The Modern World (18 page)

‘Stop! Please! I don’t understand! You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?’

‘Our first glimpse of the Gabbleratchet was as long before the dawn of life on your world as the dawn of life on your world is before the present moment.’

Never dying, never tiring, gorged with bloodlust, chasing day and night. The Gabbleratchet surged on, faster than anything I had ever seen. ‘How do you think I can outrun
that
?’

‘You can’t. But you are more nimble; you must outmanoeuvre it.’

I saw Cyan on one of the leading horses! She rode its broad back, decaying ribs. Her blonde hair tussled. Her fingers clutched the prongs of its vertebrae, her arms stiff. She looked sick and worn with terror and exhilaration. I tried to focus on her horse; its withers were straps of dark pink muscle and its globe eyes set tight in pitted flesh. The hounds jumped and jostled each other running around its plunging hooves.

On the backs of many other horses rode skeletons human and non-human, and corpses of various ages. They were long dead of fear or hunger but still riding, held astride by their wind-dried hands. Some horses had many sets of finger-bones entwined in their manes; some carried arms bumping from tangled hands, but the rest of the body had fallen away. They had abducted hundreds over the millennia.

The Gabbleratchet arced straight above me and plunged down vertically. White flashes in the seething storm were the teeth of those in the lead. The moonlight caught eyes and hooves in tiny pulses of reflection.

I had never seen anything fly vertically downward. It shouldn’t be able to. It wasn’t obeying any physical rules.

Cyan clung on. I wondered if she was still sane.

‘Run!’ shouted the Vermiform.

The Gabbleratchet’s wild joy seized me. I wanted to chase and catch. I wanted the bursting pride of success, the thrill of killing! Their power
transfixed me. I loved them! I hated them! I wanted to be one! I tasted blood in my mouth and I accepted it eagerly. My open smile became a snarl.

The dogs’ muzzles salivated and their baying tongues curled. They were just above my head. I saw the undersides of the hooves striking down.

‘Run!’ screamed the Vermiform.

I jumped forward, sprinting at full pelt. The hunt’s howling burst the air. Its gale blew my hair over my eyes and I glanced back, into the wind to clear it.

The lead beasts plunged into the ground behind me, and
through
it. The air and ground surface distorted out around them in a double ripple, as if it was gelatinous. The whole hunt trammelled straight down into the earth and forked sparks leapt up around it, crackling out among the grass. It was a solid crush of animal bodies and bone. I saw flashes of detail: fur between paw pads, dirty scapulae, suppurating viscera. The corpses the horses were carrying hit the ground and stayed on top. They broke up, some fell to dust and the creatures following went through them too. Cyan’s horse was next; it plunged headfirst into the earth, throwing her against the ground hard. She lay lifeless. The stampede of manes and buttocks continued through her. The column shrank; the last few plummeted at the ground and disappeared into it. Two final violet sparks sidewound across the plain, ceased. All was eerily quiet.

The Vermiform emerged beside me but its voices were awed. ‘It’ll take a minute to turn around. Quick!’

I ran to the area the Gabbleratchet had passed through, expecting to see a dent in the frozen soil but not one of the grass blades had been bent; the only marks were my own footprints. The hairs on my arms stood up and the air smelt chemical, the same as when I once visited a peel tower that had been struck by lightning. There was no reek of corruption or animals, just the tang of spark-split air.

I turned Cyan over carefully. She had been flung against the ground at high speed – faster than I could fly – and I thought she was dead, but she was breathing.

‘I can’t see any broken bones. Not that it matters if that thing’s driven her mad.’

‘Pick her up,’ said the Vermiform.

I did so and she jolted awake, gasped, open-mouthed. ‘Jant? What are you doing here?’

‘Just keep still.’ The Vermiform sprang up from under my feet and wrapped around us. More worms appeared, adding to the thread,
beginning at my ankles then up to my waist, binding us tightly together.

Cyan waggled her head at the deserted tundra. She screamed, ‘Do you have to follow me everywhere? Even into my nightmares?’

The worms nearest her face grouped together into a hand and slapped her.

Cyan spluttered, ‘How dare –!’

The hand slapped her again, harder.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

A horse burst from the ground, bent forelegs first. It pawed the grass without touching it. Its enormous rear hooves paced apart. Long hair feathered over them; its fetlock bones swayed as it put its weight on them and reared.

Cyan wailed, ‘What does it want?’

Its fore hooves gouged the air, its long head turned from side to side. It couldn’t understand what we were. It sensed us, with whatever senses it had, and it shrieked at us. It could not know its own power nor regulate its voice to our level. It gave us its full unearthly scream, right into my face.

The Vermiform tightened around my legs.

Its tongue curled, its jaw widened, it was bone; no tongue but the jaw dotted with holes for blood vessels and peaks for ligament connections. Its incisors clamped together, the veins appeared running into the bone, the muscles flowered and rotting horseflesh became a whole beast again. It turned its mad, rolling eye on me. Sparks crackled over us, tingling. Hounds and horses began springing up around us. No soil stuck to them; they had treated the earth as if it was another form of air.

The horse arched its neck. I looked up into the convoluted rolled cartilage in its nasal passages. Its jutting nose bones thrust towards me, its jaw wide to bite my face. Slab teeth in living gums came down –

– The Vermiform snatched us away –

Its coils withdrew and dropped me on a hard surface. I sat up and crowed like a cock, ‘Hoo-hoo! That was a neat move, Worm-fest!’

Beside me Cyan crawled and spat. I helped her up: ‘Are you all right?’

‘Jant, what are you
doing
here?’

‘I’ve come to rescue you.’

‘
Rescue
me? Sod off! What just happened? Did you see those horse things? … Argh! Worms! … What the fuck are these worms?’

‘Allow me to introduce you to the Vermiform,’ I said. It was writhing around my feet in a shapeless mass. If it had been human, it would have been panting.

‘We must keep going,’ it chorused.

Cyan said, ‘A horse was lying down and it seemed friendly. I climbed on its back. I didn’t know
that
was going to happen … Oh, god, what
is
this place?’

A water drop landed on my head. Good question. I looked around and realised we were in a gigantic cavern, so vast I could not clearly see the other side.

The sound of a bustling market broke all around us. The stone walls rucked and soared up a hundred metres in the gloom, latticed with ledges from which bats dangled like plums. I gazed up to the roof, into vaults and rifts and wedding-cake tumbles of flowstone arching into darkness. The ceiling dazzled with circular gold and purple jewels, so lambent I was tempted to climb up and collect them until I realised they weren’t gems embedded in the stone but water droplets hanging from it. They reflected the cool, blue light from the bulbous tails of Neon Bugs clinging to great trunks of suspended stalactites, bathing the whole chamber in their glow.

Market stalls were laid out in disorderly lines on the uneven floor, filling the cave, and up into a circular tunnel climbing slowly to the surface. Slake Cross town in all its entirety would fit into that passage. Stalls tangled along both sides of it like a thread of commerce linking the cave to Epsilon city’s immense market a kilometre or more above us.

‘It’s Epsilon bazaar!’ I said. I’d known it extended underground but I had always turned down invitations to visit. I envisaged a dirty crawl with my head caught and pressed between two planes of rock, my feathers wet and muddied, and my knees popped from kneeling on stony nubs in a stinking stream passage all the way. But this was wonderful!

At the distant end of the tunnel its entrance shone with white sunlight like a disc. Shafts of light angled in, picking out a faint haze in the air. Reflections arced the tunnel walls, showing their smooth and even bore.

I began, ‘Well, Cyan, this –’

The Vermiform seethed urgently. ‘Explain when we have more time! The Gabbleratchet could be here any second!’

‘What?’

‘It could be chasing us. If it can still sense us, it will pursue us.’

Cyan said, ‘This is weird. In dreams you’re not normally able to
choose what you say.’ She crawled to her feet and wandered off between the stalls.

The Vermiform heaved limply. ‘Come back!’

Cyan was looking at the gley men browsing in the aisles. Gley men are completely blind, just a plate of smooth bone where their eyes should be. They feel their way with very long, thin fingers like antennae, touching, touching, searching. They are naked and hairless with milky, translucent, waterproof skin; but underneath it is another skin covered with thick fur, to keep them warm in the deep abyss. You can see through their upper skin to the fur layer pressing and wiping against it.

Cyan didn’t seem as repelled by them as I was. She seemed entranced. One of them, by a refreshment stand, was picking cave ferns off the wall and putting them in sandwiches. He had beer bottles, brown and frothy, labelled ‘sump water’. He sold white mousse made from the twiggy foam that clings to the roofs of flooded passages. He had boxes of immature stalagmite bumps that looked like fried eggs, breccia cake, talus cones, and crunchy tufa toffee.

Cyan paused at a jewellery stall and examined the cave pearls for sale. She put on a necklace made from broken straw stalactites and looked at her reflection in the mirror-polished shell of a moleusk – one of the metre-long shellfish that burrow far underground.

She didn’t know that, as a visitor to the Shift, she could project herself as any image she wanted, so she appeared the way she imagined herself. Like most female Shift tourists Cyan’s self-image was nothing like her real body. She was a bit taller, more muscular and plumper, and she wore casual clothes. She looked like a young, unattached fyrd recruit spending her day off in any Hacilith bar. She was slightly less pretty here than in the Fourlands; I suppose that meant she lacked confidence in her looks.

For once, I couldn’t alter my appearance. I was here in the body and I planned to take it home intact.

Some stalls sold stencils and crayons for cave paintings. Some displayed everyday objects that ‘petrifying water’ had turned into stone. Mice with three legs (called trice) ran under the rows and cats very good at catching trice (called trousers) ran after them.

Neon Bugs illuminated beautiful constructions of silk. Replete Spiders hung from the ceiling on spindly, hairless legs, their huge, round abdomens full of treacly slime. It dripped, now and then, on the awnings of the stalls and the tops of our heads. The noisome things lived suspended all the time, and other bugs and centipedes as long as
my arm swarmed over the cave walls to bring them morsels and feed them in return for the taste of the sweet gunge they exuded.

The smell of wet pebbles rose from the cavern floor, which descended in a series of dented ripplestone steps to a pool so neatly circular it looked like a hand basin. A waterfall cascaded down a slippery chute, gushing into it. Its roar echoed to us across the immense chamber as a quiet susurration.

Naked gley children were sliding down the chute and splashing into the water where Living Fossil fish swam; the play of their luminous eyes lit up the pool. It was screened by thick, lumpy tallow-yellow stalactites so long they reached the ground and were creeping out over it like wax over a candleholder. Between them chambers and passages led off, descending in different directions into the depths. Most were natural but some were like mine shafts, with timber props and iron rails.

Tortuoise with huge shells crawled frustratingly slowly up and down between the stalls, towing baskets on wheels. There were Silvans, child-shaped shadows who live only in the shade of cave mouths and tree-throws in the forest. At the furthest end of the cavern, where the subterranean denizens who prefer to stay away from the light shop and sell their wares, hibernating Cave Elephants had worn hollows in the velvet sediment.

‘Call her back!’ the Vermiform chorused. ‘The Gabbleratchet could be here any second!’

I glanced at the cave mouth.

The Vermiform said, ‘It doesn’t need an entrance. It can go anywhere! It can go places you can’t, where the atmosphere is poisonous: hydrogen, phosphorus, baked beans. You saw that solid rock is nothing to it. It can run straight through a planet without noticing.’

A big, lumpen Vadose was standing by a stall. Cyan realised that the man was made of clay. She sank her fingers into his thigh, pulled out a handful and started moulding it into a ball. The Vadose turned round. ‘Excuse me, would you return that, please?’

‘It’s my dream and I can do what I want!’

‘Dream?’ articulated the Vadose. ‘I assure you, poppet, this is no oneiric episode.’