Over the plains of broken glass, the Twk-Men took T’sais Prime. Soon, she understood the true nature of the glass, and why none lived amongst it for very long. Each shard had captured and now reflected the light of some more ancient time, which played out in an insanity of fractured prisms. As they traveled, she saw laid out below her, and identified for her by the Twk-Men, the Gardens of Mazirian, a raging Thrang the Ghoul Bear, impossibly large, and Sadlark in battle against the demon Underherd. She saw Kutt the Mad King leading his menagerie of magically created monsters, Kolghut’s Tower of Frozen Blood, and, most terribly, a forever-replicating scene over many leagues, of Golickan Kodek the Conqueror’s infamous pillaging of the people of Bautiku and subsequent creation of a squirming pyramid of human flesh five hundred feet tall. And, yes, eventually, though she chose to ignore them, many reflections of her own self, some tiny, some huge and monstrous, bestriding the landscape below, brought out from the crazed glass. After awhile, T’sais’ initial horror gave way to such fascination that she could not bear to look down, as if her interest was unwholesome.
“What happens to those who walk the surface?” she asked the Twk-Men as they struggled with their burden. They were headed for what looked like a series of dull, irregular clouds on the horizon.
“They go mad,” one replied.
“They become what they see,” another said.
“They forget to eat or drink.”
“They perish, believing all the time that they dine in the banquet hall of Kandive the Golden or are whispering in the ear of Turjan the Sorcerer.”
“How did Sarnod create the glass?”
The lead Twk-Man laughed in an unpleasant way. “That is beyond Sarnod’s ken. The glass is all that remains of the all-seeing Orb of Parassis, shattered in the War of the Underhinds. Sarnod’s luck is that it inhabits his prison, making the lives of vanquished enemies worse by far than without.”
“And yet,” T’sais replied, “the glass illumines the UNDERHIND.”
Day and night had no meaning in a world with no sun, dying or otherwise. Everything around them existed in a state of perpetual dawn or dusk, depending on the brilliance of the broken glass. The bright flashes of gold and green beneath them as ancient wars were fought, courtly dances re-enacted, and ghost-galleys sailed long dry oceans, now created a kind of weak sunrise.
Soon, T’sais saw that ahead of them the clouds had become strange oblong balloons that moved, their tan hides pulsing, tiny limbs sticking out from the sides, heads mere dots. “Floating mermelants,” the Twk-Men called them, and, strapped to these creatures by means of ropes and cables and pulleys, were the frames of ships, canisters, balconies, and baskets. Even more peculiar, a vast tangled garden of flowers, vines, and vegetables hung from the moist moss-lined hull of each airship.
“Who are they, the people who live here?” T’sais asked.
“Raiders and builders and gardeners,” the head Twk-Man replied. “Murderers and bandits and farmers and sky sailors.”
“How can they be all of these things?”
The Twk-Man smiled grimly. “To be sent here, you must be a rogue of some kind, but to live here you must become something else.”
“What if I do not desire to be taken there?” A sudden sense of helplessness overwhelmed her, despite her spells. To be beholden to the Twk-Men irked her, but to be dependent on strangers not bound to her will would be worse.
“You have no choice. We will not take you by air raft across this entire world; we will risk your already weakening spell if you do not free us. Besides, these people roam everywhere.”
So saying, they increased their speed and soon left her on the deck of one of the ships, the living balloon above snorting and expelling strong yet sweet-smelling gasses.
The ship’s captain waited for her, his crew of ruffians hanging back, although whether from respect or caution, T’sais did not know.
The Captain had two eye patches over his left eye, as if whatever lay hidden there had need of further restraint. The remaining light blue eye made him look younger than his years. A thick black beard covered much of his face. He had the wide, muscular build she favored in a man, and he smelled not unpleasantly of pipe tobacco.
Just as T’sais found it difficult to forget that the living creature above her was all that kept the ship from plummeting to the broken glass below, so too it was difficult to forget that in her world the Captain was smaller than a thimble.
“Welcome to hell,” he said, unsmiling.
“Welcome to a spell,” T’sais replied, with a passion that surprised her — and cast Panguirre’s Triumphant Displasms, meaning to bind him to her.
But the Captain merely chuckled and removed one of his eye patches, whereupon the spell bounced back upon her and she felt an overwhelming urge to obey the Captain’s every desire.
“Do not make me remove the other eye patch,” he told her, although not without a certain humor.
Looking him in his one good eye, fighting the spell even as it mastered her, she asked, “Why? Will I die?”
“No,” the Captain said, “but you would be so revolted by what lives in my eye that you would not sit down to dinner with me.”
Soon, beyond the cavern guarded by the now curiously absent Bloat Toad, Whisper Bird came upon the outskirts of the village where the gaun had said he would find his quarry. The space above extended so far that the distant rock ceiling, glowing green from vast and mindless lichens, was little more than a conjecture. Things, though, could be seen moving there, in shapes that made Whisper Bird wary.
The village itself he at first thought had been built among the old bones of long-dead monsters. But he soon came to understand that it was built
In the middle of the village square, an old man sat sightless atop the skull of some grotesque beast with three eyes and oversized fangs. He wore a beard of pale purple lichen, and the hair on his head swayed, made from tendrils of thin white mushrooms. His robes rippled, and Whisper Bird, shuddering, did not like to look upon them for long.
Whisper Bird came up beside him and said, “Do not be afraid. I seek only a man or a woman.” He projected the images into the old man’s mind. “Do you know them?”
The old man laughed. “Do you know who and what I am? With a flick of my fingers I could kill you. With a thought, your life extinguished.”
“Then proceed, certainly, if that is your desire,” Whisper Bird said. “But while we are exchanging useless threats: I could relieve you of the burden you call a life with the same effort it requires to stand here asking, again,
“I am adept at sensing the invisible by now, creature,” the man replied, ignoring Whisper Bird. “I can see your outline in my mind, and you are neither man nor bird but some combination of both.”
“Do not call me creature,” Whisper Bird said.
“Well, then, Not-Creature,” the old man said, “did you know that you are a door?’
“Do not call me that, either,” Whisper Bird said. He was tired. His body feasted on sunlight and sunlight existed only in the other world, not here. Here there was only a dull, thick soup of almost-light. His thoughts had become slow and looping on the one half, fast and bright on the other.
“But you
“You know of the Bloat Toad?” Whisper Bird asked, caught by surprise.
“A wise man might suspect I am the one who positioned him there as a watchdog against our
