Alium, page 56
Then he heard the unmistakable laughing, deep and sonorous as the sea. The boom of a forbidden god’s mirth unshackled, incarnate at last, liberated upon the surface of Altum, free to destroy all that it would and inexorable in its enjoyment. All it touched would end, said the laugh; all it saw would fall. It was too much for the King. Once more he sank to his knees as the hellish noise continued, and madness seized his fevered brain. Seeing its offender broken from within, the eye retreated, leaving a sick film of slime upon the glass, and the head of the beast reared back so violently and distantly from the ship upon its endless serpent neck that it was almost entirely visible, opening wide its cavernous mouth to reveal layers over layers of jagged, dissimilar teeth big as mountains and sharp as finest swords. The great mouth strained ever wider, with a gruesome burst unhinging to reveal the oblivion of the monster’s naked esophagus, and the lower jaw fell down too far to see, so that the maw before Chalem was wide as the abyss.
At last, bright blue streams of tiny fighter jets poured out from the hangars far below and swarmed like electric hornets around the enormous monster. They fired their blue beams as well into its flesh, but it was unperturbed, even still widening its jaws. Then they closed, all at once, all that violently slow, bone-breaking, muscle-tearing and horribly forceful process of opening consolidated in a moment’s undoing. Slam went the teeth, total darkness suffocated all sight, and an awful sucking sound filled the ears of the ship’s occupants no matter where they stood in fear. On the command deck, only the eerie blue light of luxint shone on the hideous texture of the mouth-flesh which now flexed and contracted, squeezing the body of the ship so tightly that it groaned in its innermost foundation.
“This cannot be.” Chalem trembled at first with rage, then as that furious defence dissolved, with pure, untamable fear filling his vacant voice as he stared into the black abyss.
Nubes cleared his throat most irritatingly. “Perhaps your cannon will be ready to fire from within the beast’s stomach. An ulcer would give it at least some form of pause, don’t you think?”
The King turned to his forgotten prisoner, squinting as into a bright light. Limp and sickly now seemed his blond hair, his eyes clouded with terror. Suddenly like a child he sprawled before the old man and grabbed at his robes like a beggar. “Nubes…” he said hoarsely. “Save us.”
The wizard chuckled solemnly. “Have you still the mind to unfasten these infernal cuffs?”
Chapter XXIX
Zenidow
Ogwold was alone. In vacant darkness he floated, one arm abstracted ahead. As the abyss could not apply the slightest friction to its reach, he withdrew that searching hand to seek—if anything—its living heat against his face. But neither cold nor warm, the closing notions of palm and cheek passed one through the other, exchanging nothing.
Still, the thought of one hand invoked a second; and oh!—at his side, five fingers curled from the void. Cracking knuckles gave each their sharp report, together sparking a jointed unity. From that skeletal echo, muscles expanded unto the dark, heavy with blood. Now chipped nails slid against the hard shapes of calluses, and the soft reply of the inmost palm cupped their different edges in warmth.
Just as naturally, this new and visceral hand discovered the broad shelf of his cheekbone, actuating further the tough skin which pressed and held its becoming. So too did those creating fingertips conduct the long current of his hard jaw, and enliven one rubbery vein in his neck, which trembled as he ran its length, searching for a shoulder below. Yet as one wading out into a deep, dark lake knows not when the supporting land will drop away, suddenly there was nothing to grasp.
As though gracious embodiment raised a floor beneath his feet, the removal of that certainty sent Ogwold plummeting down into the black. Yet sudden as that weightless speeding fall commenced, there came as from the void itself the solid shock of water, cold and hard, a soaking impact whose combining waves were quick to pull him under. Now with scrupulous intimacy the remorseless flow quickened all it touched—the hand, cheek, jaw, and neck anew, yet far more clearly realized, and every inch of the skin, all the finest details of muscle and bone, including, at last, the bottomless hole in his shoulder.
Yet here in this medium so familiar in his lungs, such a loss was little hindrance. Instinctively the impulse to swim rippled down through flexing, whipping ankles. Membranous wing-fins left their spinal cores and caught voluminous angles against an ever-forked yet singular path. So delicate in strength were the dual edges of those ascended limbs that like the bows of violins they found in toneless matter a wondrous music. Notions of light and joy were in its timbre, such that Ogwold too was singing—not knowing when he had started—in a sacred language newly learned as it was always known.
Out from the pit of his wound came an answer. Flowering luminance burst forth about him, magnificent as a third wing, then endlessly more complex and vast, shooting and budding as golden green light exploded and washed the water with infinite detail, blowing back the black. Suddenly all the sea was radiant with its being. Yet so vigorous was the evolution of this unfolding awakening force of life that it carried on with the sheer exuberance of its being, jetting off like some transforming invertebrate, trailing its godly roots, now a streaming, blazing star, small in the watery night, and gone.
*
Ogwold slowly opened his eyes. Low orange light seeped through his sleep-stiff face. The first he saw was the tiny silver sphere, floating before him; already it was winding away into the warm openness of a great room. The sough of numberless dry leaves tickled his hairy ears, cut through by the proud cry of some far-off night-bird. Now he remembered how the weary trek through Pivwood had deposited him here upon the warm wood of the highest floor of Nubes’ tower. Sighing, blinking blearily out of the near window, he recalled as well the Fonsolis, and released his coal-black, tattered shoulder from the tight grasp born of his dream.
But for one swishing tail and cursory white eye, though Elts was first to notice his return from troubled sleep, she merely nodded and resumed her severe scanning of several yellowed pages she had taken up from the sagging desk. However immersed was Sylna in her own text, a large, mouldy tome, the witch expressed far greater concern for the ogre’s well-being, her brown eyes leaping from the page of impossibly fine print. Setting aside her reading with focused delicacy, she strode across the room.
“Ogwold! Perhaps you should rest a little more?” She pulled the lumpy blue quilt back over his enormous legs. Suddenly he couldn’t help but grin, reminded by the heavy warmth of the blanket that he was settled in a silly crimson chair quite like those which had held even his enormous carriage aboard Nubes’ absurd ship so many months ago. But the darkness of the dream crept already into the periphery of his mirth, and the upturned corner of his oafish mouth knew not why it froze there.
“Do you think Nubes kept an armoury?” he said, looking up at the witch with the utmost politeness. This affectation caused Sylna to laugh, as it had many times already, juxtaposed with his huge and rough exterior. It didn’t seem to bother the ogre, as he went right along with her and bowed his great head dramatically. Still, he had spoken sincerely.
Forgetting his question as if it were some manner of joke, Sylna said, “You know Ogwold, I could swear your hair is already growing back!”
“Gods!” The ogre ran his hand over the bumpy bald dome of his head, and there replied against his broad fingers indeed the coarse bristling of his deceased mane’s shallowest buds. Looking quickly around for some reflective surface, he found only the glint of Byron’s green eye, an emerald in the shadows, where the mercenary sat against the high wall between two rickety bookcases.
“I wouldn’t think you a vain one,” grunted the mercenary. “Especially if Nogofod hair is so quick to proliferate.”
“Would it hurt you to sit in a chair?” Ogwold divested his hand of its thorough investigation, but though his broad grey cheeks darkened, he did not seem entirely embarrassed. “You wouldn’t understand. I’d been growing it my whole life.”
Byron laughed, placing one hand over the massive scabbard which lay close beside him. “Hair will return in time. But if it’s a weapon you’re missing, you’re not getting this sword back so easily.”
“You dishonour my gift.” Ogwold leaned forward, planting his huge elbow against one knee—and his meaty chin to his fist—as his blanket slid once more to the floorboards. “I would never ask for my dad’s sword back, for the same reason it hurts so to be without the Fonsolis. You and Azanog are partners now.”
Byron snorted, and though his face already was shadowed, he deemed it necessary to turn away and obscure his expression.
Sylna looked back and forth between the now very serious men. Now she thought of her own, white bow, leant beside the desk behind her, and she realized that Ogwold had not asked idly for a look into the armoury. Ashamed as she felt to have mistaken his vulnerability for humour, she took that avenue to security which was most familiar to her, and intellectualized the issue of his loss.
“I see what you mean,” she said quickly, as if she understood everything now, trying to imagine the Fonsolis as it had been described for her on the way back through Pivwood. “I cannot pretend to offer something so special as you’ve lost, but I’ll go look around. Nubes kept all sorts of odds and ends. There must be something to put you at ease.”
Embarrassed as she was affected in her posture and confidence, the witch went quickly away, slipping through the wooden door which had only barely admitted Ogwold when they had arrived, and all could hear the rapid patter of her feet upon the stair. As the steps faded away into the dizzying depth of the tower, Ogwold settled back into the voluminous chair and pulled the heavy quilt up to his chin, thinking back to his dream and wondering if perhaps some piece of the Fonsolis still lived, if not materially, in his soul.
Strangely, it was Byron who first broke the silence. “Elts, what is it you’re reading?”
She turned from the crepitating pages, one sheet held between forefinger and thumb. “Descriptions of the different moons,” she said. “I had never thought to imagine them as having such vastly eccentric features.”
Ogwold peered over the quilt. “That’s fascinating!” His muffled voice sounded quite deep.
Elts gazed over the piece of paper at the ogre, and she too could not help but smirk. He was a ridiculous specimen—gigantic, clumsy, hairless, like a monster out of some fairy tale. But she could also see quite clearly that he was kind of heart and gentle to the core, for the way his grey eyes shone out at her seemed only to encourage and uplift.
“This one, Vitalem, Moon of Growth, as it is called here, though to my people it is Setfret,” she said, “seems to be entirely forested, or at least a forest is the closest approximation the writer can make. Whatever it is which covers the landscape, it is likely a kind of vegetation which seems to participate in the formation of an oxygen rich atmosphere. It is a world not unlike our own. Of course, there cannot be the blight of elz trees there.”
“Elz trees have a beauty of their own,” Byron said from his dark seat. “A tragic one, but still they were changed by love, not hate.”
Elts glanced at the mercenary. “I’ve met only a few Novare, but I doubt any in the world would agree with you. I am even a Xol myself and see nothing beautiful in them. Too much love is a thing which smothers and kills.”
Busily as she’d left, Sylna returned, her voice coming first through the open door saying, “Nubes actually quite loves the elz trees, and he’s Novare!” Arriving herself she stopped and stood proudly before the others, arms akimbo, as there floated after her and into the room a great wooden club. Long, narrow handle up, with its massy trunk angled down to the floor, the slowly spinning object looked like a sad upside-down balloon as it listed and stopped before the ogre. The club was about the length of his arm, its rich wood a dark and glossy brown, and all along its body he could see now the fine furrows of its grain.
“Am I a troll then?” he grumbled exaggeratedly, not without enjoyment. He reached out and closed his hand around the long hilt, as though drawing a sword from its sheath, and at once the intense weight of the object ratcheted up into his chest. But he held on and already the club was stable in his grasp, such that he stood up and hefted it swiftly over his shoulder like an adventurer. Suddenly the mass of the club overwhelmed him, and he nearly fell to his knee under its tremendous weight. “Or perhaps a troll would stand like this,” he added, lowering his voice to fit his drastic hunch.
Sylna laughed. “I’d say you’re much stronger than a measly troll to even lift up so heavy a thing,” she said. “I’m not one to fold the Fabric unless I must, but there’s no other way I’d have transported such a mass.”
“What do you mean ‘fold the Fabric’? Isn’t it made of wood?” Ogwold asked.
“Ah, yes, of course, it is wooden, yes, but wood itself is only one manifestation of the Fabric. You see, the universe is…” Sylna found herself already pacing about just like her master used to do; stopping rigidly, she decided perhaps it was not the time for a lecture. “I had to use magic, to put it simply. And, well, there is magic of the kind as well in the very structure of the club. The harder you swing it, the heavier it becomes.” Sylna swept her tall, pointed hat as though she had solved all of the ogre’s problems, but quickly retreated into a demure laugh. “That is why it became so unwieldy when you flung it round.”
“Magic,” said Ogwold dreamily. “I’ve thought about it always, you know, but I had ascribed it to the gods before I met Nubes. Then I really saw something I couldn’t explain. There wasn’t a crew at all aboard his ship, and it seemed a great wind came from nowhere to fill his sails. I really would like to know how it works. Is it something you’re born with? Does it come from learning?”
Sylna nodded austerely for one so happy to be questioned on the subject. “I can tell you all that I know in time, but suffice it to say that the Fabric is in everything.”
“And you can fold such a thing?” Ogwold’s jaw fell open in so comic a manner that even Byron chuckled. “You must be able to do anything!”
“Hardly.” Sylna smiled.
Ogwold lowered the club slowly from his shoulder, and indeed it became all the lighter in his grasp, such that he straightened his posture. “So, this wood then; it can be light and heavy at once?”
“Yes! If you were to drop it out of the window it would make quite a crater in the land below, but if you handle it lightly, one so muscled as you should have little difficulty bearing it. For me however, its basic form might as well be an anvil.”
Ogwold stared at the club for a little while, his grey eyes misty. “I name you Wogdof,” he said suddenly and proudly, “for you are as hard-headed as you are subject to change.” Then he set the club on the floor beside him gingerly, leaning the haft against the arm of his chair. Only doing so did he notice the carving of a small, bow-necked turtle set deep in the handle. “Ah and of course, a turtle! So I can never forget Nubes. Thank you, Sylna.”
The witch bowed, replacing her hat atop her long brown hair.
“What is it with the turtles?” Byron’s gruff voice cut in. He swung his eye impassively over the room and its turtle statues posed in various positions, carved from the legs of the desk and feet of each chair, smiling wanly or closing their eyes in deep contemplation. The mercenary himself was surrounded by them. Two very large wooden likenesses guarded over his little shadowy domain across the room, and along the empty shelves were arranged a procession of metal bookends of like form.
Ogwold laughed at the stony intonation of the haggard man enclosed in such kind and gentle images. “Nubes loves turtles,” he said, sitting down once more in the crimson armchair, his hand already drawn as by some notion of security to touch the club beside him. “They were all over his ship.”
“His favourite animal,” Sylna agreed. “Once, he said he’d journeyed to Pivwood to study all manner of turtles more than anything else. We’ve composed many records of their unique forms in this forest; though, I only know they’re unique because he says so, and because we cannot find them in his other taxonomical books, which are very esteemed pieces of work I’m to believe.”
“Is that your telescope?” Elts startled everyone by speaking, for she had seemed so reabsorbed in reading since the witch had returned. But now they saw she had set the loose pages aside and pointed to the great brass cone which shot down like a vast metal icicle through the domed ceiling. “We’ve some instruments in Xoldra, but none which could have yielded such descriptions as are contained upon these pages.”
“Oh, yes!” Sylna beamed up at the esoteric instrument, lambent in the musty cave of the roof. “It is not like any other telescope in the world, at least according to Nubes. Would you like a look?”
“Very much so,” said Elts.
“Ogwold, I’d wager this is something new to you,” Byron remarked from the shade. “Telescopes are like a special looking glass for studying the Cosmos. Through the lens of even very simple such devices you can study the faces of distant worlds.”
Ogwold gawked. “Other worlds? Don’t you mean the moons?”
“Perhaps I’ve underestimated your ignorance.” Byron laughed. “What things the Nogofod believe! Caelare is the highest God, and Altum the only world in the Cosmos?”
Elts intervened kindly, seeing that even the resilient cheeriness of Ogwold was rippled by this reminder of his past, though she knew little about it. “There are many worlds other than Altum, Ogwold,” she said. “Some are visible even to the naked eye, though they appear as stars in the night sky.”
“That’s incredible!” Ogwold suddenly stood straight up, all embarrassment forgotten in wonder, such that the old floorboards creaked perilously. “But you can see the moons as well, yes? Are you saying that through this thing you can see more closely the surface of Somnam?”
