Veniss Underground (13 page)

The saylber came to a precise halt at the edge of the docks. The docks—the giant cranes and hauling machines—had been abandoned; anyone who had wanted to flee had fled a long time ago. The metal posts of the docks were topped with heads: human heads, inhuman heads. Shadrach didn't spare them a second glance. He'd seen so much worse. Instead, he hopped up onto the pier, the Gollux beside him. The saylber, with a wet squelch, immediately submerged, and Shadrach had the impression of its vast wings pumping furiously as it tried to put depth and distance between it and its insensate cousin, the leviathan.

From the moment Shadrach set foot on the dock, he could feel the vibration of the leviathan's heartbeat: now tremulous, now strong. And the beating of its fins deep underwater, which made its body, and the dock, nudge ever so slightly upward, so that he felt as if he were in danger of being launched into the air. A weird music played all around them, like a dirge. Above, the fish's teeth, like inverted mountain peaks, glinted down at Shadrach from a great height.

“Which way, Gollux?” he asked.

“This way,” said the Gollux, and headed up the stairs toward the inside of the leviathan's mouth. The automatic mechanism on the stairs had failed because of the putrefied bodies that had jammed its lower levels, so they had to walk up them, stepping over the carnage.

Not more than ten steps up, a Ganesha hurdled the railing and ran toward Shadrach, followed closely by a meerkat with a club in its hands. The meerkat, before Shadrach could react, caught up with the Ganesha and hit it so hard the back of its skull crumpled inward. It fell with a wet thud at Shadrach's feet. He shot the meerkat before it had a chance to do anything, whether friendly or hostile. It too fell with a wet thud at Shadrach's feet.

“I don't like this place, Gollux,” Shadrach said. “Let's get where we need to go in a hurry.”

“The Gollux tells you this: It's just a rotting fish. Nothing to like or dislike.”

They managed to make good progress after that, despite the steepness of the incline and stacks of dead bodies slick with blood. The Gollux made great leaps to attain each next step. Shadrach marveled at the strangeness of a sudden vision: that huge as the leviathan appeared to him, to the Gollux it must be as big as the world.

When they reached the lip of the leviathan's mouth, they stopped and looked around them. To right and left, intolerably close, the jaws rose like twinned cliffs. The teeth, as large as ships, glinted in their own white light; giant silverfish threaded their way through the teeth, intent on cleaning the pitted surfaces. Were the leviathan to close its mouth, snap shut like a trap, Quin's whole world would be gone. What did it mean that Quin had chosen to live within the jaws of so large and dangerous a beast?

But the jaws held his attention for only a second—he had seen them from afar; up close, it was merely more of the same. The sights within the mouth of the beast interested him far more, for it was here that Quin had built his underground empire.

Never had any beast so wide, so varied, so interesting a throat. From where Shadrach stood, it was at least four thousand meters to the opposite jawline. Between, in the basin of the beast's gullet, a new world had been carved from nerveless flesh.

The teeth themselves lit the entire tableau—a deep yellow, so that the light had an erratic quality: Some teeth had been pulled, others sunk into the gums, or teetered on the edge of falling, or had fallen down into the gullet. Parts of the gums had, like pieces of rotten fruit, sloughed off the mouth and lay in puddles and piles down below, littering the entrance to the gullet, or having smashed into buildings. The hot wind that rose from the firmament, smelling of blood and rot, came from the gullet, and in this way the beast regulated its temperature, casting aside the coldness of being buried under thirty levels of stone.

Each side of the gullet represented an entirely different world. To the left lay a variety of vats (green and monstrous and dull) interspersed with a low, flat line of buildings. They hunched against the jawline as if carved from the flesh, a second set of irregular teeth, pressed up against the jaw out of fear of falling into the gullet. The dwellings and laboratories (Shadrach could not guess their function) boiled over with activity, as the skirmishes carried out on the leviathan's scales had blossomed into battles. Meerkats shot at one another and other creatures indiscriminately. From this distance, the miniature struggles had a curious slow-motion quality, the tactics as obvious and inexorable as some ritualistic game. One particularly tall tower crackled with flames, and the flesh of the leviathan curled and blackened when the tower touched it, a matchstick to paper. Inside and out, the leviathan was slowly being cooked, roasted as it idly hovered in the water and its eye sought a means of escape. Like giant discarded wine bottles, the vats lay open or cracked, their skins occluded with a fine green smoke. As Shadrach watched, a vat came free of its moorings, the gobbly flesh within screaming as the vat fell into the gullet, bouncing off one side, then the other, before disappearing into a pink and hungry darkness.

If the left half of the leviathan's mouth suggested a world gone mad, the right side had a preternatural calm to it. There, Quin had fashioned a forest of fir trees amongst which nothing moved, not even the trees themselves, despite the wind. Shadrach thought he could see a glint, as of a distant brook. The suggestion of a white bridge. The forest seemed strangely familiar to him.

Shadrach asked the Gollux, “Which way?”

“Into the forest. The Gollux has been there before.”

“Why is the forest so calm?”

“Quin lives there. Not even now will they cross Quin, or tempt his anger. Quin is a Living Artist. Quin created the Gollux. He created all of us.”

The path that led to the forest was a path of agony. To either side, creatures writhed on dozens of crucifixes. Shadrach refused to look left or right, but merely took John the Baptist from his pocket and strapped him to his arm once again. It hardly mattered now what he did with John. The meerkat head looked around glassy-eyed at its surroundings. It sniffed the air, said something Shadrach could not understand.

“What did you say?”

“I smell crabs. I smell food.”

“We're almost there.”

“I know. We're both almost dead.”

“Will you be defiant to the end?”

“What did you expect me to say?”

“Nothing. Do you see what's around us?”

“Yes. Chaos. Traitors to order. Waking dreams. Nightmares.”

John's eyelids flickered and closed again. The meerkat had so little life in him that Shadrach almost laid him to rest by the side of the path, beneath the feet of the crucified, but he could not bring himself to do it. Somehow, John the Baptist had become more than his companion; he had become a talisman.

Besides, John still had a bomb in his ear.

         

BEFORE THEY
could reach the floor of the mouth, and from there the forest, they chanced upon a hundred Candles. The path veered sharply down and to the right, sidestepping one of the leviathan's teeth, which had fallen from the gums, probably many years ago. When it leveled out again, the forest was directly ahead of them. To either side, more crucifixes, this time uniformly hammered to them, a hundred creatures that looked just like Candle: more than half wolf or coyote, the elongation of the face revealed as muzzle, the eyes yellow and ancient. The legs ended in half paws, half feet. The tails were crusted in blood and hung limply down. Like vultures in their stance, but unnaturally so, the long arms and legs a burden to them. Behind them, the corona of fires amongst the buildings.

There was none of the moaning that had marked the other crucifixions. They made no sound at all. Nuts and bolts held them to the posts; there was no way to bring any of them down.

“Candle?” Shadrach shouted as they walked down the path. “Candle? Is one of you Candle?”

The one nearest to him raised its head, blinked through the blood in its eyes but said nothing.

“Why was this done to you?” Shadrach asked, while the Gollux skittered around impatiently and muttered under its breath.

“They always do this to traitors—it will be done to you,” whispered John the Baptist. The meerkat whimpered, opened and closed its mouth.

The creature lowered its head as much as it was able, so it could look at Shadrach. “I am a priest of the Church of Quin. Quin no longer wants priests for his church.”

“I can help you down. I can . . .”

“I'm dying. Kill me or leave me. That is all.”

But Shadrach could not kill this Candle surrogate. He knew that if he killed this creature now, he would come all undone, would be worthless when he faced Quin. So he heeded the Gollux's pleading and continued down the path, promising himself . . . what? Nothing, really. He couldn't make such promises. His only allegiance was to the idea of the death of Quin, the life of Nicola.

         

WHEN THEY
reached the path of white pebbles that descended into the valley of dark fir trees—when he heard the sound of running water and saw the small bridge of red and white, half-hidden by the trees—when he smelled the thickness of the fir trees . . . then he realized he had seen the forest in Nicola's head, in her mind. And he wondered whether there really was such a place above level. What if he had entered a series of dreams in her mind—of things that actually happened, but that were distorted, unsound, mirror images. For a moment, this thought disoriented him (didn't it mean she might love him after all?). But the pebbles beneath his feet were real enough—and they scrunched against the Gollux's feet too . . .

Over the bridge they went, where the fiddler crabs stalked red-and-black butterflies. Just beyond stood a cottage with white walls and a thatched roof. Birds had built nests from the thatch, oblivious to Quin's workings. Or had Quin made them too?

“Is this it?”

“Yes,” John the Baptist said, surprising Shadrach. “This is the place. Do not enter.” He looked into Shadrach's eyes. “You will not come out.”

“What is your real name?” Shadrach said. It suddenly seemed important, after all they had endured together. “Not John, not Affliction, not Salvador. What is it?”

The meerkat coughed blood, its tongue pale, and said a word that sounded like the chattering speech of beetles. “That is my name. My real name. It's nothing you could ever actually say yourself. It's nothing a human could ever say.”

“You're right,” Shadrach said.

He turned toward the Gollux and asked, “Is this the place?”

“Yes,” the Gollux said.

“Then lead the way.”

         

INSIDE, SHADRACH
found a long, empty corridor lined with blank glass cages occupied only by dust—and at the corridor's end, another remote of Quin, its sad Oriental face swaying on too long a neck. The glass cages embedded in its sallow flesh had been covered by a black panel. Surprised and unnerved by the emptiness, Shadrach kept close to the Gollux as they walked toward the Quin remote. He flipped the safety on his gun. The stillness of the empty room was more horrible than if it had been occupied by a hundred monstrosities. The Quin remote leered and bobbed at them.

When they stood before the remote, it said, “I am Quin. What do you want with me?”

The Gollux said nothing.

Shadrach said, “You're not Quin. You're a remote, a construct.” He raised his gun and shot the construct through the head. The head flopped over its counter. A spackle of blood glittered on the wall behind it. It shivered. It shuddered. It slowly righted itself and rose again. “No,” it said, staring at him with a smile as its head gushed blood, “this is not me.”

The compartment in front of the facade slid open and there, on a small reclining chair, lay a puddle of pale flesh and scar tissue. Somewhere in the mass of perpetual double chins, the wriggly, maggotlike flesh, a dozen intense blue eyes shone out from jellied orbits. A lyrical laugh issued forth from some orifice hidden from Shadrach.

Like all creative beings, Quin, when compared to his work, failed to measure up. Shadrach felt as if he had just met a cretin who happened to be a brilliant holovid artist. If the situation had not been so tense, it would have been hilarious. He would have laughed out loud. This horrid gobbet of flesh, when he had expected a giant!

“Surprised?” the Quin remote asked.

“Just a little bit,” Shadrach lied.

“What did you expect? A great head? A lovely lady? A terrible beast? A ball of fire?”

“None of the above. I'm just surprised that you seem more amorphous in the flesh than as an idea.”

Shadrach thought he read disappointment in the glob of flesh that was Quin. Here and there, where the flesh was not translucent, Shadrach could see a nascent leg, an unborn arm.

“Were you always this way?” Shadrach asked. He felt no sense of urgency now that he had finally found Quin, simply a bone-aching fatigue and a need for answers.

“Not always. I was much more human. Once.”

“What happened to you?”

The flesh formed a grim smile, but the eyes danced in the body.

“There is a point beyond which the human body cannot recover. I have passed that point. I have experimented on myself for too long, and I have put too much of my own tissue into my creations.”

“You don't seem surprised to see me. Can you see the gun I'm aiming at you?”

“Why should I be surprised? I've expected you or someone like you for a long time. I've made enemies, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose. You just happen to be among the first to possess the combination of tenacity and insanity needed to find me. I assume you mean to kill me. By all means—kill me. It makes no difference. I've done what needs doing. There is no stopping it now.”

“Do you mean the war going on outside?”

“No, no, no. Periodically, I set them upon each other. The ones who survive breed, creating an ever-stronger strain. This time, though, it seems somewhat more permanent.”