“Elcin, oh, Elcin! Come down, Oh Great and Tiny God of Lightning and Loud Noises! Come down from your mountain, oh Elcin! Come down from your mountain and strike down this infidel who dares to profane the sacred name of your magic!”
Shoogar stood atop the demon couch and stretched his arms toward the sky. Triumph was spread across his face as he chanted the final
The swimming heated compartment crawled with fuzz balls and stingers, crabs and krakens and leeches. Somewhere something was burning, and oily smoke seeped up the walls. I choked on the rotting air and blinked the tears from my eyes.
It was a masterpiece.
I followed Shoogar out of the nest. The dry grass crunched underfoot as I dropped to the ground. We had spent a lifetime in that Shoogar-generated hell.
I was amazed to find that it was still day. The double sunlight washed the world with a reassuring familiarity. Trees and plants and grass looked black to me; and I wondered if my eyes had seen too long by the light of Purple’s nest.
My head swam in the cool clean air. Waves of dizziness swept over me. Even so, it was I who had to help Shoogar to walk. I had only observed the curse. Shoogar had executed it, and it had taken its toll of his strength. We moved unevenly down the slope. Our shadows wavered before us, tinged with red and blue edges. As the curse had ended, so had the conjunction. Once more the suns were separate.
It seemed a miracle that Purple had not interrupted us, but it was still only mid-afternoon. We had finished with time to spare.
We collapsed behind a clump of bushes. The unfouled air was like strong Quaff, and I was drunk on it. We lay there under the familiar black leaves, taking deep heaving breaths.
After a while I rolled over on my side, looked at Shoogar, and asked, “When does it begin?”
He didn’t answer, and for a moment I thought he had fallen asleep. It would not have surprised me. The exertions of the past days had left him pale and haggard. His eyes were red when he opened them, and rimmed with deep circles. He sighed slowly, “I don’t know, Lant, I don’t know … Perhaps I forgot something.”
I sat up and looked uneasily at the black nest. It waited there in a hollow between two hills, its door invitingly open, Its door-!!
“Shoogar!” I cried. The door! We left it open!”
He sat up suddenly, stared horrified across the hill.
“Can we close it?” I asked.
“It must need another spell for that,” said Shoogar. “And we don’t have it.”
“Couldn’t you —”
“Couldn’t I what?” he demanded. “Make up a door-closing spell? Not for that nest, I couldn’t. I’d have to know what activates the door-opening spell first.”
“But, I saw you open the door —”
“Lant,” he said wearily, “you are a fool. I know how to use the spell — but I do not know why it works as it does. You saw what trouble I had with the light device. No, Lant — unless you know something else about the way that door works — and I know you don’t, for I peered into your mind — it’s going to stay open.”
“But the curse —”
He cut me off with a gesture, “I don’t know — it must be waiting. It needs something to activate it, probably the closing of the door. Without that…” He shrugged, let the sentence trail off into silence.
The suns crept westward, the blue now visibly ahead of the red. I peered uneasily across the hill. How long would that curse wait before it went bad? Only the gods could help us if this, the greatest of Shoogar’s spells, were to go foul — and if it did go foul, there would be no gods left who could help us. They would all be against us.
Slowly the shadows lengthened; the chill of the dying day crept across the world while Shoogar and I stood helplessly by. The black nest waited, grim and forbidding, yellow light poured from its door.
The world waited. We waited. The nest waited.
The curse waited…
And then, abruptly, a sound. Footsteps crunching up the side of the hill. We dropped down behind the bush.
Seconds later, Purple came into view, striding up over the rise — I wondered if he had satisfied his yearning — then down the slope toward his waiting nest. He could not see the open door from the direction he approached.
He rounded the curve of the nestwall and stopped. Then he stepped hurriedly forward and peered within. For the first time we saw Purple react to Shoogar’s magic. He screamed like a hunting banshee-bat.
No doubt a translation would have been most instructive, but the speakerspell was silent. Purple clambered into the door; the jamb caught him across the forehead, knocking the glass appurtenances from his nose. (How had Shoogar managed that?)
We heard his voice from inside the nest; great anguished cries, hardly recognizable. Occasionally, words would come from the speakerspell, booming across the hollow, “My god in …! How the … did they get in? Stung me! Get off my foot, you … son of … Why isn’t the pest killer working?!!”
“The sting things are giving him trouble,” I whispered.
“God-damned sting things …!” Purple’s booming voice corrected me.
“But the sting things are not the spell, Lant,” Shoogar hissed. “They would sting whether they were part of the curse or not.
Shoogar was right. The curse had not yet been activated. Anguished, I tore at my fur. What were the gods waiting for? Would they wait so long that Purple would have time to nullify the elements of the spell and turn it back on Shoogar?
More words came hurtling across the slope. “
“At least you have ruined his composure,” I whispered to Shoogar. That’s a beginning.”
“Not enough. … The gods should be tripping over each other in their eagerness to destroy him. … It must be the door! It must be! Lant, I fear….”
He trailed off ominously. I felt ice melting along my spine..
“Savages!” boomed Purple’s voice. “Primitive savages! This damned gray paint — Where the hell is the …? Incest, love-making, illegitimate, compound incest, excrement, excrement, excrement, oral-genital contact, rectum, castration, diseases passed by lovemaking, primitive anal lovechildren! I’ll kill the lovemaking offspring of dogs! I’ll burn this lovemaking world down to the bedrock!”
Purple may have been incoherent, but he certainly sounded sincere. I readied myself to run. I could see him moving about within the nest; he was stabbing furiously at the various bumps and depressions that we had painted over. Savagely Purple twisted the knobs, one after another, trying to nullify Shoogar’s spells.
“And as for that fur-covered animal, Shoogar —”
The heavy curved door slid shut and cut off Purple s last raging howl.
A gentle breeze tugged at the leaves the bushes and the cuffs of our robes. The shadows had lengthened until they stretched eastward into darkness.
The blue sun twinkled and vanished, leaving only the bloated disk of the red. Below us the hills lay like the folds of a crumpled red cloth. All was deathly silent.
Slowly Shoogar and I crept out of our hiding place. The black nest sat quietly in its depression. The door, closed now, was only an orange oval outlined on its smooth featureless surface.
We edged forward, curiously, cautiously.
“Has it begun yet?” I whispered.
“Shut up, you fool! Every god in the pantheon must be listening!”
We moved closer. The black egg waited there, motionless. Shoogar put his ear to its surface and listened.
