“Save your pity for yourself!” Augeren’s voice was wet and panting. “For my tale will soon be told …” He drew back a little, sobbed and shook and slopped saliva, finally achieved a measure of control. “Now, about the mating of halfling and Url,” he said. “Let me tell you of that.”
Hero really did not want to know, but if he stopped Augeren’s tale now … what then? “Do go on,” he said, once more applying himself to his bonds, which by now were surely weakening.
“The female Urls allow it,” said Augeren. “Simple creatures, who live only for the present and have little if any thought of possible futures, the fate of Urls gone before means nothing to them. Indeed, they welcome their mating with halflings; for when a female worm is with young she is pampered and fed and fattened individually by the halflings, even lured from her burrow into a granite pen from which she cannot escape. And why is she given this preferential treatment? Why fattened on raw dhole juice? Because the young she will bear will be many, and very demanding. So demanding, indeed, that even though she be fat and full of her disgusting milk, still her dominant infant will kill off all the others—as many as ten or eleven—to take their share! Aye, and he grows and grows, very quickly, in both size and intelligence until, for all her brimming udders, still his mother is hard put to feed him. Then, no longer satisfied with her gruel milk, the young human-cum-tick-come-Url draws blood!
“At this stage the mother must be watched most carefully. She knows her child will kill her, and so she will try to kill him. That is not to be allowed! She is expendable, but he is not. He kills her and, bloated with her blood, is carried aloft by gaunts …”
“Into Luz?” Hero stared wide-eyed, trying to comprehend.
“Obviously—where else ‘aloft’? Yes, into Luz, which is his birthright—for he is now a Lord of Luz. Or a Lady, of course.”
Hero’s mind whirled. “But what … what is he? Or she? I mean, how must they—?”
“How must they look? What is their nature? I will tell you,” said Augeren. “They are uttermost monstrosities! They have the claw hands of ticks, some eyes like yours and perhaps several like mine, flattish of body but with many stomachs, so that they may bloat with blood. They are roughly the size of a man, but their limbs—vestigial in their worm mothers—are lengthened into rubbery tentacles which they can coil or flail at will. Some have cartilage drills for mouths, others the shovel face and tube tongues of the worms. Most are pale pink, and all are utterly bestial!”
Hero shuddered, licked his lips. “And you call such as these ‘Lords’?”
“From now on they are watched closely indeed,” Augeren continued without bothering to answer. “Watched and trained. They are watched for aberration, for madness. Oh, they are aberrant, each and every one—they are loathsome in their habits, their lusts, their greed and their nameless appetites—but if they are also insane, and many are …”
“The great ossuary of the dholes?” Hero guessed.
“Of course. Nothing is wasted.”
Hero’s mind was morbidly at work. “But how, in creatures like these, how may one distinguish ‘madness’? I mean, is there any sanity in them at all?”
“Madness in the Lords is not measured in depth of depravity but level of intelligence,” said Augeren. “Or rather, lack of it. But if they can learn, then they are intelligent—‘sane.’ If they can follow the rituals they are required to observe, and perform other … functions, then they are fit—to serve!”
The way the monster slobbered out these words had the short hairs on Hero’s neck instantly erect. “Their … functions,” he repeated. “Fit to serve. What functions? And ‘to serve’ whom?”
“Miscegeny is done with now!” the beast went on, “but still the final phase has not been reached. Still the ultimate abomination is yet to be born. For now Lord mates with Lady! Aye, but of their progeny ask me nothing! I do not know. No creature knows. Except the Lords of Luz themselves—whom you may call priests!”
Hero’s mouth worked but he said nothing. He had expected some such, but still it came as a shock. These things masqueraded as men in Inquanok, and the worst things of all as Veiled Kings!
“And all of this, everything I have told, occurring in darkness,” said Augeren, creeping closer, until Hero was sure he must notice his secret sawing. “All of it taking place in pitch black abysses of earth and rock, where even now men mate with monsters, and their halfling children with others more monstrous yet. And what light there is—the glow of certain phosphorescent mosses, or the foxfire of rotting fungi—even that is too much light! Things lusting, devouring each other with their lust and simply … simply devouring! Can you picture the nightmare of it? You likened it to a hell, but I say it is the hell of hells! I could not stand it! By comparison I was clean! I would not be penned with an Url, however ‘comely’ for one of her race! They said I was more nearly human, and indeed I was not unlike the men I saw down there in D’haz. I talked to them, learned all I could of the outside, the upper lands, and when finally it was my turn to mate …”
“You fled,” Hero breathlessly finished it for him.
“Aye, crime in itself. Fled—and fleeing I slew. Slew my Url bride-to-be, her halfling keepers, even a Lord. Threatened a pair of stupid gaunts until they carried me out of the underworld entirely and flew me down to the foothills in the night. Then I slashed their throats and so slew them, too. And at last I came upon human beings for the first time—innocent human beings, mind, not the lusty criminals brought down to D’haz by gaunts—and so learned how I could never find a place here.
“For each and every one, when he or she first saw me, cried out in horror! Cried out until my blood boiled over, and I … and I …”
“Go on!” cried Hero, afraid to let the creature pause.
Augeren nodded, but crept closer still. “Now picture my dilemma. I could not go back—the broken limbs, the boneyard of the dholes—and I cannot go forward. So here I stay, halfway, a half-creature, half mad.”
Strands parted behind Hero’s back. He worked harder. And to cover his activity: “And have you no plans at all?”
“Only this,” said Augeren, “to live until I die. Until others come, perhaps like you, to put an end to me. Or until the Lords of Luz find me and take me back. For escape from the underworld is not permitted, do you understand? What, escape and bring word of that horror into the outside world? The tunnels of D’haz, winding through slimy rock like the tentacles of some terrible cancer, are mazy and widespread. Perhaps they reach even so far as a certain temple in Inquanok.
“Plans? Not really. Only a desire to destroy. To destroy Luz, also to kill as many ‘human beings’ as I may before my life is done. For aye, I hate you all, and you”—he leaned forward until his terrible face was only inches away—“you, who I perceive to have been a waking-worlder—yours is the type I hate most of all!”
“There are things,” Hero gabbled, “certain things, which you have not explained.” He shrank back, molded himself to the wall of the cave. “If you will, please go on …”
“What things?” Augeren’s voice was a low slobber.
Hero’s mind raced desperately. He remembered his conversation with Eldin—how long ago? Yesterday? Impossible! “Eyes!” he cried. “And auguries!” He prayed he had Augeren’s attention, and:
“You said your eyes—your eye—can hardly ‘see’ at all as I understand sight. And yet in D‘haz, you must have seen infinitely more clearly than I ever could. Your ‘sight’ must be far superior. So how did you see, down there in reeking darkness?” More strands parted behind his back.
“This faceted eye,” Augeren replied, drawing back the merest fraction, “came to me via my leech-like mother, as did my plated, bone-piercing tongue. What I got from my father I cannot say, except for my general shape. Him I never knew, for he gave himself to the dholes before I was spawned. So perhaps he may be held to account for my ‘sensitivity,’ eh? As for the eye: it detects and interprets not only light o
f the present but light of the past, even a little light of the future. It is in itself a sense, additional to the five senses of ordinary men. When my ears hear sounds, the eye gives them shape. When my nose detects odors, the eye frames their source. I touch a living thing in the darkness”—he quickly reached out a huge, taloned hand, touched Hero’s thigh—“and my eye describes it in its entirety. See!”
Augeren blinked. Hero saw. The glitter of his eye grew filmy, moist, then quickly cleared. And in its myriad facets, Hero saw himself—a hundred selves—mirrored, ghastly pale, shuddering, trapped here in this very cave, with Augeren crouched over him.
“The eye is also my memory,” the monster spoke again. “Let me show you. Now I draw light from the past …” The eye shuttered again, and when it opened—
Hero saw mirrored in its facets … the underworld! He saw Luz, and frightful half-glimpses of Things that moved oddly in the deeper shadows. Another blink of the eye, and the pallid grass Downs of D’haz crept away into gloomy distance, with squalid huts and stone pens everywhere, and fungi forests, and loping halflings about their business in the wreathing mists. Blink, and now upon every hand great banks of bones, for this was the prehistoric ossuary of the dholes. And: “Would you see a dhole?” Augeren inquired.
Hero shook his head; said very quietly, “No.”
The faceted eye blinked again. A girl ran through misty woodland, panting. She stumbled in her terror, fell, glanced back. Her myriad faces filled with horror, loathing. And before she could scream, Augeren’s shadow fell over her …
Blink! Ilfer Maas, gagged, bound, sat in a cave much like this one. His eyes were wide over a nose where the nostrils flared in a silent scream. The hexagonal pictures came closer, ran into each other, became one. Ilfer’s eyes grew larger, more terrified still. Something white, dripping slime, slid into view. The opening at its top widened, and a needle-sharp shaft struck forth, chopped cleanly, instantly into the youth’s forehead. The picture faded.
And Hero’s petrified gaze crept from Augeren’s eye to his mouth. The quester watched that gristle-plated organ poise before his face, tilt slightly upward, saw its tip opening and something white gleaming within.
“Augury!” Hero croaked. “Future light! You said you could read the future!” He sawed at his bonds, his wrists now sticky with blood.
“Only the immediate future,” the monster’s voice was a gravelly growl. “Surely you do not wish to see that?”
“I do! I do!” Hero cried. “Also, why do you hate me so? A waking-worlder? Aye, I was that—but what is that to you?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I no longer know anything!” Hero sobbed, finally unmanned. “I know only what you tell me!”
“Then ask yourself this,” Augeren hissed bubblingly. “Ask why all of this must be: the underworld, the monsters mating here, the nightmare existences I have described, which are as real as I am?”
At last Hero knew the answer. It had come to him with the word “nightmare.” It showed in his bulging eyes, his suddenly slack mouth.
“Of course!” cried Augeren. “Yes, certainly! All of these things are—Luz and D’haz, the Unknown Things, the tick-folk and Urls, halflings and Lords—because some monstrous man of the waking world dreamed them!”
“A madman, perhaps,” Hero gabbled desperately. “But I am sane. Or at least I was!”
“Alas,” said Augeren, “but quite definitely, I no longer am. But very well, the immediate future; see it now, then see no more.”
Blink!
Things snuffling, scrabbling in darkness, squeezing their grotesque bodies through impossible crevices in fractured rock, digging with spade snouts or clawing their way with sharp knife hands. And others lurking behind, goading them on, urging with quivering tentacular arms!
Hero saw all of this in the monster’s fantastic eye—and Augeren saw it, too. He drew air in a slobbering gasp. “They’re coming for me!” And even as he cried his frustration, so the floor of the cave shuddered, began to settle in a sagging of rotten rock and crumbly soil.
Blink!—and another picture forming:
Hero’s ropes parting with a twang, and spattering blood from his torn wrists onto the black rocks; and a hundred Heroes reaching cramped, agonized hands for the daggers tucked away in the cuffs of their right trouser legs.
“Curse you, quester!” shrilled Augeren. Drill mouth working frantically, he tried to grab Hero’s shoulders—but Hero jerked on his bloody wrists and the ropes parted, just as he had seen in the monster’s eye! He rolled out of Augeren’s reach, grabbed for his knife and found it. Augeren was on him, but Hero’s knife was arcing up.
Blink!
Light! Blazing, blinding, merciful light! White light shot with red and yellow, flaring light. The light of a hundred torches, burning on—burning in—Augeren’s naked eye!
Blinded by a blazing vision, a scene from his own immediate future, Augeren staggered backward into the hole appearing magically behind him in the floor of the cave. Rocks rained down and dust shook itself free of the walls, and a jagged crack shot across the floor, accompanied by a low rumble of shifting mass. Then … several things, all happening at once:
The light glaring forth from the many facets of Augeren’s eye was supplemented by real light, marginally preceding the blundering bulk and hoarse, worriedly-inquiring voice of Eldin the Wanderer. Hero, in some entirely detached part of his psyche, might have seen, might have heard something of this arrival; and certainly on that ethereal plane he would have exulted that Eldin yet lived and breathed; but his will was now focused upon one and only one task: to kill, and send to hell, and so be free of, the monster Augeren. All else was peripheral to consciousness; only that one desire, that single instinct remained.
To this end, even as Eldin roared into the cavelet with a blazing torch held high, Hero severed the cords binding his ankles; turned upon Augeren, who seemed jammed in the hole in the floor as in quicksand. There was blood on the monster’s neck and shoulder from Hero’s blind thrust of moments earlier, but Augeren seemed not to notice. He was screaming over and over again: “Come for me! They’ve come for me!”
And as the floor of the cave continued to shudder, while ominous cracks began to zigzag across walls and low ceiling, so the monster reached out his huge hands and grabbed Hero’s ankles.
“If I go, quester, then you go with me!” he sobbed. “One thing to learn of the ways of the underworld second-hand, but another entirely to actually experience them!” With that he half drew himself up from the hole—and was dragged back!
Then Hero saw the blood—the monster’s blood, from that first blind knife-thrust—on his trousers where they were being half yanked from him as Augeren sank snarling into the ever-widening hole, and finally the taut thread of sanity snapped in him. That nameless, tainted blood—spawned of reeking pits and inhuman lusts—on him? In a frenzy of horror, he stabbed at the clawed hands where they held him, stabbed blindly and savagely, as often as not slicing into his own calf-boots and leather bindings in his frantic, repetitious attack.
Augeren’s head was below the level of the floor now, leaving his arms and spastically clawing hands protruding, clutching at Hero. But his head came up one final time, glared its hatred from the blackly glittering, faceted eye. His hatred … and his pleading. “Then kill me!” he choked, as “hands”—and many of them, and all more monstrous far than his own—reached up to gain firmer holds on him.
Until now Eldin had seen very little: dark shadows leaping, dust falling in powdery rills everywhere, Hero’s white face, wide-eyed, and something like a great red one-eyed spider, many-armed, that writhed and heaved on the floor where Hero slashed and slashed at it. The Wanderer couldn’t know that the “spider” was Augeren’s bloodied head, or that of its many apparent arms, only two belonged to the thing itself! The fact that the monster quite obviously threatened Hero was more than enough. Eldin lowered his blazing torch, thrust it straight into the hideously glittering eye.
The scream that issued forth then was an entire nightmare in its own right, but Eldin cared little for that. No time for caring or for anything else now, for events were rapidly drawing to a close.
Eldin stepped quickly to where Hero crouched sobbing and stabbing at the sliding rim of the quaking hole in the floor. “Lad?—David?—we have to get out of here, now! Can you walk?”
Hero didn’t answer, seemed not to have heard. Up and down went his knife; the blade broke where it struck rock at the edge of the hole, and still Hero’s arm pumped like some mad mechanical thing. But what was he stabbing at? The spider-thing was gone now.
As the cave shuddered yet again, Eldin thrust his torch down into the hole and waved it about. It seemed to him that monstrous shapes, distorted faces and figures, drew back down there. Shadows, most likely. But he couldn’t be sure.
“Lad?” he said again. And getting no response, he simply kicked the broken knife from Hero’s spastic hand. It made no difference: still the younger quester’s empty, clenched fist pumped, still he sobbed and raved. Eldin cuffed him hugely on the side of the head, grabbed him in one hand as he crumpled, then half-dragged, half-carried him out of that hellish place and along the exit tunnel to dreary daylight.
Behind them as they emerged, the tunnel went down in a fall of rock, venting pressured dust thick as smoke as that entire section of the quarry face crashed vertically down in massive blocks, filling in the main area of subsidence …
Hero came to when he was dumped jarringly on his rump at the top of the ramp. Down below a seething mist lay on the floor of the quarry, with nowhere a sign of what had passed there. Up here, where a pale sun was striving to break through rising vapors, the whole thing might have been a dream within dreams—except that Hero knew it had been real. His chafed wrists and ankles were ample proof of that. Eldin sat close by, panting like a bellows, his wary eyes on the younger man.
At first there was a glazed look to Hero’s eyes, but this gradually disappeared as a very little of his color returned. Then he gave a start, sat up straighter, gazed all about. “Inquanok!” he gasped, as if suddenly realizing where he was—and as if the very word tasted bad in his mouth.