Jack L. Chalker - Rings 1 - Lords Of The Middle Dark

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LORDS OF THE MIDDLE DARKLORDS OF THE MIDDLE DARK

e-book ver. 1.0

To all those who still believe that without imagination we are nothing,

and without bold adventures and risks nothing great of permanence is

attainable.

1. A BOWL FULL OF GODS

MOST PEOPLE BELIEVED THAT THEY WOULD EVENTUALLY go to heaven, even the ones

whom

everybody else knew would never make it. Very few, however, believed they

could

get there without dying.

The mountain had always fascinated him, but he had never really understood the

awe and fear it inspired in almost everyone else. The Mountain of the Gods,

the

Cheyenne called it, and to be sure it was peculiar.

Enormous, it had a conical, volcanic shape although it was not, nor had it

ever

been, a volcano. It rose up in the center of lesser, ordinary mountains,

straight into the sky itself. None had ever seen its peak and lived to tell

about it, for even on the clearest of days a dense ring of clouds shrouded its

top from view. The clouds moved around the peak, usually clockwise, and

sometimes seemed to swirl and boil as they did so, but the great cloud ring

never dissipated, never thinned, and never revealed what was beyond the

five-and-a-half-kilometer mark.

Certainly there was good reason for the people of the region to both fear and

worship the mountain. It looked different, it behaved differently, and it had

been there for as long as any of the People could remember. Why he felt more

fascination than fear, and had felt that way even as a child, he couldn't say,

although he had always been somewhat different from others.

He was a Human Being—what the subhumans of other nations called a Cheyenne—and

he was a hunter, a warrior, and an adult of some rank. He shared his people's

mystic sense of being one with nature, of the tangible and spiritual

interrelationships between human and nature, and accepted most of what he had

been taught. He did not, however, believe that gods lived inside mountains.

Both his chief and his medicine man knew of his obsession with the mountain,

but

they were unable to sway him. They argued that none who had ever dared to

climb

the sacred mountain had returned and that the spirits guarding its slopes were

of the most powerful sort. He believed in spirits and in sacred ground, but he

could not believe that the mountain was a part of this. The mythology alone

was

too new, by the way his people measured time, and quite unconvincing. He also

knew that there were things of Heaven and things of Nature and things of men,

and the mountain had always seemed to him to be the last of these, the legends

and stories deliberately spread to prevent any questioning of the mountain's

existence. It was on the People's land, but it was not a part of the People,

nor

had it been there in ancient times, as had the other mountains.

What the others saw as supernatural, he saw as insult and, perhaps, as

sacrilege.

"We hunt the buffalo and deer, and we manage the land well for the Creator,"

the

medicine man noted. "It is a good life we have here, a precious thing. The

mountain is a part of things, that's all."

"It is not a part of things," the rebel argued. "It is unnatural but not

supernatural. I know as well as you what it is like for those in the Council.

There they live not by nature and the skill of their inner and outer selves

but

rather by machines and artifices. Everyone knows this, for they must return to

us for a season every two years. This mountain is neither of god nor nature,

but

of men. You are a wise man. Surely in your heart you know this."

"I know many things," the medicine man replied. "I am not saying that you are

not correct in this, but correct does not necessarily mean that you are right.

You know, too, that the Creator once punished us for our pride and subjugated

not even to the subhumans but to demons with white faces who slaughtered the

buffalo, slaughtered the People, and contained the rest on worthless land,

condemning us to a living hell in which our very way of life was made

impossible. Most of the white demons have been carried off now to the stars,

and

the rest given their own domain far across the Eastern Sea, but they left many

works of evil here. You can still stand on peaks and see where they had

blasted

great roads through the mountains, and you can still go to many places and

find

the remains of their once-great cities."

"Then you are saying that it is true." The words were spoken with a curious

sort

of smile. "That the stories and legends of the mountain were created to keep

people away. It is in fact something created by creatures of Earth, not

heaven."

"Creatures of Earth and hell," the medicine man spat. "It is a foul place. It

perhaps the doorway to hell itself. Left alone, it does not bother us, and we

not disturb it. What if you challenge it, and it devours you as it devoured

the

few others who have gone to it? What is gained? And if you survive, and if you

let loose the hordes of evil demons that it might imprison, then you might

well

bring down the wrath of the Creator upon all of us once more. Then much is

lost."

"All that you say might be true, yet I will challenge it. I will challenge it

because it is there and because I choose knowledge over cowering like some

child

in a summer storm, its ignorance reinforcing its fear. It is the duty of Human

Beings to conquer fear, not be ruled by it, or we become less than the

subhumans. I respect the mountain, but I do not fear it, and there is but one

way to show that to the mountain and to the Creator who raised us above all

others in spirit. I do not accept your argument. If I do not go, then I show

fear and lose my own worth. If I go and die, then I die in honor, in an act of

courage. If I do not go because it might loose some demons upon the People,

then

the People as a whole will be subject to fear. If we allow ourselves to be

ruled

by fear in anything, then we are not the true Human Beings, the highest of

creation, but are instead subject to something else—fear of the unknown. And

we are subjected to that, then we are subjugated and deserve nothing less, for

if fear can rule us in this, it can rule us in other things as well."

The medicine man sighed. "I always knew I should have nominated you for

Council

training. You have the kind of mind for it. It is too late for that now, I

fear,

and too late for you. Go. Climb the mountain. Die with your honor and courage

proven. I shall lead the weeping and lamentations for you and for myself, for

erring in this way and having such a fine mind come to such a purposeless end.

will argue no more fine points of logic with you. There is a very thin line

between stubbornness and stupidity, and I cannot shift someone back who has

crossed that line. Go."

The climb was dangerous but not difficult, which was all to the best because

his

people had little in the way of metals and metalworking, and he had to make do

with rope and balance and sure footing. He had been afraid that he would be

ill-prepared, but the slope was rough and craggy, and with patience and by

trial

and error he found a sort of path upward.

He had dressed warmly, with fur-lined clothes made to stand the toughest test

and a hood and face mask to help keep out the terrible cold even at this time

year. An experienced mountain man, he also knew that the air would grow

thinner

as he made his ascent and that he would have to take the climb very slowly to

give himself a chance to become acclimated to the altitude. He could carry

only

so much water, but after a while snow would do. It would have to, for his

salt-packed rations caused great thirst and dehydration.

As he grew closer to the great ring of clouds, he began to wonder if in fact

any

of the others like him had ever even gotten this far. There were snow slides

and

hidden crevasses here, and the problems of weather, acclimation, and

provisions

would stop anyone not totally prepared for them and fully experienced in

high-altitude work. The climb was not really difficult, but its relative ease

would fill a novice with confidence and cause him to ignore the many other

threats.

So far it had been like any other mountain that could be climbed without piton

or grappling hook, only taller. It looked neither as regular nor as strange

when

one was on it as it did from afar, and he began to wonder if indeed

imagination

might have played cruel tricks on the People.

But there was still that swirling mass of thick, impenetrable clouds that

should

not have been there, at least not all the time and certainly not at that

altitude. He might doubt his preconceptions, but he did not doubt his resolve.

He would go into those clouds.

Still, he almost didn't make it. Parts of him suffered from frostbite, and it

seemed at times as if his eyes would freeze shut, but he finally made the base

of the clouds. Here he knew he would face the greatest of all the dangers, for

he might wind up moving blind in a freezing, swirling fog. He had always had

the

suspicion, now a fear, that the mountain might end right at the clouds and

that

he might well step off into space.

The clouds were dense, although not as much as he'd feared, and he had some

visibility, although the wind was up, making every move treacherous. Still,

there was no mistaking the fact that these clouds were nothing of nature; the

air was suddenly relatively warm—above freezing, anyway—and he felt the pain

his frostbitten extremities along with a welcome relief that the fine mist

that

soon covered him remained a mist.

There was, however, a curious lack of odor. The clouds were getting their heat

from somewhere, yet there were none of the earth-fumes he would have expected

from a volcanic area. He continued his climb and was shocked to break out of

the

clouds only twenty or thirty meters up from their start. It was not the end of

the clouds; really, but rather a break between two layers of cloud, formed by

trapped mass of warm air. Above him swirled a solid ceiling of clouds. He did

not worry about them, though; the mountain did not extend any farther than a

dozen meters, beyond the end of the lower cloud barrier.

Up here it did at least look like a volcano, one of those great mountains of

the

west. The summit was a crater and appeared perfectly round, but it was less

than

a hundred meters across. It was as unnatural as were the clouds and the

warmth.

It was certainly the source of the heat: The air seemed to shimmer all around

that basin. Laboriously he made his way, half walking, half crawling, to the

edge, and with hurting eyes he peered down inside and froze in awe and wonder,

his jaw dropping. For a moment he wondered if the climb had cost him his

reason.

Faces ... Huge faces coming out of the rock wall and extending all the way

around the crater. Men's faces, women's faces, strange-looking, alien faces

none

of which seemed to have the features of the People.

Demon faces.

Giant faces extended out of the crater wall, carved of some whitish rock or

some

other substance. The noses alone were eight or more meters long; the mouths,

though closed now and expressionless, looked as if they each could swallow a

herd of buffalo.

Who carved such faces? he wondered. And why?

About forty meters below the faces was a floor that appeared to be made of

very

coarse cloth, although he was sophisticated enough to realize that it must be

metal. The fine mesh of the grating allowed the warm air to rise from inside

the

mountain, creating the odd cloud effects and giving the region of the peak its

moderate temperature. The mesh grate also had five circles painted on it, four

in a sort of square surrounding a fifth in the middle, and there were designs

each circle. He could not make out the designs, partly because of the distance

and the condition of his eyes and partly because there seemed to be material

covering parts of all five circles. The material, whatever it was, was

randomly

scattered about and certainly not native to the place.

He stared again at the giant carved faces and felt a chill go through him.

They

were certainly both mysterious and awesome; most people who made it this far

would worship them, knowing they had seen the faces of the sleeping spirits of

the mountain. He counted twenty-five faces around the rim just inside the

crater, all expressionless, all seemingly asleep, eyes closed. With a start he

realized that there weren't twenty-five different faces but only five, each

repeated four more times.

There was the man with short, curly hair, thick lips, and a broad, flat nose.

There was a chubby, elderly-looking woman with puffy cheeks and short, stringy

hair. There was a younger, prettier woman with a delicate face whose features

some ways resembled that of his own people but whose eyes seemed oddly

slanted,

almost catlike. There was a very old man with wrinkled skin and very little

hair. And, last, there was a strange-looking man with a very long face, a

lantern jaw, and a birdlike nose.

Each of these was repeated so that the same five, had their eyes been open,

would have been looking out, or down, at any point within.

Who were they? The ones who built this place? If so, why had they built it,

and

why here, and what was the source of the warmth below? Had they built this

place

and then added these faces as a monument to their work, a permanent sort of

memorial? Would that question ever be answerable?

He paused, trying to decide what to do next. He'd challenged the mountain and

won, and proved his point, but now what? He'd never taken it any further than

this. Now it seemed idiotic to return below, reversing the climb, facing even

more dangers in the descent than in the ascent if only because, going down,

one

was always a bit careless compared to facing the unknown ascent. To go down

and

say what? That there were twenty-five huge carved heads of five sleeping men

and

women in a crater, and below them a huge net through which blew warm air?

Would

he even be believed? Would he believe this sight if he weren't now seeing it,

and would he believe an account of it if teller and listener were reversed?

Now what?

He needed something tangible to take from this place. He needed more than just

this bizarre vision.

He needed to go down there.

But could he? Was there any place here to fasten a rope securely? Was his rope

long enough and strong enough to bear him down and back out again?

He walked carefully around the crater until he spied something sticking out of

the ground perhaps a meter and a half from the rim. He went to it and then

stopped.

It was a metal stake. A piton, driven expertly into the rock and still

containing the rotting remains of the rope knot, although not the rope itself.

He was not the first to make it up here, that was clear, and he was not the

first to consider the descent into that place.

The piton had not been traded from one of the metal-working nations: Although

rusted, it was too smooth, too regular, too exact, and too strong. This was a

thing of machines, of Council origin or higher. The rope, too, seemed strange

and far too thick and complex to be handmade.

He flattened himself, crawled along the line to the edge, and looked down

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LORDSOFTHEMIDDLEDARKLORDSOFTHEMIDDLEDARKCopyright©1986byJackL.Chalkere-bookver.1.0Toallthosewhostillbelievethatwithoutimaginationwearenothing,andwithoutboldadventuresandrisksnothinggreatofpermanenceisattainable.1.ABOWLFULLOFGODSMOSTPEOPLEBELIEVEDTHATTHEYWOULDEVENTUALLYgotoheaven,eventheoneswhomevery...

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Jack L. Chalker - Rings 1 - Lords Of The Middle Dark

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