by John Shirley
She had raised herself onto one elbow and was talking to Astriana in low, urgent tones. Astriana scarcely seemed to listen, but instead she busied herself rearranging the bedding so the shifter could lie more comfortably. And when the firbolg captain strode in, she turned on him. “Didn’t I ask you to take care of them? Bring her to my guardroom, to my couch. Give her water mixed with wine.”
“Lady, she’s a—”
“Do not tell me what she is.”
Later, she brought Haggar to a square stone chamber cut into the rock. Food and water had been laid on an iron table—roast capon, pepper sauce, and bread. They sat on iron stools. “To answer your question, I promised I would fill his boots with gold.”
“And her?”
“An invitation to the court of the Summer Queen at Senaliesse. The thanks of her majesty. You see,” she said, biting into a bone, “you work for cheap.”
“I would not have come here for those things.”
“Don’t I know.” And then after a pause: “Themiranth was a fool, but at least he did me this favor. No one will question my decision to bring druids from the mortal realm. The tiefling. You and the shifter. You have a toughness that the eladrin have lost, most of us.”
She grimaced, then continued. “Themiranth said it was because I was most at home with outcasts and degenerates. Creatures more like animals. He said it was because none of my own kind would look at me. Because of my ugliness.”
He said nothing, even though he imagined this confession cost her a great deal. He watched her take a gulp of water from a crystal cup. At first he’d been embarrassed to eat with her, until he’d noticed how messy she was, licking her fingers, wiping her mouth on her hand. She’d changed into new clothes, soldier’s garb that was heavier and plainer than the thin silks she’d worn in Cendriane.
“Eat,” she said. “You’ve had nothing, and you need your strength.”
The chamber was lit with magical lights that burned with a hard, white flame. They were set in niches in the walls. Haggar leaned forward on his stool and stuck his spoon into a wooden trencher: grilled mushrooms in black sauce. “What do you know of the Far Realm?” she asked. “The Living Gate, that’s where it leads. No—‘leads’ is not the word I want.”
When he didn’t reply, she frowned. “I told you how to find the texts to study these things. Months ago—years ago, for you. Because I knew I wanted you for this. So try and talk to me. Try to be cleverer than you are. The Far Realm is outside of time and space—”
Haggar interrupted. “The words we use to describe these things, we can’t control them.”
Astriana looked at him, grease on her lower lip. “So?”
“So—nothing. This is what I took from what little I read, before I forced myself to stop: It makes us vulnerable to think about these things. Outside time and space—what does that mean? Objects and creatures that we can’t perceive. What we see is only indirectly, by its effect upon our minds. And this is corruption. Creatures from this world that are pulled from their true nature and transformed.”
Astriana stared at him, chewing slowly. “That razorclaw shifter,” she said. “Hazel is her name. She told me Themiranth and the others are still alive down there. Mind slaves. Servitors of something called an aboleth.”
“Did she see it? How does she know its name?”
She laughed. “I told her.” Then after a moment: “The important thing is sealing the gate. These creatures, the aboleths, mind flayers, and their slaves. They will try to prevent us.”
She kept chewing, pointing at him with her chicken bone. “You and me.”
And when he said nothing, she paused, looked down. “Because you promised.”
He cleared his throat. “When we have done with this, I won’t be content with any knowledge or money or the worthless thanks of some archfey. The Far Realm is not the only thing that can’t be thought of without damaging ourselves.”
“So,” she said, “you’re saying we can use stupidity to protect ourselves. I suppose it’s not so bad, to cultivate the minds of animals.”
“It’s what our people do,” he said, not meaning orcs or eladrin, but followers of druidic knowledge from the dawn of time, before the higher races had evolved.
She smiled. The scar across her lips was livid in the dim light. “That’s a lofty reason to have no plan at all. Eat,” she said.
He chose a leg from the bowl of capon parts and brought it to his mouth, wondering if she could see his heavy teeth, the long tearing incisors, and if so, whether she’d grown accustomed to them. “Lord Themiranth and the others, I’m sure they were full of plans. Scholars of the Far Realm. Mind slaves now. After this, we won’t think or talk when we fight against these creatures. Instinct only. Kick me if I have a thought.” He stuck the leg bone in his mouth and snapped it off.
“I’ll kick you anyway,” she said.
After they finished, she left him for a few hours to rest. In a lighted alcove off the main chamber, he found a mirror set into the wall. Standing before it, he unbuttoned the remnants of his father’s shirt and slipped it off, put it aside. He poured water from a crystal ewer over a linen towel and used it to clean his body, wipe away the mud that obscured the tattoos on his hairy arms and chest.
Like all shapeshifters, he wore only leather, which absorbed into his skin during the transformation, as did the bone of his totem stick. Doubtless Astriana at that moment was dressing herself in armor, choosing her swords and knives and spears, but he couldn’t use any of that. Instead he stared at himself in the dim glass, while in his mind he allowed himself to climb the curving helixes of evolution away from his finished nature. These were the shapes he would take with him on this adventure, and he moved through them in the new air of the Feywild, to see if anything was different in this world.
He watched his jaw lengthen, and his neck grow thick and slope down toward his shoulders, which swelled first and then receded as he sank down to all fours—a wolf, the totem of his clan. It was his most comfortable shape, but he didn’t stop there. Instead he increased the pace of transformation, while in his mind he scampered up the ladders: the coarse hair thickened on his forearms turned into plumage, while at the same time a web of skin stretched from his shoulders to his wrists, and his jaw turned cruel and sharp. And then his feathers receded into patterned, oily skin, and the scales spread from his nose as his legs fused together and his arms clung to his sides, and he dropped down before the mirror in a coiling heap.
But he was curled up asleep in his wolf’s shape when she returned. She was dressed in the war garb of a shiere knight in the Summer Court of Queen Tiandra, an armor of overlapping scales, alternating blue and green, made from carapaces of insects, lighter and tougher than steel, and so tight and fine that they covered her body like a second skin. Her hair was brushed back from her face and held at her nape with a silver ring. She wore ridged gauntlets of silver mail and carried a mace in her left hand, while a long scimitar hung at her waist. In the dark alcove, her body seemed to glow.
“Time to move,” she said, and he got to his feet and stretched, lowering his shoulders, letting his tongue loll out between his teeth.
He followed her through the studded door and down through a warren of deserted ward rooms and low-ceilinged corridors. In ordinary times, this place was full of life, the borderland between the Feydark and the surface world, where the fomorians of Harrowhame and the eladrin rangers of the woods maintained a queasy peace. This nest of warriors was now empty, but when Haggar and Astriana reached the endless staircases that led deeper into the guts of the rock, they found them packed with refugees, goblins and cyclopses and fomorians all crowding toward the surface, their possessions on their backs. And in their terror, all these pale citizens of the underworld had forgotten their differences, though they came from a dozen clans and races and competing powers. They waited in long lines so that they could pile on upward toward the sunlight, which many of them had never seen.
Hunchback
ed women with bloated hands and faces carried their children on their backs, and they shrank against the damp, black walls to allow Haggar and Astriana to pass, the last guardians of the Living Gate. Occasionally they touched their foreheads or else murmured some vestigial token of respect before they bent to their burdens again and resumed their place in line. Now the wolf bounded ahead to clear the path, the long staircase that was lit not by torches or burning chemicals, but by glowing crystals in the rock, which shone blue and green and purple as they climbed down.
In time they came to Harrowhame itself, the dismal fortress of King Bronnor, built in an enormous cavern of quarried salt. They came out suddenly onto the salt floor, where the stone and iron ramparts rose above them. Here at least were light and soldiers also, the myrmidons of the fomorian king. From the citadel came the sounds of drumbeats and brazen trumpets, which echoed from the crystal walls. But the gates were closed, and there was no guard to acknowledge them as they crossed the salt plain under the battlements to continue their descent.
They entered a gigantic fissure in the rock, where the ground sloped downward. And here the world changed. Above, nearer the surface, the rock was cut, quarried, and dead. Here it was still alive, growing in a landscape as varied as any forest or mountainside. They climbed down through glowing forests of mushrooms. Animals lived here, snakes and lizards and rodents of all kinds, but also tiny deer and goats perched upon the rocks, and even a few pale birds. Flowering vines and creepers covered the distant walls, and hung from the stalactites above their heads. The air was lighter, richer here, and breezes wafted through the endless caverns, as if freshened from below.
The wolf loped ahead. They came to the shore of a black river and climbed the shattered rocks beside the waterfall. Haggar picked his way over the stones and paused at the first man-made structure he had seen in hours, a guard house built from black cubes of pumice stone, and lit with a guttering lantern. “Who is there?” Astriana called.
Her armor glimmered green and blue in the darkness, and she raised her silver mace. A man staggered out the open door, a firbolg warrior dressed in leather armor, carrying his sword. “You’re here,” he said. “Thank the gods. I’ve stayed alone for hours, waiting for them to come back. They’ve taken all my men,” he added, pointing with his sword to a hole in the rock wall, lit from within by an unearthly mix of colors.
“Who?”
“Themiranth and the others. What’s left of them.”
He was a big man. Sweat glistened on his pale skin. Raising his sword, making a gesture toward the depths, he said, “I was about to try again, one last time. There are too many of them if they come out in the open. But we can fight them in the tunnels, one by one.”
“What’s your name?” said Astriana.
“Garm, my lady.”
“You’re a brave man. Let’s go down.”
Finally they reached the environs of the Living Gate, that tiny portal to the Far Realm. Its diameter could be measured in eyelashes, yet even so, the substance that seeped through, less matter than deranged ideas, could poison a whole world. Once inside the last cave, they could see how all its surfaces were covered with a glistening slime, which sucked at their feet and made it hard to move. Yet it provided light for them; a mile and a half in, they saw the first of the aboleth’s servitors, the eladrin guardians it had bent to its will. One of them appeared suddenly, standing up out of the shin-deep slime, where he had been lying full-length.
“Themiranth,” Astriana breathed.
His skin was transparent now, his organs and blood vessels mottled and visible, his staring eyes wide with unthinking malice. He wore no clothes, carried no weapons, but waded toward them with his arms stretched out, trying to wrap Astriana in his slimy grasp. She hacked at him with her mace, which made a wet, squelching sound as it sunk into his flesh; Haggar didn’t watch. He had already begun his transformation, climbing down the curving ladder in his mind, until his body had lengthened many times, his arms and legs had disappeared, and he was slithering through the mucus-covered rocks, past Themiranth and past the other eladrin servitors deeper down in the hole; they couldn’t see him.
As he passed, he battered at their ankles with his blunt nose; one he knocked from his feet and encircled with his tail as he pulled himself along, crushing out of him or her what still passed for life. He let go, then swam down to where the slime was thickest, submerged in a paste or stew of half-dissolved corpses, until he found a corridor that was entirely packed with mucus, and he slithered through.
Just for a moment he saw the aboleth, with its wings and flanges and tentacles, its three red eyes in a vertical line; he closed his own eyes, closed his ears, let his mind sink down into its tiniest reptilian confinement, locked inside his flat little skull as if inside a prison made of bone, in the center of which he rolled his consciousness into a ball, as a prisoner might sit and hug himself on the floor of his cell, turning his face inward partly from despair, partly as a way to conserve his strength.
On the long dull surface of his body, along the smooth patterned skin of the great snake, he allowed himself to feel no sensation as he burrowed through the slime into the belly of the great beast, a belly that absorbed him as it allowed him to pass, and sucked him down into a landscape of inflamed viscera, mucus-encrusted tunnels full of parasites.
Even with his mind shut down, and sunk into his body as far as he could permit it without letting go of the synapses and ganglia that controlled his breathing and his heart, still he caught a vague impression of Astriana and Garm up to their knees in effluence, hacking and pounding at these parasites as they tried to drag them down.
Then Haggar was past them, and had slipped down through the submerged tunnels yet again, and glimpsed again the red eyes of the aboleth, and sunk through the membrane of its body once more.
In the heart’s core of the monster he discovered the Living Gate, the portal to the Far Realm. Contagion seeped from it, a tiny valve of puckered flesh in the contracting wall. Another monster lurked there, floating in a substance that was neither solid nor liquid nor gas, a creature made of writhing tentacles around a single flaming eye. Daggerlike teeth circled its maw, and Haggar found himself drifting toward it in his natural form, naked save for his totem stick, which protruded from the bone of his forearm. It was as if this creature could perceive his true essence after all, and limit him to his weakest shape.
Gouts of fire burst from the monster’s eye. But Haggar had his totem stick, and with it he began to stir the substance of the deep, grunting, muffled evocations as he did so, until the matrix that surrounded him began to move, assume a shape like a vortex or tornado; he was controlling it, as he would a cloud or a storm in his own world. The streamers of fire circled back, catching the monster in a net of its own flame, while at the same time the living gate spread open, and a single purple tentacle stretched through it. This was the mind flayer, the last of the horrors that awaited him here, and it searched for him diligently, penetrating through the ooze, grasping for his head. Doubtless just beyond the gate was the encrustation of the elder brain that was commanding this entire web of illusion and deceit.
He kicked away and it grabbed hold of him. Inside the prison of his mind, a long hand snaked through the bars, because he was afraid. He sat naked, curled up in the center of his cell, allowing the hand of the mind flayer to palpate his skull, searching for a place to enter. He felt a rush of emotion and sensation surge up through him, and his mind was full of pictures of the past and present and the future: his mother standing by the fire outside her cottage in the woods; the pool in the abandoned city on the mountainside, and Astriana standing in it with the water around her knees; Astriana with her mace held high, breaking the flesh of the slime-covered servitors, while he failed here, allowed the mind flayer to take him and destroy him, destroy them all.
But then with a last effort of his reptile will, he choked all that away, constricted the mental passages it flowed through, that sequence of images,
and his mind went dark. Those processes of the brain and heart were what the creature fed on, and Haggar felt its grip loosen, its probing tentacle release its hold. Instead of struggling, he forced himself to relax, to welcome the touch of the jailer’s hand upon his face. And the more he welcomed it, the more he emptied his mind of panic and regret, the weaker and less sure was its grasp, while at the same time he was climbing downward into a new reality, in which he stood in his wolf’s form at the edge of a rocky, fetid pool under a blood red sky. Some kind of twisting mollusk was down there, a cephalopod with purple tentacles, and he stretched out his claws and ripped along its flabby, unprotected head.
He heard a scream, all the more horrifying for being silent and internal. He pulled back his paw. And then he found himself floating up through the spheres of illusion: the Living Gate with his naked body suspended underneath, watching the arm of the mind flayer suddenly retract and disappear, and the gate pucker closed. At that moment, as if the source of contagion was necessary for its life, the beholder shut its awful eye. And again at that same moment, Haggar found himself lying on his side among the mucus-covered rocks, his fur matted and greasy, his body aching and hurt. He licked at the air, and then after several panting breaths he stumbled to his four feet, and climbed and scratched his way out of the tunnel, to where Astriana sat among the stones, her armor coated with a glowing slime, her mace broken, her scimitar in her hand. Haggar crawled past Garm, the firbolg soldier, floating on his back, his face contorted in the rictus of death.
And then Astriana put her hand out and Haggar crawled under it, and allowed her to rub the soft fur of his forehead and around his ears. His tongue lolled out, and he licked her hands. She bent over him to put his face against her face, while he—not because he thought it was a good strategy, but out of simple exhaustion—allowed himself to find his natural shape again. His heavy head fell into her lap. She took her fingers from his hair, rolled him aside, and stood up hurriedly.
