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VI

The soul-sewer branched and veered and branched. We steered through the reeking maze for an endless time. Defalk sat hunched, no doubt remembering things. Haldar stood rapt at the Guide's side, his eyes straining with an avid light at the semi-dark.

I could not share his calm rapture. It seemed to me the current had begun to quicken, and that the gloom was thinning . . . and somewhere ahead there was a sound, too faint to read, but growing. I was not at ease. It made me realize how separate our thoughts had really been in the days just past, even during our closest planning. For my friend this exploit was, from its first proposing, a feat of devotion, a chivalrous quest. He loved me well, and made a point of gloating over the prize we would win—but he did this out of concern for my feelings, lest he should seem to scorn the baseness of my motive by proclaiming the disinterest of his. Splendid Haldar! He was transparent to me. I saw then that when the moment came he would, on oath, renounce his share in the Key, and would demand that Dalissem bestow it formally on me alone. Thus did he mean to declare his love to that queenly ghost. For him, Defalk was a cur, and Dalissem nearly a divinity.

But I was in it for the Key. For me, Defalk's suffering was an ugly necessity, and Dalissem was a splendid but utterly self-willed spirit. And most important, nothing was to be taken for granted in that place. In Death's world, any covenant, no matter how mighty, can fall null—any spell, however cogent, can be abrogated. The only certain law in that place is Death itself.

Just then my uneasiness was getting a lot of encouragement. The current was unmistakably increasing, for the ectoplasmic sewage had begun to seethe with alarm and resistance. At the same time it was getting lighter—a yellowish light that thickened like mist. The ribbed vaults above us showed clearer. I discovered, with horror, that the Guide had no eyes. His sockets were wrinkled craters filled with grey smoke.

I was sure he had eyes in the death room—or had he? I can't explain why it unnerved me so—I gaped at him. He looked back at me, waiting.

"What is that noise, Lord Guide?" I stammered.

"It is the entrance to Death's domain," he said. That it well might be. It was a holocaust of cottony sound—a mumbling roar of waters. The Taker shipped his pole. All around us, the soul-trash—all the bugfaces and rotten monocular snouts and desperate feelers—made a mindless noise of woe, and churned up the speeding scum with their struggles. The sewer fell abruptly to a steeper pitch, and took a turn.

As we slid out of that turn we saw the terminal arch of the tunnel far ahead, framing a burst of yellow light. We knew the hugeness of the smutty gulf beyond the arch by the way it swallowed up the howl of the falls. The giant reverberations fled away to unguessable distances beyond. At that point I knew—knew that we had been tricked, and all three of us were being abducted into the land of death forever. It was my blessed luck to be too stunned by the thought of the falls ahead to make any move at all. Therefore I did not draw my blade and assault the Guide of Ghosts. Woe if I had! Down that last slope the raft seemed hardly to rest upon the leaping, jostling waters, so smooth and fast we went. Then we plunged into the dreadful jaundiced sky that yawned out and down.

We sledded out upon the empty air, and saw that we had issued from the face of a wall stretching past vision, with a hundred tunnelmouths to either side, puking and groaning their currents down. These waters braided in a vast feculent tapestry, whose lower reaches hung hidden in boiling fog. Into that fog we ourselves settled, the raft spinning, tilting, swooping—descending with the crazy zigzag of revelers staggering down a street, and falling no faster than a wind-buoyed leaf. The fog wrapped us close.

We spun through the mist so long I thanked its being there to hide the drop from us as we first went over. Then we broke down into clean air, and found under us a huge black lake. We knew by the sound that we had moved far out from the falls, but even here the laketop danced and jittered like a tubful of shaken slops. As we dropped to the water it stirred my nape to see, under the surface below us, a blurred eye half as big as the raft. It blinked and submerged. The waters were alive.

The shore was not far—a line of crags against the sky—but we saw much getting there. We moved steadily, by what means did not appear, and the water's denizens, as they saw us, all dodged our course. Some were rooted and could not: men whose legs fused and tapered to a stem and whose bodies hung just under the surface with every vein and nerve sprouting out of them, like fan-corals red and grey, and with their brains branching out above like little trees. Crabs with human lips scuttled up and down these nerve-festoons. And everywhere in the water were shoals of armless, bald homunculi, fat as sausages, kicking through the darkness. Scores more of these same creatures were to be seen bandaged in silk and trailed in wriggling, staring bunches by water-skating spiders big as dogs—though not spiders entirely, for men's faces were set in their flat forebodies, just behind the fangs.

So many combats broke the surface, what must those depths have been like? Men backed with great limpet shells emerged here and there in a grisly wrestling that entangled their limbs and their slithersome, ropy innards as well, everted for the fight. Off to port something as big as a whale heaved up, foaming. All along its length ranks of spindly limbs flailed pitifully—they were human arms. We shortly understood their panic when that island of skin was over-swarmed by scorpion men and pinchers like flensing knives. With these they busily lopped the waving arms.

Some shacks stood at the foot of the crag we drifted toward. Beyond that ridgeline which marched with the shore, was empty yellow sky, promising that the land fell away past the lake's brim. The Taker of Souls jumped out and beached us. We stepped onto the soil of Death's domain. It had an ugly resilience to the foot, a bruised and sweaty texture. The manlizard waddled toward the shacks, and disappeared between two of them. The Guide stood by the water, turning the smoky nothingness of his gaze on each of us in turn.

"Mortals, to pass through this place, you must meet one hard condition. The Master's lieutenants dwell everywhere. To pass those places where they have the Right of Toll, you must pay them a morsel of your flesh."

I asked him, "Does the Master have . . . many Lieutenants?"

"As many," he said, "as there are ways to enter this world. But no man must pay toll more than once. Nor may the toll be lethal in its nature."

Having come through what we had, we couldn't let this ghoulish necessity be an obstacle. We nodded—Defalk said nothing, knowing that consent was not required of him. There was a banging from behind the shacks, and a noise of wheels and harness. The Taker reappeared, leading a pair of shrouded beasts hitched to a giant black chariot.

The wheels were high as a man, the body like the prow of a fighting sloop, black as obsidian but ribbed inside with ivory. Of the team we could see two hairy tails and eight massive paws with nails as long as my fingers. The beasts' heavy shrouds of black canvas were bound snug with leather straps.

The Guide mounted the car, took up the reins and drew them tight.

"Mount," be said, "and grip the rail. You must hold fast before we loose the team."

We got up into the chariot—but Defalk stayed on the ground. "It is unfair!" he shouted. "How many oaths are made and broken by how many thousands of young lovers?!" None of us answered, only waited, for we all knew he had to come—he too knew it. We couldn't grudge him the thin comfort of making his moan before descending to his fate. "I loved her well—I loved her greatly—none of your sneering can alter that. But love is life, not swords in the heart! How could I know she would do what she swore?"

"Oh yes," Haldar said, "I'm sure you thought her as trifling as yourself, you had to to save your pride. So you missed your sworn hour. What about after, when you knew what she had done? You had seven years to make it good."

"Kill myself! Cleave my bowels with a dirk! Oh yes, thief—what easier done? She was dead. Her pain was past. With or without me she faced her mother's hate and imprisonment. She'd have loved any man she had the chance to, just to spite her mother, and she'd have died for the same spite whoever had been her man."

"Climb aboard, courtier," said the Guide. "Our way is hard, and we must start."

Defalk let his shoulders hang, and looked at the ground. Then he got aboard. The Guide tightened the reins and grasped his staff near the butt, stretching it out over the shrouded pair. The serpent coiled restlessly, and its tongue flickered. The Taker of Souls unbelted the shrouds, and leapt away as he pulled them off.

Two immense black hounds sprang up against the light, and howled. Then they fell on each other like famished sharks. Their knotted, lean-strung bodies were not of living flesh, but something more like clay, for their red jaws tore great clots of it from one another, and there was no blood. Only a giant's strength could have held them within the traces. The chariot rocked and swayed. The serpent began to strike down upon the beasts.

With a hammer's power and a whip's speed it sank its fangs into their heads and shoulders. The hounds wailed with pain and raised their fangs against the snake's, always too slow. With flicks of his wrist, the Guide administered pain to the beasts, till their fighting ceased, and they cringed apart. Then he shook the reins, and the dogs bounded to his will. The Taker of Souls bowed his farewell to the Guide, but we did not see him rise from his salute, so swiftly were we whirled away.

We thundered up the lakeside ridge, and poured across it. All hell spread out before us, far below. A score of rivers foamed down into those black badlands, which were all tunneled and canyoned and chasmed with the branching water's, till the terrain looked like the worm-gnawed wood you find on beaches. Then we were plunging down into it.

Ye powers dark and light! What a ride, Barnar! There was no road—there needed none. Though we favored high ground, following ridgelines, we cut just as readily across the flanks of hills, or dove down the steepest canyon walls and charged through fordings with our great wheels tearing the water to spray.

And one had no wish to linger down in those gulfs either. From above you saw only forests of branched things that stirred slowly, or the roofs of bizarre dwellings. But within the valleys you could see the victims splayed upon what had looked like trees, feeding their foul, slow appetites—and you could see that those roofs were thatched with bones, and caulked with black blood. I was glad of every hamlet, every thicket of rooted shapes, which we steered clear of. At the same time, it was impossible not to exult—even to rejoice—in the power of our passage through a place of such infinite, endless captivities. To surge through league on league of darkness, where a whole world is doomed to endure forever, and be yourself exempt, on fire with life! I caught Haldar's eye; he smiled and nodded. Drinking the dead air like wine, we rocked and soared behind those dead titans which the viper scourged on.

But our glorious detachment was not to last. We crested yet another ridge and saw that it broadened to a wide field which ended, far ahead, at a chasm. This field bore a crop of big, tough bramble-vines, and in each of the vines was entangled a man or a woman. The feet of these sufferers merged with the dry roots, while their bodies were pinned and pierced in a hundred places. Little buckets hung from the vines to catch the rivulets of unexhausted blood that twisted through the thorns. Three hags moved among these plants—pruning, or tying the vines, or guzzling from the buckets. As we drew near they sighted us, and dropped their work. They began to race for the chasm, toward the point we seemed to head for ourselves.

They moved their crooked limbs with ghastly speed, shrieking like daws as they went, and waving. The dogs pounded past the bleeding thousands—our spokes hummed in the dead air. But the hags came before us to our goal: a bridgehead at the chasm's edge.

They blocked the bridge, bobbing and leering as the hounds were reined up in a scramble of paws. Stooped as these crones were, their height matched the Guide's. They were huge in their stench too, charnel house mixed with the smell of a brothel's slop room. Their eyes were flat and opaque, like glazed snot in the wrinkled cups of their sockets. They all had torn-out patches in their hair, and what showed was not scalp, but yellowed skullbone. Yet their faces were fleshed—wenned and warted. They wore grave-rags cinched with gallows rope at the waist. A glimpse through the robe of one, where a cancered breast showed a tumor-pit you could get your fist into, was enough to tell us that their rags were a mercy to our eyes. The fiercest of the three came forward, grinning. One of the hounds leaped on her with a roar. She gave it a clout to the skull with her fist that sprawled it shivering in the traces.

"Skin, Guide!" she shrilled. "Manskin with blood in it, living blood. We want a piece or you can't cross. We want a piece now!"

"Hail, Famine-sisters," the Guide said. "We shall pay your toll." He turned to us. Haldar and I traded a look, and turned to Defalk. He saw our intent to make him pay first. His hopeless expression gave me a twinge of guilt, and so I said:

"I'll pay it, Lord Guide." I'd have to settle up sooner or later, after all. The Guide nodded, and motioned me to jump down.

"What piece of this man do you want, starving ones?" he asked. They flew into a raucous discussion. They squawked, hissed, cursed and counter-cursed with a force that sent out gusts of their vampire-breath. They named every part you might think of and there were moments when I blanched and promised myself to draw my sword and be damned. Then at last the chief one came forward again.

"We want an ear," she shouted. "A nice, fat red ear hot and juicy with blood we want. A left ear."

"No!" shrieked a sister behind her. "A right ear. We want a right ear, you scabby sack of tombslime!"

"A left ear," insisted the first. She snatched some rusty shears from her waist. The blades were furred with mold where the blood was crusted, but I took the tool almost gratefully. It was only an ear, you understand, and the hole would still be there for hearing. Look. Here's my work—I spared myself a bit, you see, but I had to give them all the lobe, for that's where the blood is, and they'd have noticed a cheat there. Seeing through a bright red haze, I tossed them the shears, and then the morsel. Instantly they were a screeching heap, fighting for the prize. Hair was rent, and strips of flesh torn from lean flanks. They fought like famished gulls, while I remounted, and the Guide lashed the dogs. Haldar bound my head with a strip from my sleeve as we whirled across the bridge. It seemed endlessly long. The gulf beneath was a dreadful one. A groaning of deep waters filled its darkness.

Even before my brain had swum clear of nausea and pain, I discovered I was hearing things most deep and hidden and distant—hearing, impossibly clear, the secretest sounds of this world. The smallest whispers from the gulf floor entered my brain as if little rat-mouths were murmuring directly through the ruined gate in the side of my head. Pleadings in a mindless speech of moans; torturing giggles and chuckles from dry throats of bone; babbles of devil-confession; the liquid noise of strange stews; the scuff of hooves, claws clicking—even the silken sweep of deep fins. That gulf and all the canyons beyond said much to me as we pounded through them, and hinted countless things I did not wish to know.

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Framed