“Tell me why they made you dig.”
“’Tis better if you see for yourself,” Jarmon said, blowing the dust off the rock and starting on the shoulder joint. “What did you find up the slope?”
“Three attacked me. They burn well when mixed with wind. Then I came back.”
“Go back and climb all the way up the neck to the head, to the eyes. Pay attention to how many are there, then come back and tell me what you’ve seen.”
“What does that mean, neck, head, eyes? Whose neck, head, and eyes?”
Jarmon looked up from his task, seemingly annoyed.
“Did you study nothing about this place before you came here, King Ysk?”
Achmed’s mouth dropped open in shock.
“What did you call me?”
The skeletal man grinned broadly. “I called you by your name, did I not?”
“No,” said Achmed. “That has not been my name for a very long time, nor is it the most recent name before the one I now bear.”
“Ah, a shame,” said Jarmon. “You might want to rethink that. But we can talk more about this when it’s safer—when I am done with my task, and you have seen more of the slope. This is a very big vault, and it is full of very evil things. I imagine you would like to know what you’re up against, would you not?”
“Of course,” said Achmed sullenly. “Whose head, neck, and eyes?”
Jarmon finally stopped working to crush the shoulder and came over to Achmed, holding the bone like a club or a gavel.
“When this place was built, there were many more of the folks that live here inside,” he said, waving his shoulder bone for emphasis. “And their sheer number strained the facility, shall we say? The Wyrmril, the race normal people call dragons, gave their cache of Living Stone to make the place, and as you can see, they’ve only had one escape since the beginning of Time. But when that threat of rupture seemed possible of coming to pass, the Progenitor Wyrm, the originator of the race, saw the place bursting at the seams and wrapped him or herself around it, consuming it and, I believe, Ending.”
“I know this tale.”
The animated pile of rags threw its one remaining hand up into the air.
“Well, why didn’t you say so?” Jarmon inquired. “If you know the tale, then you should be able to figure out whose head, neck, and eyes I’m talking about.”
Achmed blinked. “Oh.”
“Go.”
The Bolg king watched as the dried-out man went back to work grinding his own shoulder into dust.
He returned to the place where the three F’dor spirits had swept down on him, silent now except for the endless drone of maniacal noise in the distance. He traveled up the slope, through a number of peaks and corners that he realized after climbing along them were the shoulders and neck of the enormous beast, a creature for which there was nothing he had ever seen to match for scale.
At one joint of the neck, another ambush occurred.
As he was turning through what appeared to be a series of hiding places, a circle of flames sprang up around him, chanting, cursing, insulting him, trying to overwhelm him with flashes of black fire pitched at his eyes.
The Bolg king responded by taking out Kirsdarke and drenching both himself and the corridor, raining water down upon the beasts and snuffing many of them. As each of them winked out, a puff of smoke was left behind, leaving the slope hazy with it.
The rest of the screaming fires fled to distant corners, sending up wails of agony that made his skin throb.
Finally he came to the end of the tunnel, an enormous cavern that was filled with wheedling sounds being emitted by disembodied voices, all trying to encourage him into foolish tasks or suicidal undertakings in the dark, spoken sensually or maliciously combative, voices calling mournfully or begging plaintively, a cavern full of lies and manipulations.
At the bottom of which, set into the enormous oval floor, were two reflective pools of silver mirrors that flashed with the movement of anything coming down from the slope above.
Achmed paused here.
He was uncertain at this point what to make of this place, because, unlike the endless pain and frustration, terror and threat of the rest of the Vault he had seen so far, he had come into what passed for a hopeful place.
A place of promise, where he could feel the palpable potential of escape. Demonic flames were chasing each other around the circular floor, entreating each other, and him, to help them out.
Many of the bristling fires were repeatedly slamming themselves into the mirrored pools, flashing and flaring and occasionally winking out.
See? the tempting voices were saying. There is a world beyond here—the legends are true. Look out through the eyes; they are the windows of the soul.
You have no souls, you monsters, Achmed thought disdainfully. But the entreaties were so powerful, so compelling, that he had the irresistible urge to do as they said, to look out through the ancient dragon’s eyes, to see what lay beyond the Vault, as they did.
He did so, only to discover an image reflected back at him, an image of himself, twisted and rotten, thick where he knew himself to be thin, weak where he knew he was strong, the internal mirrors causing him, for the slightest of moments, to cease to believe in his own resolve as another squadron of flame grew nearer, whispering promises of power, of escape.
Then, as one, they all came roaring at him at once, only to be snuffed out by a sweep of the air sword that expanded their flame to the point of not being able to be sustained.
A series of explosions that looked for all the world like fireworks lit the interior of what had been part of the Progenitor Wyrm’s skull, leading to a swelling chorus of screaming and acidic hatred once again.
As he was returning, he saw that the low ceiling of the place, well within his reach, was deeply scratched, and noticed light suffusing through, most likely dead rock that had once been Living Stone, as if it was a very thin layer of rock that he knew was part of the exterior of the Vault.
He reached out his hand in confusion and touched it with his glove.
This is clearly a place where the rock is directly submerged in the depths of the sea, he thought hazily. Why would they be scratching their way out here? And how? Surely they must know their efforts will destroy the one thing that keeps the sea from pouring in—
He looked more closely, only to discover that there was condensation and seepage all along the top, as if there were a million tiny grooves and cracks, behind which the seawater threatened to burst through at any moment.
It perhaps explained the lack of demonic presence in this part of the prison.
On the stone floor at his feet was a puddle of dampness that had been whitened by salt.
Achmed looked around to assure himself of a lack of ambush, then opened his pack. He set up his still to catch and purify the water for later use, not so much for himself but for Jarmon, whose thirst he could still feel in his skin, even this far away.
“What in the world are they trying to do up where the skin of the Vault is thinner?” he asked incredulously as he returned to see the skeletal soldier finished with his task. “If they want to drown, I am more than willing to help them.”
“They don’t want to drown, King Ysk,” Jarmon said, settling his emaciated body under a column of Living Stone. “There are no cracks, for, unlike most of the Vault, that part’s not stone. It is the skin of the great beast that gave its life. Some water passes through it, but they will not escape that way.
“They are not sentient creatures—they are sheer will, chaos, and destructive mania. They want out, so they compelled me, not long after I came to this place, to attempt to make an opening in what they thought was the roof, until the seepage was noticed. They feared being overwhelmed and drowning, so they made me stop. They originally were the ones who had made me dig in the first place. That’s why the weapons that were on me when I came to this place are gone; they were worn away by my attempts at digging.”
Achmed
sat down in the dust of dead Living Stone and Jarmon’s bones.
“I have more libation,” he said, opening his pack and taking out two more poles. “Tell me your story, and at least one of them will be yours.”
39
The animated pile of bones and skin sat down and extended an eager hand.
Achmed put a pole of whiskey in it.
“My story ended the day I entered here,” Jarmon said, opening the pole with his teeth. “Nothing but dust since then, sunless, starless ages of dust. It never occurred to me that the bane of my existence would be a dry world, but it is.”
“You said you could tell me everything of the F’dor,” Achmed said, removing the cap of his own brandy and resolving to make certain that the next time he offered one to Jarmon, he handed it over open. “And how you know what was once my name.”
“The latter is a quicker tale,” the ancient soldier said. “I know of you, Ysk. I know every secret that has been put on the wind. When I stand at the top of the shoulder, at the thin place where they are mostly afraid to go, every secret that rides the wind comes by, or at least it does on the rare occasions when the sea pulls back, as it must have for you to come through the door you did. Whenever the top of the Vault is in the open air, the secrets pound at the roof, wail outside the Vault, demand to be heard, carried here on the sea wind.
“And the demons, they are impressive listeners. I learned from them how to hear the secrets brush along the scales of the peak, learned to guess their size and shape as they circled round the world. There is not much left of me. Bones carried by secrets, and anger and their creeping dread that they’ll miss witnessing my self-destruction—and yours.”
Achmed took a deep draught of his pole of brandy.
“I despise riddles,” he said. “Can you speak clearer to me?”
“While there are stories on the wind about the great Dhracian assassin, there have also been tales of you within this place for as long as you’ve been alive—perhaps longer,” said Jarmon, leaning back against the wall. “Your conception was an epic event in here, apparently, though I was not here when that happened. I am younger than you—easy to believe, me being the picture of youth!”
The skeletal soldier laughed. Achmed smiled in spite of himself.
“There is only one thing more terrifying to a F’dor spirit than a Dhracian, the race that has been patrolling outside the Vault since the Before-Time, waiting to sing their death chant and explode their host, or banish them to oblivion. And that, King Ysk, is the prospect of a Dhracian that has ties to the Earth itself. There has only been one such entity since the beginning of Time, at least in the lore of this place.
“And all their prophecies warn them of such a hunter, who can walk the Vault with impunity, free from their powers. They have feared your coming as much as the upworld fears their escape.”
“That’s hard to imagine,” said Achmed, drinking again.
“As for the F’dor, the reason I could claim to tell you everything about them is that I have housed all of them in my time. I know their secrets, as I know yours.”
“Housed them?”
“Whenever they can beat me into submission—and I’m proud to say that isn’t very often—they attempt to catch me in thrall, or otherwise make me a temporary host. None of them would want me permanently, of course—to take on such a shambling midden of trash would be a terrible curse, since they would have trouble shaking me afterwards—but if they merely ride along, they are able to use me to feel solid for a while, like their fellows who escaped long ago, when the falling star hit the Vault and ruptured it. They are very jealous of those who made it out.”
“I imagine.”
“They are also very jealous that I move and act and see in the world, even such a world as this. Yet they know they should not destroy us, for we are all the chances they have.”
Achmed sat up straighter. “Us?”
“There is an old man—or there was.”
“Where did he come from?”
Jarmon finished his whiskey, then sadly held the pole upside down.
“Hmmm? Oh. There is a powerful F’dor, one who escaped during the rupture, named Brann. He came home to see if he could aid the Master in getting them all out of the Vault the second time the Sleeping Child arose. He took as a host an old fisherman who had rowed out from the fishing village of Dry Cove on the northern seacoast at Kyrlan de la Mar to see what was occurring during the days before the Rising, then lured Hector and me to this place, convincing us to take the king’s scepter, which as regent he had access to, and open the Vault.”
Achmed choked on his brandy. “Hector opened the Vault?”
The skeleton’s black eyes turned darker.
“Do not gainsay my commander,” he warned, his voice thick with threat. “You must remember that F’dor are superior liars and manipulators. It was a confusing time, to say the least. And the old fisherman led us here, to this wasteland, assuring us that he had found an ancient mine that might be able to offset the rising of the sea, like a levy or a sluiceway.
“Once we had opened the door a crack, he strengthened in power, no longer the old fisherman, but now the demon who had taken the poor man as a host. We battled over the door, and when it appeared the spirits might actually escape, I told Hector to open the door, and threw myself into Brann, wrapping my arms around his knees. We both went flying over the threshold, and Hector had the chance to slam the door closed and lock it again.”
In a way, I suppose, Achmed thought, swallowing more brandy and remembering the arms through the door handles.
“At any rate, the fisherman that Brann took on was dragged into the Vault with me. And he’s somewhere around here, if they haven’t driven him to take his own life by now.”
“So tell me what I should know about these fire demons.”
Jarmon’s eyes narrowed.
“The first thing you should know is that they are not made of fire. When you are looking at them, what you see is fire, feral, consuming, self-important, because that element is in their makeup, but they are not fire. Natural fire wishes unity, one flame seeks another until it becomes a colony, a column of flame that spreads but does not wish escape. Each of these is a spirit, selfish for its own chaos. It hates its brethren as much as it hates you and the limits of the world.
“The lore is that they are a race of creatures created this way, that a generous, loving god I no longer believe in made them of flame, but I know what they really are. You have been lucky, King Ysk, to have wrapped them in your sword, to keep them out of your heart and ears. Because what they really are is words.”
“Words?”
“They are the words of a lonely, angry god who couldn’t control his offspring, who wrestled the ether into this imperfect world.
“Each one is the utterance of that god—a curse, a sigh, a wail, a sneer. The dragons fled from them. My poor philosophy dares not attempt to translate the thoughts of a god, and I do not think you will be able to kill them, to silence them all. They will beat at you, slide between your certainties, unravel your logic, turn you against yourself. All that I loved, they drained of meaning, and then drained from me.”
Achmed raised the pole to his lips, narrowed his eyes, and thought of the terrible potion he had made to silence the Sea Mages.
And plotted how it might silence the demons.
“You mentioned a Master,” he asked finally. “Tell me of him.”
“He is no king, though he fashions himself such. He lives in the very bottom of the Vault, where it is eternally cold, and where the souls of those whose bodies were taken as hosts, then their spirits eaten by the demons, wander, lost, for eternity in a great lake that is wracked with ice, but never freezes. It is the way that he attends to his most important duty, which requires there to be frost within the depths of a world with a core of raging, elemental fire.
“The Master has but one function, and he is the only F’dor patient and forethoughtful enough to be resp
onsible for it. He is the guardian of the Wyrm.”
Achmed leaned forward.
“I cannot imagine that it is wise to speak of such an entity in this place,” he said quietly.
Jarmon shrugged. “Why not? It is common conversation here. The demons are incessantly proud of that Sleeping Child, that entity that dwells even deeper than the Vault, in the bowels of the Earth, that child, stolen from the Progenitor Wyrm, whose body encircles this prison, not far below its parent, asleep for all of Time. There is no risk in speaking of it, because it is given to conversation more than any other subject other than the escape that would allow the residents of this place to awaken it.”
Achmed exhaled. “Go on,” he said.
“And ‘guardian’ is a generous title, given that first, only the very fewest of minds in the world, known or unknown, have ever even heard of this Sleeping Child, and even fewer have seen it. I may be in the presence of one right now, but I am not one.
“Second, there is little responsibility to stand guard, given that he, like us, is trapped in here, and should something come that threatens the Child—imagine the irony of that for a moment—he would be able to do nothing to stop it. And, finally, there is nothing that anyone is able to do to stop it, King Ysk. It is the death of the world, known from the Before-Time to be so. Not a question of how, as they say, but when. All he does is guard the door. Their name for him, in their tongue is He That Watches the Door.”
The Bolg king pointed up to the enormous entranceway through which he had come into the Vault. “Isn’t that the door?”
“As I’ve told you, that’s just one door. There is another, much bigger door. And it leads to a greater prize, from their point of view. He has no key to it—again, not much of a guardian.”
“What else?”
Jarmon shook his remaining arm, and shrugged his remaining shoulder. “You don’t have weapons to kill them all.”
“You don’t believe so?”
“Well, if you are thinking of the Thrall ritual, many of them have survived it before. And it is highly likely that you will be assaulted from all sides if you undertake it. Most likely not physically—but their weapons are not physical.”