‘Kill him!’ whispered Krindle.
‘This youngster actually wants to go to Hel,’ Skullop told his men with a laugh. ‘What do you think of that?’
‘A good idea!’ one of them called back. ‘Almost as good as marching us into a quicksand.’
‘Yes!’ called another. ‘“Follow me!” he said. “Follow me, boys, we’re going to be rich!”’
The Yetis hooted with derision.
‘That’s what I have to listen to all the time,’ Skullop growled. ‘You make one mistake and—’
‘Hey, youngster,’ someone called. ‘Be careful you don’t run into any Vrahoks on your way to Hel.’
‘Shut your trap, Okko!’ snapped Skullop.
‘What are Vrahoks?’ Rumo asked.
‘Listen,’ said Skullop, bending over him. ‘I realise you don’t want to be dissuaded from going to Hel. You’re stark raving mad, but still … If I told you what Vrahoks are you’d reconsider your decision. Well, shall I tell you what they are?’
‘No,’ said Rumo.
‘I can’t put him off, men!’ Skullop called. ‘He’s got guts. The sort of guts we don’t have any more.’
‘The youngster’s crazy, that’s all!’ Okko called back. ‘Ever since I’ve had a noodle full of Cogitating Quicksand I think twice about everything I do. And the last thing I’d do down here is visit that crazy city of my own free will.’
‘You see?’ said Skullop. ‘We think too much. We’ve turned into a bunch of yellow-bellies.’
‘Go with him, then,’ called Okko. ‘Show the youngster the way to Hel, like you showed us the way into that quicksand.’
Skullop hastily punted on. ‘Stupid idiots!’ he grunted. ‘Talk about bearing a grudge!’
‘Sorry, youngster!’ Okko called after them. ‘We may be dead, but we aren’t tired of life!’
His cronies laughed.
‘Did you hear that?’ said Skullop. ‘They’re dead, damn it all, but none of them would be mad enough to go to Hel. There’s no mercy down here. No laws, either. Insanity reigns supreme in Hel. It’s Gornab’s monumental madhouse.’
The far shore of the lake came into view. Rumo fidgeted impatiently.
‘How do I get to Hel from here?’
‘There are various routes. I honestly don’t know which to recommend, they’re all so dangerous. You could go via Gornab’s Echo, but it’s a very long way round and that’s where you’d be likeliest to bump into some roaming Vrahoks. You could also go via the Fridgicaves, but they’re terribly cold and said to be infested with Icemagogs. There are some secret passages through the roof of Netherworld, but you have to know your way around extremely well if you don’t want to get lost. Your best plan is to keep going straight ahead, because in Netherworld all roads lead to Hel – don’t ask me why. It’s just a question of how far you get. Down here there are only two directions: straight ahead or straight back.’
‘I’m not going back.’
Skullop sighed. The punt grounded and Rumo leapt ashore.
‘All right,’ said Skullop. ‘What will you do if you get to Hel?’
‘I’ll go in and rescue my friends. Then I’ll give Rala the casket.’
‘Who’s Rala? What casket?’
‘Rala is … well, my sweetheart,’ Rumo said hesitantly. ‘I’ve carved her a casket out of Nurn Forest oak.’
‘Oho.’ Skullop laughed. ‘Better and better! A casket, eh? And that’s why you’re going to Hel all by yourself? With that cheese knife of yours?’
‘Kill him, I beg you!’ Krindle whispered again.
‘I’ve done similar things before now, cheese knife or no cheese knife.’
‘I’m sure you have. I like you, my boy.’ Skullop grinned. ‘You really are a screw loose.’
‘Many thanks,’ said Rumo.
‘That wasn’t a compliment, it was an insult.’
‘I wasn’t thanking you for the insult,’ said Rumo, ‘just for ferrying me across.’
Skullop laughed. Then he pushed off and disappeared into the mist.
Urs hadn’t been surprised when Rumo failed to appear for supper. It was a common occurrence lately. Rumo avoided other people’s company and preferred to spend his evenings roaming the deserted side streets of Wolperting. He usually returned home late and flopped into bed right away.
Urs hoped that his advice to consult Ornt El Okro would bear fruit. His life had become devilishly complicated since he’d got to know Rumo, what with their strenuous fencing lessons in the woods, their interminable conversations at night, the fracas with Rolv, and his duties as a municipal friend. Everything had been much more uneventful before Rumo appeared on the scene. More tedious as well, granted, but Urs was fond of tedium. He even cultivated it.
That was why he took advantage of this Rumo-free evening to indulge in a little civilised tedium. One essential was a supper requiring protracted preparations, in this case a pot-roasted joint of beef which he had patiently studded with dozens of cloves of garlic and braised for several hours until tender.
Should he read a Prince Sangfroid thriller while eating? No, far too exciting. He thought a while. What did his meagre library have to offer in the way of suitable – in other words, tedious – reading matter? Fifty-Five Ways of Caramelising Sugar? No, he knew it by heart. Wait, how about Culinary Delights from My Garden, an unspeakably boring treatise on the cultivation of vegetables by Dancelot Wordspinner, one of Lindworm Castle’s hopelessly outmoded authors? Yes, that was ideal. He decided to reread the chapter on blue cauliflowers.
Urs removed the beef from the saucepan, opened a bottle of long-hoarded Florinthian burgundy, sat down at the kitchen table with his meat, wine and book, and bored himself rigid. In the end he fell asleep face down on the table top.
The first thing he noticed when he awoke was an unpleasant smell. Had he been sick? Nonsense, he hadn’t drunk that much! How had he got to bed? Why was the bed so hard? Oh, he was lying on the floor! He tried to stand up. There was a jingling noise in the darkness and he felt something cold round his wrists. He was handcuffed! What was this, one of the triplets’ practical jokes, or was he still dreaming?
He heard a long-drawn-out scraping sound. A chink appeared in the gloom and the room was filled with a fitful glow like the flicker of firelight.
This wasn’t his room. He was in a cell built of rough-hewn black stone, bare and windowless. Its only noteworthy feature was a pair of round, fist-sized holes in the floor, and from them issued the chains attached to his handcuffs. What was that noise drifting in from outside? Confused voices and laughter? A commotion of some kind?
Urs got to his feet. He gave an involuntary belch, and the sour taste nauseated him. Then he tottered over to the door. The chains did little to restrict his movements. The further he went the more links emerged from the floor.
Urs’s nightmare
Once outside the cell he saw that flames really were the source of the light. It came from two large torches secured to the wall on either side of the door. He was dazzled for a moment, but then his eyes became accustomed to their new surroundings. He had emerged into a passageway. Stretching away to left and right of him was a wall interspersed with more doors flanked by torches. It was dark overhead, and on the other side of the passageway was another stone wall. This was where the babble of voices and laughter seemed to be coming from.
Urs was familiar with dreams of this kind. Animated, colourful nightmares full of sensory impressions and realistic architectural scenery, they usually culminated in some terrible catastrophe that woke him up: earthquakes, floods, conflagrations, meteor showers. They were the price to be paid for his midnight feasts: nightmares induced by his overtaxed digestive organs.
The sensory impressions were exceptionally strong this time. Urs could detect as overwhelming an abundance of smells as he had at the last annual fair: smells of cooking, perspiration, burning oil.
Another Wolperting emerged from the door on his left. Urs knew him, but only vaguely,
so he couldn’t remember his name. He was also wearing handcuffs and looking equally bewildered.
‘Urs?’ he said. ‘Is that you?’
Urs shuffled towards the opposite wall with his chains scraping along the ground behind him. At every step the babble of voices became louder, the smells stronger and his uneasiness more intense. What lay beyond the wall and, anyway, was it wise of him to try to find out? Wouldn’t it be better to slink back into his cell and stick it out until he woke up?
The theatre
Urs peered over the wall. He found himself looking down into a big, circular – no, octagonal – arena lit by hundreds of torches and braziers, a deserted expanse of pale, neatly raked sand. He was clearly in the gallery of some vast theatre, a sort of balcony running right round the eight segments of the auditorium. Above and behind him was another tier that seemed to be unoccupied, and assembled below him, in the largest tier of this nightmare theatre, were the spectators. Urs recoiled at the sight of them. It confirmed that he really was dreaming, for no place on earth could have harboured such a weird assortment of creatures.
He leant over the wall for a closer look. Roughly half the audience consisted of two-legged creatures notable for their greyish, sometimes almost deathly, pallor. Their heads, which were cloven above the eyes, stuck out on either side like bulbous horns. They wore sumptuous robes of velvet and shimmering silk, and their jewellery – gold rings, diamond brooches, silver bangles – glittered in the torchlight.
The front few rows of seats were reserved for the pale-skinned creatures, whereas sitting behind them were other spectators whose most salient characteristic was their diversity. Many of them were as small as dwarfs, others at least ten feet tall. Some were covered with green scales, others had red, yellow or blue skin. Urs saw apelike creatures with wings, midgets with crocodilian heads, Hogglings with elephantine trunks. Their one common feature was the fact that they belonged to a wide variety of life forms.
The audience, which included a scattering of Bluddums, Yetis, Turnipheads, Voltigorks and other boorish creatures, must have numbered thousands. This was certainly the weirdest place Urs had ever been to, whether sleeping or waking.
Immediately opposite him, on the far side of the arena and within the palefaces’ tier, was an enclosure that attracted his attention. Separated from the rest of the audience by a balustrade and a cordon of Bluddum mercenaries, it was a box occupied by only two persons. In the centre of the box stood a bizarre throne resembling a big four-poster bed.
The hideous dwarf
When Urs focused his gaze on the figure seated on the throne he recoiled a second time.
He had never before set eyes on such a grotesque dwarf: the head was far too big for the body, the eyes too small for the head, the arms and legs too muscular for the puny chest, the neck too thin to bear the weight of the massive cranium, the nose too long and tapering for the bulky chin, the hands too fine-boned for the dwarf’s generally uncouth appearance. Most horrifying of all was his mouth, which wore a ghastly ear-to-ear grin that might have been incised into his face at birth by a single sword stroke. Although he was utterly unlike any other creature in the theatre, his pale skin indicated that he was one of the life forms that occupied the best seats, and the fact that he was sitting on a throne might even signify that he was their king.
Over and above all this, however, Urs was particularly fascinated by another, non-physical characteristic: he had never seen anyone look so brazenly and unashamedly evil. The dwarf rolled his eyes theatrically until only the whites were visible, narrowed them to menacing slits, opened them wide once more and swept the audience with his piercing, hostile gaze. He was forever pulling faces, forever licking his grinning lips with a long, thin, darting tongue, forever cackling so spitefully that those around him flinched as though lashed with a whip. Urs couldn’t understand how such an utterly repulsive creature had managed to insinuate itself into his dreams.
The figure in black
The second figure in the box was hovering in the background. It displayed the same graveyard pallor and cloven head but was tall and gaunt, unlike the dwarf. Also unlike the latter, it did not appear to relish its prominent position – in fact, it almost seemed to be skulking behind the throne.
The dwarf sat up on his throne. The gaunt figure gestured imperiously with its right hand and the hum of voices in the stadium died away. Having licked his grinning lips once more, the dwarf proceeded to speak in a high-pitched, strangled voice.
‘Ingreets, new tivecaps of the Theetra of Thead! You have been troughb here to tighf! You have been troughb here to repish! O you torfunate ones! O you sochen ones! You are distened to tighf and repish for the internatement of this stinguidished ideaunce! And tighf you will! And repish you will! That is your escinapable disteny! Let the gillink mencecom!’
Such were the words that rang out across the arena. Couched in a mixture of familiar- and unfamiliar-sounding language, they seemed to be directed straight at the Wolpertings. Indeed, it seemed to Urs, despite the distance between them, that the dwarf’s sparkling little eyes were focused on himself.
The Wolperting beside Urs gave him a look of incomprehension.
‘Did you get all that?’ he asked.
Urs noticed only now that a number of other Wolpertings had emerged from their cells in chains and were lining the parapet. In the distance he spotted Rolv, Vasko, Balla and many others. Ushan DeLucca was standing on the opposite side of the auditorium.
He suddenly remembered his neighbour’s name: Korryn Darkfarm.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘I didn’t.’
‘Where are we?’ asked Korryn. ‘Is this a dream?’
The spectators had listened to the dwarf’s peculiar speech in silence, almost as if they felt embarrassed. They now began to shuffle their feet and utter nervous little coughs.
Urs thought, ‘He asked me whether this is a dream. If it is, which of us is dreaming it?’
‘Where are we?’ Korryn asked again. ‘Who are all these creatures and who the devil is that hideous dwarf?’
The story of Gornab the Ninety-Ninth
Gornab Aglan Azidarko Beng Elel Atoona the Ninety-Ninth was, as his name unmistakably implied, the ninety-ninth ruler of Hel. In addition to granting him certain prerogatives and imposing certain obligations, this meant that he was the scion of a long family line and that his immediate successor, if any, would become the hundredth sovereign of Netherworld, charged with fulfilling the Red Prophecy.
The Red Prophecy was an ancient inscription on a weather-worn pumice-stone wall in the centre of Hel. It was inscribed in the blood of the great alchemist and prophet Yota Beng Taghd, who had lanced an artery with the tip of a goose quill and written until he was – quite literally – bled dry. A great prophetic vision having appeared to him just when he was inkless and far away from his study, he was obliged to use his own lifeblood and died in the fulfilment of his martyr’s duty. Or so it was reported in the annals of Hel.
The Red Prophecy
Although the Red Prophecy was written in an archaic script and badly defaced by the elements, the alchemists of Hel had spent centuries laboriously deciphering and translating it. It was subdivided into twenty predictions of which the first eighteen were incomprehensible to anyone but an expert. They were composed in a kind of alchemistic secret code and teemed with words that had long been obsolete. If the translators were to be believed, however, all of these eighteen predictions were favourable. They foretold that the inhabitants of Hel would be blessed with health, wealth and good fortune – but only if they held the art of alchemy in high esteem. This was one reason why the alchemists of Hel had enjoyed such a superior status over the centuries.
The nineteenth prediction, by contrast, foretold a terrible catastrophe: either a great flood, or a subterranean volcanic eruption, or the collapse of the vast cavern in which Hel was situated. However, this disaster would come to pass only if the art of alchemy had not been held in high esteem. That was the
other reason why the alchemists of Hel ranked so highly there.
The twentieth and last prediction took the form of a command to be obeyed on pain of an all-consuming epidemic: The hundredth ruler of Hel shall leave the city, together with his army and all the Vrahoks, and conquer Overworld. He will then be the Gornab of Gornabs.
Gornab Aglan Azidarko Beng Elel Atoona the Ninety-Ninth was far from displeased at being only the ninety-ninth ruler of Hel and not the hundredth. He had no desire to leave Hel and conquer Overworld. He had no desire even to quit his throne. His royal duty to preside over the Theatre of Death was quite fulfilling enough for him. Indeed, it sometimes proved too much for him, but he enjoyed watching people fight, kill and die, and he revelled in his subjects’ applause. He had the best job in Netherworld: he was the king. All things considered, Gornab was a contented monarch.
It has never been ascertained whether the city of Hel took its name from the Hellings, its pale-skinned inhabitants, or whether the Hellings took their name from the city. The first ruler of Hel was Gornab Aglan Azidarko Beng Elel Atoona the First – that much is an established historical fact. He reigned at a time when the city consisted of a few caves hewn out of the rock with stone axes, and when its inhabitants sustained themselves by digging fat lava worms out of the soil or eating deceased members of their own species.
Another unanswered question is where the Hellings originated, but it can be inferred from their pale skin that they had always lived in a sunless, subterranean environment. Historians surmise that the Hellings’ ancestors could perceive neither light nor colour, and that they had antennae instead of eyes. This would account for the hornlike excrescences on their heads, which are simply atrophied antennae. These, however, are no more than conjectures.