Hezekiah, still sitting on top of the corpse-heap, yelped and tried to catch his balance. The bodies beneath him were shifting, muttering incomprehensibly. As fast as he could, the boy scrambled off the mound, running to my side as if I would protect him from whatever happened next.
No need. The one active wight was on her knees, rocking back and forth like a child trying to comfort herself. The corpses too were moving, the whole pile shuddering in pulses. The muttering sounds grew louder, slowly blending together until all the bodies were moaning in unison, «Huhhhh… huhhhh… huhhhh…»
«Hoksha ptock!» Wheezle cried again.
«Ahhhhhhh,» the corpses sighed, and the wight hissed along. «Ahhhhh…»
Then, with a soft gooey sound, every dead body turned liquid – a runny brown liquid collapsing onto the floor with a loud splash, as gooey as egg whites. The fluid surged up to my feet like an ocean tide, flowing over my boots in a wave. Hezekiah tried to jump away, but there was nowhere to go: the spill of liquefying bodies covered the floor. We were both awash, up to the ankles.
«Yuck!» the boy shouted. «Euuu!»
«Do not fear,» Wheezle said calmly. «It is a form of ectoplasm. Not dangerous in any way.»
«So it's not poisonous?» I asked. «Good.»
The taste was something like olive oil, but saltier. With a little vinegar, it might make a fine salad dressing.
«We have done a great thing this day,» Wheezle said. «The undead gods will not forget us.»
«Is that a good thing?» Hezekiah whispered to me.
«Probably not,» I whispered back. «But I'd rather have them pleased with us than angry.» In a louder voice, I said to Wheezle, «Of course you realize you've destroyed… sorry, freed… a lot of corpses who could have been on our side.»
«They would not truly be our allies, honored Cavendish. You must have observed how quickly the wight killed the drow once I took control of the scepter. Undead animated in this way always despise the persons responsible. The wights cannot resist direct commands from their creators, but they do their best to twist those commands contrary to the original intent. We will do better taking over the wights created by others – those wights will be grateful to us, at least for a time.»
I had to grant the truth of what he said. Wights would never be trustworthy for long, but the one we freed from the drow had smiled at me in a friendly manner… until Wheezle turned her into brown goop all over my boots.
«All right,» I said. «Let's find more wights and tear this place apart.»
* * *
With a swish, the door opened in front of us. Wheezle took the lead; he was no longer invisible, but he carried Unveiler… something we wanted the wandering undead to see as soon as possible. I followed Wheezle and Hezekiah followed me.
The corridor continued to curve before us, following the building's central ring. This time, however, the inner wall was not opaque metal – it was another triangular patchwork of glass, finally revealing what lay inside the ring.
The center was simply a bed of dust, light brown in the gray light. Our building surrounded the dust like an arena around a playing field, raised about two storeys above the surface. The enclosed region was enormous, a circle about four hundred yards in diameter – the far side of the ring was only a dim shadow in the grayness.
For a moment, I thought the dust floor was completely empty. Then I caught some motion a quarter way around the ring. Asking Wheezle to stop for a moment, I pressed my nose against one of the glass triangles and peered out at the unmoving dust.
Four figures had just emerged from a door at the base of the building, figures who moved with the peculiar arm-swinging gait of wights. Slowly, they waded into the arena, dust up to their thighs: a team of wights walking directly forward, swinging their claws to scoop up handfuls of dust and throw it over their heads.
The disturbed dust did not drift down slowly as I might have expected – it fell as fast as stones. Was each dust mote as heavy as a boulder? No, the wights showed no strain as they tossed around handfuls of the stuff. After a few moments' thought, the explanation struck me: the arena had no air. The dust didn't drift because there was nothing for it to drift upon; with no air resistance, the dust fell as fast as anything else.
«No wonder they wanted to manufacture all those wights,» I murmured. «Whatever they're up to down there, they need creatures that don't have to breathe.»
As we continued along the corridor, I glanced out the window from time to time. More and more wights were wading into the dust – all the four-monster teams that had been assembled while Hezekiah and I hid in the corpse-heap. They soon spread around the whole circle, simply walking and throwing dust in the air.
«They're searching for something,» Hezekiah said in a low voice.
«You think so?» I asked.
The boy nodded. «There must be something buried in the dust and they're trying to find it.»
For once, Hezekiah appeared to be right. The wights slowly worked their way across the surface, sweeping through the dust with their hands. I wouldn't call it a methodical search; but perhaps this random wandering was one way the wights could do a bad job for their masters without actually disobeying orders.
In time, we heard the sound of shuffling feet directly ahead of us – four wights with a hobgoblin guide. Before I could stop him, Wheezle simply called, «Hello!» and waved the scepter. The instant the wights saw that someone new held Unveiler, they turned on the hobgoblin and ripped him to gobbets of bloody meat.
«Wheezle,» I said, «next time, let's try to take one of these berks alive. If we can interrogate a prisoner, we might learn useful things.»
«A hundred apologies, honored Cavendish.»
Since the phrase was usually «a thousand apologies», I don't think Wheezle was particularly contrite.
* * *
We continued on our way with the four liberated wights trundling amiably behind us. Wheezle had chatted with them briefly, offering them a choice of being «freed» immediately or accompanying us on our hunting mission. All four were hissingly eager to slice into more of their former masters… which should be a warning to all you readers who want to create wights of your own.
The wights trotted along at a healthy speed, far faster than the sullen shuffle they had shown previously. In minutes, we had caught up with the next team of four, this group led by a human woman. «Take her alive!» Wheezle shouted as soon as her party came into view; and a heartbeat later, the woman was pinned against the glass wall by her former followers.
With four pointy-toothed wights grinning malevolently in her face, the woman opened her mouth to scream. Immediately, one of the wights stuffed its hand between her lips, pressing her head back hard against the glass panes. She still screamed, as any sensible person might with a corpse's hand thrust into her mouth; but the muffled sound went nowhere.
As I trotted up to her, I told the wights, «Don't hurt her… for the moment.» I said it only for the woman's benefit – as long as Wheezle held Unveiler, the wights didn't care a pin about orders from me.
The woman's eyes were wide and watery, glaring at me with vicious fury. She was in her early thirties, of middling height but very wiry. Up where the wights held her hands, her knuckles each sported a thick knot of callus, as if she liked to use her fists on passers-by; Brother Kiripao's knuckles had an identical set of calluses.
«Hello,» I said to her. «I'm going to ask this nice wight to take his hand out of your mouth… and if you behave, he won't have to put it back in. All right?»
Grudgingly, she nodded. «Do what he says,» Wheezle murmured to the wights, tapping Unveiler lightly against his thigh.
The wight slowly removed its hand, watching for any sign the woman might try to scream again. However, the hard-edged expression on her face showed that her initial outburst had been a one-time reaction; now she wanted to show how tough she was. «Who are you?» she growled.
«We don't have time to exchange life stories,» I said. «You're going to tell us everything we want to know, and you're going to keep answering our questions until we say otherwise.»
«If I don't, you're going to feed me to the wights?»
The wights all leered with their pointed teeth, but I shook my head. «That would be too easy. If you won't talk, I'll turn you over to… The Kid.»
Dramatically, I spun around and pointed at Hezekiah.
«Me?» he gulped.
«Him!» I said, turning back to the woman. «Looks like a gawky little Clueless, doesn't he? Too stupid to live. I wish I had a ducat for every person who's thought that… every corpse left festering in an alley, the body mutilated and the face frozen in agony. Look at him again. Can anyone really be that much of a leatherhead? Or is it just an act to make you think he's harmless?»
«Britlin…» Hezekiah began, but I stopped him quickly.
«No!» I cried, cringing in front of him. «Don't be angry with me for giving away your secret. Please, master, don't… don't…» I stumbled against him, and in reflex, the boy reached out to steady me. The moment his hand touched my shoulder, I gasped, «Oh saints, the pain!» and collapsed, whimpering.
«Please,» Wheezle said to the woman, «please, honored lady, you see I am a Dustman and no stranger to death. Yet even I cannot bear the hideous atrocities which this youth might visit upon your person. They claim he learned the arts of torture from the Lords of the Abyss. Surely you have heard of him? Surely you have heard of… The Kid.»
A pity I was down on the ground, moaning like a barmy – I would have given a pound of gold to see the expression on the woman's face. Or on Hezekiah's face, for that matter. Still, I hoped the boy would have the wit to play along with the act; if we didn't scare this woman with cheap theatrics, we'd have to use real torture to get information out of her. That would mean noise and delay and a burden of guilt I preferred to avoid.
Carefully, Hezekiah stepped over me and approached the woman. I groaned louder and wondered if the boy was about to mess up my plan. «Don't let these berks peel you,» he said in a passable imitation of a Sigil accent. «I'm really quite harmless.»
And then, suddenly, Hezekiah was terrifying. From my position on the floor, all I could see was his boots; and they were the most frightening boots I had ever seen in my life. Terrible visions erupted in my mind, showing those boots kicking me mercilessly, breaking bones, crushing the skulls of children and grinding eyeballs under their heels.
Boots marching over the stubble of scorched fields.
Boots stamping face after face, annihilating every flicker of life.
Then, just as suddenly, Hezekiah was once more just a Clueless youth, innocent and ungainly. «You see?» he said in his normal voice. «I'm harmless.»
I moaned, and this time the moan was no act. It took all my strength to stop myself from shivering in the afterchill of terror. My sudden unreasoning fear must have come from magic, of course – some spell cast by Wheezle or Hezekiah himself, to make the little leatherhead seem monstrous; but my usual composure was shattered by the experience. I found myself asking which was the illusion: the suddenly horrendous aura surrounding the boy, or perhaps his usual bumbling persona. What did I really know about him? A Clueless hick who just happened to know high-powered magic… did that make sense?
«Keep him away from me!» the woman shouted.
«I do not have authority over The Kid,» Wheezle answered. «But if you tell what you know, perhaps he will not trouble himself to make an example of you.»
«All right, I'll talk,» she said. And she did.
* * *
Her name was Miriam and she didn't know much. Ten days ago, she'd been a streetcorner thug in Sigil, playing the protection peel over a few blocks of dingy shops: «Cross my palm with silver, or I'll burn your place down.» When some basher in a tavern offered her a heavy purse in exchange for three weeks of strong-arm work, she'd said yes. That's how she'd come here to the Plane of Dust.
Yes, this really was the Plane of Dust that Oonah had mentioned a few days earlier. The plane was nothing but an infinite ocean of dust – no water, no air, just dust untouched by the slightest wind. I'd heard a rumor that the Doomguard maintained a citadel somewhere on this plane, because it was the sort of lifeless place that appealed to their sensibilities; but this building didn't belong to the Doomguard. Miriam told us we were standing inside the Glass Spider… «Glass» because of its see-through walls, even though they were constructed from something much more indestructible than ordinary window panes. The «Spider» part of the name came from the building's shape: a circular central body almost half a mile in diameter, with eight arms radiating outward around the circumference. Each arm was a long sloping corridor like the one where we'd come in, and the outer end of each housed a portal to some other part of the multiverse.
The most surprising aspect of the Glass Spider was that it could move. Miriam claimed the Spider's legs could crawl through the dust faster than an eagle could fly, stirring up silt in mammoth plumes that streamed away for miles behind the speeding bug. It had been racing through the dust for most of the past week, covering a hundred leagues every hour; but a short while ago it had finally stopped, apparently at its journey's end.
What was the Spider's purpose? Who built it? Miriam didn't know, but at least she could list the people who had arrived with her ten days ago.
Her immediate superior had been the drow back at the corpse-heap; since the wights had torn him to bloody confetti, we didn't bother asking his name.
The drow's boss was our old friend Bleach-Hair, his real name Petrov. Petrov hailed from some Prime Material world whose predominant landscape was ice; Miriam didn't remember the world's name, and none of us cared. (I might comment, by the way, that so-called ice worlds usually have their share of green fields, lakes, and even jungles; when someone like Petrov says he comes from an ice world, he almost always comes from a perfectly normal world and just lived in an icy part of it. Folk of the Prime Material plane are so parochial they seldom know much about their own homes, let alone the multiverse at large.)
Petrov occupied the second highest rung on the ladder of command. Above him were two powerful figures who shared control of everything that happened in the Glass Spider. One was a human mage who called himself «The Fox»… although Miriam contended «The Loon» was a more appropriate title. The Fox loved fire the way another man might love women; he could gaze at flames for hours, talking to the blaze and showing every sign of listening to it talk back. Thanks to various magic spells, he could even caress fire, bathe in it, wear it like a cloak. Needless to say, the Fox manufactured the firewands used at the courts, and masterminded all the other fiery accidents that had struck faction headquarters in Sigil. The very first incident – the riot at the Gatehouse asylum – had started when the Fox broke out of a padded cell where he had been confined for years.
The Fox had managed his escape with the help of the other leader of this group, a human woman named Rivi. She was not a sorcerer – Miriam claimed that Rivi hated sorcerers, although she got along well with a barmy like the Fox – but Rivi could still do things that struck Miriam as magic: reading minds, for example, or projecting her thoughts through the building to give orders to underlings.
«Oh,» said Hezekiah. «Rivi must be psionic.»
«What do you know about psionics?» I asked him.
«How do you think I teleport?» he replied. «I'm not a magician.»
«I thought you were.»
«Nope. It's all mind over matter.»
Hmm. If Hezekiah's mind could win that kind of contest, it substantially lowered my opinion of matter.
* * *
Miriam didn't know exactly what Rivi and the Fox were up to, but they wanted to find something that was buried in the dust a long time ago. The mysterious object had been unearthed once before, by an expedition under the leadership of Felice DeVail, Guvner Oonah's mother. The Fox had belonged to that expedition, along with members of many other Sigil factions; they had toured several planes including Dust, eventually jumping by accident into the middle of the Gray Wastes and finding themselves trapped between hostile armies in the Blood Wars raging there.
Most of the party had died in short order; the Fox had been battered by evil magics, and driven insane; but a few, including Felice, had escaped unscathed, dragging the Fox with them and eventually making their way back to Sigil. Naturally, the survivors had all reported these events to their factions, depositing personal accounts of the expedition in the various faction archives. Just as naturally, the Fox had set about stealing those accounts from faction headquarters the moment Rivi freed him. His eagerness to return here suggested that the long-ago expedition had found some kind of treasure in the Plane of Dust but hadn't taken it with them. Now, the Fox had come back to collect that treasure, using the information he had stolen from the factions.
Miriam's story introduced a dozen new puzzles about what was going on, but such questions could wait. At least we knew something about our opposition now: fire-wizard Fox, psionic Rivi, and an assortment of bashers from Sigil. There was only one other question in my mind, and I asked it. «If Petrov and his cronies captured some prisoners, where would he take them?»
«To Rivi,» Miriam answered immediately. «She can do things to people's minds. She can… change you. Back when she and the Fox were recruiting people, they hired two first-rate knights of the post: sneak thieves. Only problem was, the thieves wouldn't work together – one was githyanki, the other githzerai. Hated each other like poison. So Rivi took them away for a few hours, and next thing you know, they're bosom buddies. Lifelong friends. She did something spooky to their brains.»
«Is that really possible?» I whispered to Hezekiah. It irked me to turn to a Clueless for information, but he was the only authority we had on psionic powers.
«Rearranging a person's thoughts can be tricky,» he whispered back. «Making it permanent is even harder. It once took Uncle Toby a whole day to stop two kings from declaring war with each other. Of course, he had to fix up their generals too, so that's what dragged out the time.»
«Your Uncle… painted over their minds?» I pictured how easily I could change a frown to a smile with just a few strokes of the brush. Was it that easy for Uncle Toby? Was it equally easy for Rivi? If this brainpainter had enough time to work on Yasmin, to rape her mind…
«We have to save the others,» I said. «We have to save them now.»
«Where can we find this Rivi?» Wheezle asked quietly.
«Her quarters are on the lower level,» Miriam replied. «I can show you.»
I glanced at Wheezle, raising my eyebrows. «We cannot trust her,» Wheezle said, answering my unasked question. «On the other hand, it is safer to take her with us than leave her or kill her. As long as she remains in our hands, she has an incentive to cooperate.» The little gnome turned to her. «You understand what these wights will do if you betray us?»
The wights leered in her face, but she just jutted out her chin. «I know the game,» she answered. «I'll play.»
«And I'll make sure she does,» Hezekiah said. «I'll take her under my wing.»
He moved to her side and smiled. Suddenly, he was terrifying again – his face didn't change a muscle, but his smile took on the unnatural brightness of a killer, the placid tranquility of a child who could slay its mother without conscience. In that face was all the cruelty of childhood, the taunts, the bullying, the inventive tortures of insects and younger siblings.
«You'll be good, won't you?» Hezekiah told Miriam. Then he was simply a Clueless boy again, his smile only a smile, his face only an eighteen-year-old face.
I couldn't stand to look at it.
«Don't worry about me,» Miriam mumbled. «You're my high-up man, you are.» She edged away from him but kept her head lowered, like a dog showing submission to a wolf.
«Then we're all set,» the boy said. «Let's get going.»
* * *
With a pair of wights taking the lead, we proceeded down the corridor. Below us, in the circular arena surrounded by the ring of the Glass Spider, other wights continued to wade through the dust, searching for who-knew-what. I wondered how big their target was. Something the size of a needle would take days to find, but something substantial, like a spellbook or a magic sword, would surely turn up soon; there was a lot of ground to cover out there, but there were a lot of wights searching.
If we didn't rescue Yasmin and the others before the wights found their objective, I knew we'd all be in big trouble. No one went to all this bother for something innocuous.
Soon, we were approaching the next intersection of a radial arm with the Spider's central ring. As before, a furniture-filled lounge occupied the area where the arm connected with the body; but in the center of the room was a spiral wrought-iron staircase leading down to a lower level. The iron was bare and unpainted, yet I couldn't see the slightest fleck of rust – either these steps were scoured daily by a platoon of wights with sandpaper, or there was some kind of magic at work, maintaining this place in pristine condition. I put my money on the magic: the whole Glass Spider was in good upkeep, but it had an air of antiquity about it, as if it had endured for eons, impervious to decay.
Miriam gestured that we should go down the stairs. Wheezle stopped her and sent two wights ahead to see if the way was clear. They came back smiling their pointy grins and hissing in a relaxed fashion that suggested no one was lurking in ambush. We formed up our company again, wights at the head and rear, more wights tightly surrounding Miriam; then we began our descent.
As we climbed downward, my ears picked up a rumbling in the distance. It took me a few seconds to identify the sound; but then I remembered a tour I had taken of The Lady's Chime, that huge clock tower just down the street from Sigil's Hall of Speakers. The upper floors of the tower had echoed with the clicking of gears, the whirr of flywheels, and the ratcheting of counterweights pulling time forward. The rumble I heard now had the same sort of mechanical edge to it – a giant clockworks muttering to itself. We must be approaching the machinery that allowed the Glass Spider to move.
A long arcing corridor led us away from the stairs, and soon the air filled with the smell of metal: bare metal, oiled metal, hot metal. The corridor was lit by glass globes suspended from the ceiling; each globe burned bright and white from some inner fire. Their light revealed that Hezekiah had linked his arm with Miriam's as soon as we reached this lower floor. Clearly, he didn't want to risk her running away while he'd been appointed to watch her.
The mechanical rumble grew louder as we continued forward. Ahead lay an open doorway, and beyond that was a room full of metal machinery: I recognized gears, chain-belts, cables, and other simple trappings, but the great bulk of equipment was beyond my comprehension. How could one understand a bank of square crystals glowing with hieroglyphs of light, or huge metal drums that occasionally hissed steam through red-hot stopcocks? What was the purpose of a dozen metal pistons pounding in and out of smoking cylinders, or a gold stalactite mounted above a copper stalagmite with squirts of lightning leaping between their points? All I knew was that the air burned and reeked with oil, like the vestibule of some fiery hell.
Wheezle stopped us once more and turned a questioning gaze toward Miriam. «It's always like this,» the woman shrugged. «You're a gnome – you should know about machines.»
«I specialize in death, not devices,» Wheezle replied. «Are we close to where this Rivi would be?»
«Her quarters are in this machine room,» Miriam said. «She likes it here.»
«How can she sleep with all this noise?»
«She says it just takes discipline. Rivi is hot blazing barmy about discipline.»
«Why doesn't that surprise me?» I muttered. But Wheezle was already leading us forward.
* * *
A machine room full of moving parts is no place to go when your nerves are on edge. Gears clank; you whirl, expecting an attack. Steam erupts from a release valve; it leaves cloudy films on nearby surfaces, looking like ghosts out the corner of your eye. Pistons bang and conveyor belts flap; so much motion, so many nooks for enemies to hide. Every second, there was something new to jump at.
«There's a control room over in the corner,» Miriam said above the clatter of machinery. «That's where Rivi spends most of her time.»
«Then you stay here with Hezekiah,» I told her. «Wheezle and I will see if Rivi's home.»
«Whack her the second you see her,» Miriam advised. «She'll addle your chops if you don't.»
«No loyalty toward your former boss?» I asked.
«None,» Miriam replied. «If you don't put Rivi down, she'll turn my brains to cheese for helping you.»
«We shall try to avoid that eventuality,» Wheezle said. Kowtowing briefly to those who were staying behind, he gathered a selection of wights and gestured for me to take the lead.
The control room in the corner had thick concrete walls without a single window. An odd design – if you were a worker controlling the machinery, wouldn't it be nice to see what the equipment was doing? On the other hand, perhaps the room was not a command post where you calmly watched gauges so much as a bunker to take cover when you pushed the wrong button.
The door to the control room was closed. I took one side of it, Wheezle took the other, and the wights stood directly back from the opening, ready to charge in as soon as I turned the knob. Holding up his fingers, Wheezle counted off Three, Two, One. Flick, I threw open the door, and with a clatter of toe-claws across cement, the wights leapt forward. I jumped in right behind them, my rapier drawn and ready to impale anyone who could paint obscenities over other people's brains.
There was nobody home.
Undoubtedly, however, someone did live in this room. In the back corner was a small cot, its crisp sheets tucked and folded with a precision that would satisfy the most fastidious member of the Harmonium. Around the walls, wooden tables held neat stacks of paper, numerous books alphabetized by title, and a few scrolls hung on pine dowels. The whole place had an air of obsessive organization.
I turned my back on it. «Rivi's not here.»
«True,» Wheezle nodded. «But her library is. It could teach us a great deal about her intentions.»
«It would take days to read all this, and that's assuming it's written in a language we understand. Let's keep moving.»
«Surely we can spare a minute to glance at a page or two,» Wheezle said.
I waved my arm at the collection. «Which page?»
«The oldest.» He shuffled to the closest table and peered at the stacks – paper, parchment, vellum, papyrus. «The oldest,» he went on, «is most likely to tell of the beginning of things. Obscure secrets. Forgotten wisdom.» He moved to another table. «I have studied a number of ancient languages and am quite fluent in… ah, this looks interesting.»
Standing on tiptoe, he pushed away a stack of papers to reveal something underneath: a clay tablet, covered with scratchy marks like the footprints of a mouse. At some point in the past, the tablet had broken into three flat pieces; later on, Rivi or someone else had reassembled the pieces like parts of a puzzle, imbedding them in newer clay to hold them together. I had to admit, it certainly looked like the oldest document in the room.
«Can you read it?» I asked.
«I have seen the script before,» Wheezle replied. «The language is called Urqlish – extremely old. Some say it predates the eldest gods. No one knows how to pronounce its words, but my mentors taught me how to decipher such writings. The Urqs, whoever they were, left massive volumes of text to posterity. Much of it deals with incomprehensible facets of their culture, but this… this is something different.»
«What does it say?»
«Let me see. The Words of Savant… I can't make out the savant's name, but it doesn't matter. The Words of Savant whoever to his liege lord: Know, O Queen…»
Know, O Queen, that in the mists of the past, things were not as they are today. There was a time when the secrets of magic were hidden from the seven races; indeed, some scholars say there was a time before magic was born, when humans alone lived in a fresh and simple world.
But the flower of magic blossomed in its time, and the simple world yielded to a more complicated age. Wizards seized great power for themselves; and in the way of all souls, some used their power for good while others used it for evil. Often, rival sorcerers waged terrible war on each other, devastating the land and slaughtering innocents by the thousands.
At that time, our gods were not yet born. Some sages claim that the beings who walked the hidden places of the land were not true gods at all: they were mere mortals, but able to command engines of such puissance that our ancestors mistook them for gods. I do not know the truth of it, O Queen; but I can tell you there were celestial powers of one type or another who watched the havoc wrought by magicians and shook their heads in sorrow.
