The Mirrors Read online

  “They sing the magickal song to the demented, deformed giant Crastagulus, the Sleeping God of the Void. They sing it to Him in the hope that They might wake Him, so that He might take on His rightful reign over All That Truly Is. You see, to the Choir of Beasts, Crastagulus is the one true God—and They are but supplicants. They were given rule over All That Truly Is only because Crastagulus (in what one might call shrewd wisdom) abdicated it in favor of the oblivion of sleep. The Choir of Beasts resent His withdrawal and wish for nothing more than to wake Him. And so They sing horrific, magickal songs to give Him nightmares, which I suppose may have led Him to toss and turn—but haven’t yet sufficiently stirred Him to arise from His slumber. Perhaps that’s why things keep getting worse in Sultor, Amberbynn, and the Cravenbynn Forest. The Choir of Beasts grows more desperate, seeks to paint pictures ever more monstrous with Their wretched lyrics. Pictures, Hunter, lyrics like you and me, the surviving men of Sultor, the three maidens of Amberbynn, and the dead world all around us. We have no real substance, you and I. Our lives are not real. Our surroundings are not real. We are simply characters in a magick song, who then become characters in Crastagulus’s nightmares. And we can put an end to it all by silencing the Choir of Beasts.”

  I shook my head, disbelieving. “Even a Shaman’s wisdom is subject to the cobwebs of senility.”

  “Use your power of reason for something besides tracking, Hunter. Use your intuition, while you’re at it. It makes sense that you and I and everything and everyone around us are just the characters, props, and settings for nightmares ricocheting ’round the head of a demented God. Yes, this strikes you as an odd notion. And yet, the notion resonates. It seems intuitive. Look around you. Existence equals nightmare. Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure.”

  “So far you’ve offered me ramblings. Ravings. A good Hunter relies on intuition only after surveying the evidence. Tracks, scents, fur caught on brambles. Evidence. You offer me tales of dreaming giants and green tigers, and expect me to believe them.”

  The Shaman sighed, then reached a cold, white hand up to my face and stroked it, as a woman might stroke the face of her lover. “If it’s tracks you demand, Hunter, then tracks you’ll get.” He moved his hand away from my face and slammed it against the earth three times.

  A trail of bull’s tracks glowed in the woods, as if each of his hooves had set the ground afire, but did not consume it. “Follow these tracks. They lead back to my hovel. There you’ll find all that you need. All the implements required to murder the Gods and the nightmare-world They’ve sung into existence.”

  “If you really are in possession of these tools, Shaman, why haven’t you used them yourself?”

  “Because I’m no Hunter. Look at me. Old. Frail. Your chance of success on this mission is much greater than my own. Though you’d do well to mark, before your expedition to the Plain of Drau Meghena, that there are many, many Beasts there. You will not be armed with sufficient weapons to kill each God that sings a creature into existence and pain. You will only be able to kill one. Mark this, Hunter, most of all: The Beast you will go to slay—the Predator who sings the Song of Men and Maidens—is, in size, unlike any beast you’ve ever stalked before. It’s a—”

  I looked off in the distance at the trail of glowing hoof marks. “With all due respect, I think you underestimate me, Shaman. When there was a thriving village of Sultor, I was its Second-Chief Hunter. Not only a Hunter, but a leader of men in the hunt. To this day, the antlers of a mammoth mother goddrel I killed, six men wide—the largest ever seen by Sultorian eyes— adorn the village beer hall as testament to my prowess. I think you should—” I turned my head back toward him, to make certain he was listening.

  He wasn’t there. In his place sat a pile of dusty, disarticulated bones. The skeleton of a bull, smothered in a cloud of flies. I took in the sight, noting with awe and revulsion the dry-rotted arrow in the midst of the bone pile.

  I followed the tracks.

  At first I told myself I did this only out of curiosity. I considered the possibility that the Shaman of Cravenbynn and his tale of the Choir of Beasts were just fever-dreams—signs of desperation, madness, or even the first indication I might be sick with the Pox. I felt my flesh for nascent sores, but found none. On the other hand, I thought some good might come of believing the encounter had been authentic. It gave me a reason to go on (even if that reason was the merciful annihilation of myself and the other suffering survivors).

  Daylight was wasting away. The sun sat on the horizon. We still had at least a little meat in the smokehouse. No one was starving—yet. I should have returned to the village, to come back again the next day.

  But I didn’t. Too much had happened that I couldn’t explain, and perhaps nothing appeals more to desperate men than the hope that their plight might be explained to them— that there might be some meaning.

  I thought about “Nightmares Making Nightmares,” then about the stench and hopelessness awaiting me back in Sultor. When fears arose about my vulnerability in the forest (without so much as a lantern), I thought about just how little I valued my own life. Then I put all thought out of my head and set my mind to one purpose: to follow the tracks, no matter where they led. They snaked through the woods, forming a path miraculously uncluttered by carnage. I followed it until I arrived at a swelling from the ground, bedecked with flowers bearing soft petals that grazed my bare calves as I climbed it. Bloom Hill. At the top, a dwelling.

  I expected a hut, of the sort typically found in Sultor. What I found, instead, was a dwelling made entirely out of tufts of thorn bushes that had been yanked out of the ground. Mud had been used as mortar to give the structure some stability. The entrance was low and wide. Made for a bull.

  I leaned my head into the all-consuming darkness of the Bull-Shaman’s lair. I encountered odors both putrid and pleasant. Between the dusk and the dense, light-blocking thorns that constituted the walls, I couldn’t see what caused such a commingling of scents. I knew the Shaman was a joker and feared he might have led me to his domain for some malevolent purpose, with the lure of a lie. I feared the Shaman had some grisly surprise in store for me.

  I felt my innards writhe. I reminded myself I could still turn around. I could follow the luminescent white tracks back to the point where I’d met the white bull. I could then walk the rest of the way back to Sultor, through the fallen bodies of birds, the decaying carcasses of rodents.

  But what would I be going back to? The blacksmith? The acolyte? Graves and flies and worms and a world with no mystery—only death?

  I took my first step into the hovel.

  The very moment my sandal hit soil, two clusters of illumination erupted in mid air. To my left, tiny dots of white light, rising, falling, blowing like snow in a blizzard. Next to it, a dimmer shade of white—no, not that, a gray light. That’s the best I can describe it, though it might seem nonsensical.

  I took another step forward.

  The smells—both wince-inducing and sublime— intensified. So did the light. The white and gray lights grew brighter and brighter until the whole room achieved a degree of illumination not unlike that of noon.

  Then and there, I finally saw the interior of the hovel for what it was. The white and gray lights surrounded flasks of the same colors that sat next to one another on an oak table. On the far side of the table sat a black flask that had been obscured in the darkness. A disembodied hand, dark as the void between stars, held it in a clenched grip. I noted that all three flasks levitated ever so slightly off the table’s surface, such that a fly or worm could have squiggled underneath, but nothing larger.

  I knew now that I was not Pox-stricken. I was not insane. I’d heard a description of magickal potions and then, after only a short hike, found them. Reason and intuition both spoke the same answers to me: there really was a Plain of Drau Meghena, and before me—floating over this simple oak table—were all the implements needed to bring an end
to the nightmares wrought by each day’s rising sun.

  I removed an arrow from my quiver and dipped it into the gray flask. When I took it out, the tip glowed gray. I repeated the task ten times over. I wanted every arrow to be up to the task. Then I grabbed onto the white flask and without pause drank its bitter, foul-smelling contents (the source of the hovel’s foul odor). It made me gag, but I did not retch. I watched my flesh dissipate into air—an odd, vertigo-inducing sensation. Seeing what I could of my own body provided a frame of reference, a compass and a grounding. Being unable to see my own body was a strange incident indeed.

  Only the black potion, held in the grip of the obsidian hand, remained. I tried tugging the bottle away. The hand wouldn’t yield its treasure. I tried prying its cold, dark fingers off the bottle, but found the hand’s grip like that of tree roots in good soil. After pacing the hovel and considering the dilemma, I approached the oak table and slammed my palm against the surface three times—just as the Shaman had slammed his palm against the ground.

  The cold black hand relinquished its flask. I took it, drank it, and woke on the Plain of Drau Meghena after what seemed like a fitful sleep. I awoke to the chant of the Choir of Beasts.

  Time passed differently on Drau Meghena. No sun shone in the sky. The light radiated from the ground itself, and from its Beasts. While I was aware from the Shaman’s statement that the Choir sang songs full of lurid lyrics, I heard only one note sung continuously. I couldn’t count all the mouths, maws, and snouts the songs were sung from. They were legion.

  Each Beast sang in a slightly different pitch. Rarely, a Beast would add a flourish—a trill here or there, a warble. But the overall impression forming in my mortal brain was that of a monstrous synchronicity.

  The plain stretched out in all directions, and I could not see the end of it. My eyesight seemed to work differently. There was, it seemed, no horizon. When my eye found a point where a horizon should have been, I blinked and found that my perspective had rushed forward. This made me unsteady on my feet, until I became accustomed to it.

  The light emanating from the Creatures’ hides mixed together to give the sky purple and rose hues, while the ground was like a fallen rainbow; a free-for-all in which no shade or handful of shades predominated. I surveyed the herd of chimeras—each Beast a corruption of its counterpart in Sultor, endowed with some aspect or aspects that rightly belonged to another. A bird, sagging in flight under the weight of tiny hooves. A dog with the face of a monkey. A bear with a snake’s eyes and tongue.

  I considered for a moment that these were the Gods that innocent farm boys were taught to worship and appease. Families sacrificed much in the way of wealth to send such a lad off to learn from the priests how to make proper supplications to these Monsters. I shuddered, and nearly ruined my stealthy advantage by vomiting. But I managed to swallow my bile. Then I padded through the multicolored ground, again surveying the quarry, looking for a sign of that Beast that sang the Song of Men and Maidens so I could silence it and bring the Great Nightmare—mankind—to an end.

  I could not, at first, detect any sign of the giant. I began to suspect the story of Crastagulus was an embellishment on the Shaman’s part (after all, storytelling is another traditional Shaman craft). Then I felt a gentle rising and falling motion beneath me, as though I were in a boat on the Halator when it was calm. I then knew that what I’d mistaken for the ground beneath me was, in fact, the very torso of the gigantic God, Himself.

  I crouched and tiptoed my way through the Choir, taking in the whole scene, plotting and planning how I could possibly complete my mission. After I’d walked several hundred paces, by my best reckoning, all the Beasts took on the chanting of a new note. This one ever so slightly higher. I heard Their song in this fashion, one note at a time, each note consuming vast stretches of time. Or, perhaps, my experience of time did not match that of the Beasts of Drau Meghena. Perhaps time passed more slowly for me than for Them.

  I’d traveled, before, to other lands and noted the relationships of their animals one to another. If a chimeric tiger sang the Song of the Antelope and a chimeric lamprey sang the Song of the Fish, then it made sense that whatever sang the Song of Men and Maidens would be a chimera who was Predator to our prey. I searched for the bear-snake chimera I noted upon my arrival, as both beasts could be fatal to man. I looked also for something in the shape of a wolf. Or, perhaps, a wild boar.

  As I surveyed the plain for the proper Beast whose slaying would bring an end to the misery of myself and my species, something wispy and slimy grazed my face. I slapped at my cheek, trying to be rid of it—as even that hint of a touch of its legs on my face felt foul. The insect offered Its own high-pitched rendition of the note sang by the Choir as a whole. It flew tight circles in the air around my head while singing, then landed atop my nose.

  It couldn’t see me, but perhaps this particular Beast could smell me.

  I looked in horror at the mishmash of beasts It represented—a long, slimy midsection of white worm, covered with a sparse coat of bristly black hair, bulging with tumors crusted over by oozing yellow sores. It had the thin, membranous wings of a fly. It buzzed. Like the pestilence-bearing, corpse-corrupting flies in Sultor and the Cravenbynn Forest, It buzzed. It sang Its high note, synchronized to that of Its bestial kin.

  I examined It in each of Its parts—the maggoty middle of It, skin so afflicted with disease it seemed to be boasting of it. I examined how the body was attached to the buzzing wings of that creature who had proven so inescapable since the rise of the Yellow Pox in Sultor. Whose song replaced that of the birds.

  Then the recognition came.

  I fell to my knees, laughing and wailing, and the Fly-Beast flew off in the air. Yes, this alerted the whole Choir to my presence, but what of it? Oh, the Bull-Shaman-Fool had played fair, all right. He’d tried to warn me that the Beast I had to slay was, in size, like none other I’d ever stalked before. And I? I’d met his warning with a boast.

  I’d expected to slay a huge Monster and come to find my real quarry was a fly! A chimera of maggot, full-grown fly, and disease! These were the Predators? So ill-prepared was I, their puny prey.

  Laughing and wailing, I abandoned all training and pursued the Creature half-frolicking, half-racing. I snapped my useless bow over my knees and used arrows only to swat at the singing, buzzing God. Nearly getting It once, perhaps even grazing Its wing as It had once grazed me, but then I found I’d been unmindful of my feet, and tripped against the webbed foot of a singing frog-boar chimera. It darted Its tusks toward me, mid-note, and it was only through the use of quick reflexes that I was able to escape being pierced as It hopped toward me.

  I ran and I ran, now no longer even trying to slay the Fly-Beast. I ran to rid my brain of this new knowledge. I ran away from the herd toward the horizon—then belatedly remembered there was none. I had no choice but to listen to each note of Their melody. I covered my ears and ran through Their ranks, seeking escape but finding none. After much running, I felt a cramp in my side. My stomach began to spasm, and—mercifully—black bile (the Shaman’s potion, I imagine, commingled with bile) erupted from my mouth.

  My head grew heavy. I saw conflagrations of purple and rose. I had visions of the entirety of Sultor slathered in yellow effluvia. I saw two lights—one white and one gray.

  What I yearned for most of all was blackness.

  The next thing I saw was sunlight bleeding through the open passage into the Shaman’s thorn-hovel. The next thing I heard were birds. Coughing up more black sputum, I found myself too weak to stand. I could, at most, only squat there on the dirt floor. I looked down at my leg and noticed, with some trembling, that I once again could see myself. I had, apparently, thrown my clothes off in a fit that I couldn’t recall.

  My flesh had been bleached white as a cloud. The Plain of Drau Meghena had absorbed all pigment from my body. Moreover, my skin had become extensively wrinkled and sagging, much atrophied. I ran a nervous hand through my h
air—only to find myself without any.

  For many comings and goings of the sun I regathered my strength. I rooted into the dirt floor and fed on worms and beetles, managing to snag a stray rodent now and then. (The forest animals had no aversion to entering the hovel; they came and went quite freely and showed no signs of fear.) In time, I found myself strong enough to rise. I didn’t dare venture outside, for fear I might discover the birdsong had been a false noise foisted on me by madness. I hadn’t the heart to glance on a world nearly picked clean by pestilence.

  Instead, I lingered like that in the hovel, naked and reclaiming the use of my senses. I discovered the Shaman’s scrolls hidden away in clay canisters and found him to be a grim scribe, indeed. Some scrolls told of the conspiracy inflicted against men and maidens by the priests (among others), to keep from them the truth of the Choir’s existence. Some scrolls provided instruction in a hideous branch of chymistry. Some were works of poetry and fiction (after all, storytelling is another traditional Shaman craft)—songs for dead dreamers and tales of a Great Black Swine that is All That Is.

  Had I stumbled upon such scrolls before my voyage to the Plain of Drau Meghena I would have considered them the world’s worst abominations. As it was, I found in them the ability to create nightmares outside of the Nightmare. A sort of magick the Shaman had used to out-dream the Nightmare. Perhaps that’s how Shamen managed to live so long.

  Yes, he dwelt among the animals of the forest and built a kinship with them. But not because he ventured out among them. Rather, they must have come to see him, through the open door of his hovel. He must have been a recluse. Staying there, writing on his scrolls until he ran out of them. Only venturing out to slay a deer from whose skin he made new scrolls (or to play the part of a Bull for a hapless Hunter).