The Last Guardian of Everness

by John C. Wright

  Galen suddenly looked up. “If they were taken, where would they be taken to?” He had straightened up; his voice was clear and sharp. “If they are prisoners, who is guarding them? Where?”

  Azrael said softly, ‘Aha. Now the youth asks a question worthy of a man.”

  VIII

  Azrael spoke in a low, solemn voice, so that Galen had to lean close to hear him. “Few know where Nastrond lies, which is the harbor and waymeet of the dreaded selkie-folk: but that hidden place is known to me. No matter where next they might take the Three Queens who are their prisoners, whether to sunken and sunless Acheron beneath the sea, or to the frozen northern atolls of Heather Blether, or to the windowless domes atop the bleak plateaus of Uhnuman on the far side of the moon, the seal-men would first take any captives, fair or foul, to Nastrond’s shore. For they go by secret routes into countries beyond the sphere of the moon, into the forbidden upper night, where mankind may not go, not even in dreams; and to this end, the Selkie must propitiate and praise the bloodthirsty and inhuman gods that guard the realms where sane men dare not venture, and bribe them to overlook that forbidden voyaging. Each captive must be prepared, woven into song like a caterpillar in its silks, so that the song of the selkie, full of horror as it may be, will keep the victim’s ears clogged with sounds to drown out the singing of that which lives beyond the ordered sphere of fixed stars. (They say no man has heard the inhuman music from beyond, and returned sane from such overreaching wayward dreaming, except the dreamer Kuranes, and even he was not permitted to return to his body back on earth, which died, but was given the timeless and enduring citadel of Celephais in the clouds above in the inland sea for his kingdom, both as consolation and reward for the brave resisting power of his soul and sanity.)

  “And how I came to know this brings me no happiness to tell, for I spoke with a creature only somewhat human and made terrible bargains with him, and this creature came to me because I saw a thing in the darkness.

  “I have seen a thing unknown to any others, be they men awake or men wrapped in dreams, or men passed into the greater dreaming of true death; for the malice of the jail keepers of Tirion puts my small cage upon a longer chain by far than all the others, so that, by dawn, I am thus so much nearer to the burning breath of sun when he comes up from underfoot, and so that, by dusk, I am thus so much farther from his warmth, and deeplier dipped into the cold abyss below.

  “By this, I have seen farther down into the gulfs beyond the world’s end, farther even than my fellow prisoners here, farther, I suspect, even than the nadir-astronomers who peer so timidly athwart the brink above us with their telescopes and mirrors. They are too near the sun to see full ways into the gloom. In dark solitude, dark wisdom grows. For I have seen from whence the Black Ships come.

  “Do I need to tell you of the Black Ships, young man? Every seaport in the lands of dream has been visited by them at one time or another; seaports made of crystal or of cloud, elf ruled, loyal to Mommur, next to oceans of light; and seaports made of brick and wood, inhabited by what we would recognize as men; and the great fortified iron headlands of Nidvellir, next to oceans made of boiling rock; all these, through all the cycles and aeons of recorded time, have feared the Black Ships, and never known from what quarter of the world they hail, or what level of the dreaming. But I know. They come not from earth, but beyond it.

  “Once and twice and thrice I have seen them, monstrously huge, sailing up toward earth from this chasm, weightless as thunderclouds, their expanse of sails adrip with ice and swollen with nameless winds from far below. Their lanthorns burn with elf-light marsh gas, or the glow which fireflies carry in their tails, as they rise up. And across the gulfs of night air, sometimes I would hear lonely wailing voices raised in song, hymns to darkness and pain, paeans to the joy one finds in other’s sufferings; and this singing from the ships was interspersed with eerie barking laughter, harsh commands, and the cracks of whips and cries of pain; and no voice of them was human in its tone or timbre.

  “Whenever any of these ships rose up, she would reach a certain height below the level of the world’s brink, and would at once all douse her lights and singers gag; and silenter than moths would float, by careful courses plotted to ascend through the night sky only by the darkest zone, far from constellations, that her passage might not occlude any star, nor give a warning of her silent running to the militia in Tirion below.

  “Made bold by desperation or despair, I began to sing the uncouth hymns I had heard when next I saw a Black Ship rising up; nor did I fall silent when the Ship doused all her lights, but louder called forth, shouting blasphemies upward toward my slumbering jailers.

  “The Black Ship struck sail and hung adrift, lamps black, off the southern point of Orion, past Rigel, which even then was level with the world’s horizon. A pilot boat was lowered, and dark hunched shapes, bent over muffled oars, rowed this boat across the gloomy air down toward me.

  “The pilot boat came to where my cage hung in midair, and I saw the tall shape in the stern was manlike but had no human face. Above his lace cravat and below his tricorn hat, I saw his nose was whiskered like a cat, his eyes were liquid, large and dark; merry, beastlike eyes, full of cruelty and laughter; his pelt was black and shone. And when he spoke, his sharp fangs were white and clean like the teeth of a fox. His warm breath smelled of fish chewed raw.

  “He raised a hand in greeting, and I saw, out from the lace cuff of his heavy seaman’s coat, a clawed paw, black and furry on the back, pale of palm, with webs of black membrane stretched between the finger joints.

  “He chuckled and snorted when he saw the cruel torture of my imprisonment, and lightly touched the jagged teeth which line these bars, and said, ‘The folk above are fishing. They have left you dangle here as bait to the leviathans which lumber in the unnamed nether oceans into which these icy waters plunge. But I think you are too small a morsel to tempt those jaws to swallow up these many hooks. Hah! Are you so friendly with the fishermen above that you must squeak and squall when we are preparing our nice surprise to penetrate their rude blockades? You must be discreet, my scrawny mouthful, or the kindly men who put you here will lose the opportunity to fish with live bait.’

  “I told him scornfully that one such as he should not dare to threaten me. He laughed, describing the tortures to which he would put me, and leaned toward the bars with his saber. The weapon came within my reach.

  “The next boat out from the ship carried a higher-ranking officer of their race and kept a respectful distance while they treated with me. I will not trouble you to tell you what oaths were sworn that night, nor to what dreadful powers; but I will confide that much secret intelligence I gained, greatly to the good of my cause, were I able to reveal it to my people. And the sea-men allowed me keep the saber and the seal-coat of my first visitor, nor did they dare come near enough to take his body down from where it hung on the cage bars. I ate well for nearly a month.”

  Galen, listening, now looked at the bloodstains on the cage bars with new horror.

  And then Azrael said softly to Galen: “Come closer.”

  IX

  Galen realized that he could turn and go away this moment and put himself far out of reach of this caged man, return to his grandfather, and have no more to do with these dark matters. And yet, if Galen did not even attempt to rescue the Three Queens of Vindyamar, if he did nothing, how could he ever be worthy of the Guardianship?

  Galen leaned closer. The bloodstained hand of Azrael reached up and gripped his shoulder. Galen was astonished at how cold the fingers were, and how strong. The cold hand drew him down till his cheek almost touched the thorns of the bars. Galen stared at the hooks and saw teeth hanging inches from his eyes.

  Azrael whispered, “The traitor is the Seal-King himself. His secret name is Mannannan. His emissary and go-between is Dylan of Njord, whom you shall recognize by such tokens as I shall describe. They would not dare to have harmed these Queens of ancient Vindyamar. The Seal-King wi
ll release the Three Queens to you; you shall discover the location of the Talismans from them. You will disguise yourself as a selkie using a dark art I have learned. Draw on this coat I give you; now you shall become a selkie yourself. . .”

  6

  The Song

  of the

  Selkie

  I

  Galen said to Wendy: “The founder gave me his instructions to find the shore of Nastrond. He had a seal-coat in the cage with him, and he handed it to me, saying that he was giving me a coat in return for the cloak I had given him. I had to get right up next to the cage before he would hand it through the bars to me. With it, I was supposed to be able to imitate the selkie and approach unnoticed.

  “There was a certain selkie the Founder said had come to his cage, a counselor and lieutenant of the Seal-King. Azrael described a great white seal with a dappled coat, who, when he wore a man’s shape, was a silver- haired old man with a salt-and-pepper beard. He dressed in green and gray and wore a silver moonstone ring on his finger. The selkie’s name was Dylan, son of Nereus of the House of Njord. There are three nations of selkie, coming from the Witch-City of Ys, from Atlantus, and from Cantriff Gwylodd. Well. You don’t care about that.

  “So I asked how I could prove to Dylan that I came from Azrael, that it wasn’t a trick? Azrael said he would entrust me with the secret of his life, something he had learned from a necromancer to whom the selkie had introduced him. And then he plucks out of his coat—it almost looked like he pulled it right out of his chest, but he didn’t flinch or scream or anything—this little ball of crystal, that had this light inside of it, sort of a flower shape, but glowing and beating. It was about the size of a child’s marble.

  “He told me to guard it carefully, and to have it when I came to Dylan; Dylan would recognize it for what it was, and this would ensure success for the cause to which Azrael had devoted himself. With my help, Dylan would see to it that those unjustly prisoned would be free, and those who must return to earth would do so. Those were his exact words.”

  Wendy, listening to the story with great interest, rattled her bedsheets in a gesture of impatience, saying, “But why did you trust him? I thought the selkie were your enemies! Bad guys!”

  “That’s true. But one thing was that, after all, one of the three storm- princes works for us, so why not a selkie?”

  “Was that your idea?”

  “Well, actually he said that to me. Azrael.”

  “I would have asked him a lot more questions about who this Dylan was. I would have asked him who betrayed Vindyamar (I love that name!) Well? Didn’t you ask anything about any of this?”

  “Well, I tried to ask, but the moment he handed me the glowing marble, he kind of fell over and collapsed against the bottom of the cage. Also, he had said the dawn was going to come, so I should go immediately. I had to jump.”

  “Off the end of the world?”

  “Off the end of the world.”

  “And—?” prompted Wendy.

  “And what?” asked Galen, blinking.

  “And why didn’t you tell him no?”

  “Well, I didn’t, I mean—I needed to prove myself. And he was unconscious.”

  “Jumping off worlds cannot be good for your health. No wonder you’re a ghost!”

  “It wasn’t like that!”

  Wendy raised one eyebrow with an intensely skeptical look. (She had practiced this look in front of a mirror after she had seen Vivian Leigh in Gone With the Wind look that way at a Union soldier just before shooting him. It was one of her favorite expressions.) “Well, I guess you’re pretty young and trusting. Oh! Don’t get that look on your face; you’d think you’d swallowed a frog!”

  “I haven’t swallowed a frog—I mean, I don’t look like that. . .” Galen’s face was burning red. He was noticing how pretty Wendy looked in the moonlight, and it pained him to think she was older than he was, particularly since she acted so much his junior.

  “You look just like that!” said Wendy firmly, giving herself a little nod of agreement with herself.

  “Like what?”

  “Guilty conscience. Why was this guy in the cage to begin with? Because he was trustworthy or because—wait for it—he was not trustworthy?”

  “I mean, he told me he knew how to make it so I’d survive the fall! And, well, he is the Founder of my Order, the first ancestor of my house, and—”

  “And if he told you to jump off a bridge, would you do that, too? Oh, wait,” she said primly, “you don’t exactly need to answer that one, do you?”

  “The Black Ships float! The selkie know the secret.”

  “Really?” Wendy now perked up. “I knew how to fly once. I wish I could remember. What’s the secret?”

  “If you drench your craft in the blood and sweetbreads of thirteen slain fairy-girls, killed by one stroke of a silver knife, you can . . .”

  “Yuck. Gross.”

  “I mean, it is a spell.”

  “Gross. Yuck.”

  “The Founder is a magician, you know!”

  “And his first magic trick is, he makes you lose track of whether something is wholesome or unwholesome, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Magic! It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, my Mum says. You start thinking the strangest things are perfectly normal, and you wonder why everyone is staring at you. Like watching too many murders on TV: and you start thinking murder is normal. My daddy kills murderers. Did your magician ask you to murder a fairy?”

  The young man gave a start of surprise. “The Red Knight attacked me first! Um, I mean, no. I didn’t kill any, um, fairies.”

  “Good for you!”

  “Didn’t need to. Azrael already gotten a bottle of blood and brain fluid from the . . .”

  “Please. I cannot tell you how much I do not want to hear the end of that sentence.”

  “Well. So he, the Founder, told me he had soaked the cloak in the blood for the proper amount of time, and if I wore it. . .”

  “Gross. You put a bloodstained cloak all over your body.”

  “It was for a good cause! Sort of. I thought I was saving the Three Queens of Vindyamar!”

  “He told you to put this bloodstained thing on your body, and jump off the end of the world. And you believed him.”

  “Grampa is a magician, too! We’re all magicians.”

  “Uh huh. And if Grampa told you to wrap your face in a bloody sheet and jump off the edge of the world, would you listen to him, too?”

  “I listen to everything Grampa says! Well, usually. I mean, it was an emergency, and all, and I had to show him I knew what I was doing, and . . .”

  “And did you?” asked Wendy brightly.

  “Did I what?”

  “Know what you were doing?”

  “Well, no. But the Founder was helping me.”

  Wendy let that comment pass by in silence, but her red little mouth was pursed in a look of girlish skepticism, nodding her chin forward so she could regard her ghostly visitor at an upward angle through the tangle of her black bangs, and she hoisted one eyebrow aloft.

  Galen fidgeted with his shining spear under her inspection, and then he shrugged and said, “Well, whether it was a good idea or not, sometimes, you just have to act on faith, and jump.”

  “You jumped?”

  “I jumped.”

  II

  Galen fell through alien skies and systems, zones and zodiacs flying past him as he fell, and the cliffs of earth dwindled to a dim high expanse behind him. Hour after hour as he plummeted, he saw the scattered constellations to either side and underfoot becoming clearer and cleaner in outline, filled in with depth and shading by stars whose light could not be seen on Earth, but only close at hand: Cancer now could be seen as a crab, with legs and claws and whiplike antennae; the beard and stern eyes of Orion the hunter were distinct, glistening with starlight; Canis Major was a wolfhound; lean and snarling; Canis Minor was a collie.

 
But soon even the winter constellations were left behind, and Galen found himself in zodiacs unknown to men, with strange shapes rising up like the indecipherable glyphs of antique Aztec pyramids. Here were hooded brooding shapes, or images of slime-clotted ziggurats and ruins occupying these stars; or sea-beasts multitentacled, or spidery shapes with sucking mouths, insectoid queens consuming their lovers, or Scylla-legged matriarchs with womb and bloody entrails gnawed by their own monstrous young.

  Galen closed the clasps of the seal-coat and immediately found himself possessed, not of legs, but of strong flippers, paws shaped cunningly like hands; and when he twitched his nose, he saw long whiskers wiggling before his eyes.

  Delighted, he began to romp and splash within the ocean of night around him, which, somehow, had become dark and salty, crisscrossed by surging waves. He found now he could leap and dive and surge through the foaming water with sleek speed.

  For a time, he practiced this, attempting to perfect his disguise, and took an animal joy and childish delight in his newfound mastery of swimming.

  How he could be in ocean, yet still be falling as if through air, was never clear to him; but he accepted it with the logic of a dreamer.

  And the seas became thin about him as he fell further; and he saw only one or two constellations still below him; beyond that, darkness, in which dim, vast shapes floated or monstrous hulks moved with slow, huge motions.

  To his left he saw again the gray steep faces of the cliffs of Earth, and, at their feet, on a small shelf of land before they dropped into the starless darkness of the nameless oceans of the under-sky, a beach near which tall ships were anchored.

  Galen swam furiously toward that shore, plunging at a downward angle, hoping to reach it; for if he fell beyond it, there was nothing underfoot but the leviathans of the abyss and the dark, from whence no man returns sane.