Page 23 of The Affair of the Mysterious Letter
“Your point is well made, Mr. Wyndham,” returned Ms. Haas, as she idly checked the action on her harpoon gun. “But our options are limited. Few captains will venture into the deeper reaches of Ven, and fewer still can be trusted.”
“You trust this... this”—my descriptive powers failed me—“personage, then?”
“Insofar as I would trust anybody in his line of work. We have travelled together before and he has conveniently few ties in the city. Half the pilots on the docks are in the pay of some power or other and while Saltpetre has his own loyalties they are not relevant to our present endeavour.”
“If I might ask, to what are they relevant?”
“To a conflict that shall not take place for approximately eighty-four thousand years.”
And, with that, she climbed nimbly up the side of the submersible and disappeared inside. I followed, still uncertain but undeniably curious; a state of mind that, alongside abject terror and absolute bewilderment, would come to characterise a significant fraction of my acquaintance with the sorceress Shaharazad Haas.
A few moments later, we were joined by Mr. Saltpetre, who dropped through the hatch with a certain feral agility and slammed it closed behind him. He elbowed me out of the way and took his place in the one available seat—a tattered chair, surrounded by a disorderly array of dials, switches, levers, and wheels. These he operated in some arcane sequence, causing the whole machine to shudder tumultuously into life. I was conscious of a sensation of motion and we began our descent.
Whatever strange energy animated the vehicle had bathed the interior in a sickly green light that appeared to emanate from a dusty glass jar set into one wall. While I was glad not to be in total darkness,the scene it illuminated was far from prepossessing. Between the metal tubes and the humming boxes and the devices that scribbled undecipherable data onto ever-unspooling rolls of paper there was barely room to think, let alone to stand. There could be no doubt that the vehicle into which we had sealed ourselves was primarily military in function, for I had seen similar machines in my time at the Unending Gate. Some swam, some crawled, and some flew, but all were designed for the same purpose—to ensure that death came sooner to one’s enemies than to oneself. In truth, I was not entirely delighted to find myself within one again, although I was able to bear the experience without complaint.
Once the engines had been primed and the course set, Mr. Saltpetre turned to address us. His accent was not one I had heard before, and his voice gruff and throaty, but I have done my best to capture the gist of his speech here.
“Okay, Shaz, Shaz’s mate,” he said, “we’re running low, and as quiet as this bucket of bolts can get. We’re going to have to go the long way round the pearl farms, steering clear of the Colossus and the Coral Towers. We’ll take a shortcut through the Unremembered Gardens and I should have you in Keeper’s Shallows within the hour. When we get there, you’ll need to hop into the torpedo tubes, and remember to swallow your worms before you get fired out, or you’ll probably drown. If you’re not back at the boat by dawn, I’ll assume you’re dead and leave without you.”
He did not say “leave.” He used an idiomatic phrase ending with the word “off” that I am certain my gentle readers shall not have heard.
The journey itself was uncomfortable but uneventful, and we passed it mostly in silence. When Mr. Saltpetre indicated that we had arrived at our destination, Ms. Haas passed me one of the creatures that she had purchased earlier in the evening. I had never used a Surfeiting Worm before, as I had always restricted myself to the aerated sectors of Ven, but I was familiar with the principles of their use.
The Surfeiting Worm is, from a scientific perspective, a remarkable entity. The product of millennia of careful breeding and sorcerous manipulation, it enters through the mouth and crawls into the trachea, where it secretes certain chemicals that permit it to interface with the host’s lungs, larynx, and central nervous system. A form of mystical hybridisation then occurs, permitting the user to filter life-giving airs from the water, much as a fish or eel would, and also to communicate with other worm-users and subaquatic entities, the creature’s tail supplanting some of the functions of the user’s own tongue. Regardless of the academically fascinating opportunity before me, I confess that, holding the animal in my hand, long, lithe, and wriggling as it was, I did not relish the prospect of giving it access to my person. Nevertheless it was, for the sake of our client, necessary that I do so.
I shall spare the reader a precise description of how it felt to have the worm squeeze its way down my windpipe and infiltrate itself securely into my bronchial tubes. There was a brief sensation of choking and a strange awareness of alien thoughts impinging gently against my own. Should you ever visit the great city of Khelathra-Ven and feel the need to explore the sunken ruins of Ven you may perhaps have cause to make use of the worm yourself. I would be remiss in my duty as a chronicler of adventures were I not to remind you of the paramount importance of selecting a healthy specimen from an accredited wormerer and of being certain to take the exfiltrating toxin as soon as your work under the sea is concluded, lest the creature solidify its hold on your nervous system and suborn your brain for its own inscrutable purposes.
I hunkered down into the torpedo tube and waited for Mr. Saltpetre to fire.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Eternal Empire of Ven
Before I proceedwith the central thrust of my narrative, it behooves me to ensure that the reader has an adequate understanding of the history behind the lost and marvellous place to which we now journeyed. My editor is not in agreement with me on this matter and has requested on several occasions that I excise these elucidating passages in favour of scenes of a more sensational or salacious nature. For those amongst you who share my editor’s predilections, please rest assured that following this necessary digression there shall be a sequence in which we fight a shark, another in which we are suspected of murder, and a third in which we are drawn into intercourse with several members of the city’s vile criminal underworld.
Any exegesis on the history of Ven must inevitably begin with an acknowledgement that the vast gulf of history between the collapse of its empire and the present day, combined with the extratemporal nature of both that realm and the enemy which ultimately destroyed it, makes all historical speculation circumspect. Much has been written on the subject, and very little agreed. My somewhat biased opinion is that the most reliable authority on the matter is Professor J. R. Donahue-Kishen, with whom I was acquainted at university, who has made this subject zir life’s work, and of whose researches I have made liberal use in the following passages.
For those who would prefer to “skip straight to the action,” as my editor puts it, you need only know the following: that Ven was once the heart of a mighty empire that stretched across time and space, that the empire was destroyed by a terrible enemy, and that it has since sunk beneath the waves. You may now turn to the beginning of the next chapter, in which Ms. Haas and I fight a shark, although if you are reading this in the serialised edition you shall be forced to wait until next month’s instalment ofThe Straitmagazine to hear of this diverting incident. For the remainder of my readers, I present my inadequate summary of the decline and fall of the Eternal Empire of Ven. Should you wish to read more on this subject, I direct you to Professor Donahue-Kishen’s excellent treatiseThe Eternal Empire of Ven: An Analysis of Its Origins, Descent, Dominion, and Destruction, presented in detail, and illustrated with woodcarvings by Lady Quinella Thrumpmusket.
The Eternal Empire of Ven was so named because its provinces and colonies extended not only across the known world but to distant stars, distant galaxies, distant realities, and even distant times. At the height of its power, a Vennish Lord could reach out his, her, their, or zir hand and pluck fruit from the crystal trees that grew on the mountains of burning wax at the dawn of all creation and then cast the pit into the great and sucking void that shall swallow the cosmos at the end of all things.
During their ascendancy there existed no army, no nation, no world, and no god that could challenge the Eternal Lords of Ven and this fact may, at the end, have proved their undoing. Having achieved dominion over everything that was, they turned their attention to that which was not. To the uncountable infinities encompassed by the antiworlds and unlands ruled over by the Empress of Nothing, that terrible mistress of all that never was, nor would never be.
Where the real had bent easily to their arcane technologies and limitless magics, the unreal legions of the Empress of Nothing were anenemy beyond reckoning. They unmade the patterns that bound the empire together, unmooring the Eternal Lords of Ven from time itself and consuming their works in water or fire or oblivion. The great nexus city itself crashed beneath the waves and was drowned, its masters imprisoned within their towers, where they remain, their once boundless power folded in upon itself into a fragile, local omnipotence. As the millennia passed, the seas changed them, and they the seas.
Over time other creatures from the fathomless depths of the oceans have crawled or swum or slunk into the ruins of Ven, and scholars are divided as to whether these beings are intruders who the Eternal Lords tolerate or if, from within their Coral Towers, the once- mighty sorcerers have reached out and gathered about themselves new subjects and new servants. A tiny datum in support of the latter interpretation is that when the Eternal Lords made their overtures to the Council of Interested Parties during the secession of Khelathra from the Uthmani Sultanate their interests were represented by one of the piscine hybrids now native to the strait.
Today surfacers venture into Ven to view its unique sights, to indulge in certain vices that I shall not name, to trade in pearls and other, more esoteric materials, and to access some of the remote pathways that connect the underwater city to distant realities. Occasionally somebody from the upper city will be permitted audience with one of the Eternal Lords and will often take this opportunity to negotiate for access to or even the creation of a specific gateway. Such encounters abound with both opportunity and danger, for while the masters of Ven are not easily stirred to action, once roused, their capacity to offer aid or injury to those who catch their eye is near limitless.
Persistent rumour holds that an emissary from one of the Ubiquitous Companies once slighted a Vennish Lord by the name of Nine Opals. The individual in question worked for the Ubiquitous Company of Skrive Makers. That nobody now knows what a skrive is, orwhat any such thing may ever have been, or what purpose manufacturers of such things may have had in negotiating with an Eternal Lord, but everybody nonetheless agrees that this was, indeed, the name of the company may serve to illustrate quite how absolute is the peril one faces when trifling with matters Vennish.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Keeper’s Shallows
I emerged fromthe torpedo tube with such velocity that I did not notice the shark until we had already collided. It was a large specimen, ofCarcharodon marvosi, a terrible and justly reviled predator once native to the planet Marvos before the industrial excesses of that world’s people drained its oceans and scoured its lands into a red desert.
Underwater combat had not formed part of my training with the Company of Strangers, but I had, on occasion, been called upon to defend myself in environments that lacked air or gravity and so I was not entirely without resources when the voracious beast rounded upon me, its mouth wide and displaying countless rows of razor-like teeth. In such a circumstance the instinct to flee can prove both overwhelming and fatal. Large hunting animals will naturally pursue anything that attempts to evade them. I did my best, therefore, to remain calm and resolved, where possible, to answer aggression with aggression. I did my best to strike it a forceful blow upon the nose as I often read of people doing in adventure stories, but the drag of the water, combined with the infelicitous angle, meant that I did little but graze my knuckles on the edge of its snout. If I wished to put the monster to flight, I would need more precisely to target its areas of vulnerability.
