Shadow - Monsters, Machines and Mad Scientists!: Episode CXLVII

The barrage seemed to go on forever, a rolling succession of explosions so loud that the Absolution itself seemed to be straining at its rivets. But there was an end to it and when the silence took hold and the smoke began to clear, Ellis found that the world was going to carry on regardless.

His pain had not abated. It left him pressed to the deck, muscles stretching and pushing, his feed sliding, purchaseless, through pools of blood. His screaming had stopped, but only because he was now clamping down with his teeth, barely avoiding biting his tongue off, letting out moans and sobs with each breath. The world seemed to grow colder.

"Activate the emergency fuel reserves!" Siren commanded from somewhere in the misty otherworld that lay outside the pain. The deck shifted beneath him and the dark sky above, complete with rippling tentacles descending, began to move with greater speed. Crew hurried around him, some slipping through the blood, too focussed on their task to stop for the wounded, not yet.

And then a familiar face was leaning over him, pale and gaunt with straggly wisps of hair escaping from under a tall stovepipe hat, only there was no thin smile this time, no mischievous glint in the eyes. This face was all concern.

"Ellis, Ellis my boy," the Former Baron was saying through a quavering voice, "can you hear me? Are you still with me?"

Ellis stared at him through the pain, unable to unclench his mouth to answer and so willing that response with eye contact alone. I'm in agony, his eyes said, but I'm still here. Help me. Please. He felt sweat popping out all across his skin, but he already felt so cold. Do I have a fever? he wondered.

The Former Baron looked away, his eyes scanning quickly across the deck, then stopping, fixed on one point. "Rockspark! Rockspark, we need some of your herbs and Stoneskin trickery over here at once!"

Ellis closed his eyes against the pain, then opened them again when he felt a sharp pain somehow cut through the constant howl of his wound. Rockspark was leaning over him now, with the Former Baron at his side, just a little bit further away, watching with worried eyes.

"The pain will pass," the Spiketail Shaman was saying, "but it must get worse before it gets better. You've been poisoned."

As Rockspark said it Ellis knew it must be true. He'd see the horrible fluids the tentacled projectile had been spitting into his wound before he killed it, and now his body was burning up, yet leaving him feeling frozen. A wave of dizziness and nausea threatened to overwhelm him.

"I don't think it's working," the Former Baron was saying, "he looks worse than before."

"No one has faced this poison for centuries, but the Shamans of Ashvault keep the secret. It is a living poison and it must be drawn out with trickery and cunning, but that means letting it get worse along the way."

"Curse these Lakhmaspawn!"

"When he is better, not before."

Meanwhile, in Ellis' arm, the pain was still intensifying. It felt like it was on fire, literally burning, the skin dying, crisping, blackening. Ellis found he couldn't look at it for fear of what he would see. Am I losing my arm? Am I dying?

Rockspark was working some more herbs between his clawed fingers, but Ellis couldn't really see what they were exactly, nor did he know what they would do. The world was becoming blurry and indistinct, the only thing he was aware of with any clarity was the pain. It was becoming him, taking him over and then everything was fading, fading, fading...

Ellis opened his eyes. He was sitting in a comfortable armchair near a fire crackling hot enough to bring beads of sweat to his forehead, and yet it wasn't unpleasant. It had the feeling of nostalgia to it, like a childhood memory half-forgotten. The chair and the fire appeared to be in the main room of a rustic cottage, or a farmhouse. Narrow Georgian windows with warped pains looked out onto a stormy night, made distant by the warmth from the fire and the soft pop of moss on the firewood. It was like something out of a cosy period drama, he thought, then noticed the smell of apple pie baking from another room. His stomach rumbled.

"It'll be ready soon," came a warm, cracked voice from behind. He craned his neck to see who was speaking, but it wasn't really necessary. The old woman was walking slowly past now, towards another chair on the opposite side of the fire. She placed herself down upon it with great care, closed her eyes for a moment as she settled, then opened them up to look at him.

"There's a little while yet, of course," she said, "so you and I have time for a nice chat."

Her face seemed impossibly old – indeed it was aged past the point where it was entirely obvious whether it belonged to a man or a woman, only the voice gave it away. Her rheumy eyes were almost lost in the creases of her high cheeks, but her yellow teeth were clearly visible in the centre of a broad smile. She radiated warmth almost as much as the fire did.

Ellis wanted to ask where he was and who the old lady was. He was sure he had just been doing something important, like this whole conversation was interrupting a thought. Before he could formulate the right question, however, the old woman spoke again.

“So, I’ve been trying to get to know you,” she began. “Of all of your companions, save perhaps Annabella, you seem to stand out in particular. I think I understand why that is, and yet I find I don’t fully understand you. I’ve been watching you since Whispercove, of course, even through all the depths of rock that lay between us these last few weeks. I only lost you the once, just a few hours ago, in fact, and I think I know what was happening there also, but I don’t understand you.”

Ellis frowned. He had no idea what this woman was talking about. As far as he could recall they had never met before, indeed she didn’t seem even remotely familiar, and yet she seemed to know so much about what had been happening to him recently.

“Annabella I know. She was coloured by her experiences in my realm and there is a part of her soul that is kindred, now with my own. You, however, your energies are very different, they do not match those of my world or of this Shadow city. I have to ask myself. Where are you from? Why are you here? What does all this mean for what I want out of this world? These are heavy questions, don’t you think?”

Ellis didn’t really know how to reply. The woman before him didn’t speak very much like the kindly old lady she appeared and yet there was something disarming about her. But how did she know all this, and how did he come to be there? What had he just been doing?

“I’m from Shadow,” he answered after a moment’s hesitation.

“Of course. Of course that’s where you came from originally, but it’s not where you feel you are from, now, is it?”

Ellis tried not to answer. He was getting a feeling that this woman was not really his friend, that anything he answered might ultimately be used against him and yet, despite of this, he found himself shaking his head, just slightly, but enough to be seen. The old woman smiled.

“So where else have you been?”

“I… I’m not sure I should say…”

“Ah,” the woman replied, looking slightly disappointed for a moment, then smiling again, “of course. Very wise. Perhaps I should go check on that pie, then. And there’s tea, of course. There should always be tea.”

She pulled herself out of her seat and shuffled her way across the room to the door which, by the smells wafting through it, must lead to the kitchen. “I assume you do want pie, yes?” she asked, poised on the threshold.

“Very much so, yes.” Ellis replied without even thinking.

“Good, good!” she said with a smile. “I’ll be through with it shortly.” Then she disappeared through the door, leaving Ellis alone and confused with his thoughts.

After a moment he stood up, deciding to try and work out where he was, exactly and how he might have got there. Any visual clues might also jog his memory and help explain why he didn’t remember what he had been doing before he arrived. The room was not large, and with the heat and light from the fire it had a very cosy feel, although Ellis was still uncomfortably hot – he could feel sweat running down his back. Aside from the two armchairs there was a small table with two chairs, a sideboard, a couple of small bookshelves and a series of paintings and embroideries hung on the walls. One in particular caught Ellis’ attention, a small embroidered work hidden amidst a sort of collage of differently sized images. It seemed to show a vessel at sea, beset by tentacles, like in a classic maritime painting. What made it stand out were three things, really. Firstly that it was embroidered rather than painted, and rather sloppily too, perhaps by the old woman. Second, the ship appeared to be a more modern, metal sort than those usually depicted facing off against the Kraken. Thirdly, and most unsettlingly, were the tentacles. Whereas in the classic artworks they would be seen rising from the deep, attached to the massive body of the beast, these were descending from the sky.

Lakhma.

The thought came to his head as if from some outside source and yet immediately memories were unlocked, the deck of the Absolution, the blood, the poison. And the tentacles, of course, reaching down out of the clouds to meet them.

“Here you are, the pie is ready and hot, hot, hot.”

Ellis spun to face the old lady as she was coming through the door, her hands sheathed in oven mitts and holding an enormous, steaming pie, which she proceeded to place in the middle of the table before leaning to stretch her obviously aching back.

“I was shot,” Ellis said. “I’m unconscious.”

The old lady sighed. “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“Then this is all a dream. I’m hallucinating.”

“Not exactly. I wasn’t expecting you to be so lucid though. You must be stronger willed than I thought.”

“Who are you?”

“A more complicated question than you might think. This body is a sort of emissary, but the mind behind it… well…” she tapped the embroidered picture and tentacles began to rise through the pastry lattice of the pie.

“Lakhma.”

“That’s what they always called me on this world. I have hundreds of other names, however, and no great attachment to any of them. Call me Lakhma if you wish.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I want to understand. You come from a world I have never visited, a world that-”

she licked her lips “-tastes different, more exciting than any I have encountered before. So full of life and death, beauty and ugliness. Your world is rich beyond my wildest dreams and I want to know where it is!”

Suddenly there was no pretence. Ellis could see the monster in her eyes and as the tentacles rose out of the pie, untwined from the wood of the tables and chairs, unwound from the fabric of the armchairs and danced in the flames, he realised that, unconscious or not, he had to fight it.

“Just how many ancient monsters am I going to have in my head today? I won’t tell you. You’re not getting there through me!”

“Just a little longer and you won’t have to tell me. I can smell it in your blood, taste it in your soul! I know the multiverse like no other: I had swum the eddies of the cosmos, have danced in the vortices of the Aether. I have consumed stars and exhaled nebulae and I can feel it, almost feel where your world is. Just a few more mouthfuls of your delicious essence and-”

“No!” he screamed,

There was a sword in his hand. He had no idea where it came from, barely noticed that it was the very same sword he had picked from the Former Baron’s armoury in tentacle lane so many months ago. He merely felt its weight in his hand, gripped it tight and charged.

The heavy metal swung through the air with its own force, Ellis only had to get it started. The blade sliced through the old woman’s visage, tearing like paper and for an instant he saw something of what lay beyond her, a great machine of wheels and metal, entwined with those ever-present tentacles in a terrible symbiosis.

Then the cosy cottage fell away and Ellis was left on the deck of the Absolution once more and the pain returned, though, he realised, it wasn’t so bad as it had been.

“How is he holding up?” came the Former Baron’s voice and Ellis discovered he could turn his head to see the old man talking to Rockspark who knelt at his side.

“He’s past the worst of it, I think. The poison is dying.”

“So soon?”

“I think he did some of the fighting himself.”

The Former Baron caught a glimpse of Ellis looking at him and exclaimed, “Oh, he’s awake.”

Rockspark turned to look and smiled a toothy Spiketail smile. “Good,” he said, “then perhaps he can help us get him below decks.”

Ellis glanced back up at the sky and realised that it wasn’t there. There was daylight coming from somewhere behind them, but above was the worn rock ceiling of a cave.

“Where are we?” he asked in a voice so much weaker than the one he had used in his mind.

“We’ve found a safe haven,” the Former Baron replied with a grim smile, “and not a moment too soon.”