“How do they hunt? How is that beast able to follow us?”
“The Off-Moo tell me it is heat. Somehow the eyes see heat rather than light. And their sense of smell is extraordinary. They can pick up certain scents that are a mile or more away. The darklanders live in terror of them. The Off-Moo believe the cats are their greatest single protection against threats from the cannibals.”
“The cannibals don’t hunt the panther?”
“They can hardly protect themselves against it. Superstition and fire are about all they have in their defense, for they, too, are largely blind. They instinctively fear the creatures, for whom they are relatively easy prey.”
But the Off-Moo were alarmed now that they could see the cat. They spoke in high-pitched Greek which was almost impossible for me to understand. Fromental told me that this sign increased their anxiety, their sense of danger. Why had the cat come so close to the river?
“Perhaps nothing more than curiosity,” suggested my friend.
He signaled to Scholar Brem, an acquaintance, and went to talk to him. When he came back he seemed disturbed. “They fear that some powerful force drives the cats away from their usual hunting grounds. But there again it might just be an isolated young male looking for a mate.” I didn’t see the great, black sabertooth again. We were already slowing as the thrust of the river met the embrace of the blazing lake, whose further shores were lost in the pitch-darkness beyond.
Gradually, just as one might from a ship or a train entering the outskirts of a mighty city, we began to notice that the formations around us had given way to the slender living towers of the Off-Moo. These towers often reflected soft shades, the merest wash of color, which added to their mysterious beauty. Curious Off-Moo began to appear on the banks and on their balconies while our steersmen strained against their sweeps, catching the current which bore us gracefully in towards a harbor, where several similar petrified sea monsters were moored.
With considerable skill, the sweepsmen brought the raft alongside a quay of elaborately carved rock. On it a small crowd waited to greet us. For the most part they were Off-Moo, subtly individual in their conical hoods, but then I recognized a shorter figure standing to one side and knew such pleasure, such relief, that I was surprised by the depth of my own emotion. I had come to care very much for Oona. Her pale, albino beauty gave her an even more ethereal quality in this world than it had in my own. But that was not what gladdened my heart. It was a feeling far more subtle. A sense of recognition, perhaps? I hurried off the bizarre raft and onto the basalt of the quayside, running to greet her, to embrace her, to feel the warmth, the reality, the profound familiarity of her.
“I am glad you are here,” she murmured. She embraced Fromental. “You have arrived in time to meet Lord Renyard’s friends. They bring desperate news. As we suspected, our foes attack three realms at least, all of them strategic. Your own world is in mortal peril. Tanelorn herself is again under deep siege, this time from Law, and could fall at any moment. And now, it seems, Moo Uria herself faces her greatest threat. This is not coincidence, gentlemen. We have a very powerful opponent.” She was already leading us away from the docked raft, through twisting, narrow streets.
“But Tanelorn can’t be conquered,” said Fromental. “Tanelorn is eternal.”
Oona turned serious eyes up towards his distant face. “Eternity as we understand it is in jeopardy. All that we take for granted. All that is permanent and inviolable. Everything is under attack. Gaynor’s ambitions could bring about the destruction of sentience. The end of consciousness. Our own extinction. And possibly the extinction of the multiverse herself.”
“Perhaps we should have killed him when he first threatened us,” said Fromental.
The young huntress shrugged her shoulders as she led us into one of the slender buildings. “You could not kill him then,” she said. “It would be morally impossible.”
“How so?” I asked.
Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if I had missed the most obvious answer in the world.
“Because,” she said, “at that point in your mutual histories he had yet to commit his great crime.”
CHAPTER NINE
A Conference of Spheres
I was having difficulties with Mittelmärch notions of time. It seems we were all fated to live identical lives in billions of counterrealities, rarely able to change our stories, yet constantly striving to do so. Occasionally, one of us was successful, and it was the effort to change that story which somehow helped maintain the balance of the universe—or rather the multitude of alternate universes Oona called “the multiverse,” where all our stories were being played out in some form.
Oona was patient with me but I was of a prosaic disposition and such notions didn’t sit easily with my ideas of common sense. Gradually I began to see the broader vision, which helped me understand how our dreams were simply glimpses of other lives, often at their most dramatic, and how it was possible for some of us to move between these dreams, these other lives, and even sometimes change them.
She spoke of these matters after she had taken me to my quarters and allowed me to refresh myself. Then, when I was reinvigorated, she led me out into the sinuous streets of Mu Ooria, a vital, crowded city which was far more cosmopolitan than I had anticipated. Clearly not all humans were banished into the darkness. Entire quarters were filled with people of many different races and creeds, evidence of a great mingling of cultures, including that of the Off-Moo. We passed through street markets which might have flourished in modern Cologne, between houses which would not have been out of place in medieval France. Clearly the Off-Moo had a long history of welcoming refugees from the surface, and these people had kept their habits and customs, blending happily with the others.
As well as the familiar, there was also the exotic. Oona led me past reflective jet and basalt terraces festooned with pale lichens and fungi, balconies of sinuous limestone whose occupants were sometimes indistinguishable from the rock. This eternal, sparkling night had a luring beauty of its own. I could understand how so many chose to settle here. While you might never know sunlight and fields of spring flowers, neither would you know the kind of conflict which could rob you of both in an instant.
I understood and sympathized with the people who had chosen to live here, but I longed to see again the familiar, robust, cherry cheeks of our honest Bek peasantry. Not one of the inhabitants of this place looked entirely alive, though they obviously took pleasure in their existence and enjoyed a high level of complex civilization, despite the sense of the crushing weight of rock overhead, the knowledge of this land’s dark boundaries, the hush which seemed to settle everywhere, the slightly exaggerated courtesy you didn’t expect to find in a busy metropolis. I had every admiration for it but would never choose to settle here myself. Would I ever now find my way back to my fatherland?
Again I was filled with a sense of desperate frustration. I loved my country and my world. All I wanted was the opportunity to fight for what was decent and honorable in both. I needed to take my place with those who resisted a cowardly terror. Who encountered cruelly philistine forces wishing to destroy everything that had ever been valuable in our culture. I told Oona this, as we continued to stroll through the winding canyons of the city, admiring gardens and architecture, exchanging pleasantries with passersby.
“Believe me, Count Ulric,” she assured me, “if we are successful, you will have every opportunity to fight the Nazis again. But there is much to be done. The same battle lines are being drawn on at least three separate planes and at this stage it looks as if our enemies are stronger.”
“You’re suggesting I fight for the same cause by taking part in your struggle?”
“I am saying that the cause is the same. How you serve it will ultimately be your decision. But it will be simultaneous with other decisions.” She smiled at me and put her delicate hand into mine, leading me eventually into a great, natural circle, slightly concave, close to the city’s cent
er. Here there were no stalagmites, and the stalactites in the roof were hidden by the deep shadow created by the lake’s glare.
I thought at first this was an amphitheater, but there was no evidence that it accommodated any kind of audience. Leading out of the circle was one wide main thoroughfare which seemed to go directly to the lake. If the Off-Moo were a different people I would have assumed it was designed to display some kind of military triumph—a returning navy might parade up this avenue and its victorious forces present themselves to the people in the great, shallow bowl.
Oona was amused by my stumbling suggestions, my noticing that the floor seemed to have been worn smooth by thousands of feet, that there was a faint, familiar smell to the place.
“This is the only chance you will have to come here,” she said. “Assuming the tenant returns.”
“Tenant?”
“Yes. He has lived with the Off-Moo for as long as their history. Some think they came to this world together. There is even evidence that the city was created around him. He is very old indeed and sleeps a great deal. Periodically, perhaps when he is hungry, he leaves this place and travels down there”—she pointed to the broad avenue—“to the lake. The times of his disappearances vary, but he has always returned.”
I looked around for some kind of dwelling. “He lives here without furniture or shelter?”
She was enjoying my mystification.
“He is a gigantic serpent,” she said. “In appearance not unlike the voluk, but much bigger. He sleeps here and offers no harm to the Off-Moo. He has been known to protect them in the past. They believe that he goes into the lake to hunt. A strange beast, with long side fins, almost like the wings of a ray, but primarily reptilian. Some believe he has vestigial limbs secreted within his body, that he is in fact more lizard than snake. Not unlike those resurrected husks they turn into rafts, though much larger, of course.”
“The World Serpent?” Half amused, half in awe, I referred to the mythical Worm Oroborous, said by our ancestors to guard the roots of the World Tree.
Surprisingly her tone was sober when she replied. “Perhaps,” she said. Then, deliberately, she lightened her mood and took my hand again.
I was suddenly conscious that I was trespassing and was glad to let her laugh and lead me through another series of winding twittens to show me the pastel glories of the water gardens, fashioned from natural stone and cultivated fungi. Glimmering points of light from the misty miniature falls reflected all the subtle colors of the bizarre underground fauna. My guide was delighted at my enchantment, taking proprietorial pride in the wonders of Mu Ooria.
“Could you not learn to love this place?” she asked me, linking her arm in mine. With her I felt a friendliness, a comfortable closeness which I had never experienced with another woman. I found it relaxing.
“I love it already,” I told her, “and I think the Off-Moo a civil and cultivated race. An exemplary people. I could stay here for a year and never experience all the city has to offer. But it isn’t in my nature, Fraülein Oona, to take exotic holidays while my nation is threatened by a monster far more dangerous than Mu Ooria’s adopted serpent!”
She murmured that she understood my concern and that she would do everything she could for me. I asked after Captain Bastable, the mysterious Englishman, but she shook her head. “I believe he’s engaged elsewhere.”
“So will you, who clearly can come and go at will, lead me out of here?”
“There are dream roads,” she said. “Finding them isn’t difficult. But getting you back to where you came from can sometimes prove impossible.” She raised a hand to forestall my anger. “I have promised you that you’ll have the chance to fight your enemies. Presumably you would like to be as successful as possible?”
“You are telling me to be patient. What else can I be?” I knew she was sincere. I gave her arm an affectionate squeeze. I felt I had known her all my life. She might have been one of my more attractive relatives, a niece perhaps. I recalled her rather odd expectation that I would know her. Now I understood that, in the conflicting time streams of the multiverse, it was possible for something to be both mysterious and familiar. She had no doubt mistaken me for someone else, even one of my myriad “other selves” who, if she and the Off-Moo were to be believed, proliferated throughout a continuously branching multiverse.
I was not comforted by her assurance that I had not one doppelgänger but an infinite number. Which reminded me to ask her about the two bizarre figures I had seen earlier. One of them had been my double.
She found my news disturbing, rather than surprising. She asked me precise questions and I did my best to answer. She shook her head. “I did not know there were such forces at work,” she said. “Not such great forces. I pray some of them choose to ally their cause with our own. I might have misused or misunderstood my mother’s skills.”
“Who were those armored men?”
“Gaynor, if he wears the armor you describe. The other is his mortal enemy, one of the greatest of your avatars, whose destiny is to change the very nature of the multiverse.”
“Not an ancestor, then, but an alter ego?”
“If you like. You say he was asking you for something?”
“My guess.”
“He is desperate.” She spoke affectionately, as if of a very familiar friend. “What did Fromental see?”
“Nothing. These were glimpses only. But not illusions. At least, not in any sense I understand.”
“Not illusions,” she confirmed. “Come, we’ll confer with Fromental and his friends. They’ve had long enough without us.”
We crossed a series of canals rather like those of Venice, one narrow bridge after another, following natural gullies and fissures employed as part of the city’s water system. I was impressed by how the Off-Moo adapted to the natural formations of the earth. Goethe, for instance, would have been impressed by their evident respect for their surroundings. Ironically, those surroundings, if described in my own world, would have been taken for the fantasies of some opium-addicted Coleridge or Poe. A tribute to the majority’s capacity to deny any truth, no matter how monumental, which challenges its narrow understanding of reality.
Eventually we entered a small square and Oona led me into a doorway and up a twisting, asymmetrical staircase until we came into a large room, surprisingly wide for an Off-Moo apartment. The place was furnished more to human taste, with large couches and comfortable chairs, a long table loaded with food and wine. Evidently a meal had been eaten while Fromental conferred with Lord Renyard and the three strangers who rose to greet us as we entered the room.
I had never, outside of a comic opera, seen such a collection of swaggering fantasticoes. Lord Renyard wore the lace and embroidery of a mid-seventeenth-century fop, balancing his slightly unsteady frame on an ornamental “dandy pole.” A scarlet silk sash over his shoulder held the scabbard of a slender sword. His eyes narrowed in pleasure as he recognized us. “My dear friends, you are most welcome.” He bowed with an awkward grace. “May I introduce my fellow citizens of Tanelorn—Baron Blare, Lord Bragg and Duke Bray. They seek to join forces against the common enemy.”
These three were all dressed in the exaggerated uniforms of Napoleonic cavalry officers. Baron Blare had huge side-whiskers and a wide, horsey grin displaying large, uneven teeth. Lord Bragg was a glowering, self-important cockerel, all blazing wattles and comb, while Duke Bray had a solemn, mulish look to his huge face. Although not as distinctly animal-like as Lord Renyard, they all three had a slight air of the farmyard about them. But they were cordial enough.
“These gentlemen have come by a hard and circuitous route to be with us,” Fromental explained. “They have walked the moonbeam roads between the worlds.”
“Walked?” I thought I had misheard him.
“It’s a skill denied to many.” Lord Renyard’s voice was a sharp, yapping bark. He spoke perfect classical French but he had to twist his mouth and vocal cords to get some of his pro
nunciations. “Those of us who learn it, however, would travel no other way. These are my good friends. When we understood the danger, we all left Tanelorn together. Our Tanelorn, of course. We were separated some while ago, during an alarming adventure. But they came here at last and brought fresh news of Tanelorn’s plight.”
“The city is under siege,” said Fromental. “Gaynor, in another guise, attacks it. He has the Higher Worlds on his side. We fear it will soon fall.”
“If Tanelorn falls, then all falls.” Oona was pacing. She had not expected such dramatic news. “The doom of the multiverse.”
“Without help Tanelorn will most certainly perish,” said Lord Bragg. His flat, cold voice held little hope. “The rest of our world is already conquered. Gaynor rules there now in the name of Law. His patron is Lady Miggea the Mad. And he draws on the power of more than one avatar.”
“We came here,” said Duke Bray, “searching for those avatars in the hope that we could stop them combining. In our world it has happened already. Here, Gaynor has barely begun to test his power.”
I didn’t understand. Oona explained. “Sometimes it is possible, with immortal help, for two or more avatars of one person to be combined. This gives them considerably greater power, but they lose sanity. Indeed, such an unnatural blending threatens the stability of the entire multiverse! The one who draws on the souls of his avatars in this way takes terrible risks and can pay a very great price for the action.”
Something in the way she glanced at me caused me to shudder. The chill went deep into my bones and would not leave me.
“We can’t let Mu Ooria be attacked because of us,” I said. “Why don’t we lead an expedition into the Dark Land and strike at them first? It will take Gaynor months to marshal a force.”
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