A Vision of Hell: The Realms of Tartarus, Book Two Read online

  “No mirrors?” said Warnet.

  “No.”

  “What’s it for?” said Dayling. “Collectors? Scientific studies? Art lovers?”

  There was silence. It was slow and uneasy. Finally, Burstone broke it. He revealed what he had been holding back, not even knowing why he wouldn’t say it.

  “It’s part of the Plan,” he said.

  For a moment, there was blank misunderstanding on the faces of the Eupsychians. They both jumped to the conclusion that he meant the Plan which Heres had proposed only hours before. That was uppermost in their minds. Then, belatedly, they realized that he meant the Plan. The first Plan.

  “But it’s finished,” said Dayling.

  “Some of it,” said Burstone. “But there are some things that can’t finish. Won’t ever finish.”

  “Are you trying to tell us,” said Warnet slowly, “that this has been going on throughout history? For thousands of years? For all the time that the Overworld has existed we’ve been exporting materials into the Underworld? Supporting it, sustaining it, helping it? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the Council is behind this?”

  Burstone hesitated, and Warnet pounced on the hesitation.

  “They don’t know, do they?”

  “They must,” said Burstone. “Heres, at least....”

  “Where does it all go?” demanded Dayling. “All the things you bring back. Where do you send them? Who keeps it all? One of the Institutes? The Museum? The Colleges?”

  To all of the suggestions, Burstone shook his head.

  “So who?” Dayling kept on. “Who’s doing the research? Who’s supplying the stuff? Who’s behind it? And what do you mean by saying that it’s part of the Plan? Who told you that?”

  Burstone said nothing.

  “We want the names,” Warnet said, in a soft voice. “That’s the one thing we must have. We need the names.”

  “There’s only one,” said Burstone.

  They waited for him.

  “Sisyr,” he said.

  CHAPTER 11

  From time to time, Iorga was forced to leave the fire in order to go foraging. The fire needed to be fed, Aelite needed to be fed, and so did he. It was no easy task to live off the Waste. Whatever was edible was being consumed even as it grew, by myriad consumers who were likewise eaten while they fed. In order to eat in the Waste, one had to compete with other eaters, and also with the eaten. It was not so bad, if one could move through the bad land, because few eaters roamed far in the foul swamps. Iorga had hoped to beat the Waste, to keep moving, but that was no longer possible. Aelite was still, now, and what was still was eaten in the Waste. He could protect her while he was with her, but while he was apart....

  It was difficult to feed the fire, too. Food for fires was as difficult to find as food for stomachs. With things as they were Iorga needed a bright fire and good food. For Aelite’s sake. She would not recover from the smoke-cloak which was eating her slowly if all she had to eat herself were white worms and bog weed. If they had been on the move, they could have sustained themselves on a diet like that, but while they were forced to wait in the heart of the festering wilderness, they needed far greater reserves of strength and health.

  So Iorga searched for special plants—sweet ascocarps and bulbed roots—and he stalked what animals he found to hunt. There were always many crabs, which he pulled to pieces and shelled, but crabmeat was thin and sour, and insufficient in itself. He made every effort to catch birds and bats, but it was not easy. Every now and again a starling would settle on a glued perch, or he would discover a hanging bat whose reactions were a fraction slowed by trance, but he had to count such captures as pure luck.

  Every so often, when Aelite was fed, Iorga would build up the fire and search her fur carefully. The smoke-cloak had got holds in her legs and on her back, and because the silky hair grew particularly rich in just those places it was difficult to comb out the spores. Always there would be one or more which would escape to grow mycelia under the skin, and ultimately send up fruiting bodies like tiny orange star-bulbs unless they were located and burned out. Iorga had to sort through Aelite’s fur patiently, guided by her itches when she was conscious and could make sense out of her own feeling. It was easy enough to pinch off the fruiting bodies but that was useless, if the infective mycelia remained. It was not enough to prevent spore formation. The mycelia simply grew, if they were not allowed to fruit. They turned the skin gray, burst and blistered the surface, caused bad pain. So they had to be burned out. But that, too, burst and blistered the surface, and caused pain, and weakened the body. It was a hard fight.

  Aelite had been courageous, in the beginning. She lay quite still while he sorted out the infected spots and fired them, and she only sighed when the pain became intolerable. But lately, she was past sighing, and the stillness of her body did not reflect courage, but lassitude and imminent defeat.

  Iorga knew that he was trying to fight the disease under impossible conditions, and that he was virtually certain to Jose, but he would not give up. It was not in his nature. He would not let the infection alone to claim her.

  She could not be moved. The decaying mycelia under the skin, even burned out, became toxic, and the toxin would only stay in the epidermal tissues while she did not try to walk. The skin excreted the poison in time, given a chance, but it would spread if she became active.

  The center of the infection was an old mycelium on her upper thigh which had been fired twice and yet still, somehow, managed to survive. Iorga dared not burn the flesh any more at that place, or the leg would die from the burning, and so he had to be content to shave off the fruiting bodies until the first burns had healed. He continually plastered the exposed skin with the pap of a red squab which he believed to be useful in healing the flesh and limiting the parasite. It may have been effective, to a degree, but without time on his side there was little enough reason to hope that it would be effective enough.

  Iorga, of course, picked up the spores of the smoke-cloak himself whenever a fruiting body got the chance to distribute spores, but he had managed to prevent the infection getting a hold on his own body. It would not, provided that he was careful, scrupulous, and sensitive to the slightest risk, but he knew full well that he was running a risk.

  He did not trouble to debate with himself the chances which would dictate whether Aelite lived or died. He did not think of the fight in terms of whether things got better or worse. He knew both hope and fear, but he would not let them occupy his mind or dictate to his body. He had switched himself out of the agonizing cycle of self-examination and repair. In order to cope with the situation he had deliberately relinquished what others might have called his “human” qualities. He needed to see the battle to the end, and he could not fight himself as well as the parasite.

  Camlak found him while he was combing Aelite’s fur. He did not look up to greet the newcomer, and Camlak did not interrupt him, but simply sat down beside the fire to wait and watch.

  When it was time, and the combing was done, the hellkin looked at his visitor closely. Camlak stared back, examining the large green eyes which glowed luminous in the firelight, with the vertical slits half-closed.

  Camlak displayed his empty hands. It was hardly necessary, but it was proper. Iorga matched the gesture, sealing the truce.

  “I have food,” said the Shairan. “You will share.”

  Iorga nodded, almost imperceptibly. Camlak took what he had from his pack and began to sort it out. Until they had eaten, he would not say more. The hellkin was involved in something of his own, something difficult. Camlak did not really want to invade his privacy at all, but he wanted to help. The hellkin would not be grateful, but he would hardly refuse.

  Afterwards, Camlak asked: “Have others passed this way?”

  Iorga was silent, but Camlak knew that the lack of an answer was honest.

  “How far is the iron wall?” asked Camlak.

&nbs
p; The hellkin shook his head, again very slightly.

  Chemec came out of the shallow water behind Camlak, carrying a handful of dead things. Small things, but warm. No crabs. The cripple looked at Camlak, and then at the hellkin. He gave the fresh food to the Old Man, and displayed empty but bloodstained palms to Iorga before moving closer.

  “Smoke-cloak?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Iorga. Chemec drew back. “Not here,” said Camlak to the bent-leg. “We’ll move on.” Chemec was obviously relieved. He had a healthy fear of disease. His relief was quickly contaminated with disgust when Camlak gave the small creatures which he had labored hard to catch and kill to the hellkin. Iorga seemed hardly to notice.

  When the Children of the Voice passed on into the wilderness, Iorga followed them with his eyes. When Camlak looked back and saluted, he nodded in acknowledgment. When they had gone, he went back to staring into the fire. Not until they were well away did he begin to rip up the fresh meat with his teeth, tearing away the fur and ripping the meat from the tiny, thin bones before he pressed the pieces into Aelite’s mouth and helped her to swallow.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Why did you do that?” demanded Chemec.

  “He needed it,” said Camlak.

  “So did we.”

  “Then we catch more.”

  “You’re a fool.”

  Yami would have threatened to kill him if he’d said that. In fact, Chemec couldn’t think of any man who would accept such an insult. But Camlak didn’t touch his knife.

  “If you follow me,” he said, “you accept my way. Go back. Go into Shairn. You can live whatever way you want there.”

  Chemec asked himself why he hadn’t gone into the north-lands of Shairn, instead of following Camlak into the Waste. He could find no reasons, or none in words. The reasons existed, but Chemec simply could not articulate them. While he could not articulate them, he could not cope with them. They compelled him. The force was the power of collective identity—when Camlak had played the Sun to Yami’s Star King he had taken into himself the greater self that was Stalhelm. Chemec was still linked to that greater self. Helplessly.

  Camlak had the words to reason with, but he was not sure of himself. In his mind, he had buried Stalhelm. He did not want Chemec. But he knew that the only way to get rid of the cripple would be to kill him. That, he would not do. He genuinely did not wish to kill—not Chemec, not anyone. He knew that there were other ways and they were the ways that he wanted to find. He was certain that with the aid of his Gray Soul he could find them. In the meantime, he would put up with Chemec, if not Chemec’s ways. They were bound together by a tie of some kind.

  “Where do we go after the wall?” Chemec wanted to know. “If we find Nita, what then?”

  “I don’t know,” said Camlak. “Across the darklands by the road of stars. North and further north into nowhere. Maybe to Heaven. Anywhere at all.”

  Chemec set his teeth tight about his tongue. The ideas themselves were enough to frighten him.

  CHAPTER 13

  Elsewhere, Joth Magner was also having trouble with parasites. On his back, out of sight beneath his shirt, he had allowed a handful of bulbous growths to develop. The spores had probably slipped down the back of his neck and stuck in his sweat. He had taken no notice because they gave him no pain, even when they grew into him. Had Nita or Huldi been able to see them on his skin they would have known enough to cut out the growths at the earliest possible moment. When Joth finally paid some attention to them and asked questions, the parasitism was well under way. Nita told him that something had to be done, and that it would be far from pleasant.

  “What are they?” Joth asked. He could not, even by craning his neck, see the growths, but he could feel them if he reached over his shoulder. They were hard and granular, hemispherical, about the size of the ball of his thumb.

  “They have to come out,” said the girl, who had no ready name for them, but who knew the kind of threat which they posed.

  “I can hardly feel them,” said Joth. “I’ll surely not die of them.” But he already knew enough of the Underworld not to take that for granted. Life in the Underworld required ceaseless vigilance in self-defense, and the taking of no chances.

  “They have to come out,” repeated Nita.

  The daughter of Camlak knew that it would have to be done with a heated knife, and she also knew that she had not the strength to hold Joth down, with or without Huldi’s help. She found some small globular fungi with flame-red caps and offered them to Joth.

  “You told me not to eat them,” he said. “Poison.”

  “That’s right,” said the girl.

  “Die,” said Huldi. “For a while. Better that way.”

  “They’ll put me to sleep?”

  “Sick sleep,” Nita told him. “But you wake, in time.”

  Joth wanted to postpone the moment, but in the Underworld there were no schedules in time. What was done was done. There was no tomorrow.

  He put one into his mouth, and it burned his tongue as he held it there, temporarily unable to swallow. In trying to get it down he squashed it, and the bitter fire washed all around his mouth. He gagged, and almost threw up, but he managed to get the fungal cap down. Tears streamed from his eyes. Nita gave him another, and another, waiting patiently each time for him to do battle with it. When he had swallowed four, his whole head felt like a volcano. It was as if his throat was cut. Instead of lapsing into a deep and peaceful sleep the fire reached out to clothe his mind completely, sucking it into a hot, flaming prison. Only a few moments passed, however, before the pain became only an illusion, and his burning eyes refused to see. His mind melted, and caved in. He did not black out, but ascended as though upon a curtain of flame into a sky like shattered glass.

  Memory did not quite desert him, although he would gladly have abandoned it wholly. He was parted from the external world, and felt absolutely nothing of the work which Nita did with the knife, but he was still alive in a world of his own—a hideous phantasmagoria of images and distorted emotions. Not sleep, but sickness—sickness of the internal self.

  Outside, Nita cut out the discoid growths, and then began to trace the extent of the adventitious subcutaneous haustoria that were digging their way slowly into the connective tissue outside the scapula. Capillary blood vessels had been destroyed and the nervous tissue had begun to decay, but the great muscle was relatively unharmed.

  Huldi fetched a handful of maggots from a rotting gourd, and placed them on the wound. They would eat the dead tissue, including the haustoria, but would not touch the healthy, living cells which were no use to them. When they finished, there would be a vast wound, but the damage the parasite had done in closing the blood vessels would actually help in keeping the leakage of blood under control. The difficulty would be in protecting the wound from the rigors of the Underworld while it healed.

  Inside, Joth was lost in a maze of sensation which whirled him round, taunting and tormenting him with touch and sound and color. At first the crazy whirl was simply hurtful, assaulting his mind like poison, tearing at his sense of order and organization, clutching at the fibers of his being. There came a time, however, when it almost began to make sense. He found stars in the sky of his skull, Underworld stars that were still and staring, no matter whether he soared on imagined winds or huddled into a blob of jelly in the mud that carpeted the foul earth. Perpetual stars. There were creatures swarming in his inner being like the maggots that wriggled in his absent flesh; monstrous creatures which wore beast-faces or beast-masks. They all seemed preternaturally vast, and were made grotesque by virtue of the fact that all the wrong features were accentuated. What should have been negligible became prominent, and what ought to have been obvious became hard to focus on, hard even to see as the entity which it ought to have been. All the colors were wrong, unbalanced and un-integrated. The creatures had names but the names were garbled, real but pronounced so strangely that the sounds were tangled and wrenched beyond a
ll meaning—or all recognition of meaning

  The experience was real.

  It was not a dream.

  Joth knew that. He knew that he knew it. When he woke, he would know it still. It was real. He knew because he had touched the reality of which it was a part. His body had entered into it, though his mind never had, never could. But he had seen enough, sensed enough, deduced enough to begin to understand. The dead, fetid air which groped into his lungs, the filthy water which leaped down his throat into his gullet, the steady stream of terror which ran in his veins—these things were still alien to him, but he had looked into the face of the unknown, and he had felt their touch before.

  He knew.

  When he woke, the first thing that he said was: “How long?”

  Nita was asleep. Huldi did not answer, because it was a meaningless question and because he was not recovered enough to hear.

  The second thing he said was: “Listen.”

  She listened. She could not promise to understand, or to remember, but she listened, as she watched. She was keeping vigil over Joth. He was dependent upon her, and she was responsive to his need. She did not know why, nor even how to ask.

  She listened.

  “The dreams,” he said. “No dreams.” He had difficulty forming the words, but he felt compelled to speak, to make real and permanent what he knew, in case it faded with the vision of hell which had come to him through the fire-mind fungus.

  “Images,” he said. “Through other eyes. Visions. From someone else. Sent into my mind. His mind. He didn’t know. Something...made him receptive. He saw...with the eyes of the Children of the Voice. He dreamed their lives.... He saw with their eyes.... He couldn’t understand.... He never saw.

  “He didn’t know.”

  Huldi rested her hand on the back of his neck. He lay face downwards. His head slewed sideways, his jaw resting on the ground. He had difficulty moving his mouth to form the words.