by Michael Shea
Though the squotobes’ answering chorus was derisive and sceptical, it horrified Hex to detect in them a hideous, unearthly interest—an unholy lust to hear—which the old man had kindled in them, and which showed itself in ever hotter flashes of orange-and-amber light coruscating across their eyes.
“Bah! Impossible! Out with this tale!”
“Unheard of! Let us hear it at once!”
“Immediately! Out with this supposedly genuine tale.”
Stilth seemed to waver, grew decisive: “Absolutely not! You called me a windbag. I’m not about to give you the choicest story unearthed this century in return for that.”
Now the squotobes’ eyes blazed outright. “Insulted you? Bah! I spit on the idea—PTAH! You’re clamming up because there’s no such story!”
“Slove’s Enthralment—rubbish! You won’t tell it because you can’t!”
“What?” Stilth roared, towering in his stirrups. “Because I can’t? Can I not indeed, you presumptuous neuters! By Plague and Flame and the Dry Rot, you’ll have it then! Prepare to hear, and be humbled, you who have begged your own ensorcelment.”
The wiry, pale bodies, falling in step again with the azle, gave an unmistakable shiver of delight, understanding that Stilth was now composing himself to proceed with the story. The dreadful saurian power of that suppressed convulsion awed Hex, renewing his sense of how powerfully the love of narrative gripped these squotobes’ explosive hearts. He would not wish himself to have to tickle, with his spoken words, such volcanic sensibilities. Stilth cleared his throat with quiet ceremony, and Hex cast a look around. The harbour shone like stitchery on the ocean’s absolute black. Would he ever take ship from there, bound back to Glorak with the harvest of his venture? The moon now gave some feature to the peaks they climbed to—they were much nearer too, of course.
“When Slove the Canny was twenty-four,” Stilth—not unmelodiously—announced, “he had achieved wealth. In that year of his age, all four of the Season Kings had received him in their halls,”—his voice, indeed, had a brimming mellowness. “And all four of them sent him out again laden with gifts.
“In the lying bouts of Spring’s court, he won five hundred years from Life. From Summer, for the obscenities he intoned before that full-fleshed assembly, he received nine chests of breeding-gold, which had moreover the faculty of shrivelling the hand of any but its rightful possessor.
“In Fall’s court, Slove pitted his curses against those of Druil Faff, who was a great master of the form.” Here Hex saw the squotobe nearest him nod and murmur with the absent corroboration a rapt reader gives his page. “Here Slove won his fleet of triremes, and his seven hundred swords. With Winter he had especial luck. His dirges pleased Wolf, Winter’s chamberlain. Wolf plied an interceding tongue anent his Majesty’s icy ear, and Slave was given the power to change his shape.
“Now when Slove the Canny had these things, he sought out a removed place, and bethought himself. And he considered that, as he stood now before his twenty-fifth year, it was time to begin his work in the world.
“Therefore, Slove hung in doorways as a spider, and outside eaves as an owl, and heard what people said of the world at large, and in particular, what wits were held formidable, such that honour and glory lay in confounding and defeating them. Slove heard, and weighed, at length. At first, he thought to challenge Avatar the Confounder, and tourney with him in the Lists of Ancient Dreams.” (Hex saw his squotobe shake his head with absent protest.) “But at length, he determined that he would go seek out the renowned squotobes in the dead city of Kurl, and enthrall them with a tale. For, though this was a thing attempted by the best, the attempt had unfailingly ended their lives, and remained to that day unaccomplished.
“First, to prepare his spirit for this contest, Slove the Canny went into the hills, and lived there for a full springtime in the form of a snake. At the summer solstice he was ready, and had made a tale of marvellous simplicity, with marvellous power to enthrall withal. Ye gods! I have made a terrible mistake!”
The squotobes’ bodies were wrenched in unison, as if they had been seized in their vitals. “Fool! What did you say wrong?” wailed the lead one.
“Everything! I’ve put it all in the wrong style! So remote, and uninvolved! It hit me as I was telling about the months he spent as a snake.” Stilth slouched in his saddle to do a mocking version of himself: “ ‘… and had made a tale of marvellous simplicity…’ Bah! It’s wrong, I tell you! What was the quality of those spring days? What were Slove’s feelings? Where is the man in all this? We don’t want just an empty cipher! I must start over and tell it right!”
This made the squotobes epileptic with rage and pain. They fairly danced. Their eyes blazed fever-orange. Almost, Hex felt pity to see their loathsome bodies so racked.
“No no no!” they howled as one.
“We hate starting over! It’s horrible form!”
“We can’t stand starting over! It’s deadly boring!”
“Don’t start over! Go on, go on, go on!”
“Be reasonable. I must at least tell over his months as a snake. Think of the charm of that time, the peace Slave enjoyed, the obscure unity with the sunny grass…”
“No! Never!/Absolutely not!/It’s not done!” they simultaneously shouted.
“Very well,” the old man said stiffly. “But from this point on I will insist on an appropriate style.” The squotobes assented. Still tremulous with their late upset, they resettled to a hearkening stoop as they paced alongside Hamandra. Stilth cleared his throat.
“Having at last his tale, his magical germ of art which he meant to sow in the squotobes’ ears and reap glory from—having his tale, I say, Slove the Canny took ship and set his sails for Kurl.
“Surely these ships, Slove considered, were the very image and emblem of his inmost longings: they swiftly rode the waves, as did his hopes, and they were as trim and crafted to their purpose as was his own young frame. Through the long voyage Slove stood in the bow of his trireme, the wind bathing him, taunting him, even as his ambition softly taunted his deepest desires.”
The squotobe nearest Hex groaned softly and gnashed its teeth. Stilth paused at the sound, then continued calmly:
“Slove reflected on this wind that bathed him. Somehow, through all the world’s changes the wind, an endlessly changing thing—indeed, the very symbol of change! —remained the same! And that, in a sense, this was the very same wind that had bathed him through the long days he had lived as a snake. And as he stood there in the bow, those recent days returned to him in a rush. As in a dream, he relived the long, sliding tickle of the grass-shafts against his scales, the tactful touch of the earth against his segmented underside, the peaceful, obscure unity with the sunny meadow that he had enjoyed. And now, he told himself, this same wind was bearing him to his destiny, wafting him to—”
A snarl of anguish burst from the jaws of the lead squotobe.
“Stop! Cease! This cannot go on!”
“Yes! Stop at once! That’s a dreadful style!”
“Damn you then,” Stilth roared, “that’s my limit of abuse! You’ll hear no more from me!”
The creatures commenced a shuddering dance that appalled the pair flanking the azle. The light of the squotobes’ eyes was so intense Hex saw it actually sweep his body, like light from a crazily agitated torch.
“S’Death! Calm yourselves!” Stilth cried in consternation. “I did not guess you were so high-strung. Come come! I won’t be petty, since it affects you so! I’ll tell you the rest. To accommodate your rustic ears, I’ll abandon the lyric style. But my first style was unacceptable. I won’t return to it. In a spirit of compromise, I’ll give you the rest of the story in the original scansion, as it appears in the Quimble Bay parchments. Do you accept this?”
The squotobes groaned with relief.
“Willingly!”
“Absolutely!”
“Get on with it!”
“Very well then. It runs
as follows. Though of course I must first point out that it is Beedle’s recension I am following here. I’m aware that in the late controversy the Quimble Cabal—as they are rightly named!—have done their scurrilous utmost to discredit Beedle’s scholarship. But I for one, sirs, will never prefer such mincing, tintinnabulous doggerel as they provide for an alternative, the work of their much-trumpeted Haggle, a scholar of dubious genius. I know that you will join me in deeming Beedle’s manly, strophic measure to be a seemlier mode for so—”
“Beedle is fine! Fine! Proceed!”
“Get on with it!”
“Beedle will do splendidly!”
Stilth nodded, then bethought himself anew: “There is of course Thurrible’s recension, which is not utterly devoid of—”
But the squotobes’ paroxysms now compelled compliance. The creatures seemed endlessly irascible, knowing no relaxation of spirit, each succeeding fit keener, more excruciating for them than the last. For the pilgrims the delirious play of their eye light was a frightening, almost palpable caress, a premonition of explosion. Stilth cleared his throat. As befitted epic verse, a certain pomp entered his posture as he intoned:
“… Thus his keels cut the brinehills
his course to Kurl bore him,
til he crossed the foam border
where the combers fall broken,
and the sea weaves white lace
on the skirts of wide lavas.
Then down on his foredoomed spot
where those firedrowned spires and domes
lie sepulchred in ash, there Slove
lightly sprang, and stood on Kurl,
on the pride of its towers, stone sunk,
entombed by the peaks’ streaming sap.
Yes, down leapt that slyboots
like a dancer so lightfoot
and, his mind on his quest,
he turned quick to his mission.
He crowed o’er that red waste—
his cries they went winging:
“Dire Squotobes, I challenge ye!
You will hearken till helpless
my harmonies hold ye
and like stone you stand,
stunned with my story!”
The first these boasts conjured was Quaspar—
dire Quaspar, the fiercest, the kingly!
Arch-wit of all Squotobe learned,
arbiter most quoted and loved—”
(Here Hex detected another absorbed nod of confirmation from the creature nearest him.)
“—yea, now skullish Quaspar darted
from a gully’s darkness, and gasped:
“Slight skulker, you lie!
Sleight-of-talk you lack for it!
You are tongueless to charm us!
Your tale will chain us!
All assemble! To the heights!
Of Seven Hairs Hill!”
Thus he squalled up his cousins,
and pale squotobes came scuttling,
pallid as fungi
they popped from each fissure
fleetfoot as rat hordes
they flowed from ravines—”
(Here Hex noted in his creature some vexation with the imagery, but saw this was completely outweighed by the squotobe’s raptness with the tale.)
weasely and white
they wormed out to witness,
and flocked up to Seven-Hairs
where, with flourish, and sprightly,
already young Slove…”
Stilth paused. He cleared his throat, and repeated:
“and flocked up to Seven-Hairs
where, with flourish, and sprightly,
already young Slove…”
The squotobes’ eyes, deliriously ablaze already, fixed the old man, malignant satellites to the bushy orb of Stilth’s puzzled face. He was pulling vexedly at his beard.
“Well I’ll be roasted,” he muttered amazedly. “This is not possible. I! I, who have won renown for tale-telling from Quimble Bay to Boguspolis!”
“What are you saying?” bleated the lead squotobe. An eerie plangency, as of exquisite pain scarcely contained, haunted its voice. “Get on with the story!”
“Impossible! I’ve forgotten the rest!”
“Forgotten?” Three inhuman voices chimed this, yet it was the merest wisp of sound, for something had broken in them.
Stilth exploded: “Yes, fools, forgotten! Do you know the word? I have forgotten a tale! Don’t stand there drooling! Help me remember!”
A spasm of hideous power shook the chest of the lead squotobe, and shuddered through the length of its body. Even as its legs gave way, the light of its eyes went dark. It lay in a heap, and its hands twitched once. The other two were already down.
“Are they dead?” Sarf asked quietly.
“Yes,” said Stilth, geeing Hamandra up. They put the three corpses behind them.
“How did they die?” Hex asked.
“Frustration. It’s said to be the only way you can kill a squotobe. You can try to enthrall them, of course, but they are such finicking critics that it’s doubted whether any tale can succeed in this. Many argue that the Itzpah tale itself is merely a myth they circulate to encourage people to try, because the squotobes love to hear a story before dining.”
21
The Voyage of the Necronauts
Just under the mountains’ highest crags, in a shadowed graining where two confluent tendons of lava met, the trio sat watching the dawn. Behind them, sprawled doglike on the ground, Hamandra snored. Farther back within the vale raggedly yawned the wide mouth of the shaft that plunged, half a mile straight down, to the Incubarium of Dazu-Zul.
As the dove-grey light fanned up from the horizon, the harbour’s torches paled, its maze of floats and piers grew more distinct against the silver of the water, and some unusual flux of business could be seen there: more than a dozen big ships docked as a group, disgorging cargo and men, and in their midst, a smattering of bigger shapes they appeared to manage and shepherd on to shore. The three men watched this, though they were more engrossed in their talk.
“How do you know,” Hex was asking, “that in this… grappling, they have no power to win?”
“But they have, of course!” Stilth snapped. “If your nerve fails, if they cow and terrify your will, if you can’t firmly tell them no, then they will take possession, and enter you, and warm their deathly chills in the glow of your life. And then too,”—his voice softened here, and he smiled—“there will perhaps be one you choose to admit, a ghost that perhaps you regret. I couldn’t say, not knowing whom you’ve killed.”
“I’m still not clear in this,” Sarf put in. “If we did take on, accept, one of our own, then we would be protected from the rest?”
“With certain qualifications, my friend. If you go in all bold and flagrant, you will be mobbed by all who see you. If you swim humbly through the waters, offering yourself to your own. Oddly, the man who’s never killed is most at risk. The murder latent in the souls of all but the rarest is a handle any ghost can take him by. But if you have dead, and take one on, it’s said to be protection, provided it is a spirit of weight and force enough to hold you against others.”
“And if we say them all nay?” Hex asked. “How soon then does the general host descend on us? For you’ve said there’s no set distance or direction we must swim—that we reach the Portal soon or late, so that we swim at large, and randomly?”
Stilth shrugged. “For all I know, you’ll swim till your own dead are denied, and the rest swarm you to death. I never heard Yana was promised to all—only that all who could swim long enough reached it. Were you never given to understand that this enterprise was in the nature of a gamble?”
A silence followed. Inch by inch, from the docks, the microscopic mob they idly watched began ascending the slope in a column.
“My dead aren’t many,” Hex muttered. “The ones I’m sure of were so… scattered. Could they all be here?”
Stilth smiled. “You haven’t gras
ped the situation. All the incubaria are gates to Yana. All, far from being closed boxes the wizards trapped their ectoplasms in, were the nature of antechambers to the ghostly realm, which is all one and unitary, a single zone such unanchored souls all share at large. This place’s space and time lie at an angle to the space and time we move through. When the governing magi who built these… adits to the dread motherlode died or abandoned their outposts, then whatever artificial, partial separateness these latter had enjoyed relapsed, and they entirely rejoined the ghostly main. I’ve chosen this place in particular because Dazu-Zul’s outer gate remains intact; the spirits can’t spill out and range abroad, so entry’s simplest here. But wherever you went in by, you’d have all your dead to deal with.”
Hex was trying to catch Sarf’s eye, and failing. Were his friend’s dead more numerous than his own? Strange not to know, yet trust the man as he did. And how many, exactly, were his own? Did all Polypolis lie to his charge? For he had aimed at and strenuously aided the entire killing, as a chosen mission. Would he be mobbed below? The far procession had now drained from the docks, and as it trickled up the slope its minute march proclaimed a striking energy, snaking smartly over the terrain.
“It’s a little army, nothing less,” Stilth mused, not unimpressed. Hex, feeling gloomier by the moment, wished they had an army of their own as escort on this last leg of their trek. What host of uncouth shapes, down in that pit behind him there, was he about to meet? What of dead he might not guess at? Had any in Poon’s whorehouse died when he had brought about its hideous transposition? What more likely?
His situation, which he saw now as some stranger’s, stupefied him. To have come so far, for so mad an aim! Unending life. The gluttonous mania of some twisted soul. Yet what else was left him to do, but go down that shaft, and through Dazu-Zul’s door?
This particular annexe to the ghostly realm had been, Stilth told them, designed as a vast lake, whereon chained demon giants floated. To this undying fodder the gibbering, faint-bodied hordes had flocked. Differences in the demons’ species had sorted the ghosts according to their tastes in feeding, and wizards seeking specific grades of spirit could take ship to the appropriate, bevampired colossus.
