I had to admit I'd met the same sort of person, in Sigil and most other places I'd visited in the universe. If you wanted a room or a meal or some lamp oil, she'd escort you to an establishment that overcharged and slipped her a kickback under the table; but in exchange for wringing your purse dry, she'd honestly take good care of you. Then again, I'd met some not-so-honorable «city guides» too – the kind who smiled with helpfulness till nightfall, then led you straight into ambush. Usually, there was no way to distinguish the two types.
«We should go to the Plague place,» Hezekiah said with surprising firmness. «Anywhere else would be worse, right?»
Yasmin looked at me. I shrugged. «From everything I've heard, all the Lower Plane gate-towns are bad. If Miriam knows Plague-Mort and can find us a quick way back home… Garou, I assume you can ferry us to Plague-Mort?»
«The Styx does not touch on the Outlands anywhere near Plague-Mort,» the marraenoloth replied, «but I can take you to a portal which jumps to the town.»
«And you can supply us with a key to that portal?» Yasmin asked.
Garou smiled. I've never liked the sight of a smile on a fleshless face – it's all in the mouth, without touching the eyes. «As it happens,» the boatman said, «the key to that particular portal is an open bleeding wound. I would be happy to supply you with an appropriate gash; but I suspect you'll be spoilsports about that.»
A bleeding wound: just what you'd expect to open a portal in the Lower Planes. I shuddered and kept on painting.
Wheezle and Brother Kiripao emerged from the hut where they had been «negotiating». They looked exhausted, and were deliberately vague about what had happened in the most recent discussions. «We learned how the umbrals think,» Kiripao said. «I have never… pondered such subjects before.» He refused to say anything else.
Wheezle looked worse and said nothing for the first few minutes in our company. After a while, he chose a moment when the others were engaged with trifling conversation and dragged himself close to me. His still-useless legs trailed along behind him through the mud.
«Honored Cavendish…» he murmured.
«Yes?»
«The umbrals have undeniable powers of persuasion.» He mopped his brow with the hem of his sleeve. «I told you they want us all to become 'of one mind'. Do you know what that means?»
«Tell me.»
«We talk of ourselves… they talk, Kiripao and I talk. All together in a single hut. It becomes hard to breathe; their bodies take on a peculiar smell; the room darkens almost to blackness…»
«In other words,» I said, «there's magic at work.»
«Perhaps.» The thought seemed new to him. «Perhaps magic. Perhaps the power of their thoughts. But there were times… times I felt I was losing myself. Becoming one of them.»
«Maybe that's why they spend so much time over negotiations like this,» I suggested. «After all, how long does it take to agree on a simple selling price? But if this bargaining process is actually some kind of assimilation that takes three days to complete…»
«It could be,» Wheezle nodded. «I do not think I can withstand another day in that hut. By the end, I would be an umbral… mentally, if not physically.»
«Not to worry,» I assured him. «We're getting out tonight: Garou will help us escape to Plague-Mort. Of course, Plague-Mort has risks of its own —»
«Please,» the gnome interrupted, holding up his hand. «I do not wish to hear about risks, honored Cavendish. If you believe this is our wisest course of action, so be it. As long as we leave tonight.»
I patted him on the shoulder. «We're just waiting for the umbrals to go to sleep.»
But the umbrals showed no sign of sleeping. There were always a few of them sliding silently through the streets, though they had long ago abandoned their daytime activities of sculpting and harvesting beetles from the marsh. Even when I couldn't see the fiends amidst the shadows under the trees, I could still feel their hollow eyes gazing at us from the pockets of darkness.
At last Miriam whispered the words that must have been on everyone's mind. «Something's up tonight. Maybe they suspect we're trying to give them the laugh.»
«Impossible,» Kiripao answered immediately. «They cannot know our thoughts.»
I looked at him and wondered why he used that turn of phrase. Know our thoughts. Kiripao and Wheezle had been cloistered with the fiends most of the day, with the purpose of becoming one mind. Perhaps our monastic companion was steadfastly trying to deny something he secretly feared was true: that as umbral thoughts invaded his brain, some of his own thoughts bled into the fiends. They might have caught enough psychic vibrations to know we were jumping their cage tonight… which was why they now kept a peery eye on us.
Hezekiah turned to Garou, who was sitting watching me paint. I had already explained I would not finish the job until we'd reached some sort of safety; the marraenoloth was not pleased, but he wasn't surprised either. «So little trust in the world,» he had sighed. Now he looked at Hezekiah and said, «What do you want?»
«Do you know what the umbrals are up to?» the boy asked.
«I believe they will hold a revel – in honor of negotiations with your group. They will dance, they will sing, they will play the pipes… all to make you feel at home, of course.»
He cracked a wicked smile at Kiripao and Wheezle. The elf quickly spun away to face the Styx, but the gnome simply stared, his face slowly turning ashen. In a strained voice, he finally said, «I do not think I can tolerate any sort of carousal. It might… overwhelm me.»
I knew piking well what he meant. If he and Kiripao were in danger of being assimilated, the last thing they needed was an umbral orgy getting under their skins. Music, dance, perhaps debauchery… even in the absence of magic, those were powerful forces for establishing communal unity; and there would be magic at work too, I didn't doubt that.
In the heart of the village, fire blazed to life in the flame-pit: a fire that burned as scarlet as blood. «Isn't that interesting,» Hezekiah said. «The wood here must have strange alchemical properties to burn such an odd color of red. Uncle Toby would be interested in —»
«Hush!» Wheezle snapped, the sharpest I'd ever heard him speak. That didn't bode well; the strain was already showing on his face.
And then the pipes began to play.
I couldn't see the pipers, let alone the pipes – the flame-pit was fifty paces away, too far to distinguish unmoving umbrals from normal shadows – but my ears were keen enough to identify the instruments as simple unreeded flutes, made from some wood like bamboo or rattan. A trio of the flutes played, weaving together three separate melody lines with a subtle dissonance that made my flesh crawl. Wheezle clapped his hands over his ears and began to whine softly. Kiripao just listened slack-jawed, as if he had lost the ability to move.
«We have to get out of here,» Yasmin whispered to me.
«Don't rush your painting,» Garou snapped. «I'll be very upset at a slapdash job.»
«I'm just about done,» I told him, then turned to Hezekiah. «Can you teleport yet?»
«Sure, I just needed some sleep,» he replied. «What did you have in mind?»
«Jump from here to our hut, gather everyone's packs, then teleport back here.»
«On my way,» he nodded, but Yasmin stopped him with a hand on his arm.
«Is it safe for him to teleport?» she asked me. «Remember the white dust.»
«The dust doesn't affect psionics,» I reminded her. «That's why Rivi wanted the grinders in the first place – the dust stops other people's magic but Rivi's own powers stay intact. Get going, Hezekiah.»
The boy furrowed his brow, then winked out of existence without a sound. «I'll have to learn that someday,» Miriam muttered.
Wheezle began panting. Yasmin wrapped her arms around him and tossed a meaningful look in my direction. I knew what that look meant: finish the painting fast.
Fortunately, I was close to the end. In fact, I'd been dragging things out over the past hour, waiting for the umbrals to slink off to bed. Three minutes would be enough to finish as much as I wanted to; I just hoped we had that much time.
Up at the flame-pit, someone started playing a drum: a soft pattering beat, like raindrops. Wheezle groaned. I dipped my brush into the paint and concentrated on not making mistakes.
«All right,» I said with a last swipe of the brush, «I'm done. Let's go, Garou.»
«Are you mad?» the boatman asked. «We can't put into the river till the paint dries.»
«The paint is more than a foot above the waterline,» I told him. «It will be perfectly all right if you keep the splashes to a minimum.»
«I shall not be the one to splash,» Garou replied. «Your companions, however, may choose to rock the boat.»
«Miriam,» I said without looking at her, «can you safety-proof our friend Kiripao?»
, «Oof!», , «Oof!», .
«He'll be quiet as a lamb now,» Miriam announced. She and Kiripao would no doubt debate the ethics of sucker-punches when the elf woke up, but that could wait.
«Put him in the boat,» I told her, «and let's get out of here.»
Under Garou's supervision, Hezekiah and Miriam eased the boat into the water, while Yasmin held Wheezle and I packed equipment. «Peel it away,» Wheezle muttered. «Peel away the shell.»
«What's he talking about?» I said.
«Look,» Yasmin replied, nodding toward the fire in the center of the village.
The umbrals had begun to caper around the flames, a dance with slip-sliding shuffles and extravagant leaps through the blood-red fire itself. Back-lit by flames, one fiend stood motionless at the center of the dance, hissing the same words as Wheezle: «Peel it away. Peel away the shell.» Then the umbral reached up to its face, dug its talons into the skin of its cheeks, and raked down with all its strength.
The flesh fell away: ribbons of it, sloughing off in tatters. Beneath was something darker – pure shadow, the blackness that had been visible in the umbrals' hollow eyes. Faster and faster the creature slashed at its skin, ripping away the dross and letting it pile up on the ground. Naked darkness emerged… still shaped like an umbral, but much harder to see, even silhouetted against the flames. The figure seemed to flicker with every move of the fire, blending into the shadows cast by the other dancers.
«Peel it away,» hissed a second umbral. «The shell, the shell…» And its claws sank into its face up to the quick.
«Sod me,» I thought; I was seeing the umbrals' true form for the first time. The bodies they had previously worn were conveniences, garb for everyday. Now they had revealed their genuine selves: shadows of profane blackness, the stuff of nightmares.
«Peel it away,» Wheezle giggled. «Peel away the shell.»
His fat little hands reached up toward his face. I barely caught them in time; a moment later, and he would have raked out his eyes. «We have to get to the boat,» Yasmin shuddered. «Maybe if he can't hear the music…»
It was awkward getting into the skiff, with Yasmin holding Wheezle, and me holding the gnome's hands. The boat rocked precipitously on the greasy waters of the Styx; then Garou plunged his punting pole down to the river bottom to hold the craft steady. «If you've damaged my paint job…» he growled.
«My paint job,» I replied, «and I'll fix it if I have to.» Looking around, I saw Hezekiah and Miriam at the far end of the boat, arranging the unconscious Kiripao into a safe position. «Get us out of here,» I said to Garou, as I struggled to keep Wheezle from clawing his face.
«One last thing,» Garou replied. «You may think of the Lower Planes as a crude and vicious place, but manners are manners.» He held up his head and shouted to the dancing umbrals, «Thanks for your hospitality. We're going now.»
«You berk!» Miriam exploded. She lifted her fist but Hezekiah caught her arm. «You sodding, sodding berk!» she cried at the marraenoloth. «They'll come after us now… and we're sitting ducks out here on the water.»
«That's what we get for making deals with evil,» Yasmin muttered. She snatched up her sword and thrust the point a hair's breadth away from the boatman's face. «Get us out of here, Garou, or I swear you'll die before we do.»
«You have your hands full already,» he sneered, and nodded back toward the flame-pit.
Shadows were speeding toward us; shadows racing on scaled bat wings, vanishing into every pocket of shade beneath the trees as if they were winking out of existence. Their wings rustled like leaves on the clammy air – a hundred umbrals, stripped of their outward flesh, angry to be cheated by our escape.
I shouted to Hezekiah, «Take Wheezle,» and heaved the gnome toward the far end of the skiff. There was no time to see if the boy managed to keep the Dustman from harming himself; I grabbed one of our packs from the floor of the boat and threw open the flap. «Garou,» I snapped, «it may seem like fun to betray us, but remember I haven't finished the painting. You think you can find a painter like me anywhere else in the Lower Planes? One who won't try to pike you the way you're piking us?»
«Don't be so melodramatic,» the boatman replied. «I'll get you out of here.»
Languidly, he pushed off the bank with his pole. «Faster!» Miriam cried.
«And ruin my paint job? I think not.» He planted the pole with extravagant slowness and gave a soft nudge. The boat moved inches forward, drifting into the river's sluggish current.
«Ten seconds before the fiends get here,» Yasmin murmured to me. «Are you the sort of man who likes to hear mushy things before he dies?»
«I'll let you know if I come close to dying,» I told her. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the fiends were almost upon us: pure darkness, with teeth. «Chew on this!» I yelled, as I plucked a soul-gem from my pack and hurled it into their midst.
The rushing horde hissed like hot iron thrust into ice water. The three frontrunners all fell back to catch the prize, colliding with the fiends racing up from behind. I heard a dull crunch, the sound of delicate wing-bones breaking in the tangle of bodies. A moment later, two fiends fell screeching out of the scrum, their wings trailing uselessly behind; they both caromed off the bank and into the water, where their caterwauling stopped abruptly.
Several more seconds passed as the mob of flying fiends fought over possession of the gem. At last, a victor shot away from the group, clutching the gem to its chest – the gem's purple light throbbing against the umbral's blackness. A few fiends broke off to pursue the one with the gem, but the rest turned back toward us and howled with fury.
«Yeah, yeah,» Miriam growled back. Following my lead, she had fished out another gem from our packs; now she hurled it full-force at the screaming fiends.
«Please don't rock the boat, madam,» Garou chided.
«Please get the lead out of your sodding arse,» Miriam snapped back.
«Language, language,» Garou sighed. He gave another half-hearted push with his pole, sending us out a few more inches into the stream. The current angled the prow around and drew us forward, aiming us toward one of the pillars of mist hovering above the Styx. My guess was that each such cloud acted as a portal, opening to another part of the river on a different plane; even spurred by greed, umbrals would fear to follow us through… I hoped.
The struggle to claim Miriam's gem ended after only a few seconds. No one's wings broke; indeed, a few of the fiends ignored the gem entirely, circling around the other umbrals and continuing to pursue us. Did that mean they wanted to attack us more than they wanted to claim a gem? Or had they remembered we possessed many such gems, free for the picking if they managed to dump us in the Styx?
I had plucked up another gem and Yasmin had found one too; we threw simultaneously, aiming for the closest fiends. One fiend managed to catch a gem, and was immediately set upon by two others. The remaining gem was fumbled by clumsy-clawed hands and fell toward the river. Two fiends dove for it at full speed; they reached the gem simultaneously, clonked heads like a clown act, and plummeted the rest of the way into the water. A moment later they surfaced, sputtering and gasping. Both gripped the gem… and both stared at its purple glow as if they'd never seen such a thing before. There was no way to tell how much the water had affected their memories, but they goggled at the gem with obvious greed, like crows coveting a shiny bauble. Immediately, they began clawing and biting at each other, splashing showers of greasy water into the air.
«Peel it away,» Wheezle shouted. «Peel away the shell!»
«Britlin…» Hezekiah gasped, as he struggled to hold the gnome's hands. «We've got more trouble.»
I glanced in his direction. At first, I couldn't tell what Hezekiah was talking about; then I saw that Wheezle's eyes had turned into hollow pits of blackness, as empty as the night sky. Nightmare eyes. Umbral eyes.
«He's converting,» Yasmin said. «What do we do?»
«Keep throwing gems,» I answered. «Keep the fiends off our backs until we get into that mist.»
I nodded toward the closest bank of cloud, but Garou gave a low chuckle. «You'd be very upset if I took you through that one. There's no air on the other side, and the temperature's cold enough to freeze your eyeballs to ice cubes.»
«How do you know?» Miriam asked.
«It's my business to know,» Garou replied. «We're heading for that fog there.»
He pointed to another patch of mist, some fifty paces away. It seemed like a long distance with a swarm of fiends screaming for our blood; I wondered if Garou was stringing us along, taking pleasure in our fear. «Make it snappy,» I told him, «if you ever want your painting done.»
«Britlin!» Hezekiah cried again. «Hurry!»
Wheezle's fingernails had begun to extend into claws, ripping at Hezekiah's hands as the boy tried to hold him still. The gnome hissed and growled, spitting out words like a snake spitting venom. «Peel, peel, peel! Peel away the shell!»
There was another soul-gem in my hand; perhaps that would pacify him. But when I dropped the gem in Wheezle's lap, it only spurred him to greater exertions, screaming and foaming at the mouth. Bar that then – I grabbed the gem and threw it at an umbral flying less than two yards behind the boat. The fiend caught the gem, squealed in triumph, and sped away, three other fiends chasing him.
«I can't help but think,» Yasmin said matter-of-factly, «that our visit has had a negative effect on this village's sense of community.»
«Peel, peel, peel!» screeched Wheezle.
«I can't hold him,» Hezekiah warned. The gnome's claws had torn the boy's hands bloody.
«Damn it,» I said. Poisonous umbral thoughts must be filling his mind completely. If only…
I froze. Desperate times call for desperate measures. My sword lay on the floorboards, ready to be snatched up if I needed to fight the fiends. I grabbed it now, dipped its tip into the Styx, and lifted it out again. Carefully, I moved the blade over Wheezle's screaming face and let a single drop fall on his cheek.
He stopped shouting immediately. To be precise, he fell completely quiescent, as if he had plunged into a coma. Two seconds later, we passed through a pillar of mist and the rest of the world fell silent too – the hissing of umbrals, the splashes of fiends fighting in the water, all vanished in a trice.
We emerged into a bleak expanse of gray.
14. THREE PLANES TO PLAGUE-MORT
«We should go to the Plague place,» Hezekiah said with surprising firmness. «Anywhere else would be worse, right?»
Yasmin looked at me. I shrugged. «From everything I've heard, all the Lower Plane gate-towns are bad. If Miriam knows Plague-Mort and can find us a quick way back home… Garou, I assume you can ferry us to Plague-Mort?»
«The Styx does not touch on the Outlands anywhere near Plague-Mort,» the marraenoloth replied, «but I can take you to a portal which jumps to the town.»
«And you can supply us with a key to that portal?» Yasmin asked.
Garou smiled. I've never liked the sight of a smile on a fleshless face – it's all in the mouth, without touching the eyes. «As it happens,» the boatman said, «the key to that particular portal is an open bleeding wound. I would be happy to supply you with an appropriate gash; but I suspect you'll be spoilsports about that.»
A bleeding wound: just what you'd expect to open a portal in the Lower Planes. I shuddered and kept on painting.
* * *
The light never changed, the clouds never varied… but night fell.Wheezle and Brother Kiripao emerged from the hut where they had been «negotiating». They looked exhausted, and were deliberately vague about what had happened in the most recent discussions. «We learned how the umbrals think,» Kiripao said. «I have never… pondered such subjects before.» He refused to say anything else.
Wheezle looked worse and said nothing for the first few minutes in our company. After a while, he chose a moment when the others were engaged with trifling conversation and dragged himself close to me. His still-useless legs trailed along behind him through the mud.
«Honored Cavendish…» he murmured.
«Yes?»
«The umbrals have undeniable powers of persuasion.» He mopped his brow with the hem of his sleeve. «I told you they want us all to become 'of one mind'. Do you know what that means?»
«Tell me.»
«We talk of ourselves… they talk, Kiripao and I talk. All together in a single hut. It becomes hard to breathe; their bodies take on a peculiar smell; the room darkens almost to blackness…»
«In other words,» I said, «there's magic at work.»
«Perhaps.» The thought seemed new to him. «Perhaps magic. Perhaps the power of their thoughts. But there were times… times I felt I was losing myself. Becoming one of them.»
«Maybe that's why they spend so much time over negotiations like this,» I suggested. «After all, how long does it take to agree on a simple selling price? But if this bargaining process is actually some kind of assimilation that takes three days to complete…»
«It could be,» Wheezle nodded. «I do not think I can withstand another day in that hut. By the end, I would be an umbral… mentally, if not physically.»
«Not to worry,» I assured him. «We're getting out tonight: Garou will help us escape to Plague-Mort. Of course, Plague-Mort has risks of its own —»
«Please,» the gnome interrupted, holding up his hand. «I do not wish to hear about risks, honored Cavendish. If you believe this is our wisest course of action, so be it. As long as we leave tonight.»
I patted him on the shoulder. «We're just waiting for the umbrals to go to sleep.»
But the umbrals showed no sign of sleeping. There were always a few of them sliding silently through the streets, though they had long ago abandoned their daytime activities of sculpting and harvesting beetles from the marsh. Even when I couldn't see the fiends amidst the shadows under the trees, I could still feel their hollow eyes gazing at us from the pockets of darkness.
At last Miriam whispered the words that must have been on everyone's mind. «Something's up tonight. Maybe they suspect we're trying to give them the laugh.»
«Impossible,» Kiripao answered immediately. «They cannot know our thoughts.»
I looked at him and wondered why he used that turn of phrase. Know our thoughts. Kiripao and Wheezle had been cloistered with the fiends most of the day, with the purpose of becoming one mind. Perhaps our monastic companion was steadfastly trying to deny something he secretly feared was true: that as umbral thoughts invaded his brain, some of his own thoughts bled into the fiends. They might have caught enough psychic vibrations to know we were jumping their cage tonight… which was why they now kept a peery eye on us.
Hezekiah turned to Garou, who was sitting watching me paint. I had already explained I would not finish the job until we'd reached some sort of safety; the marraenoloth was not pleased, but he wasn't surprised either. «So little trust in the world,» he had sighed. Now he looked at Hezekiah and said, «What do you want?»
«Do you know what the umbrals are up to?» the boy asked.
«I believe they will hold a revel – in honor of negotiations with your group. They will dance, they will sing, they will play the pipes… all to make you feel at home, of course.»
He cracked a wicked smile at Kiripao and Wheezle. The elf quickly spun away to face the Styx, but the gnome simply stared, his face slowly turning ashen. In a strained voice, he finally said, «I do not think I can tolerate any sort of carousal. It might… overwhelm me.»
I knew piking well what he meant. If he and Kiripao were in danger of being assimilated, the last thing they needed was an umbral orgy getting under their skins. Music, dance, perhaps debauchery… even in the absence of magic, those were powerful forces for establishing communal unity; and there would be magic at work too, I didn't doubt that.
In the heart of the village, fire blazed to life in the flame-pit: a fire that burned as scarlet as blood. «Isn't that interesting,» Hezekiah said. «The wood here must have strange alchemical properties to burn such an odd color of red. Uncle Toby would be interested in —»
«Hush!» Wheezle snapped, the sharpest I'd ever heard him speak. That didn't bode well; the strain was already showing on his face.
And then the pipes began to play.
I couldn't see the pipers, let alone the pipes – the flame-pit was fifty paces away, too far to distinguish unmoving umbrals from normal shadows – but my ears were keen enough to identify the instruments as simple unreeded flutes, made from some wood like bamboo or rattan. A trio of the flutes played, weaving together three separate melody lines with a subtle dissonance that made my flesh crawl. Wheezle clapped his hands over his ears and began to whine softly. Kiripao just listened slack-jawed, as if he had lost the ability to move.
«We have to get out of here,» Yasmin whispered to me.
«Don't rush your painting,» Garou snapped. «I'll be very upset at a slapdash job.»
«I'm just about done,» I told him, then turned to Hezekiah. «Can you teleport yet?»
«Sure, I just needed some sleep,» he replied. «What did you have in mind?»
«Jump from here to our hut, gather everyone's packs, then teleport back here.»
«On my way,» he nodded, but Yasmin stopped him with a hand on his arm.
«Is it safe for him to teleport?» she asked me. «Remember the white dust.»
«The dust doesn't affect psionics,» I reminded her. «That's why Rivi wanted the grinders in the first place – the dust stops other people's magic but Rivi's own powers stay intact. Get going, Hezekiah.»
The boy furrowed his brow, then winked out of existence without a sound. «I'll have to learn that someday,» Miriam muttered.
Wheezle began panting. Yasmin wrapped her arms around him and tossed a meaningful look in my direction. I knew what that look meant: finish the painting fast.
Fortunately, I was close to the end. In fact, I'd been dragging things out over the past hour, waiting for the umbrals to slink off to bed. Three minutes would be enough to finish as much as I wanted to; I just hoped we had that much time.
Up at the flame-pit, someone started playing a drum: a soft pattering beat, like raindrops. Wheezle groaned. I dipped my brush into the paint and concentrated on not making mistakes.
* * *
Two minutes later, Hezekiah returned with our gear. By then, Yasmin was rocking Wheezle like an infant, while he whimpered, «No… no…» A few paces away, Miriam stood beside Kiripao, ready to wrestle him to the ground if he took one step toward the center of the village; but the elf had not budged, simply blinking at the distant fire and swaying in time with the flutes.«All right,» I said with a last swipe of the brush, «I'm done. Let's go, Garou.»
«Are you mad?» the boatman asked. «We can't put into the river till the paint dries.»
«The paint is more than a foot above the waterline,» I told him. «It will be perfectly all right if you keep the splashes to a minimum.»
«I shall not be the one to splash,» Garou replied. «Your companions, however, may choose to rock the boat.»
«Miriam,» I said without looking at her, «can you safety-proof our friend Kiripao?»
, «Oof!», , «Oof!», .
«He'll be quiet as a lamb now,» Miriam announced. She and Kiripao would no doubt debate the ethics of sucker-punches when the elf woke up, but that could wait.
«Put him in the boat,» I told her, «and let's get out of here.»
Under Garou's supervision, Hezekiah and Miriam eased the boat into the water, while Yasmin held Wheezle and I packed equipment. «Peel it away,» Wheezle muttered. «Peel away the shell.»
«What's he talking about?» I said.
«Look,» Yasmin replied, nodding toward the fire in the center of the village.
The umbrals had begun to caper around the flames, a dance with slip-sliding shuffles and extravagant leaps through the blood-red fire itself. Back-lit by flames, one fiend stood motionless at the center of the dance, hissing the same words as Wheezle: «Peel it away. Peel away the shell.» Then the umbral reached up to its face, dug its talons into the skin of its cheeks, and raked down with all its strength.
The flesh fell away: ribbons of it, sloughing off in tatters. Beneath was something darker – pure shadow, the blackness that had been visible in the umbrals' hollow eyes. Faster and faster the creature slashed at its skin, ripping away the dross and letting it pile up on the ground. Naked darkness emerged… still shaped like an umbral, but much harder to see, even silhouetted against the flames. The figure seemed to flicker with every move of the fire, blending into the shadows cast by the other dancers.
«Peel it away,» hissed a second umbral. «The shell, the shell…» And its claws sank into its face up to the quick.
«Sod me,» I thought; I was seeing the umbrals' true form for the first time. The bodies they had previously worn were conveniences, garb for everyday. Now they had revealed their genuine selves: shadows of profane blackness, the stuff of nightmares.
«Peel it away,» Wheezle giggled. «Peel away the shell.»
His fat little hands reached up toward his face. I barely caught them in time; a moment later, and he would have raked out his eyes. «We have to get to the boat,» Yasmin shuddered. «Maybe if he can't hear the music…»
It was awkward getting into the skiff, with Yasmin holding Wheezle, and me holding the gnome's hands. The boat rocked precipitously on the greasy waters of the Styx; then Garou plunged his punting pole down to the river bottom to hold the craft steady. «If you've damaged my paint job…» he growled.
«My paint job,» I replied, «and I'll fix it if I have to.» Looking around, I saw Hezekiah and Miriam at the far end of the boat, arranging the unconscious Kiripao into a safe position. «Get us out of here,» I said to Garou, as I struggled to keep Wheezle from clawing his face.
«One last thing,» Garou replied. «You may think of the Lower Planes as a crude and vicious place, but manners are manners.» He held up his head and shouted to the dancing umbrals, «Thanks for your hospitality. We're going now.»
«You berk!» Miriam exploded. She lifted her fist but Hezekiah caught her arm. «You sodding, sodding berk!» she cried at the marraenoloth. «They'll come after us now… and we're sitting ducks out here on the water.»
«That's what we get for making deals with evil,» Yasmin muttered. She snatched up her sword and thrust the point a hair's breadth away from the boatman's face. «Get us out of here, Garou, or I swear you'll die before we do.»
«You have your hands full already,» he sneered, and nodded back toward the flame-pit.
Shadows were speeding toward us; shadows racing on scaled bat wings, vanishing into every pocket of shade beneath the trees as if they were winking out of existence. Their wings rustled like leaves on the clammy air – a hundred umbrals, stripped of their outward flesh, angry to be cheated by our escape.
I shouted to Hezekiah, «Take Wheezle,» and heaved the gnome toward the far end of the skiff. There was no time to see if the boy managed to keep the Dustman from harming himself; I grabbed one of our packs from the floor of the boat and threw open the flap. «Garou,» I snapped, «it may seem like fun to betray us, but remember I haven't finished the painting. You think you can find a painter like me anywhere else in the Lower Planes? One who won't try to pike you the way you're piking us?»
«Don't be so melodramatic,» the boatman replied. «I'll get you out of here.»
Languidly, he pushed off the bank with his pole. «Faster!» Miriam cried.
«And ruin my paint job? I think not.» He planted the pole with extravagant slowness and gave a soft nudge. The boat moved inches forward, drifting into the river's sluggish current.
«Ten seconds before the fiends get here,» Yasmin murmured to me. «Are you the sort of man who likes to hear mushy things before he dies?»
«I'll let you know if I come close to dying,» I told her. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the fiends were almost upon us: pure darkness, with teeth. «Chew on this!» I yelled, as I plucked a soul-gem from my pack and hurled it into their midst.
The rushing horde hissed like hot iron thrust into ice water. The three frontrunners all fell back to catch the prize, colliding with the fiends racing up from behind. I heard a dull crunch, the sound of delicate wing-bones breaking in the tangle of bodies. A moment later, two fiends fell screeching out of the scrum, their wings trailing uselessly behind; they both caromed off the bank and into the water, where their caterwauling stopped abruptly.
Several more seconds passed as the mob of flying fiends fought over possession of the gem. At last, a victor shot away from the group, clutching the gem to its chest – the gem's purple light throbbing against the umbral's blackness. A few fiends broke off to pursue the one with the gem, but the rest turned back toward us and howled with fury.
«Yeah, yeah,» Miriam growled back. Following my lead, she had fished out another gem from our packs; now she hurled it full-force at the screaming fiends.
«Please don't rock the boat, madam,» Garou chided.
«Please get the lead out of your sodding arse,» Miriam snapped back.
«Language, language,» Garou sighed. He gave another half-hearted push with his pole, sending us out a few more inches into the stream. The current angled the prow around and drew us forward, aiming us toward one of the pillars of mist hovering above the Styx. My guess was that each such cloud acted as a portal, opening to another part of the river on a different plane; even spurred by greed, umbrals would fear to follow us through… I hoped.
The struggle to claim Miriam's gem ended after only a few seconds. No one's wings broke; indeed, a few of the fiends ignored the gem entirely, circling around the other umbrals and continuing to pursue us. Did that mean they wanted to attack us more than they wanted to claim a gem? Or had they remembered we possessed many such gems, free for the picking if they managed to dump us in the Styx?
I had plucked up another gem and Yasmin had found one too; we threw simultaneously, aiming for the closest fiends. One fiend managed to catch a gem, and was immediately set upon by two others. The remaining gem was fumbled by clumsy-clawed hands and fell toward the river. Two fiends dove for it at full speed; they reached the gem simultaneously, clonked heads like a clown act, and plummeted the rest of the way into the water. A moment later they surfaced, sputtering and gasping. Both gripped the gem… and both stared at its purple glow as if they'd never seen such a thing before. There was no way to tell how much the water had affected their memories, but they goggled at the gem with obvious greed, like crows coveting a shiny bauble. Immediately, they began clawing and biting at each other, splashing showers of greasy water into the air.
«Peel it away,» Wheezle shouted. «Peel away the shell!»
«Britlin…» Hezekiah gasped, as he struggled to hold the gnome's hands. «We've got more trouble.»
I glanced in his direction. At first, I couldn't tell what Hezekiah was talking about; then I saw that Wheezle's eyes had turned into hollow pits of blackness, as empty as the night sky. Nightmare eyes. Umbral eyes.
«He's converting,» Yasmin said. «What do we do?»
«Keep throwing gems,» I answered. «Keep the fiends off our backs until we get into that mist.»
I nodded toward the closest bank of cloud, but Garou gave a low chuckle. «You'd be very upset if I took you through that one. There's no air on the other side, and the temperature's cold enough to freeze your eyeballs to ice cubes.»
«How do you know?» Miriam asked.
«It's my business to know,» Garou replied. «We're heading for that fog there.»
He pointed to another patch of mist, some fifty paces away. It seemed like a long distance with a swarm of fiends screaming for our blood; I wondered if Garou was stringing us along, taking pleasure in our fear. «Make it snappy,» I told him, «if you ever want your painting done.»
«Britlin!» Hezekiah cried again. «Hurry!»
Wheezle's fingernails had begun to extend into claws, ripping at Hezekiah's hands as the boy tried to hold him still. The gnome hissed and growled, spitting out words like a snake spitting venom. «Peel, peel, peel! Peel away the shell!»
There was another soul-gem in my hand; perhaps that would pacify him. But when I dropped the gem in Wheezle's lap, it only spurred him to greater exertions, screaming and foaming at the mouth. Bar that then – I grabbed the gem and threw it at an umbral flying less than two yards behind the boat. The fiend caught the gem, squealed in triumph, and sped away, three other fiends chasing him.
«I can't help but think,» Yasmin said matter-of-factly, «that our visit has had a negative effect on this village's sense of community.»
«Peel, peel, peel!» screeched Wheezle.
«I can't hold him,» Hezekiah warned. The gnome's claws had torn the boy's hands bloody.
«Damn it,» I said. Poisonous umbral thoughts must be filling his mind completely. If only…
I froze. Desperate times call for desperate measures. My sword lay on the floorboards, ready to be snatched up if I needed to fight the fiends. I grabbed it now, dipped its tip into the Styx, and lifted it out again. Carefully, I moved the blade over Wheezle's screaming face and let a single drop fall on his cheek.
He stopped shouting immediately. To be precise, he fell completely quiescent, as if he had plunged into a coma. Two seconds later, we passed through a pillar of mist and the rest of the world fell silent too – the hissing of umbrals, the splashes of fiends fighting in the water, all vanished in a trice.
We emerged into a bleak expanse of gray.
14. THREE PLANES TO PLAGUE-MORT
The sky had a mournful lack of color, like a muted winter's day when the snow falls somberly from dawn to dusk. The land was equally bleached of anything to please the eye: nothing but dying willows and poplars, their leaves white, their bark black, all drooping limply along the shores of the Styx. Gray mold fuzzed over the soil, stifling any chance for grass to struggle up into the light… but I wondered if even grass would have the heart to grow in such a cheerless world.
«The Gray Wastes,» Garou announced… as if any of us needed to be told.
In the Walk of Worlds at the Sigil Festhall, the Gray Wastes were portrayed in dignified shades of silver, with soft enchanted mists draping demurely over the entire scene. It was a popular room for elderly lovers, dancing with unhurried composure to the slow music that plays continuously.
But there was no music in the real Gray Wastes. I doubt if you could find lovers of any age, and unhurried composure would quickly degrade into dejected lassitude. The oppressive gloom of gray trees/gray land could deflate the most confident of spirits.
«Lovely day,» Garou said, inhaling deeply.
He had no reason to inhale. Admittedly, the plane offered breathable air, but it was completely devoid of smell. No odor came from the trees, the moss, the oily river water… I sniffed at my own skin, damp with the sweat of exertion and fear; but I couldn't smell the slightest hint of perspiration. In a way, it was worse than going blind.
«How's Wheezle?» I asked loudly, to force my mind onto other thoughts.
«Better,» Hezekiah replied. The gnome's hands had reverted to normal, the claws shrinking as quickly as they had grown. His eyes looked like gnome eyes, watery and brown, not empty hollows in his face. The single drop of Styx water had made Wheezle forget all that had happened to him among the umbrals, had purged his mind of their influence; the only question was, how much more of his memory had it stolen?
«See if you can wake him up,» I told the boy.
Hezekiah gave the gnome's cheek a few light pats, and said, «Come on, Wheezle. Wake up, come on.»
Wheezle stirred. His eyelids fluttered and his gaze focussed on Hezekiah. «Who are you?» he asked.
«You remember me – Hezekiah Virtue.»
«Ah.» Wheezle's voice sounded polite, but dubious. «Who are all you other people? Why can't I move my legs?»
Garou laughed. «Think of the positive side: at least he still remembers how to talk.»
My father would have thought of something.
Garou poled on past the silent gray banks, as the others explained to Wheezle what had happened. He took it calmly, for the most part; he even thanked me for saving him. His voice, however, had nothing in it but formality, good manners without warmth… and his hands were continually straying down to his useless legs, pinching the skin as if he could not accept that he would live paralyzed all the rest of his days.
Wheezle lapsed into silence soon enough; and the rest of us found we could think of nothing to say to each other. The gray quiet pressed in around us, muffling emotion as well as sound. It was actually a relief when Kiripao woke and grabbed Miriam by the front of her shirt… but his anger evaporated almost immediately into a slump of exhaustion that laid him down on the floorboards.
«Are you all right?» Hezekiah asked.
«I'm tired,» Kiripao answered softly.
«If your mind is full of umbral thoughts,» Hezekiah pressed on, «Britlin has found a cure.»
«Yes?» Kiripao did not sound hopeful.
«It's only a last resort,» I said. «Why don't you sleep for a while? Now that we're clear of Carceri, the umbral influence should fade.»
Kiripao didn't answer. He closed his eyes, but I could tell he was nowhere near sleeping.
Yasmin leaned back against me, her head settling against my chest. The feel of her there was a comfort; I wrapped my arms loosely around her, and after a while, the warm solidity of her body eased some of the dissipated melancholy weighing down my heart. Touching me must have had the same bolstering effect on her, because after a while she found the strength to ask Garou, «How much longer here?»
The boatman's eyes grew a deeper black, just for a second. In that moment, I had a flash of insight: that Garou was toying with us again, just as he had alerted the umbrals to our departure out of sheer malignant whim. Garou wanted us to succumb to the dreary oblivion of this place, the dull ache of its emptiness… not because he planned to rob us, sell us into slavery, or otherwise exploit the erosion of our wills, but simply because he liked to see us miserable. Suffering for suffering's sake: just to know he had the power to get under our skins.
«Yes,» I said loudly to him, «are we going to hang around this boring place much longer? It's putting me to sleep.»
Garou let out an angry snort and stabbed his pole into the water. «If you're so impatient,» he replied, «perhaps we'll take a short-cut.»
With a ferocious shove, he sent the skiff veering into a patch of mist we had almost passed by. The fog thickened around us until I couldn't see Yasmin's head still pressed against my chest; then the clouds wisped away and we were somewhere else.
The body was naked and female, possibly human… but it was difficult to be sure, given the bloat of the corpse, plus the damage done by fish and eels. The woman's ears were completely eaten away; the fingers were simply bones held together by gristle, and the cheeks were both torn open into ragged holes. As I watched, a delicate silver pilchard darted in through one of the cheek cavities, bit into the dead woman's tongue, and tried to wrestle away a piece of pink meat.
I had to look away. When I did, I saw other bodies drifting up out of the sea, as if our arrival had loosed them all from some confinement fathoms below. Each corpse was tattered with bite marks; each belly was swollen with the gases of decay.
«A pocket in the Astral Plane,» Garou said. «The Sea of the Drowned.»
But Yasmin looked at the woman closest to us and whispered, «Mother.»
«Nothing,» Yasmin answered immediately. «I don't want anything from you. Go away.»
«What do you ask?» the woman said again. Her breath fouled the air like sewage.
«I told you, I don't need anything. I don't want to talk to you.» Yasmin snatched up her sword, though the body was floating just too far to reach. «Go back wherever you came from.»
«Impossible,» the dead woman said. «I have been recognized. What do you ask?»
«I ask you to get out of my sight!» Yasmin's voice was becoming shrill. «Now!»
«That is not within my power,» the floating corpse replied. «What do you ask?»
Yasmin balled her hands into fists and covered her eyes. I put an arm around her shoulder and growled at Garou, «What's this all about?»
For a moment he didn't answer, perhaps debating whether the truth would cause us more pain than ignorance. Then he said, «Nothing truly dies in the multiverse. When a soul is killed in one place, it is merely re-embodied on another plane… but with no memory of its former existence.»
«Any leatherhead knows that,» Miriam muttered.
«But if the memories are gone, where do they go?» Garou asked. «They can't just vanish – the multiverse doesn't let anything slip through its fingers so easily. Every dying person's memory drifts like flotsam on unseen tides, until it fetches up in a holding basin like this one. Here lie the remembrances of all those drowned on a million worlds. I could show you other such memory sinks: the Poisoned Jungle, the Plain of Knives —»
«What do you ask?» interrupted the floating corpse.
«Why does she keep saying that?» Yasmin whispered.
«The memories are drawn to those who knew their owners in life,» Garou replied. «If you recognize and name them, they are compelled to reveal a secret to you. Your mother – or rather, the cast-off memory of your mother – will not rest until she has discharged this burden.»
«What do you ask?» the dead woman said. She spoke in a monotone, devoid of emotion; yet I suspected she would follow us the length of the Styx until we had let her disclose something of her past.
«Ask her anything,» I told Yasmin in a low voice. «If you don't have an important question, ask something trivial. What she had for breakfast the day she died.»
But Yasmin wasn't listening. She simply stared at the floating woman, an unreadable expression on her face. Yasmin had never spoken to me of her mother, nor revealed a word about her childhood… but then, we'd had so little time to talk. Anyway, a child may have a hundred hard questions to ask her mother, and be afraid of every answer.
Yasmin licked her lips. «Who…» She cleared her throat. «Who was my father?»
The corpse sighed. I could almost see the air thicken with the bilious smell of corruption from her guts. «Your father was a man, a human man,» the woman said. «For the week we were together, he called himself Rudy Liagar. But later, much later, I saw him from a distance in the streets of Sigil; and every tongue chanted admiration for the hero, Niles Cavendish.»
Without hesitation, the corpse disappeared once more beneath the clear moonlit water. I would have sold my soul for her to leave ten seconds earlier.
His voice trailed away. Even a Clueless boy knew when he was grasping at straws.
Still, Yasmin turned to me with a fierce look in her eyes. «Tell me it is a lie, Britlin.»
I couldn't meet her gaze. All I could say was, «My father was a hero, not a saint. I know he had other women: mostly short-lived romances during his adventures, but a few dalliances in Sigil too. It always made me so sick at heart, but… never mind. I usually didn't know the women. One of them might have been your mother; but by all the gods, Yasmin, I never suspected… if I ever suspected…»
Could I say it would have made a difference? It made a difference now, yes, with Yasmin staring at me in horror; but still, the sight of her, the brown skin of her shoulders, the flow of her body… could I have resisted her on mere suspicion?
«It's possible,» I sighed. «It's very possible. What else can I say?»
Miriam made a spitting sound. «How about saying, 'Who the hell cares?' I've been watching you two; I have eyes. And the way I see it, people should play things for themselves, and pike the rest of the world. Why should fathers and mothers matter? The past is past, and bloody good riddance. Seize the present, make it yours, however you want. It's your own hearts that matter, and sod all else.»
None of us said anything in reply. Garou laughed and continue to pole past the silent floating bodies.
The banks of the Styx rose high on either side of us, twenty feet tall and made of dusty red clay. Much of the bank was covered with bramble, a thick brush reminiscent of Sigil's omnipresent razor-vine; but in spots, recent earthslides had left patches of bare dirt, now squirming with ants and beetles. Fossilized bones poked out from the soil, all of them blood-red, of no recognizable species. A skull with three fat horns protruded some distance over the water… and each horn ended in a screaming skeletal face.
«The uppermost level of the Abyss,» Garou announced, «called the Plain of Infinite Portals. We're not far from a portal that can take you to Plague-Mort.»
«And you'll show us which that is, right?» Hezekiah said.
«All part of the service.» The boatman bowed mockingly.
The river soon widened and the banks fell away, to reveal a desert of rusty gravel and stone. Here and there, pools of molten metal dotted the landscape, sizzling with bright orange heat; their shores were scattered with lumps of glowing lava, spat out by the pools as subterranean gases belched up to the surface. I could see no lifeforms larger than insects moving amidst this desolation, but I was sure bigger game lurked out of sight – creatures that could eat our party and wash it down with a slurp of liquid iron.
«Just your typical homey hell,» I said aloud; and I huddled myself sullenly on my chosen thwart of the boat, refusing to gawk at the infernal scenery. As a Sensate, maybe I should have tried seeking out ever more sulphurous fumes to sniff, or strained my ears to hear the wailing of the damned… but frankly, I wasn't in the mood for such melodramatic fizz-fazz. I'd seen lava before. I'd tasted iron-contaminated dust. For a while, let the world rot on without my active participation.
We all looked. Hezekiah was the first to say, «I don't see anything.»
Garou chuckled, in a tone I had come to dread. «It's up there, my esteemed passengers. Do you recall I said the key was an open wound? Go up there bleeding, and see what happens.»
«How addle-coved do you think we are?» Yasmin demanded.
But Hezekiah had the required addle-coved look in his eye, the kind that was seconds away from volunteering. The boy took a moment to look over at Miriam; and I realized he wanted to show her how brave he was. The truth clicked for Miriam too. Before Hezekiah had a chance to speak, she hopped from the boat and growled, «Wait here, you berks.»
«You'll need this,» I said, holding out my sword. She stared at it a moment, then swiped her finger along one edge of the blade, opening an inch-long cut. Her expression didn't change as she squeezed the edges of the incision to force out a line of blood. Then she slapped the blade out of her way and walked away from the river, with an obvious stiffness to her gait. I suspected Miriam hadn't made many sacrificial gestures in her life, and she was floundering in self-consciousness trying to pull this one off.
Hezekiah hopped out of the boat himself, with every sign of following Miriam into whatever nasty surprise awaited. Yasmin grabbed him by the shirt-tail and held him back; but she stepped out on land too, and unlimbered her sword in case she had to run to the rescue. In short order, we were all poised on the bank, weapons ready for action.
Now that we were on our feet, we had enough height to see a large carcass lying on the sandy red dirt, about forty paces inland from the Styx. The dead thing might have been an elephant before the scavengers got to it, but it was hard to tell now. Dozens of carrion-eaters had already eaten their fill, and now it was the turn of the flies, buzzing all over the corpse as they chewed inroads through its leathery hide. When Miriam approached, the buzzing increased; like sharks, the flies could smell her blood from many paces away. I tightened my grip on the pommel of my sword, and offered up a prayer to any friendly powers who might be listening – if those flies went for her, we'd have a sod of a time getting them off.
No sooner had the thought entered my mind than it came true.
As a single mass, the flies lifted off the carcass and swarmed Miriam, roaring. Flies covered her face like a buzzing hairy-legged veil; they clotted her clothes and tangled themselves blackly in her hair. The densest concentration, however, attached themselves to her hand, to the finger with the bleeding cut. They teemed there by the hundreds, a thickening ball of insects the size of a massive beehive. Their weight dragged Miriam down to her knees… and I could imagine the ones closest to the wound jostling each other to attach their filthy sucker mouths for a sip of human blood.
«We have to save her!» Hezekiah cried, taking a step forward.
Wheezle, lying on the ground at the boy's feet, grabbed the leg of Hezekiah's pants. «Wait, honored Clueless. If this were a true feeding frenzy, the flies would have flayed her to the bone in the blink of an eye. She is still alive; wait.»
Miriam was so carpeted with flies, I couldn't tell how Wheezle knew she still had flesh on her skeleton… but perhaps Dustmen have an instinct that can sense life and death. I stared at her fly-laden body, trying to discern any sign of a living woman beneath the buzzing mass; and as I watched, a few flies struggled out of the clump on her hand and soared into the air.
The flies were glowing red, like blood-colored sparks.
Moment by moment now, more of the insects were taking their leave, all of them blazing the same color. They flew a short distance, then simply stopped and hovered… until enough of them had taken position to show they were arranging themselves in an arch. A red-glowing arch.
«A gate of flies,» Kiripao murmured. His voice betrayed an unhealthy tone of rapture. Clearly though, he was right. As more flies tasted Miriam's blood, they too joined the arch, filling in a parabolic curve that shimmered with buzzing power. Other flies, still clinging to Miriam's body, flapped their wings in unison, raising enough wind to spin up dust-devils in the surrounding red sand. They didn't have the strength to lift a full-grown woman into the air and fly her through the portal; but they generated sufficient force to propel Miriam forward, still on her knees and blinded by so many insects on her face.
At the very last moment the flies scattered away from her, swarming off her skin and clothes, giving her one last push toward the glimmering arch. Miriam toppled forward, head and chest crossing the line. Immediately, they vanished into darkness beyond; a moment later, the rest of her body was sucked through, as if some monster had grabbed her by the arms and was dragging her away.
«Well, that was amusing,» Garou said with a raspy chuckle. Standing beside him, Hezekiah tried to punch the boatman in the jaw; but Garou caught the fist in his own hand and squeezed until the boy grimaced with pain. «You're amusing too,» Garou laughed. He shoved the fist away, and Hezekiah backed off, nursing his knuckles.
«We have to do something,» Hezekiah muttered to the rest of us.
«Wait a second longer, honored Clueless,» Wheezle told him. «The honored thug-lady —»
«Miriam,» Hezekiah interrupted. «Her name is Miriam.»
Wheezle dipped his head, as much of a bow as he could manage in his condition. «Your honored Miriam may well…»
The flies, mostly quiet for the past few seconds, suddenly burst into a thunderous buzz. The hovering archway, still intact, darkened again; and this time I could see that the other side wasn't complete blackness, but simply a normal night sky, scattered with clouds. Miriam emerged from the darkness, her face fly-specked, but definitely in one piece.
A very angry piece, I might add.
«Garou!» she roared, loud enough to be heard over the din of buzzing flies. «You're going for a swim, you berk!»
The boatman curled his fleshless grin at the rest of us. «Cherished friends, if you'd be so good as to prevent your comrade from rash action…»
«Oops,» said Yasmin, «my boots are all dusty.» She bent down and busied herself picking invisible flecks of dirt from the black dragon skin.
«Sorry,» I smiled at Garou, «I have to finish that last painting.» I picked up a brush and made a show of cleaning the bristles.
Garou looked nervously at the approaching Miriam, much closer now and still furious. «I brought you all to a perfectly respectable gate,» he stammered. «It leads to Plague-Mort and you can see this woman is unhurt…»
«You should have warned her about the flies,» Hezekiah said. The boy stepped back to give Miriam a clear path to the boatman.
«A swim should not harm you,» Wheezle added. «Your kind are immune to the Styx, are they not? Unlike the rest of us.»
«Make him suffer,» Kiripao murmured softly to no one in particular. «Make him wriggle with fear. Come from the shadows, come from the night…»
«Hush,» Wheezle told the elf.
«I can defend myself,» Garou told Miriam in a cracked voice. «I have powers beyond your mortal ken.» He lifted his hands in something that might turn into a mystic gesture.
«Naughty, naughty,» I said. In my hands was the salt grinder. A moment later, Garou was covered with white dust. «If you try any magic now,» I told him, «you'll really regret it.»
He tried anyway. He howled in pain as the dust briefly flared with heat. And that was about the time Miriam grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and heaved his flailing body into the river.
The splash was magnificent.
«Why?» Yasmin snapped back. «You set a price for transporting us here. We paid it. And for all the other services you've done us – alerting the umbrals to our escape, showing me my mother, feeding Miriam to the flies without warning her – well, we've paid you for those too. And a damned low price too, considering. You'll dry soon enough. How soon do you think Wheezle will get his memory back?»
«The Gray Wastes,» Garou announced… as if any of us needed to be told.
In the Walk of Worlds at the Sigil Festhall, the Gray Wastes were portrayed in dignified shades of silver, with soft enchanted mists draping demurely over the entire scene. It was a popular room for elderly lovers, dancing with unhurried composure to the slow music that plays continuously.
But there was no music in the real Gray Wastes. I doubt if you could find lovers of any age, and unhurried composure would quickly degrade into dejected lassitude. The oppressive gloom of gray trees/gray land could deflate the most confident of spirits.
«Lovely day,» Garou said, inhaling deeply.
He had no reason to inhale. Admittedly, the plane offered breathable air, but it was completely devoid of smell. No odor came from the trees, the moss, the oily river water… I sniffed at my own skin, damp with the sweat of exertion and fear; but I couldn't smell the slightest hint of perspiration. In a way, it was worse than going blind.
«How's Wheezle?» I asked loudly, to force my mind onto other thoughts.
«Better,» Hezekiah replied. The gnome's hands had reverted to normal, the claws shrinking as quickly as they had grown. His eyes looked like gnome eyes, watery and brown, not empty hollows in his face. The single drop of Styx water had made Wheezle forget all that had happened to him among the umbrals, had purged his mind of their influence; the only question was, how much more of his memory had it stolen?
«See if you can wake him up,» I told the boy.
Hezekiah gave the gnome's cheek a few light pats, and said, «Come on, Wheezle. Wake up, come on.»
Wheezle stirred. His eyelids fluttered and his gaze focussed on Hezekiah. «Who are you?» he asked.
«You remember me – Hezekiah Virtue.»
«Ah.» Wheezle's voice sounded polite, but dubious. «Who are all you other people? Why can't I move my legs?»
Garou laughed. «Think of the positive side: at least he still remembers how to talk.»
* * *
As closely as we could figure, Wheezle had lost a year of his life: a year of unreclaimable experience vanished like smoke. To a Sensate, stealing those memories was a hideous crime; I cringed with guilt at the thought. Certainly, splashing him with that drop of water prevented him from turning into an umbral… but I felt as if I should have found some less destructive way to help him.My father would have thought of something.
Garou poled on past the silent gray banks, as the others explained to Wheezle what had happened. He took it calmly, for the most part; he even thanked me for saving him. His voice, however, had nothing in it but formality, good manners without warmth… and his hands were continually straying down to his useless legs, pinching the skin as if he could not accept that he would live paralyzed all the rest of his days.
Wheezle lapsed into silence soon enough; and the rest of us found we could think of nothing to say to each other. The gray quiet pressed in around us, muffling emotion as well as sound. It was actually a relief when Kiripao woke and grabbed Miriam by the front of her shirt… but his anger evaporated almost immediately into a slump of exhaustion that laid him down on the floorboards.
«Are you all right?» Hezekiah asked.
«I'm tired,» Kiripao answered softly.
«If your mind is full of umbral thoughts,» Hezekiah pressed on, «Britlin has found a cure.»
«Yes?» Kiripao did not sound hopeful.
«It's only a last resort,» I said. «Why don't you sleep for a while? Now that we're clear of Carceri, the umbral influence should fade.»
Kiripao didn't answer. He closed his eyes, but I could tell he was nowhere near sleeping.
* * *
Time passed like an old man on weary legs. This stretch of the river had its share of misty patches, but Garou steered around them. Once I came close to asking him how much longer we'd have to travel through this soul-wearying plane; but the effort of opening my mouth seemed too great to bother.Yasmin leaned back against me, her head settling against my chest. The feel of her there was a comfort; I wrapped my arms loosely around her, and after a while, the warm solidity of her body eased some of the dissipated melancholy weighing down my heart. Touching me must have had the same bolstering effect on her, because after a while she found the strength to ask Garou, «How much longer here?»
The boatman's eyes grew a deeper black, just for a second. In that moment, I had a flash of insight: that Garou was toying with us again, just as he had alerted the umbrals to our departure out of sheer malignant whim. Garou wanted us to succumb to the dreary oblivion of this place, the dull ache of its emptiness… not because he planned to rob us, sell us into slavery, or otherwise exploit the erosion of our wills, but simply because he liked to see us miserable. Suffering for suffering's sake: just to know he had the power to get under our skins.
«Yes,» I said loudly to him, «are we going to hang around this boring place much longer? It's putting me to sleep.»
Garou let out an angry snort and stabbed his pole into the water. «If you're so impatient,» he replied, «perhaps we'll take a short-cut.»
With a ferocious shove, he sent the skiff veering into a patch of mist we had almost passed by. The fog thickened around us until I couldn't see Yasmin's head still pressed against my chest; then the clouds wisped away and we were somewhere else.
* * *
Open water spread without end beneath a jet black sky. There were no stars, but three moons, all of them full – a white moon, a silver one, and a moon of frosted green, each lunar face pocked and ravaged with craters. The moons cast enough light to provide a clear view around us: the waters of the Styx, as foul and fetid as ever, streaming out like a malodorous black stripe across an otherwise crystal sea. Two paces away the sea water glistened with the dappling of moonlight, as calm as a windless lake. The sight made me yearn for a swim in the soft, beckoning waters; but even as I tried to touch the cleanness beyond the polluted path of the Styx, a body bobbed to the surface.The body was naked and female, possibly human… but it was difficult to be sure, given the bloat of the corpse, plus the damage done by fish and eels. The woman's ears were completely eaten away; the fingers were simply bones held together by gristle, and the cheeks were both torn open into ragged holes. As I watched, a delicate silver pilchard darted in through one of the cheek cavities, bit into the dead woman's tongue, and tried to wrestle away a piece of pink meat.
I had to look away. When I did, I saw other bodies drifting up out of the sea, as if our arrival had loosed them all from some confinement fathoms below. Each corpse was tattered with bite marks; each belly was swollen with the gases of decay.
«A pocket in the Astral Plane,» Garou said. «The Sea of the Drowned.»
But Yasmin looked at the woman closest to us and whispered, «Mother.»
* * *
The woman's half-eaten eyelids opened. I saw now that her eyes had a tiefling cast: blood-red and feline, with no discernible whites. She did not move a muscle, but her body circled on some undetectable current until her face was focused on Yasmin. «I have been recognized,» she said, in a breathy voice that released the stink of gases from her gut. «What do you ask?»«Nothing,» Yasmin answered immediately. «I don't want anything from you. Go away.»
«What do you ask?» the woman said again. Her breath fouled the air like sewage.
«I told you, I don't need anything. I don't want to talk to you.» Yasmin snatched up her sword, though the body was floating just too far to reach. «Go back wherever you came from.»
«Impossible,» the dead woman said. «I have been recognized. What do you ask?»
«I ask you to get out of my sight!» Yasmin's voice was becoming shrill. «Now!»
«That is not within my power,» the floating corpse replied. «What do you ask?»
Yasmin balled her hands into fists and covered her eyes. I put an arm around her shoulder and growled at Garou, «What's this all about?»
For a moment he didn't answer, perhaps debating whether the truth would cause us more pain than ignorance. Then he said, «Nothing truly dies in the multiverse. When a soul is killed in one place, it is merely re-embodied on another plane… but with no memory of its former existence.»
«Any leatherhead knows that,» Miriam muttered.
«But if the memories are gone, where do they go?» Garou asked. «They can't just vanish – the multiverse doesn't let anything slip through its fingers so easily. Every dying person's memory drifts like flotsam on unseen tides, until it fetches up in a holding basin like this one. Here lie the remembrances of all those drowned on a million worlds. I could show you other such memory sinks: the Poisoned Jungle, the Plain of Knives —»
«What do you ask?» interrupted the floating corpse.
«Why does she keep saying that?» Yasmin whispered.
«The memories are drawn to those who knew their owners in life,» Garou replied. «If you recognize and name them, they are compelled to reveal a secret to you. Your mother – or rather, the cast-off memory of your mother – will not rest until she has discharged this burden.»
«What do you ask?» the dead woman said. She spoke in a monotone, devoid of emotion; yet I suspected she would follow us the length of the Styx until we had let her disclose something of her past.
«Ask her anything,» I told Yasmin in a low voice. «If you don't have an important question, ask something trivial. What she had for breakfast the day she died.»
But Yasmin wasn't listening. She simply stared at the floating woman, an unreadable expression on her face. Yasmin had never spoken to me of her mother, nor revealed a word about her childhood… but then, we'd had so little time to talk. Anyway, a child may have a hundred hard questions to ask her mother, and be afraid of every answer.
Yasmin licked her lips. «Who…» She cleared her throat. «Who was my father?»
The corpse sighed. I could almost see the air thicken with the bilious smell of corruption from her guts. «Your father was a man, a human man,» the woman said. «For the week we were together, he called himself Rudy Liagar. But later, much later, I saw him from a distance in the streets of Sigil; and every tongue chanted admiration for the hero, Niles Cavendish.»
Without hesitation, the corpse disappeared once more beneath the clear moonlit water. I would have sold my soul for her to leave ten seconds earlier.
* * *
«It could be a lie, couldn't it?» Hezekiah said, when no one else spoke. «Some kind of demonic trick…»His voice trailed away. Even a Clueless boy knew when he was grasping at straws.
Still, Yasmin turned to me with a fierce look in her eyes. «Tell me it is a lie, Britlin.»
I couldn't meet her gaze. All I could say was, «My father was a hero, not a saint. I know he had other women: mostly short-lived romances during his adventures, but a few dalliances in Sigil too. It always made me so sick at heart, but… never mind. I usually didn't know the women. One of them might have been your mother; but by all the gods, Yasmin, I never suspected… if I ever suspected…»
Could I say it would have made a difference? It made a difference now, yes, with Yasmin staring at me in horror; but still, the sight of her, the brown skin of her shoulders, the flow of her body… could I have resisted her on mere suspicion?
«It's possible,» I sighed. «It's very possible. What else can I say?»
Miriam made a spitting sound. «How about saying, 'Who the hell cares?' I've been watching you two; I have eyes. And the way I see it, people should play things for themselves, and pike the rest of the world. Why should fathers and mothers matter? The past is past, and bloody good riddance. Seize the present, make it yours, however you want. It's your own hearts that matter, and sod all else.»
None of us said anything in reply. Garou laughed and continue to pole past the silent floating bodies.
* * *
The skiff was moving swiftly at last. Our marraenoloth boatman had no more reason to dawdle; he had hurt us and was happy. Soon we entered another spume of fog, leaving behind the haunted moonlight and coming out under a swollen red sun. A wash of heat struck our faces, like stepping into the Great Foundry when the furnaces blazed their brightest. In seconds, sweat was dribbling profusely down my forehead.The banks of the Styx rose high on either side of us, twenty feet tall and made of dusty red clay. Much of the bank was covered with bramble, a thick brush reminiscent of Sigil's omnipresent razor-vine; but in spots, recent earthslides had left patches of bare dirt, now squirming with ants and beetles. Fossilized bones poked out from the soil, all of them blood-red, of no recognizable species. A skull with three fat horns protruded some distance over the water… and each horn ended in a screaming skeletal face.
«The uppermost level of the Abyss,» Garou announced, «called the Plain of Infinite Portals. We're not far from a portal that can take you to Plague-Mort.»
«And you'll show us which that is, right?» Hezekiah said.
«All part of the service.» The boatman bowed mockingly.
The river soon widened and the banks fell away, to reveal a desert of rusty gravel and stone. Here and there, pools of molten metal dotted the landscape, sizzling with bright orange heat; their shores were scattered with lumps of glowing lava, spat out by the pools as subterranean gases belched up to the surface. I could see no lifeforms larger than insects moving amidst this desolation, but I was sure bigger game lurked out of sight – creatures that could eat our party and wash it down with a slurp of liquid iron.
«Just your typical homey hell,» I said aloud; and I huddled myself sullenly on my chosen thwart of the boat, refusing to gawk at the infernal scenery. As a Sensate, maybe I should have tried seeking out ever more sulphurous fumes to sniff, or strained my ears to hear the wailing of the damned… but frankly, I wasn't in the mood for such melodramatic fizz-fazz. I'd seen lava before. I'd tasted iron-contaminated dust. For a while, let the world rot on without my active participation.
* * *
Garou put in at the base of a ruined bridge: a construction of pure white marble that seemed to have dropped in from the Upper Planes by some fluke of magic. Local citizens had obviously taken offense at the arrival of such a pristine celestial object, and demolished the central span – fallen chunks of marble congested the river below, raising doubt whether we could sail our way past. However, it appeared we didn't need to; Garou pointed up the bank and said, «There's your portal.»We all looked. Hezekiah was the first to say, «I don't see anything.»
Garou chuckled, in a tone I had come to dread. «It's up there, my esteemed passengers. Do you recall I said the key was an open wound? Go up there bleeding, and see what happens.»
«How addle-coved do you think we are?» Yasmin demanded.
But Hezekiah had the required addle-coved look in his eye, the kind that was seconds away from volunteering. The boy took a moment to look over at Miriam; and I realized he wanted to show her how brave he was. The truth clicked for Miriam too. Before Hezekiah had a chance to speak, she hopped from the boat and growled, «Wait here, you berks.»
«You'll need this,» I said, holding out my sword. She stared at it a moment, then swiped her finger along one edge of the blade, opening an inch-long cut. Her expression didn't change as she squeezed the edges of the incision to force out a line of blood. Then she slapped the blade out of her way and walked away from the river, with an obvious stiffness to her gait. I suspected Miriam hadn't made many sacrificial gestures in her life, and she was floundering in self-consciousness trying to pull this one off.
Hezekiah hopped out of the boat himself, with every sign of following Miriam into whatever nasty surprise awaited. Yasmin grabbed him by the shirt-tail and held him back; but she stepped out on land too, and unlimbered her sword in case she had to run to the rescue. In short order, we were all poised on the bank, weapons ready for action.
Now that we were on our feet, we had enough height to see a large carcass lying on the sandy red dirt, about forty paces inland from the Styx. The dead thing might have been an elephant before the scavengers got to it, but it was hard to tell now. Dozens of carrion-eaters had already eaten their fill, and now it was the turn of the flies, buzzing all over the corpse as they chewed inroads through its leathery hide. When Miriam approached, the buzzing increased; like sharks, the flies could smell her blood from many paces away. I tightened my grip on the pommel of my sword, and offered up a prayer to any friendly powers who might be listening – if those flies went for her, we'd have a sod of a time getting them off.
No sooner had the thought entered my mind than it came true.
As a single mass, the flies lifted off the carcass and swarmed Miriam, roaring. Flies covered her face like a buzzing hairy-legged veil; they clotted her clothes and tangled themselves blackly in her hair. The densest concentration, however, attached themselves to her hand, to the finger with the bleeding cut. They teemed there by the hundreds, a thickening ball of insects the size of a massive beehive. Their weight dragged Miriam down to her knees… and I could imagine the ones closest to the wound jostling each other to attach their filthy sucker mouths for a sip of human blood.
«We have to save her!» Hezekiah cried, taking a step forward.
Wheezle, lying on the ground at the boy's feet, grabbed the leg of Hezekiah's pants. «Wait, honored Clueless. If this were a true feeding frenzy, the flies would have flayed her to the bone in the blink of an eye. She is still alive; wait.»
Miriam was so carpeted with flies, I couldn't tell how Wheezle knew she still had flesh on her skeleton… but perhaps Dustmen have an instinct that can sense life and death. I stared at her fly-laden body, trying to discern any sign of a living woman beneath the buzzing mass; and as I watched, a few flies struggled out of the clump on her hand and soared into the air.
The flies were glowing red, like blood-colored sparks.
Moment by moment now, more of the insects were taking their leave, all of them blazing the same color. They flew a short distance, then simply stopped and hovered… until enough of them had taken position to show they were arranging themselves in an arch. A red-glowing arch.
«A gate of flies,» Kiripao murmured. His voice betrayed an unhealthy tone of rapture. Clearly though, he was right. As more flies tasted Miriam's blood, they too joined the arch, filling in a parabolic curve that shimmered with buzzing power. Other flies, still clinging to Miriam's body, flapped their wings in unison, raising enough wind to spin up dust-devils in the surrounding red sand. They didn't have the strength to lift a full-grown woman into the air and fly her through the portal; but they generated sufficient force to propel Miriam forward, still on her knees and blinded by so many insects on her face.
At the very last moment the flies scattered away from her, swarming off her skin and clothes, giving her one last push toward the glimmering arch. Miriam toppled forward, head and chest crossing the line. Immediately, they vanished into darkness beyond; a moment later, the rest of her body was sucked through, as if some monster had grabbed her by the arms and was dragging her away.
«Well, that was amusing,» Garou said with a raspy chuckle. Standing beside him, Hezekiah tried to punch the boatman in the jaw; but Garou caught the fist in his own hand and squeezed until the boy grimaced with pain. «You're amusing too,» Garou laughed. He shoved the fist away, and Hezekiah backed off, nursing his knuckles.
«We have to do something,» Hezekiah muttered to the rest of us.
«Wait a second longer, honored Clueless,» Wheezle told him. «The honored thug-lady —»
«Miriam,» Hezekiah interrupted. «Her name is Miriam.»
Wheezle dipped his head, as much of a bow as he could manage in his condition. «Your honored Miriam may well…»
The flies, mostly quiet for the past few seconds, suddenly burst into a thunderous buzz. The hovering archway, still intact, darkened again; and this time I could see that the other side wasn't complete blackness, but simply a normal night sky, scattered with clouds. Miriam emerged from the darkness, her face fly-specked, but definitely in one piece.
A very angry piece, I might add.
«Garou!» she roared, loud enough to be heard over the din of buzzing flies. «You're going for a swim, you berk!»
The boatman curled his fleshless grin at the rest of us. «Cherished friends, if you'd be so good as to prevent your comrade from rash action…»
«Oops,» said Yasmin, «my boots are all dusty.» She bent down and busied herself picking invisible flecks of dirt from the black dragon skin.
«Sorry,» I smiled at Garou, «I have to finish that last painting.» I picked up a brush and made a show of cleaning the bristles.
Garou looked nervously at the approaching Miriam, much closer now and still furious. «I brought you all to a perfectly respectable gate,» he stammered. «It leads to Plague-Mort and you can see this woman is unhurt…»
«You should have warned her about the flies,» Hezekiah said. The boy stepped back to give Miriam a clear path to the boatman.
«A swim should not harm you,» Wheezle added. «Your kind are immune to the Styx, are they not? Unlike the rest of us.»
«Make him suffer,» Kiripao murmured softly to no one in particular. «Make him wriggle with fear. Come from the shadows, come from the night…»
«Hush,» Wheezle told the elf.
«I can defend myself,» Garou told Miriam in a cracked voice. «I have powers beyond your mortal ken.» He lifted his hands in something that might turn into a mystic gesture.
«Naughty, naughty,» I said. In my hands was the salt grinder. A moment later, Garou was covered with white dust. «If you try any magic now,» I told him, «you'll really regret it.»
He tried anyway. He howled in pain as the dust briefly flared with heat. And that was about the time Miriam grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and heaved his flailing body into the river.
The splash was magnificent.
* * *
Garou came up spluttering. The dunking hadn't washed off much of the dust – I doubt if Styx water can make anything clean – so there were patches of white caked wetly all over his head. «You'll regret this,» he coughed. «You have earned the enmity of the marraenoloth race…»«Why?» Yasmin snapped back. «You set a price for transporting us here. We paid it. And for all the other services you've done us – alerting the umbrals to our escape, showing me my mother, feeding Miriam to the flies without warning her – well, we've paid you for those too. And a damned low price too, considering. You'll dry soon enough. How soon do you think Wheezle will get his memory back?»