by Michael Shea
“Oh what is this?” the Ghul trilled. “What offering is this, worth priceless pages to the adoring Ghuls?” He swept towards the nearest bier, the boy’s, and lifted one hand towards the corpse. The hand, like a hummingbird pausing by a flower, hovered at the youth’s throat, then, with a forefinger, touched it. The Ghul drew back his hand and applied, with virginal amazement, his red fingertip to his tongue.
At the taste, the Ghul turned his huge eyes on the understudy and the litter bearers, seeing them all for the first time.
“We are well met my friends, my goodly friends of the fair ones! Could it be there are some texts, some pages in our endless stores thereof, that you desire to own? Some spells or legendaries, some lines of close-linked syllables constraining powers untapped, commanding wealth or—”
All heads (save three) turned in sharp unison towards one of the shaftmouths. Hex followed their look, catching an instant later than they had the grinding footfalls that approached. He remembered the stony tread of the thing that had caused his fall to this place, and waited in horror. But the thing that emerged from the tunnel was little more than nine feet tall.
It had the form of a naked man save for two features. Its shoulders were surmounted by a sarcophagus mask, a broad, embossed abstraction of a face, the mouth a slot. And it was sexed with what looked like a spindle, a conic spike with a grooved handgrip near its base.
It paused in the shaft mouth and greeted the party before the door with a deep bow. Stunned, they half responded, and the giant advanced. It moved with a dry friction that suggested a sculptor’s pumice stone polishing a statue. The thing was made of flexible rock. Its voice was boomingly distinct: “Good evening. I rejoice to find you here. I need seven whole lives, a set of wits from one man, and the eyes and hearing of another. I thought you were eleven. I note now, alas, that three of you are dead. We must make do. Have you concluded your ceremonies?”
The litter bearers shifted on their feet, the understudy stood with a limply working jaw, and the Ghul had already begun a gradual retreat, with subtle writhes that it disguised as bows and obeisances to the giant.
“Alas, we are not in fact finished, benign giant,” fluted the Ghul, bowing yet again towards the open valve of the door behind him. “For what do you require these lives and… other things?”
“My master’s soulscape, Ghul, for whose continuance he fashioned me, and whose epic scope I have unflaggingly expanded, these eight hundred years since his demise.” The giant had paused some score of feet from the party, and as he spoke, he was unscrewing his spindle from its socket in his crotch.
“Indeed!” cried the Ghul. “Surely then you are the renowned Ghellim, created by Mahood the Inspired?”
“I am,” replied Ghellim. Even as the Ghul uttered his question he had sprung for the door, and Ghellim, as he answered, flicked the point of his spindle like an angler casting. There was a small, clear sound of meaty impact, and the Ghul’s body froze in mid-air, a foot above the spot he had leapt from. Hanging thus, his chest swelled into a spine-reversing bulge towards the giant.
The seven men were fleeing in as many directions. As the knot of them fragmented, the giant snapped his spindle again and again; with each flicker of his wrist a man was snagged from his flight and hung straining in the air. He had all seven hooked and dangling before they had well dispersed.
Now Ghellim began rolling the spindle back and forth between the flats of his palms. It was a busy, patient motion which did not draw the eight suspended forms any nearer, but tautened their limbs, and bowed their spines more and more radically, till they were impossibly curved, like fighting fish. Then Ghellim gave a tug to the spindle; there was a snap, and all eight collapsed to the pavement.
Six lay as they had fallen: heaps, jointless, jumbles of flesh and rags. One of the litter bearers, and the understudy, struggled onto their knees. The understudy made it on up to his feet, palping frantically at the dry, vacant orbits of his eyes, and at his ears. The litter bearer remained on all fours, where he began to drool, rave, and hammer the floor mechanically with one fist. The giant patiently wound his tool.
“I can’t see! I can’t hear!” screamed the understudy. “What? Where?” He tottered forward and stumbled against his gibbering confrère. “What’s happened?” he asked, gratefully embracing the living motion of a comrade. The witless one, galvanized by the understudy’s touch, seized him deftly by the throat, and throttled the astonished man. The giant began screwing his spindle back into his crotch. The madman dropped the understudy’s corpse and seized himself by the throat. The giant paused in his screwing-in, and then began unscrewing again.
“How fortunate!” the Ghellim cried. “I did not notice you there!” (The madman, purple, uttered a terminal gurgle and dropped himself to the floor, leaving the three nudes, enthroned, in serene domination of the littered plaza.) The giant had turned towards the stairs Hex crouched on; his granite hand flicked and Hex felt a light splat against his breast. A red taproot of pain sank to the centre of his lungs.
Even as he felt this, a hand grasped the invisible line right above the hooked spot in his ribs. Stilth was standing beside him. The old man’s grip on the line was remarkably strong. It was braced against the giant’s tug, intercepting the agony of the hook’s pull. His voice too was strong, plangent in that mausoleal air:
“Seven questions, Ghellim! Seven questions!”
The Ghellim’s form and face were impassivity itself, yet still it subtly bridled, its bigness restless, resentfully constrained somehow by Stilth’s words.
“Seven questions, then, Trickster.”
“First then. Are you well, good Ghellim?”
“Yes, thank you, Trickster, I am well.”
“Secondly. Must you use my friend’s life in your soulscape?”
A gritty shrug. “I will, because there is no reason not to and yours as well, Trickster.”
Hex was clinging to Stilth’s shoulder, sweating freely, barely keeping his legs under him. The old man’s hand, without seeming to move, was covertly wiggling the hook to free it. The barbed pain, ratlike, worked in his raw heart muscle reiterated wounds. He fought not to betray the covert operation, though the sweat runnelled off his face.
“But what of your work’s form?” Stilth asked in amazement. “How can it not matter what goes into it? And what of great Mahood’s unequalled elegance, his commitment to concise expression?” The cunning squirm of the hook sent out waves of sickness that half-unhinged Hex’s knees.
“That’s third, fourth, and fifth,” the Ghellim said, holing taut his line. “As a man who loved the ephemera of his restricted span, Mahood considered events and objects to be grave, important. His selectivity served his passionate attachments. But naturally, selection has no meaning in an infinite flux of endlessly unique experience.”
“What!?” Stilth trumpeted. “Are you not, then, making a trash-heap, a sprawling psychic junkyard, of Mahood’s great, deathless epic?”
“No doubt. To match the trashed plains of eternity.” Hex’s knees now did collapse, as the hook came free.
But his grip on Stilth’s shoulder held and he did not sink. Not once had Stilth’s hand moved perceptibly, nor did it now. “That is the sixth, Trickster. What is your last question?”
“It is this. How can you betray your maker, Mahood the Inspired, as you do?”
Even as he asked this Stilth jumped sideways and pulled a statue down. It fell crosswise in front of them as the pair fell back, and pinned Ghellim’s invisible line to the step. The giant reeled in powerfully, but so quick had Stilth been to snag its hook on one of the statue’s fangs that the giant’s pull only noosed the statue tighter, and hauled it down a step. Yet he was still compelled, and though his voice raged, his words obediently answered, their echoes chasing the pair as they fled—Stilth half dragging Hex—the way they had come: “I can’t betray him—I am he, and do no other than he would have done in my place, for he furnished me with his own memories and desire
s, ending himself in making me begin.”
A noise of shattered stone followed, and a grinding thud, a massive sprinting sound, came after the pair. Fear had returned Hex his legs. They rushed through the vent—a bruising passage for Hex. Beyond, the star-sketched ruin of whatever he had landed on, now inert, was like a ramp that Stilth unhesitatingly ran up, to grasp a glowing purple filament hanging in the shaft. Loathingly, Hex followed suit. Stilth climbed two-handed but no sooner had Hex clutched the cord than it retracted, and drew him smoothly up. Like a hail of drums the giant’s echo muddled voice sounded in the deeps behind him as he rose towards a seam of stars. There the azle stood silhouetted, the cord re-coiling itself round its saddlehorn, ceasing to glow as it did so. Once above ground, Hex made to bolt further, but Stilth stayed him.
“Peace, Bramt Hex. The Ghellim cannot surface. Catch your breath a bit, and meet the one whose acquaintance, for some reason, you so precipitately shunned.”
Gladly Hex snuffed the upper air, and good-humouredly met Stilth’s mordant eye. There, in mid-glen, stood a statue a storey and a half high, set on crude wooden wheels. Its gem eyes flashed with oily life. It was carved crouching, with an outstretched paw, from whose talons dangled the abandoned harnesses of the men who had been pulling it.
Sarf presented the statue to Hex with a courtly armsweep. “His companions,” he suavely explained, “startled by a most unearthly glow that afflicted their flesh, did not stay.”
Hex made the monolith a deep and solemn bow.
20
Slove’s Enthralment of the Squotobe Host
“Well, Bramt Hex,” Stilth said when they had resumed their slantwise upslope march. “I grieve at the lack of faith in me this flight of yours betrayed.”
“Listen Stilth, it was only the smallest part of a betrayal. My feet alone were faithless. They took flight. The rest of me stayed calm and true as steel.”
“I’m relieved to hear it. In any case, good came of it after all. Your fall killed a durb—the biggest one I’ve ever seen. Its stonework was flawless. No one could have told that den from a genuine portal.”
“I refuse to accept credit for the deed. I felt it was the least I could do to atone for my feet’s defection.”
“Well, don’t tax yourself. I enjoyed the exchange with Ghellim. S’Death! I handled that one neatly, don’t you think?”
“With all my heart!” said Hex. “We’re fast learning to value your judgement, Stilth. Forgive one question, which I can’t repress. You know of Yana. Why haven’t you gone there?”
“What an idiotic question! I’m scarcely a century and a half old! I’ve got at least a century more if I keep my wits about me. Why should I need even to think about immortality yet?”
“Well, wouldn’t you want to perpetuate a… younger self?”
“This is ridiculous!” Both Stilth’s aspects seemed truly peeved, and looked more querulously senile, withal. “I don’t even look old yet!”
“Well, elderly,” Hex said stoutly. Stilth spat, and said nothing. His protracted silence distinctly bristled. Now above the relatively coalescent apron of flatter lava near near the sea, they moved up and across a great frozen tendon of rock. Stilth’s hand came up for their attention, though the azle did not pause.
“We are now in the worst kind of danger. We’ll be branching off ahead there on to open ground—I think there’s a Tax Station above and we’re going to go past it, though I’m sure that won’t help us shake the beings who are about to join us. Stay close to the azle, move calmly and unconcernedly, and say nothing. We’re already being observed.”
As they moved farther up the great hogback of ashen stone, they saw there was indeed a Tax Depot ahead: one large, and several smaller buildings of weathered planking. Fire baskets raised on posts lit the compound. They burned a cheap fuel whose yellow light looked unclean in the star-vaulted night.
“In a moment,” said Stilth, “there will be much talk between myself and certain squotobes. Throughout, remember to stay mute, walk smoothly, hope.”
Hex immediately violated Stilth’s second command, and jumped nearly a foot when a slight, pale figure landed on the path in front of them, loose-jointed and light, having jumped, it seemed, down from the air. Two others followed, one appearing at Hex’s side, and one at Sarf’s.
“Why, good evening, fair squotobes!” Stilth cried with pleased surprise. He nodded at each, a courtesy Sarf and Hex aped with ghastly smiles as they viewed—with a dismay they could not hide—the features of these new companions. Their greasy white hair grew in lank tufts and tongues widely separate across their bodies, and their skin was rubbery and pale between the patches. They were shovel-jawed, and their white lips’ bespittled slackness showed their jutting mandibles to be crowded with crooked, carious fangs. Their eyes were lemur-large, and hot with a light that seemed almost lambent. Though a shade less than man-tall, their walk—a disgruntled slouch, really—expressed a fluid, reptilian strength that made the two pilgrims they flanked profoundly uneasy. But it was particularly Stilth that all three squotobes had their eyes on as they walked.
“Why so sombre?” he rallied them. “Is it not a splendid night? The air like wine?” The creatures grunted a sullen, perfunctory assent, and kept staring at Stilth. Now they were passing before the Tax Station’s main building—an act that would have dismayed Hex moments before, but now seemed insignificant. The building’s front door stood wide open.
Inside, four men surrounded a table that stood endwise to the doorway, and whereon someone lay who presented a pair of wildly kicking bootsoles. Three of the squadmen held this person down—the fourth worked, furiously with unseen hands, where his face would be. “Scum!” this fourth was shouting, straightening, stripping off thorn gloves whose barbs were clotted with new gore. “Get me some coals!”
A brazier of live coals fumed on the porch. A squadman, striding out to fetch it, saw the trio and their squotobe escort. Horror shook him—he stumbled as he stepped, and pitched face-first into the coals. His friends now, too, had seen and, howling, slammed and barred the door, leaving their tormented mate to writhe outside. His cries dwindled astern as the azle Hamandra ambled on upslope.
“Well then,” grumbled the squotobe who walked in the lead of the beast. “Tell us a story, traveller. A good story.”
“Yes,” said the one by Sarf. “Tell us an interesting story, traveller.”
“That’s right!” chimed Hex’s pallid neighbour. “An interesting story!”
“What’s this? You say you’d like to hear a story?” Stilth spoke in tones of awakening pleasure. “Now this is really lucky! This is delightfully opportune! You see as it happens, my dear squotobes, I am no mean narrator. In fact, in all candour, it’s amazing how I can weave myself in and out of a fiction—what twists I can give to the threads of a plot! My friends here, unaccountably, say they think me tiresome and, to make a long story short, I have sat bottled up for this last hundred leagues. I’m sure that connoisseurs such as yourselves can appreciate how an accomplished tale-teller pines to speak, how he swells with his undischarged narratives when he is denied an audience. He moons and mourns for all the unborn felicities of expression, the delicate internal resonances of theme and image which, lacking issue from his fecund mind, must inflate him till he—”
“Enough!” shouted the lead squotobe. “Get on with it! I do hope you can tell a story well!”
“Yes!” cried the one by Hex. “I do hope you can. You sound like a terrible windbag!”
“Yes!” chimed Sarf’s pale Doppelganger. “A dreadful windbag! Why don’t you get on with it?”
Stilth was enraged. He actually reined up Hamandra. “I’m dead and roasted if I’ll suffer such abuse! Go fish other waters for your story! And you’re great losers by all your ill manners, I’m glad to tell you, for I had in mind to tell you the story of Slave’s Enthralment of the Squotobe Host.”
“ ‘Enthralment of the Squotobe Host’? Bah! There’s no such tale!” The
lead squotobe was outraged in his turn. But then he turned to a distraction. Their path had now dropped down the tendon’s farther side, and plunged them in the shadow-cleft dividing it from the next great magmatic sinew. Thus, they stood with high ground to their left, and now, from this, a Tork sprang down on them—a stump-legged whip-tailed maggot as big as a wolf, jawed with ragged black carapace like a termite soldier’s. These, once locked on prey, fixed it as the axis for the larva’s python twining, and oviposition, after paralysis.
Sarf’s squotobe caught its gaping jaws in either hand, broke their joints, and used them for handles to pin the glittering head to the rock. But the squotobe’s jaw dropped to a second, lower hinge—clamped, and, with one pressure bit clean through a maggoty neck as thick as Hex’s thigh. Tossing the head aside, the creature fiercely echoed:
“Exactly! There is no such tale at all. There was only Itzpah’s Enthralment of the Squotobe Host!”
“That’s right!” cried Hex’s squotobe passionately. “Only Itzpah ever enthralled the ears of the squotobe host!”
Stilth crowed derisively. “Ah, you’re such perfect examples! Glib error always goes with haughty manners! I might have expected you to drag out that tedious Itzpah chestnut! Let me just ask you this: does the story of Itzpah’s enthralment of the squotobe host contain the tale itself whereby he worked this alleged triumph? Oh no! As all the world knows, it does not! It merely alludes to it!”
“What of it?”
“Yes, suppose it doesn’t, what of that?”
“Yes, what difference does it make if it does or not?”
“It signifies, oh arrogant squotobes, that the tale’s apocryphal. The Slove cycle, meanwhile, recently recovered from among the Quimble Bay Parchments, is the true original of that tale. And it is its own proof of this fact, for it contains the tale wherewith Slove enthralls the minds of the squotobes, and any of that race who hears it stands himself enthralled, the living proof of the story’s genuineness.”
