The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

by Kij Johnson

  On the second day, Vellitt found herself near the cavern of Flame itself—she could hear a rich, roaring crackling and see light of an inconstant bloody red flickering at the far end of a tunnel—but she was turned aside by a severe-looking man with a great forked red beard, who had something of grandness in his manner and bore beaded crimson gloves upon his hands. He turned away, but she laid her hand on his arm and spoke. “Please. I am seeking two people, a dreamer from the waking world, and one of our own, a young woman of Ulthar. Can you at least tell me whether they passed this way?” The priest looked at her hand as though deciding whether to push it off, but said nothing, and she persisted: “I have a duty to retrieve my charge, Clarie Jurat. I cannot go without knowing whether she has passed through here.”

  She thought he gave a start at the name, but he replied only, “I will tell you this: no one of the temple has opened the Gate, not in many years.”

  She was not unaccustomed to rhetorical evasions, so she asked a little tartly, “Then, has anyone else?”

  But the man said only, “This part of the temple is forbidden,” and left her. She watched his back, receding, rigid with disapproval. She toyed with the notion of defying him—and indeed, the young woman she had been might have done so, trusting she would not be caught; at the worst, that the priests would not kill her—but she was older and could no longer trust to youth or beauty to get her out of trouble. And wiser: there was no point to such defiance.

  She turned at random down another corridor and found herself in a high-ceilinged chamber filled with a gentle white light. The lovely cavern had all the appearance of a secret garden, for on its floor were green mosses like grass, spangled with colonies of mold like starry white flowers; it was these that illuminated the space. Tall, heavy-stiped fungoids trailed hyphae, elegant as willow wands, and beneath them were things that looked like bright-leafed aloes, though as she approached she saw that they were fungi, as well. The scent reminded her of lilies but was not; the slight strangeness was not unpleasant.

  A broad pillar rose at the cavern’s center, pierced with a gate caked so thickly with lichens that she could not identify the figures wrought into the iron, except that they were creatures. Inside the pillar was a staircase of white stone, circling upward into shadow. The cat (which had accompanied her for its own inscrutable reasons) loped forward, squeezed through a gap in the gate, and trotted up the stairs. Vellitt placed her hand on the iron, but the metal burned as though it had been newly pulled from a fire, and she stepped back quickly.

  She was returning to her rooms when a purple-robed boy found her, panting like a dog in summertime from running. “Nasht has called for you,” he gasped, and all but dragged her by the hand. She followed him, wondering whether she was to be cast from the temple at last. The boy trotted ahead, looking back every few feet, but she refused to rush. She would not meet the high priest Nasht sweaty and breathless.

  They came to tall doors of white wood bound in iron. The boy effaced himself; wordlessly, the two acolytes standing sentry opened the doors. She stepped forward and found herself in a long, narrow audience room, lined with statues of unsettling configuration and dimly illuminated by sconced torches burning every shade of red: crimson, scarlet, and carmine. Raised on a many-stepped dais of polished basalt at the room’s far end were two seats as grand as thrones, and over each hung an immense boulder of black granite that glittered with reflected flames. The left-hand seat was empty, but a black-bearded man sat on the other, wearing heavy robes of indigo and violet, and bearing on his head a pshent studded with opals. She stepped forward.

  The High Priest looked down at her and exclaimed, “Veline!” in a voice that summoned a memory she could not quite grasp.

  She looked curiously up at him. “Not for many years. I am Vellitt Boe of Ulthar. I come for news of Clarie Jurat, and to retrieve her if I can.”

  The man stood, so that his pshent brushed the overhanging boulder. Something in the manner of his movement plucked at that lost memory.

  “Reon?” she said, hesitantly.

  * * *

  Recognition changed things. The High Priest Nasht, who once had been Reon Atescre, led her from the red-lit audience room through a door behind the thrones to a small windowless cave, stone-walled, low-ceilinged, and furnished with surprising attention to comfort. Spots of light from the many pierced-work lanterns spangled across the plush wall tapestries, the heavy padded furniture, and the shelves stacked with novels and pastoral poetry: a room at odds with the severity of the temple as a whole.

  He poured glasses of the sweet green wine of Hap, and they sat looking at one another for a moment. Reon Atescre of Sona Nyl had been slim and laughing-eyed, a lighthearted, fearless man who was not attracted to women, seeing her for what she was and not what he wanted her to be, and therefore an easy companion to her. They had parted ways in the infamous demon-city Thalarion for no reason but the restlessness that is in the young; in all the years since, she had heard nothing of how he fared. Now, so changed, and heavier altogether: his face nearly hidden behind his black, spade-shaped beard, so that she could not see his mobile mouth. His light step had turned ponderous with weight and authority. Even his voice seemed heavier, its humor silted away.

  “I have had a vision, but first I’ll answer the question you’ve been asking for two days. The dreamer Stephan Heller came to the temple of Flame three days ago at dusk, with a woman of our world, though he did not give her name.”

  She came to her feet. “So I was hours behind them! You—”

  But Nasht interrupted, “Listen,” and in a more natural voice, added, “I see you are still as unrestrained as ever you were, Veline. Leaving our lands is always easy for dreamers—just wake up—but Stephan Heller wanted his companion to cross. He did have one of the silver keys that opens the Upper Gate; yet it is ordained that people of the Six Kingdoms may not pass into the waking world, so we barred their passage. That night, he prayed to the Flame, and shortly after, my fellow priest Kaman-Thah had a vision. It was an edict from an Elder One, demanding that she be allowed to pass. So we stepped aside.”

  Vellitt turned from her pacing. “I could have overtaken them! You’ve wasted days, Reon.”

  “Sit down, Veline. You’re giving me a headache,” Nasht said, sounding in that moment so like the friend of her youth that she did so, leaving unspoken all the hot words that warmed her mouth. “We didn’t know she was followed, but we couldn’t have refused the edict in any case. But this afternoon, the Flame spoke to me. It was a single piece of information only, like a thunderclap in my mind: that Clarie Jurat is scion of a god.”

  Vellitt shook her head. “No. Her father is a burgher of Ulthar. She was born there. He owns shares in the Woolmarket.”

  Nasht said musingly, “Actually, I should have guessed when I saw her—she has the look of the people of Leng.”

  “Hypothetical Leng . . .” Vellitt had grown up on stories of that icy and inhumane plateau bounded to the north by the great mountain Kadath, where the gods half-slept in blind, muttering madness beneath the malicious eyes of their divine keepers.

  “Not hypothetical,” he said. “I’ve been there.”

  “It’s impossible.”

  He shook his head. “Some of the stories we learned as children are true. At times, a god escapes from Kadath, takes human form, and lives in Leng; and for a while he thinks a little as we do: he loves, he dreams, he drinks wine and laughs at jokes and picks fights in taverns. Clarie Jurat’s grandfather escaped and fell in love with a local woman. After a year or two he returned to Kadath—”

  “Leaving her alone,” Vellitt said.

  “Not by choice, I expect. There’s no real escape from Kadath, even for the gods. Their keepers find them and drag them back and they become mad and forgetful again, though they dimly recall their lost loves, and if they can, they watch over their descendants. No: he was taken back to Kadath. But. His lady had a daughter who married an Ulthar burgher.”

 
Vellitt took a breath. “And their daughter is Clarie Jurat.”

  “Their daughter is Clarie Jurat,” Nasht assented. “That god was a jealous protector of his daughter until she died. It will not be different for Clarie.”

  “So was it her grandfather that commanded her passage?”

  Nasht frowned. “No, which troubles me. It can’t have been him. I know the wheres and wherefores of many gods. The Elder One that is Clarie Jurat’s grandfather sleeps on his silk-draped couch on Kadath, and he has slept like that, deranged and dreaming, for many years.”

  Vellitt rubbed her eyes. “But why would another god care?”

  “Motives and motives. Love; hate. What if Clarie Jurat’s loving grandfather awakens and finds her gone out of this world? Rage, vengeance, reprisal and annihilation. I think that is the intention of the god that sent the vision.”

  “Ulthar.” Of course.

  The gods of the dream-realms were vicious, angry, and small. History was filled with tales of their irrational rages and disproportionate vengeances, of cities buried in poisonous ash, of garden-lands laid waste. Annihilation. In her far-travelling days, she had walked in god-blasted wastelands. There were so many of them: a transparent plain that was a city buried in glass, the buildings intact and perfectly visible beneath her feet, but the bodies gone except for stained hollows in their shapes. An obsidian cliff a mile high where there had been farmland and fishing villages a scarce year before. Gardens turned to ash and poison, islands sunk. Once, she had found a child’s gold anklet, half-melted and still encircling a small, charred bone. There had been a charm hanging from the ring: Let no thing harm me. I am Ase Iquen. Everywhere, signs of the gods and their intemperate, petty angers.

  Ulthar’s narrow streets and pretty squares, its houses and halls and temples: all blasted by god-fire and melted to slag, to glass; and its people—the students and wool merchants, the grocers and stable masters and dressmakers and every one of them—all food for carrion beasts and ghouls. The grandfather of Clarie Jurat would do it, because it is what gods did: destroy things and people. She set down her glass carefully with fingers grown nerveless.

  Nasht had been silent, watching her expressions; now he spoke. “Ulthar and more. Nir and Hatheg, and all the plains of the River Skai, even. Who knows why we were ordered to let her pass? Perhaps the Old Ones play latrunculi, and Clarie Jurat is a coin in their game, and Ulthar an incidental loss. Or perhaps Ulthar and the rest are just ants under the feet of fighting drunkards. Or perhaps a hate-filled god revels in destruction and pain, and causes it however he may. Veline, I’ve served them for twenty years, and I know little more than you.”

  She said with a tight laugh, “I was taught to worship them, but how can I? How can any reasonable person? Mathematics does no harm, at least.”

  “Worship? Is that what we do?” Nasht tipped his glass, watching the lamplight spangle through the wine. “We placate them, that’s all.”

  “All right.” Vellitt heard the tremble in her voice; and then, taking a breath, repeated more strongly, “All right. So. I must—must—go after her and bring her home. Reon, will you let me through the Upper Gate?”

  Nasht said slowly, “It’s forbidden, but I think I would anyway, if I had the means. I have not been able to leave Hatheg-Kla for all these years, but I remember the Skai plains—the fields. The sunlight on the wheat fields. How beautiful it all was. But only dreamers have keys, and not even all of them.”

  “But there are other keys?”

  There were, but only five of which Nasht had certain information: Stephan Heller’s, gone into the waking world. One, with a dreamer who had gone questing for the pillar-city Wenč of legend; it could not be guessed where he was, nor even whether he yet lived. Another, in the pocket of a waking-world man grown addicted to ghenty and wandering somewhere in the Six Kingdoms—unless he had pawned it for the silver. And one lost into remote Zobna, when the dreamer Adrian Fulton had been seized by shantak birds and carried screaming away.

  The fifth belonged to Randolph Carter, who reigned as king in distant Ilek-Vad. Vellitt nearly dropped her glass.

  “Carter?”

  Nasht paused at her tone. “You know him?”

  “I did,” and she started laughing, surprising them both. “He is a king now? Of course, he would be. Always a man with ambition— We travelled together, after you and I parted.”

  Nasht tipped his head with such a quizzical expression that she added dryly, “Yes, Reon, just like that.”

  “Is that a problem?” he asked. “Love complicates everything.”

  She said only, “For my part, no. Ulthar’s need would outweigh all the rest, anyway. But I haven’t seen him for thirty years—surely it’s all water long lost to the sea. There are no other routes?”

  “Undoubtedly there are, but I do not know them. I’m sure they are all of them very dangerous.”

  “Ilek-Vad.” Vellitt tipped her head, listening to the crackling behind her ears. “That is—very far. Months. And Carter. But there’s no choice, is there? I’ll leave at dawn.”

  * * *

  Nasht arranged for meats and breads to be prepared for her journey, sighing a little as he did so. “I wish . . . but I’ve gotten heavy and slow,” he said, slapping his belly with a rueful laugh that was filled with the Reon Atescre that was. “I don’t know how you’ve stayed in the same place for so long without growing mortar and moss as I have.”

  It was still early. There was much wine, though Vellitt had barely one glass to every three Nasht drank and he did not seem to grow drunk: perhaps in this manner he had found the means to reconcile his heart to his lot. They dined together, speaking as friends do, long-parted and soon to part again: of their lives as they were now and as they had once been, sliding without pause between memory and present preoccupations. Reon Atescre had been an impish man, light-footed and merry, and Veline Boe scarcely less so, and they had laughed often then, and now as well, as they retraced their travels together through Sarrub and Parg, Zar and Xura.

  They spoke less of the subsequent years. After leaving Thalarion, Vellitt Boe had continued to far-travel and, meeting Randolph Carter some months later, journeyed with him for a time. A year or two after they had parted, she stopped her wayfaring, attended the University in Celephaïs, and accepted the Ulthar position: a sensible decision, undoubtedly the right one. But speaking with Reon, she realized suddenly that her life in Ulthar had never seemed quite real. She had not bothered to relocate from her chaotically gabled rooms on the Fellow’s Stair when nicer rooms became available, because it hadn’t mattered. She had pretended, and even convinced herself; but Ulthar had never been home.

  Nasht’s story was shorter than hers. After he and Vellitt had parted ways, he sailed to the harbor city of Lelag-Leng in the far north, ascending the plateau of frozen Leng itself. “The men of Leng were as beautiful as I’d been told.” He raised his glass in a silent toast, though his face was somber. “But it was cold and always dark, and the people were suspicious of me. They don’t see strangers often, except the gods who escape to walk among them, and I certainly wasn’t that. But there was one house that welcomed me and fed me. They drugged my food and tied me to a stone to be burnt alive as a sacrifice. The Elder Ones accepted me, but not as my hosts intended, maybe. I didn’t burn. When I awoke, I was lying on a slab of smoking basalt, my clothes charred to ash, and a ukase in my head like a pounding brown noise: Reon Atescre is dead. Nameless go to Hatheg-Kla and become Nasht. My host’s fields and flocks were just cinders and smoke. I have been here since.”

  “And your family?” Vellitt said softly. Reon had always been full of sunny stories about his brothers and sisters, and she had gone with him once to stay with his parents for the Turfilae festival, and they had welcomed them with laughter and home-brewed ale: a loving home, joy-filled.

  His voice was empty. “Reon Atescre is dead. I hope they forgot him quickly.” He did not smile again that night.

  Before they separate
d, he led her to the library and took from a shelf a small flat object of black enamel ornamented with silver bosses and black cabochons. He spoke prayers over it that caused shadows to move through his eyes, and left him looking pale and drawn behind his black beard. “There,” he said finally, and handed it to her. “If you make it to the waking world, this box will bring you to Clarie Jurat.”

  “What is it like, the waking world?” she said, turning the box over in her hands. It was surprisingly heavy, cool to the touch.

  The question had been idle, but he answered, in a voice of visions: “Filled with strangeness and monsters. The sky never ends. The night has a million million stars. There are no gods.” He had no recollection of his words a moment later, even when she repeated them to him; only laughed and said, “Well, you can tell me the truth of it all when you return.”

  “Of course,” she had said. “When I return.”

  Back in her guest-cave after their farewells, she wrote to Gnesa of everything she had learned and of her plans to go to Ilek-Vad and ask Carter for his key, return, and charm or force her way past the keepers of the cavern of Flame to the Upper Gate. She did not see the cat all that night, but when the first light through the high window was cold lavender with approaching dawn, it returned, its whiskers spattered with the gore of some tiny beast, and groomed itself contentedly, cleaning blood and flecks of matter from its face. So it also was stronger than it had been in Ulthar, lean with muscle though still small, and when it followed her onto the white ledge and back down the stairs, she did not seek to dissuade it.