, if there was such, seemed closed about me, smothering my voice. Panic rose like bile and it took all the will I could summon to wrestle it back.
I walked forwards, though the ground gave no resistance to my footsteps. I could not be certain if even there was any surface. I felt dwarfed into insignificance by the seeming vastness of my surroundings. I had no perspective, no sense of dimension. I could have been a mighty colossus or an insubstantial mote, it mattered naught to this all-encompassing emptiness. Such an absence diminishes a man’s soul, stripping it of all value, vanity and worth. He finds his true place in the scheme of things.
I stopped and stood as there seemed little purpose in continuing for there was nowhere to go. The silence was eternal. I had no reference point for distance or duration, only the rise and fall of my chest and the steady drum beat of my heart marked the passing of time.
It was then I felt the darkness shift.
I have no other word
s to describe it. I saw and felt no tangible movement but there was something. A fluctuation, a stirring, the rolling of a wave but on an incomprehensible scale. This new universe, this blank slate of creation, turned.
Before I could muse upon it, this strange world was riven by a line of white light. It was not illuminated in and of itself but was rendered luminous by its blatant opposition to the darkness. The line continued to widen its edges into the tenebrous expanse.
I retreated only to find myself moving up and back until I was looking down upon the scene. From my high vantage, I could see the line – now more a bilious pearlescent than pure white – did not continue unbroken but was punctuated by a dark delineator before continuing on. I felt myself retreating further and further, unable to manage my ascent until I was so far removed I could see the entire thing, whole and at once.
A taut, pallid ellipse whose transition was broken by another on a vertical plane. It was a putrescent green colour, flecked with yellow. I wracked my brain with thoughts to its purpose and then it turned to look at me.
It was an eye.
It was an eye and it was looking at me.
My fear found purchase and I screamed. I felt the fabric of my sanity start to fray when a clear bolt of hope was cast down to me.
“Father!”
Miranda’s voice, as fresh and pure as the dawn, reached out to me and raised me up from the abyss – a lifeline by which I was able to haul myself safely to shore.
I awoke in a nest of black rock, waist deep in seawater and my head aching. Miranda was pulling at my clothes endeavouring to keep me from sliding beneath the surface.
“Father! Wake up!”
My senses settled and I pulled her tightly to me as if to impress her into my very heart.
“Miranda!”
“I told you we would be alright,” she said, as calm as you like.
“Yes, yes you did.”
Reluctantly I let her go and groaning, pushed myself to my feet. Seawater sluiced from my clothes that hung heavy about me, yet regardless of the discomfort we were alive and together.
“Are you hurt?”
“No,” she replied. “I thought you were when you wouldn’t wake up.”
“I must have hit my head but I am well enough now.”
“Where are we?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “The tempest could have flung us anywhere but some land is better than none. Are you up for a walk?”
Miranda nodded and took my hand.
The black rocks rose in a steady incline from the shore inland. Those at the periphery had been slathered with slime and seaweed but further in it was possible to define their form more clearly.
To call them rocks was a misnomer for they seemed to be a kind of obsidian. A dark, smooth glass, comprised of keen-edged planes. It was a landscape of lines and hard angles with no curves or ellipses anywhere to be seen. Unlike glass however, as mirrored as they might have been, they strangely did not hold a reflection. Nor upon, closer inspection was their surface in a pure ebon state but rather peppered with tiny whorls of nebulous light.
Staring deeply it was possible to see that each whorl was spinning upon a luminous axis and each spiraling limb in turn was spangled with further points of light and about those lights orbited other bodies and upon those bodies lay islands and oceans and upon those, vast cities whose architecture did not play host to the human form.
“Father!”
Once more Miranda’s voice pulled me back. The tightness of her hand in mine anchoring me to this world.
“I was calling and calling but you didn’t hear me. You just kept staring at the stones!”
The fear and concern was writ large in her eyes.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you. I think perhaps I hit my head harder than I thought. I shall have to be more careful.”
We moved on through the piceous jumble. I took care not to rest my gaze upon any one for longer than I dared. I had no doubt now that we were in an unnatural place.
In my youth I had delved into the obscurities of wild magic. I sought to peer behind the warp and weft of creation, to discern the lattice upon which all life is laid. In honest humility, I confess I had developed a modest talent, but the passing of my father and the calling of my station as Duke of Milan meant that I was obliged to put aside such trivialities and set my mind to more practical matters.
I cannot but marvel now at my naivety. Where I took pride in my arcane dabblings I see now that I was merely wading in the shallows, while here, in this place, we were above the dark water.
“Look, a boat? Is it ours?”
Miranda was pointing back down behind us to a small cove further along the bay. There, buoyed amongst the rocks was indeed the tiny vessel that had saved our lives. Like us, it too had miraculously weathered the storm and appeared, at least to my eyes, to still be sea-worthy. I was half tempted to return to it and chance our fortunes to the water once more, but the small hand in mine gave me pause. Without provisions we would not last more than a few days. If there was salvation here, we had to find it.
With no small struggle, we crested the steep escarpment. I felt Miranda’s hand instinctively tighten in mine again and with good cause. I was correct in my study, this uncommon geography was not made for the likes of men. It was clear now the beach upon which we had made landfall was but broken remnants of the interior that had migrated towards the periphery. The island proper comprised great spars of black crystal ten times taller than a man and wider around than a mill stone. Between them ran broad hexagonal plinths stacked and stepped in irregular tiers all leading towards the interior.
Nothing about this place spoke of the world we knew. There were no beasts, nor birds, nor foliage of any kind. It was as if all were fearful to set foot or take root here. I too shared their reluctance. This place was less of the natural world and more an intrusion of some alien other into our own.
Again, all of my instincts bade me turn back and depart headlong for the horizon in that fragile shell of a ship. It was to risk certain death to be sure but at least our immortal souls would remain whole and untainted, whereas to linger here I feared for more than our lives.
Yet, despite this, I still placed one foot before the other, inexplicably drawn to the centre of this island by curiosity and a compulsion I cannot explain.
“You’re doing it again.”
I was the subject of Miranda’s scrutiny once more.
“Does your head hurt? Do you want to stop?”
I could not help but smile at her concern.
“No, thank you. Although, I think I am finding this place strange and distracting. As if we should not be here but somehow it wants us to be. Don’t you feel it?”
Her brow furrowed as she thought for a moment.
“Not really. I feel tired and thirsty, but that’s all.”
“Do you want to carry on?”
“Yes. Well, there’s nowhere else to go really, is there?”
I could not refute her logic. She was considerably wiser than her six years. That she did not share my sense of dread or foreboding obliged me to question whether this indeed was all in my mind. Or perhaps her innocence and the purity of her soul shielded her somehow from the deleterious effects of this odd environment?
Slowly we pressed on. I lifted Miranda over certain of the plinths that she could not negotiate herself. We fell into a steady pattern of ascent until suddenly she gave a shrill, fearful cry.
The ache in my bones, and the weight of my water-logged clothes, counted for naught as I heaved myself over the brink. There, lay the body of a man. A Moor and a mariner, by his attire. A sword of deadly purpose and uncertain origin protruded from his chest. Miranda was staring at the corpse in strange fascination.
“It’s alright,” I said. “There’s no need to be afraid.”
“I’m not,” she replied, matter-of-factly. “He made me jump when I first saw him, that’s all. It’s not the first dead bod
y I’ve ever seen.”
This was certainly true. There had been an outbreak of typhus in Milan the summer before. The bodies had been stacked high on handcarts en route to being burnt.She had lost several friends and a cousin before the infection was extinguished.
I have never shielded her from the fact that death is a part of life. A process and a passage, it is one of two certainties over which we have no control. We are born and we will die. How we choose to spend the time in-between is what defines us.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked. “Apart from being dead?”
I looked again and saw the reason for her curiosity. On closer inspection the corpse’s skin was possessed of a faintly greenish hue. Not that of grave moss or putrescence but an iridescent shimmer more akin to that of fish scales. With my attention now attuned for similar irregularities, they seemed all the more evident.
The dead man’s pupils were considerably wider and darker than was customary, and his teeth small, sharp and serrated. Spanning between his fingers was a translucent webbing while on his neck, below his ears, were several flaps of skin that I could only surmise were gills.
The body before me was a freakish impossibility and yet here it was. I grasped the sword and pulled it clear from his chest. The vile miasma that followed caused us both to gag.
“He smells like bad fish!” said Miranda, her hand over her nose and mouth.
“That he does,” I replied. “But he also looks to be a sailor. Perhaps his ship is still here?”
“And perhaps so are the ones who killed him.”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Are you going to kill them?”
“That too is a possibility, but let’s hope it does not come to that. Are you ready to keep going?”
She nodded, her hand still clamped firmly over her mouth and nose.
I took the lead now, scouting ahead to make sure our route was safe before beckoning her to follow me. All the while I could feel a strange yearning in my chest, an aching fondness that you feel when you have travelled far and long and are within sight of home. Having never set foot here before, my reason counselled that such a sensation was not possible, yet my instincts felt the pull of this place, as if there were a line about my heart and I was being reeled in. I fought against it in quiet concentration, although part of me secretly wished to see it to the end.
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