Insensitive to his fellows’ state, Cabal continued: ‘Seven miles further up is the highest any human has ever climbed. Barzai the Wise was his name, which just goes to show that names don’t tell you everything, for two miles further up is where the gods themselves sometimes sport. I have no idea what comprises sport for a god – don’t ask. In any event, they took exception to Barzai getting close enough to irk them.’
‘What happened to him?’ asked Corde, the first to discover that the best cure for an umbrella in the psyche was simply not to look.
‘Oh, something ghastly. It usually is with gods. They have no sense of proportion. If you are particularly interested, there is a rock at the eight-mile point that has the full story carved into it as a warning to the curious. Why, Corde? Curious?’
Corde was, but not enough to risk either the climb, or the possibility of getting his very own memorial, courtesy of the gods.
Cabal smiled, technically. He turned his back on the peak and pointed out over the land. ‘That river is the Oukranos. If we follow it down to the sea, we shall find ourselves in the city of Hlanith. Hlanith is a useful sort of place for dreamers, as it is close to the Enchanted Wood.’ He pointed at a great forest visible south of the river a good way off. ‘A twee name, but furiously dangerous. It is where most mortals who enter the Dreamlands through the usual route of sleep first emerge. On the other side of the river is the Dark Wood. A less twee name, but no less dangerous, just in case you were hoping for some sort of inverse relationship between names and peril here. Almost everywhere is dangerous, so you should get used to that idea as soon as possible, if you wish to survive this world.’
Shadrach and Bose had finally managed to tear their eyes away from the peak of Hatheg-Kla with the help of Corde, who had taken firm hold of their chins and steered their gaze in a safe direction by force. ‘How will this . . . Hlanith,’ Shadrach chewed on the unfamiliar word, making it sound like a small mining village in Wales ‘. . . how will it help us, Mr Cabal? We are not dreamers.’
‘Not in any sense,’ said Cabal. ‘But as a result of every Tom, Dick and Harry with a talent for the particular mode of dreaming required to travel here, Hlanith is a gathering place for people whose minds are not altogether mired in the sticky romanticism of this place. In short, gentlemen, there we will find people who will give us straight answers to straight questions.’
Bose shielded his eyes against the sun, an orb whose light seemed a little more golden than that which shone over the Earth they had so recently left. ‘I can’t even see the coast from here. How long will this journey take? How far must we go?’
‘Time and space are not measured in the way we are used to,’ warned Cabal. ‘To give you a time in hours or a distance in leagues would be useless.’
Corde gestured over his shoulder with a jerk of his thumb. ‘Just a minute ago you were telling us that this boulder commemorating Banzai the Wishful –’
‘Barzai the Wise.’
‘– is eight miles up the mountain. Now you’re telling us that units of measurement are meaningless. Well, which is it?’
‘Ah,’ said Cabal, sagely. Before anyone could complain that ‘Ah’ did not really answer anything, he said, ‘We have over a mile of treacherous mountainside to traverse before we reach gentler slopes, gentlemen. Perhaps we should begin.’
‘A mile!’ exclaimed Corde, in an attempt to make his point again, but Cabal was already stepping from the promontory that the Silver Key had dumped them upon, and on to the great steep field of scree and bare rock beneath them.
The most peculiar thing about the descent was how it seemed to take hours, yet when they reached the bottom of the long, ragged escarpment, the sun had barely moved a degree in the sky. Cabal muttered something about subjective objectivity, and there the matter lay. The second most peculiar thing was that, while Shadrach and Bose were neither of the utmost physicality nor especially well dressed for shinning down a mountainside, both arrived at their destination winded but not exhausted, their clothes as pristine as when they had set off.
They walked down towards the bank of the Oukranos in near silence, taking in the wonders around them. At this point they consisted largely of a ruined mansion off to the south, through whose abandoned orchards – in themselves covering the area of a small town – the party made their way. At first glance, the only truly unearthly thing about the environment was the sheer scale of everything: Mount Hatheg-Kla was huge, the ruined mansion was huge, the orchard was huge and contained trees of ancient growth; even the river before them was Amazonian in proportion. To Cabal’s searching eye, however, there were more details that proclaimed the alien nature of the place, and the more he looked, the more subtle they became.
He saw a creature that was neither caterpillar nor butterfly, but rather a caterpillar with broad wings projecting from a chrysalis-like band about its upper third, as if a butterfly’s life cycle had been cut and stitched into a single stage. He saw a rat scurry into a hole, but when it peered out again he thought he must have been mistaken for it had a little flat face like a capuchin monkey’s. He finally realised it had the body of a rat but forelimbs ending in apelike phalanges, and the face of a tiny man with sideburns and a widow’s peak. It glared at him with a mixture of angry hatred and curiosity until it understood they had no interest in it. At which point it grinned like a happy little man, and vanished deeper into its burrow.
The most subtle of the anomalous details, however, was all around them, its very ubiquity making it difficult to notice. The Dreamlands did not, quite, make sense to the eye. The most overt expression of this had been Mount Hatheg-Kla’s ill-mannered refusal to be comfortably comprehensible to the viewer. It was not only big, it was the very epitome of bigness, and it wedged itself into the viewer’s perception like a fat man into a small armchair. All around them now, however, the same perceptual unwillingness was always apparent. It was never quite clear just how far away the ground beneath one’s feet really was. As they passed a tree, the degree by which the trunk’s hidden side was exposed never quite matched up with the degree by which the trunk’s side previously visible was turned away from them. Nothing worked quite as expected. Very nearly – 99 and a good number of percentage places – but never quite perfectly enough to escape a keen eye and an analytical mind. Cabal had these attributes, in addition to something verging on an allergy to whimsy, so he noted these anomalies early, and he noted them often.
This, then, was the stuff of dreams, and it nauseated him. Sloppy, half-baked fancies oozing from a countless multitude of sloppy, half-baked minds. He could hardly wait to conclude his business with the Fear Institute, the quicker to quit that land of the dazed. Those of an artistic bent would doubtless find much to admire in the Dreamlands’ hanging gardens, their crystal fortresses, their gargantuan waterfalls and their towers of brass and steel. To Cabal, however, they were fripperies; momentarily impressive, but ultimately risible. His interest in the place was predictably prosaic.
Many necromancers had travelled to the Dreamlands before him for a variety of reasons – to speak with gods, to seek dark knowledge, or even to grow powerful and gather wealth, respect and a harem of houris who found names like ‘Wesley’ or ‘Cecil’ inexpressibly exotic. Not a few of these predecessors had come with the express intention of never returning, and so they had come as sleepers, engineering the death of their sleeping physical forms by strange rites that guaranted their spirit lived on in the land of dreams. It was an immortality of sorts, as they would never age or die naturally, but Cabal sneered at them as failures. While real knowledge, even experimental knowledge, could be gathered in dream, it was of no consequence if it could not be communicated somehow to the waking world. With the Silver Key in his possession, Cabal planned to make several unannounced visits on such reprobates, and gather their knowledge, by hook or by crook or by the patient application of thumb screws. Cabal didn’t mind: once in the Dreamlands, he had all the time in the world.