by Kij Johnson
In the dim light, she could see him erasing the lines on her face, and with mingled regret and affectionate contempt she recognized his expression. He would try to kiss her—or rather, what he remembered of who she had been—in spite of the difference in their years, in spite of everything. And so she claimed a fatigue she was not feeling, and left him.
* * *
Randolph Carter did not accompany Vellitt Boe on her quest, and in this also he had changed, for in the youth they had shared, he would never have refused such an adventure. He stood upon the steps of the dark opaline palace of Ilek-Vad, dressed in royal robes of red couched in silver, and bearing on his head a great crown of gold, each point ornamented with an impaled silver mouse—for he was known as the Shrike to his enemies. In spite of his smooth face and unsilvered hair, he seemed old, older than she, gray and stern; and Vellitt mourned a little for the Randolph Carter she had known.
Here at last, after all these weary leagues, the small black cat of Ulthar left her: seated beside Carter, grand as a vizier in its blue collar. Vellitt knelt to stroke its head a last time, and murmured, “No ill thing, little one.” It was better this way. No cat would abide such a foul place as the under-realms, and in any case it could not survive, too small not to be eaten (if some worse fate did not befall it); but she nevertheless wept, and wiped the tears away secretly against the backs of her gloves.
Carter had assigned Vellitt an escort of twenty men. Riding-zebras and yaks awaited them at the base of the cliffs; and here also was a choice gift to be offered to the ghouls, a small ebon box sealed with red wax and etched with runes.
The nearest access to the under-realms was through a cavern deep in a silver mine in the mountains behind the town of Eight Peaks, known also as Octavia. The mine had been worked for centuries, despite the strange noises that rose regularly from the deepest shaft, until the day when a rock face had collapsed and ghouls of unusual enterprise had swarmed out across the mine. Many miners had died; others had been dragged screaming away, and no one knew what had happened to them. The mine had of course been abandoned, though with some regret, for the silver had been of high quality and did not oxidize.
The journey to the mine’s adit would be only a few days, depending on weather and the mutability of distance. According to an apologetic Carter, this was travelling light; still, Vellitt had a silk-batted tent to herself, instantly erected and warmed with braziers every time they stopped for more than a few moments. There was wine, and she could not help but smile a little when she was brought seasoned venison to eat, or cream whipped into a froth with honey and newfallen snow. The Carter she had known would have mocked such luxuries.
Nevertheless, it was an uncomfortable, not to say risky, journey. The mountains of Perinth were never safe, even in summer, even to those not hunted by the gods. The Octaver nights were very cold and in the mornings her feet made dark silhouettes on the rock as they melted the frost. At all hours, the party saw great shapes moving across the snowfields of distant glaciers, and heard shouts like thunder echoing and reëchoing across the cirques. The moon never once appeared, though there was no telling whether that was because it had been summoned to some god’s entertainment ten thousand leagues away, or whether it had been sent away, on purpose to leave these crags in darkness.
On the third afternoon of their travel, the troop’s captain stopped and established camp in a meadow beside an agate-graveled stream. They were within an hour of the adit, but it was too late in the day to find their way down through the mine to the ghouls’ entrance into the under-realms, let alone to do so, exit, and get far enough away from the mine to ensure safety from whatever monstrosities might seethe forth with night.
The captain was a canny, angry man with eyes the color and hardness of jade, and she knew that had she been twenty she would have found a way to kiss his mouth, to see whether she might soften those hard eyes a little. She kept her thoughts to herself. She knew his anger was not for her personally but for his task. Leaving an old woman alone here went very much against the grain.
Even alert as the captain was, the attack when it came caught the party unawares. The doubled guards were alert through the night as they watched for mountain beasts or even ghouls from the adit. But the threat came from the heights: monstrous shantak birds floating down silently on greasy wings. Vellitt was tucked into her silken-walled tent but too restless to sleep, checking and double-checking her pack. The air outside filled suddenly with shouts and screams, the sounds of huge claws sinking into flesh and armor, and the indescribable percussion of bodies being dropped onto rock from shattering heights.
She caught up her pack and tore free of her tent just as it was smashed flat by one of the shantak birds, so close that she smelled its carrion stench and felt the repulsive flick of an oily feather against her face as she stumbled away.
She had dropped over her head the pendant fire opal that granted the ability to see in darkness. It was clear that the situation was hopeless: the captain dead in pieces a yard from her feet (but his angry jade eyes still blinking up at the sky) and the rest of the troopers dead or dying, fighting against things they could not see. There was nothing she could do, and she had a task more important than the lives of these twenty, but still she wept as she left those terrible sights and sounds, running along the narrow path the captain had pointed out to her the night before.
She estimated that she had gone nearly half the distance when the sound behind her grew suddenly louder and more ominous. The shantak birds picking over the ruined remains of the camp had discovered her absence and rose on their clashing wings to find her; it was the flapping and their shrieks to one another that she heard. With her augmented sight, she saw the foremost of them outlined as a red throbbing shape high against the seething dark sky. Silver light was just brushing the mountaintops: whatever god had ordered this attack had also summoned the moon for the hunt, and she would not be free to move in total darkness for long.
That final hour was a game of cat and mouse, but cat and mouse with a score of flying cats the size of elephants and a single mouse with wits and broken cover. She hid beneath overhangs and behind rocks, moving only when they were flying away from her or out of sight, making it to the scree field leading to the adit just as the moon cleared the nearest mountain and shone directly down into the valley. Cold white light exposed the smooth cascade of rubble; she knew she was as obvious as a lone tree as she scrambled up the slope. Detecting her at last, the shantak birds folded their wings and dove. She ran under the mine’s low beam and turned to see them slam into the ground just outside. One ducked its head to reach in with its great beak, but the scree shifted, began to slide in a roaring avalanche, and it fell screaming to one side and vanished. Dust glowing white with moonlight rose and concealed the mountains and sky. Hovering shantak birds began to claw at the adit. Vellitt ran for her life.
This was the last time she saw the seething sky of the dream lands.
* * *
The mine’s main tunnel was smooth-floored and broad, a steady smooth decline. Ilek-Vad’s archives had included a crude map drawn by the only man to escape the disaster, and she followed its directions down tunnels and metal-runged ladders, past rock-falls and ancient, ruined equipment, along a seam of silver so shiningly pure that it looked as though it had already been smelted. The air grew warmer, and she discarded her coat. Except for one place where she heard water rushing at a great distance, the mine was utterly silent. She began to wonder whether the hole at the bottom of the deepest shaft had been resealed: a new worry.
But the hole was open, a ragged maw just tall enough for a single slumping ghoul. She bent down to pass through and found herself in a rough tunnel that opened into a series of caves, each larger than the one before, until she came into a cavern some hundreds of feet high and a mile or more across, and so long that she could not see to the far end.
She threaded her way through a badland stained with lichens that shone sometimes, blue or green o
r orange. The opalic vision gave everything a two-dimensional feel she remembered from certain late-summer afternoons in Evat, so long ago. Living creatures (or what passed for living) glowed slightly red—including the night-gaunts overhead, crisscrossing the cavern on silent batlike wings. She was still being hunted.
She paused only when fatigue left her clumsy and stumbling. The water in her canteen was lukewarm but sweet, and in its scarcity all the sweeter: not every stream would be water, and not even the water here was safe. Her pemmican would be her only food until she found ghouls, for, though she could not eat what they did, they might at least tell her which fungi or lichens were not poisonous.
Vellitt knew a little of ghouls’ ways. Some lived in cities taken by guile and violence from ghasts or even gugs; others lived in nomadic troops; and still others dwelt alone, though these last did not live long. Troops tended to rove near their exits into the worlds in which they fed; if she could find such a group that delighted in the graveyards of Earth, she might shorten her journey. In the meantime, she must avoid capture by the patrolling night gaunts—or any other beasts: there would be ghouls eager to betray her, ghasts, gugs, and yet other, unnamed monsters.
The cavern floor descended, opening out until she was in a space so big she could not imagine how the unsupported folds and heavy blocks of the roof did not collapse and bury them all: even more so when she realized that it was running with water, and that she was beneath the twilit sea she had traversed in the Medje Loïc. She had a flash of memory—red sails against a shifting blue sky, the smell of salt—but it seemed unreal, impossibly beautiful compared to these reeking caverns, the strange, sickening flatness of the opalic vision.
As she descended, the badlands turned to what she could only think of as woodlands, a thick forest of towering mushrooms with trunk-like stipes that dropped squirming spores the size of infant mice onto her head and arms. When the agaric forest thinned, she found herself in a maze of close-set stalagmites, where in a small clearing she saw the first sign of occupation: a seven-sided flat stone many feet across and no higher than her knee, thick with crimson lichens and tiny mushrooms like the lolling tongues of voles. She felt such a cold creeping horror in its proximity that she fell to her knees retching, and crawled, blind and sick, until she knew no more.
She awoke to the sound of feathers: an eyeless bird inches from her face, plucking one of the tight twists of her hair with its hooked beak. She flinched away with a cry, and at the sound it cupped its wings and rose silently. It was impossible to guess how much she had slept, but the retching sickness she had felt since approaching the seven-edged stone was gone. She ate and drank: food enough for five days if managed carefully, but only another two days of water. When she ran out, would she grow desperate enough to drink whatever flowed in the dark streams that crossed her path? And later: would she eat the tiny many-legged things that collected in damp places, or would she turn to larger prey?
Shouldering her pack, she walked until stalagmites gave way to another forest of tall sturdy-stiped mushrooms trailing shredded veils like willow wands. She began to forget that it had not always been like this. The cavern smelled of opened graves, of decaying fungi and carrion. The interminable sounds of moisture became a bland gray noise that faded in her ears until she heard only her own footsteps and the breath in her lungs.
She came to the abrupt end of the not-woodland and, startled, looked up from her feet across a marsh to a meadow of lichens furled like ferns into waist-high coils: everything dim but entirely crisp and depthless. Far to her left was a patch of the faintest possible blue light reflecting onto the swelling folds of the cavern’s ceiling: a ghast city, for ghouls disliked the smell of the lichens that cast that light, and gugs avoided all light. To her right the cavern wall rose to the ceiling in slopes and ledges, perfect ghoul terrain. She hoped the crags were not too steep; she had been a great climber in her youth, but that had been long ago.
The marsh’s surface was scummed over with a weed that seethed restlessly. She had no desire to touch that strange, writhing skin, and was contemplating her alternatives when she heard the meeping screams of a ghoul, too desperate or frightened for silence, and the splashing of bare paws racing through shallow water—and following, a low-pitched, horrid hooting. She had been carrying her machete; she limbered her wrist and stepped back into the cover of the mushroom-trees.
A young ghoul stumbled into sight, terror written in every line of its shambling form, its sloping, long-jawed features. It had been running through scummy water that came only as high as its reversed ankles; it waded deeper, until the weedlike scum swarmed against its thighs. But it would go no farther and it turned at bay. Hooting with triumph, a dozen hippocephalic ghasts burst from the trees across the marsh: sport hunters, for the long barbed spears they carried in their bifurcated forehooves were too small-tipped to kill the ghoul, and would only cripple it. There was nothing she could do, but in the end neither ghoul nor ghast escaped, for the scummy surface of the marsh rose up and swept over them all, dragging them beneath the weed in a froth of frenzied struggles. She found another way past the marsh and into the meadow beyond.
It was not so long after this that she found signs of a ghoul troop’s camp tucked under an overhanging crag. Half-gnawed bones, organs left to soften with rot, and horrible souvenirs were scattered among rumpled mounds of shredded corpse-clothes and the hair of dead women: nests. Everything showed signs of recent occupation, so she called out the passwords she had been given, adding a few stumbling glibbers of her own: that she had a gift for the eldest ghoul, and a request.
One and then five, and then in the dozens and scores, the ghouls emerged from their hiding places and surrounded her. Almost, she wished that she did not have the opalic vision, for they were the stuff of darkest nightmare, somewhat human in form and yet insufficiently so: the reversed hinges of their knees and ankles; the long, many-jointed fingers; the soiled fur that covered their sagging, quasi-human torsos. Worst were the small intelligent eyes set into their decayed canine faces. They crept near, the smallest ones approaching closely enough to touch her clothing and skin with their cold, small, rubbery paws. She set her jaw and repeated her passwords.
Eventually, the oldest of them approached, and Vellitt offered it—her; it was a female—the black box Carter had supplied as a gift. The eldest snatched it from Vellitt’s hands and slouched away clutching it to her empty drooping dugs. When she returned a brief time later, surrounded by a vile miasma yet smacking her chops as though at a pleasant remembered flavor, she meeped that Vellitt Boe was to be accorded every ghoulish courtesy.
They offered their choicest food and drink. She refused politely, indicating that it would all be poison to her, but that clean water would not be unwelcome. Though clearly thinking a little less of her for her delicacy, they supplied this and fell to the feast they had fashioned themselves.
As they ate, Vellitt explained her quest to the waking world but did not elaborate the reasons. They would not care whether Ulthar and the Skai valley were destroyed, except as it afforded a bumper harvest of corpses; she did not want them tempted. They expressed great excitement at the undertaking, for ghouls are a fervent lot; and after much conversation, a number of the younger ones declared the intention of escorting her, as they had heard stories of waking-world graveyards and wanted to taste their dainties. The eldest sighed heavily and assigned an old female to accompany the party, for the young were always foolish and might get their honored charge killed, or even forget the sacred nature of the passwords and eat her themselves.
* * *
By the time they left, the party had swelled to twenty or so: the reluctant elder assigned to the task, a few middle-aged ghouls, and many youths, mostly female. Their goal was a cellar in a harbor city on the skirts of the ragged mountains that conceal Leng from the Cerenarian Sea. In that cellar was a staircase only ghouls knew, which led up through the thick-walled chimney of an ancient inn and terminated in the waking w
orld. No ghouls of their troop had climbed those stairs for a century, and there was no telling into which waking-world graveyard they might emerge. Vellitt Boe knew little of the dimensions of the waking world: she could only hope the graveyard would not be too far from Clarie Jurat.
The party moved faster than she would have expected, quickly ascending the cavern wall and passing through a great natural archway to enter a chain of smaller caves and tunnels. Each carried something—a pelvis to gnaw, an oversized club made from the ulna of a gug’s arm, a thick-mossed gravestone—and loped tirelessly. Whenever there was water to cross, the ghouls plashed through, holding their gravestones and bones overhead as they paddled; and Vellitt followed, there being no options.
There was a horrid festiveness to the young females’ enthusiasm, and a grotesque familiarity as well, for they reminded her of nothing so much as the students of Ulthar Women’s College—Raba Hust, Derysk Oure, Therine Angoli, and the rest. For their part, the adults might almost have been Fellows of the College, long-suffering and largely ignoring their charges except when they grew too noisy. Seeing them all in this way would for a time decrease her ongoing horror until, listening to the younger ones meeping over some treat, she would remember that the bones they bickered over were human. And yet, why should it matter? The dead did not need those bones.
Ghasts and gugs were larger than ghouls but somehow less horrible to Vellitt. At least there was no hint of humanity in those monstrous forms, no glimmer of human intelligence in their eerie eyes. With the ghouls, it was hard not to see the possibility of her own degeneration in their forms and manner, as though the only thing between her and ghoulishness was the almost accidental hinging of her legs. Vellitt felt her jaw sometimes, to feel whether it were narrowing, elongating into something sloping and canine.
They did not rest on any schedule Vellitt could determine, and she walked sometimes in an exhausted daze. She had not known she was capable of such travelling. When they did stop, she dropped to the stony floor as though in a faint, too tired even to find a wall to sleep beside.
