Tales of the Hidden World (16 page)

Brand laughed and levered himself out of his chair. He threw aside his blanket and climbed quickly under the sheets. They lay side by side for a while, neither moving.

“The dive is tomorrow, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll be dangerous.”

“That’s what I’m paid for.”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“Of course. But three black pearls . . . I’d lead an army into Hell for that.”

Mareem stirred beside him. “Are you really tired?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“But not that tired.”

4.

Brand sank slowly into the murky dark, pulled steadily down by the leather thong around his ankle, from which hung the lead ingot the divers used to jelp them reach the Very Deeps beyond the Reefs. No normal man could survive for long in the Deeps, and even Gerrandes’s help was limited. The sword at his side was a comforting weight, and his left hand rested on the pommel.

The light faded slowly behind him as he sank into the murk, and Brand’s respect for the regular divers grew; men who would daily undergo this experience to gather pearls for Vallar were brave indeed. Vallar . . . Brand’s lips curled involuntarily, letting in a little water. Just before he left, Gerrandes had told him that a slave had already been sacrificed. Brand hadn’t liked the answer to his question, “How?” The girl had been dropped into the depths with a lead weight chained to her ankles and left to drown. The similarity to his own situation did not escape him.

His feet hit bottom, and he reached slowly down to pull his foot free from the leather loop, trusting to his weighted belt to counteract his buoyancy

He was blind again . . . the sea salt was blood in his mouth . . . fear welled through him . . .

He fought it back and his mind cleared, though deep inside something screamed for him to flee. He concentrated on the feeling and found it strongest when he faced one direction. He gritted his teeth and swam steadily into it.

His progress was slow, and in his near-blind state, he was hard put to avoid rocky outcroppings from the Reefs. His head jarred painfully against a low overhead, and his hands waved aimlessly for a secure hold. His fingers brushed an uneven surface, and closer inspection found intricate carvings etched deep into the stone. Questing fingertips found the shapes eroded and coral-crusted into illegibility, but discovered ledges above and below the carvings, and to both sides. His imagination staggered at the thought of the wall made of such bricks as this, fully ten feet square. . . .

His inner fear was suddenly gone, and with it his bearings. He had no idea how far he’d swam, or how long. He shrugged, feeling carefully along the coral-crusted ledges; there had to be an opening somewhere . . . a lever. Buried under coral, but discernibly a lever. He tugged, but it was obstinate. He wrapped both hands around it, placed both feet firmly against the wall, and pulled. Muscles writhed and bulged for long agonizing moments, before the lever finally grated forward, throwing him off balance.

His flailing arms now found space instead of stone. He swam cautiously into the new opening, which rapidly proved to be a tunnel. He swam warily on. The path twisted and turned, then slanted sharply upward. He followed its path and was surprised when his head suddenly broke water into air. Misty and sickly sweet, but nonetheless welcome for that. Feeling cautiously around, Brand found himself to be in a pool of some kind. He pulled himself out onto cold stone floor. All was pitch-black and silence.

The air was unnaturally thick and heavy, and Brand found it as hard to move in as the water he’d swum through. He reached into the waterproof pouch at his waist and pulled out his tinderbox. A questing hand found a length of smooth wood, and he wadded oil-soaked rag around it. It would make a good torch. He struck sparks and ignited it.

Light flared up, illuminating a vast cavern fully a hundred yards in length and breadth. But Brand had no eyes for its size, for sprawled before him lay Manslayer.

5.

D
eep within Manslayer, a heart beats once, pauses and beats again. Blood pulses sluggishly and shivers shake the slimy bulk. Rudely cast from his bloody dreams, Manslayer wakes, hurting and hating. He has no mind that men might understand, but in his own way, he hates. Thus was he created, the Beast Out of Time, the Manslayer, last weapon of the long vanished Daun in their war against Man. Manslayer, his name and reason for existence.

Hating, Manslayer opens an eye.

Brand bit back a scream as the single pale eyelid crawled open, revealing a blood-red eye. His sword was quickly in his hand, but as quickly drooped, forgotten, as Brand stood overwhelmed by the physical reality of legend. Manslayer sprawled before him, thirty feet of blubbery white, its flowing white hair draped around the mockery of a face which declared to all the gods that were and may be that no man had a hand in its making.

Brand’s choked cry echoed through the Tomb as the Beast lurched unsteadily upright on its forearms, the long claws gouging furrows from the sold stone floor. Ponderously, the arm nearest Brand swept toward him, and he ducked more through instinct than design. Claws split the air above him, and his sword chopped deeply into the rippling flesh. A thick purple ichor spattered the floor. Manslayer slobbered and gurgled, swinging again, its speed dulled by its recent awakening from long sleep.

Sobbing in terror, Brand threw his torch to one side and hacked again and again at the monster, till the ichor drenched him from head to foot, till he could take no more. Absently, he noted that his torch still burned, though what he had taken to be a length of wood was in fact a human thighbone. Other human bones lay scattered across the vast stone floor. He stared wildly about; Manslayer was quickly awakening and would shortly crush him as easily as a man would a persistent louse. As both man and Beast paused to stare at each other in mutual hate, reason returned to Brand, and he raised his sword as though to stab again at the probing arm, then threw it directly into the single staring eye.

The slit pupil split still further under the urging steel, and Manslayer screamed, a ghastly ululation that clapped Brand’s hands to his ears as he staggered backward. Manslayer clawed in futile fury at his pain, lacerating his eye further, and then he lunged at Brand, who fell backward into the entry pool.

The cold waters closed over his head, and his senses returned as he struck out strongly along the tunnel that led to the open sea. A disturbance in the water behind him jerked his head around. Even in the dim murk, he could make out a darker shadow following him. Manslayer. Fear gave Brand strength as he sped for the saving ocean.

He burst from the tunnel mouth and suddenly something slammed into his arms. He fought hysterically for long seconds, before realizing it wasn’t fighting back. A shudder rang through him as he found it to be the corpse of the slave girl set out as sacrifice. He threw it to one side and sped surfaceward. He glanced back in time to see Manslayer throw itself onto the corpse and tear the body to bloody ruins. Brand shuddered and pulled himself on, throwing wild thanks to a number of gods for the start this gave him. He jerked the weighted belt from around his waist, striving for more speed.

And behind came Manslayer.

Higher and higher they swam, the light growing around them. Then there came a time when Brand looked back to find the Beast no longer pursued him. Instead, it shook its gargantuan bulk as though puzzled, and then twisted in sudden agony, limbs and tentacles writhing and thrashing wildly. The thickly haired abdomen suddenly bulged and distended to twice its normal size and as Brand watched, it burst, staining the waters a vivid purple. The head swelled, the single bloody eye bulged forth and fell away, as the head itself seemed to stretch and bend. As Brand stared, Manslayer fell apart and fell back into the dark depths that succoured it. The waters slowly cleared away the staining ichor, and the darkness of the deeps hid Manslayer’s remains. Brand waited for a while, watching, but there was no more. He swam slowly upward, away from the monster-haunted dark, toward the blessed light of the surface.

6.

Gerrandes smiled, shaking his head as he gently smoothed ointment onto Brand’s scarred back.

“You really should have known better than to ask Vallar for three black pearls.”

“That was the price he offered, and I had thought nobles to be an honest people in the Southern Kingdoms.”

Gentle laughter was his only answer.

Brand growled and waited stoically till Gerrandes was finished. He sat up gingerly, wincing at the dull ache in his back. The sorcerer handed him a cup, but he waved it aside.

“You should take it; you need strength.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve been whipped, nor likely to be the last. I’ll survive. I’d better leave soon; Vallar will send men after me once he learns you cut me down.”

“Why should he?”

“Because I know where the master pearl beds are. Or he thinks I do.”

“And do you?”

Brand grinned, pulling his tunic carefully over his head. He winced as the rough cloth rasped along his tender back and then turned slowly to Gerrandes.

“What happened to the Beast? It seemed almost to fall apart . . . ?”

Gerrandes smiled. “In the Deeps, the Very Deeps, the sheer weight of the water would crush a man without the protection my sorceries give him. Manslayer had lived so long at the depths that his body had adapted to that weight. Thus, when he strove to follow you to the surface, the internal pressure of his own misshapen body burst him asunder.”

Brand struggled with this answer.

“Then Manslayer is finally dead?”

The sorcerer frowned. “I think not; such Beasts are easier to create than destroy. They were created to be living weapons, to survive where no normal creature could.”

“Then it sleeps again.”

“Yes. Till its wounds are healed, and some fool such as Vallar wakes it with human sacrifice.”

Brand shivered despite the warmth of the room, and with Gerrandes’s help staggered to the door, where two slaves helped him onto his horse.

“I wonder who the last sacrifice was,” Brand mused. “For in a way she helped save my life.”

Gerrandes shrugged. “She was only a slave . . . her name was Mareem.”

Brand’s hands gripped hard on the reigns, and his eyes squeezed shut.

“Only a slave . . .”

Gerrandes stumbled back at the agonized rage in the words, and in that moment, Brand spurred his horse savagely and was gone, riding as though Hell itself pursued him.

I
n the deeps, in his tomb, Manslayer dreams blood. . . .

This was the first story I ever sold for actual money. In 1976, to an Irish semi-prozine, Airgedlamh. A good solid swords-and-sorcery story with a neat practical twist.

Cascade

H
er name was Cascade
, and I think I killed her. I hope so. But still the rains fall, still the waters rise . . .

The dream first came a month ago, a dim and ugly mixture of scenes and sounds that culminated in a hazy image of Jenny, smiling, that threw me screaming awake. Jenny was dead, two days dead.

The dream came again the next night, and the next, till at last I was afraid to sleep, afraid to close my eyes and see that smiling face. At first, I thought the dreams only natural for a man whose girlfriend drowned herself in the river below his house, but when the song came, I knew that this was no thing of nature. And I knew that the woman who called me night after night was not my love, but my enemy.

The dreams continued, though I could no longer be sure why Jenny’s smiling face inspired such terror in me, and often I awoke to the fading echoes of a lonely song on the dawn’s cold wind.

Then came the night when I could stand it no more and answered her call. I stood on the riverbank, staring down into the murk, knowing that deep down, among the choking weeds, she was staring back. Waiting.

I remembered Jenny’s gentle sea-green eyes, staring at me almost in warning over that fixed, terrifying smile, and I knew that she would not, could not, rest till I had answered whoever called with her name and her face. As I stood at the water’s edge a soft voice sang sweetly in my ears, and I knew my enemy’s name: Cascade. She called, and I came, but with a witch knife in my hand.

I stripped down to my underwear and hefted the iron dagger in my hand. It was a comforting weight. The driving rain was cold against my body. I took a tentative step into the icy waters, wincing as the thick mud gave under my foot.

I eased further into the river and shivered as the waters crept up my ribs, the cold shuddering through me. Gradually, the waters rose up around me, until I leaned forward into the murk and they closed over my head. Somewhere, I could hear her singing.

She was the last, she sang, the last of a race that lived before man, and with man, and will survive after man. She was Cascade, the last of the water elementals, the undines and sirens. Pollution murdered her kith and kin, but she had made a pact with the wind-walkers for a long rain that would swell her watery domain till it overran the dirt that was our home, and all mankind would drown to rise again as servants in her calm and unchanging watery world.
Come,
she sang,
come and join me, first among my lovers,
and a lonely ache filled my heart till I thought it would burst. But still I clutched my knife.

I glared blearily through the murk among the waving weeds that choked the riverbed, and eventually I found what I suppose I had always known I would find. A grinning skull, the eyes glowing with green fire. The skull of my dead love, wooed and betrayed by the siren song, now containing a mind old and evil from before the time of man. I swayed before it as the song burst through my mind again, almost overpowering in its intensity.
Come join me, rule with me, I have been alone so long; open your mouth, let in the soothing waters that bring peace and comfort, and our cold lips will never part
.

I raised the dagger with heavy arm, wavered, and then swung it savagely down. The skull split cleanly in two, the eyes falling away from each other as the eerie corpse glow winked out. And I knew my dead love was free from the undine’s grasp.

The waters pulsed around me, and a howling scream of rage tore through my mind, shaking me till I dropped the knife among the waving weeds, which no longer swayed aimlessly but now writhed and reached for me, tangling my legs and wrapping around my flailing arms. I watched a small stream of bubbles rise from my nose and knew my air was almost gone. I struggled wildly, clawing and ripping at the weeds till I broke free, and then pulled myself hand over hand for the surface. I burst into the air and hauled myself out onto the bank, throat burning, lungs jerking heavily, gasping down the damp dawn air.

I pulled myself to my feet, and staggering over to the garage, I seized the can of oil some impulse (Jenny?) had prompted me to buy the day before. The river waters writhed and boiled, ripples spreading from a frothing disturbance I dared not look at too closely. Instead, I watched the oil pour sluggishly onto the water, forming a dark layer that smothered the ripples. I fumbled in my discarded coat for a box of matches, my fingers numb and awkward from the icy waters. Grinning harshly, I struck a match, watched it flare for a moment, and then dropped it. A sheet of flame sprang up, spreading even as I watched, and deep in my mind something screamed in a terrible agony. I laughed loud and long, trying to drown out the screams, and then sat down on the bank and sobbed quietly to myself. The screams died away, until finally I sat dry-eyed, listening to the silence.

That was a week ago. The dreams no longer come, nor the lonely songs that rang so sweetly on the early morning air. But still the long rain falls, still the waters rise, still the waters rise. . . .

This was specially written, to accompany someone else’s art folio. A mood piece, inspired by a song from the group Camel. Very dark, very sad, very mournful. I was very young at the time. I think I’m right in saying that the payment was a quarter of a penny a word, and that it cost me more in postage to send in the story than I was paid.