The Last Guardian of Everness (War of the Dreaming 1) (11 page)

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

“Off the end of the world?”

“Off the end of the world.”

“And—?” prompted Wendy.

“And what?” asked Galen, blinking.

“And why didn’t you tell him no?”

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

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

“It wasn’t like that!”

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

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

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

“Like what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yuck. Gross.”

“I mean, it is a spell.”

“Gross. Yuck.”

“The Founder
is
a magician, you know!”

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

“Good for you!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And did you?” asked Wendy brightly.

“Did I what?”

“Know what you were doing?”

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

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

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

“You jumped?”

“I jumped.”

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At once he found himself ashore, with the retreating waves slithering around him. Before him, in tall cliffs, rose the roots of the foundations of the earth. To either side were flotillas of Black Ships resting at anchor, rank on rank of wide black sails now furled. The dunes beneath his seal’s belly were yellow and pale powder, mixed with sharp fragments of bone, scattered teeth, and here and there a skeletal fragment of a hand, or the grinning roundness of a skull. In the gloom, it seemed as if the bones were piled and wind tossed into long dunes or ranks, with deeper black shadows hunched between.

Galen pulled himself on his flippers higher on the beach, and, as he did
so, the sea behind him disappeared. The beach now simply was the brink of a long fall into darkness. There was no possibility now of swimming up against the tides of night to reach the upper world again; to leave the beach was to plunge immediately into the nether gulf; he was trapped.

As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he began to see that, near the base of a giant stalagmite of the cliffs before him, three crowned women in robes of white and red and black were bound in postures of submission; hands tied to ankles, chains from iron collars looped about their knees.

There were other figures here as well. Not human figures: in the black shadows of the dunes, he saw now, hunched, black, furred, rounded shapes, like fat and cat-faced men might look with arms and legs lopped off.

These were the selkie. They lay, like him, on their bellies on the beach, or, if they moved, did so with a painful lumpish wallowing. Some few, he saw, were about his size; the rest were giant bulks, from whom deep breathing sounded like the hiss of winds from underground caverns.

But it was not hissing, he realized. In the gloom, lying at their ease among countless crushed human bones, the selkie were singing:

We wait, we wait to rise again,

Fain for the flesh of living men;

No force or fear shall cow us then,

When darkness, darkness covers all.

When that day of doom arrives,

We’ll take their shapes and steal their lives;

With gentle rapes we’ll take their wives,

When darkness, darkness covers all.

Walking masked among mankind

Of human face, inhuman mind;

ļnside best friends worst foes to find,

When darkness, darkness covers all.

Galen listened in growing disquiet. He began humping his way across the sand toward the distant captives, then stopped when he noticed the dark glitter of many eyes watching him from the forward blunt ends of the hulking seal shapes strewn along the beach.

It was with a feeling of almost giddy relief that he noticed one of the giant seals near him was a dappled albino. When that huge seal turned toward him, its seal head fell backward furtively, and a human head peered out from a small opening in the neck. It was a silver-haired man with a salt-and- pepper-beard.

The seal’s right paw suddenly flopped bonelessly; and out from a slit opening in the seal’s belly, a human hand appeared and gestured impatiently, beckoning with a furtive motion.

On the hand Galen saw a silver ring bearing the moonstone crest of the house of Njord.

Galen, careful not to disturb his seal-face, tried to work his hand free of the coat; his human hand came out from under the round bulk of his belly, holding the marble in his fist. Galen clutched it tightly, fearful lest any sliver of light escape between his fingers and shine in the gloom.

The chorus of the song suddenly rang out, a loud and joyous crescendo:

Acheron below us waits,

To rise, and draw men to their fates

When sunless towers gape sunken gates,

Will darkness, darkness conquer all!

And as exemplar of our might,

We’ll spill the Sun and spoil his light,

That men be blind and without sight

When darkness, darkness, smothers all!

The giant form of Dylan reared back and raised his seal snout high and sang in a clear, happy voice:

Behold a folly scarce believed;

He thinks deceivers are deceived!

Be him of his guise relieved,

Nor darkness cover him at all!

How shall we spying prying pay

This little man who swims our way?

A trio of high, clear voices sang out, and Galen saw the bound shapes of the women, writhing and contorting strangely. Their arms and legs grew limp; their hair and faces crumpled and fell away, revealing the black, furry faces of smiling seals peering out from widening slits in the queen’s throats. The seals shrugged off their disguises and came out from inside the flesh of the queens, which fell into folds, empty garments of white leather dangling from the seal’s paws.

The skins of the three beautiful women had been flayed from their corpses, Galen guessed, and perhaps their souls had already been taken aboard a Black Ship and sunken down to Acheron below:

Mocking impersonations of three queenly voices sang:

Skin him! Steal his life away!

His flesh, usurp; his spirit, slay!

His bones on Nastrond to decay,

And darkness, darkness eat him all!

Galen threw off the selkie coat and leapt to his feet. But Dylan reached out and seized him by the wrist, the one carrying the precious fiery pearl; Dylan’s human face had sharp, foxlike teeth, which bent down to close over Galen’s wrist. Galen found himself garbed once more in his armor and with his spear in hand. Dylan’s teeth jarred against Galen’s gauntlet, and Dylan recoiled in pain; and in the next moment, he wallowed hugely backward to avoid the stroke of Galen’s starlit spear.

It was all a trap. Azrael could not have been this deceived. There was no traitor among the selkie. The traitor was Azrael, who had led him to come here.

The light from the spear was brighter here than ever Galen had dreamed it before. The smaller seals cowered before the spear’s light, wallowing backward, squealing in pain. But the larger ones pushed forward, even as the light burned their paws and faces. Squinting, whiskers quivering with rage, the huge selkie closed in about him.

Galen braced himself, thrust and thrust again, with sharp, clean, practiced strokes. One seal-man lay dead in the beach, another wounded and bleeding.

Silently, Galen now blessed that his grandfather had forced him to practice so many hours each day with a weapon he had thought useless and insufferably archaic. But the blocks, parries, and killing strokes were easy, just as he had practiced.

Perhaps because he had thought of his grandfather, Galen in that instant saw his grandfather in the distance aboard one of the Black Ships that were drawn up on the beach, chained at the neck. With frantic gestures, his grandfather beckoned Galen to look behind him. Galen, suspecting trickery, concentrated on the round shapes rising in front of him.