The New Weird (25 page)

A man who'd once pulled me out of a bad scrape in the far depths below Ooze, for no better reason than curiosity.

He was tall, thin like a razor, his left arm and leg made of metal, as well as the conical plate atop his skull ― all legacies of the Lizard -dressed in a robe sewn from dozens of little diamond-shaped scraps of fabric in imitation of the outer curtain of the temple.

On seeing me, WallEye's smile opened, the leather strips woven into each of his lips crackling as he grinned. One eye glinted dark in the oil lamps, the other was milky-white and rolling wildly. "Shadow Astur, as I still breathe. And you have brought me a guest." Hands of flesh and metal rubbed together while a tongue that seemed as dry and rough as his lip-leather licked about the corners of his mouth.

"Our guest bears a threat against the Lizard," I said. Behind the curtain, Brother Porter stopped his rustling about, but I went on. "I felt that you should hear it from his own lips before I dispose of him."

WallEye leaned back slightly, tilting his head to study the fisheater. "He looks healthy enough."

"For one, he does not belong here. He was practicing his perversions in public to boot."

"Ah," said WallEye. "There you have it. Tell me your story, then, fisheater."

The little dead man glanced at me, took a deep breath, and stammered through his brief tale once more.

"The clown concerns me," said WallEye. He and I stood on the narrow platform just outside the glowing curtain of the Gillikin temple. Inside, Brother Porter kept an eye or two on the fisheater.

"Why?"

"There are stirpes within stirpes, as you well know. The College of Clowns is one of the oldest stirpes, and they may have gone feral."

There were feral individuals, and rarely, feral stirpes, and even a few feral Dark Towns. New Orleans, for one, born in twisted shadow and the eternal power and pain of the Dark Towns, only to come into the light when it revealed itself to the Frenchman Bienville, who was canny enough to claim its founding. A wild city gone tame, its coiled natural violence straightened in service of ordinary men.

But most ferals simply faded. "Then let them be," I said. "I do not see how a few simple threats concern us."

WallEye shook his head, staring out into the gloaming. "The college prospers and grows, feeding on the Dark Towns the way our towns feed on the Cities of the Map. But their painted eyes have never before turned towards Ooze."

"A strange look it is they cast upon us, if they favor us with that little whiner by way of introduction."

"Perhaps it is an accident." He smiled at me, the leather laces of his lips creaking. "Perhaps there is more to our little friend. We will take the little fisheater to see the Lizard. Let it decide. Are you prepared to wager life and limb on this little jaunt?"

We.
I drew a deep breath. A Shadow is supposed to fear nothing, least of all the Lizard. But I know my own heart; beneath my shadow suit I am a man. The pit below frightened me, where shadows had teeth and the rocks sometimes walked. Fear twisted in my gut like a snake swallowed whole.

Easier to shiv the little fisheater and have done with him.

But that was my fear speaking.

I looked up from staring at my chest to meet WallEye's gaze. His milky eye seemed to see right through me. The old priest knew what was in my heart.

"I."
Quiet,
I told myself, then gently stroked my shadow suit. It was my lot in life to be without fear, even though it was a lie. Besides which, I had brought this on myself. I would never have come this deep if a simple death were all our visitor warranted.

"Life is risk," I finally said.

WallEye nodded. He did not condemn me for what was in my heart, and I silently blessed him for that.

And so I mounted the Descending Stair for the second time in my life, to walk the depths armed only with the Blades Sinister and Truth, and my voice of winds. Like blades made flesh, WallEye walked to my left, just behind my shoulder, while the little dead man walked behind me to my right.

I fancied I could hear their hearts pounding as loud as my own.

Past the Gillikin temple, it is a terrible journey further down the hole of Ooze. The priests generally make the trip in rope-slung baskets, though that seems far too much like Lizard bait for my ease. The Descending Stair is in part carved out of the walls of Ooze's shaft, and in part hammered together from scrap lumber, rope, and softer things, so that it slings outward in a certain dark grandeur of swaying rot.

An unfortunate circumstance, for the sake of one's footing.

We passed through ruined decking, layers of the greatness that once was Ooze still filling this hole like a leg fills a stocking ― shattered balconies and mud walls, great burn scars and empty spaces where people betimes walked and talked and lived their lives deep in shadow. All of it dead beyond years, nothing more now than memories scarcely discernible even by the light of our torches.

Down there, the air is hot and still, water is scarce despite the cloying damp, and rumblings can be heard from farther below. I know the Lizard lives at the bottom of this great, deep hole. Our great monster is as big as it needs to be. Some have told of resting an arm upon the cracked dome of its wizened skull, while others have danced along its teeth and dodged between legs the size of watchtowers. Still others have seen that great eye, huge and patient as years, that would bespeak a body the size of mountains.

It is real, the Lizard of Ooze, as real as we, for all that its form is mutable to the point of imaginary. The Lizard's shape and size follow no logic but that of fear and desire. I was reminded of this, because above all memory and reason, we could hear its roar as we descended. My heart raced, but I marched onward.

As the fourth hour of our descent came to a close, WallEye called a halt. "Each to his own needs," he said quietly, loathe to stir echoes. This was our time to eat, covering our respective shame with a headcloth, and chewing as quietly as anatomy and hunger would allow. I shooed the fisheater a dozen steps further down, then covered myself to suckle on a salted stick of pork fat and mushroom. Though I closed my ears from decent necessity, the hideous smack of the stranger's enjoyment echoed up the steps.

I kept my anger inside and my hands away from my Blades. This was an outlander, dead but still walking, and there was no point. He was not a hole-dweller like us, his entire life inverted as I understood the life of Ooze to be. The stirpes liked to say it made us better than the world, but having been Above I had my doubts. Different is not always superior.

After satisfying the base lusts of our guts, we cleaned ourselves and resumed our journey. The Lizard thrashed and roared far below, but the fisheater seemed resigned to his fate, and demonstrated no alarm. Eventually the noises settled, combining with the echo of rushing water to seem natural, until the walkway let us out on a round-shouldered ledge past which streamed a cataract, its foam glowing in the dark.

I did not remember this ledge or the waterfall from my initiatory journey as a Shadow, but this was the nature of Ooze ― to change, and change again, so that with a turn of the head the world would be different.

Who would want to live in a ruler-straight city girded by concrete and stone, when this life was before them?

"Water," said the fisheater. "Blood and bone of Cui-ui." He grinned, his teeth sparkling in our torchlight, somehow straighter and taller now in the presence of his totemic element. "Even here you cannot escape the power of the fish."

Then the water spoke, as did the stones, and the very air itself.

"Who-o-o-o-o-o?" it said, slow and low.

My heart raced anew, and my legs felt soft and weak. But WallEye bowed toward the darkness of the pit to our right, the hole in which the Lizard dwelt. "We come in simplicity, seeking wisdom," he called in a clear voice. "We come in fear, seeking hope. We come in humility, seeking pride."

Out in the darkness, something flashed, a fang as tall as I. Blood would be spilled, likely mine. My breath caught in my throat. Courage did not lie in lack of fear, rather it lay in passing fear by.

"Why-y-y-y-y-y?"

"One was sent."

Then the fisheater screamed and leapt across the torrent, vanishing into a darkness ever more glittering with tall, toothy knives.

WallEye spun, jabbed me in the chest with his metal arm that clattered with the motion. "What is this insanity?" he demanded.

"I do not know!" I understood my duty ― to leap screaming after the fisheater. My legs would not move.

The Gillikin priest shoved me in the chest. "You are the Shadow. Stalk the darkness."

Not trusting myself to words, I nodded, then drew the Blades Sinister and Truth. My legs wobbled, then strength returned with a settling of my heart as I took a running jump past my slinking sense of fear into the darkness after my little dead man.

Into the maw of the Lizard.

The Dark Towns can be seen as imagined involutions of heat and pain and flickering life. Perhaps they arose from the dreaming mind of Earth, perhaps from our own whirling distractions. Perhaps they simply willed themselves into being. In either case, Dark Towns are where the real and the dream are woven into a single fabric, a continuum of sensibility that scales quickly past reason in times of deep shadow or blood-boiling fear. The Dark Towns are the night mind of the world.

Right now the night mind was in a killing mood.

We tumbled, the Lizard, the fisheater and I, within a fountain of water. One moment the air was firm like a stepping stone, then it was a falling sinkhole the next. Small as I had ever heard it to be, the Lizard flashed, scales dark to the point of nothingness, teeth now gleaming fire-bright. It was no bigger than a man, no bigger than I. The fisheater flew as if he had been born a bird, swelling in his flight, his skin rippling, his robes bursting at the seams.

As WallEye had suspected, this was no terrified little pervert from the surface. I tumbled toward the invader, trying to reach him before he did some greater damage. My life was no longer at issue ― the Lizard was under direct attack.

An attack I had brought to bear.

I had failed as a Shadow.

Even as I snagged the hem of the fisheater's robe, it tore loose. His sallow skin and straggled hair rippled and shredded away into something bright and terrible. It was like seeing a jeweled beetle erupt from a rotten pupa ― where there had been a little man, lost and afraid, there was now a ruby-suited clown with the head of a black dog and hands made from dozens of knives.

I had my Blades two and true to face him, and into battle I pushed through the falling water over the racing of my heart.

The Lizard snapped and roared, turning the water to steam as the ruby-suited clown slashed at its flanks. The clown's suit glowed like bright blood, so I could not see what wounds he might take. I chose instead to slash at his ears, stabbing with the Blade Sinister, catching crosswise with the Blade Truth.

I took a length of steel for my trouble, my shadow suit rippling as it tried to accept the blow before passing the edge through to the skin of my thigh. In this airy place, the battlefield of Ooze's imagination, I rolled away from the cut, receiving a ragged slash in lieu of the muscle-tearing wound intended for me.

My second slash at the ruby-suited clown's ear was more successful, setting a silky, pink-lined flap of fur to float free in the curtain of water. I flipped the Blade Truth in my hand and used my fingers on the hilt to retrieve the scrap, barely escaping disembowelment as I did.

Then the Lizard finally awoke to its task, swelling ever larger with the anger and disease of Ooze's thirty thousand souls to engulf the head of ruby-suited clown within flaring, flaming jaws. I stabbed again at the clown's feet, trying for an Achilles tendon or at least an arch, but the Lizard worried the clown as a rat might worry at a terrier within its jaws. My blow went wild and I tumbled away.

The teeth came for me next, clown lost or forgotten. I rolled, scrambling through the falling water to dodge. I would not fight the Lizard, for the Lizard was Ooze. Though it could kill me, I could no more harm it than harm myself.

The snap of jaws missed me, tearing at the leg of my shadow suit to raise a shower of pink and yellow sparks. Rolling, I could not see the clown. Absent my target, my fear returned. I could not leave, not yet, for I had to see the Lizard safe.

I twisted away again, readying my blade. The Lizard's jaws yawned tunnel-wide as it swept toward me. A bright spark gleamed deep inside its throat.

The clown.

I took a great breath, faced my fear one last time, and let the Lizard swallow me.

I stumbled on the rough tongue, struggling against the hot gasp of the Lizard's breath, then raced toward the spark. The clown was there, gnawing at the wall of the Lizard's gullet with its dog-headed jaws.

The Lizard could not fight something that attacked from within.

Blades flashing, I broke into a forward roll, letting the brilliance of my shadow suit draw the clown's blow. Steel still struck as it had done before, sprouting from the clown's hand like a thorn from a vine, but in my side rather than my heart.

I accepted the pain, pushed myself down the blade, and set Truth against one of the clown's wild yellow eyes while Sinister came from beneath to cut the strings of his hams.

The clown yowled, his voice a dog's, as he collapsed. His next blow missed me, wide with the loss of his balance. Then I realized the hot wind of the Lizard's breath was blowing in, not out. The tongue beneath my feet rippled, the walls of the throat likewise.

The lizard was swallowing the clown. I had done what I could, it was time to fear for my own life. I gathered myself and shouted in the voice of winds, "Away!"

The Lizard roared, expelling me to tumble upward in the darkness. I had banished myself with my words, and fell onto the ledge at WallEye's feet.

"Fool," said WallEye. He nudged me with a metal toe.

"It is over," I said. The clown's warm dog ear pulsed in my hand, wrapped around Truth's haft.