(eng) Michael Shea by A Quest for Simbilis

Author:A Quest for Simbilis [Simbilis, A Quest for]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

The House on the River

The three travelers, chained and weaponless, were escorted by the bog-giants for a short way only, and then brought to a halt. The she-zombie who had been their original guide appeared out of the shadows, accompanied by a second as ghastly as herself. Both creatures carried scourges, lashes whose tendrils were strings of live blue hornets.

She who had been the guide made them a gesture, which the bog-giants took as their dismissal. They turned back and their sinewy hulks vanished quickly in the bog’s level murk. The she-zombies took up escort positions on either side of the chained three.

Mumber Sull burst into noisy remonstrations, but their erstwhile guide cut the Thane short. “You exert yourself to no purpose. I now act solely in a bailiff’s capacity, and merely conduct you to your detention. Strict silence is required. The creatures on your shoulders will aid us in enforcing this silence by repeating aloud your slightest whisper,”

And indeed, the glowing little reptiles harkened alertly. Thus compelled to silence, and urged into motion by the mere sight of the glittering whips which buzzed shrilly, the three captives trudged through the muck and the poisonous gloom of the bogs.

An unending trek ensued: The trio soon learned that the bogs were merely a phase in the geography of the subworlds. The first sign of change was that the marshy flats began to slope more radically downward, and at the same time became more and more thickly overgrown with a kind of luminous purple kelp. This grew in tentacled dumps of ever-increasing size, and from a distance appeared to the trio like static purple fire covering the dark slopes. And indeed, the growth provided them their only light, for the green-veined rock ceiling vanished from overhead as the jungle terrain sank more steeply down.

The steepness was made more dangerous by the fan that each clump of the luminous growth exuded a phosphorescent purple sweat which ran in a constant trickle from its base. The fluid had a rank smell like rotting sea life, and it slimed the rocks. The trio’s chain caused the false step of any one of them to drag down the other two, and they toppled often, frantically embracing the handiest dump for support. They discovered that the tentacles contracted sluggishly but irascibly when thus clasped, and each concluded privately that rather than a plant growth, it was more like a codenterate or mollusk.

Soon they were embracing these mollusks merely to move at all, so steep did the terrain become, and it was as if they were inching down a mountainside festooned with the slippery humid thickets of the rain forest. The purple fluid fell in thin luminous waterfalls splashing down to rock-ledge lagoons, and sluggish wraiths of violet fog haunted the face of the crags.

The mollusks’ exudations had soon soaked every inch of the trio’s skin, and for a long time they were too sickened by the smell to eat the coarse mash which the she-zombies gave them.

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