Page 65 of The Affair of the Mysterious Letter
“I can’t, but I know someone who can. We have an appointment at the Coral Towers.”
I had expected something less drastic, although, given what I had experienced since moving in with the sorceress Shaharazad Haas, I could not say why. The Coral Towers were the ancient palace-prisons of the Eternal Lords of Ven and one did not approach them without very good cause and without having exhausted all other possible recourse. To say that seeking the aid of a near-impotent, quasi-living sorcerer lord in order to infiltrate an alien city once ruled by a mad god and now governed by a populist bureaucracy famed for its efficient brutality seemed unwise would be, at the very least, an understatement. I had, however, learned by this point that questioning Ms. Haas’s choices in these matters would prove utterly futile.
Thus, I found myself boarding a public submersible and descending to the depths of Ven for the second time that month. Although the Coral Towers were, in many ways, the most perilous part of Ven they were also one of the most accessible. The Eternal Lords, having no need to fear assault or invasion, and requiring the intervention of legates and messengers to make their presence felt in the outside world, had established the travel routes through Ven such that it is easier to pass close by the towers than to avoid them. Even the hermetically sealed pipes and passages used by the city’s air-breathing inhabitants have connections to the Coral Towers. We were therefore able to disembark our submersible at an airlock station and make our way to our destination both dry and on foot.
An unfortunate fact of travel in these parts of Ven is that, since the habitable parts of the city are wholly self-contained, one never has the opportunity to admire the majesty of Ven proper, except through the occasional tiny and always crowded porthole. Indeed, there are many who find it rather disconcerting to be encased entirely in creaking, century-old steel, conscious with every unexpected drip and passing tremor of the great weight of water pressing down atop one. As a student, I found the whole experience a mixture of romantic and depressing, for there are few things that simultaneously engenderthose two contradictory emotions so completely as gazing out upon an impossibly delicate spire of pink coral and white marble through a grime-encrusted window in a leaky cabin from which you have singularly failed to banish the pervasive smell of damp.
Ms. Haas seemed as familiar with this place as she had with everywhere else we had been and led me with brisk, confident strides through the crowded walking tubes and to one specific tower, its entrance a mere fissure in the coral wall through which a small side tunnel had been rather inelegantly driven.
The gap seemed that it would barely accommodate us, and its sharp, rocky edges scraped at my hands and face as I squeezed through. On the other side was a sight most wondrous, but my editor informs me it will pleasurably heighten dramatic tension if I withhold my description of it until the next instalment of this narrative. He asks also that I remind the reader to be on the lookout for the next edition ofThe Straitmagazine, in which he, she, ze, or they may vicariously experience my arrival in the domain of an Eternal Lord of Ven.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Walking Upwards Unmaking
My first thoughton our emergence into the tower of the Eternal Lord was that I could see no way for us to go back. We stood on a platform of red coral some thirty feet across in the centre of which floated a decayed armillary sphere depicting an unfamiliar solar system. The sphere, the platform, and we ourselves were suspended in a vast and star-bestrewn void through which strange lights streamed like carnival ribbons in colours I cannot now recall but see sometimes in my dreams. Ms. Haas led me onto a staircase which arced out over empty space from where we stood and then curved upwards and backwards, leading to a second platform some way above us. The steps were barnacle-rough and kelp-slick, with neither handrails nor any visible means of support, which led me to proceed in a cautious fashion. Had I not served beyond the Unending Gate I would perhaps have found the experience more disorientating, but I had long developed the habit of focusing on the necessity of the task ahead, rather than peculiarities of the vistas around me. For all that it hovered unaided over a limitless starscape this was, after all, just a staircase.
At the summit, a woman sat upon a throne of shattered jade and tarnished silver. I say woman, but so human a term does not begin to capture the shifting nexus of past and future potentiality that was embodied in the being before us. To look upon an Eternal Lord of Ven isto witness all they are, have ever been, or may ever be, and so she was at once a laughing girl on the streets of a long-vanished city, a warrior queen in samite robes, a fish-eaten corpse in a drowned palace, and a vast, tentacled leviathan, dead and dreaming of forgotten glories. As we drew nearer, I saw her eyes across every version of herself were lightless wells of utter unbeing, and recognised the mark of the Empress of Nothing. Her name, I would later learn, was Walking Upwards Unmaking. This, too, was a scar from her battle against the Ruler of All That Is Not; the true names of the Eternal Lords having been taken along with their eyes and their empire.
She did not speak, but after she did not speak I remembered her having spoken.What brings you to this moment, Shaharazad Haas?
“I need a favour.”
You need too many favours, Shaharazad Haas. In a thousand realities, I have already killed you.
“Well, that’s fine,” returned Ms. Haas rather warily. “As long as you’re not going to do it in this one.”
Walking Upwards Unmaking slowly turned over one childlike hand, one silver-gauntleted hand, one mouldering fleshless hand, and my companion clutched at her chest, a look of horror flashing across her face as she crumpled to her knees. And now the Eternal Lord held a human heart in her tightening fist, blood dripping between her fingers and seeping into the coral as the sorceress Shaharazad Haas died at my feet.
No. Not in this reality. And then none of that had happened.
Ms. Haas swallowed. Besides this and a subtle shifting of her balance, she gave surprisingly little indication of having just been struck dead in an alternate timeline. “Thank you.” She bowed her head in a jarringly respectful manner. “But I need to travel to Carcosa and cannot go by the normal gates.”
Walking Upwards Unmaking made no reply. And then time and space and memory shifted through ninety-five degrees. Dancers whirledin a ballroom while a figure in ragged yellow robes stood above them all. Pale, misshapen towers vanished into fog-choked skies. A stranger in a pale mask stared at me from an alley in an unknown city.
My companion and I stood on the shores of a grey and turbid lake. Across the water, twin suns set and black stars rose.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
In Carcosa
“That,” observed mycompanion, “could have gone a lot worse.”
“You died.”
“I went to ask a favour from an Eternal Lord of Ven. My death was one of the least terrible possibilities.”
“In all candour, I’m not sure why she assisted us at all.”
Ms. Haas knelt down and dipped her fingertips gently in the lake. “It’s not the first time she’s helped me, insofar as ‘first’ has a meaning for such a being. My working hypothesis is that she believes I will be useful to her in some future scheme whose shape I cannot yet fathom, a thought that vexes me. And I suspect that Walking Upwards Unmaking also takes some pleasure in the knowledge of that vexation.”
“That seems rather petty for somebody with so much power.”
“My dear man.” She laughed, as she rose from the waterside. “The whole point of having power is that you can be as petty as you like and nobody can stop you. Now come on. We need to get off the streets before the byakhees come out.”
As it transpired, we had arrived on a relatively isolated spot along the shores of Lake Hali. A short walk up a sandbank and onto a narrow wooden jetty led us towards the city proper. The waterfront was entirely given over to industrial architecture, squat, square buildings from which a ceaseless stream of black smoke rose to choke the city insmog, casting a yellow pall over the sky through which even the impossible blackness of the stars struggled to penetrate.
I had never been to Carcosa, but I had seen pictures. The city’s delicate spires, alien geometries, and strange moons featured prominently in the fever dreams and opium hazes of a certain sort of artist on many worlds, a peculiarity which had made the tourist trade a booming part of the Carcosan economy. The paintings tended to emphasise the bridges and towers and weird edifices of almost organic-looking stone. Later on our journey I would observe the city did, indeed, possess these features in abundance, but the facades of the factories spoke of dreams of quite a different sort. A brutalist vision of cement and steel, a triumph of collective will over individual sentiment. And it struck me that, while this was not the kind of madness that had made the city famed through a dozen realities, it was, perhaps, a madness nevertheless.
