Chris Willrich - [BCS314 S01] Read online

  Eyetooth

  By Chris Willrich

  The weapon gleamed in a cavern so deep underground it lay almost nearer the world’s underside than the lands we know. Despite the hollow’s depth the space swelled with light. Magma flowed around a thin pillar of rock that lanced toward a ceiling as thick with stalactites as a porcupine with quills. The stone finger stopped just short of those spikes, and up there the weapon’s violet glow cast an inverted forest of shadows.

  From a jagged tunnel mouth two-thirds the way down the cavern wall there rose a perplexed voice. “The geology is all wrong, Bone.”

  From the same opening (which, it must be said, was also a third the way up from the searing magma) came a rapt voice. “It’s perfect, Gaunt.”

  From the gap, they peered: Persimmon Gaunt the black-clad poet and Imago Bone the grey-shrouded thief.

  “The geology,” Gaunt repeated as Bone busied himself with his pack, unloading ropes and pitons and more exotic objects, “is all wrong. But it’s beautiful, I admit. When we return to the surface I shall compose a trifle called ‘Ode Upon a Fiery Pillar of Doom.’ Shall we turn back now?”

  “You do not know, Gaunt,” Bone continued, an old, old look in the eyes upon his young face, “how satisfying is this tableau. Many a year I’ve thieved; a thousand walls have calloused my fingertips, a thousand rooftops have leathered my feet, and I consider myself one of the finest—”

  “As you are,” Gaunt said on cue, with a slight roll to her eyes.

  “... And yet, truth be told, most of my capers have been highly prosaic, city-bound affairs. Oh, once in a while there were retired war-hydras down to a head or two, senile tentacled horrors disguised as chandeliers, pits of spikes covered with stale cockatrice blood, venomous squirrels–”

  “Squirrels?”

  “—but for the most part, city rich are stingy and unimaginative. I mean honestly, Gaunt, iron strongboxes! Locks with poison needles! Surly thugs with swords! A thief could cry. But this—” He waved a hand at all the hellish majesty. “This is why I should have left city life years ago. It shouldn’t have taken a hundred angry sorcerers to give me a push.”

  “Well, we have beheld it,” Gaunt persisted, “and the demesne of your ‘ultimate weapon’ is surely unreachable. Now I counsel that we return to the fields we know and fulfill our quest in a sensible fashion, such as—oh, who can say—kidnapping the emperor of the Eldshore and convincing him of—Bone, what are you doing?”

  Bone had busied himself threading the end of one of the very fine ropes through an eyelet at the tail of a claw-tipped arrow. She watched him at work, noting his ferret-like motions, his sandy hair (previously dark but now lightened by months on the road), and the scars upon his face, one left by steel, one by fire.

  “Strange as our Earthe is,” Gaunt persisted, “its oddness has its reasons, like the divinity student who affords tuition by dancing burlesque. To the point, the world’s inner heat results from pockets of creation-fire captured at time’s dawn, and from candlewyrms who spawn thence and swim through and drink the fluid rock. But fluid rock should not behave with such restraint. It should long since have consumed that rocky pillar.”

  “It seems unrestrained enough to kill us,” Bone observed, touching a vial of black viscous stuff to the clawed tip of the arrow.

  “Yes, exactly,” Gaunt said, “so why does the magma preserve the weapon’s resting place? That pillar is clearly maintained by a powerful and ancient magic. It is not, I think, a place for mortals.”

  Bone frowned as he handed her a shortbow. “So this place should not exist?”

  She’d been practicing, and for a pale poet of Swanisle, she’d a strong arm. She concentrated and let fly, and the arrow found its mark. My skill grows, O you stones! A bull’s eye at fifty! “No, it should not,” she continued. “Nor should the tunnels we have spent days traversing, nor the various crystal caverns we crossed, nor the corkscrewing staircase we descended.”

  “You think this is a trap?” Bone said, donning a mask of white, offering the same to Gaunt. He watched her cover up the rose-and-spiderweb tattoo on her pale face and pull a hood over her auburn hair. “Could the cackling skull have steered us wrong?”

  “Have skulls been trustworthy, in your experience?”

  “For the most part, yes. They have little to hide.” He grunted, unloading a strange assemblage of interwoven sticks with a small claw at one end. “Yet this one was glowing with the cold light of dying galaxies slowly twisting in its shadowy sockets.”

  “I might have gotten corroboration, if it had been me. How long ago did the skull give you that tip?”

  “Ten years? Twenty...?” Owing to an old enchantment, it was easy to mistake Bone for a much younger man. Sometimes even if the observer was Bone himself.

  Gaunt smiled and shook her head. “There is a melancholy about you, Bone, born perhaps of your endless youth. The quest to destroy the forbidden book has stirred you out of that mire. I like seeing you so engrossed with an undertaking. I like the man you become at such times. I will aid you, for now.”

  Bone nodded with a touch of rue. Gaunt knew he was aging normally now, a side effect of their use of the same forbidden book against his old enemies, and as he smiled, she felt a fresh arrow of guilt at making him mortal. She had talked him into that caper too.

  “You’ve postponed a far more sensible future for all this,” he admitted. “You’re too good to me, poet.”

  “It’s well you know it.”

  “Come,” Bone said, “permit me to smear this vile protective upon any exposed skin.”

  “Such a proposition.”

  Yet soon, masked and insulated by what Bone called frostglop, the pair slipped hand-over-hand along the rope secured to the rocky pillar by means of Gaunt’s prodigious bow-shot, the claw-arrow of Bone’s, and a precious drop of ur-glue.

  Though they’d looped themselves to the line, the heat and the deadly absurdity of it all made Gaunt feel almost tipsy. Gravity in this realm was more diffident than upon the surface. Despite the magma roiling below, Gaunt felt light and giddy as a girl jumping on a bed. She studied the pillar and, at a particularly difficult juncture, observed a vein of darker stone set within the grey. She had an ah-ha! moment that briefly skewed her balance.

  “Are you in difficulty?” Bone shouted.

  “No!” Gaunt called back. And thought, I am the best possible Gaunt-suspended-over-magma there could be. And grinned.

  More than once she’d risked her life beside Bone, yet each time she’d emerged from the trial proud, if not always smiling. She hadn’t regretted leaving the great city of Palmary in his company, even though travel made it harder to compose the morbid verse which was her first love. The scholar in her, however, was frequently rewarded.

  “Bone!” she called. “The pillar is inscribed!”

  “Eh?” he shouted back. “The killers have died? What?”

  “Later!”

  Imago Bone shrugged and scuttled along toward the pillar. He’d learned to pay close attention to Gaunt’s words, even if he didn’t always understand them. In her own way, she was equal in lore to his long-dead mentor, Master Sidewinder. He reached a precarious jagged shelf upon the pillar and began pounding in pitons, finding the grayish dominant stone more receptive than the black vein of darker rock.

  “Odd stuff, this,” he told Gaunt as she caught up.

  “That’s what I shouted about. This dark vein of rock forms words.”

  A dagger flashed in Bone’s left hand. “There are wyrms?” Their masks and the bubbling magma below made it difficult to hear.

  “Words, Bone!”

  Bone looked up and down the calligraphed pillar, like a thief fac
ing a judge’s verbose sentence. “Writing is always dangerous.”

  “I recognize the language. It’s Vuuhrr.”

  “Vur? I am unfamiliar with it.”

  “Vuuhrr, and that’s not surprising,” Gaunt said. “The Vuuhrr were an advanced species of plumed lizard during the prior Solar Age, back when the sun rose in the south. They destroyed themselves in the Motive War.”

  “Motive... war? Wars have motives, yes, but can one go to war over a motive?”

  “The Vuuhrr could. For they learned to perfectly sense motivations. There’s an old account of them I once translated:

  In ancient light did dwell the Vuuhrr

  In days when Sun rose in the south

  Winged serpents, power pure

  Tongues of fire upon the mouth.

  When grunting was the speech of man

  When cave was woman’s house

  The serpents sang of heaven’s span

  And their tongues raised molten domes,

  Cooled to black obsidian.

  There they mastered eldritch tomes

  And venerated Light,

  Lit the mind’s dark catacombs,

  Denied illusion’s might.

  No Vuuhrr could hide an angry thought

  Nor cloak a burning spite

  And a searing web of grievance caught

  The Vuuhrr in blazing shame

  Until a weapon saved them, all unsought—

  Angelic iron to break the flame—

  And Eyetooth was its name.”

  “‘Eyetooth,’” Bone mused. “Odd. That was the very name the skull used for the weapon we seek.” He frowned. “I do not trust coyly named weapons. I’d rather we sought Brainslicer or Heartbore, say. You know where you stand with a bloodcurdling name.”

  “Come,” Gaunt said. “I’ll try translating as we climb.”

  Up, and up.

  Thirty minutes along, just before the top, Gaunt completed her guess:

  This is the dark word that claims breath.

  “Ominous,” she murmured.

  “What was that?” Bone said, preoccupied with the last feet before the top of the pillar and the purple glow beyond. “Hippopotamus?”

  “Something is about to happen,” Gaunt said, and relayed her translation. “The weapon itself might be a trap.”

  “Or perhaps the pillar collapses into the magma?” Bone mused.

  “Or the stalactites spear us like fish?”

  “Mm. I think I’ll burn one of these lovelies, on our current situation.” Bone unwound a line of ironsilk and affixed to one end a firework from Qiangguo, both acquired from strange caravaners crossing the Braid of Spice. To the rocket’s nose he dabbed one of their last drops of ur-glue. He grinned. “I meant to launch this some night from the Pleasure Pinnacle of Amberhorn, when it was time to retire.” Winking at Gaunt he added, “But I no longer dream of infiltrating harems.”

  “Was that supposed to be roguishly witty? I just wanted to be sure.”

  Bone sheepishly lit a spark with his tinderbox. The rocket sputtered and flew.

  It hit the base of the tunnel mouth whence Gaunt and Bone had arrived. The glue held, the ironsilk line shining thinly in the magma-light. Bone pounded in the near end with a piton, then secured two loops of mundane rope for sliding down the line.

  “Would you trust this contraption’s weight, Bone?” Gaunt asked dubiously.

  “Only against the ‘dark word that claims breath.’ But at least we have our escape route. Thanks for the warning, Gaunt.”

  “You are welcome, Bone.”

  Together they climbed over the lip of the great pillar, to behold Eyetooth.

  Or rather, what must have been be its hilt.

  It protruded from a block of stone as more famous hilts of more famous weapons throughout the ages had been known to do.

  The hilt, then: the swirls of iron evoked starfish, hurricanes, octopi, galaxies, drains, and in its center winked a fleck of sapphire glowing a peculiar violet—the purple of a clear sky just now forgetting sunset, a sky that recalls irises in your mother’s garden, dark stains of blackberries on your little hands, or the color of sea urchins beside your feet as you take your first wade into the sea, or of mountainsides framing your path on the evening you leave home.

  Strange thoughts, Gaunt reflected, watching the sapphire. Aside from the dark block, the iron hilt, and the violet glow, nothing lay visible atop the pillar of stone. “No inscription,” she noted. “No advice as to who may draw this blade.”

  “As the trap will surely spring upon me,” Bone said, “my luck being what it is, and I being the more experienced thief...”

  “The only actual thief—”

  “... I shall pluck the sword, assuming the deed is possible. Should doom approach, kindly scream and escape. Compose a poem about me, should I—”

  “What is this nonsense? I’m not abandoning you.”

  “We are not bound together, truly. You indeed have poems to complete, and people out there to read them. And somewhere out there, assuming you want him, there must be a good man for you. A man who is not a twice-doomed thief out of time. In more ways than one. To watch someone of your potential perishing beside me... that would be a doom in itself.”

  Gaunt shrugged, for poetry could be written anywhere. And was not ‘a good man’ the sort one married? And was not marriage imprisonment? So Gaunt didn’t argue. This did not mean Bone had won. It simply meant she did not argue. She would do as she chose.

  Bone slithered forward and deployed his peculiar claw assemblage. He extended it and arranged for the claw to tug at the hilt.

  “This likely won’t work,” Bone called over his shoulder. “Probably some mystical combination of sweat, muscle, and will is required. But I prefer contrivance, laziness, and runarounds.”

  “This is one reason I respect you,” Gaunt called back.

  Bone swung the contraption and plucked at the weapon. He fell over with an oomph. “So light...” he muttered. “I hadn’t expected...”

  “Bone!” Gaunt called. “You’ve only freed the hilt, I think! Perhaps the blade snapped...”

  Bone looked and saw the sapphire fleck amid iron swirls. But there was not merely a hilt, if a hilt this truly were. There were seven iron extensions the length of his index fingers, each with studs and indentations that had a familiar look to a long-established thief. None of them resembled a sword.

  Bone scrambled atop the block for signs of a blade trapped within. There must be some mistake.

  But there was no such sign, only seven small holes in the rock, complimentary to the iron extensions.

  “Bone!” Gaunt called.

  “A key!” he answered. “Merely a key. A complex one, to be sure, but...”

  “Bone! Run!”

  Bone followed her masked gaze, beholding serpentine coils of dark viscous stuff rising from somewhere down the pillar’s sides. They resembled the sinuous obsidian writing. He dropped his contraption and danced along the pillar’s top with the key, grabbing Gaunt’s hand. She ran beside him and snatched one of the lengths of rope he’d set near the ironsilk, looped it over the line, and clinging to the ends she slid out and down, across the void toward the tunnel mouth. Bone stowed the key and followed but felt a wrenching tug on his right foot.

  The calligraphy, the dark word, looped around his boot, bubbling and hissing like newly brewed tar. Burning-leather smells rose from Bone’s boot. He kicked off, shrieking, from the pillar of stone, and slid down the ironsilk line. The tendril of the dark word stretched out and out behind him, still sucking at his boot... till the doomed footwear came off with a pop.

  Gaunt, reaching the tunnel mouth, spun and watched the malignant calligraphy toss the boot aside with a seemingly contemptuous fling; it hit the magma far below and sank smoldering underneath. The dark word, now almost fully free of its grooves in the rock, tore at the high end of Bone’s line. As Bone neared the tunnel the line collapsed, and he swung wildly and hit the rock fac
e below.

  Gaunt grabbed the line, though it cut her palms. “Bone!”

  He did not answer. But presently there came a groan, and signs that this groaner was making their way up the face of the rock. Then Bone reappeared with lurch of panic and a crimson blotch spreading at the center of his white mask. They flung their masks off, and the pair, one bleeding from her hands, the other from his nose, fled up the tunnel, always imagining they heard bubbling, sucking noises just behind.

  “A key,” Bone was heard to mutter between gasps. “Why would the skull—describe a key—as a weapon?”

  “Why would a skull—describe anything?” Gaunt’s voice echoed.

  “Well, it couldn’t very well—draw me a picture.”

  “You’re too sure—that you know everything, Bone—I once knew a—maimed artist who—managed to paint with her teeth—”

  “Digressions later, destinations now—”

  “Just another—working day—”

  At the known world’s center loomed an ebon mountain crowned in white dazzle. This apex was only ice and snow to a certain altitude. Blackened stone soared above, and beyond that crouched a flattened crystalline summit born of appalling heat. On many a day the sun itself, on its journey around the Earthe, passed within a quarter mile.

  Half sunken into the crystal plain, casting immense shadows across cloud-tops at dawn and dusk, reared a black vault. Its stature would be familiar to shipwrights; its proportions would evoke nightmares in undertakers. Its only elaboration was a set of seven keyholes, each hole the point of a silver star wide as a city fountain.

  Something stirred. Through suddenly vibrating keyholes came a moan like the forerunner of every cry from each imprisoned throat in all the world’s gaols, galleys, and gladiatorial pits, all the way back to dark galleries in sealed pyramids and pits in idol-strewn grottos and the guts of ancient caves hand-painted with deer and mastadon.

  The First Prisoner knew the key was moving.

  On a windy pass amid much smaller mountains, with ordinary ice and snow glittering all around, Gaunt demanded, “What now?” as Bone bandaged her hands. “Do we question the Vesperian Oracle? Speak to scholastics at the Discreet Lyceum? Find a locksmith?”