The sky was an even, ugly yellow, like dark mustard, and not a single cloud marked its expanse.
I walked forward.
The onyx rocks were smooth and cold against my bare feet.
As I scrabbled up the terrain, my fingers squeaked on the shiny surfaces. Those sounds seemed unendurably long in the ghostly silence. I did not like this place at all, wanted out of it as fast as I could move to the next veil of mist. But it was here that I found Child, found the place where he was trapped in his own madness
IV
As I made my way over the ebony land, I reached a chasm in the shattered rocks, perhaps a thousand yards long and three yards wide at the top, narrowing to two feet at the bottom. Down there, some three hundred feet below, a soft blue light glowed. It seemed to be the gentle blue of shallow water, but even this slight color branded my eyes in contrast to the sameness of the terrain I had been struggling across for some minutes.
I called down, listened to the flat echo, but received no answer. If this was the place where Child waited, bound by his own insanity, circled by unnamed demons, he was unable to speak.
I swung over the jagged edge, looked to the bottom, then grew wings like those I had seen on the batlike creatures of the mountain. I descended gently, pulled the wings in and absorbed them as the way grew too narrow to glide. I dropped the last few feet onto the blue floor, found it was made of ice.
To the right, the rock wall cut off three feet above the ice, and the passage this created seemed to go on for some distance. Lying on my stomach, I slid along the shimmering ice; I was cold but not uncomfortable, exhilarated by the freshness of the air here. A hundred feet further on, the ceiling of black rock thrust suddenly upward, and I found myself in a full-sized cavern where I could stand.
On my feet again, I crossed the barren room to the far side where the ice-encrusted rock seemed to warp downward. There, I discovered steps roughly chiseled in the ice.
I went down them, cautiously, eventually came out in a shadowy chamber with another blue floor, though this one was not empty: Child sat in the center of it in an analogue version of his real body.
And
And: the things crawled around him, circling in mindlessness, yet with a certain uncompromising evil that terrified me even though I knew they could not do me any physical harm. They were much like scorpions though somewhat longer than a man's arm, with flared, knifeedged carapaces shielding their backs, and twenty spindly legs on either side. Their stinging tails forked at the end, each of the two prongs tipped with a trio of wicked spurs as long as my little finger and tapered to needle points.
They did riot look at me, nor did their sensory cilia, bursting like whiskers around their beaked mouths, in any way indicate that they realized my presence.
Their legs hissed on the ice, and their constant parade had worn shallow grooves in the cold floor.
There were different numbers of them at different moments. Now there might be as few as a dozen describing the wide circle-now a hundred of them, magically crystallizing out of the crisp air-now thirty, now a dozen, now two dozen. No matter how hard I looked, I could not catch one of them appearing or disappearing, though their numbers fluctuated with every passing second. I had the feeling that I was in a funhouse where there was a complicated array of trick mirrors and that there was actually but one of these creatures whose presence was magnified to one degree or another by ingenious, mirrored pyrotechnics.
"Child?" I called.
The withered dwarf paid no attention to me, but stared with morbid fascination at the nightmarish scorpion guards which kept him ringed in and obedient.
Since I had first been trapped in this subconscious reality, I had not spared the time or the energy to consider the reason and psychology behind many of the mental analogues that constituted this inner universe. I had merely accepted and tried to deal with them, to search through them for a way out, a way to freedom and my own body.
Now, as I watched the grisly parade before me, I began to wonder what this collection of monsters was representative of. Why was Child's core of energy and intelligence trapped in this place, bound to this single minim of his entire subconscious universe? What were these scorpions that surrounded him and maintained their constant, evil vigil?
I examined them more closely and discovered that they did not have that surface sheen of reality that the centaur and the wolf had possessed. They shifted, as if they were liquid, and fragments of thought associations whirled inside of them. It took only a moment to discover their true nature.
Consider the human mind: three main parts to it: the ego, the superego, and the id. The first is what we are and what we have reached through the ordeals of life; the second is what we think we are and what we attempt to delude others into considering us as; the third is all the things we want to be and do but which-either because of public condemnation or a conflict with our own superegos and guilt-we never dare consider. In the id, there are the dark facets of our human soul, pieces of racial heritage and other parts uniquely ours: blood lust and the desire to rend flesh; sexual longings of grotesque sorts and on grotesque scales; the urge to cannibalism, the hunger for the taste of human meat We repress the id and most of us do not even realize that it stirs within us like a worm in the apple, so complete is our veil of civilization.
These scorpion-tailed monstrosities were Child's id lusts, his ugly needs which he, like everyone, had always kept repressed. It was impossible to say how they had gotten free, how they had encircled him like this, but I ventured a guess or two as I watched them clack horny mandibles and lift rattling, bony legs. Perhaps, when he had considered himself the Second Coming, he had been unable to pretend the id lusts did not exist. Perhaps, finally, in order to continue thinking of himself as a deity, he had to rip the id from the other parts of his mind, tear it free of the ego and the superego. And now those lusts were attempting to integrate themselves with his mind, to establish contact with the ethereal fragments of his thought processes, where they belonged. Or perhaps the id had been broken loose of the rest of his mind when he had tipped into insanity. Either way, they had found him again, and they had spell-bound him with their evil. He held them off with his psychic energy, still unable to tolerate their being a part of him. (Did he still nurture the Second-Coming fantasy-or perhaps some equal legend from another mythology?) "Child?" I asked again.
Again: no answer.
If I could free him, if only for a moment, could contact him and jar him into a moment of sanity, perhaps I could get him to open a way into his conscious mind, a path to lead me out of his body. But as long as the scorpions were there, as long as he was transfixed by the sight of these lusts he had forgotten, I could not reach him.
For the third time since I had first entered his mind that day so long ago, I fashioned a sword from the air, a shimmering blue luminosity with a curving blade and a hilt of dazzling light. Stepping forward, I hacked at the first of the scorpions in my way, halved it. It vanished. I turned to a second of them, tore it through, then swung furiously, wading through the spinning members of the huge creatures, destroying them as fast as the magic mirrors brought them to my attention.
Their sound was a screeching cacophony, and their mandibles punctuated the wailing fury with a drumbeat of irregular snapping, thrumming clacks against the ice floor.