Fantasy Magazine Issue 48 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: fantasy magazine, fantasy, magazine, short stories, short story
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2011-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

No man can climb up the sky.

Yet I reached the topmost peak and stood on its flat table, staring upward.

All round, beneath, the lands fell away together, but they were like a game-board, with their colors of plague and faithlessness and blood. The world no more real for me.

In the sky the higher clouds ascended like a stairway. I stretched up my arms, and for hours on end I bellowed, till my voice was gone. I called his name: Orkrem! Orkrem! And then I whispered his name: Orkrem.

Night bloomed its black poison-flower and the stabs of the stars pierced out.

Then a wind woke in the core of the sky.

It came forth on me like a giant bird, a dragon. Roaring, it clutched me, and whirled me off the peak.

No longer, me, with a voice to blaspheme him, only my whisper to say now he would dash me to earth and break me. But this was not the way of it.

The sky wind thrashed me not down but upward, through the cloud and through the basement of the sky itself, and flung me headlong on the floor of a huge echoing chamber that was black as the void, yet lit as if with torches.

And when the wind was gone, and the noise of it emptied from my ears, I looked and saw I was in some colossal place like a temple of pillars, but carved out of the night itself. Far away down a long avenue, the slender moon was rising, on its side like a white boat. Swollen planets the colors of sickness and betrayal and war moved slowly through the vault.

I was in Orkrem’s house. The house of the god.

He did not come in for a while. Or he may have been there anyway, unseen and unfelt. He might have hung in the tiniest drip of moonlight, like a spider in its web. Or curled about the pillars like a sort of night mist, visibly invisible to me.

But then he did come in.

He made no sound. He did not even manifest—appear, as a flame would, struck all at once on a lamp. He was not. Then he was.

I pulled myself off the floor of his house, which was a solid floor, like marble—but it was air. I stood and looked at him, in his face.

He was high as the house, wide as the house. Yet too he was only the height of a gigantic man, not that much—a span or two—taller and bigger in frame than I. But he was the lizard, and the lion. I can describe him no otherwise. I fail to be able to describe him. Only for that—lizard and lion—or that his face was a shout like the rumble of an earthquake. And his eyes put out the light of the razor stars.

And then my voice returned.

Did he give it me? For he spoke to me, and he asked What do you want of me?

And then I bellowed once more at him, bellowed as out on the mountain before the wind lifted me up.

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